Chapter 3

In the morning Jenny's face was glowing, and she was humming something to herself. She rushed her breakfast, grabbed her books and ran out the front door.

"Ah, that first rush of love," Aunt Jessica said, watching her daughter. "Jenny has a new boyfriend, and it's got her all excited."

"I can tell. She seemed pretty happy."

"I've seen her with other boyfriends. This one she might be get serious about."

"Do you know much about him?"

"Not yet." Aunt Jessica smiled. "I will, though. But that's for later. How do you feel this morning?"

"Cruddy. The doctor said she was going to induce my period, and she did."

"Are you cramping?"

"It's not that bad," Danielle said. "I'm not a basket case, I can function."

"Nevertheless, if you need something, I've got plenty of aspirin in the upstairs bathroom."

"No Tylenol?"

Her aunt shook her head. "No, just plain old aspirin. Ask if you need it. When you've finished breakfast we'll go to the school administration building in Terminus. The tests normally take most of the day, but between the different foods, different germs, and your period, we might want to limit things today to just the morning."

"I'm not a basket case," she repeated.

"I realize that, but I don't want you quitting halfway through the test because you're feeling sick. You did take your medication this morning, didn't you?"

"The moment I got up." Danielle pushed the plate away. "Why don't I go change?"

"Is that all you're going to eat?"

"If I ate more I'd get fat, and I don't want that."

Aunt Jessica sighed. "All right. I'll see you in the living room in a few minutes."

The School Administration shared the building with an elementary school. Danielle liked that idea. She remembered how fancy, and expensive, the Administration building was back where she came from. After talking with some people in the front office, Aunt Jessica took her to a small room in back. Here Danielle took test after test, some of them silly word association, others requiring her to bend and fold shapes and pick what they looked like. She also had to write a short essay, and answer a number of questions that she found confusing. When she finished the last one she learned that each segment had been timed.

When she was finally done, she and Aunt Jessica had a belated lunch. Afterward they were shown to an office where a man in a suit was pouring over her test results.

"This does not warrant putting her in a high school anywhere in the Project," he said finally. "She is at a late junior high level, and at least three years behind other kids in her age group." He flipped through several pages. "In some cases, four."

"And yet she's 15."

"I know. It's a crying shame what the people in Zero Phase think passes for a basic education, but we can only go on what she knows."

"I thought we had immigrants take tests to determine their academic level. Could we do that? It would mean she'd have a better chance of interacting with girls her age."

"And not boys?" He picked up a page from the front of the folder. "Oh. Yes, I see. In her case ... yes, that might be the way to go. I don't think it would be fair to her to just go on her public school record, she's obviously a better student than that. Or at least the potential is there."

"Why don't we try that," Aunt Jessica said.

The man consulted a calendar on his desk. "It takes about a day to set up. We could have her come back on Thursday. It would have to be in Midtown."

"We'll be there," Aunt Jessica said. "How long do those tests take?"

"All day," the man said. He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "If we're going to call her an immigrant, she'll have to go through Orientation."

"I'll handle that," Aunt Jessica said, rising to her feet. "Thank you for getting this put together on such short notice."

"My pleasure." He smiled at Danielle as they left.

"What was that all about?" Danielle asked. "Junior High?"

"We had to determine your academic level," Aunt Jessica said. "Your results were not what we expected. Ordinarily you'd go directly to the academic level indicated by your tests. The trouble is, if we did that, you'd be put with kids who are 11 or 12. But it wouldn't be fair to you if we stuck you in a class full of younger girls. But if we take you as an immigrant, we have other options."

"More tests?"

"More tests, but you can end up in your age group but with different teachers and class material."

"So how do I prepare for them? Or can I?"

"You don't, not really. What you know is what you know. But these tests also measure your learning capacity, which is important."

"I thought I'd just, well, take up where I left off."

"Not here in the Project."

