“I just can’t get used to it,” Vixen Hvalchek said to Jack Erikson earlier that same morning, in fact at about the time Susan was turning onto Interstate 94. They were several hundred miles away in a swamp outside Spearfish Lake and, though they were in a vehicle, it was not on anything like an Interstate.

“What’s that?” Jack asked. His attention wasn’t totally on her; he was driving up an old logging road in the woods that was more treacherous than most, and he had to keep his attention on what he was doing. As they’d often done this summer, they’d greeted the dawn at a favorite bird watching spot. Both of them realized it could be a long time before they were ever back here again.

Vixen waited a moment before she replied, realizing that he had to concentrate on what he was doing, and there was a particularly nasty spot coming up. “Coming out here in this, rather than in the old Jeep.”

Jack twisted the wheel and gunned the engine to help their momentum carry the Jeep Cherokee through the soft sand blow. Boy, he thought, nobody has graded this place out in years. “Yeah, we could have brought it,” he said absently as the four-wheel drive got them through the rest of the soft sand. “But I would have had to ask Howie first, and I didn’t want to wake him up before dawn.”

“That wouldn’t be the brightest move,” she agreed, relieved to be back out on easier trail, though it was still mostly two-rut. The old open CJ-5 Jack had driven until a couple months before would have given little concern on this road. The Cherokee may have been a little more comfortable ride, but it wasn’t as good off-road. It wasn’t new; it had over a hundred thousand miles on it, and it had been a graduation gift for Jack, a vehicle he and Vixen could take to college. Jack’s younger brother Howie’s sixteenth birthday had come along about that time, and the use of the family’s CJ-5 had been passed on to him as part of the deal. The smaller Jeep was actually Jack and Howie’s father’s vehicle that he used to run out to the hunting cabin he owned with several other local men, it was used for that purpose very few times each year. The rest of the time it had made a perfectly adequate ride for Jack, and was now for Howie, to get around town.

“Well, it’s not like we’ll be coming out here that much more,” he said, glancing over to look at her. He enjoyed looking at her, especially since she was wearing his and her favorite summer birding gear, short black shorts and a tight, short-cropped camouflage camisole top. She really looked good wearing it, and Jack knew she was wearing it to augment ideas he already had.

Jack and Vixen had known each other since kindergarten, school friends but never close friends, until a wild and memorable week just a year ago when the two of them had discovered they were actually soul mates. Back in kindergarten she’d been a quiet little girl with long brown hair and mostly a home to girl cooties. Over the years she’d matured into a small, slender, quiet girl with long brown hair, a small but reasonable chest, funny-looking glasses, and what had been the worst case of zits in Spearfish Lake High School. Although Jack loved her a lot, he had to admit that – if only to himself – it was her inner beauty that appealed to him, rather than her outer appearance. She would never be a stunning beauty, but he didn’t mind that a bit. “Only about three weeks now,” he added.

“I can hardly wait, and for more reasons than one,” she grinned. “Do you think Howie will be gone when we get back?”

“Odds are he will be,” Jack replied. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Of course it does,” she laughed. “That’s one of the reasons I’m glad we’re going to college down at Southern. We won’t have to sneak around as much to get time alone to do what we want to do.”

“It’s going to be different with Alan and Summer in the next room,” he grinned. “We’ll have to get used to it.”

In that same memorable week when lightning had struck between Jack and Vixen, Jack had also serendipitously put two of their school friends together, Alan Jahnke and Summer Trevetheck; for somewhat different reasons, lightning had struck between the two of them, as well. The four of them had spent a lot of time together as couples and as a group over the last year. Early on they’d decided it would be fun if they could all go to college together, and after considerable discussion they’d settled on Southern Michigan University, almost at the far end of the state from their home in Spearfish Lake.

One of the things that had held them back from making an earlier decision on Southern was that it was expensive, and because the school was pretty new there was no endowment to help supply institutional-based grants. Through a number of different avenues, including some local and federal grants, they’d managed to clear away the basic financial barriers, but it was still clear that all of them would be attending college on a shoestring.

While shuffling through budgets they’d found a few large corners to cut. Living in college dorms is usually expensive, and it was more expensive at Southern. The school had only limited space in the dorms and actively encouraged students to live off-campus; in fact, there was a waiting list to get rooms in the few on-campus dorms. While deciding on Southern, the four of them had learned that a couple of older Spearfish Lake kids, Cody and Jan Archer, had purchased a four-unit apartment building, actually a converted large house, a couple blocks off campus. That apartment rental wasn’t cheap though. Rentals close to the campus were in great demand and accordingly priced, but the Archers had one two-bedroom apartment available. Splitting the rental of that four ways saved a lot of money for the four friends, though it was clear they would be living in each other’s pockets – the apartment wasn’t all that large.

