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Chapter 89 – Senior MomentsAlex woke up even before the alarm went off, which meant she was getting pretty stressed out about school already. She managed to get her exercising and martial arts training in before showering and eating breakfast and making lunch. With Annie gone and school starting up and her mom going back to social work only with a more important job, things were back to the same old stuff, with everyone rushing around like crazy. And her folks had a pile of stuff for her to drop off at the dry cleaners. She was so glad the dry cleaners still had a drive-through window.
This semester, she had homeroom with Mrs. Porter, who taught Health and was the swimming coach. It was pretty much like last year and the year before, except the senior homeroom classes were like twice as big, and so more people she knew were in there with her. She got Mina to sit over with her and Robyn and Nicole and Ray and Ray’s pals. Louis and Marsha were in another homeroom, but Alex figured Louis was really a lot more concerned about having classes with Marsha than about having homeroom with Ray and Alex.
Ray sat down in front of her and grinned. “Hey, guess what? I applied to four colleges last night. All of ’em are in some wide spot called Washington D.C.” Alex just grinned like crazy. He said, “I’m pretty sure my b-ball skillz aren’t up to Georgetown level, because they’ve got one of the top point guards in the country right now, but maybe the other schools would spring for an athletic scholarship. Anyway, I talked to Coach Eddurd about sending a highlight reel of my stuff from last year’s games off to all of them, and we’ll see if I get any luck on this come this year’s games.”
Then she had to get moving to get to AP English on time. Mina and Nicole were taking it with her, so it was like she really did have a clique. Or something sort of clique-ish. Ms. Walters was the teacher. Lindsay and a few other people had told her that Ms. Walters was one of those teachers who saw symbolic stuff in everything, so you had to write about symbolism in what you read to make her happy. Alex figured it could be worse. Annie said there was a history teacher one of her friends had over at Harvard, and he insisted that everything in history had to be interpreted through Marxism. And not Groucho Marx, either.
Ms. Walters had textbooks for everyone in the class, and then there were also going to be some novels they’d be reading. And the textbook was all short stories and poems and speeches and short tracts, all organized by what was going on historically at the time. That pretty much made sense to Alex.
So they were going to be starting out reading Captain John Smith and William Penn and Roger Williams and Anne Bradstreet. Alex looked in their textbook, and saw all that stuff was in the book. It looked like they would be going out of the book until they got to some early novelists. She hoped they were going to be easier to read than William Shakespeare. She was still disgusted about Shakespeare killing off Romeo and Juliet.
Boy, there was going to be a lot of reading to keep ahead of.
Second period was a break for her, so she figured she’d use it as a private study hall. She got a bunch of reading done out of the American Lit textbook. And she had a chat with Mina, and they decided they’d have their first yearbook staff meeting Friday last period, and they texted Mr. Carson and everybody on their staff to let them know.
Third period was AP calculus with Mrs. McGurty. Alex had liked having Mrs. McGurty for third period back in the spring, so she was looking forward to it. And the first day’s lecture didn’t seem that bad. She could see that drawing rectangles under a curve was a way to start figuring out what the area of the curve was. And maybe drawing rectangles with their top edge slanted right along where the curve went would let you get an even better estimate of the right area. The homework was just doing that kind of stuff, so it looked pretty easy so far.
Lunch was like always, except Louis brought Marsha over, and Mina joined them, so their table was pretty crowded even if they had one of the big tables in the middle of the lunchroom. And Donna and the cheer squad and a bunch of their boyfriends were on one side of them, and one of the jock tables was on their other side, so Ray spent most of lunch talking to guys at another table, and Nicole spent most of lunch talking to some of her homegirls in the cheer squad. Without Libby anywhere to be seen, and with Kelly busy with her posse, lunch was pretty quiet.
Robyn finally asked, “What’s the deal with Libby? And why isn’t Kelly over here busting our chops?”
Mina answered, “Kelly’s already busy starting on her big push for homecoming queen. Libby? No idea.”
