Chapter 174 – After the Prom Is Over

Alex had Tuesday off, even though Willow called her and talked with her for about an hour on computer courses Willow wanted her to take. The ‘unix tools’ course sounded totally useful now that she had a unix box to care for. And Willow said the Java course would be pretty easy now that Alex had learned C and programming techniques and OOP and C Sharp. Plus Willow thought Perl was a really fun language that was super useful.

Okay, Willow really liked C, and C was weird.

So Alex and Ray went on a bike ride and just spent some private time together. Ray had found out he was going to be housed in the ‘jock’ dorm on the Georgetown campus, so he was pretty excited to hear that Alex’s campus was going to be within easy walking distance of his dorm room. And the garden center Ray had worked at last summer was anxious to have him back again, because he was a hard worker, and also partly because he was a big basketball star.

For the summer, Alex was looking at lots of Shar-care and lots of computer coursework and undoubtedly some Terawatt crises. She really wished she could squeeze in working at Gloria’s but it didn’t look like it was going to work out. On the other hand, she was going to see what freelance news photography stuff she could line up.

So on Wednesday morning, she flew off to Edwards Air Force Base at eight thousand feet and met up with a helicopter that flew her the rest of the way there faster than she could do on her own. And she flew into the Cessna and just stayed in her Terawatt uniform, because she was going to have to be Terawatt when she arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. And she had a Willow-text on her tPhone that she should bring the Cessna’s gym bag with her so she could change into Alex after Jack picked her up.

Alex had three hours to kill, so she pulled out her tablet computer, made sure it was synched with the Cessna’s sat phone, and started reading the overview for the ‘unix tools’ course. Okay, the first part looked pretty okay. She’d had to learn about stuff like cat and vi and ex and grep in the ‘installing unix’ course. Stuff like emacs and sed and awk and perl and nroff she had no idea about.

Oh, wait, Willow had hacked the intro section with a note for her. ‘Alex, emacs and sed and awk and perl and the Korn shell are large enough topics that there are entire books — thick books — about them, and the course is just going to touch on their basics.’ Boy, she didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing

Oh. So awk wasn’t just a weird thing, it was a little language with a name that came from the initials of the guys who designed it. And sed was like a lot of other editors that were named a letter and then ‘ed’ for editor. That seemed a little less weird than she thought.

So she read for a while, then did homework exercises, then checked her answers against Willow’s answers. That was mostly good, but in two exercises, it was kind of discouraging because Willow’s answers were just a lot cleaner and way more ingenious than hers were.

She was still in the middle of the homework for the second unit when the Cessna landed. She went silvery, pulled the gym bag into her morph, and yanked open the door. Then she flew out and raced two feet above the tarmac to Jack’s car, where Jack and Willow were waiting for her.

Alex ducked into the back of the car and let Jack drive off the base. She stayed in a puddle down on the floor while Willow told her what they were going to do. Jack headed over to the DHS building where she’d had nice lunches a few times before. She waited until they were pulling past the security gate and over to the building before she changed into her ‘Alex’ clothes and went normal. Jack reached back and hauled her gym bag out of the car and carried it for her. She figured there had to be a reason for that, because Jack didn’t waste time doing stuff that didn’t make sense. Unless it entertained him a bunch.

They went in that same door and went upstairs, so Alex was pretty sure they were going to the smaller conference room where she’d had lunch with Jack before. And sure enough, they walked in and found Graham and Sergeant Scott setting up a bunch of lunch stuff on the table against the wall, while a rugged-looking middle-aged man sat at the conference table watching them.

Alex studied him. She was sure she’d seen him somewhere before. He was wearing casual clothes and hiking boots. There was a dark trench coat hanging on the coatrack that wasn’t military, so maybe that was his, too.

Jack walked over and shook hands. “Frank? I’m Jack O’Neill. We talked on the phone. General Hammond said you were fully cleared and you knew how to play ball with the DHS and the DOD. And Larry Richter had really good things to say about you. So we’re going to read you into the biggest secret on the planet and you’re gonna get bennies out of it as long as you keep the secret and help us out.”

