Chapter 89

“I don’t want to hide. I want to slow dance with you again. I want to dance with you forever.”
—Sarah Black, Border Roads

4 FEBRUARY 2020

I’ve read quite a lot. Well, the old man in me read all the time. I have to watch myself. Sometimes we have an assignment in English and I say ‘Oh, I read that before.’ Brittany looks at me strangely and asks if I’ve read everything for the class already. No. There are a few works on the schedule the old man never heard of.

I like science fiction, which is one of the reasons I want to write in that genre. And thanks to some of the less mainstream things I’ve read, I like time travel stories. There’s one I read, don’t remember the author, that included a long debate on whether your actions in the past could change the future. They tried to stop the assassination of Lincoln, for example, but discovered they couldn’t change something in the past that had already been recorded in their present. Still, it seems like a bunch of stuff that has some guy going back into the past, he changes some little thing he did in the past and the whole world is different when he gets to his own time again.

And still, we never stop to consider how one little thing we do today can change the future. I can write a dozen different scenarios about what next year or the next ten years could bring. Or in the case of my space opera, a thousand years. But it’s the one little thing I do today that can affect that future.

That’s how I feel about making love to Nanette. I somehow think we’ve just changed the future of our pod. I didn’t have that profound sense of change when Brittany and I ravished Sophie. It was like that was peripheral. Somehow, Nanette is central. The calmness she brings. The dedication to both running and her job as a physical therapist. Introducing this degree of maturity to our group is going to change things.

I hope for the better.

Getting back to school with the snow melting fast in typical Indiana fashion on Tuesday was a chaotic time. It was testing week. Well, practice testing. The real tests were still three weeks away. What a zoo.

V1 was all over the map on this one. First, it was about educators not being held responsible for the quality of education. Then, it was no child should be left behind. Then, it was bring back shop classes in school and teach kids practical skills and make kids proud of manual labor and not just college. And finally, teachers just teach the tests and kids don’t remember anything past the day they take it. You name it. If there was something to gripe about with education, I’d done so. V3 had a whole new list.

I recognized a big lumbering ox of a kid in the hall who V1 knew. Lonnie White. I had no classes with him this time around. He was one of the ‘slow kids.’ He wasn’t a bad guy but he always seemed to be in some kind of trouble. He slept in class a lot. He ran into other people—maybe on purpose and maybe just because he was clumsy. He just didn’t seem to care about anything.

Except shop class. It was like Lonnie’s hands were magically transformed in shop class. In wood shop, he was one of the first to put a bowling pin on the wood lathe and turn it into a lamp. But where he really shone was in auto shop. He learned everything there was to know about tearing down and rebuilding a car. He got a job down at a local garage and when he turned sixteen, he just never showed up at school again. I threw a rod in my first car and Lonnie rebuilt the engine for me so well that I drove that Hawk for the next ten years.

He still wasn’t a very social guy, didn’t talk clearly, and kept bumping into people. But he was a fine mechanic.

I wondered what was about to come of him here. We didn’t have shop class at Mad Anthony High School. We were an academic school. There was a program, though, where juniors could transfer to the tech college and train for a non-academic career. That was new since the ISTEP had been rescinded. That was a standardized test that supposedly determined if you were learning what you should in high school in order to graduate. It was given during the sophomore year to help counselors decide if you needed special classes because you were not, by golly, getting out of this school without passing those tests.

Mad Anthony was a gold star school with over ninety-five percent of its seniors passing the final graduation exams. I later found out that number didn’t include the students who dropped out before the end of senior year. Fudging the numbers.

Anyway, ISTEP had been rescinded but they couldn’t go without testing, so a new test was instituted: The NSRE, National Service Readiness Exam. It had most of the same content as the old ISTEP but results of this test went straight to the National Service and they judged the school on whether students were ready for National Service instead of whether they were ready for college. I began to realize that the Service wasn’t concerned with whether you graduated. It was concerned with how it could use you when you turned eighteen.

Since this was now how teachers were evaluated, of course it was the new exam that was taught. Pass at all costs. Including three days of taking a practice exam so we’d be ready for the real exam in three weeks.

Suffice it to say, the week sucked.

