Thanks to Carol for the fantastic beta job!
From Chapter 32
“Anyway, my roommate is out.”
“She is?” I said, somewhat disappointed. I had worked up the nerve to talk to Lois this morning. I didn't want to have to do it again.
Star nodded. “Yeah, she said something about having to work on her paper for journalism.”
I groaned. I needed to do that, too. Not that I felt at all up to it this morning.
“Want to go to breakfast?” I asked Star.
“Sure,” Star said, leaning behind her to grab her jacket. “Just don't think this means you can shove your tongue down my throat. Save that for my roommate.”
I stared at her in horror for a moment before she burst out laughing, and despite myself, I smiled.
Chapter 33
“Star said you stopped by,” Lois half-asked, half-mumbled from the doorway.
“Yeah,” I said, recognizing that I didn't sound any better than she did. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“I don't know,” Lois said, her voice still soft. “I wasn't thinking or something,” she continued before I had a chance to ask what she meant. “I didn't mean to kiss you.” I nodded, although I knew she couldn't really see me with her head down. “We're still… friends, right?” she asked.
“Of course, we are,” I said quickly. “Why wouldn't we be?”
Lois finally seemed to relax slightly, and moved into the room and nearly sank onto my bed. I stayed by the door, still feeling sort of out of place. “I don't know,” she said softly. “I just thought… I don't know what I thought. It's just… I didn't date much in high school. But it always seemed like when girls in class hooked up with friends of theirs, the friendships would end.”
I nodded. “I knew some people like that in high school, too. Where they never seemed like they had really been friends. So once they hooked up, there was no reason to keep up the charade.”
Lois nodded emphatically. “Exactly.”
“But we are really friends. Aren't we?” I asked her, suddenly feeling unsure myself.
Lois nodded again. “If I didn't screw it up.”
“You didn't,” I told her, finally feeling on firm enough ground to sit next to her on the bed, although just to be sure, I kept my distance. “Besides it wasn't just you. I hardly put a stop to what we were doing either.”
“Can I ask you something?” she asked me, looking up. The look in her eyes worried me slightly. She looked scared. What if I said yes and then I gave her the wrong answer? But what if I said no? Finally, deciding either way was a risk, I nodded. “Were you thinking about Maddie?” she asked quietly.
I paused before I answered her. Had I been? Maybe at first when I was confused, but later? Definitely not later. “A little bit,” I said quietly. “Just at first. But then I sort of stopped and… most of the time, no,” I finally said, hoping that honest was the best way to go here. Lois didn't respond, so after a few minutes I asked her, “What about you? Were you thinking about Paul?”
She didn't say anything at first, but then nodded slightly. “Sort of. At first, like you said. But then I just forgot about him. That's weird, isn't it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know. I don't really have that much experience kissing girls,” I admitted.
Lois leaned back on her elbows, but continued to stare ahead of her. “Do you still miss her?” she asked quietly.
“Maddie?” I asked and she nodded. “Sort of,” I admitted. “I miss… being friends with her, I guess. I mean, really friends. You know?” I asked. “I'm glad that things are better between us, but I miss really talking to her. I'm not sure how much I miss… the other stuff.”
Lois nodded. “You know, you never told me what really happened with you guys,” she said.
I nodded, not sure what to say.
“Maddie…” Lois trailed off. “Well, she didn't say much since she knows we're friends, but it sounded like she felt like you were keeping secrets from her.”
I smiled slightly. Trust Lois to pick up on that. If it had been anyone else, I would have been annoyed at Maddie for talking, but I was sure she had said virtually nothing. Lois was just that intuitive.
“I was,” I said without thinking.
“You were?” Lois asked surprised.
Darn! What was it about Lois that I forgot all of my controls when we were together? I sighed. “It wasn't important,” I finally said.
“It wasn't? Then why not just tell Maddie what ever it was and make her happy?”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say, but knowing it was too late to stay silent. “I didn't mean to hurt her, but there were just things I couldn't tell her. They didn't have anything to do with her.”
“I thought… I guess I thought when you loved someone, you wanted to be honest with them,” Lois said. There was no judgment in her voice – she clearly was just telling me what she thought, not what she knew.
I hung my head slightly. “I don't know. Maybe. But it wasn't like that. It wasn't that I didn't want to tell her. I did. I just… couldn't.”
“Is there something wrong, Clark?” Lois asked, sounding concerned.
“Not really,” I said, then realized how that sounded and amended it. “Nothing's wrong. It's just sort of a family secret.”
