Next morning during homeroom, Mrs. Jessup handed out more revised schedules, including mine and Arnie's. I still had a couple of the same classes, including first period Algebra, but most of my schedule was completely different. I was happy to see I still had Ms. Killian for biology, though at second period rather than fourth. I'd have fourth period lunch. She also gave us new bus schedules; they were working on adding new bus routes so the buses wouldn't be so crowded with the centaurs taking up more room.
Arnie and I compared schedules. "I'm not going to see much of you at school anymore," I said. "We should get together this weekend."
"Maybe I can get my brother to give me a ride to Will's house, and you could walk over there?" His brother, a senior at our school, had been out with his girlfriend on Valentine's Day and they'd both become Smyrna wolves. I wasn't sure if either of his parents could drive; they were both centaurs.
"Sure. Talk to Will about it." I wasn't whether sure Will had his new schedule, or if so, when and if I'd see him.
With the school allowing the centaurs five minutes extra to get to class, and a lot of kids getting lost trying to find their new classrooms, most teachers were postponing the start of their lessons by five minutes or even ten. I was pleasantly surprised to see Latisha walk into my algebra class only a minute late.
"I don't have assigned seating," Ms. Tang said to her and the other new people. "Sit anywhere that's not already taken." Latisha sat next to me.
"I emailed a couple of those bloggers you told me about," she whispered. "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
Ms. Tang had started reviewing the previous day's lesson as soon as the bell rang, so Latisha and I didn't have much chance to talk then, but she didn't get into new material until all the stragglers had arrived. After class, Latisha and I compared our new schedules. We both still had Ms. Killian for biology, but at different times of day; we also had P.E. together, third period, with Coach Renfrew.
"Do you know anything about him?" I asked her.
"My brother had him a couple of years ago," she said. "He's okay, it sounds like."
I had another pleasant surprise when Will came in to Ms. Killian's second period biology. We compared schedules before class, and saw that we'd have the same number of classes together, just different ones. Ms. Killian welcomed the new students, and reviewed what she'd talked about the day before, then continued her lesson on centaur anatomy.
I went on to P.E. from there, and had a nasty shock. The class was already full. Apparently, they'd taken advantage of the necessity for a massive rescheduling to organize the P.E. classes by neospecies. So there'd apparently be several classes that were all centaurs, and one or two that were all wolves, and one with all the ninth graders of miscellaneous other neospecies; there were more than thirty of us. There were a few kids I'd had other classes with, either here or in middle school, but most I'd never met.
The locker room was crowded, with almost twenty guys. Before class, when we were changing into gym clothes, I didn't have a problem; I just changed my outer clothes and kept the same underwear on. Most of us did. I worried that my underwear's failure to bulge where it should might draw unwanted attention, and thought about ways to fix that tomorrow, but that day it wasn't an issue; most of the guys were strangers to each other as well as to me, and there were several guys who were the only representative at our school, or at least in our grade, of some exotic neospecies; they drew all the attention.
I didn't have any chance to talk to Latisha; Coach Renfrew (who had a tail and webbed fingers like Tandy Shannon) split us up into four volleyball teams for two parallel games, and we were not only on different teams but in different games. I did manage to talk to Tyrone briefly, and he absentmindedly agreed that next Tuesday would be a good time to meet after school -- then he went back to chatting with Lindsey Babcock, who was also on our team.
After class, I couldn't get away with dawdling in the shower drying off and getting my underwear on behind the curtain. But I didn't let that stop me; I put my clean underwear on the moment I turned off the shower, then got out and dried off the rest of me before I put my other clothes on over the damp underwear. That would have drawn attention if there weren't so many more exotic things to look at, or studiously avoid looking at. There was the guy who'd been in my previous P.E. class, with tentacle arms, and another guy of the same species, who was less modest (or more of a showoff) than the guy I already sort of knew -- let's just say that wasn't the only part of his body that was long and multijointed. There was one guy who had two of them. There were guys with tails and scales and claws and even wings.
So I got lucky, nobody noticing or commenting on my excess of modesty. But I knew that couldn't last.
