Chapter 4

I had a few days off school for the funerals and stuff. Most of the time I was just sitting around and playing video games; but there were the funerals and going to the lawyers, so I guess I really needed the time off. Lu had taken some days off, too. But a week after mom and dad died, it was back to the grind of school and the Fortress of Solitude.

It wasn't quite as bad as before since some of the HS cheerleader girls came down the hall to the Junior High area at lunch to say hi to me. Of course, Lu came to see me as well, and that helped things too. Seeing some of the HS girls come and talk to me thawed the Jr. HS people. But pretty much, nobody wanted to get the daddy disease. Remember back in third grade when somebody had cooties and nobody wanted to get them? It was like that.

One time, about two weeks later, Marcy Albright came down the long hall between buildings at lunch time and practically dragged me back into the hallway. She winked at the student monitor who was supposed to keep the Jr. HS students out of the hallway to the Sr. HS. "We're just going to have a little chat," she said.

She pushed me back against some lockers into a corner. I had my notebook and a history book from the previous class and so I had that in my hand and held them up against my chest. Marcy started making 'oh, oh, oh' sounds real quiet while she was like licking my neck. At the same time, she was rubbing my crotch and I got a boner real fast, I'll tell you.

After a few minutes of this, Ms. Darylrimple, the HS cheerleader coach and a math teacher, came down the hall and got angry at me. Why she was angry at me, when I was just holding some books, while Marcy was doing all the stuff, was beyond me. She grabbed us both and took us to the Jr. HS Principal's office.

"I found them in the connecting hall, necking," she said. "I don't think it's appropriate, and I don't want to have another pregnant cheerleader on my hands." HUH? I was like a store manikin in the hall. How's somebody going to get pregnant from that?

But Mr. Ellsworth, the Principal, heard the words 'pregnant' and 'Chris Harcourt' in the same sentence and got real angry. "I thought I told you not to get involved with any girls!" he practically shouted at me. "You've done it this time, Mr. Harcourt. I don't know if it's going to be an expulsion or just a suspension, but it's going to be something."

He said he was going to call Mrs. B. and so I sat outside his office, while he called. Marcy and Ms. Darylrimple went back to the HS like nothing happened.

Mrs. B. came down about half an hour later and we had a meeting, to 'discuss things.' I didn't do much discussing, since I didn't know what to say. Mr. Ellsworth told the story like I was groping Marcy and got caught red-handed. Mrs. B. asked me if it was true or not.

"Well, I had my history book and my notebook." I pointed to them on the next chair. "And I held them against my chest like this." I showed them. "Marcy came down the hallway and pushed me back against the corner and she grabbed my ... you know ... and then Ms. Darylrimple came along and brought us down here."

"Of course he's denying everything. I won't have another high profile pregnancy here," said Mr. Ellsworth. "He's too disruptive. Please take him home until we can arrange a hearing."

Mrs. B. was a pretty quiet lady and had an I'll-do-what-you-say attitude. And she couldn't stand up to Mr. Ellsworth at all. So she took me home.

When we got to the car, she said, "I believe you, Chris, but what can we do?"

I just nodded. Mom would have peeled a strip from Mr. Ellsworth's backside, but Mrs. B. couldn't do that. So that was one difference I figured from having the B.s as foster parents, right away.

Don't get me wrong. Mrs. B. was a wonderful person, and took care of me real good. I mean, she was a wonderful cook and did the laundry and drove me to and from school and everything. And as long as I didn't need her to be assertive, everything was cool. I guess she didn't do anything for Lu either. Except that Lu was the kind of person who was smart and never got into any situation where she was, like, in trouble or anything. So there was nothing to do for Lu.

When Mr. B. got home from the U. where he was a professor, he said that this was all bullshit. He actually said that. I'd never heard him use any cuss words before. He got on the phone with somebody he called Harvey, and they talked back and forth a while. "Don't you worry, Chris. We'll get you back in school soon enough."

"Great," I said, but I guess my tone of voice gave me away. Who wanted to go back to the Fortress of Solitude for seven hours a day, and get a bunch of books – that I couldn't read – put in front of me. And my reading mentor kept going over and over the same stuff: 'Here, let's read your English books.' Or something.

"What's wrong, Chris?" he asked me.

"Nothing, I guess."

It wasn't a cheerleading practice day, so Lu was home by now. She said, "I don't think he's getting anything from being in school, and the kids are just mean to him there. Is that it, Chris?"

"Pretty much," I replied.

