15 years old, Rom’s best friend and Science Club crew member, scrappy, wisecracking, and somewhat dubious about Rom’s obsession with The All comic and plan to acquire the fractal transducer. Sometime chafes under his father’s rough, authoritarian parenting and other pressures of his family’s lower-middle class homelife. Forced to work at the auto parts yard his father manages, Rouskey is mechanically gifted, the Science Club’s engineering whiz. He is more skeptical than Rom about The All comic and sometimes questions increasingly far out direction Rom is leading them, but ultimately becomes Rom’s primary partner in the quest to obtain the Fractal Transducer, figure out its quirks, and experience its effects as a subject.
He longs to get something going with the popular, saucy Cheryl, who at first seems unattainable and out of his league. He gets his chance with her when she is inadvertently drawn into Science Club orbit by her best friend, Wendy. He clicks with her in a shared droll humor and playfulness, but her breezily unserious attitude toward boys, and competition from rival suitor Brett, hamper Rouskey’s desire to get closer. An opportunity arises to take the relationship to the next level when they meet again at a church retreat where they both feel like outsiders, when he appeals to her sporty, fun-loving nature by getting her to participate in covert extra-curricular antics with him. After the retreat he persists to woo her in the face of her breezy nonchalance, coaxing her into Science Club for the testing of the Transducer, where bond evolves and deepens as they become quantum-entangled fellow Receiver Group members.