Chapter 3
Some people are just attracted to the bad boys
They love impulsive men, thoughtless men,
Men whose problems they can try to fix,
and in some cases men with no problem hurting them.
Oh, how Olive Specter wished her problems with men were so small.
She was grateful that her niece seemed to have avoided the problems with men that she had. Still, she feared for the girl constantly, especially as long as she lived in the same house. Everything from a common cold to her boyfriend Johnny Smith was cause for alarm. Olive had nothing against Johnny, but men, especially impulsive young men, could bring heartbreak for a young girl of Ophelia’s melancholic humor.
It was with these two specific fears that Olive broached the subject of college to her niece once again.
“So, my dear, have you given any more thought to where you’d like to go to college?”
Ophelia sighed, an effort that seemed to exhale the life from her whole body. Olive held her breath until Ophelia inhaled again.
“I don’t know if I want to go… I mean, it’ll be all these people I don’t know…”
“You like meeting new people,” Olive reminded her, thinking back to the days when Ophelia was a little girl who would have to be watched, lest she approach strangers and try to make friends every time she was out. But that was when her parents were still alive.
“Yeah, but not on my own…” Ophelia shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and looked for anything in the old house to hold her gaze except Olive. “I was thinking, you know, Johnny’s not going, so maybe I’ll just stick around with him.”
“Ophelia, Ophelia! You know better than to plan your life around a boy!” The rebuke stung, mostly because Ophelia knew it was true. “Did I ever tell you what happened with my high school sweetheart? I would have followed him anywhere when I was your age.”
“You told me. But that’s got nothing to do with Johnny and me. I mean, we’re not even engaged. Isn’t it a little early to be worrying about whether he leaves me at the altar?”
“Exactly. You’re not even engaged, and yet you’re planning your life around him. Even if he wants to spend his life with you, sometimes people get taken from us sooner than we’d like and--”
“I know,” Ophelia glared at her aunt. She knew she was talking about her second, third, and fourth husbands, or first, second and third, technically, as Earl had never married her, but it was hard to take when her aunt condescended to her like she’d never lost loved ones.
“Of course,” Olive pursed her lips and was silent for a moment. “I just want to see you making choices for yourself, not for someone else.”
“Then let me make them! If I want to stay in town and get a job, I’ll do it!” Ophelia put a foot up on the furniture, knowing it would irritate her aunt.
“Do you have any plans at all? Are you planning on staying here indefinitely? Because I’d sure like to know about that.”
Ophelia frowned, “Maybe I’ll move out and live in a cardboard box. It’s my choice.”
Olive knew her niece was being facetious, but seethed all the same. “Don’t waste your life. I paid too high a price for it,” Olive hissed from behind clenched teeth, then beat a hasty retreat into the south wing of the house.
---
"Seriously,” Ripp continued, “your mom is a fine specimen of the female form. If Jill grows up to look anything like her, let’s just say I wouldn’t mind talking her talking my ear off about dolphins. Did you know they’re one of the only other species that has sex for pleasure?” Ripp waggled his eyebrow suggestively.
“Ripp…” Johnny winced like he’d been stabbed in the gut.
“What? I’m talking about in the future, when she’s an adult. That’s not pedophilia, it’s imagination!” Ripp looked up, registering for the first time that Johnny was looking past him. A shadow fell over Ripp, blocking the desert sun. Ripp cringed and turned around.
“Hi, Mr. Smith.”
“Johnny, your mother needs your help with dinner,” Petey turned his gaze toward Ripp, who started to get up, too. “You stay Ripp, I need to talk to you.”
Ripp swallowed hard, “I didn’t mean anything, sir. I just wanted to get Johnny’s goat. He’s so easy to fluster. It’s like the school counselor says: I’m just at that age, where I just want to provoke a reaction and don’t really think things -“
“Enough,” Petey looked at Ripp seriously. Ripp shifted uncomfortably. Usually Petey was jovial, seeing him stern-faced emphasized how alien he was. “You work at the refueling station down the road, correct?”
“The gas station? Yeah?” Ripp was happy to turn the conversation anywhere that wasn’t Johnny’s little sister, but unnerved by Petey’s unusually formal speech patterns.
“Are they requiring more workers?”
Ripp was confused, “Yeah, Karl just quit, so my boss, Joel, has been looking for someone. But most of the shifts are during school hours, so I don’t think he’d hire Johnny.”
“Does you employer require documentation?”
“No, I’m pretty sure Cesar gets paid under the table. Why?”
“Could you get me a job there?”
Ripp blinked. “Uh, sure. Probably. Hey, Joel’s working right now. We could go over and I’d introduce you.”
---
Ripp arrived home late for dinner. He walked in and sat down, offering no explanation for his truancy. Mac and cheese. Standard Grunt family rations.
Buck ate neatly, in small ‘birdie bites’ as their mother had taught them, but darted the spoonfuls quickly into his mouth, revealing the love of food that caused his paunch.
Tank ate like a prisoner, shoving food into his mouth with one arm, the other arm stationed around his bowl, blocking other inmates from taking his cheesy bounty. Ripp wondered where he’d picked this up, the cafeteria at school wasn’t brutal enough to require that kind of vigilance, and his brother was a big guy, unlikely to be picked on.
Ripp sat down across from his father began to eat his mac and cheese. “Dad,” he said, swallowing a bite, “do you love me enough that you’d take a shitty job and give up a life of leisure if I wanted to go to college and it was the only way?”
General Buzz Grunt was never quite knew what his middle son was thinking, but this provoked more questions than most. Some of these questions were: Since when do you want to go to college? Why would I stop being a general and take a menial job? Are things really so bad between us that you doubt I'd make sacrifices for you?
Tank eyed the discussion interestedly, but maybe just seeing if they were a threat to his food.
