Chapter 5: A Small Gathering of Friends

The next day at school, I decided to put my little experiment into motion. It would probably turn up nothing, because the whole concept of some female-ogling ESP was too fantastic to be believed. As such, there was no need for Sketchy to know about my little "project" — considering how convinced he was that I had psychic powers, his finding out about my experiment would only give him more ammunition.

Two minutes into first period, right when Mrs. Martinez went into a discussion on calculating limits on functions with point discontinuity, I got that feeling again. I looked around, zoning out from the lecture for half a second to see if I could catch anything... but there was nothing. The feeling had passed, almost as if it had been nothing more than a slight breeze tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. It didn't matter; even though I didn't catch anyone "checking me out," as Sketchy phrased it, if the theory held any validity, she had to be in this class. So I took down what names I knew and descriptions for the girls I didn't, writing them into a separate notebook.

At one point in the lesson, Drew leaned over and whispered, "Whatcha doing?"

"Stuff on limits, same as you," I whispered back.

"No, I mean in your other notebook."

I guess it was just part and parcel of the high school environment; everyone seemed to need to know everything about everyone else. And when they didn't... rumours got started.

"It's nothing... don't worry about it." Drew seemed to be appeased, at least momentarily, although I was fairly certain that his curiosity would get the better of him at some point in time during the day, at which I'd have to field more questions I didn't particularly want to answer.

Mrs. Martinez paused her lecture, gave us the "teacher stare," and loudly cleared her throat. The two of us mumbled something of an apology, and then got back to our limits and function point discontinuity.

At the beginning of second period, Mrs. Eishorn began passing out a stack of blank worksheets and told us she wanted us to complete them by the end of class. I mustn't have been paying too much attention to the goings on, because halfway through the passing the girl who was sitting next to my left gently touched my arm.

"Psst," she said softly, "pass these along!"

"Sorry," I mumbled, took the worksheets from her, then continued the train. I recognised her from my calculus class earlier this morning, although I hadn't yet learned her name. I had simply recorded her into my "project" notebook as "redhead, ponytailed." And, upon closer examination, I noticed that she had the most captivating green eyes. However, as far as my experiment was going to proceed, this class was going to be a wash; I couldn't risk exposure, and would simply have to file away what I remembered later in the day.

"Now, class, you remember that yesterday we discussed Grendel's habitual rise from the swamp to harass King Hrothgar's court. For twelve long years, Grendel wreaked havoc on the King of the Danes, so much so that word of his sufferings crossed the Kattegat channel to an island of seafarers known as the Geats," Mrs. Eishorn began. "Beowulf, warrior hero of the Geats, left his homeland to render aid to Hrothgar, and in return would seek nothing but the glory of victory over Grendel.

"In pairs, I want you to go over the epic's third episode, and draw out references speaking to Beowulf's character as a hero. Then, each of you will fill out your worksheets; in the left column, write the line reference to the poem and a quotation, and in the right column, your interpretation and thoughts thereon."

By virtue of today's seating, I ended getting paired off with the redhead who had just recently pulled me out of my daze.

"I'm Julie," she said to me in a low voice. "You're new at the Foothills, aren't you?"

I nodded. "Jay. I just moved down from Boston last week."

"Well, it's nice to meet you."

"Same."

Our hushed conversation ended there as we turned our attention to the day's reading. Occasionally, I would make notations on my handout and would underline passages of relevance to the activity Mrs. Eishorn had planned. Once, when I was so deep in thought and scrawling like crazy on my copy of Beowulf, I felt the tickle at the back of my brain, and I stopped dead in my tracks. It had been considerably stronger this time, and as soon as I stopped writing, the feeling ceased, as if the person who had been looking at me realised that she might have unwittingly given herself away. The feeling came and went for the entire class.

By the end of the period, Julie and I had drawn out and discussed every conceivable reference to the heroicness of Beowulf, son of Edgtheow, ranging from his slaying of undersea monsters to five-day swimming contests to whaling with only a sword. We debated the conflict between Beowulf and Unferth, son of Ecglaf, and the one thing which struck me as most indicative of Beowulf's heroism was his modesty, for no matter how well he was known in the realm of the Danes, he was never one to boast.

I could relate. While I hoped to avoid the renown of Beowulf and the attention that came with it, I most certainly wasn't going to announce any of my actions that would gain it.

