by Gray Gardner
8:15 am - My French exam begins.
10:00 am - I kick my French exam’s ass and intimidate all students in the classroom when I turn it in 45 minutes early and leave to go and study for the dreaded Physics exam.
12:00 pm - Lunch by my pathetic self in the Quad because all of my friends are at the mall eating Chick-Fil-A and shopping at Banana.
1:00 pm - My Physics exam begins.
3:00 pm - Utterly exhausted, I turn in what I know to be a perfectly answered exam and give Mitchell Patel the finger before leaving the room.
3:03 pm - I walk to the south wing and check the posted scores for the Western Civilization exam I’d taken the day before and totally ruled.
3:04 pm - I realize that my score has been recorded at least 30 points lower than it should have been, so I barge into the classroom where some freshmen are taking an exam and confront Mrs. Hilberger. She directs me into the hallway and I ask her about the exam. I tell her I know for a fact that I got a 100, I can even remember the answer to each question and what page in the texts and my notes I studied to get said perfect answer. She proceeds to antagonize me with her asinine anecdotes and lipstick smeared teeth as I squirm around in the hallway, totally at her mercy. She pulls out my exam with the big fat D on top and the scantron sheet with absolutely no incorrect marks on it. She then realizes that she is a moron and says that she will turn in the proper grade at the end of the week when grades are due. I tell her that it doesn’t matter what I get at the end of the week. I can’t bring home a 70 on a final exam and be expected to live to see the next day. My father will kill me, please let me take the test and scantron home and show him my score. She laughs and actually pats my head, telling me I’m ridiculous and should celebrate the end of exams by going shopping with my friends. She just doesn’t get it. My life sucks.
3:30 pm - Dressed out for track, I have already been to the toilet 7 times since I found out about my false score, and my stomach is still turning in circles. The coach wants to send me home, but that’s the last place I want to go. I can’t stay though, because I have not a morsel of food left in my body. I have to go home.
4:00 pm - I don’t blame people for thinking I’m over privileged. I am. My friends and I live in a neighborhood where you can hardly see the houses from the street because the yards are so vast. We drive nice cars, wear nice clothes, and none of our moms work. My mom spends half the morning at the end of our driveway gossiping with the other moms, then goes to some charity luncheon, then plays tennis and does yoga classes at the country club. My dad retires to his study at 4 every afternoon. He goes to work at 7 am 6 days a week, works through lunch, and is in his study at 4 pm. He’s over 80 years old, and he still goes to the newspaper to work every day. Quitting is not a word in his vocabulary. Neither is failure. I pull my suburban that was once my mother’s into the driveway.
4:30 pm - I finally get the nerve to exit the car and walk inside the house. My parents kind of scare me sometimes. My mom is such a lemming robot and my dad is a Stalinist disciplinarian. Ironic, isn’t it? My whole life, he made it very clear what would happen if I screwed up. So I never have. Not until this day when I knew he was on the phone with my guidance counselor checking my final grades in each class. If I ever made anything less than an A, he told me he would paddle me like his professors did at his boarding school in London. Reminding him that he was in high school in the 1930s didn’t serve me well the one and only time I did it, so I knew that was out. I walk into the kitchen and put my ear to the wall, listening for anything he might be talking about on the phone.
5:00 pm - He calls me into his study. I go in and notice immediately the look of disappointment on his face. I tell him that it was a mistake, then I proceed to recite each question and answer. My astounding memory doesn’t impress him, though. What hurt worse than anything was him telling me that people who make 70s on exams don’t ever amount to anything in life. He told me to prepare myself for a future of failure, because after a grade like that any success I have won’t matter.
5:15 pm – I am crying, over my dad’s lap, listening as his paddle swings through the air and connects with my butt. My track shorts are at my ankles and when he pulls my underwear down the only thing I can think to say is, “Please don’t.” Brilliant arguing, Dummy. It never ends. Even my mom comes in and reminds him that I’m a good girl and I’ve had enough. And when he stops and hugs me on his lap? I can’t even push him away because it always feels so good to be hugged by him. Pathetic.
