Alan and Summer weren’t lacking for things to do after Jack and Vixen left to get ready to go down to the track – they just headed over to his place and went back to work on the game. It was hot out, and the air conditioning in Alan’s house felt good. They made some good progress on one of the sections, but once again they couldn’t quite tell how well it would work – it needed some testing, and more than just the two of them. Four might not even be enough, and six people would be better. The problem was that they didn’t know who else to ask to help them with it – as much as they were friends with Jack and Vixen, they felt like there was a limit to what they could ask.

As the afternoon wore down, the actual work on the game tailed off into a discussion of seeing if there was some way they could simplify it so it could be played by four players. Doing that would solve several problems, but both of them felt it needed more just to keep a wide variability of options, and simplifying it would take away a lot of fun.

They hadn’t really reached any conclusions when the phone sounded. After a moment, they could hear Alan’s mother yell up the stairs, “Hey, Summer, it’s for you.”

“I wonder who that could be,” Summer said as she reached for the phone in Alan’s room. Alan could hear her saying, “Hello . . . oh, hi, Mom . . . nothing much, just working on the game a little . . . not that I know of . . . well, I could ask.”

She put the phone on her shoulder and said, “Hey, Alan. This is my mom. She asked if you’d like to come to dinner tonight.”

“I could, if Mom hasn’t already made plans for us,” he said. “Let me go ask real quick.” He headed for the stairs, and the echo of him pounding down them was heard throughout the house. He was back in a moment. “She hasn’t started anything,” he reported. “She said that if I was going to eat at your house, maybe she and Dad would go out somewhere.”

“OK, Mom,” Summer said. “What time do you want us there . . . OK, see you then.” She hung up the phone and turned to Alan. “About an hour, she said. She’s going to do a stir-fry in the wok. It’s usually pretty good, at least if you like soy sauce.”

“Love it,” Alan grinned. “That’s not the sort of thing my mom makes.”

“It’ll be nice to have you over,” she smiled. “I know I’ve spent a lot of time over here, so it’ll be good to have you at our place for once.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind getting to know your folks a little better. From what little I know of them, they seem pretty nice.”

“Look, I better warn you,” she said, “Mom knows about our beliefs. I mean, both of us. I haven’t said much about your side to my sisters, but they’re clued in like the other women in the family. But Dad . . . well, he doesn’t know anything about it at all, and we don’t want him to know. So don’t get near the subject. And that means that we shouldn’t talk about the game much, or we’re going to start to get close to family traditions that we shouldn’t talk about.”

“Yeah, I know you keep it pretty close to your chest,” he replied.

“Well, not so much among the women, but it’s our family tradition that this is a woman only thing, and men aren’t supposed to know anything about it. I don’t know why it’s that way, it’s just the way it is.”

“It’s got to seem pretty strange for you to be talking to me about it,” he observed.

“Well, yeah,” she admitted, “but that was why we decided to start our own circle, after all. I’m still not sure how well that’s going to go over with the rest of the women in my family. I may find myself getting sealed off from them, but I guess that’s the risk I take.”

“It seems a little courageous to me for you to be doing it.”

“Well, yeah, but even my grandmother said that there’s the possibility of learning something new, too. Just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

Candice Archer sighed inwardly. It had been nice to have Cody and Jan around for the last few weeks, but that was coming to an end. They had decided to head back to Hawthorne the first of the week, and that was going to leave the house even emptier than it normally was. Their older son, Shay, hadn’t been home all summer; he’d been working as a seasonal ranger at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on the far side of Lake Michigan, and it was just too far to get away except for a very hurried overnight visit.

Boy, it’s winding down fast, she thought. It wasn’t long ago that Shay and Cody were just little kids; now Shay had one more year at Lake State and he’d be out on his own someplace, and seeing him might not be a frequent occurrence. Cody and Jan most likely had a couple more years down at Southern Michigan, and where they might wind up was anybody’s guess, possibly but not necessarily with Cody in law school somewhere. Though Cody and Jan were close indeed – closer in fact, Candice knew, than most people realized, their situation was just a little strange. She didn’t know whether to call Jan her daughter – which she wasn’t; she’d never been formally adopted – or her daughter-in-law, which she also wasn’t, because the kids hadn’t officially gotten married. Yet. It didn’t matter much, since she loved Jan just as much either way. She’d come late to the Archer name and household, but having a quasi-daughter for even a brief period had brought a whole new dimension to their lives.