Will looked like he was in better shape than Monday or Tuesday, when I saw him on the bus that afternoon. I talked to him about maybe getting together with Arnie that Saturday, and he said he'd ask his Mom if it suited for us to come over.
When I got home, Mom was up and puttering around in the kitchen, not lying on the sofa, which made me feel a lot better about her. I put my backpack down and hugged her.
"The Barneses said they could give us a ride to church," she said. "How much homework do you have?"
"Not too much," I said. "I can do most of it during supper, and the rest after church."
So I just focused on the stuff I had to turn in Thursday, and didn't have time to check email or IM, or work on the project for Ms. Killian. The Barneses pulled into our driveway and honked their horn while I was washing up after supper. Mom rested her hand on my shoulder as we walked out to their car, but didn't lean on me as hard as she'd been doing.
It was a job to get Mom into their back seat, and then I somehow had to squeeze in next to her -- they had bucket seats in front. I was surprised to see Mr. Barnes wearing only sandals and shorts, and Mrs. Barnes wearing only that plus a halter top. I guessed they'd gotten fed up with wearing formal clothes over their fur, but I wondered if the other folks at church would like it. I wasn't about to complain, but I knew a lot of the older folks at our church were sticklers for formal dress even on Wednesday nights, and this was more informal than anything anybody had ever dared to wear to church. Mom was wearing the nicest of the three skirts she'd been working on, with a blouse that was too big for her now; I was wearing my usual Wednesday night church clothes, the same as Sunday clothes except without a jacket or tie.
Mrs. Barnes asked me if I could help out with visiting homebound people the next day after school, and I said sure. She and Mr. Barnes talked about it for a couple of minutes, and they said Mrs. Barnes could pick me up direct from school, and give me a ride home after we made rounds of a few people's houses.
"Is that okay, Mom?"
"Sure," she said. "Your father will be at home tomorrow, and if you want to help out with the homebound ministry Friday or Saturday as well, I'll probably be okay -- I'm getting a lot stronger."
Dad worked twelve-hour shifts, normally three or four days on and then three or four days off. With so many other paramedics turned into centaurs, or killed or injured on Valentine's day, or both, he had shorter breaks than usual, but he'd still have tomorrow off before working another three days.
Mr. and Mrs. Barnes weren't the only wolves who'd come to church that night wearing less than they used to, but there weren't many like them; I overheard some of the centaurs and chameleons and others, mostly older folks, gossiping about how indecent it was.
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Thursday, Latisha and I both got to Algebra early enough to chat for a couple of minutes before class.
"One of the bloggers I emailed already wrote me back," she said. "I'm working on a list of questions for him. Can I go over them with you before I send them to him?"
"Sure," I said. "Can you email them to me when you get home tonight? I'll be late getting home, but I'll look at them when I can." I told her about going round to visit homebound centaurs with Mrs. Barnes.
"That's cool," she said. "Here, if you want to look at them now and give them back when you see me at P.E.?" She handed me a sheet of notebook paper. I didn't have time to look at it or say anything about it before the bell rang and Ms. Tang started reviewing yesterday's lesson.
Algebra is not my strongest subject, to say the least, and I couldn't afford to look at Latisha's paper during Ms. Tang's lesson. And in Biology, I'd barely had time to sit down and start deciphering Latisha's handwriting before Ms. Killian started her lesson on how Kennesaw chameleons' skin apparently worked more like octopus skin than real chameleon skin, so I didn't have any intelligent comments to offer when I tried to give her back the paper just before P.E.
"Sorry," I said. "Email me later?"
"You can keep it until tomorrow," she said.
"Okay," I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. I didn't want to tell her I could barely read her handwriting, but I'd have to, if I hadn't figured out what she'd written by tomorrow.
We went to our separate locker rooms to change. Coach Renfrew had us playing volleyball again, but rearranged the teams. He'd separated the two insectivores, Tyrone and Lindsey -- maybe to keep them from flirting, or maybe just to make the teams more even, I'm not sure -- and now Latisha was playing opposite me.
