Chapter 33

“Technology! How can any man who means to keep his sanity go far in such an art?”
—Fred Saberhagen, Empire of the East

“GAH! HOW ARE WE ever going to decide this?” I said in frustration. We were all gathered at Joan’s house on Saturday afternoon to review the last batch of videos from security. “We’ve got ten weeks of video less four days off school. That’s forty-six videos of kids coming into the lunchroom, rearranging tables, and leaving. Every video has four lunch periods on it. That’s a total of a hundred eighty-four lunch periods at twenty-five minutes each. Four thousand six hundred minutes of footage! Over seventy-five hours. What’s even the purpose?”

“Jacob!” Beca commanded. “Sit down and shut up if all you can do is recite statistics about how futile it is. I swear, you sound like an old man trying to ruin everyone’s fun.”

I sat down and shut up. I was an old man. I didn’t mean to ruin everyone’s fun, but I didn’t see how we were going to make sense out of all the data we’d collected. The project had sounded both interesting and exciting when we conceived it but I was only just realizing the flaws. We had failed to adequately plan the project. Our only plan was to collect video and try to learn from it.

“You guys need to relax and lower your high expectations a little,” Rachel said.

“What?” Beca practically screamed at her.

“What is the purpose of the Human Geography project?” she calmly responded.

“It is,” I read from my notes, “To show an understanding of maps and spatial data. To show understanding and interpret the implications of associations among phenomena in places. To show understanding of the relationship among patterns and processes. To demonstrate defining regions and evaluate the regionalization process. To be able to characterize and analyze changing interconnections among places.”

“Wait,” Rachel said, adopting a teacher-like expression. “I did not hear you say that the purpose was to add to the knowledge and science of human geography. Where was that?”

“It’s not in there,” I said.

“Exactly! You two are acting like you are going to discover some new scientific information and reveal to the world how a high school lunchroom leads to nuclear war. You don’t have to kill yourselves over this. You have to show a high school AP level of understanding,” she said. She scowled at us and plopped back on the sofa with her arms folded.

I sat there looking first at Rachel and then at Rebeca. That was ridiculous. I grinned at her and started laughing. It just came up from inside and started bubbling out so hard I couldn’t contain it. My side started to hurt and the girls started laughing at me. When I thought I was going to pass out, I started gasping for breath and settling down.

“What the fuck got into you?” Joan asked.

“Sometimes I forget we’re in high school,” I snorted. “Really. I’ve been stressing over this like it was my PhD dissertation. I’m sorry, Beca. I didn’t mean to get so frustrated or be so frustrating.”

“I know,” she sighed. “I guess I got caught up in it, too. Sorry.”

“Kiss and make up,” Desi insisted.

“I ... uh ... We...”

“Oh, shut up, Jacob. Come here and kiss me nicely.” I did as told. Very nicely. “You do know I’m not going to magically turn straight, don’t you? I mean, if there was no chance of me making out with Joan ... Or Rachel ... Or Desi ... I could probably close my eyes and convince myself you were just one of the girls.”

“Nice. Fourth choice. I’ll live with that.”

“You know what we need?” Desi asked. “We need to take a break. Well, I do, anyway. I can’t remember the last time I spent a day without one or more of you. Even though no one went out last night, we still saw each other at school and hung out at lunch.”

“Getting tired of us, hot stuff?” Joan jabbed at her.

“No! But I’ve got like eight weeks of farts bottled up inside that I haven’t dared let out and I want to go someplace alone where I can let ‘em rip.” We all started laughing again.

“I haven’t spent any quality time with my little brother in a long time either,” Rachel said. “I gave him a certificate for a movie of his choice for Christmas and we still haven’t gone.”

“I should do something special with Pey, too,” I said. “She was so scared during the thunderstorm last weekend that she came and crawled in bed with me. I see Em at school and in the car almost every day, but I don’t spend enough time with Pey.”

“Probably a good idea all the way around,” Joan said. “I have a couple of websites I haven’t changed in a long time. I should do something creative for myself before I tackle the big animation for this project.”

