Doing it all Over Again... My Greatest Wish

“You okay, dude?” he asked, looking at me with his stoned expression.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like I should kiss the ground.

“Hey,” he said, “how about we cut out after my lunch? We now have freedom.”

“Uh… no,” I said, shaking my head. “I got a test today in English.”

He gave me a sour expression, one that I was getting used to from him.

“All right,” he said indignantly. “But you might have to walk home. I’m not gonna stay here all day just because you wanna go to your classes.”

“That’s cool,” I told him levelly. “I can get a ride home from Cindy and Tracy.”

“Oh,” he said weakly. “Whatever.” He went storming off.

I sighed, watching him go. I could not, would not get in that car with him again. So what was I going to do now?

As he’d promised, Mike and his car were long gone when school ended that day. I found Tracy and Cindy without much searching and they gave me a ride. Cindy elected to stay for a while once we got home. She asked me if I’d acquired any new albums since her last visit.

Since our first encounter I’d screwed Cindy ten or so times, always to our mutual satisfaction. We were never publicly seen together and both of us knew the rules of the relationship. It was a sexual relationship only. Our euphemism for it was looking at albums in honor of our first time.

Even though I’d purchased nothing new since my return, I told Cindy I had bought something the other day.

“Well let’s go take a look at it,” she smiled, standing up.

“Sure.” I smiled back, following her.

Tracy watched us go, shaking her head.

Cindy and Tracy drove off to the mall later that day. After they were gone I picked up the phone and gave Mike a call. I wanted to get together with him and have a talk, to try to get him to see my point of view a little. I had a speech all set up in my mind.

“What’s up?” he asked bluntly when he came to the phone. I could already hear hostility in his tone.

“I was wondering if you wanted to come over for a little bit?” I asked. “Or maybe I could come over to your place.”

“I got things to do,” he said. “Did you get a ride home today?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Cindy gave me…”

“Cool,” he interrupted. “Do you want a ride tomorrow, or is she going to take you then too?”

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to…”

“You want a ride or not, dude?” he demanded, an unmistakable ultimatum in his tone. “It don’t matter to me.”

“No,” I said. “Cindy will give me a ride. But…”

“Whatever,” he said. A second later the phone clicked in my ear.

I debated calling him back but didn’t. I knew it would do no good. Though I still maintained some hope for Mike, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d failed.

The school year continued to roll on. I caught rides in the morning and in the afternoon with Cindy and Tracy in Cindy’s Chevy Caprice that her daddy had bought for her when she got her driver’s license. Two or three times a week Cindy would develop a burning desire to go check out some of my albums. I never turned down the opportunity to show them to her.

Mike kept his distance from me. He didn’t call me anymore, he didn’t come over. Before two weeks went by I would see him driving around a couple of freshmen in his Bug; kids he’d always made fun of before. Whenever I saw him he wouldn’t even wave at me, wouldn’t acknowledge my presence in any way. I would feel sadness whenever I saw him.

________________________________________

I began making a habit of eating lunch with Nina Blackmore through that year. It was less than a week before I stopped doing it out of simple pity or simple repentance for past sins or for simple attempts to change the future personality of a future bitch. I began eating lunch with her because I really enjoyed talking to her. I began to look forward to lunch each day so we could have another stimulating conversation on literature, life views, or some other topic. She was intelligent and pleasant once you broke through the years of torment she’d endured. I guess Life has a way of forcing certain people to grow up faster than nature intended. The way her eyes lit up when she saw me approaching her in the lunchroom always let me know that she was glad to see me too.

By the time Mike abruptly ended our friendship Nina and I were quite close and able to confide pretty well in each other. As I entered the lunchroom the day after my telephone conversation she immediately noticed my upset expression.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, giving me her shy smile.

“Oh,” I said, sitting down and opening my lunch bag, “you know my friend Mike that I’ve told you about?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The guy who likes to smoke pot all the time.”

“Right,” I agreed. “Well yesterday…”

I poured out the whole story to her, omitting of course the part about how I’d once been a 32 year old and couldn’t relate to a sixteen year old very well anymore. She listened without interruption and then, when I was finished, looked at me thoughtfully.

“You seem like you’re blaming yourself for this,” she said.

I shrugged. “We’ve been friends for a long time. Maybe I’m being a little hard on him. Is it that much for him to ask for me to drive to school with him each day?”

“If you’re putting your life at risk it is,” she answered. “It sounds to me like he is the one to blame for this, not you. He is the one willing to end a friendship over something so stupid as who you drive to school with and whether or not you smoke pot with him.”

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. “But we’ve been friends a long time. I can’t help but feel I’ve let him down or something.”

“If you’ve been friends a long time,” she said, “don’t you think he’ll eventually grow up a little and realize how stupid he’s been? He’ll come around.”

“It might be too late by then,” I blurted.

She looked at me puzzled. “Why do you say that?”

“Oh, just ignore me,” I told her. “I can be awfully bleak sometimes.”

I left the lunchroom that day feeling better about the situation. Though nothing had changed I always felt better after I’d talked to Nina.

I also got into the habit of checking the business section of the newspaper each day. I would look through the stock market report, memorizing and tracking various stocks. It became such a routine at the breakfast table each morning that Dad quickly stopped asking me why I was doing it. In my former life I’d followed stocks only as they related to my 401k plan. Now I was trying to get a grip on the market, to begin the process of understanding it and eventually mastering it. If I could master it I knew, I could master everything.

Summer break began. When I brought my report card to my mother I actually feared she was going to faint as she stared at it.

“Straight A’s, Billy?” she asked, looking at it in disbelief. “You?”

“I guess I just started to take all that stuff you’re always sayin’ about how education is the most important thing, seriously, Mom,” I responded.

An extended version of The Look followed this.

“Do you think you can make your tacos tonight?” I asked next.

“Sure,” she said numbly.

The summer went by quickly in a haze of hot days and sexual activity. Although Mike no longer hung out with me I found new companionship with Cindy and Tracy. My relationship with my sister had improved to the point where she was confiding secrets in me. She began telling me her hopes and dreams; that she wanted to go to law school, that she wanted to marry a nice man and have children, that she wanted a nice house and a nice car. These were things I’d never known about her since her life had been cut short before we’d gotten out of the teenage rivalry stage.

She also no longer seemed to have a problem being seen with me. Maybe something I’d said, something I’d done had given her a little kick in the head, but she treated me that summer as a friend and companion, taking me with her when she went to parties, either with Cindy or with one of her other friends.

She’d also developed a similar aversion to being in a car with an intoxicated driver; an aversion she’d managed to share with Cindy. Whenever we went out one of the girls would stay sober enough to pilot the car safely home. They developed a designated driver rule long before that buzzword caught on. I always suspected my little speech to Tracy that one night had a lot to do with it.

It was from Cindy and Tracy’s ranks of friends that I chose my sexual companions. They were both part of the popular crowd, members of the elite, and in my previous life I would have been intimidated as hell to be at a party with them. But now things were different. I could not bring myself to be intimidated by teenagers, but oh how I lusted after them. I rarely left a party without using one or more of the condoms I carried with me at all times. I got to sleep with girl after girl from my fantasies and it was usually they who would approach me thanks to an underground reputation I had developed among the females.

The guys at these parties, who were for the most part older than I, either seniors or college freshmen, were oblivious to what I was doing. Despite my reputation with Fairview they considered me harmless, even as I was taking their girlfriends out for a little walk while they were playing a game of quarters or having someone pour beer down their throat with a beer bong. They wondered what I was doing there of course. I was inevitably the youngest male in attendance and none of them ever chose to converse with me. That was fine with me. As long as they saw me as no threat when they spotted me talking amongst the girls or having a private conversation with one of their girlfriends.

Tracy told me once that many of them thought I was gay. They didn’t tease me about it because of Richie Fairview but that seemed to explain why I chose to hang out with the girls instead of trying to come over and talk football or cars. I never tried to convince them otherwise although the queer logic of this amused me to no end. A guy wants to hang out with girls so he must be gay.

I had careful rules about my relationships during that summer. I generally didn’t sleep with anyone more than once and I made it clear that I desired no sort of commitment or ongoing relationship. I was in it for the sex and the sex only. Most of them understood this. They were in it for the sex too and happy that I was happy to keep my mouth open while it was on their pussy and closed afterword. I had two exceptions to this rule however: Cindy and Anita. I continued to sleep with both of them on a regular basis. It was nice. They both understood the rules, especially Anita who had no desire to have anyone find out she was boffing a teenaged boy. They were also both on birth control so I didn’t have to wear a condom with them. It was nice to sink bare flesh into bare flesh for a change of pace.

Except for the rift with Mike and except for the absence of my discussions with Nina, which I missed, it was quite a pleasant summer. The best one I’d ever remembered to that point.

I got my learner’s permit that August when I turned fifteen and a half. Dad then ’taught’ me to drive.

“You’ve caught on to this remarkably quick,” he said, looking at me with something close to suspicion the first day. “Tracy hasn’t been letting you drive, has she?”

