Author's Notes: This is part two of a series. I'm not sure how long this series will be, but I'll keep it coming.
Feedback: Is always appreciated. :)



So, Jed Bartlet pretty much lectured through the entire morning session. And, to tell you the truth, I'm not one hundred percent sure he wasn't just making those numbers up. But I digress. Making the numbers up or not, he was still pretty damn impressive in there this morning. Most of the other guys probably had no clue what he was talking about. I was barely able to follow him there for a few minutes.

Anyway, he's eating lunch with his dad this afternoon, and I'm making tater tots in my undershirt because once again, I didn't have time to change out of my only dress shirt and tie.

I can't help but be slightly jealous that he's got a dad to eat lunch with. Jed doesn't seem to like him too much. I didn't like my dad too much either, but now that he's not around, I do miss him. I don't miss taking all the beatings so he wouldn't hit Josie, and I don't miss listening to my mother cry herself to sleep every night, but there's something kind of sad about not having a dad around.

At least when Dad was around, I could make up stories. 'Yeah, Dad and I went fishing this weekend,' or 'Yeah, Dad took me to a football game.' None of the guys at school knew that Dad was usually drunk in the living room for the better part of the day. They knew he was a drunk, but that wasn't exactly abnormal in our little Quincy neighborhood. It was abnormal if your dad wasn't down in the pub with everyone else's dad after work. But when your dad is dead, there's no room for embellishment.

Tater tots weren't popular at lunch today. I don't think I would have eaten them either. Nothing in this cafeteria has been exactly appetizing, but I really can't complain. I dump what's left of them into the garbage, grab my shirt and tie, and head out the back door for a little fresh air before our afternoon session.

It's warm outside, surprisingly enough, since this is California in August. I never do adjust to the weather in a new place. I've got Boston in my blood. I fold my dress shirt up and sit down against a tree in front of the lecture hall. I get a couple of approving looks from some co-eds. Probably just because I'm sitting down though. Working construction all summer got me well tanned, muscular arms, but I didn't grow an inch. If I were standing up, they wouldn't have given me a second glance.

Where the hell is Jed, anyway?

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Leo looks like he's about to doze off as I approach from my lunch with Dad, or as I like to call him, Jackass. Jonathan has never understood why Dad and I seem to fight all the time, but then again Jonathan is everything Dad could ask for in a son. He's tall like Dad, he's an average student like Dad was, and he plays football, like Dad did. In addition, Jonathan decided not to be confirmed into the Catholic Church, and Dad wasn't too upset about that either.

Jonathan calls me a Mama's Boy. And after today's particular argument, I don't really mind it so much anymore. Sometimes I wonder how my mom was ever able to teach me anything with all the negative brain washing that my dad tries on me. 'You're at this school because I'm the headmaster, and you're Catholic because your mother is.' How many times have I heard that line?

I've decided to go as far away to college as I can stand. As long as I can get myself there, I really won't need to worry about coming back.

I look down to see Leo watching me.

"How was lunch?" he asks.

"I wouldn't call it lunch so much as I'd call it a battle of wits," I smirk. "A battle for which my father was grossly unprepared."

Leo laughs.

"How was kitchen duty?"

"Greasy," he says, standing up and slipping back into his dress shirt. I reach up to straighten my tie as we walk over to the lecture hall. "What were you two battling over?"

"He's going to move to strike the segregation debate from the docket," I sigh. "He says there will be fist fights and general unrest."

"He should have seen you in action yesterday," Leo chuckles.


"There has to be unrest or nothing is ever going to change, Leo," I say. He nods. "This debate is going to happen whether it's on the docket or not."

"I'm with you," Leo says. I open the door to the lecture hall and he disappears into the crowd of other guys.


***********************************************************


The rest of the day passed pretty slowly. Missouri talked about funding for roads and highways all afternoon. I was bored to tears, but I glance over at Jed, and he's sitting there listening attentively and taking notes. Taking notes! This kid is a geek.

Dinner duty passed quickly because I only had to set out the desserts. I ate dinner with the guys from Massachusetts. Jed disappeared right after afternoon session ended and I haven't seen him since. Maybe he tried to eat dinner with his dad and talk some sense into him.

