Chapter 25

With Gingrich gone and the tensions gone with him, things slowed down for Susan quite a bit. She was still busy with her studies at Riverside and her work for the Record-Herald, but for the most part the hassles were behind her. Even though she knew she was still being carried on the books as a student at the high school, she didn't think of herself as one. She agreed to help Mr. Delahayne out in first class perion on Friday mornings, strictly as a volunteer, as long as she didn't have something else going on. He was glad of her assistance, and it allowed her to walk into the school and not have to think of herself as a student.

Almost two weeks after the pivotal school board meeting, she was invited out to Windmill Island to the open house the Newtons had planned. She went, of course; it was a beautiful day, a fall day as fine as the North Country around Spearfish Lake can manage. The house turned out just as spectacular as she had imagined when there to do the photo story back in the summer, and she thought the Newtons were going to have an adventure living on an island in the middle of a frozen lake come winter. She took the Nikon with her and shot a number of photos, which resulted in another full-page photo feature in the Record-Herald the following week, although this time without the front page teaser photo.

While she was there, she had another long talk with Randy Clark, whose company had built the house. There was some discussion of the whole school board mess, of course; it was still a main topic of discussion around Spearfish Lake, but they also talked about her college plans. Not unexpectedly, Mrs. Clark made a pitch for Weatherford, but Susan told them that while the possibility of going to school in Germany was still in the cards, right at the moment she was looking hard at Michigan State or Grand Valley State University. She told them she planned a campus visit trip in the near future.

The weather wasn't anywhere as nice on the following Saturday; it was overcast, rainy, and rather chilly. It would have been tolerable outside in the hot tub in the nude, but it didn't appeal to her. It all added up to a pretty slow day, so she used it to make sure she had all of her studies up to date, and also read ahead in her textbooks.

Even that got old after a while, so in the early afternoon she decided to call the Hauners in Germany. She hadn't talked with them for a while, and she was curious about how Hans was doing at Albburg as there hadn't been a word about it in the e-mails they'd exchanged back and forth. The e-mails she'd sent to Hans had gone unanswered, and that made her wonder a little, even though she knew he wasn't real great about that kind of correspondence.

Elke answered the phone. "So, what's happening in Regensburg?" Susan asked, in German, of course.

"It is not a happy time here," Elke told her. "Things are all messed up. The folks are in Albburg, trying to buck Hans up a little to get him to stick out the term."

"Stick out the term?" Susan replied, a little shocked. "Is something wrong?"

"According to him, a lot is wrong. It turns out, he hates the place, hates the classes, hates the professors, and especially hates the other students."

"Wow," Susan said at the revelation. "What brought this on?"

"It's something he should have seen, we all should have seen," Elke explained. "Albburg may be a very good school, but there apparently are a lot of pretty snooty types there who look down on students from families who actually have to earn their money. Nobility isn't supposed to mean anything in Germany anymore, but apparently it still does there, and there are a lot of nobles there that like to look down their long noses at everyone else. According to Hans, he's treated as the lowest of the low, even by the professors. It's been all the folks can do to keep him from packing his bags and catching a train home, and I wouldn't be surprised if he showed up with them when they return."

"It's that bad?" Susan asked. "I thought you guys liked the place."

"Oh, we liked what we saw of it; we all did," Elke admitted. "But we apparently did not see everything, or missed something important in the glamour of the Albburg name. All I can say is that if we missed things like that we must have been pretty blind. Whatever happens today, after this I'm just about sure than none of us will be going to Albburg next year. A lot of plans have been changing around here very quickly. I do not know what Hans will do. He has said a lot of things, but none of them make a great deal of sense. He's just searching for something else to do and doesn't know what it could be. I almost think it would be better if he did leave and spend the time figuring out something sensible to do."

"I don't know what to tell you," Susan replied. "You know what happened with me; I left a school because of an intolerable situation, but I managed to land in something that's probably going to be better for me."

"Yes, you told us about that. The thing of it is that you had time to make other arrangements. Hans doesn't. If he drops out now he may not be able to get into another uni in time to even start the winter term. It could be next fall before he could go again, and he could be doing something else by that time. Right now he is not very thrilled about uni at all."

"God, that doesn't sound like Hans," Susan replied. "He was the one all excited about uni, and about Albburg."

"Yes, but when your dreams fall far, they make a bigger splat on the ground," Elke said. "I hate to say it, but that's what he is, just a big splat on the ground right now. Once he has a chance to think clearly, he will probably do something sensible, and I have reminded him that something similar happened to you, but you came out of it well. But he isn't seeing it right now."