And all too soon, the house was going to be empty and echoing. How fast time passed, she thought as Jan helped her pick up the dinner dishes. It had been a good dinner – tacos that Jan had made, and that gave Candice a little satisfaction. Jan hadn’t been much of a cook when she’d come to the Archer household, but she was now pretty darn good. It still seemed strange that a quasi-daughter-in-law would have come into their lives in such a strange and violent way, but it had all worked out.

Just then the phone rang. Since Candice was close to it, she picked it up. It was Charlie Wexler, who asked, “Hi, Candice. Is Cody around?”

“Just a second,” she said, handing the phone to Cody. Just from the sound of Charlie’s voice Candice knew that whatever plans Cody and Jan had for the evening had just been put on hold, although the string of “OK’s” from Cody didn’t give her any hint as to what was going on.

In only a few seconds, Cody handed the phone back so Candice could hang it up. “Gonna have to go in,” Cody announced. “Some sort of special deal, I don’t know what it’s all about, but Charlie said it might go late.”

“Well, it’s not like we had anything planned,” Jan shrugged. “I guess I’ll be all right watching TV with your folks. Besides, we can use the money.”

“Yeah, another hundred for a full shift wouldn’t break my heart,” he said. “Charlie said as soon as possible, so I better get changed.”

“Be careful,” Jan urged. “You know I worry about you.”

Candice worried about her younger son, too. Being a police officer, even a very part-time one, wasn’t exactly the safest of careers, but it brought him in more money than the typical part-time job a college student might have. It still seemed strange that Cody was a fully certified police officer, as young as he was, but that was another unexpected spin-off resulting from Bryson Payne’s essentially running Cody out of school almost two years before. Since Cody had been a police officer for only about a year, he’d mostly worked backing up another officer, or occasionally by himself during periods that weren’t expected to be very busy. But, Candice thought, surprises come when you least expect them . . .

“Shouldn’t be anything special,” Cody assured his girl. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

Shelly Battle was less than happy about having to go to the football team’s pre-practice beer bust. She was a cheerleader, and cheerleaders were normally part of the party, although she knew it would mostly consist of standing around watching the boys see how drunk they could get, and how much they could puke up after they did. If it proved to be anything like it had been last year, there would be several girls on the team who wound up having sex, out in public, and some of them with several of the football players. That slut Mary Lou Kempa had tried to set a record of how many of the players she could service last year. She probably had set one – sometimes two at a time, using her mouth on one while another went at her down below. It had been pretty damn disgusting but it had made her something of a slut hero for the team. Shelly liked to be popular, but not that popular, and not quite that way.

The thing that really got her panties in a wad was the fact that Vanessa Robideaux was probably going to be there, and right at the moment she was rather pissed off with Vanessa. A week before there had been another party, a smaller one, out at Alison DuQuoin’s house. While she’d been going with Eddie Awkerman at the time, things had gotten a little loose and Eddie had been necking with Vanessa, just a little, and just to get even she’d started making out with Vanessa’s boyfriend, Scotty Parsons. It had gotten a little, well, intimate; after a while she realized that Eddie and Vanessa weren’t around. She had to pee anyway – beer will do that to you – so she broke it off with Scotty for a few minutes to take a leak, and sure enough, she found Eddie and Vanessa getting it on in Alison’s bedroom. Really getting it on, too – Vanessa was screaming with delight and Eddie was just as happy to pound it into her hard. That got her really pissed off. Rather than raising hell about it with the two of them she’d gone back out to the living room and gotten really intimate with Scotty, to the point of winding up on the same bed with him in her a half an hour or so later.

