Once Upon A Time at College

Chapter Six

~*~

As they started down the stairs to the first floor, they met a small elderly woman laden with groceries. She was obviously having difficulty, and one of the sacks was about to spill its contents onto the stairs.

"Let me help you with that," Daria said, grabbing the top of the sack before it could spill.

"Oh, thank you, dear," the woman replied. "I don't believe I've seen you here before."

"I'm Daria, and this is Jane. We're moving into 301."

"Oh, then we're neighbors. I'm Mrs. Eiffel, and I live in apartment 302."

"Hi," said Jane. "Let me take that for you."

~*~

Twenty minutes later, Daria finally came within sight of the first floor at the bottom of the stairs. "Damn, she sure can talk! I think I can write her life story now."

"She's just lonely, Daria. There are a lot of old people like her. She's a widow, her friends are dead or in nursing homes, and her kids never visit. Whichever of us outlives the other is likely to end up like that."

"Gee, Jane, thanks for cheering me up," Daria groused as she knocked at the door of apartment 102.

"What I'm here for."

Mrs. Ward opened the door. "Oh, hi, girls, is everything all right?"

"Just fine. Can we move in any time?"

"You certainly can. Here are your keys, Jane, and here's some information you'll be needing, like how we handle utilities, and who to call to get your cable started, and high speed internet if you want it, and rules about loud music and making holes in the walls and such. Do you have any questions?"

"How about parking?" Jane asked.

"It's around back. The two spaces marked 301 are for you. Please don't park in anyone else's space, even if there's a car in yours. If that happens, come see Mister Ward or me, and we'll get it moved, one way or another."

"Great," said Daria, taking the offered brochure. "I don't suppose there's an elevator , is there?"

"I'm afraid not. If there's something you can't get upstairs by yourselves, Mister Ward will try to help you with it, but if it's too heavy for him, you'll have to find some strong young students to help. Bribing them with a beer usually works."

"Sounds like a plan," Jane smiled back at Mrs. Ward. "Be seeing you."

"Wait a second." Mrs. Ward disappeared and came back with a plate of cookies. "Have a cookie, and do read the brochure."

~*~

"Make a note, Jane. These are the good old days." Sighing contentedly, Daria surveyed the carnage before her. Heaps of spiky Snow Crab exoskeleton, like the shattered armor of slain demon warriors, littered the battlefield that lay between her and Jane. She forked a small bite of pecan pie, hoping that it wouldn't be the one that caused her to explode like an overinflated parade float.

Jane patted her belly and gave forth an unladylike belch. "So noted. Tell me more about this strange babysitting job-slash-scholarship of yours that made this orgy of gluttony possible. First off, why does Upchuck need a babysitter? Is he worse now than he was in high school?"

"God, I hope not, but he did get booted out of Halyard for patting some girl's butt. He starts at Raft this next quarter. His dad wants me to be a friend and good influence."

"And spy."

"Well… yeah."

"So, when is Third going to be showing up here? Just in time for next quarter, or earlier?"

"Second hasn't told me yet. I assume that Chuck will go back home, he and his dad will spend some time together, and he'll see some sort of counselor while he's there. But that could be an unwarranted assumption. His dad said something about making more time for him, but he also said something about needing to get back to Kazakhstan."

"Kazakhstan?!"

"He's involved in finagling a right-of-way for an oil pipeline."

"He owns an oil business?"

"Don't know. He owns a lot of companies. Pan Press is one. Ruttheimer Baby Buggy Bumpers is another."

"Hmm. Did he tell you anything to watch out for, or to be sure not to do?"

"Not yet. I'll add that to the list of stuff to ask him next time we talk, but I get the impression that Second doesn't know Third all that well."

Jane cracked a segment of crab leg and nibbled halfheartedly at the meat. "Mm. This is so good. I wish I had more room."

Daria smiled. "Aren't you worried about losing your spot on the BFAC track team?"

"Ha. I wish they had one. BFAC has hardly any athletic program."

"But you're still running, right?"

"I am now, but I didn't run much the last couple of months, because of the lousy weather. I think I put on a few pounds."

"Are your roomies in the garret complaining?"

Jane gave Daria a funny look, then smiled a little. "Not a bit. In fact, they cut my share of the rent in half, in exchange for doing half the modeling instead of a fourth."

"Hmm. Half the modeling. That would amount to about…what? Fifteen sessions a month?"

"About that," Jane said. It was actually somewhat more.

"A couple of hours per session?"

"Give or take."

"And they cut your rent from…?"

"A hundred a month to fifty."