Alex admitted, “I was watching over the photography room most of the afternoon, and I didn’t see her, but I was out taking snaps several times. I could’ve missed her.”
She pulled out her phone and texted Willow. ‘libby not at school’
In a matter of seconds, she got a reply. ‘ptsd. cant get near east side of school. going to st marys this yr’
Alex explained, “Libby can’t handle coming back here because of, you know, the whole nearly getting burned alive thing, so she’s going to St. Mary’s this year.”
Louis asked, “Wow, isn’t that an all-girls school? With really boring uniforms and a ‘no makeup’ rule?”
Nicole nodded. “Yeppers. My friend Toni goes there. She says the nuns are super strict, and if you break the rules they get out the ruler, and it’s no fun at all. But her family’s Catholic, so she and her sisters all have to go there.”
Alex asked, “Toni?”
Nicole told her, “Sure. You met her at my Halloween party last year. She was rockin’ the ’60s look with the ’fro and you were talking to her about how long it took to get her hair like that?”
Alex paused a second. “I thought her name was Mary.”
Nicole nodded. “Mary Antoinette Lessandra Collier.”
Louis burst out in a laugh. “Her name is Marie Antoinette? Are her parents trying to get her guillotined when she’s older or something?”
Nicole stuck her tongue out at Louis. “It’s not her fault. All the girls in her family are Mary Something. Mary Antoinette, Mary Beatrice, Mary Chelsea, and Mary Deirdre.”
Robyn snarked, “What would be next? Mary Egberta?”
Nicole admitted, “Her mom told her that if she’d had a fifth girl she would’ve named her Mary Elizabeth.”
Louis said, “Imagine being in a really huge family. ‘Oh, I’m Mary Xylophone. You’re looking for Mary Quagmire.’ That would be pretty annoying.”
Nicole nodded. “Yeah, that’s why Toni goes by her middle name when she can, even if all the nuns call her ‘Mary Antoinette’ just all the time. She says there’s like half a dozen girls in her classes with first name Mary, and she’s not even the only girl named Mary with a middle name that starts with ‘A’. So … yeah.”
Alex muttered, “I hope Libby’s okay.”
Robyn insisted, “Not me. I hope she gets the ruler across her butt a couple times a week until she learns her lesson.”
Ray agreed, “Most of the school’s probably hoping she gets some payback.”
Louis added, “Most of the guys in school are probably fantasizing about the ruler across the butt thing.”
“Eww!” Alex complained.
“Just sayin’,” Louis pointed out.
Marsha still gave him an elbow. Then he whispered something in her ear, and she got an expression that Alex recognized at once. The ‘Willow thinking dirty thoughts about sex stuff and looking forward to later on’ look. Alex didn’t say anything, though. She was just happy Louis and Marsha were getting on so well.
And finally, Kelly came by. “Hi, Alex. Hi, Alex’s posse.”
Louis stuck his tongue out at her and thumbed his nose, but she had her back to him, so she didn’t see him.
Alex smiled. “Hi, Kelly! What’s up?” Not that she really thought Kelly deserved a big smile, but she was going to pretend Kelly wasn’t bugging her.
Kelly announced, “Well, I’ve been working on anti-Libby slogans before we get to the Homecoming Queen voting.”
Alex told her, “Libby transferred to another school. You won’t need any anti-Libby slogans.”
Kelly fumed, “WHAT? And why didn’t you tell me? I wasted almost a week on this!”
Alex calmly said, “I only found out like two minutes ago from a friend who doesn’t go here.” She was not going to let Kelly make her upset. She had way bigger stuff to be upset about. She had Danielle Atron and The Collective and Maggie Walsh to worry about. And silicates and giant spiders and giant blobs and city-imploding weapons and the Failsafe Option and who knew what else. And supervillains. And stuff like the mutated animals and that radioactive lake in Russia.
“Well, here’s my list for homecoming.” Kelly handed Alex a sheet.
It was twenty-eight girls’ names. Alex glanced at the top several and realized Kelly had a list of everyone who might be in the running for Homecoming Queen. Kelly and Donna and Libby were at the top, followed by Alex and Nicole and Trish and Cathy and Jill.