One of the Massachusetts guys was excited about segregation debate, and the other guy didn't object to it, but didn't openly voice his support. It's a sticky topic, and there are going to be words flying in that lecture hall. I've decided to bring the topic up, because Jed's gonna get his ass kicked enough just for being seen with me after this debate starts. He doesn't need the added bonus of being the scapegoat for the issue.

After dinner we had the option of going to hear a Congressman from Georgia speak, but I decided to skip. It's all rhetoric, and the man is a racist. I wasn't much in the mood for racist rhetoric, so I returned to my room and picked up my well-worn copy of The Works of John Locke. I must have dozed off because Jed scared the hell out of me when he burst into the room.

"Leo! Get up!"

I had to peel my face off the book I'd fallen asleep on.

"Where have you been all day?"

"I went to the library," Jed began, pacing the room. "I've decided to bring up voting rights in tomorrow morning's session. Are you ready to get beat up?"

"When am I not?" I smile.

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Leo looks genuinely confused as I burst into his room. He sits up and looks at me, a nice imprint of the margin of his book down the middle of his face. If he had more hair than that crew cut I'm sure it would be sticking up in every direction.

"Poll taxes, literacy tests," I say, pacing the floor. "It'll set everything off."

"How are you just going to bring this up?" Leo says, stretching.

"We're discussing making the legal voting age eighteen tomorrow morning," I say. "But do we really need to be discussing the age when millions of people in this country are denied the vote based on the color of their skin?"

"And I assume you'll just blurt that out as soon as you get the floor," Leo says. "Which, might I add, is going to be difficult for you to regain after this morning's economic lecture. The guy sitting next to me will filibuster before he lets you have the floor again."

"So, you yield the floor to me. Shouldn't be hard to do at all," Jed says, sticking a cigarette into his mouth.

"Why don't you let me bring it up? Alabama is already angry with you. One of them is going to jump on you when I'm not there to piss them off," Leo says. He looks concerned.

"You think I'm afraid of them?"

"No, but I think you should be. People have been strung up for far less than voicing their opinions on segregation," Leo says.

He's right. I'm sure plenty of the guys from the southern states have family members that own their own white sheets. I bet some of the delegates themselves are actually Klan members. They hate us enough because we're Catholic, but they'll hate us three times as much when we take the side of the blacks in America.

"I know, Leo. I know," I sigh, exhaling a huge puff of smoke. I wonder if we're supposed to be smoking in the dorms.

"Have you ever seen a lynch mob in action, Jed?" Leo is sitting up now, running his hand over the closely cut hair on his head.

I shake my head in response.

"One of my mom's sisters lives in Atlanta. We went down a couple summers ago to visit. My dad and my uncle heard about a Klan rally somewhere outside of town, and went to watch. They didn't actually participate in the rally, obviously, because they're both Catholic. But they were both despicably racist. I followed them, because I didn't have much else to do. All my cousins are girls, and none of them play chess," Leo pauses and I chuckle at the notion of him trying to teach a six year old girl how to play chess. "Apparently a black family from Maryland had moved into a farmhouse outside the city because the father had gotten a construction job in Fulton County. The construction company he was working for had gotten a couple of jobs over a white construction company, and the Klan was plenty mad about it. But what set everything off was that the mother of the family was in the market and bought the last decent cantaloupe or something. One of the Klansmen's wives was in line for the fruit and was stuck with a bruised cantaloupe. So, she went home and complained to her husband, who found it despicable that this black woman had been shopping at the same roadside market. So, this rally pretty much fired everyone up, and they walked three miles in the dark with torches to this little farmhouse out in the county. My father and uncle followed behind them, in the shadows, and I followed behind them."

Leo looks like he might throw up. He stops for a minute and takes a deep breath.

"They get to this little farmhouse and set up the traditional burning cross in the front yard. Then they yell and scream for the father to come out. Finally, someone broke free from the group and kicked the front door in. They dragged the father out of his house and into the yard, where they spit on him and screamed at him for fifteen minutes. Then someone kicked him, and he just sat there. He just sat there on his knees in the yard and took it. That made them even more angry, and more people started kicking and hitting. My father and uncle got so worked up that they eventually rushed into the mob and joined in. Then I watched as my uncle produced a rope. My father helped hold the man down while several Klansmen threw the rope over the branch of a tree and tied the noose. They slipped the noose over the man's head and strung him up. While he was hanging there, they continued spitting at him and screaming obscenities," Leo pauses. All the color has drained from his face.