It was darn good that they had become close friends, and all of them agreed that they hoped they’d be able to stay that way when living in such close quarters.

All four sets of parents involved had been a little dubious about the arrangement, although they all conceded on the financial savings. The kids had argued that the apartment was going to be set up as a dorm-style boys’-room and girls’-room arrangement, though they’d spent some time discussing it and agreeing among themselves to secretly do it the other way around. They all admitted they hated the idea of having to go behind their parents’ backs that way, but figured it would be easier to get forgiveness after the fact than it would be to get permission beforehand. Besides, everyone was over eighteen, and it would be five hundred miles away from home, so as long as they kept quiet about it, it might never matter.

“It won’t be the first time we’ve had Alan and Summer in the next room,” Jack grinned. “We ought to be getting used to it.”

“Yes, but not quite that close,” Vixen giggled. “I do recall some places where the walls were a little thin though.”

“Uhh, yeah,” Jack laughed. “Fortunately we weren’t trying to cover things up with them.”

Jack and Vixen had first had sex in a motel room ten months before while on a birding trip. Alan and Summer had been in the next room, having sex for the first time as well; they really weren’t interested in the birding but it made for a more than adequate cover story for what they all really wanted to do. It had also been sold to the various parents as a boys’-room and girls’-room thing, though all of them wondered just how much wool was really being pulled over the collective parents’ eyes – probably not much, at least in a couple of cases. Since then there had been a couple more birding trips and some campus visits that had turned into overnighters, but it was still difficult for Jack and Vixen to be alone with each other as much as they wanted.

This morning looked to be one of those times. Jack’s mother worked an irregular schedule, and was going in early this morning, and Howie usually went out with some football player friends – and some of their girlfriends – for an informal and unofficial football and conditioning practice.

“I hope Howie’s gone when we get there,” Vixen grinned. “It’s been a while since we’ve been in a bed, rather than on the foam pad at one of our more isolated birding spots, or just playing ‘catch me, fuck me,’ out in the woods.”

“That’s fun and exciting in a way,” Jack replied. “But I’m hoping to be a little more conventional, especially when the weather gets colder. We have to be careful that we don’t overdo it, though. I think they’re going to be keeping us busy enough at Southern.”

“In a way, I hope so. It’ll be nice to get our teeth into real classes, rather than inane high school stuff.”

“Yes, it will. I don’t want to say what they were teaching us was garbage, because really, it wasn’t, but there wasn’t much in last year’s classes that had anything to do with what we want to do as a chosen profession.”

“I still think it’s a long shot but it’s worth trying for,” Vixen added with a grin that pushed her glasses up on her nose. Though Jack had once considered them to be funny looking, somehow they didn’t look as bad on her as they once had.

Despite his age, for several years, Jack had been considered the leading birdwatcher in the Spearfish Lake area. Vixen had always had an interest in nature and birds, but getting involved with Jack had turned her into nearly as much of a fanatic as he was. He had long had the goal of becoming a professional birder, and Vixen had picked it up as well. While it sounded odd, they both knew people who actually made a living doing it, as naturalists, population researchers, and in similar fields. Their main goal at Southern was to study wildlife biology with a concentration in ornithology. In addition, Jack planned on studying photography with an emphasis on wildlife photography. Vixen was still undecided on a minor but was considering video production, again with an emphasis on wildlife and nature documentaries. Being professional birders – or at least wildlife specialists – still seemed like a long shot to both of them, but there was no way they could accomplish their goals without working in that direction.

A few minutes later Jack and Vixen made it out to the state road, and it wasn’t much longer before they pulled into Jack’s driveway. The CJ-5 – everyone now thought of it as “Howie’s Jeep” no matter how many adventures the two had had with it – was still there, but that proved absolutely nothing if Howie was out running with the football crowd.

Both of them had their minds on what they planned to do in Jack’s bedroom, so they were a little disappointed to find Howie in the kitchen, concentrating on cereal and orange juice, though wearing running clothes. Jack had been thinking about how much things had changed for him in the past year, but he was aware of how much Howie had changed in the past year, too. He had grown a couple inches and was considerably more muscular after months of serious training for the upcoming football season.

Jack had never had much to do with school sports, especially football. He was really more interested in birds, and the fact that Spearfish Lake had had a truly lousy high school football team for more than a decade meant to him that there was no reason to be a fan. What was more, the football team was filled with punks and bullies who had made a lot of trouble, for him and for others.

