Chapter 24

“In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.”
—Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

FINALS WEEK was nothing like I remembered college finals being. I guess I forgot for a while that I was in high school. Classes went on as usual. The final took either one or two classroom periods. I was lucky that my finals didn’t all fall on the same day of the week. Ms. Garity had sense enough to focus the entire final on human sexual systems so I suspect everyone passed it. It was certainly the most interesting thing covered all semester. The rest fell in the category of ‘wash your hands and eat your vegetables.’ I was especially interested in the new male birth control that would apparently soon be mandatory since the legislation passed in November. It was an implant that immobilized the sperm. It could easily be removed and full motility was restored within two ejaculations. I thought what a field day V1’s timeline would have had with that. Here, it sailed through. Maybe it would prevent some teen pregnancies that everyone bitched about in V1.

Ms. Levy had a two-part final on Tuesday and Thursday. The first part was multiple choice and if you’d read the stories required for class and watched the movies, there was no way you could fail it. The second part, though, was all essay and tested both concepts covered in class and writing ability. Our thoughts had to be organized with clear topic sentences and supporting info. Everything had to be grammatically correct. It was hard, but I’d paid attention to that stuff and thought I did pretty well. Mr. Richards excused me from the regular Human Geography exam and gave me the AP level exam. This was probably the class I’d learned the most from over the semester. I’d never had anything quite like it in my V1 education. The final in geometry was on Friday and the high point was Rachel’s short skirt. Math is math. There is only one correct answer. The only thing I needed to be careful of was not applying advanced calculus to the solution of high school geometry problems. I wasn’t supposed to know that yet. It was okay.

“God, I love your legs,” I whispered to Rachel as we left class.

“You don’t know the half of it,” she grinned. “Maybe I’ll wear a skirt on our date tonight.”

“Do we have a date tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sort of celebrate the end of the semester. Right?” We’d only had one real date so far. Rachel was devoted to taking it slow now that she felt she had me hooked. I couldn’t complain. We usually had a nice make-out session after our study times on Saturday and Sunday. Joan had joined our Sunday sessions at my house, much to my mother and my sisters’ amusement.

“It’s no fun to tease you about having a girlfriend when you’ve got three of them!” Pey complained. “I’m eight years old. I should get to tease my brother! J and Beca and Rache and Joan sitting in a tree ... See? It has no rhythm.” That was it in a nutshell.

Francie had continued to come over on Tuesdays and Thursdays after class, determined to fuck my dick off.

“You have three sweet girlfriends,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking with your dick when you’re with them. They have a lot more to lose than I do. Everybody knows I’ve done it at least once.”

“From what I hear, your expression and attitude on Wednesdays and Fridays has made it likely that everyone knows you do it a lot,” I laughed as I slid deep inside her pussy and she gasped.

“I have to admit, it’s made it a lot easier to turn down the gazillion offers I get from guys wanting to help make sure I’m really pregnant.”

When Rachel picked me up Friday night, Joan and Beca were in the back seat of her Toyota. Well, that changed the dynamic of our date but the two girls shooed us away as they bought tickets for A Dog’s Way Home and we got tickets for Glass. Neither of them wanted to see the ‘guy flick’ and wished Rachel luck.

I don’t know about her, but I sure got lucky. True to her promise, she wore a short skirt and not long after the movie started, she put my hand on her bare thigh and turned to kiss me.

“Just the legs,” she whispered into my mouth. “Not between. Got it?” I got it and was pretty happy about it when I discovered it not only included her silky soft legs but her breasts as well. I was rock-hard by the time we left the theater and had no idea what the movie had been about. “We’re not relieving each other. You have Francie for that and I have Izzy.”

“Who’s Izzy?” I asked, a little alarmed.

“My vibrator.”

It was four days before I could see Francie and I had to take things in hand myself when I got home. Damn but Rachel gets my motor running!

