Chapter 2

I woke up with my face buried in Bev's hair. I had a tit in my right hand and my dick was between her cheeks. I eased back and got out of bed.

I got my robe off the hook on the bedroom door. That was our compromise to my throwing it wherever I felt when I took it off and Bev's insistence that it to be on a hanger in the closet. A buck forty nine hook and five minutes with a screwdriver had handled that dispute. The choice between putting clothes in a hamper or on a hanger had been handed down from on high as the only allowable options for everything else I wore. I suppose you could say I cheated on that one. I wished I could remember where to put my clothes so I wouldn't get in trouble and hadn't had any problems since. I chose not to tell Bev about the wish. She was trying to keep me from using them for trivial things. As far as I was concerned, keeping her from chewing me out because I dropped a pair of socks on the floor wasn't trivial.

I got in the shower and saw a shadow pass by. By the time it was the right temperature and my head was under the water, Bev came in to join me.

"How come you didn't wake me up? You aren't the only one who has to go to school, you know."

"Bev, I had to get you up because we ride to school together every day. We have plenty of time and you looked peaceful sleeping like that. Believe me, if I hadn't had to pee, I'd have stayed there with you for another twenty minutes."

"You say the sweetest things," she said, rubbing my back with a soapy washcloth.

I heard the bathroom door open and my sister called out, "Room for one more?"

"Always," I called out to her.

The door slid open and Vicky slipped in behind Bev. Bev finished my back while Vicky washed Bev's. Then Bev had me turn around. Vicky gave me the soapy washcloth and I did Bev's front while she did mine. Then Vicky squeezed between us and I did her back while Bev did her front. She jumped into Bev's arms, making a sound that was almost beyond the range of human hearing when I pushed my soapy finger all the way up her butt.

"Just making sure you're clean all over," I said.

She started to complain at me and then Bev lost it and started laughing. Poor Vick couldn't take that. First she turned red. I'm not just talking about her face; she turned red, head to toe. Then she started crying and it took five minutes of Bev and me hugging her to settle her down.

"I'm sorry," my sister sniffed, "It's just that that's the kind of thing you do to Bev to show her that you love her and I know that you love me but not that way and it bothers me that I don't have someone who loves me that way enough to do things like that to me."

My sister can put one hell of a compound sentence together when she gets emotional. I didn't really understand what she was trying to say so I just stood there, holding her in my arms, patting her on the back. I'd found that was a much safer thing to do that than to open my mouth when I wasn't absolutely sure what I was talking about. Even when I did, I was taking a chance.

One of the reasons I'd gotten up instead of spending another twenty minutes snuggled up against Bev was that I was planning on cooking breakfast for everyone. That sort of went down the tubes with my finger up the ass trick and the resultant calm down period. Trust me to fuck myself in the ass by sticking a finger up my sister's.

It was a very pleasant surprise to smell breakfast cooking when I stepped out of the bathroom. I went down to the kitchen and there was Mom in her robe, a couple of pans with eggs and potatoes going and a plate with steam rising off piles of bacon and sausage.

I must have really wanted a good breakfast because I picked her up and laid a kiss on her that would have thrown Bev for a loop. We both turned red and stood there looking at each other.

"Thanks for making breakfast, Mom."

"You're welcome. Gotta have a good breakfast for your finals. Get yourself a cup of coffee and go get some clothes on and it'll be out on the table when you get back."

Bev was just coming out of the bedroom when I went to open the door. She took one look at me and said, "What?"

"Oh, Mom made a great breakfast for us and I went a little crazy in thanking her."

"You didn't fuck her, did you?"

"No, I didn't fuck her."

"OK, then. See you out there. Hurry up or you won't have time to eat."

When I got back in the kitchen a couple of minutes later Mom was practically in tears, the two of them were riding her so hard. They kept on me, too, asking me what I did to my poor mother but I just kept shoveling the food in my mouth. The only time I spoke was to say that I was running late for school and had to finish my breakfast.