Alex noticed that Jack put a tone into his voice at the end that totally said ‘and if you don’t keep the secret you will be sorrier than you can possibly imagine.’

‘Frank’ said, “I’ve been keeping DOD and DHS secrets for years, Jack. But my three contacts? One died in a little need-to-know problem we ran into in Colorado, one retired about a year ago, and General Richter’s retiring in months. My best sources for stories are gone, and you probably know what a loss of good information means if you’re just a freelance photojournalist.”

“Oh, my gosh!” Alex squeaked. “You’re Frank West! This is a real honor!”

And she remembered a bunch of stuff about him, now that she’d figured out who he was. He had a couple of Pulitzers. He had covered important wars and military actions, plus a bunch of world events. Some of his photos were considered iconic images of their events.

Jack grinned. “Frank West, Pulitzer Prize winner? Meet A.L. Mack, most recent Pulitzer Prize winner.”

“Call me Alex. Please,” She said, this time managing not to squeak like a fangirl. She shook his large, callused hand.

“So Miss Mack is read in, too? I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

Jack asked, “Didn’t George explain the whole deal to you?”

“No,” Frank insisted. “He just said it would work well with my exhibit at the Corcoran Museum and the little class I taught there last term.”

Jack smiled like he was enjoying not telling Frank what was going on. “Well, A.L. Mack is starting at Corcoran College in the fall, and she needs an official mentor. And we need someone who can be a dick to the other professors and yank his mentee out for a few days for an educational project whenever he wants, freeing her up to do what she really needs to do.”

Frank stared carefully at them. “Okay, I’ve seen A.L. Mack on TV when she did that interview about filming Terawatt. And I recognize Willow Rosenberg from her pictures. But …” He stopped and thought hard. He whispered to himself, “Jack O’Neill … Jack O’Neill …” Then he burst out, “Right! The Orphan soldiers in Korea! You were in the footage.”

Jack nodded. “Yep. But this is a bigger secret than Orphans helping the United States. I run a DHS program called the SRI. The Superpowers Research Initiative. And I …”

Frank got it. “Terawatt! And Action Girl! And Klar! Right?” He studied Alex. “And you want me to mentor Action Girl so she can rush off on SRI business that I would then have a heads-up on? That sounds great.”

Jack gave him a Maxwell Smart voice. “Missed it … by that much!”

“Oh, stop it, Jack,” Willow fussed.

Alex managed not to smile. “I’m not Action Girl. Although you will be meeting her, too, I assume.”

Frank frowned slightly. “Well, you’re sure not invisible, but … Holy crap, don’t tell me you’re Terawatt! You’re only … what? Sixteen?”

Jack gave her a tiny nod, so she went silvery and dived into the gym bag Jack had probably brought in just for this situation. She came out and morphed right into Terawatt. She floated a foot off the floor and ran a bright spark between the index fingers of her two hands. In her best Terawatt tones, she said, “Good day, Mister West.”

Frank flinched slightly and gasped, “Holy freaking Christ! No wonder no one can figure out who Terawatt is! Is it some kind of illusion? Shape-shifting?”

Alex admitted in her normal voice, “It’s just props. Some falsies and a wig and high heels. And I do a different voice. It makes no sense to have a secret identity if you don’t protect it.” She dived back into the gym bag and changed back to Alex.

Frank nodded slowly as he thought it over. “Right. That makes good sense. Comic book supers like Ms. Marvel? How can you not know who they really are when they look exactly the same in and out of costume? How did you figure all of this out ahead of time?” He glanced at Willow. “Did you have Orphans working it all out for you?”

Alex smiled. “A little over a year ago, I was asked to go to another universe and help fight a hellgod. An actual evil goddess with her own hell dimension, who was trying to open up portals so she could invade every universe there is. My teammates were all really experienced in the superhero biz, and I was still a newbie, so they helped me. I mean, they helped me a ridiculous amount. When I came back, I was ready to pick a codename and make my uniform a disguise and everything I’ve been doing since then.”

