In another part of the school, Calvin was standing by the edge of a driving practice track, fidgeting nervously. Summer Cove High had a comprehensive Drivers Ed. Programme, and most of the kids got their licences through it. Living in California, where land space was rarely an issue and buildings tended to be a lot more spread out, combined with a questionable at best public transportation system meant that learning to drive was virtually a career necessity for the modern generation, almost as much as mathematics, computer skills and literacy were. It was just another reason that Calvin knew it was a good idea to learn to drive, but that didn't make him feel any less terrified about this.
He had loved cars and loved engines his whole life. His mom was a mechanic, and had a small business in her own garage where she would do repairs for the locals who couldn't go to a bigger chain. Mostly patch jobs and suchlike that would extend the life of their current car just a few more months.
She couldn't bring herself to be away from her son and pay a stranger to look after him while she was working, so he had virtually grown up in the garage, watching his mom working. While other kids were read fairy tales by their parents, a young Calvin would be put to sleep by the soothing sound of his mother explaining the finer points of the internal combustion engine. He had graduated to Meccano sets while most other kids were still working on Lego, and he was working on actual engines when most kids stopped playing with toys altogether. His mom would let him do small repairs and cleaning on components for a little extra pocket money.
When it came to driving though, that was where he had the real issue. The bizarre thing was, he was fine riding in a vehicle with others at the wheel. Hayley had driven him around even before they started dating. He understood that it was a phobia, that his fear was irrational. If anything, he was in MORE danger when someone else was behind the wheel. His safety and his fate were entirely in someone else's hands, but whenever he sat in the driver's seat, whenever he had his hands on the controls, all he could think about was that fateful day.
He had told his friends about it now, but the truth was he pieced most of what happened together after the event. He had been in a go-kart, having begged his parents to let him go to the track. After working on engines and seeing his mom work on engines so long, he had naturally wanted to start driving, to see them in action. However, the speed of the kart got away from him, and other, more experienced kids could see he was struggling and would "buzz" him, passing him incredibly closely to make him nervous. On one of these passes, he had panicked and ended up steering through a restraining wall that wasn't able to restrain him and he and the cart ended up in the nearby duck pond. The cart had flipped and landed on top of him trapping him beneath the surface of the water. He was under so long before his father and one of the attendants managed to get the cart off him and get him out, he had actually stopped breathing. He was lucky to be alive, but since then, whenever he got behind the wheel, he found it difficult to breathe, and he found himself imagining all the horrendous things that could happen to him.
"WOOO HOOO!" He heard Brody call out from the car on the track as he went past. The Red Ranger seemed to be having a much simpler time of this than he was. He was enthusiastic about learning to drive, but it didn't help him in the slightest. He could really live without seeing how easy Brody was finding this whole process.
"How is he learning so fast?" Calvin asked, seeing the way Brody flew around the course in the instruction car without a care in the world.
"Hey, Cal. Ease up." Hayley told him, nudging him gently. "It'll be fine."
"Hayls, I'm here aren't I?" He asked her.
"Yes, and so am I." She assured him.
"This is...this is a bad idea." Calvin said, beginning to make a move to leave. "I know the bust timetables, I can..."
"Tell you what; it's a four-seater. How about if I ride in the car with you?" She asked him. "Would that make you feel better?"
"Add another casualty maybe." Calvin grumbled.
"Hey, it's a sealed course..."
"So was the go-kart track!" He argued.
"Do you see a duck pond anywhere near here?" She asked him. "Cal, I'm sure you'll be fine. Just...give it a try alright?"
Just then, the car pulled up to the curb and Brody came out, smiling.
"That was EPIC!" He called out. "I think I'm about ready for..."
"Fail!" The instructor told him in somewhat broken English. "You go too fast, you no signal on turns, and you run stop sign."
"Oops." Brody said with a shrug. "Well, I guess that's what practice is for. You're up Cal."
Calvin gulped as the instructor showed him into the car. He noticed Hayley was about to get in too.
"One at a time." He told her. "You no drive..."
"Um...I already have a licence." Hayley told him. "I was just wondering if I could ride in the back for some moral support."
The instructor looked between them and just shrugged.
"No disturb Elena, she sleeping." He told her, gesturing to the back. Hayley opened the back door of the car and was surprised to see a cat lying curled up in the back seat. She took care not to disturb her as she got in and fastened her seatbelt. Calvin got into the car and started to go through his checks.
"Set mirrors, good, put seat to good position with knees slightly bent, good, seatbelt on, good. Now, gently pull out from curb."
Calvin started to move. However, as he started to move, the instructor just yelled something in his native language that caused Calvin to slam on the breaks and stall the car, throwing all of them forward.
