Chapter 2

Note to readers: The wrong Chapter 1 was posted on July 3^rd. That error has been corrected. If you read that, stop, go back, and read the correct Chapter 1 before reading this. Sorry about the confusion.

Kim picked me up and drove us the short distance to school. She parked and started to get out but I put my hand on her shoulder to stop her.

“A bunch of people told me that when I proposed to you, everything would change. I didn’t think so because I couldn’t figure out what would change.”

“But now you do?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s not us. You knew before I proposed that I was going to. I knew before I did that you would say yes. Ever since you said we should take the word ‘if’ out of our planning and use ‘when’ we’ve both known.”

“I guess that’s probably true.”

“What changed wasn’t you or me, or us. What changed is everyone else. Now, everyone else looks at us and thinks ‘when’ we get married. Not ‘if’ we get married. Everyone else realizes that we haven’t been fooling around.”

“I never thought about that.”

“I want to keep the main things the same. How we feel and what we plan isn’t about everyone else. It’s about us. I don’t want to forget that. I don’t want other people’s expectations to have anything to do with what you and I do.”

“Neither do I. How do we do that?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, would we even realize how other people might be affecting us?”

“We need to be more private,” she said.

“If that’s even possible. Tell Mel and I’ll tell Bobby, and let’s eat lunch together.”

“Okay. What about classes we have together?” she asked.

“Do you know what Mr. McClusky told me yesterday morning?” She shook her head. “He said that other people would pay attention to us and that we could be good examples but we need to be intentional about what we do. He said me, but he meant us.”

“We need to talk about that. Lunch,” she said and we continued in.

We learned about the countless number of words Shakespeare had invented. It was almost laughable at how monumental his contributions were. Mrs. Middleton said he invented as many as ten percent of the words he used in his plays. We were having fun trying to guess the meaning of some of the words that hadn’t caught on. With ten minutes left in class, Kim walked in. It just wappened and we were all armgaunt. Nobody but Shakespeare knows what those words meant.

Kim stood at the back with a note in her hand until Mrs. Middleton motioned her forward. Kim showed her the note, Mrs. Middleton rolled her eyes, trying to be melodramatic, I think. They both smiled and she pointed out an empty seat three rows away. She had undoubtedly been to guidance and got her classes switched.

“I don’t know if you can have too much of a good thing,” Mrs. Middleton said, “but I’m going to fight fire with fire and let you sit next to your heart of hearts, Miss McTighe. Jack, would you switch seats with Austin.” I grabbed my stuff and stood so fast everyone laughed. “All the phrases I just used were coined by Shakespeare,” she said to the class, and then to us, “Don’t make me regret this.”

I sat next to Kim and I’m sure my smile was just as goofy-looking as Kim’s. It was a nice smile but it was still goofy. When I looked back at Mrs. Middleton, she was looking at us. “You two need to lie low, or you’ll be in a pickle,” she said.

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Yes. As is ‘send you packing’ and ‘off with your head’. Behave or you’ll have your choice of those two fates.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll both be impeticos,” I said, using one of the words Shakespeare invented but that no one used. No one knew what it meant.

“See that you are or you’ll both be pajocked,” she said, using another one. The way she said it, didn’t leave much doubt that being pajocked was bad. The class laughed and by then, class was over.

Coach Miller didn’t waste any time getting started in history. He quizzed us on some topics I knew we’d cover, probably to find out where he stood with us. Then he handed out a syllabus and gave us a few minutes to read and work on the homework he’d assigned. I took a look at the homework before I started reading. I didn’t think we’d be having any multiple-choice tests. Everything was analytical in nature.

I plopped into my chair in Precalculus and Kim sat down a moment later. Mrs. Haggerty didn’t say anything. She just started handing back our pre-tests. I was glad it was a pre-test. I’d only managed a thirty-five. I looked over and Kim had a twenty. She looked back at me and shrugged.

“This was a pre-test so some of you can breathe a sigh of relief. If you’d all passed, you wouldn’t need this class. It seems that most of you have a reasonable grasp of trigonometry and that’s a start. Some of you are very intuitive when it comes to math. You’ll find that won’t help nearly as much with calculus as it has in the past. In case you’re wondering, the high score was thirty-eight so if you’re feeling poorly, you can just stop. Open your books to page six and let’s start.”

She didn’t waste any time. I wondered who managed the thirty-eight. When class was over, everyone stood and Kim said, “I’m going to need help with this. I can tell already.”

“I’ll see what I can do. No guarantees. This looks a lot harder than trig and what she said about intuition sucks for guys like me.”