Kelly leaned over and drew a line through Libby’s name. “Well, that’s one problem taken care of.”
Alex insisted, “I’m not running for Homecoming Queen. I’ve got four AP courses and I’m taking an online computer course to get my college requirements out of the way, and my college wants me available at the drop of a hat to go talk to mentors.”
Kelly gasped — well, maybe it was a sort of screech — “What? Your college? You’re already accepted somewhere?”
Alex shrugged. “Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. I’m gonna major in photojournalism, and they have mentors for all their students, and they want me to fly out there and meet with potential mentors whenever they become available. So I might not even be here for homecoming.”
Ray gave Kelly a little verbal jab. “And she’s up for a Pulitzer Prize in photojournalism, so who knows if she’ll have to fly to the East Coast for some sort of interview.”
Alex glared at him. “That’s a secret. I don’t want anybody talking about that.” She looked at Kelly. “Don’t tell anyone. KPVC put me up for a nomination, but there are plenty of other people who get their names put in every year.”
She looked over the list. “Why isn’t Terri Williams on here? Or Elissa Conroy?” Terri was the star forward for the girls’ basketball team, and Elissa was really the best actress in the drama group, even if the ‘pretty girl’ roles always went to Trish Reilley.
Kelly snorted. “Terri’s a moose. No guy’s gonna vote for a girl who’s 6'4". And Elissa’s got a face like mud.”
Alex insisted, “Terri’s nice! And Elissa’s a really good actress!”
Kelly sniped, “And if that’s the best thing you can say about someone, no one’s gonna vote for them for Homecoming Queen.”
Alex frowned at her. “That’s just mean.”
Kelly just said, “Libby’s gone, you’re not interested … Okay, I really only have to worry about Donna.” She grabbed her sheet and walked off.
Mina growled, “Someone really needs to put a spoke in her wheel.”
Marsha agreed, “Yeah.”
Alex told them, “We have more important things in life than Homecoming Queen.”
Marsha gaped at her. “How can you be so calm about this? You could be Homecoming Queen!”
Alex tried to explain. “When Azure Crush came here to bust up the school? She was here after me. Danielle Atron sent her. Atron’s people kidnapped Mom and Dad and Ray. She thinks I might know who Terawatt is, just because I got the first pictures of her. I have a supervillainess out there who wants to kidnap me and torture me until I die. I have a heck of a lot more to worry about than high school stuff.”
Ray added, “And this was the second time Atron kidnapped Alex and her mom and dad, and the first time she kidnapped ’em, she really did try to kill all of ’em. And me, too. Her minion Lars left me handcuffed to a desk with a timebomb ticking away near me. We got out of the plant just as the bombs went off. After that, high school b-ball is just not a lot of pressure.”
Mina looked kind of shocked. “No wonder you didn’t freak when Pete and Paul steamrollered us.”
Alex shrugged. “We have supervillains running loose in this town, maybe half a dozen times a year. We have Danielle Atron loose somewhere out there. We have real, live monsters showing up around the world. There are way more important things in life than wearing a crown for an hour.”
Mina smiled smugly. “And that’s why you oughta be the homecoming queen, not Kelly.”
Marsha nodded. Robyn smirked, “I bet we could get Alex picked in a landslide.”
Mina nodded. “Sure! Who’s really for Kelly, except her posse? Who’s really for Donna, except half the cheer squad and a couple jocks?”
Louis leaned forward. “I’ll help with the campaign. First we do market segmentation …”
Alex groaned and buried her face in her hands. She just knew this would go horribly wrong.
* * *
After lunch, she had Spanish IV with Señora Martinez. Only about half the Spanish III class from last year was in there, which meant Señora Martinez would expect that everyone in the room would be the hardest working students. And half as many people meant getting called on twice as much.
Señora Martinez also did the whole class in Spanish, and wanted everyone to speak only Spanish in the classroom, even for things like needing to go to the bathroom. Alex was totally glad she’d reviewed Spanish for today. And they were going to be reading Spanish literature as part of the class. Alex was kind of unhappy about that, except that meant that some of the time they weren’t going to be doing the ‘new vocabulary and grammar’ stuff.