Unable to decide between these questions, the general said what came easiest, “Watch your mouth. I don’t want you using that kind of language around Buck.”
“Yes, sir,” Ripp knew better than to argue.
The general went back to his mac and cheese. After a few moments of silence he bit. “When did you start caring about college, anyway?”
“I dunno. I was just thinking. It seemed like a good opportunity.”
“College is an opportunity,” Buzz nodded thoughtfully, “but it’s an opportunity you have to do something with. Tank’s going to study languages or counterintelligence, and be an officer when he graduates.” Ripp stifled a comment about how Tank had always countered intelligence. “The military needs translators. It’s a fast track to success. So college helps him. The way you’re going now, you look like you’re going to be a great gas station attendant whether I send you to college or not. So how will college going to help you? You come up with something, and we’ll talk about it.”
Ripp knew his father well enough to know this was the best he was going to get out of him. If he had a plan, he got to go to college. Maybe. As the general went back to his dinner, Ripp noticed him lean forward and put his other arm around his bowl in a familiar protective motion. Figured.
---
Petey returned home just in time for dinner.
Jill was the first one to greet him.
“I’m helping with dinner!” she said. While her apron lent credibility to her story, the fact that she was gesturing to it with a videogame controller made him think otherwise.
He smiled as Jenny’s jaw dropped when she looked up. “Look at you!” She hugged him tightly, then broke away to look at his new uniform.
“I got a job at the gas station,” he explained. “I work during school hours, but I’ll be off work in time to walk Jill home from school. What do you think about that, Jill?”
“I like it,” she said, suddenly shy because of the commotion.
“Thank you so much, Dad,” Johnny was overwhelmed at the lengths his father would go for him.
“For what? Your mother and I decided a long time ago that you were going to go to school. I just had to get a job to help provide for the new baby.” Petey smiled. He turned to his wife, “I want you to know I would do anything for this family.”
---
Meanwhile, Ophelia was having a different kind of reunion with her immediate family. She sat out in the yard beside her parents’ graves.
Replaying in her head what Olive had said, she knew her aunt was right, which made it very hard to be a contrary teenager. Johnny was great to her, but with someone so familiar and comforting around all the time, she had to admit that she less inclined to venture out on a limb and meet other people. She’d done very little meeting of new people in the past few years, now that she thought about it. The idea of college as a new place where she didn’t know anyone was enticing.
Dirt crumbled through her fingers. Could she hold on to the memory of her parents, while creating an identity for herself that wasn’t rooted in their death? Yes, but it would be undoubtedly easier in new surroundings, and without familiar people tying her to her past.
She heard the iron gate creak, and for a moment expected to see her parents when she turned around.
“Fight with your aunt again?” Johnny had picked up on Olive’s disapproval of him, and disapproved right back. Ophelia could tell it was tough for him though. Not only did it go against Johnny’s natural respect for authority, and therefore adults, but Johnny didn’t know how to be a hero unless someone was the bad guy, and Aunt Olive was - for all her weird quirks - a decent caretaker.
“Yeah,” Ophelia sighed.
“What about?”
“Not important,” she looked at Johnny, picturing how hard it would be to say goodbye, but also how much she needed to get out of the patterns she’d set for herself in Strangetown. “She was right anyway.”
“I hate it when they do that. It makes it so hard to be self righteous.”
“I know!”
Johnny’s eyes glowed, excitement or simply an alien feature, Ophelia didn’t know. “I’ve got big news,” he said. “Want to hear?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to college,” he broke out in a grin. “My family really came through on this. My dad’s going to work while Jill’s at school, and my uncles are chipping in too.”
Ophelia had to smile. This was how Johnny’s life went. All problems could be solved with a hug and within twenty-two minutes (plus commercials). Sometimes, when Ophelia went over to Johnny’s for dinner she swore she could even hear the laugh track.
“Just think, next year we could be at Fiesta La Tech!”
“Oh. I was thinking of Academie Le Tour.”
“They’re pretty exclusive,” Johnny swallowed. There was no way he would be accepted, even if his mother would let him go that far from home.
“There are, but I think I’ve got a good shot. My grades and test scores are good, and I count toward a couple of quotas elitist private schools are bad at filling.”
“Quotas?”
“I’m an orphan, and I’m a person of color,” Ophelia explained.
“Oh,” Johnny wondered when green had stopped being a color. “Well, if that’s where you want to go.” Johnny moved closer to her, his elation at going to college dampened by the idea that it didn’t guarantee he’d be with Ophelia.
“Yeah, we’ll see what happens,” Ophelia agreed. Johnny was one security blanket it was going to be hard to do without.
---
Several weeks later, Pascal sat at his desk, reading a second rate science fiction magazine. He felt terrible. He was irritable all the time, lethargic, and gaining weight in a way he hadn’t seen since Lazlo’s freshman year of college. He hadn’t been on a date in months, not that that was too out of the ordinary. He was getting out of this rut, he decided. And he knew just how to do it.
Experimental quantum topologist Pascal Curious was getting his groove back, research style. There was a theory he’d been working on, several years ago, which he had dismissed as being too “out there”, despite the overwhelming number of questions it could answer. Now, he decided, after being abducted by aliens, it was time to consider extreme possibilities. He’d set up the first interviews for his theory first thing tomorrow morning.
---
Notes: I expect everyone recognized the first bad boy, but recognizing all three is a little game that probably only amuses me. The greaser is maxis made, the punk is maxis made, and the cowboy is the child of two maxis mades. I'm hoping to have less of a pause between this chapter and the next one, because I've already got a lot of the scenes lined up. Also, for those curious, topology is different from topography, and Pascal's research topic is going to be somewhat fictionalized and strangetownified from topology that one might actually study.