Chapter 1

Friday, May 18

I’d been waiting for this night for weeks, if not longer.

My last final exam wrapped up in mid-morning. The typical bureaucratic nonsense — checking textbooks back in, making sure lockers were cleaned out, etc. — occupied most of the afternoon until the final bell finally rang.

And just like that, my junior year of high school was over!

Now, I could look forward to what would likely be my last summer of freedom. Next year would be taken up with college prep stuff and the ‘rents had hinted strongly that a summer job would be a good way to earn my spending money for when I did matriculate somewhere. But I had my own plans for this summer. Hanging out at the country club pool (and ogling all the attractive female flesh on display) topped the list, but it would be Memorial Day weekend before the pool opened for the season.

Until then, I had a whole week to kill and no real plans.

Allow me to introduce myself: Garrett (Gary) Robinson, almost 17, almost ready to take on the world after the victory tour that will be my senior year. I was the elder child in a typical suburban family of four that could have come straight from central casting — Mom, Claire (an accountant by trade); Dad, Doug (owner of a real estate development company); me, and younger sister Kacie (just finished her sophomore year). About all that was missing was the dog and cat. Mom and Kacie are allergic.

We lived far enough out from the nearby big city (i.e., home to teams in all four major professional sports; big-time DI colleges close by; lots of cultural stuff like symphony, opera, museums, and an airport from which you could fly nonstop to almost anywhere worth going) that we weren’t overwhelmed by urban decay and/or renewal, but close enough in that it didn’t take a plan rivaling the D-Day invasion to go do something. Unless Mom was doing the planning.

Which reminds me, I need to check the local baseball franchise’s schedule for upcoming homestands. Yeah, the basketball and hockey playoffs were in full swing, but our local teams were nowhere to be found. The football team wouldn’t be doing anything but minicamp and OTAs until heading off to training camp in July.

In case you missed it, I was kind of obsessed with sports. It helped keep my mind off all the girls I was already (unwillingly) keeping my hands off of. Not that I was some kind of lecher, just a 16-year-old guy with hormones and all that entails.

I wasn’t a jock by any means, although one of my best friends, Jed Richards, was the starting center on the football team. At 6-foot-4 and 270 pounds, I thought of Jed as huge. It was a bit of a shock when he told me recruiters for big-time programs had advised him to add another 30 pounds before his upcoming senior season.

To that end, Jed convinced me during our freshman year to join his after-hours weight training at his home to serve as his spotter. Mondays and Wednesdays for upper body, Tuesdays and Thursdays for legs. That required me to lift a bit myself so I would be able to wrangle the 250 pounds he regularly bench pressed if necessary (he maxed at more than 400 during offseason workouts at school, but that was with other linemen spotting; our sessions were more about getting reps to increase stamina).

Where Jed could bench 10 reps of 250 pounds in a matter of seconds, I slowly worked my way up past 150 and pretty much maxed at 200. A bonus for me was increased muscle definition after several months of helping Jed. I wasn’t a body builder, but I wouldn’t be ashamed to take my shirt off at the pool this summer.

I should mention that our high school of more than 3,000 students regularly pumped out athletes who received college scholarships in most sports, including a number of DI signees. But even as a “country club kid,” I wasn’t going to crack the golf or tennis lineups. I just really liked watching sports and attended as many high school, college and pro games as time, money and the parents would allow.

As for girls, I wasn’t a total spaz. I’d dated a bit over the past year, convincing a few girls to accompany me to the occasional pro ballgame, but never really clicking with anyone. Apparently, I’d gained a bit of a reputation as a “safe” date who stopped when told (this information courtesy of my sister, who was more plugged in to the social scene than I). When it came time for the big events — Homecoming, Winter Formal, prom — I received plenty of attention from girls needing an escort. For your typical Friday or Saturday night movie date, not so much.

I’d taken Jenny Evans to prom just a month ago and thought things went OK. We’d had a couple of “warmup” dates before prom, but she always had something else going on every time I tried to ask her out after that.

Neither was I a nerd, music/theater enthusiast, stoner, metalhead nor member of just about any other clique you could find in our part of the world. I got decent grades, making the A-B honor roll, but was never in danger of being in the National Honor Society, which produced almost as many scholarship recipients as the athletic programs. I was just a face in the crowd, though a face that some people occasionally recognized.

Our house was your standard rancher in a subdivision not too far from the country club as the crow flies, but if you wanted to drive you had to go almost as far in the opposite direction to reach a road that would allow you to get there. That Dad’s company developed the subdivision and country club more than a decade ago gave us a good in with the neighbors as far as socializing goes. It also allowed me to prowl the area during my younger days, discovering all the nooks, crannies, hidey holes and shortcuts a guy could want. I could hoof it to the country club in almost the same time I could drive it (assuming I had a car to drive) and never cut through anyone else’s property.

To say we were comfortable financially would be accurate. But Dad, with his rural upbringing and blue-collar outlook on life, did his best to impress upon me the importance of a strong work ethic. If I wanted my own car, I could work for it. That basically meant laboring away on one of his contractor’s construction crews. I’d helped out on the odd weekend here and there in the past, but got this strange feeling that I would have a better chance of keeping all my fingers attached by avoiding some of the power tools and other equipment they used. I’m not saying I’m clumsy, but I knew better than to take unnecessary chances.

Dad still kept me (and Kacie, for that matter; she helped in the office from time to time) on the payroll for insurance purposes. That meant I had to put in a certain number of hours per quarter, and it was never anything like sweeping up around headquarters. I always got sent to do real work involving lifting heavy objects. I guess that was another unexpected benefit of lifting weights with Jed.

If I’d wanted, I probably could have gotten a job at the club in one area or another — Mom was on the board — but the club kind of shied away from hiring members’ kids who may or may not actually do any work. I’d passed the Red Cross lifesaving class, but the club mostly went for college kids as lifeguards. The golf and tennis pro shops were more about retail merchandising than actually helping people play those sports. The restaurant and bars also leaned more toward college kids what with serving alcohol and all. I probably could have got on as a busboy or dishwasher.

So, there I was about 6 p.m. on a Friday night in May, kicking back on the sofa in the family room and flipping through the channel guide to see if anything interesting would be on TV tonight. Mom and Dad had some function at the club and Kacie was visiting one of her classmates who lived a couple of streets over. None of the ball games on the east coast were all that appealing and I probably wouldn’t stay awake for the ones on the west coast. Most of the movies on basic cable would be heavily edited and I’d already seen most of them, anyway.

The folks had loaded up the TV in the family room as well as all our computers with the parental restrictions to keep us ... well, me ... from viewing “inappropriate content” before I even got into junior high. It took one of my buddies about 30 seconds to show me how to circumvent such controls before my parents had even paid for the cable and internet installation.

I didn’t bypass the restrictions often, especially since Mom liked to check occasionally to make sure the settings were as she intended, but this would be a good time to watch some Skinemax-type movies once the sun went down. So what if they were a little thin on plot and character development?

Sandwiches, chips and whatever off-brand soft drinks Mom had in stock were enough for supper, then I got ready for a serious workout of flexing my thumbs on the remote. I stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers, making sure the school clothes were in the laundry hamper, grabbed the afghan off the back of the sofa to cover my lower body and stretched out. I really don’t remember any of what I watched. Even the local PBS station was kind of blah (it was usually good for an episode of Nature or Nova, but tonight was some kind of quilting/baking marathon; my grandmothers would have loved it; one of them had crocheted the afghan).