Ugh. Could she even write an essay in Spanish about Spanish literature? Well, she could try doing it Willow-style: read the book with some essay topic in mind, sit down, write it as fast as she could, set it aside for a couple days, and then fix a bunch of the dumbness in it.
On the other hand, she must have learned plenty of Spanish already, because doing a class solely in Spanish wasn’t as hard on her brain as she expected. Okay, Señora Martinez’s classes were mostly in Spanish already, so this wasn’t that big a difference. But there was no way Alex could ever be a language brain like Hanna, because Hanna already spoke like a dozen languages mega-fluently.
Sometimes Alex really wondered what Erik Heller did to Hanna. Did he not talk to her in her real language for years? If he wasn’t dead, she’d really give him a piece of her mind. Okay, she’d probably have to wait in line behind Janet Fraiser. And Jack. And Cindy, too: she was pretty cheesed off about how Hanna didn’t get to be a normal girl when she was growing up. And Charlie. And probably Riley and Sergeant Scott, too.
Alex smiled to herself that at least she wasn’t going to have a ton of homework yet, because this week Señora Martinez was going over all the stuff from last year as review, and Alex had reviewed it all and pretty much had it down.
Then the next period was AP chemistry. She looked around the room. She could sit with Louis, but would Louis be the best lab partner? No. He’d want to talk, and he didn’t take good notes, so that would probably be a hassle in labs. Same for Mitchell or Deanna or … well, she knew pretty much everyone in the room. Wade Stevens was one of the smartest seniors in the school, and probably the smartest person in the room. Okay, he looked like his mom still dressed him, but that didn’t make him a bad person. She walked over to where he was sitting and asked, “Can I sit here?”
He looked up at her and said, “Umm, you … umm … might get stuck sitting … umm … next to me all year. Or … umm … at least all semester.”
So she sat down. “I’m more interested in having a highly competent lab partner. My sister warned me about sitting with someone you like and not getting enough work done on Wednesdays.”
He had a twitch of recognition. “Oh! You’re … umm … Annie Mack’s sister, right? That’s okay. I was … umm … worried … well, I was in a couple of classes with Libby Clemens.”
Eww. She told him, “You have my deepest sympathies.” He snorted with laughter, but she was pretty serious, because Libby had sort of made some smart people do her homework and take-home tests and projects for her in a couple classes. “I’m serious about chemistry. I pretty much grew up with it.”
“Oh, right. Your dad’s the head of research at the plant.” Okay, he said it with a couple more ‘umm’ words in there.
She nodded. “I’m used to always having someone running biochemistry experiments in our home lab, which used to be a garage but I don’t think it’s been used as a garage for cars for maybe fifteen or twenty years.”
“Cool,” he said. “My stepdad would go insane if I did chem experiments in the house. Or the garage.”
She asked, “How come you’re not already done with AP chem?”
He said, “I would’ve taken it two years ago, but Mr. Hooper said most colleges wouldn’t accept a grade from a course I took three years earlier, and I’d be a lot better off taking it my last year. So I did AP physics last year and biology the year before that, and I got my Health Class requirement out of the way my freshman year.” Okay, he said it with a lot more ‘umm’s in there.
She admitted, “I wish I’d taken AP physics last year, but I’ve been avoiding all the classes where the teachers had Annie for a student, because that would be like being Albert Einstein’s little brother. ‘Ohh, Albert was so smart, are you going to be a Nobel Prize winning genius, too?’ Ugh.”
Wade said, “Well, Einstein was supposed to be pretty bad in math and science in school, you know.”
She told him, “That’s an urban legend. Annie looked it up. He had really good grades in math and science in upper grades, even if he probably drove his teachers insane in whatever their elementary grades are called.”
“I … umm … didn’t know that,” he admitted.
