Free Bursting Bubbles by Dyan Sheldon Page B

out of the shrubs in the park. If it were Dr Kilpatiky asleep in that chair, Georgiana would be very tempted to push her through the window. Not for the first time in her life, Georgiana wonders why she’s always being punished for things she didn’t do.
    As she stares out of the window, her last bit of optimism dissolves like sugar in water. It’s now that Georgiana might think of the words of Dante Alighieri describing hell.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
.
    But she doesn’t. She’s thinking that, on top of everything, there’s no view of the ocean, either.

Chapter Eight
Asher Is Dragged Away from His Career Strategy with Something of a Vengeance
    Albert Grossman likes to boast about his son. There are no concerns about sex or drugs or rock and roll where Asher is concerned. No teenage inertia or teenage angst. No moodiness or sullenness. No plummeting grades or dropping out. Albert never worries about where Asher is or what he is doing. He knows where he is: working. He knows what he’s doing: more than anyone else. “He’s a chip off the old block,” Albert Grossman always says. “Being a high achiever’s in his genes.” This is an understatement. If achievement were a mountain range, Asher reached the summit of the lowest mountain when he took his first summer college course in seventh grade. And never looked back. Five years later, Asher has a 4.0 GPA, is president and will be valedictorian of his senior class, and is involved in enough extracurricular activities to keep six-normal achievers busy, including fencing, archery and martial arts. (Albert Grossman, who was once attacked by an investment banker, learned the hard way that even a corporate lawyer has to know how to defend himself.) Saturday mornings, when other boys are still sound asleep, Asher has his kung-fu class. After today’s class he has his first session at the community centre. You couldn’t say that he’s looking forward to it.
    Right now, the high-achiever is sitting in his car in the small, potholed parking lot behind the centre. Or, as Asher thinks of it, the supermarket. Asher is preparing himself. Mimicking a crane hasn’t given him quite the physical and spiritual strength he needs to meet the do-gooders and the do-nothings of Queen’s Park, so here he sits, sipping black coffee from an insulated mug, feeling sorry for himself and running through a mental checklist to make sure he has everything he’ll need to get him through the next hour and a half.
    He does. At least he’s pretty sure he does. It’s all on the seat beside him in his leather messenger bag – which is what high-achievers with presidential ambition use instead of a backpack. Usually it holds his laptop and school things, a bottle of spring water, several energy bars, a bag of trail mix, breath spray, tissues, a travel toothbrush and toothpaste, a roll of dental floss, several individually wrapped hand wipes and a spare pair of socks. Today the laptop has been left at home for security reasons (he’s sure someone at the centre will steal it) and been replaced by a bottle of antibacterial hand gel and disposable latex gloves (he’s sure the centre has enough germs to wipe out Los Angeles).
    He sighs. Asher’s always been lucky, although he doesn’t think of it as luck, of course. He thinks he gets no more than he deserves. But he doesn’t deserve this. Of all the possible assignments the computer could have given him, why did it give him this one? Maybe Georgiana’s right. Maybe Dr Kilpatiky rigged the whole thing. Trying to teach them all a lesson. Bureaucrats have small and petty minds.
    Asher’s watching a plastic bag wave in the branches of a solitary tree like a flag of truce and thinking of texting Will to meet him for lunch when the alarm on his phone goes off. Time to go in. He makes sure that he’s also set it for an hour and half from now (time to go out), and steps from the car and crosses the lot with the lightness of step of