"Hmm. Let me think about it, some." Mr. B. pulled his pipe out of his jacket pocket and popped it into his mouth. That was what he did. POP! And the pipe was in his mouth. I didn't understand how he could keep a lighted pipe in his pocket without setting the jacket on fire, but, apparently, he did. I didn't see any smoke coming out of it, but he chewed on the end and puffed away.

"Chris, go and get me the CDs you have from the University Library," he said after a while.

I went up and got the red one and the blue one and the advanced CAD disk, too.

He picked up the disk with the red label. "So, you're listening to 'Shakespeare's Heroes, a Study in Contrasts: Hamlet. Part Four.' Chris, what's this about?" he asked.

"Well, that's Part Four. The first three were about Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. I'm not finished with Hamlet, yet. I got busy with the funerals and stuff. I should be getting it back to the Library, I guess.

"Anyway, Hamlet is about a Prince who's upset at the death of his father, and he doesn't really know if he wants to live or die. He has a famous speech where he says 'To be or not to be.' I know what he feels like, 'cause sometimes I just want to 'not be.' He's got more problems than me, 'cause he meets his father's ghost, and his mother is married to his uncle, the new king. He's real depressed, especially after killing his girlfriend's father. It was a mistake, but he killed him.

"Anyway, I'm not finished with it yet."

"Chris, what do you think the play is about – not what the characters do, but what is it about?" he asked. He was a Professor of Philosophy, and he was always asking questions like that.

"Well, I don't know," I said. "Hamlet couldn't be sure that his uncle killed his father, 'cause there were no witnesses except for the ghost. When he killed Ophelia's father, it was a mistake. He acted without enough information. And I think he was upset by that all in the rest of the story. It seems to me, he wanted to get revenge, but didn't have all the facts. So he was paralyzed. At least, up until the part where there was another play with actors getting ready to put on a play themselves. That's where I stopped reading, so far."

"Very good, Chris. Very good indeed," he said. I looked over at Lu, and she was just beaming. "Now this one, 'The FDR years: Court Packing. Disk 4 of 9."

"Oh, I finished that one. I really liked it. It's about how President Roosevelt couldn't get his programs, called the New Deal, put into law, since the Supreme Court kept saying parts of it were unconstitutional. Like the Railroad Retirement Act, which was the model, almost, for Social Security. The Supreme Court struck it down because it didn't give railroad workers due process – maybe some of them would not want to pay into a retirement fund. And that would give Congress too much power: if they could force one industry to pay for a retirement fund, then they could force them into doing other stuff.

"So the President hatched a plan to put more judges – they're called justices for the Supreme Court – into the Court. Then he'd have enough votes to get his bills approved. But the plan didn't get approved by Congress, because the Senator who was its main supporter died, and then..."

"Okay, okay, Chris," he interrupted. "I take it you really liked that one, eh?"

"Well, it's more straightforward than Hamlet," I answered with a smile.

"Yes, it is," he said. "I think I have an idea. I'll have to do some investigation. By the time there is a hearing, maybe I'll have something ready. Don't worry about it, in the meantime ... I'll take your disks back to the Library and get you some new ones, right?" He gave me back the CDs.

"Can you just renew the Hamlet disk? I'm not done with it yet."

That was the end of that discussion, and the next day he came back with a bunch of disks. He said they were all school work, since I wouldn't be going to school for the next few days. GED stuff, he said. That stood for General Education Development, which is what I should be doing anyway. He said I could finish the Hamlet CD later.

I had to laugh when I got to the one for English Literature, 'cause part of it was about Hamlet, but it wasn't as good as the one I had in the first place. The Social Studies one had a section about 'The Lead Up to WWII, ' which it turns out was a lot about FDR, so I already knew that, partly. Also it was about Adolph Hitler who did some unspeakably terrible things, but FDR did some too, especially to the Japanese Americans. So I began to wonder about what was really true. I mean, this was America, right? So that meant Americans wrote the books. Did that mean we didn't do anything terrible and that only the other side did terrible things – or the authors decided just to include their stuff and not ours?

The hearing was scheduled for Thursday, so that was three days away. I went through most of the GED disks 'cause I was bored staying at home. I even got about half of the math stuff, 'cause it was Geometry, and that was about shapes and something they called 'proofs.' Proofs were just logic, so I got that; and the shapes and stuff was real easy.

The rest of the time, I studied CAD and even built a dream house with a pool and room downstairs for a ping-pong table, plus bedrooms and a nice kitchen and stuff. Well, the drawings for a house, anyway. It was mega-cool. I wasn't finished with it yet: I was working on the duct-work for the heating and air conditioning system, and I had to do the plumbing and electrical systems after that. It was an exercise at the end of the disk for the CAD program. That stuff was easy. I could picture it all in my mind, and then all I had to do was put it into the program.