Frank blinked in shock. “When you said the biggest secret on the planet, you weren’t kidding, were you?”

“Nope.” Jack even popped his ‘p’ for emphasis. And to be a pain.

Alex said, “And we really, really need you to keep my secret, because Danielle Atron knows where I live, and where my parents live, and my big sister, and my boyfriend, and a lot of my friends. My dad and my sister used to work for her at Paradise Valley Chemical. And she would totally kill everyone I ever knew to get even with us for putting her in prison.”

Willow insisted, “And we all love Alex, so we would be very, very angry at you if you spilled her secret, and very bad things would happen to you.”

Jack flatly added, “And while bad electronic things would happen to you courtesy of Willow, that’s nothing compared to what I would do to you personally. And I mean that in a really terrifying Hannibal Lecter kind of way.”

Graham said from the food table, “And I’d be right behind him in line.”

Sergeant Scott chipped in, “And me, too. As would probably every single field person in the SRI on any team she’s worked with. And most of Italy, England, Finland, Russia, Japan, and South Korea.”

Alex was trying really hard not to blush. She said, “So I really am starting at Corcoran in the fall, and every time there’s an SRI crisis, we’ll need you to pull A.L. Mack out of school for a couple of days to train her in photojournalism. And probably some of those will be us taking pictures of the disaster, which will get you a ton of perks and maybe even more Pulitzers and stuff. So this is going to be tera for you, too.”

Frank nodded again. “Yeah, there’s no way I’d wreck this sitch.”

Willow lightly slapped Jack on the arm and hissed, “Don’t you dare.”

Frank looked at them with one eyebrow up, so Alex explained, “He was gonna do a Kim Possible joke.” Jack just shrugged like it was obvious.

Frank gave her a lopsided smile and told her, “That’s okay. I can be a pretty sarcastic guy, too, when I want.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “Well, you’ll need that, because Jack is the least well-behaved general in the entire Armed Forces.”

Jack got everyone to dive in for lunch, and they all settled around the table. Even Graham and Sergeant Scott. Frank couldn’t help but notice that Alex took six sandwich halves, a pile of cole slaw, a mound of pasta salad, and a bunch of fruit salad with her Diet Coke.

She glanced at her plate and admitted, “Yeah, one of my weaknesses is I need to eat a lot because I burn up more calories than a normal person. When I’m doing serious Terawatt stuff, I burn a lot more calories.”

Frank replied, “Yeah, I can see that. It would be tough to hurl lightning bolts without ‘recharging your batteries’ pretty often.”

Willow explained, “And telekinesis uses up a lot of power. And her flight is just more telekinesis. And even her silvery morph is telekinesis, but on a subatomic level. So everything she does burns energy. Her electrokinesis is probably telekinesis on a subatomic level, too, and we have a physicist who even has an explanatory theory, but we don’t have a good way to test it. Yet.”

Jack pointed out, “More importantly, it means you don’t have to worry about Alex getting in trouble because she’s ‘just a girl’ because there’s very little on Earth that can really threaten her. And you can push your luck if she’s with you, because she can pull your fat out of the fire.”

Frank looked at Alex and smirked, “I always wanted my own personal superheroine to save my bacon whenever I needed it.” Then he scowled to himself. “We sure could’ve used your help in Colorado. I can’t tell you what it was about, but it was Ogden’s Marsh bad.”

“Eww!” Willow complained.

Jack just said, “Well, we appreciate your keeping other people’s secrets. It makes us feel like you’re more likely to keep ours.” Okay, Jack said it while eating a big bite of roast beef sandwich.

Frank just looked over at Alex. “So … four years at Corcoran?”

She nodded. “I’ve got a bunch of on-line course credits already, and I should have some AP exam credits toward courses, so I shouldn’t have any trouble graduating in four years. Maybe a little less. And then, if we work well together and we like each other, we can keep working on projects together afterward.”