Needless to say, when the alcoholic haze cleared the next morning, she and Eddie were no longer an item, and neither were Scotty and Vanessa. She had no idea what Eddie thought he was doing with a slut like Vanessa, but it proved that he was a jerk, anyway. She’d figured on leaving him behind in Spearfish Lake when she went to college – she had no intent of being stuck in this nowhere town for the rest of her life – so maybe it didn’t matter, but still, it hurt. Since Scotty was Eddie’s friend she didn’t want anything to do with him, either. It would have been nice to have a football player boyfriend for football season, but thanks to Vanessa it wasn’t going to happen. On the other hand with everyone as drunk at the party as they were likely to be, there was still a slight possibility.

God damn Vanessa, anyway! She was the one who had started all that, just because she couldn’t keep her panties on! There ought to be something she could do to get even! It would be nice if somehow Vanessa could be gotten drunk enough to try to pull a Mary Lou Kempa at the party, and God knew she drank enough. If she got really out of it, it could happen.

Well, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to help things out a bit . . .

“Wow,” Misty said to Howie on the phone a little bit later, after she’d gone home for supper for once. “Rusty is really being a bear tonight. I mean, it’s even worse than normal.”

“Let me guess,” Howie said. “He’s still grounded and he wants to go to the football players’ party, but your folks won’t cut him any slack.” Howie knew all about that, of course – Rusty had really screwed up a date the week before, and the girl’s father, a co-worker, had landed all over his father in the worst way. The way Rusty did it had been particularly thoughtless, and his father and Howie didn’t blame Rusty’s dad a bit. He was thoroughly grounded, with even his car parked someplace he didn’t know about. It was still an open question whether he’d even be allowed to play football; with practice starting Tuesday there had still been no decision, and unless he cleaned up his attitude the chances of him doing it were getting slimmer and slimmer.” Got it the first time,” Misty sighed. “Howie, if you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind having an excuse to be out of the house tonight, and I’m getting a little tired of Nintendo, for once.”

“Yeah, I am too,” he admitted. They’d spent an awful lot of time working their thumbs the past week, and all afternoon upstairs in his room, as well. That was about as far as things had gone, though; with his mother in and out there hadn’t been any chance for being any more intimate than that. “What do you say we meet at the Frostee Freeze and hang out a bit?”

“That was sort of what I was thinking,” she said. “Since the varsity football players won’t be there, it’ll be a different crowd than normal, and maybe we can find some people we like to hang out with.”

“That’d work for me,” Howie replied, thinking that it wouldn’t hurt his image any for people to see him hanging out with Misty. She was a cute girl, after all, and that might make life better when school started up again, all too soon.

“Good deal,” she told him. “How about I meet you there in half an hour or so?”

“That ought to work just fine,” he said. “I’ll have to ride my bike, though. Maybe if it gets dull we could go somewhere else and be by ourselves.”

“That might work, too,” she giggled. “And I’ll bet I know what you’d want to do if we did.”

“Probably about the same thing you’re thinking,” he replied. “See you in a while.”

Alan thought that dinner at the Trevetheck house was pretty good. The stir-fried beef, marinated in some kind of exotic sauce, tasted very good indeed. The vegetables were pretty good, too, although Alan couldn’t identify some of them, and others didn’t exactly taste like he’d expected them to. All in all it was a wonderful, exotic dinner.

It was made even better by the fact that he got to know Summer’s family a little. Rowan Trevetheck, Summer’s mother, seemed a rather earthy type, sort of New-Age, latter-day hippie, which, when Alan stopped to think about it, seemed pretty appropriate for her given what he’d been told about the family tradition, which admittedly wasn’t much. Summer’s father Mike seemed rather more ordinary and conventional, just a plywood plant worker who was on the fire department, but he was a nice enough guy, much like Alan’s father, and he got along well with him.

Summer had two sisters. The older one, Spring, wasn’t there, since she was in college and working out of town for the summer, but Alan remembered her a little from high school. She’d been in the same grade with Cody and Jan, but she was somewhat more memorable, just in that she was a very independent, outgoing sort of person – much like Summer, for that matter. The younger daughter, Autumn, a couple years younger, seemed rather shy and quiet compared to her older sisters.

Since Alan and Summer had agreed to not talk about some things that were of great interest to both of them, they talked about the meeting with Cody and Jan earlier. “While we were over at Alan’s we looked up Southern Michigan University’s web site,” Summer reported. “We didn’t get real deep into it, and Alan thinks he’s going to have to do some more investigation, but it’s starting to look like a real strong possibility.”

