Chapter 71: Back to the Grind

Sunday, March 21, 1982

We set our meeting with Jane for 4pm. It’d have to be a bit short, but Angie really wanted her nap with Gene today. Aside from that, study group was good, though mostly we didn’t study, just swam and played games. I did plenty of making out with Jasmine, too, but we put off any serious time together until we could have more privacy, and we’d continued to leave the guest room for those without other options.

About 3:45pm we headed out, leaving Rita with the usual instructions on how to reach us, and drove over to Jane’s office, finding her waiting in the lobby. We met with hugs and headed up to her office.

“How was your vacation?” Jane said.

“Good,” I said.

Angie nodded. “Yeah, good.”

“Anything noteworthy?”

“For me, yes,” I said. “We visited Austin. I went to college there and, more importantly, lived there for over twenty years, right up until starting over. It was ... it was weird. Buildings I’d worked in. Buildings that didn’t exist. Passing a road that would lead to the house I lived in for twenty years. It’s already built in 1982, so we could have gone and visited. It was unsettling, disquieting, and ... well, I think I could handle it again, now, but that first time? I’m glad Mom and Dad weren’t looking at me much.”

“Very interesting. I admit I have nothing on that. It’s not a problem I ever imagined anyone having! I’m going to assume the answer to my next question is...”

“Still behaving, yeah,” Angie said with a smirk.

“I’m getting the feeling that, if you ever don’t, I’ll find out because you’ll just shout it out.”

“Most likely so,” I said.

“What else did you do?” Jane said.

“We went to Enchanted Rock, the National Museum of the Pacific War, a natural history museum at UT, the LBJ ranch, and the San Antonio Zoo. And the Chart House, in the Tower of the Americas,” I said.

“I’ve been to most of those. That’s a good set of things to cover!”

“We enjoyed ourselves. Dad’s planning a mini-vacation up north before Indiana.”

“Anything new, outside the trip?”

Angie giggled. A lot. “Oh, just a few things.”

Jane smiled. “Do tell.”

Angie looked at me. “Do you want to, or...?”

I shook my head. “Go for it, Ang!”

She giggled again. “Okay, well, my dear brother got involved in an insurgent coup at Memorial, turned down the prettiest girl...”

“Second prettiest!”

“ ... the prettiest girl in the school for Sadie Hawkins, which made him an instant celebrity and number one gossip topic at school. He also made another girl ask him twice before saying yes. Two dates with Jasmine and Lexi, meaning sex; one date with Sheila, meaning sex. One date with Mikayla Reynolds, not meaning sex, and one encounter with Sam, also not meaning sex. That’s all beside the dating drama at school, where he’s turned down or put off several girls for dates. You were up to, what, five...” “Six.” “ ... six rejections for Sadie Hawkins at last count, some of which might turn up later.”

“Angie’s also skipping that she had a date with Jasmine, meaning sex.” Angie stuck out her tongue at me.

Jane blinked several times. “I’m not sure what to say to all that. Let’s start with ‘insurgent coup.’”

“Ang has a flair for the dramatic...”

“I do! That’s why I’m doing the summer Drama program!”

“As I was saying. We talked about this before — my suspicions about being asked to run for Student Council. That’s the ‘insurgent coup.’ Surprisingly, I’m not running for class rep, but, instead, for Vice President. Amit, Lizzie, and Megan are also running, plus Mikayla, who Angie mentioned, and Jessica Lively, who Angie inaccurately described as the prettiest girl in the school.”

Whap!

Jane chuckled. “Children! Please!” she said and grinned. “I have been waiting so long to get to say that to you two!”

“She is!”

“No, the hottest blonde in the school is sitting here next to me. Therefore, Jessica has to settle for second-prettiest.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “And you wonder why I worry about you two behaving!”

“I am not prettier, or hotter, than Jessica!”

“You are to me. So there.”

“Okay. Focus! So, what is the goal of your coup, Steve?”

“Most of Council right now are either do-nothings or a pretty homogeneous group of conservatives. Left to themselves they’d push things the opposite direction we want. Our candidates make up a pretty broad group of people who are fairly liberal, quite diverse, and well-targeted to run against the incumbents or more experienced candidates.”

“How much would you be able to change?”

“Not that much, but, like I said last time, Principal Riggs is pretty political. If we push on things that we can get parental support for, and especially if there’s legal support, he’ll give in. He does not want to get sued or have parents coming after him.”

She nodded. “That’s the way a lot of high school principals approach things. At least he’s someone you can work with. What are the odds you’ll win?”

“I’m hearing it’s good. My major opponent, James Palmer, who’s a jerk, confronted me in the cafeteria and did himself no favors.”

Angie giggled. “He was a real jerk. Lots of dumb stuff, and I swear he would’ve tried to hit Steve twice, if a principal hadn’t been watching.”

“This is also causing some drama in Debate. The current freshman girl rep is dropping off. The first person to file to replace her was Cindy Baird, who’s in debate. Her opponent in our little coalition is Megan Early. They’ve been sitting at the same table all year. I imagine that’s over and done with.”

“What’s wrong with Cindy?”

“She’s a fundamentalist evangelical. She also jumps to conclusions and sticks her foot in her mouth. She accused Steve of cheating on Jasmine, of dumping Nancy and Candice, and a bunch of other absurd stuff,” Angie said, looking amused. “And, debate-wise, she’s the only one left who’s refused to even try a single tournament this year. Good riddance!”

