Tides of the Heart (Crestwood Chronicles #1)

Chapter 15

Two weeks before the start of the semester, I embark on the long, uncomfortable public transit voyage back home to visit my parents. The wealthy area in which they live is four hours away by car, but three times that by bus and rail.

It's an obligatory visit, another stipulation imposed by my dad, and not much fun for any of us.

My mom makes an embarrassingly big deal of my arrival, but she has no real interest in my studies and quickly runs out of new things to say, while my dad criticizes everything from the length of my hair to the scuffs on my shoes. He tells me I looked like 'a real hobo' when he saw me step off the bus, and that he hopes I've learned the value of a solid paycheck by now.

Both of them more or less ignore me after the first night, leaving me wondering why they insist I make the effort, but at least I have Hazel and my upcoming classes to occupy my mind.

The only bright side is that I see how much I've outgrown the box my parents tried to keep me in, and that even if I wanted to, I don't fit it any more. A lot of that growth is very recent, and thanks to Hazel, but he's the one part of my life I can't share.

At the end of the week, my dad surprises me, offering to drive me back and saving me 12 hours of trouble.

When I accept, he surprises me again by engaging me in conversation, though this is a less welcome offering.

"You know, Mike Dunn's daughter is in the same program as you," he begins, once we've been on the road for a while.

"Who?"

"Mike—the realtor. The one with the yacht."

"Oh. Right." I have no idea who he's talking about, and I also don't care.

"Don't know why he's wasting money on her education—females are only there to meet a husband, you know, and they'll drop out of the workforce as soon as they get knocked up, anyway."

I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, but somehow manage to keep my anger in check.

"Anywho, he's all for it. Apparently, he's already got her a job lined up for an oil company doing offshore drilling. It's big bucks." He whistles. "You should look into it. Mike offered to set you up, too."

Stunned, I say nothing for too long.

"Charles, are you listening? That's a nice offer, don't you think?"

"Dad... I want to study paleoclimatology. Do you know what that is?"

"Does it pay well?"

"I... I don't know. Probably not."

"Well, there you go. Never heard of it."

"It's the study of pre-historic climate change. I want to study paleoclimatology so I can help better understand the changes happening to our planetary climate today, which is in large part caused by the oil and gas industries."

He makes a dismissive noise and waves his hand. "You've just disproved your own point. If it happened in the past, it's a natural process, not something we can do anything about."

Sighing, I sit back in my seat and give up. There's no point arguing, or trying to explain how the evolution of the first oxygen-producing cyanobacteria nearly wiped out all life on earth 2.7 billion years ago, or how the Deccan Traps—massive eruptions of magma in what is now India—resulted in climate changes that may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The point isn't that it's happened before; the point is that when it happens, it's bad news for a lot a species—especially dominant species, like our own.