Chapter 12

The beginning of school was awkward, and then it was ugly. Teddy had a girl named Bianca Zemedyev on her arm and the two were busy pushing the envelope on the school's rules against overt displays of sexuality. Perhaps they simply kicked it into high gear every time I was around.

School itself was beginning to feel like a mistake. I didn't need to be here, and its value as a facade for my real intentions seemed to be fading fast. I told the cross country coach I wasn't going to come out this year and spent my free time rock climbing or working on my modified grav pod project at the old DeWitt street labs. The pods themselves were pretty much where they needed to be. The next piece was to create the grav field generators for the actual flight suit, and for this effort, I borrowed heavily from the technology that was used in the current line of McKesson holographic Halloween costumes.

Where the holographic costumes used gravity fields only as a medium for projecting the programmed image, my fields were going to have to actually be used as flight control surfaces. My holographic wings were going to work as actual wings.

If I did everything right, and the flight control logic in the onboard computer worked as it was intended, man would truly be able to fly, and for the first time they would fly as Daedalus and Icarus had envisioned, using human muscle as the power source. The key was getting rid of all the weight that kept us pinned to the ground. Birds, with their hollow bones could manage this with proficiency. Even larger birds could soar with confidence. My suit would provide that same benefit and the flight control computer would, I hoped, substitute for the millions of years of evolution and instinct that let birds do what they did naturally and so well. But in order to build those controls, I needed to have the same feel for flying that birds do.

The work on the flight suit was a distraction from some of the other things I had to think on and work out. If going to Bret Hart High was a distracting facade between me and the rest of the world, then the flying suit was a distracting facade between me and me. I hid behind it, letting myself get wrapped up in details that could have been turned over to Proto-Star or any of a dozen other McKesson subsidiaries. Like Grandpa Andy though, I seemed to have an affinity for things gravitic. Also like Grandpa Andy, I didn't think that affinity was going to wind up playing an important role in my adult life. This was my chance to flex those McKesson muscles, so I was taking it while I had my chance.

I flew out back to the Boston area for Thanksgiving to spend it with Chris and his family. They lived north of Boston in Wakefield, Massachussetts, on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt. The area was a mixed bag as far as scenery went, and the end of November was not the best time of year for northern Massachusetts. It rained a lot while I was there, but I didn't care. I'd agreed to come out because I wanted to see Chris again, and because I wanted him to take care of a little problem for me. My virginity problem.

Chris didn't know of my expectations of course, but I suspected he had hopes in that area of his own, and dammit, the guy really did make my motor purr. No polite fiction there, he made my panties damp, and without Teddy around to scratch my itch, they had been getting damp over him from clear across the continent.

I think Chris' parents must have been on the same page of the program as we were, because they left us alone. A lot.

"Do you think your parents are trying to make sure we get together?"

"I think they think we're already together, and they're just staying out of the way to see what develops."

"Because they don't know I plan on leaving and never coming back some day."

"Yeah, well I do know that, and a part of me wants to believe you're just saying that."

"What, you think I'm deluding myself?"

"No, I think you think you're protecting yourself. You're building a barrier now so you don't have to worry about getting hurt when the time comes and you decide for sure that you aren't coming back."

"That didn't work out very well with Teddy," I dropped my head onto Chris' shoulder. He pushed my head back off of it and stepped back.

"Uh uh. No. You can't decide to be soft when you need comfort but hard the rest of the time. You either have emotions or you don't. If you can't invest yourself in being emotional for those who need you, why should we be willing to invest ourselves in you?"

"Chris?" I cried, "What is this? I thought..."