“No, Dad,” I assured him, expertly changing lanes, feeling ecstatic to be behind the wheel after, how long? More than six months? “I guess I just have a knack for it.”

“Some knack,” he said. “I guess we won’t have to go out all that often, will we?”

________________________________________

September brought the start of my junior year and Tracy’s senior year. I had a whole new slew of classes and subjects that I’d chosen a few weeks before. I was particularly pleased to find that I no longer had to take PE. My first period class was Introduction to Molecular Biology. Mrs. Crookshank taught it and it was a subject I knew little about. I’d taken it so I could relieve some of the boredom of school by learning something new. I walked into class the first day and Mrs. Crookshank greeted me stiffly.

“Billy,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again this year.”

“Nice to see you too,” I answered.

“Do you like to read about molecular biology too?” she asked me next.

There was a hint of teasing sarcasm in her face. “No, Mrs. Crookshank,” I said. “I’m an MB virgin.”

Before she had a chance to reply I turned to find a seat. I saw that Nina was in the class. She was sitting in the front row and all of the desks around her were empty. She gave me a weak smile, perhaps wondering if I was going to speak to her or not after the summer.

“Hi, Nina,” I greeted, walking over and taking the seat next to hers. “How was your summer?”

It turned out Nina was also in my third period class; Geometry. I sat next to her there also. When the lunch bell rang we walked together to the cafeteria. We found our normal seats and began to talk as we ate. After only a few minutes it was if we’d only done this yesterday.

“So you still want to be a doctor?” I asked her as we waded through the cafeteria’s version of stroganoff.

“Oh yes.” She nodded. “That’s why I’m taking molecular biology. You have to be heavy in the science classes to get in. Especially if you want to get a scholarship.”

“Where is it you want to go?” I asked her.

“Anywhere they’ll take me,” she said. “But I’d prefer the University of Washington at Seattle. It’s a top rated school but close enough so I could commute home on vacations. If I get a good car that is. My parents don’t have that much money.”

“Mine either,” I agreed. “I keep trying to get my old man to invest in the stock market but he won’t do it. I don’t think he trusts my predictions of good stocks.”

“Do you still want to study business?”

“I don’t really want to,” I said. “But I think that I should. I think that’s where my fortune lies.”

She giggled, an action she would have been incapable of a year before. “Still gonna make that fortune huh?”

“I think I’ll have a good head for investment,” I predicted.

We ate in silence for a moment and then I asked, “Do you follow all that molecular biology crap? I mean today was only the intro but it seemed pretty deep to me. Quite a change from A&P.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve read up on it a little over the summer. Trying to get myself a little edge you know? But you know what confused me?”

“What?”

“The geometry. It sounded like he was talking in Latin.”

“He was,” I affirmed. “But I think I got that handled. It’s mostly just memorizing formulas it looks like. The actual math part is the algebra we learned last year. If you can memorize the formula, you got it nailed.”

“You must have a head for numbers,” she told me, taking another bite.

“I never did before,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I answered, an idea suddenly striking me. “Listen, maybe we can help each other out. Why don’t we get together and study a couple times a week? You can help me with the biology and I can help you with the geometry?”

She looked up at me, speechless, her face reddening.

“You okay?” I asked, wondering what I’d said to embarrass her.

“You want to… study with me?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not? We can either do it at your house or mine. You don’t live too far from me, do you?”

“No.” She shook her head. She gulped. “Are you sure we should do that?”

“Study together?” I asked, confused. “Of course I do. What’s wrong with that?”

She looked at me hard for the longest time, various expressions crossing her face-fear, doubt, elation, disappointment, determination. “Nothing,” she said finally. “When can we start?”

“I don’t know,” I said, still confused. “How about whenever we get stuck on something. It’s probably gonna be often the way I see it.”

Her face cleared a little bit and she seemed more composed. She giggled a little and shook her head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, nearing exasperation.

“Nothing.” She chuckled. “Just thinking weird thoughts.”

“I get those a lot too,” I told her, still wondering what had gone through her head.

________________________________________

I saw Mike in the halls of course but he didn’t talk to me, didn’t approach me. His locker was no longer next to mine. It seemed he had a new group of friends to hang out with, the freshmen kids from last year. They all looked as if they worshipped him. I sadly guessed that that was what he needed. I also knew he would drop out by the end of this year and I was powerless to stop it. I tried to approach him a few times and he simply walked away.

Nina and I started studying together on a regular basis and our friendly relationship deepened to the point that we became intimate friends, able to judge each other’s moods with a glance, able to say nearly anything to each other. I became closer to her than I ever would have thought possible. I was closer to her than I’d ever been to Mike. After all, Nina didn’t always try to top whatever story I told or try to convince me about all of the mythical dick she was getting. She didn’t try to get me to smoke cigarettes or cut school or get stoned. There was also no underlying sexual tension with her as there was with most of the other girls I knew. We just enjoyed being together, talking together.

She met Tracy and my parents on her first day studying at my house. It was somewhat awkward since Nina was very shy before new people and my parents were very curious about this girl I chose to have meet them. Though I was fucking nearly everything I could get my dick into at that point, I’d never introduced anyone to them. I thought it kind of ironic that the one they were meeting was the one I had not had any sex with. Nina uttered monosyllable replies to Dad and Mom’s inquiries about where she lived, what she planned to do, etc, and finally they left us alone. Tracy had only uttered a polite greeting and had retreated to her room.

After she’d left, and after I’d answered my parent’s interrogation and explained that we were only studying together, that we were only friends, and that they should not start compiling a wedding list, I went upstairs to put my books away.

Tracy was doing some studying of her own, this time to the accompaniment of some heavy metal. She looked up as I passed and called me into the room.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“Have you no shame at all?” she demanded of me.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s bad enough that you’re screwing all of my friends but isn’t that enough? Have you gotten bored with that and decided to start knocking off the shy egghead girls too? You are serious scum.”

“I’m not screwing Nina,” I said, looking at my sister aghast. “We were just studying. She’s my friend.”

“You don’t have any girl friends,” she accused. “You have fuck partners. Are you seriously telling me that you invited that poor girl over here to study? You didn’t take her upstairs for a little private session before we all got home?”

“No,” I yelled, shaking my head. “My god, am I that bad?”

“Are you that bad?” she laughed. “Do you know how many relationships you’ve broken up in the last few months? Do you know that more than four of my friends have dumped their boyfriends after they fucked you?”

“No,” I said, and then, “Really?”

“Really.” She nodded. “It was kind of cute at first, how all these girls were trying to maneuver to you, to get you to notice them. But you’re getting out of hand. I’ve got girls coming up to me and pretending to be my friend just so I’ll introduce them to you. Of course I have to keep it quiet they all say. I just wanna meet him, talk to him a little. Did you know that they all talk about you in the locker room and in the bathroom? Do you know what they say about you?”

“What?” I asked.

“They talk about you the way your friends talk about chicks like Steph. You’re a male slut, Billy. They describe what you do to them and how well you do it using the most disgusting terms I’ve ever heard. They’ve even asked me if I’ve done you. Me! Your fucking sister!”

“I’m sorry, Tracy, I never…”

“But you know what they never say about you?” she went on. “They never say how nice of a guy you are or how respectful you are. They never come up to me and say, ‘Gee Tracy, your brother is such a sweetheart’. All they talk about is how you’ll eat their pussy like a goddam vacuum cleaner or about how you’ll fuck them until they scream. They never talk about how they’d like to take you home to meet their mom or about how they’d like to be your girlfriend. They talk about how they can manage to get over to your house again for another session.”

“Wow,” I said, unsure what to think. Though I’d known that I had a reputation among the girls I had no idea they talked the way Tracy was telling me. I was also disconcerted at my sister’s anger about this. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was have her pissed off at me.

“Wow,” Tracy mocked. “That’s pretty goddam profound.”

I sat down on the edge of her bed, setting my backpack full of books down. Tracy turned down the stereo a little.

“I’m sorry, Tracy,” I told her. “I didn’t know that what I was doing was affecting you. I thought I was just having some harmless fun. And I assure you that Nina and I are just friends. I haven’t slept with her and I have no intention of doing so.”

She stared at me for a moment. “You know the damnedest thing?” she asked. “The damnedest thing is that you are a nice guy and you are a sweetheart when you want to be. If you were an asshole it wouldn’t bother me for girls to talk about you that way but you aren’t. It bugs the shit out of me to hear people talk about my little brother that way. You would probably feel the same way if you went into the locker room and the guys were saying how well Tracy sucked dick or how she’d fuck anyone who asked, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” I agreed. Would it bother me? I would want to kill whomever I heard saying that.

“That’s how I feel when I hear that,” she said. “And I can’t even defend you in front of them because it’s true. You do fuck anyone who asks.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. I surely wasn’t going to say that I wouldn’t do it anymore because that would have been a lie.

“Look,” she said, “I’m just your sister. I’m not gonna ask you to stop fucking girls. I know you wouldn’t do it anyway. But can you maybe tone it down a little? Cut it down to one or two a week? Or maybe hit up some of the other ones more than once?”