“Well,” Lois said, sitting up and smiling. “It's good we're not dating then. "Cause I'd definitely want to know all your dirty little secrets.”
I leaned over and bumped her with my shoulder. “You don't already?”
“Want to know?” Lois asked and I nodded. “Of course I do.”
I laughed. “I'm really sorry about yesterday, Lois. I'm glad we're still friends.”
Lois flushed slightly. “Me, too.”
************************
“Look, I don't care what you've seen on some after school special, young man, but there is no drug use at this school!” the middle aged man in front of me said, stopping just short of shouting.
I clearly had not handled this correctly. I wasn't sure the right way to go about it. I had thought about waiting outside an elementary school yard and seeing if I might see something suspicious, but then I realized that my hanging around would be suspicious on its own.
I thought the best thing to do then was to interview the school officials to see what they were doing about the problem. I had done some looking and finally decided on the elementary school closest to where I had seen those boys. It seemed as good a place to start as any.
The secretary had been perfectly pleasant when I called. I had explained I was doing an assignment for a class on illicit drug use at local elementary schools and she had happily scheduled an appointment for me to talk with the vice principal of the school.
Everything went downhill from there, though. Mr. Dwight had seemed like a nice enough guy when I showed up – he was short and stout and reminded me a little of Santa Claus. He had smiled openly and welcomed me into his office. He had even remained smiling while I explained again what I was doing there.
But then I had asked how wide spread the problem was at his school and what they were doing to curb the problem, and his manner had completely changed. He had let me know in no uncertain terms that there was no drug problem at his school – “This is an elementary school, for crying out loud!”
“I'm sorry,” I mumbled, wondering how to go on from there, but he just kept on speaking.
“Typical of you college kids. Think you know everything. Well, let me tell you something, kid. This may not be the same as the school you went to in the sticks back in Iowa, but this isn't the inner city. The kids here are white, they come from middle class families. There is no reason why any of them would want to do drugs.”
I bit back my natural response and decided not to correct his use of Iowa. I have to admit, though, I was tempted to say, "Typical of you city folks. Think you know everything. Well, let me tell you something. Not every Midwestern state is the same. Kansas and Iowa don't even share a border, which I would think as an elementary school vice principal you would know.' Instead, I closed my eyes to control my temper.
“Well, I'm sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Dwight,” I said as I stood up. I held my hand out to him, but he just looked at it disgustedly. Maybe it was childish pride, but his whole attitude made me feel even more committed to finding out if there was a drug problem at his school and uncovering it.
************************
“No, it's just a little intimidating,” Josh told us at lunch the next day. Alicia, Lois, Josh, and I had decided to meet for lunch even though Maddie and Steve were both busy. Josh had had his first session of the short story seminar the previous day, and Lois was insanely curious about it.
“What's intimidating about it?” Lois asked. Josh laughed at her which did a good job of hiding my chuckle. “What?” Lois asked.
“Are you ever intimidated by anything?” Josh asked her.
Lois flushed slightly, but didn't answer.
“There's all these seniors in there and one or two juniors and me. We went around the room to read one piece from the portfolio we had submitted. Do you know how good they all were?” Josh asked.
“No better than you or you wouldn't be there,” Alicia pointed out.
Josh shook his head. “These guys all know they want to be writers and they've spent the last couple of years taking classes that help hone those skills…”
“Still, Alicia's right,” Lois interrupted. “You got in because you showed the same potential they did. That just means that if you end up deciding you want to be a writer, when you're a junior or a senior you'll be even better.”
I smiled at Josh, “Will you still be friends with us when your newest book is number one on the Daily Planet's Best Seller List?”
Josh threw his napkin at me. “Fine. If none of you want to hear about the class, why'd you ask?”
“We do want to hear about the class,” Alicia said.
“We just think you're letting yourself feel inferior to the other students when all data suggests you're not,” I pointed out.
“You should see these guys, though,” Josh said. “They all look so… old.”
“They're only a couple years older than we are,” Lois pointed out.
“I know,” Josh said. “But they look like… well, they look like adults.”
“That is going to be us in a couple of years,” Alicia pointed out, but her voice was a bit wistful as she said it.
“Hard to believe, isn't it?” Josh asked.
“I'm not ready,” Lois said.
“Well, you don't have to be,” Alicia said, but I got the sense she was talking to herself as much as Lois.
I said nothing, thinking about what they were saying. Who would I be in a couple of years? What would happen to Clark Kent? Would I still live in Metropolis after college? Would I have a job at the Daily Planet? Would I even want to?
