The silence in the car was deafening. In the five minutes since Clark Kent had slid into the passenger side of her VW Rabbit, he hadn’t said a word. Instead, he just sat and stared out the window.
He hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes. Lois had cleaned her car and taken it to be washed and she’d agonized over what to wear. It bothered her; even though she’d said it wasn’t a date, it still felt a little like one. The fact that he hadn’t even gone to an effort to dress up suggested that he really didn’t think of this as anything special.
It wasn’t as though Lois went on a lot of dates, and she’d asked around; no one knew anything about Clark being connected to anyone. The fact that she’d asked had gotten her strange looks from her friends, to the point she’d regretted asking.
Clark Kent wasn’t unpopular exactly. No one disliked him, but at the same time no one had ever seen him hanging out with any friends. He didn’t fit into any of the cliques. He wasn’t a stoner, a jock, a geek, or a prep. He didn’t lead any group, but he was no one’s flunkie. He didn’t register in the popularity hierarchy at all.
Lois cleared her throat. “Have you been in Metropolis long?”
Clark hesitated for a long moment, and then said, “I’ve been here for the past two years.”
“I didn’t see you around last year,” Lois said. She swerved around a slow driver and noticed Clark wincing.
“I was….home schooled,” he said. He looked away for a moment before looking back at her.
Lois frowned. In her experience, the home schooled kids were either from families that were weirdly religious, were geniuses or were excessively bullied.
“You from a religious family?” Lois asked. Clark looked too big and muscular to be bullied, although his outsized clothes did seem to indicate a desire to avoid attention. He had too many muscles to be a genius too; most geniuses didn’t have time to spend a lot of time in the gym.
Of course, it wasn’t like Lois actually knew a lot of geniuses.
He frowned. “That’s a personal question.”
“How are we ever going to learn anything if we don’t ask questions?”
“I’ve found that you can learn a lot by listening,” Clark said. He turned back to look at the setting sun again, and he sighed.
He was quiet again.
Lois noticed that although he acted as though he was perfectly calm, his hand tightened on the armrest of her door every time she made an aggressive move on the road, swerving around old lady drivers, stepping on her brakes to avoid side swiping an idiot who was driving too fast.
She would have thought he was used to Metropolis traffic as a bike messenger. Of course, he might not be used to being in a car. A lot of Metropolis residents used the subways and couldn’t afford taxis.
“So, did you see Letterman last night?” Lois asked.
“Who?” he asked.
“David Letterman” Lois said. The show had only been out for a few months, but a lot of her friends watched it religiously. Lois had been initially reluctant, but it had grown on her.
“I don’t know him,” Clark said. “Is he a senior?”
“David Letterman….the guy on television.” Lois said. Everybody had heard of David Letterman; had Clark Kent been living in some kind of bubble?
“I don’t watch a lot of television,” Clark said.
Lois stared at him. She was considered a freak among her friends for only watching a little television, but even if she hadn’t been into Letterman, she’d have heard of him.
“Are you some kind of alien?” she asked.
He stiffened and turned to stare at her. His hands tightened on her door handle, and Lois heard a strange metallic sound.
“What?” he asked, his voice flat.
“A red blooded American teenager who doesn’t watch television?” Lois said. “You’ve got to be a space alien.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then he relaxed. “I work too much to watch television.”
“Nobody works that much,” Lois said.
“I’ve got the bike messenger job until nine, and then I have to be up by three in the morning for the paper route. It doesn’t exactly leave a lot of time to sleep.”
“You were serious about the paper route?” Lois asked. He only had six hours to sleep? When did he have time for homework.
“Why would I lie?” he said. “Unlike some people, I have to make every dollar count if I’m going to get into college.”
Was that a crack about her father’s money? Now it was Lois’s turn to stiffen. Just because her father had a nice house didn’t mean they were rich. Her father might be able to afford to send her to college, but there would be strings attached to that, which was one reason she was trying to get the internship and later on a Daily Planet scholarship.
She forced herself to stay calm; her family was a sore spot for her for more than one reason. It wasn’t fair to take it out on Clark because he saw only what other people saw. On the outside, she was sure they looked like any other affluent family. That was all they wanted the world to see.
“What about the weekends,” she asked.
“What about them?”
“Surely you’ve got time to watch television on the weekends.”
“I do odd jobs on the weekends,” Clark said. “Lawn work mostly, or shoveling snow in the winter.”
It didn’t seem humanly possible that anyone would work that many hours, but it would explain why Clark was such a nonentity at school. He didn’t have time to spend in the normal teenage social scene.
Suddenly it occurred to her that Clark might have been working up until he stopped at her house. He might not have had time to change.
“Why did you agree to come with me if you’re that busy?” Lois asked. “Isn’t this cutting into your work hours?”
“I got done early,” Clark said. He looked down at his hands and Lois got the impression that he wasn’t being completely truthful.