That whole situation had turned around a year ago, when the varsity team decided to hold an illegal pre-season beer bust. It had been raided by the cops, and by the time the dust settled most of the varsity football players had been booted off the team. To maintain a semblance of a season, the former junior varsity team members had been promoted en masse to the varsity. Almost everyone expected a monumental disaster of a football season, goose eggs across the board, but the former JVs – led primarily by Howie, the quarterback – felt they had a challenge to meet and a point to prove. With the help of some new coaches, a lot of determination, and maybe even more luck, they proved it with an 8-1 regular season and a 1-1 season in the playoffs – a considerably better record than the regular varsity had managed in a dozen years or more.

Somewhere along in there, Howie and a large part of the football team motivated themselves to prove their success was more than pure luck. Several of the core members of the team had been in nearly constant training since the final gun of their loss in last season’s second-round playoff game. Though never a football fan, Jack now followed the team for Howie’s sake, and that was why the four friends weren’t leaving for college until after the opening game of the high school season. For once in his life he had an interest in Spearfish Lake football, and it was going to be hard to miss it – but Jack had other things on his mind, too.

“So did you see any interesting birds this morning?” Howie asked conversationally. Jack knew very well that Howie’s interest in birds was limited to chicken and turkey on the dinner table, but he was being polite.

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “We were totally surprised to see a black skimmer out in the swamp this morning. Lord knows what it’s doing here, a thousand miles outside its normal range. Real interesting bird, and a life-list bird for both of us, now two fifty-five for me and one eighty-four for Vixen.”

“Why’s it so interesting?” Howie asked, to be polite, Jack was sure.

“It has a long bill and skims right above the water scooping bugs and stuff up with its lower beak, and most interesting because it shouldn’t be here. It’s quite a sight. We got pictures and all,” Jack explained, then changed the topic. “Are you going out training with the gang again this morning?”

“That’s the plan,” Howie replied. “I have to eat and run. A bunch of us are going to run way out on the point, then come back to the beach and do some drills and pass the ball around on the sand, and maybe jump in the lake to wash the sweat off. That’ll probably eat up most of the morning. This afternoon Jared and the girls and I are going over to the practice field and work on Jared’s kicking. It takes all four of us to do it efficiently. Then, practice this evening, of course. What are you two doing today?”

“Oh, odds and ends,” Jack fibbed. “We really need to get our acts together to get ready to leave for college, getting our rooms cleaned out and stuff thrown away. We’re going to chip away at it here today, and probably at Vixen’s tomorrow. We may take a break and hang out by the bird feeders a little.”

“Probably a lot, knowing you two,” Howie laughed. He polished off his orange juice, then got up and put his cereal bowl in the sink. “I may be back for lunch, and I may not be. See you then if I am.” In a minute he was out the door and running down the street.

“Boy, have things changed,” Jack shook his head. “A year ago he just couldn’t wait to get his hands on the CJ-5 so he could drive everywhere instead of riding his bike. Now that he has the Jeep key, he leaves it here two thirds of the time and runs where he’s going for the sake of that much more training.”

“I remember those days,” Vixen smiled. “And you’re right, things have changed. What do you say to a quick shower before we do what we really want to do? I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for us to use our mouths a little more than just for kissing this morning.”

“I’m always ready for that, especially knowing how much I can make you squirm and squeal with delight when I do it to you.”

“I think you like that as much as I do,” she smiled as she pulled the camisole top up over her head. She never wore a bra when she wore the camisole – she often didn’t wear one anyway, since she really didn’t need it – and Jack was once again attracted to the dark brown areolas on her breasts. He thought they were some of the prettiest things about her. He was ready to rumble already, and they had the opportunity to have a good session today, maybe the last time they could have a good one in his bed before they left for Southern.

Just then the phone rang. “Damn! Wouldn’t you know it,” he sighed, as he realized it would be delaying for a few moments what he wanted to do. “Always when I’ve got something else on my mind.”

“Probably it’s Jared wanting to know if Howie has left yet,” she smirked, flashing her small but cute bare breasts at him.

“Might be Alan or Summer,” he shrugged. “No way of telling without answering it.” He reluctantly tore his eyes away from the wonderful sight of his topless girlfriend and went to answer the phone. “Erikson’s,” he said into the wall phone.

“Hi, Jack, it’s Nancy Halifax,” he heard. “I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

“No, not really,” he replied. “Vixen and I were just going to look at some birds.”

“You seem to do that a lot, don’t you? Jack, how have the two of you been this summer?”

“Actually, a little bored,” he replied, wondering what this call was all about. Nancy was one of several kids in his high school class who were considered outcasts, just as he and Vixen were because of their interest in birds rather than normal teen activities. Nancy was a rather quiet introvert of a girl, who most members of the Spearfish Lake High School Class of 2011 considered to be a lesbian, though no one would admit to knowing it for sure, at least not until recently. Over the course of the last year several of the outcasts of the class had banded together a little, but Nancy hadn’t joined their group, though Jack and his friends tried to be nice to her. “It sure will be nice to be heading for college,” he added.