“And you guys aren’t even getting credit for it,” Beca sighed. “Why don’t we take tomorrow off. No studying together, no phone calls, no text messages to each other.”

“That’s getting kind of extreme,” Joan said. “I might want you to see something on my private snapchat.” Beca looked at her and grinned.

“You know what I miss?” she said. “I miss you coming in dressed to kill on Mondays and sitting across where I could just watch you all through lunch while guy after guy came to hit on you.”

“I’ll do it if you come to hit on me, too. Then I won’t have to actually pick one of them for a date next week.”

“Only if you do the whole week’s routine with the tight jeans and Friday yoga pants.”

We finally broke up our Saturday meeting promising to give the project a rest and hit it fresh on Monday. And we’d all take Sunday off from each other.

“Hey, baby sister,” I said in the car after church Sunday. “Want to come to the park with me?”

“And what? Make sure you don’t fall over on your walk?”

“Harsh! Maybe I could find a different third grade girl who’d like to learn how to operate my drone.” I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“Really? You’d teach me how to do your helicopter thing?”

“Quadcopter. And yeah. As long as you agree to make sure I don’t fall over.”

“I’m meeting a friend at the mall this afternoon,” Em said. “I can drop you off if you want.”

“Why’d you want to do this?” Pey asked as she deftly guided the quadcopter to a stop ten feet in front of us. “Smile!” I put an arm around her shoulders as she triggered the remote camera button to capture the latest in selfies.

“Well, aside from the fact that I like to spend time with you and haven’t done that much since I got back to school, I kind of realized last weekend when you were scared of the storm that I missed just spending time with you.”

“I like to be with you but you always have girls around now.”

“Yeah. That’s weird, isn’t it? Who ever thought I’d have even one girlfriend?”

“They’re nice. I like them.”

“Good. Let’s go sit down over there. I want to tell you about a story I read not long ago.”

“You haven’t told me a story in, like, ten years.”

“You’re only eight, Pey.”

“Yeah.” We settled on a picnic bench and I started disassembling the drone to put it in the carrying case.

“So, the story was about an old guy. I mean like older than grandma and grandpa.”

“Ancient. Prehistoric. Antediluvian.”

“Where the heck did you learn that word?”

“I read, too, you know.”

“Okay. Well, this guy was thinking back over his Methuselan life and remembered that he had two sisters. The older one was kind of angry and bitter. She resented having to share a bedroom with her sister. She thought her brother was a pain in the ass. She didn’t even like her parents much. Everybody pretty much felt the same way about her. As soon as she could get out of the house, she ran away, got married, and had kids of her own. And those kids were every bit as resentful and miserable as she’d been.”

“Ish. Is this a sad story?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

“What about the other sister?”

“The old man hardly remembered his little sister. He’d ignored her when she was growing up and didn’t even come home to watch her graduate from high school. To him, she’d just been someone who got under foot, or who he had to stay home to take care of when his parents were away.”

“I don’t think I like this old man.”

“The more I think about him, the less I like him, too. So, I won’t dwell on the details other than to say that both of his sisters had died and he had hardly noticed. But as he lay there on his deathbed, he thought back to his sisters and how different things could have been if he’d reached out to them and just been a friend. The old man died, wishing he’d told his sisters that he loved them.” I paused and looked at my little sister. “Pey, I don’t want to be like that old man. When I look back on my life, I want to remember what a good time we had together and how much I loved you and Em.”

Pey snuggled up against me and hugged me around my waist.

“I want to read that story,” she said.

“Oh. I guess I’ll have to write it, then.”

I’d finished my homework for the weekend and even made some notes that I thought we could riff on for our project. Everybody was getting ready for bed and I was sitting in my room with my guitar and some music Vinnie gave me spread out on my bed. It was a simple Slovenian folk song but I was working on coordinating my fingers with what I saw on the page. I got lost in the music and just let my fingers travel the strings. I finished the piece and shuffled the sheets around to look at Etude No. 9 that was another simple piece working with the C major scale.

“I haven’t heard you play that piece in a long time,” Em said from my doorway.