Legend's Apprentice

School

When I got back to the city, I took the family photograph to a professional and had a restored copy made for me and one for Bucky, and bought nice frames for them. I gave Bucky his the next practice I had. He gave me a hug.

"Sorry I didn't think of it before," I told him and kissed his cheek before going to the treadmill to warm up. He put it prominently on his desk.

I went shopping for school supplies with my friends; I was taking English, Calc 2, US history, Lifetime Sports, Physics, French 2, a psychology class, and study hall. Thanks to my aunt and uncle, all I needed for gym was a swimsuit and shoes, and we hit Target for pens, pencils, notebooks and binders, new highlighters and colored pencils, mandated stuff to make up for tight school budgets, like reams of printer paper and dry erase markers, and things for our lockers, like kleenexes and hand sanitizer. I got a couple of wire organizers for my locker door and some extras--a small bottle of aspirin, sore throat lozenges. My friends teased me about these; we weren't supposed to have medication or give them to friends, but everybody did it covertly anyway. "Just wait til you need them," I said airily, and Rill and Karen bought their own. Aslyn just said she'd raid my locker. I also needed a better calculator and got some replacement cartridges for my printer at home. Then we went clothes shopping, which was a lot more fun.

We went to Coney Island before school started. We had a blast. Then it was time to buckle down. We had a new French teacher this year, one of the ones who assigned you a French name. We rolled our eyes, but she also did more with culture, according to the syllabus, which sounded interesting. We also had to speak only in French during class, which sometimes sucked. My English/French dictionary immediately got a workout and class volunteerism took a nosedive. I met with the guidance counselor, who recommended waiting til I was a senior and taking CLEP tests for calculus, French, history and English, since I was in Honors English and history and would probably be able to take AP English in senior year. It would be less expensive than taking classes. If I put extra work in, I could take some SAT tests for science, although she warned me against trying to do too much and not doing well at anything on the tests. Since I also had to take the SATs and ACTs this year, we decided that I shouldn't try to take college classes until next year. I also had to decide where I wanted to go to college and start thinking about getting references lined up for next year.

College was starting to freak me out. I didn't even know what I wanted to study yet.
How do you make the best choices if you don't know what you want to major in? Aslyn knew what she wanted to do, Rill was leaning toward finance, and Karen, depending on if she could get a place in a company or not, wanted to do something allied with the arts if she went to college instead. All I could say for sure was that I was pretty certain I wanted to study science.

Fortunately, I had work as a soothing constant. The oldest lab assistant had quit to go to school somewhere outside of the city so we were down to three of us, but all it meant was that I always had work, and I tweaked my habits to maximize my efficiency. I overlapped Thursday with the other two guys, which was a pain because they talked a lot, making it hard to focus. I started making that the day I did most of the glassware since it minimized the time I had to spend in the prep lab. And on the days that I worked, I always had practice with Uncle Bucky and cookies with Aunt Emma to look forward to.

A couple weeks after school started again, my uncle's eyes twinkled when he met me at the door to the training complex and led me over to the wall of mirrors where the weightlifting equipment was. It had been rearranged, and Uncle Bucky hit a switch on the wall. I watched in wonder as the mirrored wall spit out a six foot barre and the rubberized coating on the floor retracted to show a wood floor beneath. "You said you missed dancing," he said gently. I bit my lip to keep from tearing up and gave him a big hug. "Natasha'll also be using it, maybe others if they get interested." Of course, I didn't have any dance things, so I just took off my shoes and socks and took my place at the barre, running through the exercises. My uncle was smiling until he saw my feet.