He nodded. “Sounds good.” He took another bite of chicken salad sandwich and asked, “So what gear do you have so far, and what do you have in your portfolio besides pictures of Terawatt?”

So she told him about her camera and video gear including her portable ‘steadicam’ and he made some really smart recommendations on gear she might want to acquire when she could afford it. Then she told him about the work she’d been doing other than the Terawatt stuff.

He was pretty impressed with the meatpacking plant thing. But he was more excited about all the footage she had from Comic Con that she still hadn’t done anything with. He pointed out, “You should work on that Comic Con footage. Terawatt’s gonna continue to be big news, and you should be able to turn all of that into term projects for at least two or three of your photojournalism courses. And I’ll want to go over some of your work with you before school starts, so you’ll know how to adapt your work so it’s artsy-fartsy enough to make some of the teachers happy. Not everyone at Corcoran is like me. Some of them are going to want you to screw around with your depth of field or your framing or your color profile to make your pics look more ‘artistic’. I think that’s a load of crap for real photojournalism, but I can tell you ahead of time which profs are like that, and how to make them happy with your work. And learning how to make your potential editors or buyers happy with your pictures is a life skill, too. Pictures you want to sell to National Geographic are going to look different from pictures you want to sell to Newsweek, and those’ll look different from pictures you want to sell to The New York Times.”

That made a lot of sense. Frank also thought he ought to pull Alex out of school a bunch of times when there wasn’t a Terawatt crisis, so no one would be connecting the absences with Terawatt stuff. Alex was figuring that Frank would be a really great mentor.

After lunch, and after Frank traded contact information with Alex, then Jack and Willow drove her toward the White House.

“Why are we going this way?” Alex checked. “I’m not in my uniform.”

Willow turned her head and smiled. “Corcoran College’s downtown campus and the Corcoran Museum are just across 17th from the White House. We’ve got you a place north of the 17th Street Metrorail stations so you can walk to school every day.”

“Isn’t that whole area supposed to be all super-expensive places or government office buildings or like that?” Alex asked.

Jack smirked. “We found a nice basement apartment in a security building that came up for grabs when the tenant got moved from the EPA’s DC office to someplace like Ada, Oklahoma. Seems some people doing computer security work for the DHS found out he was streaming porn instead of working, and he got in a little trouble. We just grabbed the apartment a few months ago and refurbished it a little bit.”

Alex knew Jack well enough to ask, “What exactly does ‘refurbish a little bit’ mean?”

Jack admitted, “Well, we couldn’t get you some nice windows, or build a divider between the kitchen and the living room, but we did replace the old hot water heater and refurbish the HVAC unit, along with just maybe adding in a secret Tera-tunnel from your kitchen to the utility tunnel running down the street outside, which gives you access to all the local utility tunnels, and the local water runoff system, and also the Metrorail tunnel system. Naturally, Willow has complete maps of every one of ’em, complete with details on the access points and crossovers.”

Willow lectured, “And you totally don’t want to be in the runoff systems in a lot of D.C., because maybe the area near the White House is a nice separated system with no sewage in it, but there are plenty of other parts of D.C. where stormwater runoff goes through combined sewers. With extra soo. According to the EPA, over thirty-four miles of rivers and streams in and around the District of Columbia do not support swimming and aquatic life because they’re too yucky. And outflow from separated and combined sewers — well mainly from the combined sewers — is the primary source of ‘pathogens that cause impairments to the District’s local waterways.’ ”

Jack complained, “She’s been quoting the stats to me, too. But the problem is D.C.’s old. Some of this junk is over two centuries old, and back then they didn’t even understand what made people sick.”

Jack drove past the White House. He glanced over at it and murmured, “Hmm. Same old, same old.”

Willow objected, “Maybe for you mega-cool, tera, awesome powerbrokers, but I haven’t even gotten to go on a plain old White House tour.”