“No, really,” Lois said. “You took off work to do this. Why?”
“Because I don’t like bullies,” he said after several moments. “And like I said, I listen. I overheard some of the team members talking about things they could do to you at the game tonight and I wasn’t about to let that happen.”
“You could have just told me to stay away from the game,” Lois said. She felt a little guilty now. She’d brought Clark as a bodyguard without asking him, not knowing he was volunteering. “It’s not like you can take on the entire football team by yourself.”
“I wouldn’t like to have to,” Clark said. He looked at her and his voice was firm. “But I’m not going to let them hurt anyone, especially you.”
Lois felt herself flushing, and now she was the one who looked away.
Uncomfortably, she said, “I would have thought you’d have been on the football team. You have the build, and it’s a good way to get scholarships.”
Mentioning his build had been a mistake. Lois felt her flush deepen; she was sure she was turning beet red. She didn’t look at him, hoping he wouldn’t notice. The last thing she wanted him to think was that she’d noticed his body when she’d yanked his towel off.
Especially because she had.
“Football is a good way for someone to get hurt,” he said.
His tone suggested that he wasn’t the one worried about being hurt. Lois wondered how he could be that confident, unless he’d actually been the one doing the hurting in the past.
She felt her skin cool as she realized that she didn’t know him at all. She’d only met him a few days before, and she didn’t know much about him.
Usually her emotions didn’t swing back and forth like this with other people. She normally formed an opinion of someone and stayed with it. Clark, though, was an enigma, and she didn’t really know what to think.
“What kind of music do you like?” she asked.
“I don’t have a lot of time to listen to music,” Clark said. “I hear some in passing, and I like what I hear, but I really don’t know a lot of artists.”
“You could get a Walkman,” Lois said. “Cassettes aren’t that expensive.”
“I wouldn’t know what to buy,” Clark said. “And on my bike I need to hear when the traffic is coming.”
The car fell uncomfortably silent again. Clark Kent wasn’t exactly the easiest person to talk to. The usual teenage things Lois talked to her friends about didn’t seem to interest him at all, and it wasn’t like she was going to talk with him about boys.
She certainly wasn’t going to talk to him about her plans for the football team and the Daily Planet internship.
If this were a date, she’d call it a bust. Luckily, it wasn’t.
“Maybe I’ll play a little music,” she said. She reached down and turned the knob on her radio and cassette player, swerving a little as she did so. She noticed him stiffen again.
She was embarrassed as the music from her cassette played instead of the radio. She reached out to push the eject button, but Clark put his hand on hers.
“What is this?” he asked.
She found herself intensely aware of his hand on hers; the tingle that shot through her spine surprised her.
“I’m sorry. I’m going to Ireland next semester and I was hoping to go across to France, so I’m working on my French.” Lois said. She pushed the eject button.
“No,” Clark said. “What was it?”
“Uh…The Les Miserables concept album,” Lois said. “They’re thinking about making it into a play in France. This has been out for a couple of years, but my father got me a copy a couple of months ago.”
“They’ve made Les Miserables into a play?”
“Not yet…” Lois said. “You’ve heard of Les Miserables?”
“I’ve read the book,” Clark said. “It’s one of my favorites.”
“Why?” Lois asked. She loved the play too, but Clark didn’t strike her as much of a reader.
“It’s about redemption,” Clark said. “I like the idea that no matter what you’ve done you can turn your life around and become a better person.”
For the first time this evening, Lois thought she saw Clark starting to relax.
“Even if the law doesn’t agree?”
“Even then,” Clark said. “We can’t control what other people think about us, we can only work on being the best people we can be.”
That wasn’t the message she’d gotten from the play, but she’d only listened to the album and hadn’t read the novel.
“Can I hear some more?”
“It’s all in French,” Lois said.
“"Je sais parler français," Clark said.
Lois stared at him. His accent was better than hers.
“You take French?”
He shook his head. “Not until next year. It just turns out that I have an ear for languages. I picked up some languages from people in the neighborhood.”
“More than one?”
“I speak a little Spanish and Chinese,” Clark said. “And French.”
“From people in the neighborhood?”
“I spent some time in Chinatown and around Cubans, and there’s a place downtown where there’s a lot of guys from Quebec.”
“How do you have time for all of that?” Lois asked
“I listen,” Clark said. He grinned suddenly and the tingling from where he had touched her hand intensified. “And I don’t watch a lot of television.”
“Besides,” he said. “I wasn’t old enough for the courier job last year, so I spent a lot of time in the library.”
He was silent again, but Lois was surprised that she didn’t find it as uncomfortable as she had before. She found herself glancing down at his hand, which was back on his knee.
“Can I hear some more?”
She nodded.
The rest of the trip was much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, it was over all too quickly as they reached the stadium.
As she parked in the lot, Lois felt her stomach tighten. It was time to face an entirely different kind of music.