Daria took another nibble of pecan pie. "So, you model an extra fifteen hours or so for fifty bucks. That's, uhh, three thirty-three an hour, or a buck eleven from each of them. Gee, Jane, that's very reasonable," she said, trying hard not to grin. "At those rates, I think I'll hire you myself."

"What? That can't be right!" Jane groped for a pencil, but found none.

Daria, still struggling to hold a poker face, handed her a pen. Jane began scribbling on a napkin, her expression growing darker and her face getting redder as she progressed. Then she stopped and stared at the napkin as if it were a cockroach that had just crawled onto her pie. "Those bastards!"

"Give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn't do the math either. Maybe one of them just made an offer that sounded good. Anyway, you did accept."

"Not everyone is a savant like you, Daria, or a polymath, or whatever you call yourself. I can't do that kind of math in my head."

Daria sighed sadly. "It's not your fault, Jane. When I was younger, I was surprised that everyone couldn't do it, but I realized that it's mainly because the schools just don't teach it. It's easy, once you know how."

Jane looked at Daria suspiciously. "So how did you do it?"

"Well, first, I doubled each number, to give myself easier numbers to work with. Thirty hours for a hundred bucks. That's still the same rate, see?"

"Yeah."

Then, since both numbers ended in a zero, I knocked a zero off both of them. Three hours for ten bucks. Once you get to there, you can see that it's three thirty-three an hour, without doing any more math."

"Huh. That is easy. But how'd you learn it, if not in school?"

"The basic techniques like that I worked out for myself, at times when I needed to figure something and didn't have a pencil and paper. Later, I found books in libraries that taught them, and other tricks I didn't know."

"Well, I'm gonna find one of those books, or get you to teach me. Damned if I'm gonna be taken advantage of like that again. I may be easy, but I'm damn sure not cheap!"

Daria smiled. "Come on, admit it, Jane. You love being an artist's model. It gives you that exotic, alluring, slightly wicked air. You love to walk across the campus and look at the other students and think, 'I model nude, and you don't know it.'"

Jane tried to look angry, but one corner of her mouth turned up a little. "I hate you."

Daria smiled. "What I'm here for. So, what shall we do now? Assuming we can get up and waddle out, that is."

Jane looked at her watch. "Well, there's time to move one of us into the apartment."

"Good idea. Do you want to go first, or do you want to spend one more night with your bunkies?"

"Do you want to snort this crab leg? Hell, yes, I want to go first!"

"Dooming me to a long, drawn-out goodbye scene with Charlene. Well, I'll go wash up and pay up. You can get the tip."

~*~

Charles Ruttheimer the third gazed out the window. Off to the north, probably almost a hundred miles away but seeming much closer, a line of thunderstorms lit the north Atlantic with reddish purple flashes of lightning. From his vantage point, he could see hundreds of miles of the storm front, so there was a lightning bolt visible somewhere along it almost constantly. He wondered why the bolts didn't look bluish the way they did when seen from the ground, but the peculiar tinge was unmistakable. Charles grinned in the semi-darkness of the cabin. The gods on Mount Olympus never had this good a view. He made himself a promise that no matter how much he flew later in life, he'd always ask for a window seat.

This was the next to last, and the longest, leg of his journey home. They'd taken off from Frankfurt this morning and had breakfast over France, and the plane had outrun the dawn and caught up with last night. The cabin crew was starting to serve lunch now, and he'd eat dinner while still over the Atlantic. Then they'd land at BWI, and he'd get his bags, go through customs, and maybe be back in Lawndale in time to watch the same dawn for the second time.

As Charles continued to watch the magnificent display of Nature's power, he could almost feel the minus sixty degree cold outside the plane's fuselage, just a few inches away. He listened to the muted hissing roar of the slipstream past the window, and felt as much as heard the screaming moan of the jet engines with their multiple harmonics. His father was always jumping on a jet and taking off on transcontinental or transoceanic trips. Charles wanted to do likewise some day. He wanted to repeat this experience--- frequently.

Well… not the whole experience. Going to Kazakhstan with his father had sounded like the adventure of a lifetime, and it had been fascinating in spots. It was hands down the most different place he'd ever been, but it was a poor, dirty, benighted place, its cities blackened by many years of burning low-grade coal and clogged with trash that the people seemed unwilling to dispose of, as if afraid they might need it. The land was almost all flat desert, dotted seemingly at random with the black tents of nomads, occasional oil derricks, and what seemed to be abandoned military installations. What crops there were required irrigation, and what little road traffic he saw was mostly Mercedes Benzes, overloaded buses, and donkey-drawn wagons on old car wheels.

