Chapter 27: Other Evils

Kennedy kept busy during the summer, trying not to think about the camp she couldn't attend or the friends she couldn't see. Twice she went to play poker in Manhattan with Pipes and the others, each time using a different route, a different way to get there.

It was a little like being grounded, but this was by her own choice. Instead of doing what she truly wanted, she buried herself. She worked out, she studied, she read books for pleasure, and she watched TV more than she ever had before.

Now and again, she'd ask Mr. Glastonbury for a study topic; now and again, weeks later he'd ask her a few questions about the topic. It wasn't at all like it had been before, and she didn't spar with him at all. She had to forgo sparring with human partners, because the one time a guard had agreed to practice with her, she'd tossed him six feet in the air when he rushed her. If it had been Mr. Glastonbury, he'd have landed, moaned and groaned for a while, and then would have been ready to go again. The guard simply turned and left, quitting the next day.

Pipes was candid. "We've rethought the whole thing about how to fight vampires. No more going in, guns blazing away. Instead, we've got a few guys now who are getting pretty good with crossbows. When we're sure that's what we're facing we find a good spot and lie in wait. They come in range and zap! We dust them from ambush!"

"You have just two guys?"

Pipes nodded.

"You'd better train another couple, and start being careful about your ambush sites. At some point, they'll try to trap you. You need a covering force, and you'll need a clear shot at the vamps that will be coming up from behind your people."

"It grates," Pipes told her. "The men don't like it. It's not very brave to shoot from ambush. They want to do it face to face. We showed them the tape the police made of their cops flying through the air, crashing into things. Having their necks or backs broken like twigs. It just doesn't seem to sink in. They're sure they're too smart to let it happen to them.

"Except it will, won't it?"

"Vampire hunters are something vampires have faced for hundreds of years. Vamps are smart, they are tricky, and once you start building a history of killing them, they'll know about it. People talk. Then they trap the trappers. Or come after you. Stay at it for very long and they adjust and then ... that's the ball game."

Pipes nodded. "Carlo said something once, about his time in Nam. We had to be smart every time, be lucky every time ... and all they had to do was get lucky once or hit you on an off day. The vampires are like that too, aren't they?"

"Pretty much."

"I'll pass the warning. At least Clarice is still young enough to be willing to accept such things. My friend ... if he decided to do something else, you were out of luck."

"Like you said," Kennedy told him, "that only needs to happen once to ruin the rest of your life. And if you're really unlucky, it could be a very long life indeed."

When school started it was almost an anti-climax. Sure it was her senior year, and most of her classmates were eagerly looking forward to college. Still, as usual, her own future was clouded.

Right after Labor Day Kennedy had an appointment with a counselor. The counselor knew who her father was and blithely assumed Kennedy could get into whatever university she wanted to, no problem.

That mildly irritated her, because Kennedy had been hoping for some decent advice. It all kept coming back to what did she want to do after high school?

If she was the Slayer, well, things were pretty much a slam dunk. Stay in training, keep learning and cross her fingers and hope that she could do some good in the time she had. Except Mr. Glastonbury had all but said there was almost no chance now that she was going to be Chosen.

Did she want to fade away, slide into frustration and bitter anger and go out in a blaze of glory? She didn't think so. Being strong, fast and quick healing were things like her hair color, her measurements and her shoe size. They were facts about her, but they weren't her.

Did the frustration and depression happen because the Potentials knew they could be Chosen, then waited too long before started thinking about the future? Why did it happen to girls who were merely stronger then ninety-nine out of a hundred of their peers? Girls who ran faster or healed better? Why did they despair? Because they listened to their Watchers, she decided. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, she thought.

On the other hand, she'd told her stepfather where to go put his money. Money, and yes, as the counselor assumed, influence. Kennedy was sure she could go to him, apologize and he'd take care of everything. Again, that wasn't her, either.