I'd stuck a pair of socks inside my underwear this morning, and when I'd undressed and was standing around in my underwear waiting for a free shower, I worried that the bulge they created was implausibly big, or weirdly shaped, and somebody would figure out I was faking it. But if anybody noticed, they didn't say anything. When I got into the shower and pulled off my underwear, I then had the problem of what to do with the socks. I hung the sweaty underwear over the curtain rod, but set the socks on the little soap tray, where they got soaked. Afterward, I wrapped the socks up in the dirty underwear to hide them. I wouldn't have anything to stick in my clean underwear; I'd need to bring extra socks tomorrow.
I tried something different; I wrapped one towel around my waist before I got out of the shower stall, and dried off the rest of me with an extra towel I'd brought while I walked back to my locker. I sat on the bench with my legs close together -- maybe suspiciously close, I worried, too late -- and pulled my clean underwear on under the towel before unwrapping it and putting the rest of my clean clothes on.
Despite minor problems, that procedure seemed to work pretty well, and I stuck to it for a while. It was better than wearing damp underwear until I got home from school, like Wednesday, worrying that they'd soak through and make it look like I'd peed in my pants. (They weren't quite that damp, fortunately.)
I saw Will during American History, and told him I'd be leaving after school with Mrs. Barnes instead of riding the bus. She picked me up right on time, wearing shorts and a halter top as she'd done last night. It was cold enough out that I'd worn a flannel shirt and a jacket, but I guessed her fur kept her warm enough she didn't need anything else, and she was wearing the shorts and halter only out of modesty.
"Where are we going?" I asked her.
"We're visiting Mrs. Paulsen first," she said. Mrs. Paulsen was a widow lady at our church, not quite as old as my grandparents; I hadn't seen her since I came home from Uncle Mike's place.
She'd become a centaur, of course, and she was still having a lot of trouble walking. We sat and visited with her for a few minutes -- she was lying on her sofa, like my Mom did so often these days -- and then Mrs. Barnes put me to work cleaning the kitchen while she helped Mrs. Paulsen take a bath, and then had me clean the bathroom while she took Mrs. Paulsen for a short walk, supporting her like I'd done for Will and Mom. We'd brought her some groceries too, which Mrs. Barnes had bought before picking me up at school.
Next, we visited Mr. and Mrs. Riley. They were centaurs too, just a few years older than my parents. Mrs. Riley had been a little overweight, and her legs had enough muscles on them that she was already walking, but Mr. Riley had been skinny as a rail to begin with, and he'd been walking down the stairs at the moment of the change. He'd broken his right arm and both his forelegs, and they were in casts. He said he'd been in the hospital for a couple of days, but they'd sent him home because they were crowded with people hurt even worse than him.
Mrs. Riley was better off than him, but her legs were weak enough that she got tired quickly, and she hadn't been able to do much around the house. I bathed Mr. Riley while Mrs. Barnes did some housework, then I helped her with it and we visited for a little longer before we left.
After that, Mrs. Barnes took me home. "How often do you think you can help us?" she asked as she pulled into my neighborhood.
"I don't know," I said. "I can probably help twice a week and still get all my homework and stuff done. Maybe more during Spring break, and less when I'm studying for finals." I didn't think we'd be going on a family trip during Spring break, with Mom still recovering her mobility and missing lots of work.
I'd read most of the assigned reading in the car, but I had some other homework to do. When I came in, Dad was in the kitchen fixing supper, and Mom was lying on the sofa, reading; she'd already eaten supper, and was snacking on salad again.
I ate supper with Dad, and worked on homework while I ate, after talking to him a little about school and helping Mrs. Barnes with the homebound ministry. After supper I checked my email and IM, and saw that Aunt Karen had replied to my email about interviewing her and other Huntsville telepaths. I reviewed the list of questions I'd been working on, changed a few things, and sent it to her, asking her to reply to the questions and forward them to other people who might be willing to answer.
Then I remembered the paper Latisha had given me, and I took it out and looked at it. By the time I went to bed, I'd managed to decipher her handwriting well enough to read about a third of it, but the rest stumped me. I made a few notes on the questions, then started studying for Friday's quiz in American History.