As the day progressed, my "project" notebook began to fill itself out. By fourth period economics, I was even more certain that Sketchy wasn't always playing with a full deck. Last Friday, I had commented to him that there was a considerable chunk of the day when the feeling wasn't present, thus providing the impetus for my class roster cross-referencing experiment. In both my economics and French classes, the feeling hadn't manifested itself. Yet today was different; all the way through to my end-of-day chemistry class, the sensation at the back of my brain persisted, and so I gave up on keeping notes.

"What do you mean, you stopped taking notes?" Sketchy asked incredulously as we were leaving the building, the end of the school day having come and gone. "Who knows, maybe you have more than one chick making eyes at you when you're not looking."

"And how is that supposed to help me?" I asked. "I thought we were working with a single variable in the equation, not the advanced astrocalculus of dating ESP. Besides, I'm the new guy... soon enough, the new will wear off, and things will go back to normal, without my brain tickling every five minutes.

"Oh, and besides," I said, "you're crazy."

Sketchy laughed. "Think of it what you will," he replied, "but I know I'm right. What's more, so do you... you just don't want to admit it yet."

I snorted as I waved goodbye to him. "I'll see you tomorrow — try not to get hit by lightning or speak to God until then." Revving my Yamaha, I put it in gear, and peeled off for home.

"So, how did your experiment go?" Ange asked me. The incredulous look on my face must have told a story all its own. She sighed exasperatingly, and said, "Your father told me. Don't you know by now that your mother, father, and I keep no secrets from each other?"

"It's something I keep forgetting," I replied wryly.

"So, how'd it go?"

"Well," I began, "I gave up on it. I tried to create as controlled an environment as possible; you know, minimise the variables and all that. But the thing went to hell right about lunchtime and never recovered, so I scrapped it."

"That easily, hunh?" she teased. "Tell me about it."

So I did. I explained to her that I had planned to record the names of all my female classmates in all classes in which I felt the tingling last Friday, later cross-referencing the names to see if there were any patterns or commonalities. After about five minutes of explanation, ending with Sketchy's declaration that there was a girl in particular who was checking me out, Ange burst into laughter.

"Oh, Jay," she said, "that's your problem. You're assuming there's only one girl checking you out at school."

My eyes bulged. "You're not serious, are you?"

"Of course I'm serious, honey," she said. "Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?" I gave her a funny look; of course I looked at myself in the mirror, how else was I going to shave? "No, I mean have you looked at yourself in the mirror; have you considered your looks?"

"No; what do you mean?" I asked.

She chuckled. "James, you're quite the handsome young man. You've got nice facial features, broad shoulders, and you're in shape. You don't boast, you're polite, and you listen to people when they talk. Plus," she added with a grin and a gleam in her eye, "that tickler of a beard you have would drive any woman crazy."

"Ange!" I exclaimed, shocked at her comment. Laughing mirthfully, she exited the living room, leaving me to consider her remarks.

The next morning, Sketchy made his way towards me as I was putting my helmet and gloves in my locker. He looked either anxious or eager, but I couldn't tell which; his face was flushed, and he sounded like a runner trying to catch his breath just after crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon.

"Dude, what's going on? You look like you're about to have a heart attack," I said.

"Huge powwow... in the common area," he gasped.

"What about?" I asked.

Sketchy took a minute to gather his breath. After he had finally calmed down, he relayed what was going on. "This Friday, the boys' basketball team is playing at Marana." He took a heavy, deep breath. "It seems that last night, someone broke into the school through the open area and spray-painted the message, 'We're gonna fucking stomp you. Signed, the Tigers.' "

"And?"

"And what? The jocks, from football down to the swim team, are flying off their rockers! I'm gonna go find some more people," he said, sprinting off in another direction.

High school never ceases to amaze me. "You'd think someone made a comment about their mothers," I muttered to myself, simply unable to comprehend the strength of high school spirit in Tucson, Arizona. I took my calculus textbook from my case, and then made my way alone to class.

The furor didn't die, though; it only got worse as the day progressed. In first period, Mrs. Martinez taught a lesson on the airspeed limits of an unladen falcon using quadratic equations (I mentally chuckled at the Monty Python reference, but no one else seemed to get it); in English class, Mrs. Eishorn compared the Marana Tigers to Grendel and Grendel's mother; in third period physics, Mr. Wolfgang discussed the force with which a tiger would hit the ground if someone threw it out of an airplane at 13,500 feet.