“No fooling,” Nancy sighed. “I’m counting the days myself. Look, are you and Vixen still planning on going to Southern Michigan University?”

“Yeah, along with Alan and Summer. The four of us have rented an apartment down there.”

“That ought to be fun for you,” Nancy replied with a wistful sound in her voice. “Is it a furnished apartment?”

“Partly,” he said as his curiosity about her calling him increased. “There’s some stuff in it, but we have to haul some furniture from here, too. We’re renting a trailer to do it.”

“Look, Jack, I know I don’t have any right to ask, but it would be real neat if you could do a favor or two for me. I’ve got a couple of pieces of furniture I need to get down to Southern too, and most of my things. I’m not going to have a car down there so it’s real difficult for me.”

“Hold it,” he said. “I thought you were going to Meriwether College.”

“That’s what I wanted people to think,” she admitted. “One person in particular, but I actually planned on going to Southern all along. It’s a long story.”

That made things quite a bit clearer for Jack. “I don’t suppose that one particular person would be Mary Lou Kempa, would it?” he asked.

“Word gets around,” she sighed, “whether it’s the truth or not.”

“Nancy, what you’re saying is that you’d like us to haul your stuff down there for you a little ahead of time so she won’t find out about it, right?”

“Pretty much. It would be great if I could also sneak out without her finding out about it. I know that’s the chicken way to do it and there’s going to be a scene when she figures it out, but I think if I’m established on campus, well, what’s done will be done.”

Jack thought fast. It was obvious that this was going to be a pain in the neck however he looked at it. On the other hand, he considered Mary Lou Kempa to have been a pain in the neck as long as he’d known her. Nancy’s wanting to get away from her quietly implied a couple things that would have to be thought about, but they weren’t really relevant.

“Look,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “I don’t see that it would be any problem, but I really need to run it past Vixen, Alan, and Summer first. If they go along with it I’d have to rent a bigger trailer and it’ll cost a bit more for gas.”

“It would be worth the cost, and I’ll cover the extra,” she replied. “There are, well, there are some other issues, too. Let’s just say that I’m going to breathe easier once I’m out of town. When are you planning on leaving?”

“Because of Howie, and Autumn being a cheerleader, Summer and I have to be here for the football season opener,” Jack replied. “But we’re planning on leaving the day after that. It’ll give us a week and a half to get the apartment set up and learn our way around.”

“That would work fine for me,” she replied. “I just hope you can talk Vixen, Alan, and Summer into it. I’m pretty sure I can juggle things around so that date could work for me.”

“Vixen is here now, and I’ll probably be seeing Alan and Summer later today. We usually manage to see each other every day or so for one reason or another. Would you like me to call you back?”

“No,” Nancy said. “I, uh, I’m trying to keep this a secret and don’t want to be overheard talking to you or anyone about this. Tell your friends that, too. I’ll try to call you back, oh, this time tomorrow.”

“If you can’t catch me here, try me at Vixen’s,” he told her. “Maybe a little later than this, we might go out birding early again.”

“Thanks, Jack. This could be the simple way for me out of a sticky situation, at least for now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Jack said goodbye, and hung up the wall phone. “From hearing this end of the conversation, I take it she’s looking for a ride down to Southern with us, right?” Vixen asked.

“Pretty much,” Jack replied, and gave Vixen the gist of what had been talked about. “It sounds to me like Mary Lou is making an ass of herself again.”

“What ‘again?’” Vixen snorted. “She was never anything but a pain in the ass. She’s not exactly my favorite person, you know.”

“No, but she did us a hell of a big favor,” Jack grinned at his topless girlfriend. “I mean, you and I might not have gotten together if you hadn’t busted her jaw.”

“I’m glad I did it,” she smiled. “Even if it was self-defense, it was great to not have to hear her yelling for a couple months. And yes, you getting me out of the Frostee Freeze before a riot broke out was how we started out going together.”

“Hell of a first date, wasn’t it? I mean, even if it wasn’t a date at all. But I sure like where it’s come out.”

“I do too,” she grinned. “Look, if Nancy wants to pull a fast one on Mary Lou, it’s fine with me. I’m in on the deal, but maybe we’d better talk to Alan and Summer.”

“I think so too. Maybe I should just go ahead and call.”

“Like hell,” Vixen smiled. “We’ve got other things to do first, and they involve a shower and your bed. Even though we could have all day, I think we’d better be done well before Howie is likely to be back.”

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