We were all going to take the fan bus to Regionals Saturday but Nanette wanted to go with us and she wasn’t a student. She ended up driving Desi. Rachel and I went in the Yaris. Joan got her Mom’s car and took Brittany and Beca. Seemed wasteful to use three cars to drive across half the state to Kokomo but that’s what we did.

Livy? Of course, she was on the team bus and stoked about heading for another state championship like the team had won last year.

It was not to be.

We screamed ourselves hoarse during the first game against Zionsville. It went into double overtime and our girls finally pulled it out 66-65. They really left it all on the court. And that was proven when we went against Hamilton Eastern in the final that evening. Our girls’ hopes of a state championship were dashed in a 57-47 loss. Sometimes life sucks.

We mixed it up on the way home. Brittany and Desi rode with Rachel, Beca moved over to Nanette’s car, and I slid into the front seat of Joan’s mom’s Audi.

“Mmm. This brings back some memories,” I said.

“Yeah. But we don’t have to use the back seat tonight,” Joan said. She glanced at me but was paying careful attention to the road. US 24 has some wicked curves on it and the weather was still unpredictable. “You want to stay the night tonight?”

“Joan, that is hardly an invitation I could pass up. Let me text Mom to let her know where I am.”

“Tell her I’ll have you home in time for your concert in the morning. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m the lover who’ll be curled up next to you while you play.”

“So, I understand there are all sorts of things lovers can do besides having sex,” Joan whispered. We were lying in her bed naked and I tried to hide my disappointment that she wanted something else.

“Would you like to learn to play cribbage?” I asked.

“Beca and I learned last weekend,” she giggled. “I want to make love, Jacob. But I want other things, too. There are times when I just want to lie here and listen to you breathe. Is that silly?”

“I think it’s sweet.”

“I just ... When I’m away and alone in Service, I want to remember what it was like to be held ... to be loved,” she said.

“I’m not going to stop loving you when you are away,” I said. “Neither will Beca. I haven’t stopped loving Em.”

“Will we really still be a pod when I get back? Emily, at least, will have a year with you when she gets back before you have to go into Service. You’ll be leaving just when I return. We’ll be apart for four years.”

“We won’t be apart all that time,” I said. “Em’s been home twice since she started and our family is going to San Diego over spring break to be with her. I think when more of us are in Service, we’ll set up meeting points and try to coordinate all of us getting together at the same time.”

“I love you, Jacob. Will you take care of Beca while I’m gone?”

“You bet I will. Beca is still my best friend and I’ll never abandon her.”

“She’s a little different than the rest of us. She gets turned on and is a wonderful lover, but it’s not like she’s on an instant trigger. You can’t just touch her nipples and have her ready to fuck. Like me,” Joan said.

“That’s something we’re learning about each of our partners. Different things turn us on.”

“You could do it now,” she whispered.

“Do it?”

“Touch my nipples. Make love to me.”

Track practice started Monday after school. There are separate boys’ and girls’ teams and a boys’ JV team. Three different main coaches for the teams and different assistants for track and field events. A lot of the guys who went out for track were there for the fitness conditioning after the winter. Most of the football and wrestling guys did strength sports like shot put and discus. They spent most of their time in the weight room and only a few would participate in meets. The basketball guys were still in their season and wouldn’t really join the team until the end of March. Still, they’d already signed up for the jumping events like high jump, long jump, and pole vault. Our season could be half over before they ever got a chance to compete. The soccer guys were sprinters and went after the hurdles as well. And then there were those of us who were just runners. We ran.

I’d practiced so hard with Nanette and Livy on getting my pace even and consistent that it was no problem for me to run the two miles or 3,200 meters events. But I was only down to a six-and-a-half-minute mile pace. Varsity elite runners pretty much sprinted the whole two miles at a five-minute-mile pace.

Among the freshmen and sophomores, though, my pace was good enough to keep up. I’d probably never win one of these races but if I could get my time under twelve minutes there was a good chance I’d place. So Jock said. Then he surprised me by telling me he wanted me to run the second leg of the 4x800 meter relay. That set the tone for practices. We all had weight training but we were focused on getting to our first meet. And it would be a massive one.