Jack shrugged. “Hey, we both know you’ll be down visiting Alex plenty, and you can play tourist all day while she’s stuck in boring classes like Media Mangling 101 and Advanced Lying for Advertisers 220.”

Willow asked innocently, “Is that the famous ‘How to Make Crap Look Really Good’ class I hear so much about?”

Jack corrected her, “No, it’s the political ads course, so it’s the ‘How to Make Scum-Sucking Slimeballs Look Better than Their Opponent’ program. The ‘How to Make Scum-Sucking Slimeballs’ Political Opponents Look Worse Than Wacky Maggie’ course is Advanced Lying for Advertisers 260.”

Willow smiled at him and said in a high-pitched voice, “Oh! That’s very different … Never mind!”

Boy, Jack was such a bad influence on Willow.

They parked across the street from a six-story apartment building. It didn’t look all new and shiny and mega-spendy like some of the buildings she’d seen in the area. But it wasn’t all filthy or broken-down either. It just looked … average. It was sort of like the ‘apartment’ version of the Paradise Valley town hall.

Jack produced a key to the steel security door, and he unlocked the door. They walked in and down a short hall to a stairwell and an elevator. Jack took the stairs just before Willow would have pressed the elevator button.

They walked down one flight of stairs, and they were in a long hall that stretched the length of the building. There were five doors off each side. Alex guessed from how far apart the doors were that the apartments were maybe thirty or thirty-five feet wide. And they couldn’t be that deep, either.

Okay, there was no way a normal person could afford a really big, really nice apartment within walking distance of the White House. But she didn’t need ‘really big’ or ‘really nice’.

They walked down the hall. The walls were a sort of light gray and the rug was one of those mega-sturdy indoor-outdoor carpets you wouldn’t want inside your house except in a mudroom. They walked to a door marked B7. Jack had another key, and he unlocked the door. It sounded like it was a really solid lock with a big deadbolt.

By then, Alex was expecting something dingy and gray and windowless and small, like the inside of a cardboard box. But when Jack flipped the light switch by the door, Alex saw that the room was light and really nice, even if the only window was a little thing set about five feet off the ground with a heavy white vertical shade covering it. The room was about twenty-five or thirty feet deep and maybe sixteen feet wide.

The ceiling was solid white, and the walls were a pretty ivory, and the new-looking rug on the first two thirds of the floor was sort of champagne. The last third of the floor was in the open kitchen area, and it was a white-and-beige patterned linoleum.

The first third of the area was apparently a ‘living room’ with two comfy armchairs right next to where she was standing, and a big ecru couch facing them. And there was a big-screen TV on the wall to her right with the couch facing it and a white Ikea-style media center under it. On her other side was a little ‘hall closet’ to hang up coats and stuff when you came in from the cold or the wet.

On the other side of the couch was a round dining table that looked like fake oak, and four matching chairs around it, with a couple of leaves for the table and some folding chairs tilted against the wall by the fridge. Opposite the table was a big white bookcase that looked like more new Ikea stuff.

The kitchen was a really shallow, wide ‘U’ with a white formica top all the way across the back wall and going a couple of feet on the side walls to a fridge on the right and a stove-and-oven combo on the left. There was a dishwasher just to the right of the single sink, which was under the little window. And there were cabinets under the formica and above the counterspace.

Alex looked hard at Willow. “Just refurbishing?”

“Okay, so I pestered Jack to do something about the place, because it was all dark browns and dingy stuff, and it was totally of the depressing. So it’s new paint and a new rug and a new fridge and new lighting, and a new tub and toilet and sink, and a new HVAC unit and recently-cleaned ductwork and a really good water heater, and new furniture I picked out, and I totally wouldn’t let Jack pick the shower curtain that had the shadow of Norman Bates’ mother holding a big carving knife because that wouldn’t be fun to live with.”

Jack shrugged. “I wouldn’t really pick it. I just wanted to tease Will some.”

Willow added, “And I wouldn’t let him get the My Little Pony shower curtain, either.”