Dad came in and saw what was happening. He grabbed a cup of coffee and shot out the back door to calls of "Chicken!" from the two of them.

Mom did have the last say. When we were leaving, she said to Bev, "Sometimes I wonder why we adopted you. We should have just left you to the wolves."

Of course, Bev had to cry on her shoulder and apologize and Mom had to cry back and say they'd never do anything like that and then Vicky had to get in on the crying fest. Sometime in there, Dad snuck in the kitchen and started scarfing down food. He likes a good breakfast as much as I do. I finally had to put my foot down and yell that I was leaving for school in thirty seconds whether they were in the car or not and went out the back door to warm up the truck.

It was close to thirty seconds when they came out and slid into the truck as if nothing ever happened. It was less than thirty seconds after we left the driveway and were on the main road before they started coming down on me, asking if I would have really left them behind. I swear, you can't win with those two.

Bev and Vicky had discovered texting a few months ago. They'd texted before but it seems that soon after I returned from my trek, it took over their lives. The two of them seemed to live for texting.

It bothered me at first but it was harmless and I knew damn well there was nothing I could do about it. It was getting out of hand as far as I was concerned, though. For example, since I'd gotten up today, there had been almost constant texting.

No, there was no texting in the shower. Thank God for little favors. But during breakfast, it was constant. Between and even while one of them was saying something in the great Mom attack, they were texting. I don't know if it was suggestions on where to go next, congratulations on the nifty thing just said or what. All I know is they were constantly playing with the keys on their phones while giving Mom a bad time.

Next up was on the way to school. They were texting each other on the way from the kitchen to the car and all the way down the driveway. I personally think they were planning their strategy then. How to get back at me for threatening to leave them behind. The texting didn't stop because they were complaining at me, though. It continued all the way to school. They were still going at it as we walked through the gate as a group and then went our separate ways.

I know there are schools that have a special finals schedule and spread the tests over several days. We just had a policy of finals being the last Monday of the week for seniors and the last Thursday for everybody else. The tests had to fit the regular class periods.

I was surprised when I got my World History final. There were ten true/false questions, such and such happened in (year). Then there was a list of ten events in one column and ten years in another. Each of the years had a letter next to it. We were supposed to put the correct letter with each event.

Then there was an essay question: "Courtesy of Val Hendrix — Choose one of the following subjects and write an essay describing the event or major events, any contributing factors and its resultant affects upon the world." The choices were The Renaissance, The Great Depression, World War II and Sept. 11.

We'd gone over the first three and I could have written a couple of pages about any of them. I couldn't recall Sept. 11 ever being mentioned in class. That's when it hit me that history was a living, breathing, constantly evolving thing. It wasn't a bunch of words locked up in a book. It was things that happened, things that shaped the future. I chose Sept. 11 and was working on my twelfth page when the bell rang to end the period.

I'd answered all the requirements of the question but there was so much more. Just from what I'd seen on the news, heard around school, around the dinner table, what I'd thought, I could go on and on about this. Heck, I could write a book on what little I knew. Me, Val Hendrix, lowly high school senior.

Mrs. Murphy came up to my desk and I handed her my papers. "I didn't finish," I said.

"The same could be said about History, Mr. Hendrix. Have a good day."

She continued going from desk to desk, collecting final exams.

Lunch was my next period. The girls had lunch the period before mine so I didn't get to eat with them. I had a group I usually sat with but I didn't feel like eating with them today. I went into the cafeteria and got a couple of milks, an apple and a pear and went out on the front lawn.

Our school had a big lawn on a slope. There were several tall trees near the Science and Administration buildings at the top of the slope and the rest if it was just grass. The parking lot was at the bottom of the slope and everyone called it the front lawn. I found a tree with nobody sitting near it and sat down with my back against it.

There were two things common with finals at our school. They should test the students' knowledge of the subject and they should be easy to grade. Take Algebra for example. There had been 12 questions on the test. Each one was an Algebra problem. We were supposed to solve all 12 in the hour we had for the test. Correction of the test would consist of looking at the answer sheet the student turned in and comparing it to the master answers the Algebra teacher had. They either matched or they didn't match. A red X for a wrong answer, a number grade at the top of the page and it was off to the next one.