Sure, she'd done to herself, over the last year, pretty much what he'd done to her the year before. Did it matter whose choice it had been? She was absolutely positive that it did. You either had control or you didn't. If you didn't have control, at some point, if you weren't careful, you'd stop paying attention and that would be that.

Without her father, she'd have a tough time living. Paying for college? It would have to be a community college and probably part time, with most of her day filled with an eight to five job. Was that so bad? How many of her peers had that staring them in the face?

No doubt, quite a few. But, she was sure that most of them, at this point in life, were hoping against hope that it wouldn't happen to them. No fat, beer-drinking, belly-scratching husband, no fat little kids, yelling, screaming and making messes all over the place. Instead, a nice home in the burbs with a stockbroker husband, the shiny, smiling kids with perfect grade-point averages and who played championship soccer or who were training for the Olympics.

Kennedy did something extraordinary then. She scheduled another appointment with her counselor the next day.

"Let me be blunt," Kennedy told the woman. "My stepfather and I have had a falling out. I told him I'd rather die than take any of his money after I graduate. Look at my grade point average. I expect to get at least 1500 on my SAT test and maybe higher. I want to go to a college on a scholarship."

To her credit, the counselor did look. "Straight As, that's good."

"I got a B in my first semester of Spanish," Kennedy told her. That had been necessary to make sure that the other girl finished ahead of her. Which, it turned out, had been unnecessary, as Kennedy had never heard of AP classes and the girl had. There were a dozen others ahead of her as well.

The counselor shrugged. "You've never played on a varsity team sport. No soccer, no lacrosse, no volleyball, no track and field ... do you have any hobby sports, like ice skating or gymnastics? Any extracurricular activities at all?"

"Not really. I swing a mean sword at Ren Faire, I can row a racing scull really fast."

The woman hadn't been interested until the last. She looked up at Kennedy. "Sculls? You have experience with sculls?"

Kennedy decided on a whim that it was time to lie. "Quite a bit. I've had some good coaching."

"Hmmm. Sculls are a sport where maturity counts more than youth. Most of the women in it are older. How about skiing?"

"No."

"Just sculls?"

"Yes. My coach said I should try out for the Olympics."

The counselor smiled. "Kennedy, do yourself a favor and don't ever mention that again. Every coach on the planet tells their athletes they can make the Olympics. What sort of times did you turn in, in sculls? What kind of scull?"

"Single scull. We didn't do it to a stop watch. There was a rock about a mile out in the lake. The first time I went out, it was maybe fifteen minutes. By the time I was finished, it was maybe twelve minutes."

"Twelve minutes isn't a competitive time for a mile, much less fifteen minutes."

"Out and back."

The counselor shook her head. "Kennedy, we're back to believability. You don't row 3000 plus meters in twelve minutes ... or even fifteen. Maybe if you were the world champion, you could do it in fifteen minutes."

"I row really fast," she told the woman.

How could Kennedy convince her? Ask her to go up to Camp Wanakena and watch? In September, when the camp was closed? What did Mr. Waterman do the rest of the year, anyway?

"Is there some place I can try out?"

"In New York City? Are you kidding? A dozen or more."

"I'll make arrangements. I'll get the times certified."

The counselor ran her hand over her face. "There are notes in your file, Kennedy. You have to know that."

"Yeah."

"One of them is that while you probably don't always tell the truth, no one has ever caught you in a lie."

"Sometimes I fib," Kennedy admitted. "But..." she stopped herself from saying it was to low ball what happened, not the other way around. "Not about anything important. 'How are you, Kennedy?' 'Fine, thank you!'"

The counselor laughed and said, "I do that, particularly on the first day of my period.

"Look, Kennedy. Get someone unbiased to time you. I have a friend who coaches rowing at the University of Miami in Florida. Show me a good time and I'll give her a call. She's coming up in a few weeks, looking for bodies for her program. It would be pretty much what you want. Full scholarship, including tuition, room, board and fees. A stipend for books. In the second year, if you perform well in the classroom as well as well as rowing, the stipend will help you get a place off campus."

