Chapter 9

It was still in the middle of the afternoon when Susan got back to Spearfish Lake, but she didn't go by the paper to tell her parents the news. It was paper day, and all her life she'd known that Tuesday afternoon was the time that things were nuts around the Record-Herald. It was always very busy around the paper on paper day, and not the time to bother them unless something really important happened, like, say, the house was on fire. It hadn't caught fire yet, but if it did they'd be likely to show up with a camera in hopes of getting the story on the front page.

So, she went right home, parked the Cavalier in the driveway, and went in to change clothes. Once again, dressing nicely and not like a teenage slob had helped to make things work for her – they'd made her seem more mature and serious to people like Mrs. Thatcher, who was more used to teenagers coming in like they'd dressed out of the rag bag.

With nothing else to do, she gave a thought to calling Megan to see if she was doing anything useful, but rejected it almost instantly. First, she wasn't sure how much she wanted to encourage Megan after the scene on Sunday, at least not just yet, but more importantly, she wanted to talk to her parents about everything that had happened and settle on a few decisions before she told anyone about her new plan. So, now that she was home and it was still warm outside, Susan just took off the nice clothes she'd worn down to Riverside and didn't bother to put anything on to replace them. She took the package of information she'd picked up at the college and hauled it out on the deck, then spread herself out in a lounge chair. She had the intention of at least briefly doing something about her bikini lines while she went through all the material, trying to pick out what courses she wanted to take and work out a schedule.

The only course she absolutely wanted to be sure she had on her schedule was English 101e, the course about researching and writing papers. Although in her own mind Susan wasn't planning on darkening the door of Spearfish Lake High School ever again, if it worked out that she still could get a diploma from there it was the one course she absolutely had to have. It would be vital for transferring elsewhere at some future date, at least if she wanted credit for it. She soon discovered that it was only offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, although in a choice of three different sessions, all of which Mrs. Thatcher had told her were open. That meant, to limit the driving, that she wanted to schedule the rest of her courses as much as possible on those days, and that's when the juggling started.

She had to interrupt her nude sunbathing twice, once to go into the house and get a pad and a pen to make some notes, and the second time when the pen ran out of ink. At one time or another she had penciled herself into all three of the sessions, but each time she did that meant something else had to be moved or scratched. It took her a couple hours to work out a schedule that seemed like it would work. She could take up to eighteen hours as a full-time student, but reasoned early on that it would be better to hold it to fifteen, since that was going to be a lot to manage going down there only twice a week. It still meant that she was going to be there from eight to five on Tuesdays, and then eight to nine on Thursdays, as that day had a class that only met once a week.

Even with a couple of holes during the day, including time for a two-hour lunch break where she figured she could get some studying in, it was going to be a tough schedule. At least she'd have plenty of time at home where she could hit the books, assuming she didn't have to show up around the high school. It seemed workable, but she had little doubt she could manage it. While she'd had a lot of fun in Germany, the Johannes-Staudinger Gymnasium worked her a lot harder than the classes at Spearfish Lake High School ever had, even with the extra course work she'd done to get ready for her exchange year.

Let's face it, she thought as she considered the tight schedule. The classes shouldn't be that bad; almost all were basically intro classes for students coming in from high school, probably not the top students, and with only limited preparation for college. There weren't going to be many students coming into a place like Riverside who were on a par with the kids she'd known in Germany. These were going to be the B and C and maybe even D students, not the curve-wrecking top-end A students you'd find at a place like State. That meant that the courses were going to be, well, dumbed down in comparison, and that gave her confidence that she could handle it.

While Riverside had opened a real door for her, one she hadn't quite expected, she was aware that the place was not exactly Harvard or Princeton, either. When you got right down to it, it was really rather a Hauptschule of a college, at best a Realschule and it might be a reach to say that. It would do to get some of the simple requirements out of the way. It would do for a year, but the list of classes that Mrs. Thatcher was pretty sure would transfer to most schools in the country started to get a little thin to stretch it out for two, at least so long as she didn't include some major or specialty. It would probably be best to think about moving on at the end of the year, when her hopefully former high school classmates would be looking at starting college, too. Except, she grinned to herself, that she would be starting at a higher-level school as a sophomore, rather than the freshmen that they would be. That felt like a victory, no matter how she looked at it.