We split up and I went to Biology. After that, I dropped my morning books off and grabbed my Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox. Settling in where Kim and I had frequently had lunch alone the previous year, I popped open my lunchbox, hiding Catherine Bach’s best features. Kim sat across from me, saw the box, lifted the lid and laughed.

“Did you buy that on purpose?” We had watched the TV show once and I’d said that I thought Catherine Bach was a good actress. Maybe she was, but I don’t think many people watched because of that. She had great legs.

“Mom got it for me for work. I broke the thermos.”

“Your mom? That’s your story?” She was playing with me.

“Yup. And I’m sticking to it. The guys on the crew liked it.”

“I’ll bet. You’re funny. How did you get a thirty-five on the pre-test?”

“Read ahead a little, remembered some stuff from trig, and I guessed.”

“I’ll bet guessing didn’t have much to do with it. What’s on your mind?”

“Did Miss Bentz talk to you yesterday?” Miss Bentz was the cheerleading coach.

“Yeah. She congratulated me. She said the other girls looked up to me and now I’d automatically seem older and some sort of an expert on things. She said I should take the opportunity to be an encourager.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said.

“Mr. McClusky say the same thing to you?”

“Pretty close. What do you want to do about all that? Or do you?”

“One thing’s for sure. I don’t want to be the school’s Dear Abby,” Kim said.

“No. Me neither. Bobby has asked for advice a couple of times. That’s fine. I kind of want to get out of that business.”

“Me too, but you know it’s going to happen. So, what do we do?” Kim asked.

I took a bite of my sandwich and Kim started eating, too. We thought while we ate. Mom had packed a little apple sauce cup in my lunch. Kim had a chocolate pudding. We traded. Why would Mom give me apple sauce?

“Okay,” I said. “What about this? Say someone asks me for advice on dating or our plans or something they think I know about. What if I say, ‘Here’s what I did or what we did, but it’s up to you’. How’s that?”

“I’m not going to give you advice but I’ll relate my thought process or whatever?” Kim asked.

“Yeah. That way, I’m not giving advice. Just relating personal experience. It’s up to them to think it through.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” she said.

“That way, I don’t get the blame if they blow it and I don’t get the kudos if it turns out great. It’s on them.”

“That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing the whole time, anyway, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Pretty much. We asked anybody we knew that might know something about college or career...”

“Or building a house or stable. I think the closest we’ve come to asking straight up advice is on whether the real estate lady would build one story or two,” Kim finished.

“I actually asked Cheryl for a lot of advice about sex,” I said, quietly.

“She gave very good advice. I don’t think we need to share that,” she said, smiling. We just looked at each other, enjoying memories of Cheryl’s very worthwhile advice being used.

“I love how you sound when I follow Cheryl’s advice.”

“Stop it. Eat your pudding,” she said.

“It’s gone. Got anything else I could eat? Maybe something low cal?” I arched my eyebrows.

“I said, stop it!” I licked my lips. “I’m serious. Ooooh,” she said, pretending to be mad at me.

“I know what I could eat,” I said, and closed my eyes, smiling.

“You’re going to open your eyes and I’m going to be gone. Stop it.” Now, she sounded serious.

I opened my eyes and she was still there. “What’s the matter? I’m just messing around. Are you mad?”

“No, you dufus. I’m trying not to be horny for the rest of the afternoon. Just stop.”

I was ready to say something but decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. I did not want to suffer her Scottish anger.

“We could skip chemistry,” I suggested.

“Don’t tempt me. School, then lift, then back to my house. Don’t wear yourself out at PE or lifting.”

“I think I can save a little energy. Something I should know about?”

“It goes in cycles. Right now, I’m crazy, horny. This afternoon, you need to fix that.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said, smiling.

Lunch was over and we walked to chemistry together. Kim walked to the front and handed Mr. Trent a note. I sat down and looked around the room to see what he was going to do with her. He had three seats left but they were all in the back.

Susan leaned close to me and whispered, “She wants to sit right here. Right where I’m sitting.” What was I going to say?

“I’m torn,” Mr. Trent said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I could put you in the back in one of the empty seats and that would be the easiest thing to do. But I know why you went to the trouble of switching classes and therefore, I know where you want to sit. It would be easy for me to move someone to accommodate that but then it would seem like I’m playing favorites. So, you see, I have a bit of a dilemma.”

He wanted to put us together. I knew he did. I looked to my left, and then down the table to the right. We had an odd number of people in our row. Kim would make it even. Who knew?

“What do you think I should do, Mr. Pierce?”