I laughed, shaking my head. “I’ll try, Tracy. I’ll try. But remember, I’m fifteen. I’m at my sexual peak you know.”

“Fuck you, dickhead,” she laughed back. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, but you deserved it.”

“I suppose I did,” I agreed.

“You’re really not fucking Nina?”

“I’m really not.”

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

So for Tracy’s sake I toned things down a little. Also for my own. I wasn’t sure I liked being referred to as a male slut. I stopped pursuing women with the vigor I’d exhibited before, instead simply waiting for them to come to me. I also began giving more repeat performances. By the time the snow flew I had, in addition to a new best friend, a small circle of girls that I regularly had sex with instead of a constant stream. It was enough and when one of the girls got tired of the relationship or met someone they wanted to have for a boyfriend, I would covet someone else.

To my surprise Tracy and Nina actually became something like friends. Nina would come over to my house twice a week or so to study and my sister, curious about the type of girl I would choose as a friend, made a point to talk to her each time she was over. Nina was slow warming up to my sister. I knew that this was due to her past treatment by other girls, which was both crueler and longer lasting than the torment she’d suffered from boys. This was something I never would have suspected had she not told me and it disheartened me to think that the fairer sex could be even crueler to their own then boys were.

But gradually Nina lost her shyness before Tracy and even Cindy, who was also a frequent visitor to our house. The two older girls took Nina under their wing and taught her the finer points of fashion, talking her into replacing her plain clothes with more modern ones. They taught her how to put on make-up, accenting her facial features. They taught her how to fix her hair into something other than a ponytail. The change in her appearance was actually startling when you saw it. I was able to see the attractive doctor that she would one day be, although without the perpetually bitchy expression and mannerisms.

And then came the day in early December when a cold winter storm was blowing across the Spokane area. Snow was being driven through the air by gusting winds that registered more than forty miles an hour. As I walked out to the school parking lot towards Cindy’s car the snowflakes hit me in the face like little shards of steel, stinging me and making me pull my hood and my scarf tighter around me. Snowdrifts were already more than ten feet high against some of the buildings and the ground was covered in white. If it had been snowing like this in the morning they would have closed the school. Unfortunately the storm hadn’t geared up until late morning.

When I got to the place where Cindy’s car had been parked I looked up to find nothing. I looked around the parking lot, wondering if I was mistaken about where she’d parked. The wind cut into my face like a knife as I tried to locate the Caprice. It was nowhere to be seen. Other kids were rushing to their cars in groups of two or more, some of them slipping and sliding on the slick pavement. I saw no Cindy or no Tracy though.

“What the fuck?” I muttered, wondering where in the hell they’d gone.

It took me only a minute to figure out that I was stuck here with no other prospect but to walk home. I wondered if I would freeze to death before I got there. And then I spotted Raisin heading for his Falcon. I ran after him.

When Raisin dropped me off in front of my house fifteen minutes later the sight of Cindy’s car parked at our curb did not improve my mood. I thanked Raisin and bade him farewell, trudging through the thick snow on the driveway to the front door, uttering foul things under my breath about sisters and friends that left brothers abandoned in a freaking blizzard.

The door was locked so I used my key, stepping into the warmth of the living room, prepared to chew out the traitorous girls. But they weren’t there. The television was off, and on the stereo turntable one of my albums was spinning silently around at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute, the arm suspended above one of the tracks. A quick glance at the coffee table gave me a pretty good idea what had happened. An opened bag of nacho cheese chips was sitting there along with the remains of some sandwiches and a few candybar wrappers.

They were getting stoned! They’d left me to freeze to death in the snow so they could go home and get stoned. And they’d probably smoked all of the pot before my arrival. The bitches! Where were they now? I began stomping through the house, looking for them.

When I approached the door that led out to the garage I heard girlish giggles coming from the other side. Fumed, I grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. What I saw on the other side made me freeze in my tracks.

Cindy and Tracy were out there all right. The smell of greenbud came wafting over me and there was an actual haze in the confined space. But the surprising thing was who was with them. Nina was there, her mouth applied to the neck of the bong, sucking a hit up through the water while Cindy held the lighter and cheered her.

“That’s the way, girl!” Cindy encouraged. “Hit that shit!”

Tracy looked up at me, her eyes half-lidded, a shit-eating grin on her face. “Hey, Billy,” she haled. “Glad you got home okay. You want a hit?”

Nina, hearing my name broke off what she was doing, leaving smoke curling from the bong. She saw the dumbfounded look on my face as I stared at her. She held my stare for a moment and then burst out into hysterical laughter, expelling a large cloud of fragrant smoke from her mouth and nose. Tracy and Cindy instantly joined her in hysterics. They were pointing at me as they doubled over in laughter.

They laughed for nearly three minutes as I stood in the doorway and simply stared. I could not believe that they had actually gotten Nina stoned. I could not believe that she’d gone along with it. What were they thinking?

When their giggles and chortles dried up I walked over to them. Nina started to say something and then burst into laughter again. Cindy joined her.

“You got her stoned?” I asked Tracy, who was the only one not laughing. “And you had her cut school?”

“We didn’t have her do anything,” Tracy told me, picking up a baggie and loading another hit into the bong. “She asked us if we had any pot. She wanted to try it. It seems all those stories you told her about smoking out made her curious.” She giggled, jerking a thumb towards Nina. “As you can see, she seems to like it. Why didn’t you ever smoke any with her?”

“I didn’t think she’d want to,” I said, watching Nina’s face. She would start to calm down a little and then would look at me and burst into fresh laughter.

“I guess you were wrong,” Tracy said, handing me the bong and a lighter. “I think there’s a lot of things about Nina you don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Later,” she answered. “Have a hit.”

Oh well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I flicked the bic and put my mouth to the bong.

________________________________________

Cindy and Nina both left shortly before Dad arrived home from work. I worried about the two of them on the snowy roads with a stoned driver at the wheel. I wouldn’t stop them from leaving but I made them promise to put on their seatbelts. I knew Nina would and I also knew the chances of them being in a fatal crash were slim. Most fatal accidents occurred during the summer months, when the weather was clear and when the drivers could barrel along at suicidal speed. During snowy weather everyone drove slow. While there were more accidents, they tended to be minor. You simply couldn’t generate enough kinetic energy to kill during a snowstorm. If Cindy got in an accident it would probably be a fender-bender. But then nothing is absolute so I worried.

After dinner and dishes, while the household began to wind down for bed I found my way to Tracy’s room once again. Outside the wind was still howling against the windows, making the storm-shutters rattle and bang. They would have cancelled school the next day except for the fact that it was Saturday. Tracy was lying on her bed, reading the latest (for that time) Stephen King book. She was wearing her standard pajamas, a long T-shirt.

“What’s up?” she asked as I tapped on the frame of her door.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, setting the book down and sitting up.

“Earlier today,” I started, “while we were smoking out.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Wasn’t that some killer shit? I was droning all through dinner. Do you want to smoke some more? I still have a little left.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. And then I amended. “Well, maybe tomorrow. But anyway, while we were smoking you said that there’s a lot of things I didn’t know about Nina.”

“Yeah?” Tracy smiled a little.

“What did you mean by that?” I asked.

She gave me a very adult look. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Don’t know what?” I asked.

She took a deep breath. “Nina’s in love with you, Billy.”

“What?”

“Not just infatuation, not just attraction, not just puppy-love, whatever the fuck that is, but love. L-O-V-E. The big one. The ultimate like. She’s head over heels in love with you, little brother.”

I was stunned into silence for a moment. Finally I said, “Did she tell you this?”

“No,” Tracy said, “she doesn’t have to. It’s pretty plain to everyone who talks to her. I’ve known it ever since I started getting her to talk to me. She thinks you’re the shit.” She shrugged. “God knows why.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I think you’re mistaken. We’re good friends, we like to talk to each other, I can see how you would think…”

“I’m not mistaken, Billy,” Tracy said firmly. “You can accept it or not accept it. I’m just supplying information for you. She is in love with you. No doubt about it. And she’s terribly afraid that you don’t love her, that you’ll never be interested in her, that you’ll break her heart someday.”

“What? How…”

“Because I’m a girl,” Tracy answered before I could finish asking. “We know these things. She knows you could hurt her bad and she also knows she is powerless to prevent that if you decided to do it. She loves being around you but she wants more. She’s not getting more but she stays around because of the hope that someday she will. She’ll stay as long as the slimmest hope remains of that. The only way you’ll get her to stop loving you is to destroy her hope completely. She may or may not recover from that. She’s kind of a fragile girl, as you may have noticed, and I tend to think that maybe she wouldn’t. I’m not telling you all of this to scare you or anything. I just want you to know what you’re dealing with here. She loves you. You are God to her. So you need to tread carefully with her because you’re playin’ with her fuckin’ emotions. Do you understand?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I do not.” I became angry. Here I was 32, almost 33 years old and a seventeen-year-old girl was telling me about love? What the hell did she know about it? She was probably reading all kinds of things into Nina’s conversations based on the romance novels that she obsessively read all the time. “Nina and I are friends. No more than that. That’s all we’ll ever be. She likes me, she enjoys my company, but she doesn’t love me. I used to tease her in grammar school for Christ sake! You’ve got your signals crossed.”