"So what are the rest of you going to do?" Susan asked, seeing her own dreams of Albburg splattered on the ground as widely as Hans' had been. Fortunately she hadn't been banking on them quite as much as Hans or in the same way. While it had been fun to think of the five of them reunited at Albburg, somehow it had never seemed like more than a distant possibility. Now it was gone, washed down the river of Hans' disappointment.

"I do not know," Elke replied. "Everything changes daily. Right now I'm thinking about Göppingen; that's a much more modern uni with courses that are not as traditional, which is another problem that Hans has with Albburg. According to him, it seems like every class is either Latin or religion, or depends on them. He says the place is more to learn to be social in the upper class than it is to learn anything, and in that he may be right. Freya is talking about going to uni right here in Regensburg. It is not a bad school but it is a little too close to home for my taste. Lothar has another year so he can sit back to wait and see. I wouldn't be surprised if what we all do will depend on what Hans does, but we still could all wind up going to different unis. Everything is changing very quickly, and we do not know from one day to the next."

This was all one hell of a surprise to Susan; she had no inkling that anything like that was happening! Whatever else happened, her thoughts of going to Albburg with her friends next year were as dead as they could be; there was no question about that. If several of them wound up going to the same uni she still might be able to consider going there with them, but right at the moment it seemed unlikely as there weren't many other unis in Germany with the same sort of appeal Albburg had seemed to present. Maybe a junior year abroad program out of an American college if she were in the right field, but then maybe not too – after all, she'd already sort of done it.

"I guess about all I can say is keep me informed on what's happening," she told Elke, trying to not reveal her disappointment at the dashing of that option of her plans. "The way things are going now I guess I'll be going to college over here somewhere next year, although where is still up in the air for me, too."

"I will do that," Elke said. "Things are still very much up in the air for us, too. I miss you a great deal Susan, and hope that the bicycle trip next summer will still work out, but right at the moment things are so messed up that I cannot say whether we will be able to do that, either. I do not need to tell you that Mama and Papa are not any happier with this than the rest of us, and that could change a lot of things, too."

The call went on for a while, but really there wasn't much more to talk about. After the call finally ended, Susan lay back on her bed and stared at the ceiling, just trying to put things in perspective. They didn't look good; Alles was not in Ordnung in the Hauner house, that was for sure. There was nothing she could do about it now, and probably nothing she could do about it at all, other than wait and see. Damn, what a disappointment that had to be for Hans! She wished she could take him in her arms and tell him it was all right, that something would work out, but she couldn't do that, either, not from an ocean away.

Maybe Mizuki was right, she thought. Maybe she should focus on Asia rather than Europe, despite the languages she already knew. A lot of her interest in returning to Europe had hung on her friends and the thought of being together again, but right then it looked like it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, or for any great deal of time. Maybe it was like leaving Spearfish Lake High School; in one sense she hated leaving her friends there, but there were other things to do, too. But this was different, she knew it, and didn't know what to make of it.

The situation in the Hauner household had not clarified a great deal when Susan called a week later. It appeared that after some negotiation, Hans had agreed to try and struggle through the term although he wouldn't be going to Albburg the next one. What he would be doing when it rolled around was still up in the air. The options seemed to include spending several months playing video games while they tried for admission elsewhere; no one was sure, although apparently his father was trying to pull some strings at Universität Regensburg, which was not as appealing but would be at home. Elke had not made up her mind, except that she didn't want to go there, and Freya was apparently leaning the same way. In one way, it didn't matter; whatever happened, it seemed pretty clear that the five would not be reunited at uni in Germany. The bike trip was up in the air, too, and really couldn't even be considered until after the end of the term and things had settled down.

That meant the campus visit trip with Mizuki had assumed even more importance, not that Susan didn't already consider it important, and not just for the college visits. Instead of heading home after her last class on Tuesday, Susan followed Mizuki's battered old Toyota as she drove it home, about twenty miles on the far side of Camden. The trip had been touch and go up until the last minute; Susan's mother had stated early that she'd like to come along, and had only been talked out of it with difficulty. Then, during the day, Mizuki reported that her father had made much the same pitch over the weekend, and had only been dissuaded because the plans had already been made and it was difficult for him to get away.

Still, Mizuki didn't waste any time when they pulled into her yard, which was at a nice suburban house on the south side of Camden. She tossed a couple bags into the back of the Cavalier in something approaching pit stop time. "Finally!" she said as she buckled her seat belt while Susan was backing out of the driveway. "There were times when I never thought we were going to be able to do this."