Chapter 23

“The first rule in the book of love is acceptance.”
—Destinee Hardwick, Wishing on Raining Stars

I DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when we went back to school on Wednesday, January second. It was almost like New Year’s didn’t exist. Even the teachers weren’t ready to be back yet. But there we were.

I glanced around the cafeteria as I carried my lunch bag with me to our accustomed table. A lot of chatter flowed from table to table as kids gathered for the first school lunch of the new year. There were noticeable new outfits being worn—obvious or not so obvious Christmas presents. I used my cane as I navigated to the table but was more and more confident of my ability to walk stably.

The first to arrive at the table after me was Joan.

“Do you mind?” she asked as she settled opposite me.

“No? Are you going to be a regular with us?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I haven’t seen Rebeca all through break. I don’t know.” I thought that was an interesting perspective. Perhaps she’d know when Rebeca arrived? It made no difference to me because Rachel slid in next to me and leaned over to plant a kiss on my cheek.

“Miss me?” she cheerfully asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“Oh yeah. We’re going to have so much fun this spring!”

“Um ... about that ... I’m not sure...”

“Jacob, do you like me?”

“Well, yeah. That was never an issue.”

“Is Rebeca your girlfriend?”

“Not exactly. She’s my friend.”

“Are you in love with Francie?”

“No. That’s not the point.”

“Shut up and kiss me.” She pulled my face around and planted a kiss on my lips that almost went to my tonsils. “I like you. I’m not going to make you stop being Beca’s friend. I like her, too. I’m not going to get in the way of whatever you and Francie are doing. I’m not pledging my lifelong love, my virtue, or my soul to you. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”

“Okay.” Hell! Why not! I reached an arm around her and laid another kiss on her that was almost too much for the cafeteria. A voice being cleared behind me snapped us out of it.

“I hope you’re at least going to hold her hand when you walk to class after that,” Beca laughed.

“Um ... Yeah.”

She slid into the seat beside me and when Joan looked at her plaintively she held up a finger to forestall the blonde before grabbing hold of my arm with both hands.

“How soon can we get DVDs? Do we need to run to Staples?” she asked excitedly.

“They’re about five dollars cheaper by the spindle if I get them from Amazon,” I answered. It was part of our project research and I’d looked up the cost for a spindle of writeable DVDs to have the security recordings transferred to.

“As soon as we have them in hand, we can start getting the security footage.”

“Really? I can order them through Amazon Prime and have them waiting for us tomorrow afternoon. Why do we need them so soon?” I asked. I assumed that if we got permission to even view the security tapes it wouldn’t be until next semester.

“Mr. Richards held me after class this morning. He got permission for us to have the recordings. Here’s what happens. The two hours of video during lunch is recorded direct to rewriteable DVD. It’s held for one week and if not needed for incident resolution they are recycled. He says that once we have blank DVDs in the pipeline, we will receive the DVDs after the one-week waiting period instead of having them recycled.”

“That’s cool! With two spindles, we could have ten weeks’ worth of video to work with. We should be able to extract a lot of information from that!” I was really happy they’d approved the project. This was the kind of ‘research’ that wasn’t going to lead to a lot of social change or policy decisions on the part of the school. It was pure research for a class project and the school decided it couldn’t hurt.

“Order them now if you can,” she said. “We could have two weeks of baseline information before this semester ends. Then we can compare that to the new groupings that emerge in second semester.”

“I thought over the holiday that we should plot our information according to other axes,” I said. “We should correlate the data according to the day of the week and any special events that are occurring, like ball games.”

“You might as well include what’s on the menu,” Joan said flatly. “I’m sure that affects the traffic pattern.” We looked up at the blonde and Beca quickly ran around the table to sit beside her and give her a hug.

“That’s so smart!”

“You don’t need to act surprised. I do well in my classes and I had Human Geography my freshman year as well. It’s the only freshman class you can get AP credit for without retaking. I’m retaking it next year,” Joan said. I was surprised. My view of her was entirely based on the observed behavior in the lunchroom and at the dance. I considered her a first-degree airhead. She was actually speaking intelligently.