“Interesting. In the interest of time I’ll move on. Skipping the rejection, because I can guess why that might have happened, Angie said you made a girl ask you twice for Sadie Hawkins?”

“Megan Early. She was ... she made it sound like the only reason I would go out with her would be as a pity date. That’s no way to do something like that, so I asked her to think it over, be more sure of herself, then ask me again, with the understanding that, if she did, I would say yes. She’s tall and still growing, and she called herself a ‘giant gawky freshman stork’. She’s giant, fair enough, and a freshman. But she’s not gawky or a stork; she’s pretty, just tall. She’s graceful, athletic, and very pretty.”

“She is,” Angie nodded. “She just needed a self-image pep talk and asked the right guy.”

Jane nodded. “That, right there, is a recipe for a girl having all sorts of advantage taken of her. I take it she asked again in a better way?”

“She did.”

“And the girl you turned down, that was after you’d promised to hold the date open for Megan?”

“Exactly. Jessica thought it was cool, and we’ll potentially go out sometime later. The consensus from the rest of the school ran about 2-1 that I was an idiot for turning Jessica down...”

“4-1!”

“3-1 or so. But I think it worked out for the best, and it’ll make our date — Jessica’s and mine — more special. And, of course, Megan’s over the moon.”

“I would imagine so, having a tenuous self-image bolstered, and then having the guy you wanted turn down someone very pretty in her favor. Of course, that could also lead to advantage being taken, but I’m not worried in this case. I’ll jump over your dates with Lexi and Sheila. What’s this about a date with ‘Sam’?”

I chuckled. “Sam is Samantha, Lexi’s little sister. Apparently, she’s decided I’m someone she would, um ... like to spend time with.”

Jane rolled her eyes again. “Does that mean what I think it means? And how ‘little’?”

“She’ll be fourteen before I turn sixteen. And, yes, it means what you think it means. We have no agreement beyond that we’ll go out and talk.”

“That’s outside mandatory reporting, at least. Good.”

“She did her homework. She was certain of legality before proposing it.”

“Of course she did.”

“I think legality is a good thing, anyway,” I said with a grin.

“Considering ... yes. Though I’d normally advise you to run away as fast as possible. But you wouldn’t, and you have made good decisions, even the ones I’ve really questioned.”

“In this case I don’t know what the decision will be. Running away isn’t the best decision; Sam seems to have her act together and is pretty cool. I could turn her down, certainly, but it’d need to be gentle.”

Jane nodded. “Obviously ‘run away’ was a figure of speech, but I see what you’re saying there. Just be careful. How she is at fourteen is not how either of you were. Nor even Candice.”

“I will, of course. I think she’s pretty cool and pretty mature for her age; we’ll see. Nothing’s going to happen quickly.”

“Nothing ever happens quickly around Steve, that way, anyway,” Angie snickered. “He keeps putting girls off. You heard the times he’s been with Lexi and Sheila; neither of those were ‘just falling into bed’. It took him and Jasmine, what, four dates to fully fall into bed?”

I nodded. “Yeah, depending on how you count it. You could count it a couple ways.”

Jane shifted her gaze. “Before going on with all that, I believe you have a story as well, Angie?”

Angie blushed. “Um ... wellllll ... yes. Jasmine’s been, uh... after me for a while. Gene and I decided it wasn’t cheating — and, I mean, we discussed it in detail. It wasn’t a whim, it was a couple months of thinking it through. And, it was ... it was really good,” she said with a giggle. “It’s been a while.”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “Meaning there was a previous encounter with a girl? This is news to me.”

Angie blushed a bit more still. “Um ... well ... our sort of previous, yeah. Specifically, in prison.”

It was Jane’s turn to blush. “Oh! I ... hadn’t quite thought that through. Lesbian relationships are far more common in prison.”

“Yeah. And Carrie and I were pretty serious. I’d hoped we could manage through the years between our release dates and things weren’t looking bad for that when I ... um ... got ... released.”

“That’s fascinating. So, to Jasmine, it was...”

And Angie was back to blushing. “I pulled the ‘girlfriend in Chicago’ card. A story of kissing practice getting out of hand. Never actually happened, but I didn’t want to fake being shy and apprehensive when I totally wasn’t.”

“I think that’s forgivable, under the circumstances. Steve and I had a conversation a long, long while back where he was lamenting the need to maintain a lie, and I stated that that’s the price of doing things one needs to hide from others. He, of course, said that some things shouldn’t need to be hidden, which I generally agree with. However, in your case, you have something that needs to stay hidden, so that comes with lies. As long as they’re generally white lies — which the ‘girlfriend in Chicago’ story is — I see nothing wrong with that.”

“That’s how I saw it, yeah.”

“Will there be more?”

“Almost certainly. How many, I don’t know. I don’t want to get to where it is cheating on Gene. I don’t know at all if Gene and I are forever, but that’s not the way to end it. There’s, um ... also a bit of a side note. Not about Jasmine.”

“Yes?”

“Gene and I are putting our relationship on hold for the summer. We did last summer, too. We’re both excused any summer flings. Mine will almost certainly be with girls, if any happen. I’d say the odds are pretty good that they will, given a summer program in Drama.”