Chapter Four – Part 2
As Allison walked home, her morbid introspection began to diminish.
It was Friday, and she was free of Heights High for the rest of the weekend. That thought helped her get over her funk. It was a beautiful day, the sky blue, the sun shining, and the air so cool and clean that it crinkled at the edges. After a while she was kicking her way through mounds of raked leaves, humming a Lady Gaga tune and surprising herself with exactly how good she did feel the further she walked from school.
She still couldn't help thinking about her history project as she walked down the hill. Ten pages comparing the French and American Revolutions. Ten pages in a single weekend.
Once she thought past the oppressiveness of Counter's History class, she admitted she could do it. Half the job was making the paper literate, and no matter how many classes she'd missed, she had her classmates beat in that area. Over the summer she had managed to write ten chapters of a romance novel. It was horrible romance novel that embarrassed her deeply, but against those hundred pages or so, ten seemed no big obstacle, especially when half the grade was spelling and punctuation.
It was close to four when she got home. By now she was smiling and had almost convinced herself to dig the novel out of the closet and make an attempt to finish it. She had decided against it because there was no way she could do anything on top of Counter's paper this weekend, and— more important— she had stopped writing in the middle of a steamy sex scene that she had never finished.
She blushed slightly whenever she thought about it. Restless Nights would wait a little longer.
Instead, she planned out the paper. She could probably get by on common knowledge and common sense. Counter's class was bonehead history, and if she got the grammar and the dates right, he'd have to pass it.
She would have to fudge the bibliography a bit—
Rhett and Scarlett, two thirds of the feline population of the house, attacked Allison as soon as she let herself in. Scarlett butted her ankles and purred while Rhett jumped on a chair by the door, better to nose into Allison's backpack as she unshouldered it. When Allison put the pack down, Rhett's black form managed to disappear entirely into it, spilling books and notebook paper.
Allison didn't put down the history text that she'd clutched to her chest all the way home. The muse was upon her and, if she struck now, she might be able to crank out at least a rough draft of her paper before sunset. She might manage to have some of her weekend free.
After a side-trip to the kitchen to grab a box of Low Salt Wheat Thins, she went upstairs to the study.
The study was half hers, half Mom's. Allison had no idea what her mom used it for. There was a bookshelf and a filing cabinet on Mom's side of the room, all of it a little too neat. Allison's mom was an accountant, a profession that Allison found so boring that she rarely asked for any specifics. The bookshelf was filled with books as dry and impenetrable as Allison could imagine. Economics, business, accounting, taxes, Ugh.
Opposing Mom's neat half, was Allison's part of the room. There was a tiny desk from Allison's grade-school days, still bearing multicolored Crayola scars. Piled on top of it were cardboard boxes of dog‑eared paperbacks; westerns, romances, mysteries. Piled on top of them was a riot of lined paper and spiral-bound notebooks. Piled on top of that was Meowrie Antoinette— Allison had been six when she'd named her— the matriarch the felines. Old tufts of white cat-hair coated all of Allison's homework.
Allison gently petted Meowrie to let the cat know that she was there. Meowrie was older than Allison, nearly deaf, and blinded by milky cataracts. Meowrie made a half-purr, a sort of catlike sigh, licked Allison's thumb, and went back to sleep. Allison liberated her history notebook from the pile while trying to disturb the old cat as little as possible.
Her mom's souped-up HP sat alone on an austere table with only its peripherals for company. She cracked the notebook to the page where she had copied the assignment and set it down next to the keyboard. Allison flicked on the PC and began typing with one hand, digging in the Wheat Thins box with the other.
By seven-thirty Allison had managed to print out ten pages of airy but well-written essay that only needed a few footnotes and a bibliography to get past Mr. Counter's requirements. It was the kind of thing that Allison suspected drove Mr. Counter nuts— a technically perfect vacuum of an essay.
She shouldn't have been so pleased with herself, but she smiled anyway. The way Mr. Counter graded, the paper rated a C as is. With a little polish, anything less than an A would mark an obvious personal vendetta on Mr. Counter's part. It would count, in some twisted way, as a moral victory.