“Do you want to be my assistant? If this comes off well, you can probably use it for extra credit when you retake,” Beca said.

“Um ... Yeah ... sure. I’ve got time to burn.”

“Do you need an assistant, too?” Rachel whispered in my ear. She blew softly and I responded hardly.

“Do you want to assist me?” I asked.

“If it would get me more invitations to your house and the possibility of sneaking off alone together, I’m pretty sure I could find time.”

“Wow.”

Friday morning, we handed over two spindles of DVDs and received the five from the week before Christmas and the two days we were in class the week vacation started. We already had seven DVDs from each of four cameras to review.

“I’ve got a big TV with DVD player,” Joan said. Her voice still sounded flat as if she didn’t want us to notice any contribution she made. “You could come over after school for a while and we can watch.”

“Ooh. She wants to watch,” Rachel teased. “Can we give her something interesting to watch?”

“My mom will be watching, too,” Joan said. “She’s like that.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but we agreed that we’d meet at Joan’s house Saturday afternoon, assuming we could all get permission from our parents. Of course, Mom and Dad were accepting if not enthusiastic. Em agreed to take me over. Saturday was the day that Mom and Dad did everything to keep the house running, like grocery shopping and maintenance.

Joan’s house was big. It was in a community of big houses that each looked like it was built on its own hill so the lord of the castle could look out at the lands around. By all appearances, Joan’s family was rich.

“Hi,” she said when I rang the bell. “Rachel and Bec are in the TV room. You want a drink?”

“I’m good for now. Thanks for having us over, Joan.”

“Yeah. Come on.”

I was blown away. The TV room featured a flat screen that was five feet wide. The girls had already loaded one video and were watching kids from the first lunch hour stream into the room. They were laughing at something and Rachel was pointing to a guy in the cafeteria line with two trays. As we watched, we saw him sit down and pile the food all together. Both trays were for him!

“Jacob!” Rachel squealed when she saw me. She rushed over and gave me a very big kiss that I was ready to continue. Hell with the videos.

“Ahem,” Beca said. “The rest of us would like to say hi, too.” Rachel stepped back and blushed. Beca stepped up and gave me a hug. “We came over a little early and got the first video on just to see what the angles were. I thought we were going to have to watch eight hours per day, but they record each camera in a window so all four angles play at the same time. It’s pretty cool. If you spot something on one camera, you can immediately look at the other windows and get a different angle on it.” I watched for a minute and switched from window to window to see what was going on from different angles. It would make things easier.

We sat to watch and talk about the parameters of the study, outlining what we were interested in and how we could collect data as well as images. Once we got into it, we discovered we could run the feed at x3 and only take about forty minutes to look at the full two hours. Occasionally, someone would shout ‘Stop.’ And we’d freeze the frame to point out an interesting move. They weren’t always things that were relevant to our study.

“That guy is so looking up her skirt,” Rachel said. “Look. He drops something on the floor every few minutes and ducks down to look under the table.”

“So, is she showing him anything?” Joan asked. “Like, is she keeping her knees together or spreading them to give him a better view?”

“You think she knows what he’s doing?”

“Probably. Guys are always looking up my skirt. Or down my blouse. I can usually pick out which ones.”

“Does it bother you?” Beca asked. “I wear jeans and am not interested in giving guys beaver shots.”

“That guy would bother me because he’s being so damned obvious. Unless she’s playing him, she should kick him in the nose the next time he ducks under the table. Usually, it doesn’t bother me because I dress like that to get noticed. If I decide on a guy I want to date, sometimes I’ll give him a little panty shot,” Joan said.

“At least you wear panties,” I growled. “It’s indecent. We should report him.”

“Dude! We’re not the security reviewers. We’re here to find patterns for your Human Geography project, not to police the lunchroom,” Rachel said.

“If we take anything back to security, they’ll stop giving us the disks,” Beca said. “They were pretty clear about that when I picked them up.”