Feeling depressed, Danielle went back to her room when they got home. She felt like a 5th wheel on a car. She'd been all set to start a new school and make new friends. Yet now it looked like she was going to sit around for a few days.

There was a television downstairs, and after rattling around her room for a while, she went down and turned it on. There were several educational shows on at the moment. A couple of them were full of mathematics and equations, stuff clearly beyond her. She gave up on those after a couple of minutes, but there were history shows on other channels. These were documentaries, but they had a grittiness she couldn't ever recall seeing. That was really neat, and she was disappointed when the show ended. The camera work surprised her; she'd thought she was looking at real people, not actors.

An afternoon news program came on, and she almost turned off the TV, but something the man said when he was giving the weather forecast made her pause. "Tomorrow we should see a few early morning clouds. Thursday, more of the same, with rain likely in the afternoon and evening, persisting into Friday and the weekend."

She squinted at the date display on her watch. This was Saturday. But the man on the TV ... and then she remembered Aunt Jessica saying something about the time of day. There was a clock on the wall. It was 4:30, but according to her watch it was nearly 9:00. No wonder she felt out of sorts. Her whole sense of what day it was—and time—was all messed up.

She spent all of Wednesday watching TV. Now that she'd noticed it, she could see all sorts of little references to a different day of the week than her body was saying. There wasn't anything she could do about it, either, except grit her teeth and get through it.

On Thursday she and Aunt Jessica went to a town much farther up the valley. The tests were hard, and there were places where she drew an absolute blank. At the end of the she felt tired, and ended up going to bed early. The days seemed off and she felt tired all of the time. Having her period didn't help.

Her flow ended the next day, and Aunt Jessica took her in to see the doctor. It was Dr. Wayland, the one who'd examined her the day she'd arrived. The doctor ran more tests, gave her another shot and a different collection of pills. Finally she was done.

"What's the news?" Danielle asked. "Anything else wrong with me?"

"No, you've responded well to the treatments." She folded her hands on the reports. "Want to talk about it? I can't share what you tell me; we're under a doctor-patient privacy oath."

"Talk about what? What happened to me?"

"How could a girl from a prosperous family, and who's just about to turn 16, have two abortions in two years? Something must have happened to you. Care to talk about it?"

"You mean what you said, that you won't tell my family?"

"I don't know why you're worried about that," Dr. Wayland said, "I think they'd be more supportive than you give them credit for." She nodded. "But I cannot reveal what you tell me, unless it impacts your treatment, and another doctor, a specialist, needs to know."

Danielle pursed her lips. "Oh, all right," she said at last. "I almost don't know where to begin."

"Let me ask you a few questions," Dr. Wayland said. "How did things get started?"

"Parties," Danielle said at last. "Things always happened at parties."

"Parties?" Dr. Wayland raised an eyebrow. "Such as?"

"There was a party at Jocelyn Smith's house a couple of weeks ago," Danielle said. "Her house is popular because she has a pool, and her parents will often be gone most of the evening. Somebody put on some music, we drank a bit, a couple of kids hit some weed, and so on. That's how it always starts."

"Did you drink? Smoke?"

"I'd drink. I don't like blowing weed. I don't smoke, you see, and if I take a drag I start coughing. How can you get high if your face is turning green, and you can barely breathe?"

"But you said you drank?"

"Usually. It starts out simple, High-C or Hawaiian Punch in a big bowl with some ice and maybe some lemonade to kick it up a bit. If the parents don't leave we'll keep drinking it, and nothing happens. But if they leave..."

"Somebody would add some alcohol."

Danielle nodded. "Usually rum or vodka, but sometimes whiskey or something else. One time someone put Everclear in the punch, and everyone was so sick they couldn't go home for hours. I wasn't at that party, but heard about it at school the next day."

"What happens after that?"

"Nothing much, at least for a bit," Danielle said. "But after a few drinks a boy asked me to go off with him. We settled on a blanket, and at first we didn't do except drink and feel each other up a bit. But after another drink or two—I guess I drank to get my courage up—we took off our clothes."

