Chapter 1

I'm Shannon Dwyer, and I betrayed everything I'd been told to believe for love. I also attend two high schools at the same time, which isn't as dramatic as it sounds. What it really means is that I attend two high schools. At the same time. How I did it (and why) is kind of complicated, and my mother and her husband didn't know, and neither did the people who hung around home. I attended one school, Claiborne High in the Construct, but I physically attended another school, Beaverton, in the Portland area. That's the one my folks knew about. And as for the other, read on.

I wasn't supposed to be in either school, or at least that wasn't the plan, but mother was Fruit Loops crazy. She filed for divorce from my bio-father while she was in labor. Didn't even want him near the delivery room. He was on a business trip, he's a psychologist of some kind, and she went in, had labor induced, filed, had me, and moved out before he got back.

I don't know how many times we moved. Two days after I was born (in Richmond) we arrived in Charlotte. For those not too up on their geography, which is about half the kids I've ever gone to school with, the former is in Virginia, the latter is in the southern part of North Carolina. Those are states, and they're on the East Coast. The day before I turned two we made another move, and the first of my name changes. I was no longer Amelia Shelbourne, but Lisa Marie Santerra, and living in beautiful upstate New York just outside of Rochester, though somehow I have vague memories of Tennessee and Mississippi in there. Maybe we lived there, maybe we didn't. Tell the truth, we moved around so much that if you name a place, I'm sure I lived there, or at least passed through. Johnny Cash's wonderful song I've Been Everywhere applies in my case ... I think.

I was looking forward to kindergarten—I'd made a lot of friends in day care—but mother decided we needed to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Over the next few years we moved constantly. She told me it was because of her job, and maybe it was; we moved from college town to college town. We finally ended up in Beaverton, which is just south of Portland. For those kids trapped in a public school system, that's in Oregon, which is on the left side of the map, above California. We joke that Oregon is "just to the left of Idaho, but then, who isn't?"

I think we lived in 15 or 20 states. After a while they all blurred together. My name changed a few more times, not something you should do to a kid. After all, when you're that old your name is your identity, it's who you are, and you're becoming that person. And I was no different. But Lisa Marie was replaced by Kelly Jolene. By the time I reached high school I'd been a Mary, a Beth, and a Diane, and don't even get me started on the last names. When we landed in Beaverton, mother wanted to change my name—did I mention that every time she changed hers she changed mine?—but I put my foot down. I liked Shannon. I'd had that name for two whole years, I was used to it, I felt like a Shannon (however that's supposed to work, but names have power and go a long way toward defining a person). In short, I wanted to keep it. Amazingly, she agreed. It was one of those flashes of parental responsibility she occasionally showed. Old cynic me, I thought that it was because she didn't think there was any prior record of me being called Shannon.

During those years mother married at least two more times, and changed her last name each time. They were just cosmetic marriages. If she was afraid someone was tracking us, the name changed, the hair color changed, and so on to break the trail. Anyway, I'm not sure she actually wrote down her legal name on any marriage certificate after the first one (and I'm not even sure about that).

When you get shuffled around a lot like that, you either become introverted because you lose all of your friends every year or two, or you become an extrovert. Military brats know what I mean. I was the former, and one happy day I discovered that the books in the school library were the same as the ones from the previous school. They were something in my life that didn't change. I got addicted to them at an early age. I had to use the library at school because mother didn't want any trail of us at all, and so that meant no library card for whoever I was that week. But that was all right, I'd settle down with a book and spend hours in a world where girls only changed their names when they got married.

Mother got married one final time just before we moved to Beaverton, and this time they lived together, something the others never did. Suddenly there was a man around the place, and my habit of wandering through the living room in my underwear (or less) had to stop. He had a house, and we moved in with him. I even got my own room! That was so strange I almost didn't know what to do. After all, until then we'd lived in apartments, and mother and I shared a bedroom (which is how I knew she didn't sleep with any of her other husbands').

About then I hit puberty, and it hit back, hard. I had hormones raging through my body, my shape was changing, my skin was breaking out in pimples, and so on. All the joys of growing up. And then I had high school.

I'd seen enough schools by then to form a pretty low opinion of most of them. You have the really dedicated teachers, the one for whom teaching was a joy and their life's passion. They found ways to make learning special, to make the world open up to their students. They would spend hours of their own time helping a student who was falling behind, or working with another who showed a special gift. One and all they were what teachers should be, and they made the world a better place.