I tried to think what he would agree to. If he really did pair up people based on grades, he wasn’t going to put Kim and me together for labs. She had done too well. Then, the answer somehow seemed obvious. “Well sir, you could do what you would normally do and just stick Kim in an empty seat but if you did that, you wouldn’t really learn anything. But if you stuck her next to me, she could pair up for labs with Susan and I could pair up with Allen. Then, when Allen and I nailed it with our labs, they could both learn from us,” I said and Kim’s eyes got wide. I’d already earned my butt-for-the-day rating from her at lunch.

“You would, would you?” Mr. Trent asked.

“That’s my hypothesis, sir. I think you should test it.” What the heck? He smiled when I said that.

“Anyone have a problem with that? Miss Simpson? Mr. Conrad? Class?” He looked around the room. Almost everyone was either laughing quietly, or smiling. “Let’s test the hypothesis. Mr. Pierce, you have additional homework tonight. Write up the hypothesis, the nature and anticipated outcome of this experiment.”

“Yes, sir. I can do that.”

“I thought you might. Let’s dig in.”

Susan slid down and Kim sat next to me. She bumped my shoulder and called me a butt when she did but she was smiling. I’d thought I’d been pretty clever. Mr. Trent put Kim where we wanted and somehow it didn’t seem like he was playing favorites. He went over the scientific method, then introduced lab equipment and safety procedures and policies. I thought chemistry would be the most fun class that year.

With class over, I went to keyboarding and Kim went to Spanish. Keyboarding was pretty easy. We started doing drills on the home row and would advance and add letters as the class progressed. I’d been typing using the hunt and peck method on Mom’s old Remington for years but this would make things a lot easier. Miss Durand had demonstrated what a skilled typist could do on the first day. She typed a paragraph at over eighty words per minute and said that many of us would be able to type in excess of sixty words per minute by the time the semester was over.

In PE, we began a section of football and stayed in the locker room so the coach could show us some plays on the chalkboard. He explained some basic run plays and a couple of passing plays, making sure we understood the language of the sport. I knew some of it but probably not as much as some of the other guys. Slants, button-hooks, and down-and-out routes for receivers made sense. We had some pretty fast guys and I thought they would be able to run outside, away from tacklers. It was time to find out.

We went outside and our coach split us up into two twelve-man teams. We were going to play nine on nine and that would give everyone some time to take breaks as the other three guys rotated in. He sent us to opposite ends of the field where we were supposed to pick a team captain and figure out our positions. We would practice as a team on Wednesday and Thursday and have our first scrimmage on Friday.

Our dozen guys walked down to the far end of the field and gathered into a loose circle. I knew just about everyone and had enjoyed playing combat badminton with a couple of them the previous year. I was looking over the guys, trying to figure out who would be our team captain when the madness began.

“Jack,” someone said.

“Yup,” responded a couple of guys and another said, “All in favor?” and the hands went up.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “I’m just here for a couple of weeks until swim season starts. You don’t want me for team captain.”

They looked around at each other until Tony Amendola said, “Yeah, we do. We all saw you and Allen passing the ball back and forth from fifty yards away. None of us can do that. He swims, you swim, you’ll both leave at the same time.”

“Jack, you know they’re down there picking Allen.”

“Guys, I don’t know anything about football,” I said. “I’m not a big fan. I’ve probably watched ten games in my life.”

“I heard about you and baseball,” Tony said. “You didn’t know squat about it but Coach Hamilton was going to move you to varsity as a freshman. What’s the difference? C’mon, Jack.” A couple of guys echoed encouragement.

Great. This was what Mr. McClusky was talking about when he said I’d have a chance to set the example. I thought about it for a second. “You guys want me to be the QB and team captain? Are you sure?” There was a lot of head nods and agreement. “No one else wants to give it a shot?” Silence.

I thought about it again. What the heck. A lot of these guys weren’t at all competitive the year before. Maybe I could change that a little. Competitive is good, right? It was pretty quiet.

“Alright. If you guys want me then I’ll do it. But if I do it, it’s with the understanding that we’re going to kick their butt on Friday.” That got enthusiastic agreement and we started picking positions, mostly by what guys wanted to do. We lined up and walked through a couple of plays. Then we decided it would be good to see who was the fastest. I threw passes to them and found that, once I knew how fast they could run, it wasn’t hard to lead them. We were just getting into it when class was over.

Back in the locker room, Allen and I were next to each other. “We’re going to kick your butts,” Allen said.

“Last year, I didn’t get to play baseball because I broke my foot,” I said.

“So?” I waited as he thought about that. “You don’t want to miss swim season because you’re injured. Me neither.”

“It’s just flag football but who knows?” I asked.

“Yeah. I haven’t heard of anybody getting injured at PE before. Not seriously, anyway.”