She picked up her book again. “Believe what you want, Billy,” she told me, dismissing me in a non-verbal way. “But I’m not wrong about this.”

________________________________________

Winter went on. I got straight A’s again in the first semester of school. Second semester began with Nina and I in three classes together. We continued to study together a few times a week. I always watched her carefully, listened to her words carefully when I was with her. She liked to be around me, that was for sure, as I liked to be around her. She valued my opinion as I valued hers. She joked with me, revealing a quick and witty sense of humor beneath her shyness, a sense of humor that I knew no one but me ever saw. We enjoyed being together. We were friends, very good friends, best friends even. But love? I thought not.

On February 10 of that year, 1983, I went down to the department of motor vehicles with my dad after school. I took the written test, passing with 100 percent. I then climbed in Dad’s Dodge Diplomat with a crusty old driving tester and took my driver’s license test. The instructor was impressed with my abilities, stating she’d rarely seen a new driver that operated a motor vehicle so well. She gave me a 96 on the exam, marking me down a point because I hadn’t parallel parked terribly well, something I’d never mastered. I returned to the DMV office and had my picture taken. I was now a licensed driver.

As I drove Dad home that day he congratulated me and gave me a brief lecture on safe driving. Doing his fatherly duty you understand. When he was finished I turned to him.

“I’d like to get a job, Dad,” I told him.

“A job?” he asked, looking at me.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I want to start making my own money. You know, so I can buy my own car and start putting money away for college. Stuff like that.”

“Well that’s admirable, Bill,” he told me, taken aback a bit. “I certainly am not going to stop you.”

“Could I use the car on weekdays after you get home? If I find a job that is?”

“I suppose,” he told me. “As long as we don’t need it for anything. Of course you realize our insurance rates are going to go up now that you and Tracy are listed on the policy. Also the gas is going to go up. And then there’s Tracy. She likes to use the car too.”

“I’ll pay for whatever the increase is,” I promised. “And Tracy and I will work something out.”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you will. You and your sister have been getting along pretty well this last year.”

I shrugged in the way of teenagers.

“Much better than you used to. In fact, there was a dramatic change in your relationship and even in your personality some time ago.” His eyes bored into me. “It was shortly before you got stabbed that time.”

What was he saying? I felt suddenly nervous under his gaze. Dad knew something had happened to me but he didn’t know what. Did he? Was he simply probing for information? Or did he suspect the truth? The truth was nuts wasn’t it? He couldn’t be suspecting it. Could he?

“I guess I just got my shit together, Dad,” I answered nervously. “Tracy too.”

He continued to stare for a moment and then gave a slight shake of his head. “Don’t say ‘shit’,” he finally responded. “If you want to get a job and if you and your sister can work out the car, then you’ve got my blessing.”

“Thanks, Dad.” I told him.

I certainly did not want to work in one of the sweatshops that was a fast food joint so I didn’t bother applying at any of them. I had nothing but time I knew so I bided it carefully, only putting in applications at places where I knew I would be able to stand the pace. You have to understand that I had spent eight years as a paramedic. For all the gore we have to put up with, for all the responsibility that we are instilled with, for all of the abuse that we have to take, the job was anything but fast paced. On a twelve-hour shift we would respond to an average of six calls, each one taking an hour or so to complete from the moment of dispatch until the paperwork was dropped off at the hospital. That left six hours of downtime on each shift. Sometimes, on slow shifts, it was even more. I knew I would not be able to handle working on a burger assembly line for hours at a time.

It was a pizza joint that eventually ended up hiring me in early March. The manager had granted me an interview and had started it by saying that he probably wouldn’t hire me since he generally only offered jobs to those with previous experience.

“Well, sir,” I told him, “I can respect that opinion. And I understand it completely.”

“You do?” he asked, mildly amused, checking his watch for his next interview.

“I do,” I said. “But I’ll tell you something. If you hire me you will not be sorry. In fact, I’d venture to say that it would be the best hire you’ll ever make. You know why?”

That got his attention. “Why?” he asked.

“Because my father has instilled in me a solid work ethic. He’s taught me that employment is sacred in this life, a thing to be cherished above all but the family unit. If I am given the position you will receive complete loyalty from me. I will show up each of my scheduled days on time and ready to work. I will do whatever jobs you see fit in whatever manner you see fit to do them. I am not your typical teenager who will call in sick when he hears that a good kegger is going on at the falls. I will put aside my personal life in order to fulfill my responsibilities to this restaurant and hopefully you will move me up the ladder of advancement as reward.” I gave him my sincere smile. “Hire me and you will not be sorry.”

He hired me. I started the following week making pizzas in the back and washing up dishes on Friday through Monday night from 5:00 PM to 10:30 PM. I did my job well, showing up on time, as I’d promised, and completing all assignments given to me without complaint. After all, I had an adult’s work ethic. The manager was quite impressed with me. He often commented how mature I seemed. The pay was a pittance, $3.25 an hour, which was minimum wage for that time, but it was income none-the-less and, as a kid, I had no real expenses to speak of. We were paid once a week, on Friday. My schedule entitled me to $71.50 each paycheck. Uncle Sam and Aunt Washington took $12.00 from this, leaving me with $59.50 in cold, hard cash.

In my previous life I’d been a horrible financial manager. I lived paycheck to paycheck, never maintaining a savings account except for my 401k, which was automatically deducted. I’d run up a considerable debt with credit cards and car payments, not to mention alimony and child support. I’d been in the rut familiar to many Americans, that being that you owe so much that you could only afford to pay the minimum payments on anything. This of course left you in exactly the same place each month, each year, since the interest on these things accumulated as fast as the minimum payments reduced them. Even before Mr. Li entered my life, even before the Spokane Fire Department began threatening to take my job from me, I’d always wished that I had my financial history to do over again. Well now I did. I made another solemn vow. I would manage any money I got wisely, utilizing the brutal lessons I’d learned before being recycled. I would not live beyond my means ever again. It was un-American of course, but I was going to do it.

I took $10.00 of each paycheck for personal enjoyment type things. $5.00 paid for the gas I used in my dad’s car and another $5.00 went to insurance rate compensation. That left me $39.50 each week that had nowhere to go. I opened up a savings account at a nearby bank. I was amused and slightly offended to find that I had to have my dad’s permission before the bank would open it for me. My God, what chaos would erupt if minors were allowed to open bank accounts without regulation? I began putting this money in there each paycheck. The interest on the account was a pittance, a mere two percent, but that was okay. The savings account was just a holding tank until I built up some capital. When I accumulated enough money, I had a better place in mind to store it.

My parents watched all this with interest, not surprised at my work ethic, which I’d learned from them after all and which they’d expected nothing less than, but with my frugelness. You see, my money management skills in my previous life I’d learned from them also. My parents, through my childhood and teenaged years had managed their money about as well as I did as an adult, which was not well at all. I’m certainly not blaming them for my later troubles just explaining the fact that they were wondering where I’d learned my money management. They watched my savings account grow each week (they had to co-sign my deposits) with respect and admiration and more than a little confusion. God forgive them, they even suggested I take some of that money out from time to time and enjoy myself a little.

“I’m saving for college,” I would tell them. “And maybe a car sometime soon.”

“I see,” they would reply. “That’s very wise, Billy.”

My work schedule put somewhat of a kink in my sex life since the weekends had been my traditional boffing time. But it was only a minor kink. The girls that really wanted to experience my skills would find the time to be with me on weekdays. I would generally have them come over immediately after school where I would take them to my room, show them the pleasure they were seeking, and send them on their way before Dad got home from work. On most of these days Nina would come over after the latest girl had departed and we would study together or just sit on the couch and talk, drinking soda and munching on chips or something, maybe watching some TV. Mom and Dad were under the impression that Nina was my girlfriend, which actually struck me as somewhat funny. They had no idea that I was screwing the brains out of various teenaged girls before they got home. They even expressed pride that I still went over to Anita’s and mowed her lawn or cleaned her windows or babysat her kids or put her storm windows up or took them down. They had no idea that their dear friend was paying me for these services in something more valuable than mere money. I don’t believe even Tracy knew what the score really was between Anita and I.

The months went by. The frigid chill of winter gave way to the spring of 1983. I heard through the grapevine that Mike was leaving school to go to independent study classes. This rumor filled me with dread and reminded me that I still had a piece of unfinished business. Independent study was one of those state-sponsored atrocities that accounted for more dropouts than anything else. I should actually say is, since the thing still existed before my recycling. What happens is a poor student is encouraged to leave mainstream high school and go to a separate campus for study. They are required to be there only twelve hours a week and are given various assignments to complete at their own pace. They and their parents are told that they can graduate this way if they only complete the meager amount of work that is supplied. What inevitably happens is that the student in question finds that even twelve hours a week is too much and they eventually leave it for the abyss of dropout status. The whole thing is nothing more than a false hope for parents and a dead-end for students. Mike was no exception. He would be in independent study for less than two months before leaving school behind forever. He would eventually pay money to be crammed for his GED so he could get into the Air Force where he would ultimately be dishonorably discharged for marijuana use.