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Vinnie said at my guitar lesson Monday afternoon. We had the day off school for MLK Day but I was excited to have my first lesson from my Christmas present. “You’ve always been better when you disconnect your head from your playing. We just need to get you back to where you can read and understand music. I’m not going to give you any new music. We’ll work on exercises for sight reading and to toughen up your fingers again. You’ve got plenty of strength in your hands but no callouses. Don’t over-practice and get them too sore to play. Just like your other muscles, a little bit each day is better than a marathon session that leaves you unable to work the next day.”

“It’s not quite like I’ve lost all my memory,” I said. “It’s just that some things aren’t as fresh in my mind as they were. It seems like some things that I have to stop and think about used to come automatically.”

“You took a nasty rap to the head,” he said. “I think you’ll recover this quickly enough.” We started with basics like the notes on the chart and what strings and frets related to them. I was relieved that it made sense pretty quickly but my first shot at actually playing the notes in the exercise was a disaster. I had something concrete to work with, though.

I was suffocating. I couldn’t get air in my lungs. I knew I was going to die. My fingers couldn’t hold on. I was going to just let go. But the angel was there. She wouldn’t let go of my hand. It was the only thing I could feel. I knew that as long as she held my hand, I would survive. I prayed to her not to let go, even when I couldn’t grip her.

I hadn’t had the dream in a week or more. I could feel my eyes trying to cry but the tears were dry. It was like they were being sucked out of me like my life was. “Don’t let go of me, angel,” I prayed. “I will never let go,” she answered.

I woke with my baby sister petting my hand as she stood by my bed.

“Pey? Are you my angel?”

“Yeah, right. I just ... I needed to come and see you. I needed to hold your hand.”

“I love you, little sister.”

“Don’t get mushy. I’m not one of your girlfriends.” I thought I chuckled as I dropped back into dreamless sleep.

Mr. Gieseke had worked with me on my second semester schedule to make sure I had everything I needed. If I wanted to be on the academic honors program, I needed four years of math and three of science. I also needed three years of foreign language. I had math nailed because they counted my test-out from Algebra 1 as two credits and I was doing well in Geometry. Unfortunately, both Science and Languages only offered second semester classes and the instructors were not willing to take a first semester student. I still had my core classes for second semester—Geometry, Honors English, and AP Human Geography but getting into the AP class meant that it moved up a period. That in itself didn’t hurt my schedule since Health and Wellness had been a one-semester class.

Jock readily admitted me to first period Physical Education I. A lot of that class was general fitness and I could continue my customized workouts. I planned to spend a lot of time on the treadmill but Jock reminded me that I needed to keep my body in balance and the weight training was just as important. I wouldn’t be doing any dance fitness or aerobic classes, though. The State Board was considering making PE an eight credit requirement under pressure from the National Service to get students in better condition before they began basic training.

We settled on an Introduction to Business course second period and I would end my day with Adult Roles and Responsibilities. I was a little confused because the Business class was considered purely an exploratory elective but the ARR class fulfilled my ‘personal finance’ requirement. Oh well. I’d been an adult for sixty-five years. I figured I could handle that requirement.

My crew continued to have fifth period study hall/lunch. I was happy to see them. Beca and I had our second period Human Geo course together and Rachel and I would continue to have sixth period Geometry. I didn’t make it to my first study hall, though.

“Jacob, you have study hall this period, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered Ms. Levy before I left her English class.

“Would you mind staying a few minutes?”

“No problem. What’s up?”

“When you entered my class, you mentioned wanting to become a writer. I was wondering if you’ve had a chance to rethink that goal,” she said.

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” I answered. “I’m really good at math. It comes naturally to me. I might even double up one year so I get all the way through calculus before I graduate. But that is not a long-term interest any longer. I’ve become fascinated with how authors make characters who are so real to readers that it is like they live and breathe as friends. I think there are stories in which the characters become at least as real to the reader as, say, a Facebook friend they’ve never actually met. Like, reading Maus, even though it is a graphic novel, gave me a completely different perspective on the Holocaust than reading The Diary of Anne Frank.”