"I'll do that, then," Kennedy told her. "Miami? That's by the ocean. I'd like that."

The counselor laughed. "By the Atlantic -- nice beaches, nice weather ... of course you get the occasional freeze and the occasional hurricane. Believe me, the weather is simply wonderful."

"Why are you here, then?" Kennedy asked -- then hated herself an instant later.

The counselor shrugged. "Like you and your father, my friend and I had a falling out. I grew up here, I'm comfortable here. It's where I came to lick my wounds."

Kennedy was tempted to volunteer to help lick them, but decided that would be a really bad idea.

"It'll take a day or two," Kennedy told the counselor, "but I'll do it. I'll have the times for you by early next week."

"Don't do anything that will give my friend something else to be pissed about," the counselor warned.

"Never!"

That evening she went to see Mr. Glastonbury. "I need something in particular," she told him. "You seem to have a lot of connections. If you can't help, I'll call Pipes or Clarice."

"What is it, Miss Kennedy?"

"I need to find a place where I can get some certified time trials in a racing scull. Soon, as in the next day or two."

"I'm sure I can find someplace," he told her. "Is there anything else?"

"I was thinking. The counselor at the high school told me that if I was any good at a sport, I could get a full scholarship. Except you never taught me any competitive sports."

"I explained why."

"Yes, you did. Now explain something else to me. I seem to remember you saying that when a Potential gets too old, her Watcher leaves. Does that mean you don't stick around until the bitter end?"

"Sometimes that takes a few years. No, we leave on her nineteenth birthday. There has never been someone Chosen who was nineteen."

"A couple of things then, for you to take back to your sucking asshole Council. The only sport I have that I could possibly get a scholarship in is sculls ... and I learned that at a camp run by gypsies, from a demon. How do you justify to yourselves, just turning some poor girl out like that? You don't teach her any other skills at all, do you? Not even skills for coping with life. I can't cook, sew or even wash my own clothes.

"The counselor talked about if I did well, as a sophomore, I could live off campus in an apartment. Except, Mr. Glastonbury, sir, I don't even know how to boil water. If I went down to the kitchen, I'd have to hunt to find juice to pour into a glass. And where do we keep the glasses, anyway?

"And that's just one thing for me. I can't dance very well. I've never been on a date, all my training has emphasized fighting characteristics. I'm smart; I learned math, English, history and that stuff on my own with your help. I made time to read books and watch TV, things you didn't recommend. You wouldn't have made time at all for those, would you?"

"It's not essential to your training. True, you do need some recreation, but few Potentials live in a mansion with servants to do the work. They spend their extra time learning the things about living that I didn't teach you."

"Do they pay attention in school?" Kennedy pressed.

She had him! He looked away. "Not always."

"You think about it," she told him. "You think about just how you prepare a Potential for life as a normal person."

"We don't," he admitted.

"You need to think a lot more," she told him. "Let me know when you know something about sculls."

She got up, turned her back on him and walked away.

It took two days to arrange, then the following Monday she was standing in a boat house at the New York Athletic Club's facility in Pelham. Kennedy smiled to herself. It was five thirty in the morning and she'd already been waiting for half an hour.

Finally one of the coaches approached her. "What would you like, Miss?"

"A single scull. I'd like to do a two thousand meter warm-up, then one for time. I'm a high school senior, who, if I have a good time, might be able to secure a scholarship."

"And you've rowed before?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a coach?"

"A Mr. Waterman. He's the coach at Camp Wanakena, which is on Cranberry Lake up in the Adirondacks."

"That's a summer camp?"

"Yes."

"And you feel that this qualifies you, somehow, for this?"

"I feel it entitles me to try. Plus, my stepfather is Peter Stuyvesant, and I checked -- he's a member of the New York Athletic Club."

"Just a minute," she was told. The coach walked away from Kennedy without another word.

Kennedy hummed to herself, miming working out with Lady Kennedy, sitting, she was sure, forlornly lonesome in the cabinet back at the house.