“I also got some advice on Mr. Hooper’s classes from Annie. Wednesday is lab day. We’ll be better off doing our labs on graph paper for writing stuff down in tables and drawing charts. And we can get started on the lab write-up the night before, because of his handouts. And pop quizzes are pretty much always on Fridays.”
He said, “Yeah, I heard that about the pop quizzes.”
She asked, “You’re in the Science Club and the Computer Club, right?”
“Yeah.”
She’d known the answer, but she’d wanted him to be in the conversation. “Have you guys decided what you’re going to do for your action photos? We’re trying to get a big head start on stuff for the yearbook, and you ought to be thinking about that kind of stuff now.”
He just shrugged. “Why? There’s nothing cool for an action shot for our stuff. And we’re not gonna be in the yearbook. We never are.”
She frowned, remembering what certain yearbook jerks were like last year. “Well, this year’s gonna be different. And Mina and I are gonna get everybody’s group in the yearbook. Even Science Club and Computer Club and the Robotics Team and the Quiz Bowl team, and some of the club sports that aren’t ‘cool’. It’s totally not fair that the lacrosse teams didn’t get in the yearbook last year. Girls’ lacrosse did way better than the football team, and no one paid ’em any attention. And if you guys can’t think up stuff for your action photos, invite me to the next club meeting, and I’ll tell you some ideas I had.” Okay, some of them were ideas Willow had.
Then Mr. Hooper called roll and started class. It looked like it was going to start out pretty easy, because he wanted to talk about the nature of science, and how science worked, and how scientific theories were postulated, then tested, then revised.
So she had four textbooks, plus extra readings in English and Spanish. Well, she figured that was manageable. She went to her last class of the day, mentoring, which she was only supposed to have two days a week, and then she could take off early or go study. She was glad to see it was Mrs. Finnegan, because Alex liked her. There were like forty or fifty kids in the room, so Alex figured it wasn’t going to be a normal teacher-type thing.
Mrs. Finnegan said, “Now let me explain how this is going to work. All of you in this group are planning on going to college, and all of you have grades good enough to go pretty much anywhere you want. So I’ll be working with all of you individually, helping you get application forms, and get them filled out so the colleges will like them better, and helping you work out which schools you should apply to. We just have three people to deal with off the top. Jeff, Alex, Mark, you’re all here?”
Alex put her hand up.
Mrs. Finnegan read, “Alex, your packet says you’ve already been accepted by Corcoran College of Art and Design. Good work, by the way. So you’ll need a few days out of school here and there to fly to the East Coast and meet with potential mentors, but other than that, you’re set. We’ll need to talk about AP credit and any other credit you might be eligible for, and course schedules for your college freshman year. But other than that, you’ll have free periods last period for the rest of the semester. Okay?”
“Okay!”
As Alex was leaving, she could hear Mrs. Finnegan talking to Jeff, who was applying to get into the Air Force Academy and would need to do some extra stuff this year. Alex knew from talking with Jack that it was a ton of extra stuff, including getting a recommendation from a state senator or someone like him. Okay, Alex knew she could get some pretty amazing recommendations from people like General Hammond or Jack O’Neill, but what did an ordinary high school student have to do to get a recommendation from like a state senator?
On the way to Gloria’s shop, Alex called Willow to talk about American Lit and Spanish class. Willow asked, “Pretty much every book they’re going to assign is gonna be at least eighty years old, right?”
“Well, I guess so. Maybe the very last books in American Lit might not be.”
Willow smiled over the phone. Alex could hear it in her voice. “Then it’s probably already done by the Gutenberg Project, so you can download it for free and read it on your tablet instead of lugging more books around. And there’s gonna be some alternative readings you should look into that’ll be on the Gutenberg site, and they have lots of classic books in foreign languages, too, so I bet your Spanish readings will mostly be there. And if you’re reading in Spanish on your tablet and there’s a word or phrase you don’t know, you can highlight it and use an accelerator to do an instant look-up on a translator program.”
Wow, that made it all sound a lot more manageable. “Thanks Willow, you’re the best.”