Charles had been enjoying the trip for the sheer novelty, and for the chance to spend time with his father, even if a lot of that time was spent cooling his heels in shabby waiting rooms, or sitting alone at a table sipping tchai while his father conferred with local functionaries or shady fixers two tables away. Or just gazing out the window of the company Mercedes as the drab Kazakh steppe flowed past and his father pored over reports and made notes on the other side of the back seat.

But then he'd been seated cross-legged on a cushion inside a black nomad tent woven of goat hair, trying his best to look both alert and unobtrusive while his father and some nomad sipped tchai and nibbled sweetmeats and apparently exchanged pleasantries. And then suddenly he'd been in the Land Rover, just him and his luggage and the driver, heading to the airport. And then he'd been on the tiniest jet airliner he'd ever seen, made by Fokker, no less, on a hop to the main airport at Almaty, and before he could say 'merhaba,' on a Turkish Airlines flight to Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, and another one to Frankfurt.

For the fiftieth time. Charles thought back to what his father had said- just "Get in the Land Rover," and his expression when he'd said it. He still couldn't decide whether that was his "Do exactly what I say with no questions" expression, or his "You're in big trouble, boy. Don't make it any worse." expression. Charles couldn't think of anything he'd done or failed to do to incur the latter expression, but that was no guarantee that his father was of a like opinion.

On the other hand, maybe his father had suddenly sensed danger of some sort, and acted swiftly to get him out of harm's way. But if that were the case, why would he have stayed behind? Was he that confident of his ability to deal with the problem? Was danger that routine to him? Charles had once thought that his father might be a covert operative for the CIA or some more secret government agency. Recently he'd kind of gotten away from that theory, but he'd' never found any hard evidence either way. A pretty good circumstantial case could be made for it, though. His father frequently traveled all over the world, including rougher places than Kazakhstan.

Charles wished yet again that his dad had taken a few seconds to tell him what the situation was. He wished he'd taken more time before the trip to read up about the land and its people. It was a big country, bigger than any in Europe, over half as big as the continental U. S. Before he'd been whisked away, he'd learned that there were several tribes of nomads, and there were descendants of the Mongols who'd ruled Asia for most of the middle ages. Then there were the Kazakhs, or Cossacks, the largest ethnic group, and there were some Russian-descended people, and some Uzbeks in the southern part of the country. But he knew very little about what these people were like or how they got along with each other. And he had very little idea of what his father's present situation might be.

A growing ache in his neck forced him to turn from the window. He refocused his attention on the paperback he was holding. Charles was happy that new authors were continuing to write James Bond novels, and he liked the charming urbanity of the modern Bond, but there was a certain gritty lethality about the original Ian Fleming Bond that the new one seemed a bit short on. He tried to pick the story back up from where he'd left off.

The seat in front of him made a tweedly noise. Charles looked up and saw an LED blinking on a phone handset built into the seat back. It took him a few seconds to remove it and find the place to press to answer it. "Hello?"

It was, of course, his father. "Trip okay so far? Good," he began, not waiting for a reply. "Here are a few things I didn't get to tell you before you left." Before you threw me out of the country, you mean. "You have an appointment next Monday at one p.m. with a Doctor Millepieds at a place called Quiet Ivy. It's about thirty miles south of Lawndale. He knows you start at Raft next quarter and he'll work out a schedule with you. He's the best man in the area, so give him your full cooperation."

"Father, are you all right?"

"Of course I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be? Are you going to make that appointment?"

"Yes, sir." There'd be hell to pay if he didn't show up, Charles knew.

"When you land at BWI, a CIA officer may want to debrief you."

Charles's eyes opened wide and he stiffened in his seat. "What?"

"Don't get excited. It's not unusual for them to question travelers returning from certain parts of the world, and Kazakhstan is in one of those parts. He or she might ask if the people seemed restless or hostile, or if you saw anything unusual, for instance."

"Pretty much everything I saw was unusual for me."

Charles Ruttheimer the second chuckled. "Then tell them that. Give them your full cooperation. The government considers a pipeline out of here that doesn't go through Iran or Russia to be in our national interest. The person you talk to may or may not know who you are, and what I'm working on over here. They might be interested in any number of other things, from crops to radioactive waste dumps. Just answer their questions as well as you can."

"Okay. I still wish we could have gone to Baikonyr Cosmodrome. I might have seen something interesting there."

"Maybe next time. They just have a visitor's center and a short bus tour. Not nearly as interesting as Houston. Anyway, there are NASA people working there full time now, so the CIA won't be asking you about Baikonyr."

"Mm. So how are things going back there? How's old Ugly Buckaroo?"