Jack grinned. “That I would’ve picked. Unless you wanted the Little Mermaid shower curtain instead.”

Willow pretended she was ignoring him and went on, “The couch is a hide-a-bed in case Annie or your folks or Shar come to visit —”

“Whoa!” Alex interrupted. “Wait a minute! Who said anything about Shar not living here with me?”

Jack frowned. “Okay, think about it. This is not a ‘kid’ neighborhood. And even if we sited you in a more family-friendly area, you would still have a Shop target right here in D.C. where anybody might spot her just from seeing her when they pick their kids up from school or a playdate. The Shop may be crushed, but that doesn’t mean she’s really safe yet. Not as long as there are people who know about her and what she can do. She’ll come live with us next year, and you can visit whenever you feel like it.”

Willow nodded excitedly. “Yeah! They’re already doing the interior walls on our house so we’ll be moving into it in maybe one and a half or two months, and there’s tons of room for her, and you, too, and you can fly from here to our home in under an hour already and I think you’ll just get faster as your TK strength goes up.”

Jack pointed out, “And if anyone in D.C. spots Shar, and then sees she’s living with A.L. Mack, that’ll probably blow your secret identity right there. You really can’t live with Shar until you’ve graduated, and even then we’ll have to put in some serious safeguards.”

Alex suddenly felt like she might burst into tears. Just give up Shar? Even if it was only for a few days at a time?

Willow hugged her tightly. “It’ll be okay, honey. We’ll make it work. But you need to have enough time to be a serious college student, and you need time with Ray, and you need to get some Alex time in there, too. We can care for Shar, and protect her, and teach her martial arts, and all the stuff she needs.”

“She needs me!” Alex sobbed. “And I need her!”

Jack patted Alex on the shoulder. “It’ll be okay. We’ll make it work. You can spend Friday nights and weekends with Shar, and we can get you up to the base for anything special, like school plays or birthdays. And you want Shar to be safer, right?”

“Right!” Alex whimpered. “Totally!”

Jack went on, “And besides, she probably doesn’t get to watch ‘The Iron Giant’ enough at your house.”

Alex would have laughed if she wasn’t so busy being upset.

Jack went with a Bart Simpson imitation. “Not enough ‘Iron Giant’? Wow, dude, you could die of malnutrition.”

It wasn’t the best Bart Simpson she had ever heard, but it was good enough that she knew who it was supposed to be. She just had no idea what it was supposed to be … Oh, wait, yeah, she did. Those old ads for Butterfingers candy bars. Did Jack have all the TV shows and TV ads just memorized?

The worst thing was that they were right. She couldn’t care for Shar and do anything. She couldn’t stay late at school for activities or research or projects. She couldn’t go do photography or filming for school assignments. She sure couldn’t go on dates with Ray. And what would happen to Shar if Alex had to rush off on a Terawatt mission for a few days? It wasn’t fair to Shar.

It wasn’t fair to Alex either. She wanted to keep Shar with her, and there was just no way until Shar was old enough to be left alone for several days.

Alex managed to say, “Okay.” But tears leaked down her cheeks and her nose started running, which was mega-embarrassing even if it was just Jack and Willow.

Jack whipped a folded-up tissue out of a pocket. Alex blew her nose and asked, “How’d you know I’d need a Kleenex?”

Jack smirked. “I didn’t. But I can hardly take this one to a movie without getting the waterworks, so I just carry a couple all the time now.”

“Nyeh.” Willow stuck her tongue out at him.

Jack moved on, leading Alex to the kitchen. “Ignore the paintjob and the carpet and the new furniture. We had to do a bunch of junk like that anyway, so we could get away with … this.” He knelt down and opened the cabinet door for the side cabinet next to the fridge.

Alex took a peek. It went all the way back to the wall, and then had some space off to the left behind the other cabinet.

“Off to the left, it’s a false wall. The latches are on the inside, so only you can open them.”