“That’s a long way from home,” Mike commented. “Are you sure you want to be that far away?”

“That’s a concern,” Alan said, “and the money issue is still up in the air. Even with good scholarships, Cody and Jan both have to work to make it, but I get the impression they plan on getting out of college without student loans.”

“They own an apartment building, which also gives them some income,” Summer added, deciding that it wasn’t the time yet to talk about renting an apartment from them. That time might not come for months.

“Well, money is going to be tight, Summer, but we ought to be able to work out something to help you out,” Rowan said. “The time to be thinking about it is getting close, after all.”

All in all it was a good dinner, with a good conversation. Best of all, they managed to keep well clear of touchy subjects. They sat around the dinner table until well after they were finished, just talking about one thing and another. It was getting along in the evening before they got around to picking up the dinner dishes.

“Do you kids have anything planned for this evening?” Rowan asked. “It seems like the two of you have been hanging out together a lot the last few days, but if there’s been anything that even sort of resembled a date I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

“We hadn’t really planned anything,” Summer admitted. “We’ve been working on a project over at Alan’s, but I think that for once I’d like to not get into it tonight. You know, Alan, this would probably be a good night to hang out at the Frostee Freeze.”

“You’re right,” he agreed, thinking of the fact that if the football players were out getting blitzed out of their minds it might be a good night to hang out with the other kids, and he suspected that he wasn’t the only non-athlete in town who thought that. “It sounds like a good idea to me.”

Lanny Mundhenk was just getting ready for the party, not that it took a lot of getting ready, when his cell phone blared out the latest rap-crap. Almost automatically, he answered it, to discover that it was Shane Caldwell. “What’s up guy?” he asked.

“You’re going to the party, right?” Shane asked.

“I guess,” Lanny replied, a little less than totally enthusiastic. He was still a little steamed about Eddie putting the party together. He’d had a good shot at being team captain after Frenchy got his butt thrown in the slammer, at least if the party hadn’t come off. But then, Eddie had stolen a march on everyone, and that pretty well ruined his chances at that particular bit of football glory. Eddie was just a fucking lineman after all, while Lanny played quarterback, which was a more important position any way you looked at it. But no, the beer party tradition pretty well settled that issue before anything got out the gate. Lanny had been of half a mind just to skip the party, but at least the beer would be free and the gang would be there, so there was no choice but to go. Besides, there’d be some girls there and at least some of them got a little loose at this party, so there was a chance of getting a little.

“What’s the chances of bumming a ride?” Shane asked, interrupting Lanny’s ruminations.

“No problem,” Lanny said. He’d been to beer busts with Shane before, and knew what that was all about. Shane liked to knock them back – really knock them back, trying to prove he could out-drink anyone else, and he usually did, creating the downside to giving Shane a ride: he would also be expected to give him a ride back when the evening was over with. The way Shane drank he wouldn’t be in any condition to ride back in anyone’s car. Hell, he wouldn’t even be in any condition to walk back; he’d had to be poured into a car more than once. “That junior, Walt Lethbridge, might just give you a run for the money, though.”

“Never happen, not only is he a junior, he’s a pussy compared to me,” Shane snorted.

“I don’t know, they say he really slurps it up,” Lanny pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter, I’m still king of the beer hill around here,” Shane laughed.

“I don’t mind having a few, just for the sake of being sociable, but I’d really rather I don’t get so wasted that I couldn’t drive slowly up a back road late at night to get home.” Yeah, it was driving a little drunk, he thought, but so what? They didn’t mess with football players in this town, did they? Well, not unless they really screwed up by the numbers, like Frenchy earlier in the week.

“Yeah, you’re good people that way,” Shane agreed. “It’s good to know there’s people like you around.”

“Hey, Shane,” Lanny pointed out, “there’s no point in standing around here talking about it if we’re going to do it. I was just getting set to leave. If you’re at home, I’ll swing by and pick you up in a few minutes. I got a couple other guys to pick up, too.”

“Good deal! Hey, Lanny, we’re going to have us a party!”

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