Only there was a woman there. She was pretty, with long brown hair like Brooke Shields, and she didn’t look much older than him. She was sitting at the table, holding Dad’s hand on the napkin. She’d never had a facelift, and she looked like a cat in cream in a leather coat and red velvet prairie skirt.
David looked sick. And also scared.
He came over to the table. His dad looked smug. “John, I’d like you to meet Linda.”
She gave him a warm smile.
“So you’re the bimbo,” John said with a jaunty smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Congratulations. You’ve screwed your way into a lot of money.”
His mom cried on the phone. “John, you can’t do this.”
“Mom…” Everything was like ice around him, a kind of cold fury that made everything cleaner and clearer.
“John, he’s furious. You can’t do this. You have your future to think about. Don’t you understand that you have out of state tuition at UCLA? There’s no way I can pay that out of the alimony. John, you have to behave.”
She might as well have been talking to a block of wood.
He ran into Mel on Thursday, a day they didn’t have class. He almost didn’t recognize her. She was in Air Force uniform, tight skirt and jacket, sensible black heels, a cap pinned on her head.
“Woah, Mel!”
She came over. “I’m in ROTC. Thursday’s drill day. We have to wear our uniforms all day.”
“Dude.” She looked like some old picture of a WAC or something out of World War II. Nobody could actually do anything dressed like that. Especially carrying her backpack in her left hand.
She saw where he looked and frowned. “We can’t wear backpacks when we’re in uniform. We have to carry them. Are you going to give me a hard time too, John? Because I’ve heard it all and I’m pretty tired of it.”
“Me? No. Not me.” He shook his head. “It’s totally cool. I mean, whatever you want to do with your life…”
“Because I love killing babies,” Mel said. “That’s my big ambition. I want to go find some babies somewhere in the world to kill.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Yeah, well, you looked it.” She put her other hand on her hip and looked at him. “Just toss your liberal guilt right here. I’m totally responsible for Apartheid. And Colonialism. It was me. I did it all.”
“You’ve got a chip on your shoulder,” John observed.
“Yeah, well. You get asked stupid questions twenty times a day every Thursday. Try walking across the quad with people yelling Fascist at you.”
“So why are you doing this?” This being the gesture at her circa 1965 outfit, little cap and all.
“Because I want to be an astronaut.”
“Serious?”
“Serious.”
He couldn’t help but grin. “Like a real astronaut? Like Sally Ride and Judith Resnik?”
“Yeah.” She grinned back. “And you know your stuff. Most guys couldn’t name two female astronauts.”
“Sally Ride, first American woman in space. Judith Resnik, killed with Challenger. Dude I’d like to meet is Michael Collins. And I’d pretty much pay an arm and a leg to meet Chuck Yeager.”
Mel blinked at him. “I had no idea you knew anything about space. You’re not…”
“A geek?”
“A geek.” She grinned. “You look like a prep.”
“I’m not a prep.” John wasn’t sure whether or not to be offended.
She looked him up and down, untucked button down shirt, rumpled khakis. “You’re nineteen years old and you play golf. You’re a prep.”
“Ok, maybe so. But…”
“And you’re a poli sci major. Geeks don’t major in poli sci.”
“It’s for law school,” John muttered. “It’s one of the statistically best majors for admission.”
“You want to be a lawyer?” Mel asked skeptically.
Nobody had ever asked him that before. He was surprised he knew the answer. “No.”
Mel put her hand on her hip and looked at him. “Then why are you doing it?”
John shrugged. “I guess because my dad wants me to.”
“And that matters a lot to you?”
“It kind of did.”
November first there was no deposit into his bank account. $350 on the first of the month. That was the deal. It had been for the last year and a bit. The first. On the dot.
John walked away from the ATM, reading the slip over and over. He still had almost $200 in the account. With no beer and pizza he could manage until the end of the semester. He still had some money on his dining card.
And then what? The registrar expected $6,526 on January 4. Books were going to run a couple of hundred at least.
“I am so screwed,” John Sheppard said to no one in particular.
Thanksgiving was pretty bleak. It was him and his mom and David at the Tahoe house. Dad had gone on a Panama Canal transit cruise with Linda.
“You have to talk to your father,” his mother said.
“I don’t.” John stared into the stuffing.
Her voice choked, and he looked up. “John, I don’t have the tuition. I don’t have it. Our joint accounts are frozen pending settlement. When I met with my lawyer on Monday he said your father says he’s not going to pay it. That he’s not going to pay for your school at all because of the way you’re acting. And he doesn’t have to. Don’t you understand that? You’re nineteen. He has no legal responsibility for you like he does for David.”
John looked up. “He’s treating you like crap.”
“I don’t want to hear that language at the table.” She looked more like her old self when she said it, but with dark bags under her eyes where she wasn’t bothering with the makeup.
“Mom, he’s wrecked your life!”
She had always been frivolous. He’d always been kind of bored around her, since he got too big for kids’ games. She wasn’t interested in anything he cared about, and she was scared of skiing and hated golf. She couldn’t have named two women astronauts on a bet. But there was a stark kind of dignity in her face. “That’s already done, John. But I am trying to keep him from wrecking yours too.”
He took a deep breath.
“If you have to drop out of college you won’t be able to go back. Not for years. Lots of people say they’re going part time and get a job, but it doesn’t work, John. Things happen. Things come up. And they never finish. You have too much potential to waste that way. You have too much future.”