"And then you would do it?"

"Usually," Danielle said. "That party at Jocelyn's for instance. Everyone had beach towels, and after I got my clothes off, Kevin Thompson felt me up, dropped a few kisses here and there—I think that was his idea of foreplay—and pretty soon he'd get between my legs."

"And you didn't use any form of protection," Dr. Wayland said. "Why was that?"

"Well the boys hated rubbers, said it was like taking a shower in a raincoat. I didn't care for them either, they were so slick, and you get so you really like how it feels without them."

"What about other methods?"

"I needed my parent's permission."

"And you weren't going to ask for that because that would tell your parents what you were doing."

Danielle nodded. "I wouldn't be their sweet, innocent little girl." She looked down, clasping her hands, squeezing them until the ends of her fingers turned white. "I just couldn't do that to my mother," she continued in a near-whisper. "She used to brag about me to her friends! I was always the perfect one, much better than my sister. Hah! If they only knew! But I had perfect conduct, perfect clothes and hair, perfect friends—I was a member of the most popular clique—and I had grades good enough I wouldn't have to go to a Community College like my sister, but could go directly to Berkley, or maybe even USC. I couldn't spoil that image! I couldn't hurt her that way!"

Dr. Wayland rested her elbows on her desk. "When did you start going to these parties?"

"When I was 14, actually about four months after I turned 14. All of the most popular girls were doing it, and I wanted to be part of that group. They were dating all of the good-looking boys, and they were what you wanted to be part of."

"Did they get good grades?"

"Of course! They were always getting A's and A+'s. There were even rumors that some of them didn't have to crack a book to get their grades, either."

"You mean they were intimate with their teachers."

"Yeah, and a couple of those teachers were women! That's like so yuck! I mean gross to the max; some of those women were old! They had wrinkles and everything!"

Dr. Wayland cleared her throat. "It seems to me," she said, "that you were living to meet the expectations of other people. You weren't living for yourself."

"I was not, I—"

"You wanted in with the most popular girls, so you did what you had to do. You wanted to be perfect in your mother's eyes, so you did what you had to do there, not telling her about something that she needed to know about."

"I didn't have to tell them. Nobody could tell them."

"They were responsible for you."

"No, not in California. That's the law. I looked it up."

"Then it's a bad law," Dr. Wayland said. "It was probably passed with the best of intentions, too." She stirred through the papers on her desk.

"All right, we're finished here. If you ever need to talk about something, anything you wouldn't want to bring up with your family, call me."

"I thought you were going to say I was a very confused girl," Danielle said after a few seconds. "Isn't that how these things are supposed to go? That's what some of my friends were told when they complained about ... you know."

"You're not a confused girl," Dr. Wayland said. "You were caught in a sick culture, and you were trying to be everything to everybody. One of the things that'll you'll have to do in the next couple of years is set your own goals and priorities in life.

"You're here, now, not back in California. The rules are different here, as you'll learn. One of the things I'll tell you is that you're at that age where you have to begin taking responsibility for yourself. You can't be what others want you to be, which is often a reflection of themselves. You have to stand on your own feet."

"What does that mean?" Danielle asked. "I've heard people tell me that before. Does it mean—"

"What do you want to do?" Dr. Wayland asked, interrupting her. "Do you want to be a doctor? Or go into business? Or maybe the sciences? I saw some of your preliminary tests, and you're a bright girl, very smart, and there are a lot of things you could do."

"Science is for geeks."

Dr. Wayland smiled. "So ... I'm a geek? You need to study the sciences if you want to go into medicine. You are a long way from those girls you knew back in California. You don't have to be bound by what they thought."

"But—"

"What were the classes that interested you? Not what you got good grades in, but what did you cover that you later watched more of on TV, or even read a book about?"

"Um, history stuff," Danielle said. "And I liked reading about how other people lived. The teachers liked that when they found out, and encouraged me. If everything's different here, will I still get a chance to do that?"

