Danni Tyler
Copyright© 2008 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 14
Dear Dani,
I suppose you've heard by now. How could you not? I logged on to the LA Times website last night, and they had the story. Nothing sells like sex, I guess, and teenagers in an orgy ... The final toll is 16 kids arrested and placed in foster care. Three of the girls are pregnant, Suzette, Tammy, and Kylie. Yeah, Kylie, who was behind so much of it, this is her third baby, and from what I understand, the court is going to make her have it. I find that ironic. Actions have consequences.
The word got all over school, about like you'd expect. All of a sudden those things nobody dared say are coming out. The police and newspapers are getting an earful. And I understand the police and CPS made a video as they entered that backyard. It's out on the internet right now. You probably have dial-up, and it's a fairly big file, so you may not be able to view it. Of course it is child pornography under the law, so the cops are trying to find who loaded it. Good luck, it's probably on a million servers.
Tanya McDonald, you probably remember her though she was in a different group of people than the one you ran in, she's been following this rather closely. She's the new editor of the school paper, and she wants to cover the story like the big papers, but the school administration has told her she can't. Tanya produced a bootleg copy of the paper, and was smart enough to cover her tracks. The principal is beside himself trying to find where the paper came from.
Tanya almost outed herself by giving a speech on censorship through spiking in Speech class. Spiking is when a paper just refuses to cover a story, kills it so to speak, in hopes that it will go away. I think the idea is that a story is only real if the papers cover it or something.
Anyway, Tanya called in a lot of favors, and she's pretty much scooped everybody. She has names, she has times of the parties, and unlike the Examiner and the others, she insists this was done without the parents knowing. She was the one, by the way, who found out who was pregnant. That's supposed to be private information, but if a girl tells another girl ... Tanya printed that as "speculation" and "rumor".
Okay, aside from the big story, I just got your letter. You're probably lucky to be in that small town. I've never lived in one, but a couple of my friends have, and they say parents keep a closer eye on kids there than they do in Tiburon. Don't know if that's true or not, but I'd like to think that it is. I sort of wish we still had something like that. But some of the parents here in Tiburon treat their kids as sort of mini-adults with all of the knowledge and responsibilities, and yes, maturity, of adults. And they can't let kids be kids. We both know of parents getting over-protective about their kids.
Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with us, and couldn't we go back to when things were simpler?
Can't wish for the past, though. It's in the past.
With all of the excitement going on here, almost everybody forgot about the SATs. That was last weekend. Okay, I didn't get double-800s. My combine score was 1590. I got a congratulatory letter from UCLA Admissions. Now I just have to live up to it.
Anyway, I hope you're well. I'm glad you're not here, I think you would have ended up in that whole mess. Your parents were a lot more perceptive than people know. There were a number of kids who bad-mouthed you after you left, but now the laugh's on the other side of their faces: their in foster homes and their names are available for those who check (despite the "official" policy of not releasing a kid's name).
Anyway, write and tell me what you think. You were involved with that crowd for a bit, and you probably have a unique perspective. And tell me what your college plans are? Are you going to go to one of the UC campuses? And what would you major in?
Your friend,
Kendra.
Danielle put down the letter, feeling a little mixed-up about the whole thing. Those had been her friends, but there were times she really hadn't liked them very much. There were times she felt that she'd been forced into that whole mess. Certainly she hadn't gotten much enjoyment out of those parties.
She kind of laughed at that. There were all of those magazines that insisted a girl got un-ending pleasure out of sex. There were some things she liked about doing it—mainly the kissing—but there were parts of it that seemed downright boring. You were supposed to enjoy yourself, but she hadn't. Of course that had been sex wtithout love. It was probably different when you actually had affection for the boy.
She drew a breath and put that out of her mind. Her aunt had left her a series of pamphlets, each one about a different time in history. That was probably from Dr. Wayland talking to her. She'd leafed through them, kind of bemused at what she was seeing. She realized she didn't know enough to really form an opinion. In the end she tried to picture herself wearing the clothes, sort of like that woman she had video-chatted with who was in a Renaissance city. Hoops and bustles were out, that eliminated the late 19th Century. And there was no way she could picture herself done up like a mummy, which ruled out the whole Middle Ages. Besides, she suspected that life in the Middle Ages was messy and short.
The Classical period sounded interesting. She could sort of picture herself in the clothes worn in Roman times. Greek? Maybe, but from what she'd read, Greek women were pretty confined to the home. Earlier? She really didn't know, though there was one picture of a woman wearing little more than a breechcloth. She definitely ruled out going topless, or even bare to any large extent.
She picked up the pamphlet that covered from 1600 to about 1850. They had some pretty clothes, so there was that going for them. Right now it looked as if the things that interested her were either that period, or the 20th Century, and there was a note that the Security Commission had a real issue with people exploring the ins and outs of some of the world after World War 1. Apparently there were a lot of secret police around, and they were very good at breaking people and getting secrets.
Of course to get to study this she'd have to get better grades. She wondered if there was a place for someone on these study teams that didn't require a college education. She'd have to check.
She had a more immediate concern that a college education, a math test first thing in the morning. She opened her math book and looked at the problems. The teacher had assigned only the odd-numbered ones, so she began working on the even-numbered ones.
AT lunch the next day she showed Fiona her test paper.
"An 89," Fiona said. "That's much better than your first test. That was a..."
"65," Danielle daid. She felt ridiculously pleased with the test... "Just one more point and I would have had an A0. That's got to be the best I've done on a math test since ... since I was in grade school."
"Feels good, doesn't it."
Danielle smiled at the paper. "I suppose I should see what I did wrong with the ones I missed."
Fiona nodded. "That's how you learn."
Danielle spent the rest of the day in a warm glow. She had accomplished that. And the test had been hard, not a make-work test like she'd seen in Tiburon.
Some of that was still with her when she settled in Enlish the next day. There was a new girl there, and the teacher introduced her.
"This is Cathy Wilson. She just moved here from a town next to the ice sheet."
There were only three girls in the class, not counting Cathy, so Danielle decided she had to introduce herself. Cathy was of medium heightand a little chunky. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her brown dress was belted at the middle with a matching belt.
" ... it was cold all of the time. Summer meant it was just less cold."
"So your parents moved here?" Robin asked. "We're about as far from a glacier as you can get."
"Actually no," Cathy said. "There's a glacier at the head of the valley. Dad's here to study it."
"How do you study a glacier?" Danielle asked. "They're big, they're full of ice, and they're cold."
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