The Plaza Zaragoza went wild. Men threw hats in the air. Others threw their signs in the air. Still others cursed when those came down-they were heavy enough to hurt. "Freedom!" some shouted. Others yelled, "ЎLibertad!"
Rodriguez shouted in Spanish, then in English, and then in Spanish again. Which language he used didn't seem to matter. The Freedom Party had won. Jake Featherston had won. That made him feel as if he'd won, too.
Someone started a new chant: "Nothing can stop us!" He gladly joined in. How could he not believe that, when it was so obviously true?
Armstrong Grimes didn't want to get out of bed. He mumbled and tried to stick his head under the pillow when his mother shook him awake. "Get up!" Edna Grimes said sharply. "Annie's already eating breakfast. You don't want your father coming in here, do you? You'd better not, that's all I've got to tell you."
He didn't. With a last resentful mutter, he got to his feet and went into the bathroom to take a leak and brush his teeth and splash cold water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to decide whether he needed to shave. He had his mother's long, oval face, but his coloring was darker, more like his father's. "Hell with it," he said to his reflection. He'd shaved the day before, and at sixteen he didn't have much more than peach fuzz to begin with. He also had pimples, which made shaving even less fun than it would have been otherwise.
Back to his room. He put on a checked shirt and a pair of slacks. He would rather have worn blue jeans, but his father wouldn't let him get away with it, not when he was going to high school. Some of his friends wore dungarees all the time. He'd pointed that out to his old man-pointed it out in loud, shrill, piercing tones. It hadn't done him any good at all. Merle Grimes wasn't a man to bellow and carry on. But once he said no, he wasn't a man to change his mind, either.
With a martyred sigh, Armstrong carried his three-ring binder and the books he'd brought home the night before out to the kitchen. Annie, who was four, was making a mess of a bowl of oatmeal. Armstrong's mother had a plate of scrambled eggs and toast and a glass of milk waiting for him. His father was digging into a similar breakfast, except he had coffee instead of milk. "Morning," he said.
"Morning, Pa," Armstrong answered. Breakfast resigned him to being up.
Then his father had to go and ask, "Did you get all your homework done?"
"Yes, Pa," Armstrong said. As much of it as I understood, anyhow, he added, but only to himself. His junior year, which had started two weeks earlier, hadn't been much fun so far. If algebra wasn't something Satan had invented to torment indifferent students, he couldn't imagine what it was.
"You'd better keep your grades up, then," Merle Grimes said. He could do algebra. Armstrong gave him a resentful look. His father could do algebra with effortless ease. What he couldn't do was show Armstrong how he did it. Because this is how it works, he'd say, and wave his hands and cast a spell (that was how it looked to Armstrong, anyway) and come up with the right answer. And when Armstrong tried waving his hands… he'd add when he should have subtracted, or he'd forget what to do with a negative number, or he'd just stare at a problem in helpless horror, with no idea how to start it, let alone finish.
His father got his pipe going and worked his way through the newspaper. He didn't have to get to the office till half past eight, so he could take his time. Armstrong had to be at Roosevelt High at eight o'clock sharp, or else the truant officer would start sniffing around. That meant he had to gobble his breakfast-no great hardship for a sixteen-year-old boy, but he didn't like getting up from the table while his old man lingered.
Annie waved good-bye. His mother called, "So long, son," as he went out the front door. His only answer was a grunt. As soon as he got around the corner, he lit a cigarette. The first drag made him cough. He felt woozy and lightheaded and a little sick; he was just learning to smoke. Then his heart beat harder and he felt more alert. He enjoyed that feeling, even if it wasn't the main reason he'd started smoking. People he liked smoked. So did people he wanted to be like. That counted for more.
He smoked two cigarettes on the way to Roosevelt, but made sure the pack was out of sight before he got to the campus. Smoking there was against the rules. The principal had a big paddle in his office, and he wasn't shy about using it.
"Morning, Armstrong," a boy called.
"Hey, Joe," Armstrong answered. "Can I get some answers to the algebra from you?"
Joe shook his head. "I don't know how they do that stuff. I'm gonna flunk, and my old man's gonna beat hell out of me."
"Me, too," Armstrong said dolefully. He still had a couple of periods to go before he had to turn in the math homework, such as it was. He didn't look forward to English literature, which he had first, with any great enthusiasm, either. Memorizing chunks of The Canterbury Tales in the original incomprehensible Middle English wasn't his idea of fun. But getting walloped because he didn't do it also wasn't his idea of fun, so he tried.
English Lit did have one compensation. He sat next to Lucy Houlihan, a redhead who had to be one of the three or four prettiest girls at Roosevelt High. That would have been even better had Lucy had the slightest idea he existed. But she didn't. She had a boyfriend: Frankie Sprague, the star tailback on the Regiment. Still, she couldn't shoot Armstrong for looking at her, as long as he didn't drool too much while he was doing it.
The textbook, naturally, didn't include "The Miller's Tale." Herb Rosen, one of the class brains, had found out about it, and started whispering. By the time the whispers got to Armstrong, they were pretty distorted, but the piece still sounded juicier than anything the class was studying. He wondered why they couldn't read the good stuff instead of boring crap about sweet showers.
A trail of sniggers ran through the class. "The Miller's Tale" would do that. "And what is so funny?" Miss Loomis inquired. She was a tall, muscular spinster with a baritone voice. She didn't use a paddle. She wielded a ruler instead, with deadly effect. Nobody said anything. The sniggers didn't stop, but they did ease. Miss Loomis looked at the students over the tops of her half-glasses. "That will be quite enough of that," she declared, and got on with the lesson.
As soon as Miss Loomis turned back to the blackboard, Lucy asked Armstrong, "Why is everybody laughing?" She hadn't heard, then. Well, some guys would be shy about saying such things to a girl.
Armstrong wasn't shy about anything-and having Lucy notice him for any reason at all was a reasonable facsimile of heaven. He gleefully told her everything he'd heard about "The Miller's Tale." Odds were, Chaucer wouldn't have recognized it. It was still plenty to make Lucy turn pink. Armstrong watched the blush in fascination-so much fascination that he didn't notice Miss Loomis bearing down on him.
Whack! The ruler scorched his knuckles. He jumped and yelped in pain. Miss Loomis fixed him with a glare that would have paralyzed Jake Featherston. "That will be enough of that," she said, and marched back up to the front of the classroom.
Lucy, damn her, didn't even say she was sorry.
He was glad to flee English Lit for government, even though Miss Thornton, who taught it, was almost as big a battle-axe as Miss Loomis. She didn't look so formidable, being round rather than tall, with a bosom about the size of the USS Remembrance. But she was a stickler for detail. And, naturally, she picked on him. "Why is the new Confederate Constitutional amendment so important?" she demanded.
"Uh," he said, and said no more. He remembered his father saying something about the amendment, but couldn't remember what to save his life-or his grade.