So, while Albburg was still on the list of potentials for next year – and in a very high spot on the list, too – the idea of getting out of college a year sooner was a real possibility. Or, if she stretched out a four-year college an extra year, it meant that she could pick up a lot of skills that might be useful in her search for an international job. She might be able to work out two majors, maybe even three, in fields that were largely unrelated in order to make her a more appealing hire. And then, there was the possibility of grad school, too – lots of possibilities, more than she really wanted to contemplate right at the moment.

She was still considering the broad spectrum of possibilities when her parents got home. By now the sun was down low enough that it wasn't helping her tan much, and she'd done a couple turns in the hot tub just to relax and get away from staring at class schedules. She'd thought about getting supper going, but decided against it. It was Tuesday, after all, and sometimes that meant her folks got home at five PM, and other times as late as nine or ten, but the latter usually only if they had a council meeting, which thankfully wasn't on the schedule that evening.

They actually showed up at six-thirty, which meant that they'd had gotten out a tough but not impossible paper. "Hey, Mom!" Susan said. "What's for supper? I'm willing to cook it, but you're going to have to tell me what it is."

"We've got fried chicken on the menu board," her mother told her. "But right now I'd settle for a carry-out pizza as long as I don't have to cook it."

"Tough day?" Susan asked.

"Very tough," her father said. "Fall sports issue, so you know what that means. Not only all the team photos and schedules from Spearfish Lake, Albany River, and Warsaw, but all the stuff that goes along with it. Anissa was just about going nuts, and it was all we could do to keep her from driving us nuts, too."

Susan knew exactly what her father meant. While Anissa Hodges was a sports fan and a good writer and photographer, she wasn't exactly up to speed with some of the other details about getting pages made up for something like a major special section. Since the fall sports section was one of the three biggest the Record-Herald ran each year, it meant others had to fill in for her. No junior reporter to help meant the duty would fall on her father and mother. It also meant it had been a very good idea that she hadn't bothered them when she got back from Riverside. "I could grill the chicken, I suppose," she offered.

"Do it," her mother said. "We have some left-over potato salad to go with it, and I'm pretty sure we can make up the rest of dinner from something in the refrigerator. The chicken should be thawed and in the refrigerator."

"Just take it easy," Susan suggested. "The hot tub has felt pretty good to me this afternoon, and I'll bet it will to you."

In spite of being tired, Susan's mother helped her get things organized for dinner a little, and soon Susan was presiding over the gas grill out on the deck. She was wearing a full apron; she'd learned long before that grilling chicken in the nude was a good way to get some nasty burns in places that she'd really rather not have them. Her parents were settled in the hot tub before her father got around to asking, "So, how did it go with you today?"

"Much better than I expected," Susan told them. "I won't go into all the details right now, but I can be a fulltime student at Riverside this fall if I want to be, and if it's Alles ist in Ordnung with you."

"I thought you could only take six hours," her mother asked.

"Well, normally," Susan told them. "That's all they'll go for on the dual enrollment deal, and I couldn't be a fulltime student without being a high school graduate. But then I waved the Abitur around showing that I am a high school graduate, and it was all downhill from there. Oma Birgit really had something there when she suggested last night that I take it along."

"So where does that leave you with high school?" her father asked.

"I'm not sure." Susan told him. "But I'm not sure I care, either. I'm just darn tempted to not even bother with it, except for them picking up the cost of six hours' worth of credit. Other than that, I think if anyone asks in the future, I'm just going to tell them I'm a 2004 graduate of the Johannes-Staudinger Gymnasium in Germany and not even try to explain the Abitur to them unless I have to."

"Somehow, that sounds like my girl," Mike grinned. "Never meet a problem head on if you can go around it."