“Oh! And I’m working on a Terawatt cosplay costume. I’m still trying to talk Jack into telling me exactly what your mom got for boots and the wig and all that, and I’m trying a couple things for a mask and makeup, but could you talk your mom and dad into helping me out?”
Alex rolled her eyes. “Willow, Mom and Dad love you. Just call them up. Drive down and let Dad do a model of your head like he did mine, and then he can make a mask and plastic eyeshadow and plastic lipstick like he did for me, and you’ll love how it looks on you. And Mom would loan you some of the spray stuff and show you how she did the leotard, but you’ll have to design in an invisible zipper in the back first, because it’s not leotard-y once it’s sprayed.”
“You’re sure?”
Alex insisted, “Sure I’m sure! Drive down for eight o’clock dinner tomorrow night, and we can do all this stuff.”
It was only after she hung up that she realized she hadn’t checked with her mom first. Uh-oh.
She called her mom and got her answering system. “Hey, Mom, it’s Alex, can Willow come over for dinner tomorrow night? Bye.”
Around about five o’clock, her mom called her back. Alex had to finish taking a couple orders before she could call her mom back, or at least check the message. Okay, the message said, “We’d love to have Willow come over for dinner!” So everything was okay.
Once Alex got home from waitressing and had dinner with her folks, she explained about Willow and the cosplay costume. Her dad worried, “Sure, we can make a mold of her face and give her a really realistic mask and plastic makeup, but isn’t that going to be a problem if someone thinks she’s really you?”
But Alex explained, “Dad, there’s already hundreds of people making Terawatt costumes, and some of ’em are so real-looking it’s freaky. When I did the judging in San Diego, there were maybe ninety Terawatts there, and about four women looked more like me than I do. I mean —”
Her mom interrupted, “We get what you mean, honey. But what if we make her a mask and plastic makeup that look pretty good but aren’t perfect?”
Alex shrugged. “Willow’s shorter than me anyway, so I think anybody looking at her up close would know it can’t be Terawatt, who’s like six feet tall.” Her mom snorted with amusement.
Her dad thought it over. “Okay, but I’ll give Willow the option when we do dinner tomorrow night.”
Her mom suggested, “And we should look for a vegetarian slow cooker recipe for tomorrow night. I think there’s a hearty bean and lentil stew we could try. And I’ll pick up some really nice bread at the store, and I’ll make a big salad.” She looked at Alex and added, “And you can eat half a dozen doughnuts before you come home, so you won’t complain about not having enough to eat.”
“Mom!” But it wasn’t going to do any good to complain, because her dad thought that was really funny.
After cleaning up the kitchen, she did some reading for lit and some Spanish review, and she read the first section in the chem textbook, and she read the first two sections in the calc textbook. The calc was really easy, so far. Anybody could see how to estimate the area under a curve on a graph by sticking rectangles in to fit underneath. And anybody could see that your computed area would be a little bit of an underestimate, just because when you drew it, you’d always have little gaps between part of the curve and the rectangle. Or you could make the rectangle sit just above the curve, and then it would always be an overestimate. Or you could pick the middle of that chunk of the curve for the height of your rectangle, and then the rectangle would have a tiny bit above the curve and a tiny bit below, so it would sort of even out. And if you kept making the rectangles narrower and narrower, you’d be off on your estimate by tinier and tinier pieces.
All that part made a lot of sense, so she kept reading until she hit the ‘limit’ stuff. That was kind of freaky. She read that part, too, but didn’t really get it. But the idea was that if you let your rectangles keep getting narrower and narrower, then you had a mathematics thing with a ‘limit’, a value when the width of the rectangles went to zero and the number of rectangles went to infinity, like if they were just vertical lines instead of rectangles, and then you ended up with a math formula for the area, and presto, you had integral calculus. Man, Newton and Leibniz must have been so freakishly smart! Maybe even Willow-smart.
Wait a minute, if your rectangle was so thin it was just a straight line up to the curve, then it wouldn’t matter whether you picked a rectangle that fit at the lowest point of the curve in your rectangle, or a rectangle that fit at the highest point of the curve, or a rectangle that went through the middle of the curve, because if your rectangle was as thin as a line, they’d all be the same height! So all those ways of figuring out the area would turn out to be the same. This stuff was pretty sneaky.
