Chapter 101: Study Weekend

Saturday, February 22, 1986

Most of today was study time, and much of that was business-related. I didn’t need more time on Computer Science, but the others did, so we were planning on getting together tomorrow. Poly Sci was also meeting tomorrow, but that was mostly just ‘obligatory’. If I was going to be in a class, there would be a study group. I really didn’t need it, but some of the others probably did.

Business, though, we needed. That covered our courses in Accounting, Marketing, Finance, and Management. Three of them revolved around rules, math, or both. Only Marketing was really a ‘soft science’ sort of class.

I would very likely have been able to get A’s in all of these classes on my own, but none of them would have been a cakewalk. With the Business Brigade, it would be much closer to being a cakewalk. Five years of experience told me that study groups made everything better. These were particularly potent since I had so many friends in the groups.

We knocked off around nine. Most people left, but we wound up with ten people in our hot tub, including Cammie, Paige, Angie, Darla, and me. Sherry, too. Not Jas, not Mel, and not Candice. Jas and Mel weren’t in business and Candice wasn’t in this group of classes.

Darla and I had been all business (figuratively and literally) except for a brief discussion of the Jarre concert. Just like Amy, she wanted to hear some of his music before deciding. I’d loaned Amy ‘Oxygène’, ‘Équinoxe’, and ‘Magnetic Fields’ (aka ‘Les Chants Magnétiques’, but I had an English-titled version). I had a copy of ‘Zoolook’, but that really wasn’t the best intro to Jarre (I was fairly certain very little of ‘Zoolook’ factored into Rendez-Vous Houston), so I played ‘The Concerts in China’ on our CD boombox. That might have been the best intro, anyway, since those were live performances.

The consensus among all of the newcomers to Jarre was, first, that his music was ‘weird.’ That seemed entirely fair enough. Most of them thought it was ‘weird and also cool,’ fortunately. That was also fair enough.

I made the point that this would be weird but cool music accompanied by fireworks and multi-story screens showing projections and might be the largest concert in world history to date. Angie backed me on all of that, saying she was super-excited for it (and she was — she’d also been super-excited about it since long before Jarre even thought of it). Our enthusiasm swayed even the initial naysayers into thinking it might be worth the trip down to Houston.

A bit of that was cheating. The current audience estimate being bandied about was in the 500,000 range. Rendez-Vous Houston had taken off enormously in the last few days in my first life, with the final estimate being around 1.5 million people. No one had expected people to simply park on I-10, Memorial Drive, or Allen Parkway, but that had happened, restricting the first two to one open lane in each direction and closing Allen Parkway entirely. I had actually watched it from the center of an intersection on Allen Parkway. The road offered better sight lines than being off of it.

Darla was in, and would share a room with Amy if Amy was going and wanted to share with her. If not, she would probably stay with her parents, but staying downtown sounded much more fun.

Bed-hopping might be an option, of course. Maybe it would be Darla and me sharing a room with Jas and Amy sharing the other one. Who knew? Darla certainly wouldn’t mind that!

Or, if Amy wasn’t going, maybe Darla would just share with Jas and me. I saw no downside to that and doubted either of them would, either.

Speaking of bed hopping, Angie wound up going with me to drop off the dorm residents. We figured it was the least we could do, given how late it was.

On the drive back home, she said, “We’re clear for tonight. I suspect Paige has already spirited Jas off to our room.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

She sighed.

“It sounds wonderful to me. We don’t need this like we used to, but we still need it.”

“We do,” I said.

“What I think I need more of is Jane. It was better when we were on a regular schedule.”

“It was. I’m not sure what to do about that.”

“Me neither. She and I have talked about phone appointments. Maybe? I think we could. I ... there was a time I was paranoid about them, given ... you know ... what we talk about. But, now ... mostly less paranoid,” she said.

“I get that. Jane isn’t out to get us, and I can’t imagine anyone is tapping our phones.”

“If they are, we’re screwed anyway. Some calls with Laura or Jess are just as ... I dunno. Incriminating? We’re hardly criminals, but you know what I mean.”

“Technically, we are criminals,” I said.

She giggled and pinched my leg. Not very hard, though.

“Well, yes, but what I meant was, dying and getting reborn as our younger selves isn’t criminal.”

“It would be a really weird law.”

“You think? It’s not like we got a vote!” she said.

“Nope. And ... God knows what I would have done if I’d gotten a vote.”

Angie sighed, and said, “I think I would have turned it down, honestly. It ... it would have felt like giving up. Abandoning Mom and Dad and the work I put in on my degree, all for the chance of reliving the hell that was high school? College? It ... I couldn’t have thought outside of the box. I would have assumed it would be multiple schools in Chicago, Daddy dying, Sharon fucking me up, Iceberg Steve ... all of that. Dear God, no! Just having to go through Daddy dying again ... ugh! I hated that he was already gone this time, but I think it made everything easier.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I would have come at it from that angle, too. Why repeat all that crap? Because maybe I could do it better? Maybe I couldn’t.”

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: we were each other’s biggest missing pieces, and that had to happen before we could see it. No one could have told me, ‘Well, you’ll have Steve, but a far better Steve who’ll unlock things you never even dreamed of.’”

“And no one could have told me that, either. I mean, about you. I saw it, or the potential for it, in the hospital, but that’s after. And it was just potential, right then.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it, too. But both of us could easily have thought, ‘Well, this was a life-threatening event. The changes won’t last.’”

“Especially since we never actually knew each other.”

“Your Angie was closer to me, I think. Iceberg Steve wasn’t the you I knew even before you got here.”

“Well, yes, but I didn’t know her. I’d probably spent less than two hours actually talking to her. It barely registered,” I said. “Most of what I ‘knew’ was after-the-fact stuff. ‘Your cousin is in trouble with the law again.’ That sort of thing. That wasn’t 1980 Angie.”

“Yeah. 1980 Angie might have been headed downhill, but she wasn’t screwed yet. Frank wouldn’t have let that happen, and he made it past 1980 in both of our first lives.”

I got home and parked. We headed in and right to bed.

We put conversation on hold while changing and using the restroom, but picked it up once we were in bed with the lights out.