"We have all of history open before us," Dr. Wayland said. "And if you show an aptitude in something, the teachers will encourage it."

"Even if I say things that aren't politically correct?"

"Even if," Dr. Wayland said. "You have to learn to think for yourself. In the next few weeks you'll get a chance very few people get back where you come from. I would advise you to do some thinking. See what's out there, find what you like to do. And when you do, the teachers will help you do it."

Danielle was going to say something, but she took in the doctor's expression. The doctor, she decided, was honestly trying to help her, and she wasn't being put down, either. She remembered a school counselor she'd gone to, the first time she'd gotten pregnant, and how the counselor had made her feel so stupid. Dr. Wayland didn't seem that way.

"I'll do some thinking," she said at last. "I don't know where to start, though."

"There are some educational channels on TV," the doctor said. "Talk with your aunt; I'm sure she could suggest a few things. And if you meet other adults, talk to them, ask them what they do."

Dr. Wayland drew a notepad over and scribbled something. "I'll set up an appointment for you for next month. In the meantime, like I said, if you need someone to talk to, call me. Here's my number."

"Are you doing this because you're a doctor?"

"I became a doctor because I wanted to help people who were hurting."

That explanation made sense. Danielle smiled. "I'll talk to you after a bit."

Aunt Jessica was waiting for her, and they rode home talking about minor things. When she got home, Danielle went into the backyard. A hedge marked the back of the property. The backyard was open, except for some trees. She settled back against one. The sun was still well up in the sky, and it hit her directly.

She edged her skirt up almost to her hips, and unbuttoned most of her blouse. She did all of her best thinking when she was tanning. She didn't think Jenny lay out, but quite a few people were tanned, some of them rather heavily. She'd have to see about getting some sunscreen so she didn't burn.

Dr. Wayland was only trying to help, and she wasn't making any judgments. Danielle had seen enough school counselors who did just that to be suspicious of any offer of help. They were always judging you, telling you how you'd failed to conform to whatever they'd learned in school, and laying a pretty hard guilt trip on you. But all Dr. Wayland had done was listen, give her some encouragement, and remind her that her future had yet to be written.

She knew the future of those girls back in Tiburon. They'd go to college, meet the right boy, and marry him. They'd become 'Mrs. So-and-so', wife of the doctor, lawyer, businessman, or politician. They'd have one or two kids, and settle into being the perfect wife and hostess. Some would drink because of the boredom of their lives, others would take up drugs, always being careful to hide that part of themselves from the world. They'd see their friends, the same ones they'd known in high school, and gradually fade from view.

What did she want to do? Doctor? Something else? She wasn't sure. She remembered something her favorite teacher had said—it was ironic that the woman taught in 8th Grade, not high school—"Gather the facts before you decide." If Dr. Wayland was right, she was going to have some time to 'gather the facts'.

She shifted slightly against the tree and relaxed. This might be the only time she had to get some sun. She'd better make the most of it.

That Saturday Jenny and her boyfriend took her to an afternoon concert in the park. As they were getting ready—Jenny was fixing a picnic lunch—she got a chance to look at her cousin's boyfriend.

There was nothing really spectacular about him. He didn't have a lean, muscular body, but he wasn't fat, either. He was wearing a red short-sleeved shirt and dark pants; she thought he'd look better in jeans, at least for a picnic. He had dark hair, and a cowlick that kept trying to escape down his forehead.

She wondered what Jenny saw in him. She did note that they were always touching, and she wondered if that meant they were active. She'd have to ask her, and ask her what she was doing for protection. She wondered if Aunt Jessica knew, and if she should drop some hints. Maybe just to get back at Jenny.

"You'll like this concert," Jenny said as she made some potato salad. "It's in the middle of the park, and the performers used the bandstand. People lie around on blankets, especially on a day like today, and just enjoy the weather and music.