* * *
The next morning, she was already into the school-year schedule. She got up early and did her martial arts exercises, and she washed her nice, short hair that was way faster to wash and dry and style, even if she had to make sure she used her shampoo for colored hair and not Annie’s super-cheap shampoo for people who didn’t care about their hair at all. She got dressed and packed her school lunch and helped her mom start the slow cooker while she ate four fried egg sandwiches.
Then it was off to school, with the usual stuff. Ms. Walters wanted to talk about the symbolism in Captain John Smith’s writing, but Alex thought that was goofy, not that she was ever going to say so. The guy was just writing big PR blurbs for the New World, as far as she could tell. Now she could see lots of symbolism in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, even if it was all religious symbolism. But she figured if she had a choice, her first paper would be on Anne Bradstreet instead of something she’d be unhappy writing. Then Spanish was more review, and she was ready on that. And Mr. Hooper gave a lecture that was pretty much the history of chemistry. It was so weird finding out that tons of regular chemistry was so new it didn’t even exist when her dad’s father was born.
She made the time to drop in on Mrs. Finnegan, who had a dozen other students in the room already. But Alex just waited.
“Now, Alex, I see you’re taking four AP courses now. If you do well on the AP tests, you’ll want to make sure they use these for any math and science and humanities requirements, and you should try to make sure they use your AP English for any intro English or writing course they give to the froshes. Do you have anything else?”
Alex admitted, “A friend of mine has me doing some computer courses. I did two this summer for college credit and got ‘A’s on both.”
“Computer courses?”
Alex nodded. “An intro course and a course on structured programming using the C programming language.”
Mrs. Finnegan’s eyebrows went soaring. “And you got an ‘A’? I’m impressed. All I know about C is it’s really hard.”
Alex blushed some. “Well, I had plenty of really good advice from a programmer friend on why C is so weird. That helped.”
Mrs. Finnegan made a couple of notes in Alex’s folder and then asked, “And is there anything else?”
Alex admitted, “Well, my programmer friend wants me to do a couple more computer courses between now and next school year.”
Mrs. Finnegan nodded. “Okay, then I think we’re set until next term, unless you complete another one of these courses. If you do that, come in and let me know, so I can keep a record of it. So you’ve now got last period free for the term.”
Alex grinned. “Okay. I’ll be able to get a lot more studying in before I go to work.”
And at Gloria’s, she made sure she could leave early enough to get home before eight. And maybe she ate two chocolate eclairs and two apple fritters. Not that she thought the stew wouldn’t be filling or anything, she just was hungry.
Then it was so great having Willow over for dinner. And Willow seemed so surprised that anyone would invite her over to eat with them, which just made Alex feel bad for Willow, and like a really rotten friend for not inviting her over like a dozen times a month. And Willow brought a couple more chocolate zucchini cakes, because she said she had zucchini coming out of her ears, and she already had plenty stored in her freezer.
Her dad teased, “Your zucchini must have heard Alex was extra hungry this summer.”
Dinner went great. Willow really liked the stew and even asked for the recipe. Alex thought it was pretty tasty, even if it would have been better with maybe some chunks of smoked sausage in it, too. And the bread was really great. Alex ate about half the loaf.
Then she finished off the heel while her dad took Willow into the garage and did the stuff to get a mold of Willow’s face. It was cool to watch, but sort of icky to do, because you had to pull your hair back and pull on a ‘bald cap’ to cover your hair, and paint waxy stuff on your eyebrows, and make sure you didn’t have any hairs sticking out anywhere, and rub lots of goopy lotion on your skin. Then you had to sit still while you got thick stuff painted all over your face and back toward your ears, and that took like ten minutes to dry, and you had to breathe through your nose the whole time. Then there was a layer that got painted on over that which dried really hard in a few minutes, so the whole thing could get peeled off. After that, the mold got used to make a cast of your head with a special gel plastic while you cleaned wax out of your eyebrows and washed greasy lotion off your face. But Willow didn’t complain, maybe because Alex sat next to her and talked to her the whole time about her birthday party and how much she liked Willow’s gift, and how she knew Willow helped Jack come up with that utility belt, and a bunch of stuff like that.
