Chapter 50: Good News and Travels

Wednesday, October 26, 1983

All the hoping and wishing paid off. We had envelopes waiting when we got home (which we did directly after school, just in case there might be envelopes waiting).

A bit of phone calling later, we decided to open them at home. Angie called Paige from our line, while I called Jasmine from the main line.

There was a bit of fumbling around, then Angie announced her score first.

“I got a 1500!” Angie said, loud enough for me to hear. She sounded thrilled, and who wouldn’t be? I shouldn’t say that, because I knew a few people who wouldn’t be.

I repeated that for Jasmine, whose voice wavered just a bit as she said, “I’m afraid to look.”

“Honey, I know it’ll be good.”

“I’ll...”

Angie called. “Paige got a 1460!”

“I heard that!” Jas said. “Not helping!”

“Do you want me to go first?” I said.

“Nah. Hang out ... I got a... 760?” she said. “Wait, no, that’s English! I got a 1480! Oh my God!”

“Jas got a 1480!” I called.

“Congrats! And from Paige, too!”

“Congrats to them both!” Jas said. I could tell she was crying, almost certainly in relief. Camille was in the background, sounding very happy.

I opened mine last. “1540!” I said. “800 on verbal, 740 on math.”

“Jerk!” Angie said. “You had to outdo us!”

I’d outdone myself, too. Only by 20 points, but there wasn’t a lot of margin at this end of the range. The bigger change was that my first-life 1520 was 740 verbal, 780 math. Three years of vastly different priorities had an effect.

“Hurrah!” Jas said.

Everyone bounced a bit. Angie and I promised Paige and Jas hugs soon, then hugged each other.

The last major hurdle was done, and we were solidly in the top few tenths of a percent of high school students. We already knew that (the National Merit cutoff is half of a percent), but this was proof again.

Jas’s insecurity was perhaps still a worry. At this point, though, I thought it was much like mine — annoying, but not serious. Impostor Syndrome isn’t something you beat, once and for all, but it is something you manage. Part of managing it is realizing that no one bad test will ‘expose’ you and ruin your life, instead of insisting that you can’t have one bad test. Even so, every positive outcome is a victory.

We decided to stay home with our parents tonight and not try to go out. This was one of those major ‘live vicariously through your kids’ moments. Neither Dad nor Mom had been outstanding students (solid, but not outstanding), nor had they had full scholarships or their pick of colleges or anything of the sort. I knew how happy Mom and Dad had been during my first go-round, and this time it was at least doubled with Angie in the picture. I suspected that, while these things aren’t simple arithmetic, it was closer to four times, or maybe more. Jasmine and Paige were now ‘theirs,’ in a way, and their successes were celebrated nearly as much as ours were.

Similarly, I knew Camille and Francis were nearly as thrilled by my score as they were by Jasmine’s, and I suspected the Seilers were pretty happy about Angie’s performance as well as Paige’s.

I got Laura on the phone after dinner. She’d gotten a 1560. She actually gloated a bit over beating me, though it felt all in good fun.

We caught up a bit, too. She was looking forward to seeing us in person at the Michigan tournament, which was coming right up in a week.

Thursday, October 27, 1983

Most of the seniors were buzzing about their scores. A few hadn’t gotten their envelopes yet and were sweating the wait, and a few hadn’t even taken the SATs yet, but the vast majority had their scores and were either celebrating or, in a few cases, scheduling the next SAT offering.

None of my close friends were in that second category. The lowest score of anyone in Study Group was Sheila’s 1380, and that still put her easily in the top percent or two and kept her National Merit hopes very much alive.

Sue and Connie tied with perfect 1600s. That was no surprise at all for me, though both of them professed surprise. Gene’s 1500 would keep him in the mix to stick with Sue, and Jimmy’s 1540 (with a perfect 800 math score) should let him stay close to Connie. Neither needed the same school, just one close enough that they could live between them.

Everyone else was scattered in the 1500s or 1400s. Mark lorded his 1460 over Morty’s 1440, to everyone’s amusement, until Emily bopped him and told him to cut it out and respect her 1480.

We’d most likely get some more paperwork from the National Merit people shortly. We were in the endgame for National Merit Scholarships now. After the SAT, it was keeping up our fall grades and getting them letters of recommendation and the like, all of which we had well in hand.

Jess played very coy with her score. I think half of the school probably thought she’d bombed. I attributed it to a bit of psychological warfare in the ongoing battle against Trish (who, a little bird told me, had a 1240 — not in the least bad, except by comparison). Trish might well believe she’d eclipsed a reticent Jess.

In fact, Jess had a 1540 herself. She’d whispered it to me between classes. I’m not sure that even most of the cheerleaders knew that. In my estimation, most of them fit right in at a school like Memorial. There just wasn’t a lot of room for airheads. On the other hand, there were certainly a few whose scores didn’t keep up, and part of Jess’s management strategy had always been to somehow be simultaneously ‘just one of the girls’ and their unquestioned leader. One-upping a bunch of them might have upset that delicate balance.

Kyle got back to me. He agreed about Martin Connelly. We discussed when to get together. My problem was a fairly swamped schedule over the next two weeks. I had Jane this weekend, Michigan next weekend, and the play the weekend after that.