"Ugluz Bukhoro. I managed to smooth his ruffled feathers, but it cost me a camel, three goats, and a case of mint jelly. You owe me."

"How so? I didn't ruffle his feathers."

Yes, you did. He saw you looking at his daughter."

"Huh? I didn't look at his daughter any more than I looked at his hookah or his rugs or his gilded camel saddle. I think he just saw a chance to gouge you. Anyway, there was nothing visible of her but her eyes and her fingers, and a couple of toes for a second."

"Aha. See, you were looking. Chuck, you have to be very sensitive to religious and cultural things like that when you're dealing with people so far out of the cultural mainstream. The very fact that they cover their women up so thoroughly should have told you to be extra careful not to stare at them."

"I didn't stare, dammit!"

"By his definition you did, and when you're on his turf, that's the definition that counts. To us he may be a poor, primitive, ignorant nomad bossing a not-very-large extended family, living in tents on land no one else wants. But, practically speaking, he controls a sizeable stretch of the steppe out here, and bad things would happen to the pipeline if we put it through without his blessing. Understanding stuff like that and being able to deal with people like Ugluz is why the oil consortium is cutting me in for a piece of the action."

"That and the fact that you own the Black River Pipeline Telemetry company. Okay, let me know when you'll be back home, and I'll have the camel, the three goats, and the mint jelly waiting. I wonder what Mrs. Standish next door is going to say."

What might have been a chuckle came over the phone. "You'd better not. What you owe me for is having to help eat the roast goat."

"Ewwww!"

"It's not too bad with mint jelly."

"My eww stands. Seriously, dad, did I really mess up so bad that you had to send me home?"

What might have been a sigh came over the multi-satellite linkage. "Not really. Ugluz has sons, one about your age. He knows how boys are. The daughter was the problem. She's been of marriageable age, as they reckon it, for two or three years now, and I noticed the looks Ugluz and his wives were throwing back and forth. I decided it was best to get you out of there. You would have had to go back pretty soon anyway, because you have stuff to do back in the States before spring quarter starts at Raft."

"So… you'll take me with you on other trips?"

"As long as you're doing well at Raft and it doesn't interfere with your education, and the nature of the trip permits."

"Great! I really enjoyed the trip… what there was of it."

"I did too, son. Maybe we can complete the next one as planned. I can't guarantee that, though. Something always comes up. Now, a counselor will be arranged for you in Boston, and your Raft student advisor has agreed to spend extra time with you to help you with any school-related problems."

"That's nice."

"Something the matter?"

"No. It's just that…"

"You don't know anyone there?"

"Yeah. I guess I'll meet people." Yeah, like I did at Lawndale High. Making friends is not one of my major skills.

"Well, there's one freshman at Raft whom you do know."

Huh? Someone I know got into Raft? Can't be Brad or Brett, they're doing their first year at Oakwood Community College, to save money. Not Jodie or Mac, I know where they're going. Who else do I know who could get into Raft?

"I've arranged for this person to help you settle in to life at Raft, and to help you with your studies should you require it. I don't expect that you will, but Raft does have high academic standards."

Who the heck does Dad think can help me academically? There were only two students at Lawndale high with that kind of brainpower, Jodie and Daria. Can't be Jodie, and Daria would never…

"I understand she graduated with a 4.5 grade point average, and won an award for academic achievement."

She? Award? "Daria?!"

"Daria Morgendorffer, yes. I want to make it very clear that there will be no fanny patting or any other form of unwanted advance on your part toward Daria, her friend Jane, or for that matter, anyone else. Understood?"

Daria! The divine Miss M! The mega-feisty one! Goddess of Intellect, dark queen of my dreams! And she has somehow agreed to… help me? Oh, be still, my wildly beating heart!

"Understood?"

"Huh? Oh, yes, absolutely! How did you…"

"Believe me, it was not easy. Listen, I'm about to lose this uplink. Details of these arrangements will be emailed to you. Print it out and keep it with you. You know how to reach me if you need to. Stay out of trouble. Bye."

"Take care of yourself. Goodbye, Dad. Thanks!"

Charles replaced the handset and stared straight ahead of him with a look of blank, open-mouthed astonishment. It began to soak into his consciousness that somehow, in the last couple of minutes, his life had taken a sharp, skidding turn for the better. His father wasn't angry with him. And when he arrived at Raft, there would be a familiar face waiting. No, two. Jane Lane would be there, too. Ah, now he remembered. Jane was attending BFAC, which was also in Boston. But that wasn't important. Daria was there! Daria was attending Raft! He was attending Raft! They would attend Raft together! Charles's astonished expression slowly changed into a big silly grin, drawing a worried look from a flight attendant.