I had to take a shot at preventing this. I simply had to.

That week I had my dad deposit only $24.50 in my savings account, keeping an extra fifteen bucks for myself. Naturally, since this was a break in the routine, he questioned it.

“Swaying from your convictions a little?” he asked as I handed him the deposit slip.

I shrugged, grinning sheepishly. “I guess you guys are right,” I told him. “I should enjoy myself once in a while. I thought I’d just blow fifteen bucks on something this time as a reward.”

“Well good for you,” Dad told me. “What are you going to spend it on?”

“No firm plans,” I lied. “Maybe I’ll just spend it all on video games down at the arcade. You know, Space Invaders and all that?”

“Well you deserve it,” he told me, putting his signature next to mine.

The following Monday at school I found Steph wandering through the halls. She was glad to see me.

“Do you think maybe your brother can get me an eighth of some good greenbud?” I asked.

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” she answered. “You got the cash?”

I handed her fifteen bucks-a ten and a five. She took it from me and then peeled off the five and handed it back to me. “For you it’s only ten,” she said, smiling, “if you let me bring it over to your house today to deliver it personally.”

I looked her up and down, remembering what her body had felt like beneath mine. And it was five bucks. I’d certainly made worse deals in my life. “You’re on,” I told her. “Just show up right after school. I have to work today.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised, stuffing the ten into the pocket of her jeans.

She was there. She handed me a plastic baggie of pungent pot and then we retired to my bedroom. I enjoyed her body in as many different ways as I could imagine while she enjoyed mine. She left with a smile on her face.

I stuffed the pot she’d given me under the center of my mattress and headed for the shower. I had to be to work shortly after Dad got home.

The next day, Tuesday, I found Mike wandering through the halls between third and fourth period. I took a deep breath and then walked up to him, matching his pace when I was beside him.

“What’s up, Mike?” I asked carefully.

He looked over at me, his face registering instant hostility, obviously debating whether or not to speak to me. Finally he said, “Nothin’.”

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I commented.

He shrugged. “Been busy.”

I nodded wisely. “Yeah,” I replied. “Me too. Workin’ and everything. Listen, I was thinking that maybe we could get together after school today. Bullshit a little you know. Just like old times.”

“Naw,” he said instantly. “Got things to do.”

I nodded again. “Okay,” I answered, knowing that I was resorting to dirty tricks but it was a desperate situation, wasn’t it? “Too bad. I just scored an eighth of some killer greenbud.”

His eyes lit up like pinball machines. “Really?” he asked, his disinterest dropping away instantly.

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s cool. If you got things to do…”

“Well I can prob’ly come over for a while,” he put in. “You know, we haven’t hung out in a while.”

“Cool,” I said, suppressing a smile. “I’ll see you after school then.”

“Right.”

On the way home from school I asked Tracy and Cindy if they maybe wanted to go to the mall for a few hours before Dad got home from work.

“The mall?” Cindy asked, lighting a cigarette. “I was hopin’ you had some new albums to show me today.”

Tracy gave her a look of annoyance and then turned to me. “What’s the matter, Billy, you getting’ shy about your study sessions with our friends?”

“No,” I answered. “Not at all. I have something important to do today. Mike’s coming over.”

“Mike?” Tracy said, disgusted now. “That fuckin’ hoser! I thought you’d wised up and stopped hangin’ out with him.”

“Please?” I said, not offering any explanation. “This is important. If you guys go out for a while I’ll smoke some of the bud I scored with you later.”

That did the trick. I’d long since learned the barter power that the possession of a little marijuana held in a teenaged society. Cindy let me out at the curb and roared away shortly afterword, Tracy in the passenger seat, with a promise not to return until Dad got home.

Mike pulled his Beetle to the curb soon after.

Our conversation was cautious and casual as we went to the garage and smoked ourselves into oblivion with Tracy’s bong. By the time we re-entered the house we were well into the stratosphere. I hoped I was coherent enough to speak my mind effectively through the drug haze. My own intoxication was countered by the fact that Mike, in his stoned state, would be extremely susceptible to suggestion. We watched some TV for a few minutes while we munched on some food we’d found in the fridge. By the time we went to the garage for our second set of bonghits, we were comfortable speaking to each other despite our months of separation.

“I hear you’re going to go to independent study,” I said as I dumped the bong water down the sink and rinsed the chamber.

“Yep,” he said, obviously excited about it. “My parents put in the application the other day. The counselor says it’ll be approved and I can prob’ly start next month. After only six months of it I’ll graduate.”

“Six months huh?” I said. “And you only have to go twelve hours a week?”

He nodded. “Isn’t that fuckin’ cool? And I get to schedule my own twelve hours. I can go six hours for two days and take the rest of the week off, or four hours for three days, or three hours for four days. Whatever I want.”

I carried the bong upstairs and replaced it in Tracy’s room. Mike took a seat on the couch while I was gone. When I returned I sat next to him and took a sip out of a soda.

“Mike,” I asked, “do you realize that you’re being encouraged to drop out of school?”

“What?” he replied, looking at me with renewed hostility.

“The system is encouraging you to drop out of school. Independent study is nothing but a joke, a joke designed to allow people to drop out with some measure of self-respect intact. First they offer you something that sounds appealing: you only have to go to school twelve hours, you work at your own pace, you’ll get to graduate early. It’s an offer too good to be true.”

“What the fuck you talking about?” he asked. “It’s not too good to be true. That’s how it works.”

“Really?” I continued. “How many people do we know that have gone through independent study? Let’s see there’s Rodney, Steve Kale, Michelle Beckenwood, Stacy Smith. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of them graduated, not a single one.”

“Yeah, but they were stupid,” he said defensively. “I’m different.”

“No you’re not,” I told him. “You’re being used by the system. I’m sure the counselor spouted a bunch of bullshit to you and your parents about how this will help you. They’re lying. It doesn’t help you, it helps them. They’ve marked you as a likely dropout in the near future so they’re trying to get rid of you before that happens. They don’t give a shit about you or your future. They want you to drop out. But they want you to do it this way because it doesn’t go on the school’s statistics as a dropout. You’ll go down as a transfer to another school. That way they don’t lose any of their budget money or have their teaching methods audited by the state board of education.

“So off you go to independent study where you’re encouraged to fade politely away. Do you know how they get you to drop out with this program? Do you know what the kicker to it is? It’s that flexible schedule you were talking about. Come whenever you can, you only have to be there twelve hours a week. But you see, if you offer a teenager a deal like that, they’ll abuse it and those fuckers know that. You get up on Monday and say to yourself, ‘I don’t have to go in today because I only have to go twelve hours. I can knock out some hours tomorrow.’ Then Tuesday rolls around and you say the same thing. After all, you don’t have to be there on Monday or Tuesday. Before long you’ll find yourself at Thursday without any hours built up. By that time the thought of spending six hours is too much to take. So you cut for that week; after all, anyone they send to independent study is an accomplished school cutter, aren’t they? Before two months go by it will be too much trouble to go at all. There will be no paperwork done, nothing that says you’ve officially dropped out, but you will in effect have dropped out. Just like they planned for you.”

Mike had simply stared at me during this speech, absorbing what I was saying without expression.

“Where did you come up with all that shit?” he asked me finally.

“My dad’s a teacher,” I told him. “He works for the damn school district. Believe me, that’s the way it is.”

“What the fuck are you tellin’ me all this for?”

I took a deep breath. “Mike, you’re my friend. We’ve been friends since we were kids, right?”

“Yeah,” he agreed carefully, “but what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Friends try to help each other. Remember when Fairview stabbed me? You grabbed him off of me. You helped me. That’s what I’m trying to do for you. Help you. You’re about to make a big mistake, a mistake you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

“How do you know I’m makin’ a mistake?” he shouted. “Even if I do drop out what makes you think it’s gonna be a mistake? What do I need a fuckin’ diploma for anyway?”

“What do you want to do with your life, Mike?” I asked him.

“What?”

“What do you want to do?” I repeated. “What would like to do for a living? What would be a dream job for you?”

“Man,” he said, dismissing me, “fuck this shit. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Look, Mike,” I said carefully, “like I said, we’re friends and I’m trying to talk to you as a friend. Nobody else is here, nobody’s gonna hear what you say. I’m not putting you down or anything, I’m just trying to help you because you need some help. You’re on a path of destruction here and I’m trying to steer you off of it. So tell me, what would you like to do for a living? What would be a cool job?”

For a minute I didn’t think he was going to answer. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

He shrugged. “I never thought about it before. I can’t picture myself in five years, I don’t know.”

“Maybe that’s part of your problem,” I said. “You don’t have any goals.” I looked him up and down for a minute, an idea occurring to me. “You’d probably like a job where you get a lot of days off each week, wouldn’t you?”

“The more the better,” he agreed.

“A job where even when you are at work, you get to spend a lot of time sitting around on your ass.”

He scoffed. “Yeah, like

there are jobs like that.”

“There is, Mike,” I told him. “There is.”