She reached out with her TK and felt against the cabinet wall. It looked like a regular part of the cabinet. But there were two latches locking the panel in place. She unlocked them, and the panel slid off to the side like a garage door, only sideways.

“A tamboured door. Willow’s idea, naturally,” Jack said. “And when we rebuilt the cabinets, we left a dead space the height and depth of the cabinet and about a foot deep. There’s enough room for one of your gym bags, and an Annie Farrell valise, and a few other things we’ll dream up, plus …”

Alex stuck her head in and took a peek. There were two plastic circles on the wall, and both of them had tightly-closed three-inch circular ports in the middle.

Jack explained, “The one on the right is a three-inch steel pipe in a little tunnel we drilled from the utility tunnel running along underneath the street into here. The other end of the pipe is a sealed port like this one, only camouflaged so no one will notice. It gives you covert access to the under-street utility tunnels. And within a block there are connects to the local water runoff system and also the Metrorail tunnels so you can also fly through the subways if you want to.”

“And the left one?” she wondered.

“We hooked that one to a vent stack in the wall right here. You can go straight up to the roof, pop off the protective cap on the pipe, and fly up into the night skies if you need to, without anyone seeing you.”

“Wow, this is … awesome.” She used her TK to slide the secret panel closed and lock it in place.

Willow said, “And that has to be more secure than leaving your gym bag under your bed. I downloaded maps of the underground utility tunnel system here, and the local storm runoff system which covers pretty much everything within a mile of here plus some extra areas, and also how to get into the Metrorail tunnels and what their whole system looks like. You can get all over the place without anyone seeing you.”

Jack ‘helpfully’ added, “And she’ll download all that to your tablet so you can get used to it, because she’ll feel really guilty as soon as you see how much she spent on you in the bedroom.”

“What?” Alex squawked. “You mean Willow bought all this stuff? I thought …”

Jack confessed, “Willow didn’t like what the GAO picked out when we listed this as a DHS safehouse —”

“It was doody!” Willow griped. “It was totally of the crappy! It was ugly and cheap and horrible! Alex needs some nice things! And anyway, it’s not like I’m bankrupting us and Charlie’s gonna be eating ramen and Kraft mac and cheese for the rest of the year.”

So Alex immediately looked off to the left. There was a tiny hallway just big enough to have a door on each side and the bathroom door in front of her. The left door was the door for the tiny area that had the furnace and air conditioning stuff and the fancy water heater. The bathroom was very white, with a white tub and an off-white shower curtain and a white toilet and a white sink on a white formica counter that had blue and red flecks in it for some color. It wasn’t big, but the brightness kept it from feeling cramped. And there was a louvered white door just on the other side of the faucet side of the shower that had one of those little over-under washer and dryer combos that would be plenty for one person.

The right-hand door off the tiny hallway was into the bedroom. She stepped in. The wall on her left was bumped out three feet for the closet. The bedroom wasn’t big, but it had a lot of stuff nicely arranged in it. To the left, there was a nightstand between the closet and the queen-sized bed, which had a new box spring and mattress on it but no sheets yet. On the right was a nice chest of drawers. On the wall under the small, high window was a computer desk. They were all antique white. To the right of the computer desk was a big white Ikea-esque bookcase that went nearly to the ceiling, and to the right of the bed was something Alex had never seen before. The top part was all cubbyholes, and the bottom part was two drawers that were as wide as the whole unit. The bottom wide drawer was a file cabinet but with the file racks running sideways instead of into the unit. The upper drawer was a big storage drawer with dividers.

Willow walked Alex over to the weird unit. “I saw this and I knew you needed it. All your files for school and projects and news stories and taxes and stuff can get filed in the bottom drawer, and all your camera gear can get put in the cubby holes, and all the computer stuff like spare cables and types of papers and printer cartridges and all your other loose stuff can go in the storage drawer! It’s perfect for you! And the computer desk will be great for your laptop.”