"What is it? What did I do?" Calvin stammered.
"You no signal!" The man answered. "Signal when pull out from curb!"
"What the HELL!" Hayley yelled at him. "You even gave me a heart attack! Did you really need to call out like that?"
Calvin and the instructor looked to her, looking a little surprised, but just shrugged and turned back to what he was doing.
"Pull away." Instructor told him. "This time signal."
Calvin took a deep breath, before flipping on his turn signal and moving out.
In the nurse's office, the school nurse was taking a close, careful look at Victor's hand. Victor was looking decidedly pale as she checked it out. Preston was sitting a little way off, looking rather worried. In the same week, one of his tricks had caused a mass panic at the school, while another one had ended up with Victor impaling his hand. A second visit to the Principal's office in as many days was NOT going to go over well with his dad. Sarah was sitting in the corner, flipping through a report, reading it. The nurse turned Victor's hand over in hers, before sighing and starting to pack gauze around the nail penetrating his hand and starting to tape it in place.
"Well, that's a hospital job for sure." She told him. "I'll call someone to take you there."
"Aren't you going to pull it out?" Victor asked in horror. The nurse just looked at him.
"Right now the nail is sealing the wound, if I pull it out you start bleeding again." She explained to him. "I think I'll let the hospital deal with that."
"It's all his fault anyway!" Monty snapped, pointing at Preston in an accusatory way.
"MY fault!" Preston protested. "I told Victor not to touch it!"
"You tricked him with that...trick!" Monty protested, even when he couldn't think of a logical argument. "He couldn't have known there was really a nail there!"
"That's the point of the trick dumbass!" Sarah said in an exasperated tone.
"But...but...we were sure he palmed the nail..."
Preston reached to Victor's hand, going to the block of wood the nail was in. He pulled something off, showing it to them.
*"There's a small piece of fishing line taped to the base with the nail in it." He explained. "It's hardly visible to the audience, but when I see that, I always know where the nail is! I never take the nail off the table!"
"But...but...but Victor..."
"Victor was so intent on ruining Preston's show that he didn't stop to listen to Preston warning him about the fact it was dangerous!" Sarah told him. Just then, Principal Hastings came into the room.
"Mr Tien!" She addressed Preston, before gesturing with her finger for him to follow her. Preston gulped and followed her.
"I'm coming too!" Monty told her, gathering up his things. "Don't worry Victor; I'll make sure he pays!"
With that, the three of them left the room. The nurse finished wrapping up his hand, before shaking her head.
"I swear you kids get dumber every year." She commented, pulling off her gloves. "I'm going to bring around the car, and if you even THINK about bleeding on my upholstery, what happened to your hand is going to seem like a gentle hug!"
As she left, Victor sighed and looked to Sarah, who was sitting in the corner.
"Go ahead, you know you want to." He grumbled. Sarah just looked to him.
"Want to what?" She asked him.
"Gloat." Victor muttered. "I know you love seeing..."
"Hey, I might not like the way you treat people, and yes, I might like it when things backfire on you and you get taken down a peg or two, but if you think I like seeing people get hurt, you really don't know me at all."
"Really?" He asked her. "Even though I was messing with your friend..."
"Hey, I hate it when you mess with Preston's shows, but watching someone impale themselves is not my idea of a proportional punishment." She answered.
"I guess that's fair." He answered. "What are you reading anyway?"
"I'm reading your lab report." Sarah told him.
"You're not still banging on about that are you?" He asked. "So Monty does some of my homework, is that really such a big deal?"
"Oh, I didn't mean the one Monty wrote, I'm familiar with his work. He's the only one who can beat me on some of the assignments." She told him. "I was talking about the one you wrote."
"I need to re-do my reports to make sure no one knows I'm copying." Vince said with a shrug. "It would look a bit odd if all of my homework was handed in written in Monty's handwriting and identical to his."
"Oh, I was sure you'd have to do that. You'd also have to make a few mistakes to make sure no one got too suspicious when your scores are equal to Monty's." Sarah stated. "But re-writing the report would take you at least some time, and I saw Monty give you that report before...well...this happened. So the only two ways I can think of you being able to have another copy of the report this quickly was if you had someone else get you a copy too, or if you wrote it yourself."
She put the report down in front of him.
"You have no right to..."
"For what it's worth, it's pretty good work, I'd say it's a solid B+, which I think is about your average isn't it?" She asked, ignoring his protests. Victor just sighed and put the report away.
"I never hand in Monty's work." He told him. "It's like you said, what's the point getting him to do all my work? It's not like he'll always be there to do it for me."