Alex also talked all about Ray’s birthday party, which was going to be on Saturday, because his birthday was actually the coming Monday and that wouldn’t work as well. Alex had been helping plan the party, and had a special birthday present that would probably get used as soon as the guys saw it, because it was just what Ray needed: a big net to go across the end of his driveway to keep basketballs from bouncing out into the street and down the slope so you had to chase the ball like crazy before it got two blocks down and went out into traffic and got run over by a truck. The net was thirty feet wide and seven feet high and at either side it had big, sturdy poles with bases you filled with water so they wouldn’t tip over. Ray hadn’t lost a basketball when Alex was over for about five years because of the whole telekinesis thing, but he’d lost a few before Alex got her powers, and he’d lost at least one since then when Alex wasn’t there to retrieve the ball. And when one of those big street cleaner trucks runs over your ball with those rotary brushes going, there’s not a lot of ball left.
Alex let Willow use her bathroom and her facial cleanser and all her stuff, until Willow didn’t feel like she’d rubbed Vaseline all over her face, even if that was pretty close to what she’d really done before the plastic molding stuff went on your face. Then they had a few pieces of Willow’s cake.
Okay, Alex had three pieces of cake. Everyone else had one. Maybe her dad had a second piece at bedtime, too. But Willow stayed for another hour and got Alex started on the Object Oriented Programming on-line course, which made a lot more sense when Willow talked about what OOP meant to her.
* * *
On Friday, things went really smoothly. She was even ready for Mr. Hooper’s pop quiz. The yearbook meeting went great, and everyone was totally glad it only took like twenty-five minutes, instead of four hours spread over four days like last year. She managed to sneak Ray’s gift into his folks’ garage while Ray was out, and she gave Ray’s mom the fancy birthday banner Willow had printed off for Ray that said ‘HAPPY B-DAY RAY!’ only all the letters were made of basketball players and basketball nets and stuff, and it was printed on one long strip of paper. So she was set.
She must have said it out loud or something, because Saturday morning, when she was on her way to martial arts lessons in her Terawatt uniform complete with her brand-new utility belt, she got a call from Jack.
“Tera, we’ve got a Code Red. All I know so far is we got a buzz that a paranormal force just wiped out the research center of the DSI in Virginia.”
Alex gulped. “How wiped out is wiped out?”
Jack grimly said, “The agent who called it in had to hike miles to get to a working cell phone tower. She said there wasn’t a building left standing, and there were less than two dozen survivors, most of them injured. Out of what’s supposed to be a staff of over two hundred, including some very heavily armed security teams. And she said everything that wasn’t on fire was already burned to a crisp, including a lake. I don’t know how accurate any of that is, since on the playback I heard she sounded somewhere between hysterical and ‘screaming meemies’ but I need you out here yesterday. The Blackbird’s already on its way up.”
Alex said, “But … it’s Ray’s birthday party!” She didn’t whine. She didn’t!
Jack sympathized, “Sorry. I understand. I was going to take Charlie and Grover out hiking. So it’s crappy all the way around. But if whatever took down an entire heavily-defended compound is still out there, it could do a hell of a lot of damage. And Washington D.C. isn’t that far away. I really need your help.”
Alex just wanted to cry, but she told him, “Okay. I’ll be waiting at the runway for the Blackbird, and then I’ll be there I guess an hour later.”
“I’m really sorry about your plans.”
She frowned. “I guess Ray’ll understand. Oh, by the way, what’s the DSI?”
Jack said, “Another black ops group that sticks its nose in paranormal phenomena, just one that’s bigger than us. Officially, they’re the U.S. Department of Scientific Intelligence, even though they’re not really a ‘government department’. Inside the DHS they’re mainly called The Shop.”