“Yeah?” he said cynically. “Name one.”

There was only one that I could think of. It was one that was well within reach of Mike if he would only graduate from school. “A fireman.”

“A fireman?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Firemen work twenty-four hour shifts ten days a month. That leaves twenty days off a month. When they’re on shift they have beds, TVs, lounge chairs to sit in, all the amenities of home. They get to sleep while they’re on the clock. And they make damn good money, much more than they deserve to.”

He was turning the idea over in his mind. I could see him doing it and I felt the first ray of hope. Was I finally getting through to him a little?

“And you know what the best thing about being a fireman is?” I asked.

“What?”

“The public fuckin’ worships you. You can do absolutely no wrong. And women dig firemen in a bad way. They’ll practically drop down and give you head right there.”

He was definitely interested now.

“The requirements are that you’re eighteen and have a high school diploma. You also have to be able to pass a physical agility test, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you. You’re in good shape.”

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Dude,” I told him. “If you can just graduate you’ll be in.”

“No shit,” he said softly.

“Look, Mike, if you just work through this year you’ll have it made. The school has a work-study program for seniors and fire technology is one of the classes. If you can hang in until then and bring your grades up to a 2.0 average you can go to the ROP classes. That means you’ll just have to take three classes each day and then you’ll spend the rest of the day hanging out at a fire station somewhere. You’ll get to go to calls with them and watch them work and it’ll look damn good on your application after you graduate.”

He soured a little. “There’s no way I’ll get my grades up to a 2.0. I’m workin’ on straight F’s now.”

“I’ll help you with your work,” I promised. “Just come over after school.” I paused and then amended, “well, after my dad gets home that is, and I’ll help you with your work. You can do it if you just go to school each day.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t spent a whole day in school for the last year. I’m not sure I can do it.”

“You can, " I insisted. “Dude, you’re only seventeen years old. You have the rest of your life in front of you. How hard will it be to spend six hours in school for another couple of months? If you work at it we can bring your grades up and you’ll be almost free next semester. A year of ROP and only going to three classes and you’ll graduate. You start applying at fire departments and one of them will take you. It’s not that long and it’s not that high of a price, is it?”

“I guess not,” he said.

It was touch and go for a while. Mike told his parents his decision to stay in school and they accepted it dubiously. However when his parents told the school counselor to withdraw the application for independent study they met some resistance. According to Mike, she tried her damnedest to get him and his parents to change their minds. She nearly begged he told me. But in the end he stuck to his guns and his parents stuck to theirs. The application was withdrawn and Mike stayed in high school.

As I promised, I helped him with his homework. There was some friction at first when he discovered that I wasn’t planning to do his homework for him but to help him do it. There was also some friction when he didn’t show up a few times so he could go get stoned with someone. I talked to him plainly about this, explaining that I would only continue to help him if he showed up each day. He was morose about it but agreed. His attendance at my study sessions improved remarkably.

His attendance at school also improved. Though he whined about it to the point of genuine annoyance on my part, he faithfully showed up to classes each day, only occasionally cutting out for a session with a marijuana pipe or something.

By the end of the first month of our studying together, study sessions in which Nina was a frequent participant, he began to catch on to his work and actually began to complete more of his assignments in school. I felt I’d done well with him and my satisfaction was great.

________________________________________

As the end of the school year drew closer I worried incessantly about Tracy. This was the point that she was scheduled to die. All of the signs told me I’d steered her away from that path. When Lisa Sanchez, the cheerleader, began making friendship overtures to Tracy, she’d been almost rude in her rejection of them. The friendship that eventually evolved into the foursome that was fated to drop into the river never flourished. As a result, Tracy never went to the party where she would meet the football player that would cause her death. Instead she stayed close friends with Cindy, another deviation from the previous path. When Tracy had begun hanging out with Lisa before, the relationship with Cindy had faded away. But despite all this I was worried. Again, I did not know the rules involved here. Was fate absolute? Would Tracy end up dying one way or another simply because she was scheduled to?

On the other hand I did have some indication that things were not pre-destined. Mike was a shining example. As May began winding down towards June and the end of the school year, he was still enrolled in school, was in fact working his grades upward to the C average. This was something that had not occurred before. Mike gave me hope that I’d succeeded in saving Tracy.

The end of the school year came. Mike got his report card and it showed his year’s average to be 2.1. He was qualified to go into ROP the next year. He didn’t give me much in the way of thanks but I understood. It wasn’t in his nature. I received tremendous satisfaction from his accomplishment anyway.

Tracy graduated. I dressed in my suit and attended the ceremony with my parents. Though my sister and I had never talked about my prediction for her fate on that night since the first time, it was obvious she remembered what I’d said. She was perhaps the only member of her graduating class to go home with her parents after the ceremony. She took off her dress and went to bed early.

When I got up the next morning I staggered downstairs and found her sitting in her pajamas in the living room. The television was on, tuned to the local morning news program. Dad and Mom had already gone off to work so we were alone in the house. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I was to see her there. She was alive, still drawing breath a day after she’d died in her previous life. Things could be changed!

My elation was dampened a little as I got a good look at her. I could see immediately that she was upset. Her face was pale and she was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Trace?” I asked carefully.

“I’ve been watching the news,” she told me slowly, turning a pair of haunted eyes to my face.

“Yeah?”

“There was an accident last night,” she said. “Near the falls.”

I felt all the spit in my mouth suddenly dry up. My arms broke out in goose bumps. “Was there?”

She nodded. “A Camero with four people in it crashed into the river. Lisa Sanchez was killed. She drowned in the car.”

I was speechless as I listened to her, numb with shock.

“There were other people in the car,” she went on. “A guy named David Mitchell was driving. He’s a football player at the college. Another football player named Rick Manchester was also in the car. Rick was Lisa’s boyfriend. And there was one other girl in there. Barbie Langston, she’s David’s girlfriend.”

“What happened to her?” I asked unsteadily.

“She got out. Lisa was the only one killed.”

“Wow,” I whispered, trying to figure out what that meant. Barbie was a cute redhead who had found her way to my bedroom last summer during my ‘male slut’ period. She had been installed in Tracy’s place when Tracy did not meet and begin dating David Mitchell. She had lived. Why? Was it because she had lived past graduation in the previous life? Was she simply a better swimmer? Was there any meaning to be found with her non-death?

“Billy,” Tracy said softly, “all of those names were the ones you gave me that day except for Barbie. You described the car, the driver, the passengers, the accident location, everything. How did you know?”

“I can’t tell you, Tracy,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“Billy, for Christ’s sake! I would have died yesterday if I hadn’t listened to you, wouldn’t I have?”

“Yes.”

“You scared me that day when you started talking about all of that. You scared me bad. But I never really, you know believed it could be true. I didn’t think it would really happen. Even when little things started to click into place. Lisa Sanchez trying to make friends with me, stuff like that, even then I never really believed it. But Jesus, you were right!”

“I know, Tracy,” I said. “And you’re alive today instead of dead. I’m glad you listened to me.”

“Christ,” she said, shuddering and trembling. “I could have died.”

“But you didn’t,” I told her. “You didn’t.”

________________________________________

Summer vacation began. Tracy sent off college applications and was accepted into the University of California at Berkeley on an academic scholarship. She spent a good portion of her vacation preparing for the move to California. My parents, who had no idea how close they’d come to losing a daughter, were preoccupied with helping her at this task. They took out a second mortgage on their house to help pay for some of the expenses until Tracy managed to get a job in the Bay Area. I could tell they were worried about money although they never mentioned it to either one of us.

I was able to increase my work schedule an extra hour a day and an extra day a week now that summer was upon us and there was no school to attend. By the beginning of August I had nearly a thousand dollars in my savings account. It was time to make my first move.

“Dad,” I said at the breakfast table one morning, “I need you to do something with my money.”

He looked at me over his paper. “Your money?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I want you to pull it out of the savings account and take it to a stock broker.”

“A stock broker?”

“Here,” I said, handing him a slip of paper upon which I’d written careful instructions.

He looked at it for a moment, his eyes widening. “You want to buy stocks?”

“I do,” I affirmed. “As you can see there, I’d like to invest six hundred dollars in Lytech Corporation and three hundred in Smith Manufacturing Corporation.”

“Billy,” he started slowly, as if he were speaking to a lunatic, or a teenager. “Do you understand what you’re doing? Investing in stocks is a risky business. You have no guarantee that you’re going to get any return. You could lose all of your money.”

“I’ve studied up on it pretty well, Dad,” I assured him. “I’m pretty sure that these two corporations are going to go through the roof in the next year.”

“What are they?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of either one of them.”

“They make latex products,” I explained. “Condoms and surgical gloves mostly.”

“Condoms and surgical gloves? You think there’s money to be made there?”

“It’s a matter of timing, Dad,” I explained. “You know about AIDS, right?”

“Of course I know about AIDS,” he told me. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been following the news on AIDS as well as checking the business section. Right now AIDS is mostly confined to homosexual men and IV drug users. But that’s slowly changing. As more and more heterosexuals become infected the fear of this disease is going to grow, probably into a paranoia.”