We had a lecture about that near the beginning of the year, before I went off on my fateful journey. Many mathematics teachers wanted to see how you came up with your answers. "Show your work" was the common phrase. Mr. Alberts said it was fine in a learning experience because you had something to look back on to see where you screwed up. Real life wasn't like that. You could come out with the damndest proof, but if your answer was wrong, it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. He said it was a lesson Mr. Gore never learned.

Physics was similar. The answers might be up to a dozen words, but the questions asked only had one correct answer. There were a lot of explanations of principles or the results if several things were done.

I know what Mrs. Murphy was up to when I read the dedication of the essay question to me. She was pointing out that I'd shaken things up in her class and turned it into something more than dates. We'd had some pretty wild discussion throughout the final months and we'd gone beyond taking what was in the history texts for granted. Let's face it, some Duke who steals 90% of his duchy's profits, rapes all the women and works all the men to death, is probably going to write things a little differently in his memoirs. Or if he commissions them to be written, the ghost writer had better be careful. Who knows? Maybe that's where the term ghost writer came from.

As I said, we had some wild discussions. There was name calling and a couple of times people almost came to blows. Over things that occurred 800 or 2000 years ago.

Mrs. Murphy could zip through the true/false and the mix-n-match questions in a minute or two per test. But reading what had been written and grading it was going to take some effort. Or maybe that's what she was looking for. The effort, the thought, the work put into each one might determine its grade. I realized the way I was writing, I might have finished if she'd given me the whole school year to write. No lectures, no homework, just write your impressions of 9/11, Val.

Would I get a good grade on the essay? If I was right about the way she was going to grade them, probably. Did it really matter? Not a bit.

She made me start thinking. I'd hit so many areas with not enough time to do them justice, like trying to catch a herd of roaches when you turn on the light. The use of a plane as a weapon, how just about anything could be used as a weapon, how the airlines had lost the trust and faith of the public, how airports had turned into war zones where the customers were suspect, 24/7. How the airline industry had almost collapsed, how gasoline had been affected, the war in Iraq and the way it had changed since its start. The way the world would never be the same. How political correctness was hogtying us in any effort to keep the bad guys out.

Today I'd figured out what I was going to do with the extra year I had on my hands. I'd never planned on college. Nobody, especially me, had ever thought I would be college material. That might be different now that I'd fixed my "I don't get it" problem. If so, waiting a year so the two or three of us could be in the same grade made more sense than trying to find a college at this late date. Let the girls finish high school and then we'd look at it.

Next year was going to be the year of my blog. I was going to put out a daily column on post 9/11 and how the world had changed. Any and every change was acceptable for posting, whether or not it happened to be politically correct. From clerks in 7-11 getting targeted for beatings to babies having their shoes removed to gain access to air travel. It interested the hell out of me and I wanted to see if it interested others. Doing a book sounded great, but it was a lot of work to get a finished product that may not even be popular. I could always put a book together from blog entries if it went over the way I hoped it would.

It was worth a year of my life that I was going to piddle away, anyway. If it didn't fly, I wouldn't feel like I lost anything. But if I didn't try, I'd always wonder. I was beginning to realize just a handful of hours in that one day in September had as much effect on the world as the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the printing press, maybe even fire or the wheel. It was certainly a lot more immediate than any of the others.

I glanced at my watch. It was a couple of minutes till next period. I looked over to the parking lot and saw a couple coming up to the lawn. The way they were fixing their clothes, it was pretty obvious they'd been messing around, probably in one of the cars in the lot. The girl looked very familiar. As they got closer, my suspicions were confirmed. It was Vicky. I didn't recognize the guy. Like I said, Vick and Bev had lunch the period before me. She should be finishing up one of her classes, not returning from the parking lot, making sure her panties were straight.