“Me neither. But how many guys do you know that broke a foot because they turned a corner in the rain?” The answer was one. Me.

“That’s because you’re a klutz,” he said laughing. “I get it. We can do this and have fun but we’re both going to be out of here in a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah. Let’s not lose sight of the goal,” I said.

“I think we can win conference this year. It will be harder without Birch, maybe.”

“Definitely harder without Birch. Bobby’s going to be faster than last year, I think, and he’s going to do IM.”

“What about you? You going to do IM?” he asked.

“Yeah. I think I might be faster in the longer distance. We’ll see. The main thing for me is that I want to be able to compete. I’m not going to mess up my arm trying to throw a long bomb or something.”

“I hear that.”

Kim was already at her truck when I got there. On the drive to my house, I told her about PE and how I’d been drafted, then about my conversation with Allen. Kim had talked with Miss Bentz about their desire to compete well at State.

“What about Marci Watkins and Jan Tigner? They were on the team that came in seventh or whatever.”

“I don’t know. Hard to get a read on them. They’re the seniors so it seems like one of them should take the lead,” she said.

“But none of you want to be led to seventh again.”

“No. But it’s a team thing so if they don’t want to put in the effort, I don’t know what we can do.”

“Ask them how they felt after doing so poorly last year,” I said. “Isn’t that enough to motivate them?”

“You would think so. I think Jan will probably give it a try. I don’t know about Marci.”

“Marci seems strange,” I said. “I don’t know what it is.”

“She likes girls,” Kim said as we pulled into the driveway.

At first, I didn’t know what that meant. We got to the gym and what that meant dawned on me. “Oh. She doesn’t like boys?” Kim raised her eyebrows in a funny half-smile. That was just weird. That’s probably all I needed to know about Marci.

“I don’t know if she likes boys or not. I just know that she likes girls,” Kim said as Mom walked out to join us.

“I like girls,” I said.

“Shush. Let’s just lift. Oh, I don’t know if that supposed to be public knowledge or not.”

“Gotcha.”

“What are you two talking about?” Mom asked as she started stretching.

“There are two seniors on the varsity cheerleading team. They came in seventh out of eight last year and Kim and the rest of the squad that’s moving to varsity don’t want to settle for that this year,” I said.

“Ah. Let me guess,” Mom said. “One of them should be the team captain because they’re seniors but it didn’t turn out so well last year and now you don’t know.”

“Exactly,” Kim said. “And after today, I still don’t know. I don’t particularly want to be the team captain but if one of them is, and they don’t want to work to be competitive, I think I’ll drop out. If I do, I think Melanie will and probably Lisa, and then there’s not much of a team.”

“You need to talk to Miss Bentz,” I said. Kim agreed and we started our workout.

I had a great workout. My pull exercises had benefitted from working on a landscaping crew during the summer. I increased all my back and bicep exercises by at least ten percent. It felt great. It felt like I could have done twice as many sets and I knew I’d be increasing my weights again next time we did pull. We finished, I threw my bike in the back of Kim’s truck and we went to her house so I could help her with chemistry.

“Nice workout, Aquaman. Do you have any energy left?”

“Yeah. That felt really good. I’m a little surprised...” I stopped. Kim didn’t want to talk about the workout. Kim didn’t want to talk about Chemistry. I had plenty of energy.

We got out of the truck and walked inside. Kim hollered but there was no one home. We went to the kitchen and she checked messages. There weren’t any. “Remember Puerto Rico? Remember when we could hear the ocean and you went sort of crazy?” she asked.

“Not something you forget.”

“That’s what I want. I’ve wanted that since before lunch. I’ve wanted you since before lunch. Do me right, Jack.”

I did her right. She wanted me to get crazy but that’s what she did. Wow. Whatever had gotten her wound up was amazing. Afterward, we lay there, just enjoying each other. I ran my hand over her stomach, just enjoying the touch.

“You’re flawless, Baby. So smooth, warm, and soft in all the right places. And I like how you sound. Best sound in the world.”

“Glad you think so. Do you think you could make me sound like that again?”

Holy cow. Insatiable. I made her sound like that again and she sounded just as good the fourth time as she did the first. Wow.

“Thank you. You can be done now.”

“Ha-ha. I don’t know what’s going on with you today but I like it.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve been in heat all day. It’s probably later than you think, stud. Want me to drive you home?”

I looked at the clock. Holy cow. “No. Let me rinse off quickly and I’ll beat it. Do you have the names of lab equipment memorized?” I asked. Since I’d come to help her with chemistry, I thought it would be good if I helped her a little, even if she didn’t need it.