"So why is he giving you homework at all?" Sarah asked him. "Why haven't you told him to stop?"
"Because...I don't have the heart to tell him to stop." Victor admitted. "I helped him out of a jam once, and we've been friends ever since. He kind of felt like he owed me so he started doing my homework. He feels like he owes me."
"So you used him..."
"Like I said, I've never handed in any of his work." Victor told him. "But after four years, it's kind of hard to convince him..."
"FOUR YEARS?" Sarah interrupted him, her eyebrows shooting up. "He's been doing your homework for four years? What the hell did you do, save his life?"
"Does it matter?" Victor asked her. "None of this is any of your business anyway, so unless you plan to turn me in to Principal Hastings for NOT cheating on my homework, can we just drop it."
Just then, the nurse came back in.
"Alright genius, time to go." She told him. Victor reached across, taking the lab report from Sarah and putting it in his bag before putting it over his shoulder.
"Alright, let's do this." Victor answered, before heading out with the nurse. Sarah sat alone in the office for a moment, curious about what she had just found out. Before, she had thought that Victor either forced or convinced Monty to do his homework to coast through High School. He was a superficial jerk who didn't care about whether or not he earned the qualifications that would one day land him a job that someone who had actually worked for the position would miss out on, but seeing his copy of the lab report, it looked like he was a pretty decent student in his own right. He only let Monty keep doing work for him out of some strange charity to Monty, who felt like he owed him. Could she really have been so wrong about him? Was there more to Victor Vincent than she knew?
Back at the Driver's Ed. Course, Calvin was finding the whole experience a lot more terrifying than he had originally believed. The car just seemed to move so fast when he was in the driver's seat compared to sitting in the passenger's seat. He knew it was perception, but it was almost as though as soon as he was aware of something he was practically on top of it.
"You run red light!" The instructor told him. Calvin just groaned, realising that this was either the fifth of sixth serious error he'd made, errors that would instantly fail him on a driving test. "Gear change work better with clutch, you try to wreck car?"
Calvin could hardly keep up. As soon as he was dealing with one thing, it seemed like another thing needed to be done right now! It was like the world's most complicated busy box, but with potentially deadly consequences.
"You no put on turn signal." The instructor told him. "Speed up."
"Speed up; slow down, will you make up your mind?" Calvin lashed out. The instructor just glared at him.
"Concentrate on road, not me." He told him. "STOP!"
Calvin looked up in time to see a wooden board, on which a school bus was painted moving out in front of him. He hit the brakes, throwing everyone in the car forward, but still too late and he hit the board. Just for good measure, the engine stalled. Calvin leaned back and his eyes rolled back in his head.
"Congratulations, you hit bus, everyone on board dead." The instructor stated.
"Don't you think you're exaggerating just a little?" Hayley asked, rubbing her neck. The instructor turned in his seat to glare at her.
"Boyfriend hit bus." He reiterated. "He dead, you dead, me dead, Elena..."
He noticed that the back seat next to Hayley was empty.
"Where Elena?" He snapped. He started grumbling and speaking in a language Calvin didn't recognise.
"Look under the seat genius." Hayley heard a voice say. She shook her head, she was hoping the voices were going away, but here she was, hearing another voice that didn't belong to anyone in the car. The only thing she did know was that these voices had never led her wrong. She started to look under the front seat. "The OTHER seat!"
Hayley reached under the seat opposite her and carefully dislodged the cat from there, beginning to make soothing sounds at it.
"Good, at least one of you can take simple directions." The voice said again. The instructor reached back, grabbing the cat.
"Both of you, get out!" He barked at them. Both Calvin and Hayley got out of the car, before slamming the doors shut. "You menace on road!"
"You're...you're right." Calvin muttered morosely as he looked to the ground. Hayley was starting to get impatient, especially seeing him being attacked by his instructor.
"And YOU are meant to be a teacher!" Hayley yelled at him. "Maybe Calvin would respond a little better if you weren't constantly screaming at him!"
"Your boyfriend drive us into bus..."
"He drove us into a PLYWOOD SIGN!" She corrected him. "That's why you have a practice course, so he can make mistakes while he learns without putting anyone in..."
Calvin had heard enough and stormed off. Hayley just sighed.
"Cal, wait up." She told him. "CAL!"
"Good Riddance." The instructor grumbled in response. Hayley turned back to him, an enraged look on her face.
"Don't worry, I'll teach him myself if I have to!" She snapped. "Asshole!"
As she ran to catch up with the Yellow Ranger, the instructor held his cat closely and started stroking it, whispering to her in a comforting way.