"And that poor man just hung there and took it until he finally died. His wife, his son and his two daughters were forced to watch their husband and father treated like an animal. I'll never forget the look on the son's face," Leo said, wiping his eyes. "It was like he'd seen evil in its purest form. And I think he had."

I'm stunned. Leo just sits there and stares at me.

"I ran away as the crowd was dispersing. When I got back to my aunt's house I spent twenty minutes throwing up in the backyard before I could go into the house. My mom and my aunt were sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in. I walked over, put my head in her lap, and cried myself to sleep. I've never been able to fathom what produces such hatred in people," he finishes. I don't know what to say to him.

"Leo," I say after a few minutes of silence. He looks up at me.

"My father shot himself in the head last winter, Jed. He and my mother had been arguing because I wrote a paper for school about George Washington Carver. He was drunk, of course, and looking for a reason to argue. He pulled my paper off the refrigerator and asked my mother how she could let her son write about such worthless people," Leo says, and I feel like he's staring right through me. "Mom got so angry that she called him a racist. She asked how he expected to be able to raise children with the prejudices he was harboring. Usually, a remark like that would get her slapped. But Dad just stood there for a minute and then left the house. I watched him go out to the garage from my bedroom window upstairs. I figured he would just go out there and drink himself stupid for the rest of the night. I turned away from the window and went to sit down at my desk, and I heard the gun go off."

Leo gets up and walks over to his small suitcase to pull out a bottle of something. He takes a long swallow and then looks at me again.

"I never even cried over it. He'd been dead to me since that summer in Atlanta," he says. I'm stunned. I don't know what to say to him.

"Jed, this is an issue that isn't going to go away. If I can just cast a little bit of doubt into one of those guys' minds, the ones from Georgia and Alabama, then getting beat up will be worth it."

"Leo-"

"I'm gonna take a nap, Jed. You wanna come up later and play chess?"

"Yeah," I say. I wish there were something I could say to him. But I'm completely at a loss for words. I watch him as he flops back onto the bed. He gives me a half-hearted smile and I turn around and leave him to his thoughts.

***********************************************************


I must have just scared the hell out of Jed. I don't think I'll forget the look of absolute horror on his face when I told him about the lynch mob. I don't think he's absolutely sure about what he's getting into. I just want him to know that once we take a stand on this, it's not going to be an easy three weeks for him. It might even be scary at times. I don't think he's gonna change his mind, not in the slightest. I just want him to know. These people will be out to stop us.

I'm so tired right now I can barely even think, and yet I can't fall asleep. I just lay here and stare at the ceiling. I wonder if there's anyone else in the world like me. Someone who'd rather read John Locke than shoot basketball. Someone who is kept awake by injustice in the world night after night. Someone who feels twenty years older than his actual age. I never thought I'd meet someone else like me.

But I just watched him walk out the door.

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I think Leo's sister may have a point with whole 'old man' thing. Leo is more of an adult than my father is. He talks like he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders; like he's the only person that wants to change anything. We both know that's not true; but he's got this stuck in his teeth.

I'm going to go up and play chess after a while; and he'll have switched out of political mode and not want to talk. But I think he should. He's obviously got all this pent up anger and disappointment and he's never been able to talk about it with anyone before. I don't think I'll let him drink too much tonight either.

The look on his face when he had to walk over to his suitcase and pull out the bottle of liquor was something like I've never seen before. It was a mixture of need and self-loathing. He knows he needs that alcohol, but he hates that he needs it at the same time. He hates that he's like his father in that respect.

I've never even tried alcohol aside from communion wine. My parents don't drink, and as far as I know Jonathan hasn't messed around with it. And here's someone who is only a year older than me, and he's already a slave to this stuff.

I've known this guy for two days and I feel like I've known him since I was born. Mom always talks about how it should feel that way when I meet the girl that I'm going to marry. I ask her if she felt that way when she met Dad. She's never answered me, but I can probably guess what the answer is. Girls can wait for now; most of them can't stand the sight of me, and the ones that can don't go out of their way to make conversation.

Right now I'm going to go upstairs and play chess with Leo. And I'm going to try and be his friend, if he'll let me. Because Lord knows we both need a friend right now.

TBC