“That’s all very interesting, Billy, but…”

“When I got stabbed,” I told him, “I remember that the paramedic who was treating me was not wearing any gloves. I’d been cut open and I was bleeding and he was touching me with his bare hands. The nurses and the doctors in the hospital did the same thing. It wasn’t just me, it was almost all of the patients I saw there. Nobody was wearing gloves on their hands as a matter of routine. It just isn’t done right now. Are you following me?”

“You’re saying that is going to change?”

“In a big way I predict, and soon. As more heterosexuals get the disease and the epidemic grows, ambulance companies, fire departments, hospitals, nursing homes, every medical office is going to start ordering huge supplies of latex gloves. There might even be a shortage of them for a while. The price of them will go up according to the law of supply and demand and their sales figures will probably increase by at least four hundred percent, maybe more. This is the perfect time to invest in the latex business.”

He was impressed with my reasoning of the subject but I could tell he still wasn’t convinced.

“It’s still pretty risky, Bill,” he told me. “Are you sure you want to invest all of your money in this?”

“All of it,” I confirmed. “Can you do that today?”

He gave me one last glance and then said, “Sure. I’ll do it during lunch hour.”

________________________________________

The summer rolled on. I continued to have plenty of sex on a fairly regular basis but my heavy work schedule put something of a ding in the variety I was getting. I was down to three females that I enjoyed, rarely getting anything new. Anita would still have me over to do some work for her a few times a week, after which, or sometimes before which, we would go to her bedroom and enjoy a long sex session. She always had me over in the evenings when her kids had gone to bed. Cindy still came over to check out albums with me during the day when my parents were not home. If fact, with Tracy gone a lot of the time on various missions to prepare for college, Cindy’s visits became more frequent. It seemed she felt a little guilty about screwing me while my sister was there. With Tracy gone we enjoyed the best sex we’d ever had, with no worries about being too loud or too obscene. The third girl was Maggie Bartlett, a friend of Cindy’s. She would come over on the days when Cindy did not. I tried to talk them into a threesome a couple of times but they just giggled and told me they weren’t into that. A pity.

Nina and I remained in contact with each other even though we no longer had to study for anything. We would meet a few times a week at my house or hers, just enjoying each other’s company. A few times we drove into nearby Idaho to spend the day at one of the resort lakes. One such day I found myself looking at her in her bathing suit while we soaked up rays on the hot sand. She was starting to fill out nicely. Her breasts, which the previous summer had been almost non-existent, were now pushing at the cups of her one-piece. Again I remembered her classy good looks as the bitchy emergency room doctor. Now that I’d removed the bitchiness I figured she would make some guy very happy someday.

“What are you looking at?” she asked, blushing a little as she found my eyes upon her.

I smiled. “Just seeing how your tan is coming along,” I told her.

“Well?” she asked. “How is it?”

“It’s lookin’ good,” I answered. I picked up a bottle of sun lotion. “Can you put a little of this on my back? I don’t want to burn.” That was the advantage of having a girl for a best friend. You could have them put oil on your back. You certainly wouldn’t ask a guy friend to do something like that.

“Sure,” she said softly, taking it from me. I noticed a slight tremble in her hands as she squirted some into her palm.

Dismissing this, I laid on my stomach on the towel. Her hand began smearing the slippery lotion across my back. Her hands on my skin felt good, I realized. They were soft yet eager, gliding over my shoulders and through the small of my back. Her touch was almost sensuous and I felt myself, to my surprise, getting a hard-on beneath my suit.

What a mind-blower, I thought. Nina is giving me a boner. What a strange world.

________________________________________

On September 2, Tracy left the house for California and UC Berkeley where she would begin her first semester as a college student. She planned to get her graduate degree in Business Administration and then move from there to law school. Her hopes were to one day be a rich corporate lawyer. At least she was honest about it.

I gave her a big hug before she climbed into Dad’s car for the trip to the airport.

“Take care of yourself,” I told her. “And be careful.”

“You too,” she answered.

She climbed into the car and a minute later it backed out into the street. As I watched it go I felt a tear running down my face. Tracy was still alive.

My senior year began. Because Cindy had graduated and enrolled in college that meant that I was without a ride to school. Though Mike had improved in many areas over the last few months his driving was not one of them. I attempted to mellow him out a bit by letting him know that the fire department would not hire him if he had too many points on his driving record. I suppose this did some good, he never got any points put on, but I still was not going to get into that Volkswagen with him. Strangely enough, though this subject had prompted our long estrangement, he seemed to understand. The subject was never brought up. But this still left me without a lift to school and I’d been driven so long that I’d lost my taste for walking. Nina came to the rescue here. Her mom, who was a housewife and who thought I walked on water, had always been in the habit of driving Nina to school all through high school. It didn’t take much convincing on Nina’s part to persuade her mom to run by my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. Her mom, who was considerably older for a parent-Nina had been a late child-drove like an eighty-year-old grandmother. That was just fine with me. I felt there was little chance of getting killed with Mrs. Blackmore at the wheel.

The reason I’d known so much about our school’s ROP program was that I’d taken it as a senior my first trip through. I hadn’t taken fire technology but health careers where I’d been assigned to the emergency room at one of the local hospitals as an ER tech. It was this part of my life that had seduced me into my eventual job as a paramedic. I took the health careers once again, as did Nina. I tried to remember if she’d been in it with me before and I couldn’t. She had been such a forgettable person back then. Nina planned to sign up for emergency room assignment since she figured, as I had all those years ago, that would be the most exciting. Though I was tempted to do the same-I missed the thrill of the unknown that came with working in emergency situations-I chose central supply instead. Those who chose central supply were sometimes hired by mid-semester if they showed some responsibility. I planned to show lots of it. Central supply techs were paid six dollars an hour.

Mike was accepted into the fire tech ROP program. Like with our health careers program, it was required that you spend the first two months in a classroom learning the finer points of your career assignment. He grumbled about having to spend three hours a day in a class instead of in a fire station like he’d thought but he stuck with it. I knew his grumbling was good-natured and offered only because it was expected of him. He was actually finding the classroom lectures on the basics of firefighting interesting, perhaps the first thing besides marijuana and pussy stories that had ever interested him. I began to feel that Mike was going to be okay.

I perhaps suffered the worst through the classroom portion of ROP. They were teaching us how to take blood pressures, temperatures, pulses, and how to respond to various hospital emergency situations like fires or floods. This was all stuff I knew not just intimately but genetically it seemed. There were, however, some interesting perks to the classroom. It was made up of mostly girls. I had a fresh hunting ground to pick from and an additional challenge thrown in since most of the girls did not know who I was because ROP classes were made up of students from all the regional high schools.

As I went to work on a few of the more attractive students I noticed that Nina, who was in the same class, would become morose and even throw some dirty looks my way. What was up with her? I wondered. Was Tracy right? Was Nina in love with me? I hoped not. She was my best friend and I was her best friend but I’d never done anything to encourage her to love me. If it was true, how could it have happened?

In deference to her feelings I tried to keep my flirtations discreet when she was around. There was no sense hurting her. And if she did have some love-like feelings for me they would eventually fade, wouldn’t they?

I was troubled by these thoughts but not too troubled. By my second week there I enticed a girl named Susan Kelly, a breasty brunette whose ambition was to someday work as a registration clerk, to my house after school. I was glad to find that I still had the touch after the long summer.

________________________________________

In September of that year the United States sent a force of Marines to Beirut as part of a peacekeeping force. I knew that tragedy would befall 240 of them at the hands of Muslim extremists. With their deployment came the opportunity for some experimentation on my part. I knew what was going to happen. Could I, in good conscience, simply let it occur without trying to stop it? I could not.

The question was, how could I stop it? I put some thought into the matter while I read as much on the peacekeeping force as I could. A plan developed in my mind by the end of September.

Using plain paper and pen I drafted a letter to the commanding general of the American forces there. I stated that I was an American Muslim and that I’d received information about an impending attack upon the forces there by way of relatives in Lebanon who were part of the extremists but not as radical as their friends. I explained exactly what was to take place and on which day. I made 25 copies of the letter and dropped each copy into a separate envelope, all of which I addressed and labeled CONFIDENTIAL. I put stamps on all of the letters and then borrowed my father’s car one Saturday morning, telling him that I was going to an all-day party. I promised him I wouldn’t drink and he gave me the keys.

I left the house at 9:00 that morning, getting onto Interstate 90 and heading west. Four hours later I was in Seattle; a large, anonymous city that I had never lived in. Careful was my watchword and if any feds tried to find the deliverer of the message, as I was sure they would, I wanted no trail leading them to Spokane. I dropped the letters into a mailbox in one of the suburbs. I had a quick lunch and then headed home. I’d taken my shot. My conscience was assuaged.

Of course I had no way of knowing if my letters had reached their destination and, if they had, if they would be taken seriously. I hoped that they were enough to at least take simple precautions. I listened to a news station on the radio all day on October 15, the day the attack was to take place. Nothing came across about a tragedy in Beirut. But towards the end of the day something else came across.