Nothing in the situation necessitated prompt action. I thought we had a practical deadline of the end of the year, but we’d missed any deadlines for the previous tax year and were plenty early for the current year. We’d pay the late filing penalties along with anything else we needed to.

Kyle would try to schedule an appointment. He had hopes of making Saturday the 19th work. It was quite close to Thanksgiving, but it still seemed like a good option.

Friday, October 28, 1983

Today’s hapless victim — erm, opponent — for Memorial was our sister school Northbrook. I think most people’s primary concern was that the game end quickly so we could head off to the Halloween dance. It was cold (though not nearly as cold as that infamous game three years ago where I’d caught some seniors that were up to no good) and we didn’t expect it to be a hard game.

We were right, too. We scored three times in the first quarter, taking the score to 21-0. After that, we substituted liberally, bringing in the second, third, and even fourth team offense and defense. By this point in the season, part of the game was making sure that our key players weren’t injured in some meaningless game and thus unavailable for the playoffs.

The score at halftime was 31-3, and the game ended at 41-6. For all intents and purposes we’d won it with the first touchdown, scored about a minute into the game.

The only effect of this game was to guarantee that we’d play Bi-District at home. We had a reasonable shot at hosting the Area game at home, too, depending on how the rest of the Houston area did. After that, Regionals and Quarterfinals would be at the Astrodome, while Finals would be in Dallas. The only mystery would be Semifinals, and that depended almost entirely on who was in the game. We wouldn’t have that answer until well after Thanksgiving.

Hopefully, the answer would matter to us at that point. We’d won eight games to this point. We still had to win seven more to become state champions.

We headed back to Memorial as quickly as possible once the game ended. Being good fans, we resisted the temptation to leave early, though. For one thing, Mel and Cammie, as girlfriends of the players, really couldn’t leave before the game ended, and a dance wouldn’t be a dance without Mel. To avoid tempting people to leave early, they wouldn’t open the gym until at least a bit after the game had ended, anyway.

We’d worn our Halloween costumes to the game, of course. That meant that we were all fairly cold, even if we had worn jackets. We mostly warmed up on the way back, though, and figured we’d warm up the rest of the way at the dance.

Mel was at the check-in table by the time we arrived, but then she’d sat right along the sidelines and could presumably leave quickly. We exchanged our tickets for pumpkin pins, put them on, and then headed in.

We immediately discovered that Trish and her gang had commandeered the tables we would usually sit at. They’d claimed more than they could reasonably use, too, with several of them sitting by themselves at a table to hold it.

We pretty much shrugged and headed to another set of tables. I really didn’t think Trish was aiming at us personally (though perhaps that was naive). We just knew where we wanted to sit, and it looked like she wanted to sit in the same place. Angie’s face was unreadable, but that was to be expected. It certainly could be petty on Trish’s part, but the worst thing we could do would be to show that it bothered us, so we didn’t.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Trish and Mike’s costumes, though. She’d gone as Sandy Olsson from ‘Grease’, while Mike had gone as Danny Zuko. I had no idea what sort of message that was intended to send, nor to whom. For all I knew, it was simply a socialite in-joke that had no meaning for the rest of us.

Angie didn’t seem to know what to make of it, either. She certainly didn’t clue me in at any point, and gave me a little shrug when I raised my eyebrows and flicked my eyes toward Trish.

With the exception of ‘stolen’ tables and ambiguous costumes, the rest of the dance was plenty of fun. As always, I danced with as many different girls as reasonably possible while making sure Jas was never left out. We got plenty of slow songs together. Jas, for her part, danced with most of the boys that we knew.

One of my dances was with Sarah Weiss. She seemed slightly hesitant at first, nodding a bit to Mike. I think she was wondering if I cared if it might upset Mike. I just shrugged and took her into my arms. We avoided discussing much of anything, but I did establish that she was happy, that she missed us (but not all that much, reading between the lines), and that she’d gotten a 1420 on her SAT. Good for her!

Angie and Paige ‘just happened’ to be right up close with each other for many of the fast songs. Funny how that goes! Mel and Cammie couldn’t risk that, of course, and stayed close to Andy and Cal unless they were dancing one-on-one with someone from Study Group, Debate, or Student Council.

Jess was here with Brad Billet, who’d made strides as our featured halfback this year. As with the last dance, no one would confuse her and Brad with being a couple, but they seemed to be having fun tonight, anyway.

Her dating plan had clearly changed, and I think everyone who was paying attention knew it. All of the girls did, I was certain. Before, she’d have picked a likely guy, dated him for a month or so, then moved on. Now, even that pretense was gone. She dated someone for a social event and maybe one or two more times, then moved on. The guys often had their own girlfriends (Brad certainly did), and the girlfriends never seemed at all upset with ‘their’ guy having Jess on their arm for a few nights. Nothing was going to happen and everyone knew it.

Somehow she’d managed to shift to a sweet spot between signaling that she just might, maybe, fall for someone at Memorial and signaling that it would never happen without seeming stuck-up or (possibly worse) uninterested in boys. She had a good time, the guy had a good time, the guy’s actual girlfriend had a good time, and everyone stayed friends.

If Trish had meant there to be drama, she failed. I didn’t know if she had meant there to be, though. Even Angie, who’d been her ally so long ago, couldn’t even explain what game Trish was playing, much less what the rules were.