As we were leaving physics, I pulled Julie aside and asked her, "Has the entire world gone insane?"

She laughed. "What, y'all didn't get excited about high school rivalries in Boston?"

"Maybe," I said, "but nothing as crazy as this. Throwing tigers out of airplanes? The principal of Marana's mother resembling an ogre from Beowulf? It's absolutely senseless!"

Julie shrugged. "How would you feel if someone made a crack about Tom Brady or Adam Vinateri? Or, even worse, if someone suggested that Babe Ruth should be sainted for his 'Curse of the Bambino?' "

I reeled. "Whoa there, that's walking a might fine line," I started, only to get cut off.

"Now you understand how it is," Julie said. "We just take our high school sports a little more seriously; I guess it's because we're Arizonans, and there's not much else to do in Tucson."

After we walked together for about thirty feet or so, she lightly grazed my army with her fingertips, and said, "I've got to get to class... Speak to you later?" My mouth dried out, and I couldn't get any sounds out. With a sparkle in her beautiful sea green eyes, she turned and walked in the direction opposite from me, leaving me with goosebumps and my mind racing a mile a minute.

The dam had broken, and the tingling sensation at the back of my neck receded the further away she walked.

While sitting through Mr. Littlemount's economics class, I had a fairly strong inkling that I had unmasked my one discrete admirer, and that she had long red hair, green eyes, and a sparkling personality. Perhaps my conclusion was based on my reaction when her fingers barely touched my arm; perhaps I was reading too much into the encounter. Ask any woman, and she'll tell you that a man is an open book to be read from cover to cover; ask any man, and he'll tell you that a woman is a mystery on whom one could devote an entire lifetime of guessing and come up with as little as one started. Still, as far as the situation went, if Miss Julie Newheart was the one throwing glances my way, I would consider it no misfortune.

I shook my head ruefully, and then brought my attention back to the exercises on the board relating to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which authorised the United States government to pursue companies restraining both interstate and foreign trade. Monopolies, which naturally held a chokehold over the markets for which they formed the industry, were subject to being forcibly dismantled by Congress if Congress surmised that they were in violation of the Act. Given the inherent nature of the monopoly, being that they always sold goods at a considerable markup, and thus disadvantaged society, I could see the reasoning behind the law. Monopolies generally do not benefit democracies.

"And so we come to the example of Bill Gates, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world," Mr. Littlemount lectured. "In the late 1990s and early 21^st century, he became the subject of the most intense scrutiny on behalf of both the American government and the European Union. They alleged that certain business practises of his aimed to destroy his competitors in the market of computer software."

One student in the back of the fourth row raised her hand. "Sir, I don't understand," she said.

"Precisely, Miss Summers, what is it you don't understand?" the teacher asked.

"Well... I mean, pretty much everyone owns a PC, right?" The teacher nodded. "And pretty much all of them run Windows, right?"

"That's correct with a few qualifications, but pretty much right."

"So... I mean, if everyone is running a Windows machine, how could he be out to destroy his competitors if there aren't any?"

After the words left her mouth, one of the more quiet students raised his hand. "If I may?" he asked. The teacher nodded. "Y'all use the internet, right? A show of hands — who here uses Internet Explorer?" A fairly strong majority of the students in the class raised their hands. "Anyone use Netscape?" Another good chunk of hands went up. "Anything else?"

"I use Firefox," one girl offered.

"And why is that, Miss Clyde?" Mr. Littlemount asked.

"I dunno... I just like its features better, is all."

"So you see, class, Bill Gates does have a number of competitors in the software industry, as Mr. Velasco adeptly pointed out," the teacher continued. "Some of you don't use Internet Explorer for a number of reasons. Maybe you've used Netscape since the internet came out; maybe like Miss Clyde, you use something else because it suits your needs more. The bottom line is that all of you have a choice in which internet browser you use.

"But what if you didn't?" he asked rhetorically. "That's what Bill Gates was accused of doing; governments suspected he had coded Windows to forbid the installation of any web browser made by a competitor, be it Netscape, Firefox, Opera, whatever. And so," he said, going to the whiteboard with a marker, "because he constrained consumer choice, underhandedly tried to destroy what competition existed to his product, and tried to restrict trade, he got hammered." Everyone chuckled. "No, not like that," the teacher responded. "What I mean to say is that he got fined pretty heavily — to the tune of $600 million in Europe alone for abusing Microsoft's near-monopoly power."