“U.S. Marines,” said the announcer, “have captured a group of Muslim extremists who were setting up heavy caliber mortars near the Marine barracks, apparently with the intention of shelling the soldiers inside. A source tells us that the Marines were acting on information they received via an anonymous tip that the attack was to take place. General…”

I’d done it! I had prevented a tragedy! The Muslims who had been about to shell the barracks, destroying it and killing 240 Marines had been captured before they could do it. I had changed history!

I walked around in a state of elation for the next seven days, beaming with pride at what I’d done. What else could I change? The Challenger disaster was coming up in a few years. I could probably stop that also. In the course of that week I had myself believing that I could prevent the Persian Gulf War.

And then came October 23. I awoke to the news that a suicide bomber with a truck full of explosives had rammed into the Marine barracks, killing many inside. My elation died the instant I heard that.

It was two days before the final death toll was announced. 240 Marines had been killed. 240! That number put an icy finger of dread upon my heart.

In my previous life the Marine barracks had been shelled from outside the base by Muslims armed with Russian made eighty-millimeter mortars. 240 had been killed by the attack. In this life I’d prevented that from happening but a week later a suicide bomber had hit instead. 240 had been killed by that attack. I wondered if the death list of those 240 was the same in both lives. Instinctively I knew that it probably was. I had prevented nothing. 240 Marines had been killed, as if they were fated to die. As if they were fated!

I had prevented Tracy’s death in this life. Was she too fated to die? Was she just going to be killed in some other manner now that I’d changed her original destiny? Was there anything I could do? Could I really change anything here? Was I fated to end up a paramedic in debt again? Was Mike fated to end up an unemployed loser? Was Nina fated to end up a bitchy emergency room doctor? If so, what had been the point of coming back? What had been the point?

I was depressed and edgy for the next week as news of the bombing in Beirut was swallowed up by news of the successful invasion of Grenada a few days later. Nina, who knew me better than anyone, picked up on my mood and tried to discover the source of it in her gentle, probing way. I told her nothing, claiming that everything was just fine. What else could I say? How could I possibly tell her what was bothering me? That I feared my sister had a death sentence hanging over her head. That I feared that everything I’d done over the last eighteen months had been meaningless.

“Do you believe in fate?” I asked her as we rode the bus to our ROP classroom one day.

“Fate?” she asked, looking at me. “What do you mean?”

“You know, that everything is pre-destined. That we have a schedule we follow in life and that we’re powerless to change anything?”

“No,” she said. “You don’t believe that do you?”

“I didn’t used to,” I said. “But lately I’ve been wondering.”

“Are you okay, Bill?” she asked tenderly. “You’ve been kind of, well tense the last few days. What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing I can put into words,” I told her. “I guess I’ll get over it.”

I turned my head to look out the window and as I watched the traffic pass by outside the bus I felt her hands on my shoulders. They began squeezing and kneading the muscles there, forcing them to relax. It felt wonderful and I leaned my head back and sighed.

“That feels good,” I told her. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I’ve been reading on massage techniques,” she told me. “Am I doing it right?”

“Perfect,” I said, closing my eyes and letting the sensation take me away.

As I felt her squeezing and caressing me a thought occurred. Nina had put her hands upon me completely uninvited. She had simply reached over and done it. Nina, who had been so shy once she wasn’t even capable of smiling in front of someone, who couldn’t even bring herself to answer questions in class, who wouldn’t have dreamed of touching someone with or without permission the day I’d first approached her in the cafeteria.

Nina had changed. She was no longer the mousy butt of everyone’s jokes. She had friends now. Me, Tracy, Cindy, even Mike. She had learned to socialize with people even to the point of taking some bonghits at a party. I didn’t think it possible that she would evolve into the Dr. Blackmore I would one day know. She would become Dr. Blackmore but she wouldn’t be the same person. She couldn’t become that person at this point because the psychology that had formed her future personality had been altered. Was it possible that maybe things could be changed? That maybe they tended to fall into pre-destined patterns but that rule was not absolute?

In Nina’s comforting hands I found some hope.

________________________________________

We graduated from the classroom portion of ROP and were given our assignments. Nina went to the emergency room at one of the smaller hospitals as an ER tech. I went to the supply room in the basement of the regional trauma center and was put to work sterilizing and packaging medical supplies and instruments. Mike was assigned to Spokane Fire Station #3 near downtown.

It took me only a few days to be trained in the routine I would be following. Central supply was a little more challenging than making pizzas, but not by much. My work mate was Julie Salinas, a cute Mexican girl who had been in my training class. I’d tried once to initiate some intimate conversation with her but she had shot me down without a second glance, stating in no uncertain terms that she was engaged to be married after graduation. I’d shrugged her off. That kind of thing happened from time to time and there were plenty of other targets in the class.

When I walked in and saw her there the first day I assumed it was not going to be pleasant. She had been a little snotty in her rejection of my advances. But I was surprised to find that she was friendly to me as we spent three hours together each day. With our bodies covered by baggie scrubs, our shoes covered by paper coverings, our hair covered by paper nets, we would chat easily as we went about the tasks of putting forceps and scalpels and syringes and little bottles of medicine into sterile packaging and then labeling them for the appropriate departments within the hospital. It was a fun relationship. She was pleasant to talk to and since I already knew that she wasn’t interested in me I was releived of the sexual tension that usually went along with being next to someone like her. Or so I thought.

As the first few weeks went by I couldn’t help but notice that Julie was always there when I got there. I knew she had her own car which allowed her to drive to the hospital instead of taking the bus but why in the name of God would she show up earlier than she had to? Finally, when our relationship matured to the point that I could ask such things, I asked her.

“Because,” she told me, “I intend to get hired here at mid-semester. Can you ima

gine? It’s a dream job. If they hire you, you get paid for your time here and still get the school credits. You also get another three hours on the clock at $6.00 an hour. So if I get noticed by showing up a half an hour earlier than everyone else, so much the better. They only hire three or four of us each year you know and there’s more than twelve of us working down here.”

“That’s a pretty good idea,” I said with complete honesty. After all, I was counting on getting hired also. To do so would nearly double my current income. “I wish I had a car so I could do it too.”

I meant nothing by this statement. I was merely speculating out loud, wondering in my mind if I could break loose some of my portfolio to purchase a cheap car. If it helped me get a job it would be a sound investment, wouldn’t it?

“If you want,” Julie said, looking at me thoughtfully, “I could give you a ride. I have to drive right by your school to get here and right by it to get home. I’d rather work with you then some of the other losers they got around here.”

“Really?” I asked, looking at her, trying to gauge her intentions. Usually when girls asked me something like that what they wanted was sex. I wasn’t so sure about that with Julie though. After all, she’d already told me she was engaged. She in fact talked quite a bit about her fiancée, who was in his second year of junior college where he was learning the finer points of drafting. She was also a practicing Catholic-a religion which most definitely frowned upon pre-marital and extra-marital sex.

Finally I decided it was a genuinely innocent offer that a friend makes to another friend. “I’ll take you up on that,” I told her. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she assured me.

________________________________________

Nina and I had arranged our school schedules that year so we shared the last two classes before lunch and ROP. We always sat together in the classroom during those classes and then walked together to the lunchroom where usually we would sit with Mike and eat lunch prior to heading off to our job sites. Mike had had the same idea as Julie. He drove his Bug to the fire station, getting there earlier than he was required. He also tended to stay a little later than was required. He talked repeatedly of his experience at the firehouse, continually and obviously inflating his stories of what they allowed him to do. For instance he told me once that they’d allowed him to don breathing gear and go into a burning building to help fight a fire, something that they would never do. But I was gladdened by his exaggerations. It meant that I’d hit upon just the right thing when I’d suggested firefighting as a career.

After he took off from lunch break to head downtown Nina and I walked out to the bus area where the ROP buses picked up the students. As we walked I explained my new riding arrangements to her along with the theory that it would help me get hired at mid-semester.

“Julie?” Nina said, frowning. “You’re going to be riding with her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That way I’ll be able to…”

“But she’s engaged!” Nina nearly yelled. A very un-Nina-like display of emotion.

“So?” I asked, looking at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re gonna…” A pause as she tried to formulate her words, “… get a ride from an engaged girl?”

“Well yes,” I affirmed. “Is there something wrong with that?”

Her face was actually turning red as her eyes, once so soft and mellow, burned into me. What the hell was the matter with her? “No,” she said stiffly. She turned away from me and started heading for the bus stop.

I followed after her, grabbing her by the arm. “Nina?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I’ll see you later.”

Right then Julie, driving her little Japanese car, pulled to the curb in the red zone. She saw me and smiled. “You ready?” she called.

“Just a sec,” I told her, turning back to Nina. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m fine,” she said sadly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Do you still want to ride with me to school?”

“Of course,” I said, “but aren’t we going to get together and study today after school? We have to go over that calculus.”

“Not today,” she said coldly. “I’ve got things to do.” She turned away from me once again and disappeared into the crowd of students waiting for the bus.

With a troubled mind, more troubled than I cared to admit, I went to Julie’s car and got in.