Chapter 5

I liked a girl, and she liked me. If that had been the whole of it, I might have breezed through my decoy years of high school relatively pain free, but of course it was not that simple.

Ben Collier was also a freshman, and very hunky. He asked me to dance three times at that first freshman dance and I said yes each time. He asked me to dance even after I danced a slow dance with Teddy, and that would have been reason enough to like him even if he wasn't hunky.

But he was. It required a lot of thinking, especially when, during our last dance, he asked me if I wanted to grab lunch together at Mike's Pizza on Saturday. I said yes again.

A lot of my thinking was best done while running, so I ran, but I picked my own time and place. The plan was still the plan, and I still had things to discover and tools to build.

Dust was not the facet a normal person would pick to run, even when it was at night, under the cold gleam of its moon. Of course a 'normal' person couldn't use the Light to jump themselves between facets.

My body could repair itself, if I asked it to. I was trying to train it to do that without my having to ask. Places like Dust required it. Even at night the effects of the deadly solar radiation was debilitating. I ran for three hours across the cold sands. I only had to stop and force my body to repair the damage twice. That was a big improvement. A few more weeks of night runs and I might start thinking about trying a daylight run.

I switched to a Hurlon form for the last fifteen minutes, floating above the sands within a naturally generated grav field. In this form, Dust's harsh radiation held no danger for me, but I fought the natural Hurlon creepy crawly sensations of being out of water. I needed this form to learn to slip loose from those constraints. Again, all a part of the plan. Now I hovered as I went, but still, I was thinking.

Teddy was jealous, and had good reason to be. Ben definitely gave me the same kind of feelings she did, and to the same degree. I had to promise Teddy a public 'date' similar to my lunch with Ben for the following Saturday to make it up to her.

Dating brought out a 'parental' gathering, or rather word of its impending certainty did. Not only did I have to sit through a couple of cautionary discussions with Cole and Melissa, but I even had a visit from Grandpa Weaver and Grandma Wind, followed by one from Mom and Dad. None of them had a problem with my announcement that I had two dates on back to back Saturdays, nor did any of them express concern with the differing genders of those two dates.

Grandpa Weaver and Grandma Wind both asked me to be careful and to keep a mental eye out. Mom and Dad told me to follow my heart and trust my feelings. Cole and Melissa told me to stay out of trouble. I fully intended to heed all three of them as completely as I was able. Mom even managed to invoke the name of Great Grandma Ginny McKesson when she asked me to give her a little show and tell on reading my own body and controlling my reproductive functions. We had had this little 'talk', both the Arborian version invoking the spirits, and the Obsidian version with the Light based physiological monitoring and control. The Obsidian talk was nowhere as dry and technical as the description suggests, but delving into those techniques and ways of thinking can definitely be distracting.

Saturday at Mike's Pizza with Ben turned out to be more of a group date than a regular boy-girl date. Ben's best friends Chuck and Dewey met us their with their dates, Renee and Ginny. There were a lot of Ginnys attending Bret Hart High. Virginia had become a very popular name over the years.

The six of us split a large pinwheel pizza and a side of sizzlin' donut sticks, washed down with two pitchers of Mike's own draft root beer. I made no effort to eat like a bird. I wolfed down my share. Most of the talk was just mindless teenage chatter, and after fending off the usual McKesson questions, it was the basics — 'what do you like to do', 'who's your favorite singer', and so on. My favorite singer was Starlight Hellerin, but I couldn't give that answer, so I said Great Aunt Maia Poole. She had been a headliner for decades, but with her family connections it was something of an expected answer. To the 'what do you like to do' question, I gave the easy answer as well.

"I like to run."

Of course the cross country season had already started, and I was already on the team so running was also not a surprise answer.

"How long have you been running?" Renee asked.

"As long as I can remember, really. We've always had someone in the family who liked to run, so whenever we have a family gathering, there's always someone who wants to organize a run. It was a morning tradition back home, though you do have to take a little care to make sure you're well armed."

That reminder of my supposed origins on Islandia got the conversation diverted into a relatively safe, if semi-fictitious area. I had done my research and had plenty of accurate anecdotal conversational tidbits. I found this Ginny to be a bit of a socialite wannabe, and while Chuck seemed to have a good grip on the real world, Renee and Dewey were vague, self-centered and completely clueless. Harmless, but clueless. Unfortunately that was the same evaluation I came to with regard to the great majority of my classmates.

The following Saturday brought my date with Teddy. It was a much more intimate, private time, with just the two of us riding tandem on Teddy's grav scooter up Murphys Grade Road to Murphy's for lunch at a little cafe called La Viña de Oro. There was an arcade nearby featuring a bunch of old school pinball machines and video games, and we wasted a couple of hours playing games and enjoying each other's company. Teddy let me drive the scooter on the way back. She hugged herself to me very tightly all the way back. Her hands and arms wrapped around me felt very intimate, as did her warm cheek laid against my back. With the scooter's grav shield preventing the wind of our passage from reaching us, we didn't need coats or riding gear, so Teddy's warm cheek against the thin fabric of my blouse penetrated very nicely to the skin of my back.