And then you had the time-servers, the ones who were in the classroom to get their ticket punched, agitated in their union, didn't give a rat's ass about their profession, and barely one about the kids. They were the ones who were militant at the bargaining table and always propagandizing the other teachers. They would preach to the students, pushing their political views, but clumsily so you never adopted them (if you were smart). And far too many of them went on to be principals and administrators and told the real teachers what to teach and how to teach it, consequently ruining who knows how many kids.

I'm not saying good teachers didn't do those things, and I'm not saying the bad ones only did that, but a lot of them did. But I soon learned to spot the two basic types. One I would tune out, doing just enough to get through the class; cooperate and graduate. The other I couldn't get enough of. I would try to absorb everything they had, and then read voraciously from the lists I badgered out of them.

By the time I got to high school, the teachers were far too rare, and the time-servers were far too plentiful, at least in the city schools I attended. Part of it was the pay. They're right, teachers don't get paid enough. And if you work it out on an hourly basis, you have to cut it in half because a teacher would spend 8 hours in the classroom, and then another 6 to 8 hours doing paperwork for the students. In our zeal to provide a standard education some twit of a politician had created the drone's wet dream: the Department of Education. And it sucked the life blood and passion out of the teaching profession.

I swear, if I was Queen-For-A-Day I would put every member of the Department of Education on a ship and sink it. Hmm, have to use a very large ship, or maybe several of them. Then I would ram through a law forbidding the establishment of anything like it again, and providing torture to any who even suggested such a thing.

So school, for the most part, was boring. I'd learn what they had in the first couple of weeks, and then doodle and daydream the rest of the term. My grades reflected that. I wasn't 'difficult', and I was never a discipline problem. I was considered 'lazy and unmotivated', and why shouldn't I be? The classes were geared for the dumbest, slowest student, never the average. After all, we wouldn't want the poor darlings to get left behind, or worse, feel inadequate. It might damage their fragile psyche. And since the lowest grade you could get was a C—no, strike that, that only happened in this one California school I suffered through for one term—anyway, the system was set up to discourage kids excelling. I actually got counseled about 'showing up' the other students and doing damage to their egos when I did pay attention.

The social pressure from the kids didn't help. I don't know where it came about, but if you were good in school, you were a 'big brain', a 'nerd'—yes, that came back into use as a pejorative term after Bill Gates left Microsoft. The popular kids weren't that way. So I blended in. Cooperate and graduate. Or, as my mother put it, "Don't leave anything for them to remember you by." I became as close to a nonentity as I could.

I wondered if we were in the Witness Protection Program. I fantasized that my mother knew some dirty secret, maybe on some Mafia Don or something. After a while I knew better. Fruit Loops. My mother wanted no connection to a past that was more than a few months old. And that included my bio-father, my bio-grandparents, and any other relatives. I knew, theoretically, that I had them. Never met them. Until the Incident in Denver, I only had the vaguest notion of them.

So I started high school with the same low expectations as before, and they were met. But during my freshman year I heard of some of the super schools that were online. I don't know why my mother agreed to them, she must have been off her rocker or actually sane that day, but she did. Or maybe it was my step-dad. Or, and this has to be spoken in a hush, maybe it was one of the people who hung around the house. I was a daughter, for crying out loud, a legally registered oppressed minority, and I had to be given every advantage that you could wring out of the system (no fooling, they talked like that).

So I applied.

You had to pass a series of tests and interviews to even be considered. And talk to a shrink; that was required because of the comments teachers had put in my records. It was hard work, but I kept at it, round after round of tests and interviews, each time with fewer and fewer students. It seemed like every Saturday morning I was taking a test. Sometimes it was paper and pencil—fill in the oval—sometimes, more often as things progressed, it was on a computer. And there were interviews after the tests, sometimes with a shrink, but later with people who actually seemed to care how much I knew, and more importantly, how I went about learning. I didn't learn to recognize the difference until several years later.

In some ways it was a lot more challenging than school. I don't know if I breezed through the tests, but finally mother and I got to meet with this nice woman in an office in downtown Portland. I had three choices of schools: Mary Magdalene, which was all girls; Broadhurst, which focused on the humanities; and Claiborne, the top of them, which got you through two years of college, and got you a full-ride scholarship in just about any college in the country.