The coach returned and watched Kennedy exercise. "I'm not familiar with that style of warm-up," she told Kennedy.

"Usually I practice with a sword. I'm a big Ren Faire fan. Still, a warm-up is a warm-up."

"That it is. You have permission twice to do this; that is a little unusual."

Kennedy smiled. "Good! If you'd said no, I was going to open my purse and start pulling out stacks of money until you agreed. My stepfather and I have had a falling out and in eight and a half months, the money stops. In the meantime, I have no compunctions about spending it."

The coach held out her hand. "Cynthia Beason."

"Kennedy."

"Come along, Miss Kennedy."

"Kennedy is fine. Just plain Kennedy. Miss Kennedy makes me think my tutor is talking to me."

"Then come along," she was told.

She was waved to a rack of boats. Kennedy started running her hands over the finish, passing up a dozen before she picked one that was better than the rest.

She carried it to the water and got in. "Proceed, Kennedy," Coach Beason told her.

Kennedy looked around. The coach chuckled. "About two hundred meters ahead and to the right, are six lanes. The inner four are in use. Use the outer lane. The buoys mark 200 meter intervals. If I were you, I'd go out just a couple of hundred meters, then return for your time trial. Then I'd keep it to say, four hundred meters."

Kennedy paddled to the lane indicated and simply kept going, making no attempt to start. She kept it down, way down, just getting used to the feel of the oars, the scull and above all the water. The ocean was an entirely different beast than placid Lake Wanakena.

She turned at the end, pleased she'd not have needed her training wheels and cruised back.

Coach Beason was dismissive. "Four thousand meters for a warm up? You'll be lucky to get two hundred meters."

"Tell you what, Coach," Kennedy said, not really angry, but trying to sound it. "Do you have a dollar in your purse?"

"It's back in the boathouse. I have it in change, yes."

"Fine. I'll bet the folding green contents of my purse against your dollar. You get a scull, come down here and race me the two thousand meters. That's fourteen thousand to one odds."

"I'd get fired. My dollar against just one of yours."

"Whatever. Get in the water."

Kennedy could see the coach didn't react well to being bossed around. Still, a few minutes she had a scull in the water herself and a few minutes later they were lined up. "You call the start," Kennedy told the woman.

"Start!" the woman said instantly and started.

Kennedy chuckled and started after her.

At two hundred meters she was abreast with the coach. The woman glanced at Kennedy, but that was all.

Kennedy chuckled. "Is that the best you can do?" Kennedy called. She went from about forty percent effort to about eighty percent and started streaking down the lane.

She never bothered to look back. At sixteen hundred meters, she put in the last twenty percent and flew the rest of the course.

She circled and waited nearly four minutes for the coach to catch up.

The woman stared at Kennedy stonily. "My, my! Aren't we amped up!"

"Pardon?"

"On speed."

"Well, I do like to go fast, but I think you're talking about drugs. I don't even use caffeine."

"Well, I have to admit, you don't look like you're on steroids. Want to race back? Double or nothing?"

Kennedy laughed. "Sure, why not? Can I call the start this time?"

Their sculls were facing each other, Kennedy headed the right way. The coach shook her head. "You have to wait until I'm ready."

"Like you did for me?"

"We were both lined up. I'm not lined up."

"Well, whatever you're comfortable with," Kennedy told her. "Call it when you're ready."

In a moment they were lined up. This time Coach Beason was trying to psych her out by waiting and waiting. "I'm dying of old age here, coach," Kennedy said with a laugh.

"Go, then!"

Kennedy got up and left. This time she ran at thirty percent, more than enough to keep her ahead of the coach for the first thousand meters, then she ran up to sixty percent. At the end, two hundred meters from the finish she went back up to a hundred percent.

This time the wait was almost six minutes. Kennedy had paddled back to the dock and was waiting for the coach. When the coach arrived, she gestured at a woman standing on the dock. "Sharon?"

"Seven minutes, five seconds outbound; ten minutes twenty seconds on the flip side. She's a horse."

