Special thanks once again to DJ who has a lot of plates to spin and still manages to spin my work to sound half-way decent.
Table of Contents When we last left our dear friends in Part 9, Lois was in a bit of a mood:
“Clark, is this really what you wanted to do with your life?” Lois challenged him.
“Yes, of course. This is The Daily Planet. What more could I ask for?”
“Kent, you cover stories like, ‘Girl Scout Jamboree Big Success.’ When was the last time you had a front page story?”
“My interview with you was a front page piece.”
“Front page of ‘On the Town’,” Lois pointed out. “That’s not the same as a true front page story. I’ve read your work. You’re really talented. You could be so much more.”
“I like what I do, Lois. Why does all the news have to be so bad? Why can’t we report on all the good things that happen?”
“Because, in this business, it’s either catastrophe or atrophy. Mayhem and murder sell papers… Besides there’s no feeling like the pursuit of a great story. I don’t know if you know the feeling—I mean, how could you really—of being the only reporter out there when the guns are firing and the bad guys are going after the good guys. A well-written story can change not only public opinion; it can change the world.”
Lois stared him down as she proclaimed her indictment, “And you’re missing all that, Kent.”
“But, Lois, it’s not my job to change the world. I do what I can when I can. I try to use my talents to do small acts of kindness everyday. That’s a great feeling.”
“Maybe we’re just two different people going two different places. You don’t understand my world, and I don’t understand yours. And maybe we’ll never get past that.”
Lois picked up her trash and headed back to the bull pen. This little lunchtime rendezvous was over.
_________________
And now, Part 10:
Lois was making great progress. There was something about anger that motivated her in a way that nothing else did. She had just worked up a good pique, when she felt a warm breath on the back of her neck.
She suppressed her Tai-Kwon-Do instinct, instead spitting out, “What?”
“H…hi,” a male voice stuttered over her shoulder. ‘Skippy’ seemed to regain his emotional balance and tried again, “Hi. I hear you’re new around here.”
“You’re not quite sure?” Lois taunted. She was in no mood for small talk; she never indulged in water cooler chit-chat before the job was done. “Maybe I’ve been here the whole time, and you just misplaced me.”
Junior shifted on his feet, chewing on his lip, as if trying to figure out what to say next. He tried again.
“So you’re in research, aren’t you? I’m in research, too. Well, sort of. I’m more like the Chief’s go-to guy, if you know what I mean.”
Lois didn’t know, but she didn’t care and wasn’t about to ask. The answer came shortly enough, anyway.
“Olsen?” Perry’s voice thundered across the cacophony of the newsroom. “Olsen! Have you finished fixing my singing fish?”
“Not yet, Chief,” ‘Mr. Go-To Guy’ hollered back. “I haven’t even had the chance to pick it up.”
“Well, get it out of my office; will ya’?” Perry accentuated his fit by hoisting the offending fish out the door. It flipped across some poor reporter’s desk and landed atop the lady’s purse.
“I’ll get right on that,” he muttered in the direction of Perry’s slamming door. He shrugged and then focused a bright grin in Lois’s direction. “So, the name’s Jimmy. And since we’re going to be working so closely together and seeing how you’re new in town, I could show you around. I’ll show you the sights, and then maybe we’ll catch some dinner.”
Lois let out an exasperated sound that started in the back of her throat and matched the fire in her eyes.
“What is it with this place?” she erupted, not caring that more than a few heads turned her way. “That’s the same pickup that Kent used. What? Are you all a part of the line-of-the-month club? This isn’t a part of some competition, is it? To see how many women you can bed? Because I’ve had it with guys like…”
Jimmy waved his hands defensively in front of himself and backed up a step, whether to get her to shut up or because he was concerned with what the irate woman would do next, she wasn’t sure.
“Whoa! Whoa! Wait a second,” he interrupted.
She quieted down, but her steady glare told him that her tantrum wasn’t over.
“I didn’t mean anything by it; I’m just being a little friendly. That’s all. No harassment intended.”
He laughed nervously. She glowered in response. He nodded his head and smiled artificially.
“Okay… Well, I guess we’ll talk later. Mm hmm. Bye.”
Lois defiantly stared at the retreating figure and then lifted her steaming gaze to the crowd of busybodies.
“And I suppose you all have work to do, too,” she projected.
Heads spun back to desktops. Papers flew. Aside from the clackety-clack of keyboards, you could have heard a pin drop.
Lois turned back to her work, but it took her a moment to find her place again. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but in the quiet moment she heard Jimmy’s voice across the room.
“So did she say you asked her out, CK? My man!”
It was impossible to hear the response, as the normal workroom clatter closed in before she heard the silky-smooth reply.
~*~
It was sociology that purportedly held Lois’s attention on the bus ride home, but it was difficult to focus her attention through the ire she had built up throughout the day.
She let out a deep sigh as she disembarked at a fast clip. This wasn’t like her at all. It was the first time in years that Lois lacked direction. Oh, she had her studies, and was dedicated to getting good grades, but without a good lead it felt like the real part of her was drying up.
And now she had become some kind of a target for the lonely-hearts club. Frustrating!