Or would I have given that up, despite my parent's wishes, and be living alone somewhere, helping out when I could? Where would I live in that scenario? For some reason, I kept imagining a cave in the Arctic. It seemed kind of cold and lonely.
“Clark?” Josh's voice pierced my thoughts.
“Sorry,” I said shaking my head. “Just thinking about what my life would be like after we're finished here.”
“Picturing yourself as the next Billy Norcross?” Lois asked.
I smiled slightly. “More wondering what I'll do if that isn't a possibility.”
“Nonsense,” Alicia said. “It's clearly a possibility.”
I smiled. “Thanks. I'm not so sure, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
“I thought guys were supposed to have more self confidence than this,” Lois said to Alicia.
“Me too. I guess it's just our luck that we became friends with these wusses,” Alicia said with a smile.
“Hey!” Josh and I said in unison, but Lois and Alicia just laughed at us as we got up to head to out.
************************
“So, have you started on your article yet?” I asked Lois as we walked toward the dining hall after journalism class. We had already established a pattern of having lunch and dinner together on Mondays and Wednesdays. We had lunch with everyone else, often split up afterwards, but would meet up in class and then have dinner afterwards. Josh had an evening class on these nights and Alicia had dinner with Chris, but sometimes Steve or Maddie would join us. We had invited Alicia and Chris, too, and maybe they would join us at some point, but right now they seemed like they wanted to spend as much time alone as possible to make up for the break.
“A little,” Lois said. “I did some more digging around on the building codes and what they would need to be and how someone could get around them.”
“And?” I prodded her on.
“And it still looks possible, but no real data yet. What about you? Did you pick a topic?”
I nodded. “I think I'm going to write about illicit drug use in Metropolis' elementary schools.”
Lois stopped in her tracks. “What? You're kidding. That's way more newsworthy than my article.”
“It is?” I asked. “Public funding being used to build shoddy housing for the poor? I would think that was pretty newsworthy. Besides, at least you have some data to back up your story. So far, I have nothing.”
“Have you started?” she asked me, still looking skeptical.
“I met with a vice principal of an elementary school in town. But he wasn't very helpful. He insisted there was no problem at his school.”
“You think he was right or just in denial?” Lois asked.
I smiled. “I don't know. I guess I think if he was right, it was more luck than anything else. He was so insistent it was clear he had never thought of it before. His argument was mostly that the students were middle-class white kids. Apparently, middle-class white kids don't do drugs.”
“Do middle-class black kids?” Lois asked. “Or lower-class white kids?”
I chuckled. “My guess is both, but no group is as bad as lower-class black kids.”
Lois laughed. “I didn't realize middle-class white kids came from perfect homes.”
“Well, they do,” I said, suddenly flashing to Maddie. She was white and her family was definitely middle-class. Probably even upper middle-class. But that didn't change the fact that… well, the thing with her cousin. That could drive a kid to do drugs, couldn't it? Even if it hadn't done that to Maddie, it could do that to someone easily.
Not that I hadn't known that Mr. Dwight was being a bit racist and classist, but the thought hadn't been quite so well-formed before. I knew a white, middle-class person whose home life had not been as idyllic as he wanted to believe.
“You did, didn't you?” Lois asked softly as we sat down at a table in the dining hall with our dinners.
I looked at her quizzically. “I did what?”
“You come from a perfect home,” Lois said simply.
“Yeah, I sort of did,” I told her. Well, if you ignored the alien/science experiment for a son anyway. “What about you? I don't know much about your childhood except that you have a younger sister and your parents are divorced.”
Lois shrugged. “There's not much else to tell. But it's not perfect.”
“You said your dad has some social problems?” I remembered.
“You could say that. My dad is a doctor, but he does more research than real practicing. And he's like the stereotypical scientist – reclusive and more comfortable in his lab than with people.”
“I'm sorry,” I said softly.
Lois shrugged again. “Lucy and I are used to it. And to be fair, in the last year or so he's made efforts to be around more.”
“How about your mom?” I asked her.
She didn't answer at first, just stirred her soup. “She's not reclusive,” Lois finally said quietly.
I reached over to place a hand on top of hers. “You don't need to tell me if you don't want to.”
Lois looked up, “She's an alcoholic. Recovering, I guess, but she relapses frequently.”
I tightened my grip on her hand. “I'm sorry,” I whispered, although I wasn't sure if she could hear me in the noisy dining hall.
She nodded her head, smiling slightly. “Thanks.”
And then, it was like my head left the rest of my body again. I leaned over the table and our food to press a soft kiss to her lips.