Coach Beason got out of her scull and Kennedy did the same. The coach waved at the boat. "Take it back to the boathouse."

Kennedy wasn't stupid. "I'll be a step behind you," she told the coach.

"Sharon, my scull," Coach Beason told the woman, who wasn't much older than Kennedy.

Sharon lifted the coach's scull out of the water, and started carrying it back to the boathouse. Kennedy bent down, lifted hers by brute force, ignoring the sweat popping out on her forehead and her screaming arm and thigh muscles. She took a few quick steps, catching up with the other girl.

"Kennedy, just put it down. I don't want you to drop it," the coach requested.

Kennedy ignored her. She put the boat on a set of supports. "It needs to be rubbed down."

"Sharon will do it," the coach told her. "Come with me."

Obediently, Kennedy followed her. They went a few yards from the boathouse, into a building that was clearly a combination of offices and classrooms. Coach Beason wended her way through the offices, sat down at a desk and pulled open a drawer. She handed Kennedy a plastic cup, wrapped in plastic.

"Fill this."

"What is it?" Kennedy asked.

"A whizz cup. Pee in it. I'll have your urine tested for drugs. If you show up positive, I'll see you banned." She waved to a door. "There's a rest room through there, first door on the left."

Kennedy looked around the office. There were a half dozen others present, four men and two women, including Coach Beason. Kennedy pushed her shorts down and filled the cup where she was standing.

When she finished, all the conversation in the room had evaporated, every eye was on her.

Kennedy handed the cup to the coach. "There." There had been no way to keep from leaking around the edges. "Can I have some Kleenex?" Kennedy asked.

The coach took the cup, wiped it off from a box she had on her desk, then wiped her own fingers, before offering Kennedy some Kleenex.

"What was that about?" the coach asked, waving at the cup.

"I read somewhere that in real urine tests, someone has to watch, to make sure it's not bogus. I didn't want anyone to think I was cheating."

A man approached the desk. Kennedy eyed him warily, but his attention was focused on Coach Beason.

"What was that about, Cynthia?"

"A urine test, sir."

"Please, I'm sure I told you that the young woman was Pete Stuyvesant's daughter, right?"

"Yes, sir. She said it as well. Never heard of him."

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, you will, I'm sure." He turned to Kennedy. "Miss Kennedy, on behalf of the New York Athletic Club, I apologize for Ms. Beason's behavior and attitude."

Kennedy shook her head. "Look -- all I want is a certified time for my rowing this morning. She thinks I need a drug test. Fine. I don't want people saying I cheated, okay?"

The man turned to Coach Beason. "Tell me that there was a good reason for this serious invasion of privacy of a member of the club?"

"She rowed a 4k warm-up. Then we raced 2k and she turned in seven minutes and very small change. We rested two minutes and then came back. She came back in ten and a third minutes. If she is a she."

The man turned to Kennedy. "I'm Jake van ter Horst, the head coach for sculls. Your father called me Friday night, telling me you wanted a fair timing. I'd already told Mr. Glastonbury I'd give you one, and I told Ms. Beason to be firm, but fair. I had no idea she'd interpret 'firm' as rigid."

"No problem, sir."

"Miss Kennedy, would you please have a seat," he waved to a chair next to Coach Beason's desk.

"Why? I heard the times. Unless you're going to lie about them."

"No, we'd never do that," Mr. van ter Horst told her. "This is about something else. Please, a few moments of your time."

Kennedy sat down.

He sat down on the corner of the desk, blocking Kennedy's view of the coach. Kennedy was pretty sure that the gesture was pretty rude on the man's part. He was looking at Kennedy, with his back to the coach.

"Miss Kennedy, do you know what the world record times for single sculls are?"

"No, sir."

"Well, you'd have given the best men in the world a run for their money. You'd have easily beaten the best woman single sculler. Pete said you were talking about trying for a scholarship at the University of Miami."

"I heard I could get a full scholarship there, sir."