It was always a race on Tuesdays and Thursdays to get home from work, eat dinner and make it to class on-time. Lois wasn’t sure exactly why she strayed from the path long enough to get her mail but, then again, she wasn’t really making good choices these days. So while she was walking through the Student Center, she stopped off at her mail box. The slip she found inside summoned her to the mail room to pick up a package. With a glance at her watch, she made a fast decision. She wasn’t expecting anything but, since she was here, she went to the mail room to fix the mistake.
The blond at the mail room wasn’t nearly as inefficient as she looked. Still, she managed to cut Lois’s schedule to within a razor’s edge of being on-time. She thrust a clipboard and a box toward Lois, indicating the dotted line Lois was supposed to sign. Lois checked the label carefully before committing to a signature, but her name was clearly written across the label.
She glanced at the return address, but there was none. The lack of a post script indicated that the package had been mailed on-campus.
That explained a lot. It must have been sent from the bookstore. Her sociology teacher had the nerve to charge $15 for class notes, which of course were a required purchase, but he hadn’t bothered to print enough for his class. She juggled purse, box and books into somewhat of a stack and raced off to biology.
It wasn’t until after class ended that she gave the box a second thought. She plopped on her bed and ripped open the plain brown postal paper. She tore open the flimsy white box and reached in to grab the notes. But instead of feeling the cool, smoothness of paper, she felt something squish between her fingers. In her surprise, she jumped, sending a shower of baked goods across her bedspread.
She stared at the mess for a few minutes, trying to make sense of it all. This time, she carefully slid her finger under the fold and broke the tape. In addition to the mess she had already discovered, there was a bottle of hot sauce and a saucier-looking novel.
There was no note of explanation. It made no sense. Her family and she had lost track of each other a few countries and a few birthdays ago. Since it wasn’t a big loss, she hadn’t bothered to notify them that she had demoted herself and was living only a few miles from home. And even if she could scrounge up some semblance of a friendship from her last port of call, it wouldn’t explain the on-campus point of origin. It made no sense.
Lois picked up the book as she mused and noticed the final oddity: the book was French.
Who knew that Lois was fluent in French? She had no college buddies who she might have mentioned it to. So whoever sent her the package had been close enough to her to notice the French romance novel she had thumbed through before classes began.
The package had been sent by a stalker.
Lois wondered what the etiquette was. Does one eat food sent by a stalker? It smelled wonderful, but how was she to judge the mental capacities of a thug? If it was drugged or poisoned…
Before Lois could finish her thought, her roommate bounded in, smelling of cheap perfume and unwashed armpits.
“Care package!” she cried. She grabbed a bite of apple thingamabob and devoured it, only asking, “Do you mind?” as an afterthought.
Lois supposed that if her roommate wasn’t ill tomorrow, then Lois would eat as well—if there was any left.
~*~
“Hi, Lois,” Jimmy greeted her as she settled in at work the next afternoon. Then he clarified, “Not that I mean anything by that. Just saying, ‘hello.’”
It was like that for the next few weeks. Jimmy was one of the few at work who were cordial, although he still tended to be overly careful about it.
She really had no friends at school. Conversations floated around her, but she felt no compunction to join in.
The air turned cool. The leaves changed colors and crunched underfoot. Mid-term exams came and went. Papers were handed in. Care packages arrived every other Monday or Tuesday, filled with baked goods and personal items. Life developed a natural rhythm.
And then there was Clark.
Clark held a strange rhythm of his own. He was the only one who seemed at ease around her. He never failed to stop in, frequently asking directly for help in research rather than going through channels. While she wasn’t fully advised of any juicy stories, at least he made her feel an integral part of a team.
And he wasn’t shy about casually inviting her out on a semi-regular basis. She actually had surfed the internet to come up with a half dozen new languages to turn him down in. Despite telling ‘Leisure-Suit Larry’ that she had turned down men in over a dozen languages, she really was only fluent in English, French and Spanish. She had worked through an interpreter in Iraq and had left Georgia because she couldn’t handle the Cyrillic alphabet. Lois Lane was never one to turn down a challenge, though, so she had found a webpage that not only taught her the word ‘no’ in half a dozen languages she wanted, it sounded it out for her.
Clark was persistent enough that she had the opportunity to try out every one. She had to give him an A for Effort.
But one Thursday, he caught her in a bit of a mood.
“Feel like stopping on the way out for a bite to eat?”
“I’m cutting a heart out tonight.”
“Excuse me?” His eyebrows shot up in a way that left a single curl on his forehead.
“I’m dissecting tonight in biology lab. Better eat light.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “Let’s stop at a diner, then, for some soup.”
She watched him for a heartbeat before suggesting, on a whim, “What if I skipped class tonight and we go out and get a couple of tattoos?”
She finally had him. He hesitated.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. You’d look great with a tattoo on that bicep. We could get matching tattoos. Maybe in red… Or blue,” she suggested. “Get something that reminds you of home. How would ‘Mom’ look right there?”
“But, Lois. I…”
“Okay, then get a bimbo that dances when you flex.”
“I’m a little too conservative for that.”
“But that’s just it. You’re not just conservative. You’re all talk. You constantly invite. But I notice you never follow through. You make yourself out to be some kind of Don Juan, but you’re really just Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“I think you got that backwards. Wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac the man that had all the right things to say?”
“You’re missing the point. The point is you never date anyone, Kent.”
“I don’t want to date just anyone, Lois. I want to date you.”
“Yeah, right. Whatever. I’m going to go cut up a frog.”