Alex checked out the computer desk. At knee-level there was a fancy printer/scanner sitting on a paper storage thing that had half a dozen thin drawers for different kinds of paper. Above that was a pull-out keyboard tray. And the top of the desk was completely clean except at the very back was a thing her laptop could slide into, and it had a big LCD screen sticking up above it.

Willow continued, “So it can be a plain old study desk or makeup table, and your textbooks can go on the bookshelf, but when you slide your laptop into the docking port, you’ve got a big desktop system with a good screen and a really nice keyboard. Oh, and I bought a really good UPS so you can keep working for maybe two hours while docked even if your power goes out, and then you can undock it and run on your laptop battery for hours more. And the printer will do really high quality photographs if you need it. So now you just need to learn how to cut mats and frame pictures, and you’re ready for your gallery showings!”

Alex fussed, “I’m not going to be showing in a gallery.”

Jack gave her a smirk. “Of course you are. You’re going to a school where students do that kind of stuff. And you’re the most famous student going there now. You need to stop thinking like little Alex Mack and start thinking more like important A.L. Mack.”

“Or like Terawatt,” Willow added.

Alex looked around the room again and complained, “Willow, I love you, but this is really too much. I mean, this is worse than Bruce getting carried away with that Canon body.”

Willow pouted and said, “I’m pretty sure that everything I bought all together isn’t as much as that even half of that Canon camera body.”

Jack said, “And none of this is as expensive as what it cost to get that tunnel drilled into your kitchen without anyone wising up. And you don’t want to know what it costs to send you somewhere in an SR-71. But you know what? It would absolutely be worth it even if you cost us something crazy like a hundred million dollars a month, because you’ve saved a few billion lives already, and tens of trillions of dollars of people’s stuff. You’re the most cost-effective line item in the national budget.”

Alex felt like her face was getting really red.

Willow smiled. “And anyway, when you graduate and we sell this place, we’ll more than recoup our investment.”

“If we sell it,” Jack said. “We might want to keep it as a DHS secure location.”

Willow looked her in the eye. “Anyway, when you find out what it costs to equip a kitchen from scratch, and ship all your stuff here, and fill in the gaps in your wardrobe, and buy all the bedclothes, and buy the rest of the camera gear you want, you’ll plotz.”

Jack pointed out, “And you’re not going to want to keep your car here. You can leave it at home or store it at our place, but there aren’t any more available secure parking spots in back of the building, and driving around this town is a headache anyway.”

Willow nodded. “And what’s the point? You can fly ten times faster than you can drive through D.C. traffic, and you can zoom up to see us in an hour, and you can fly to Annie’s place in not a whole lot more time, and there’s no way you can drive in less than several hours. Or a lot longer if there’s rush hour traffic. And you’d probably want to take the train up to Boston anyway. There’s a grocery store a block and a half from here, and two specialty foods stores within four blocks, and it’s a simple walk due south down 17th to the downtown campus, and if you cut over a few blocks to the west as you go you’ll be on the Georgetown campus.”

Jack explained, “A lot of D.C. is a just-walk-around-the-neighborhood kind of place, even if some of the neighborhoods are the ’hood and I don’t want you going places like that.”

Willow went on, “And you won’t need to lug around tons of notebooks and textbooks. Corcoran has electronic syllabus materials and I can get you all the textbooks electronically, and you can scan any handouts or just type up the useful stuff, so you can have stuff on your tablet and make notes there, so you’ll have everything you need on your tablet except camera stuff and art stuff. For some weird reason, they like the photography people to take a drawing course, too.”

Jack glanced at his watch. “Come on, let’s walk over to The Cork. Or whatever you artsy-fartsy college kids call it.”

Willow nudged him and said, “I’d like to look some in the museum. It’s got some great stuff in it.”

Jack grinned. “And if you two behave, I’m buying an early dinner at the Ritz-Carlton before Alex flies home.”

“No way,” Willow insisted. “We talked about this. I’m buying.”

Jack smugly said, “Okay, whoever behaves the best in the museum can buy.”

Alex just knew Jack had something naughty up his sleeve.

 
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