Mother and I talked about the choices. She actually consulted with me on what I wanted, and seemed inclined to consider my opinion. This was a first, and so I gave it some serious thought.

Mary Magdalene was out right away. First of all, you had to wear a uniform, a gray or navy skirt, and a white blouse. I think I'd worn a skirt or dress just once in my life, back when I was 2. I didn't have the philosophical hang-up that mother did about clothes like that (she called them a symbol of the oppressor), plus I'd just never gotten the hang of wearing them. First, something happens, and you're exposed for everyone to see. Now that didn't bother me as much as it might some because we'd lived for over a year in a nudist resort in Florida when I was 8, and I didn't have that skin taboo that girls are given by their parents and peers.

Second, there was a lot of emphasis on horseback riding and other athletics that girls are supposed to excel in. Me, I was as athletic as a lump on the couch, and I didn't see how exercising on a computer did anything for you (I later learned that the athletics and horseback riding were done in real life). Finally, you got a general high school education, albeit it was all honors. I wanted out of home, and I had my sights set firmly on college. Would Mary Magdalene help? Quite possibly, but I didn't want to take any chances. Besides, I was cocky. I thought an all honors course would be too slow for me.

Mother wanted me in Broadhurst so I could take the Humanities courses and 'help mankind'. I didn't feel the overwhelming need to change the world. For one thing, the only way you really could change things was to get into a position of power, and then make gradual changes so it didn't disrupt what was already working (if we'd learned one thing from history it was that abrupt change caused tremendous disasters). Agitating and other things could be ignored because they were gnats buzzing around the head. 'Speak truth to power' is what the people who hung out around the house all said. I added the thought that the only way you could do that was by being powerful.

After a lot of reflection I decided I wanted Claiborne. I wanted to be stretched, to learn at my own pace, not at that of some kid who could barely tie his shoes by the 8^th grade. That was the second argument I ever won from her (the first was my name). I got Claiborne.

It was everything I wanted, and more. Talk about getting stretched academically ... That first week I was left in the dust, and I had to run like heck to catch up. I did, but it was hard. I had to put in a lot of hours, revamp my study habits, and read voraciously. And apply it to my classes.

I loved it.

I should mention two of the things about Claiborne that weren't brought out in the description of the school. First, everyone was naked. Girls, boys, teachers, everyone.

Now I didn't have the problem a lot of girls have with nudity. That year in Florida at a nudist resort had conditioned me. By the time I was 8 I knew the basic anatomical difference between girls and boys. And I knew what all of that anatomy was for as I'd accidentally stumbled on a few people who were intimately involved with each other.

Believe it or not (and a lot of people don't because it's some sort of wish-fulfillment), rampant sex doesn't happen at a nudist resort. Oh, sure, people do it a lot, but they don't do it in the open. You won't find them next to the pool or on the volleyball court going at it. They do it in private in their trailers or cabins. It was my luck (good or bad) that I saw a few couples who were a little indiscreet and left some window blinds up. I saw that a male penis, when hard, was perfectly designed to slip into a female vagina. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, too, which was at odds with what my mother told me when we had The Talk.

Yes, I'd had that conversation when I was 8. Mother was rather blunt about it: "The man forces that thing of his into you, and it makes a baby." Rather stark for a girl of 8. But I didn't see any growing tummies on the women I'd watched, so I turned to one of the older women at the resort. I think she took pity on me or something. But she told me a lot more than what I'd seen, and even gave me some things to read; before anyone thinks it was salacious material, it wasn't. They were stories that weren't very graphic (though I thought at the time that they were), but were long on romance and love. Fill the girl's head with the idea that you have to be in love before you let the boy put anything in you. That's one of the most effective protections a girl has ... until puberty hits and she falls in love with everything human with a penis.

So I didn't have any problem with nudity. It was disconcerting to see everyone naked. People equate nudity with sex, and that was the other part of the equation at Claiborne. It started with Orientation.

There were 8 of us girls, and we started Orientation a week before we started classes. Within 15 minutes of being shown into the classroom (this was all done in VR, what they called the Construct), girls were hesitantly taking off their tops. I didn't see any big deal about it. Boobs were boobs. Every girl had them. Some were bigger than others, some smaller. So what? Some girls were taller, some shorter. No biggie. I didn't realize until later how much some girls thought their self-image was tied up in their bust.