5:20 pm - Did I mention my life sucks? I am now in my bedroom crying because I know he’s right. The look of dissatisfaction on his face was enough to let me know that I was a failure. I will prove him wrong, though. Tomorrow I’m going to go to my guidance counselor and bring home 7 grades that are all 100 or above, thanks to my advanced placement points I get to add. I’ll go before he leaves for work, so he can be proud of my grades all day. I’m already a National Merit Scholar and my first SAT scores were 680 verbal and 750 math, so if I can study all summer and take it again in August, I know that I can bring up the verbal score to something acceptable.
7:30 pm - My mom and I go to a graduation party for my friend Russell across the street. My dad won’t go because it’s so late and he’s still mad at me. My mom dresses me as a mini-her and makes me put lipstick on so I won’t look so plain. I wish I looked like a supermodel so she’d leave me alone and wouldn’t make me feel so bad about myself.
8:30 pm - I feel like I’m wearing a scarlet letter and everyone is staring at me in judgment. She’s a failure, they are saying in their heads. Her dad spanked her for being a loser. I finally stare at the floor and push my way to the terrace in the back so that I don’t have to tell anyone else about winning the previous month’s Academic Decathlon again. I can’t stand to listen to anyone else ask me which Ivy League school I’ll choose next spring. There’s no way I can get in. Why? Because my life sucks.
8:35 pm - I finally make it outside to where the other kids are hanging out, but of course I run into the idolized ‘popular’ crowd before I can spot my friends down the split staircase by the pool. We both pretend to care about how each other’s exams went, and as they delve into why it’s so rough being a cheerleader in high school and then having to make the impossible transition to cheering in college, I gracefully excuse myself and head for my normal friends. My group is neither the most popular nor the most hated. We aren’t the most beautiful but we aren’t bloodcurdling. Most importantly, though, we’re content with just being friends with each other. It’s not a competition with us, which is about the only awesome thing going in my life right now.
8:50 pm - I finish telling them about what an imbecile Mrs. Hilberger is, and they all agree. The dumb jocks from the popular group are now in the pool in their clothes. We all laugh and move up to the terrace where the ceiling fans are. I’m really going to miss Russell next year.
9:00 pm - My mom makes me go home with her, even though Russell, Jessica, Ashley, Kit, and Meyer are going to a movie. Kit is graduating, too. Her graduation party is tomorrow night in DC.
9:30 pm - I set my alarm for 6 so that I can rush to school tomorrow and get my REAL grades. I can’t wait to see my dad’s smile when he finds my report card on his desk in his study. He’s going to be so proud of me, and he won’t think I’m a failure anymore.
Connor closed the book and sipped his beer as he watched Burton. She was in her own world, staring at the grass underneath her crossed legs. She had such a hurt expression on her face. It couldn’t have been easy to go back to that day. Not only was it a horrible day for a little seventeen-year-old girl who so desperately wanted to please her father, but according to what Agent Ferguson had told him, it was also the last day she ever saw her parents.
He had actually enjoyed whispering with Ferguson while Burton was sleeping in the jail cell down the hall. He was so knowledgeable about her past and had a huge box full of information just on her. Had he known what an ass he’d been to her, he
wouldn’t have been so cordial.
Connor nodded too and finished writing on his legal pad. Then he pressed his lips together in thought. That first entry had been revealing: her father had been a harsh disciplinarian, her mother uncaring. The next entry was even rougher than the first, but he opened the journal up anyway. She was opening up and he didn’t want to stop.
“May I continue?”
She swallowed and shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t get any better.”
“But if it helped you then—writing it all down and letting it out—maybe it will help you now.”
“Whatever,” she sighed, sipping her beer. She was acting like she didn’t really care, but it was agonizing. She wanted to go back and tell that young girl that nothing sucked in her life, and so what if your dad treats you like a disappointment and your mom shares the embarrassment of your existence. High school doesn’t last forever, and the older you get, the worse things get. She sighed and looked over at Connor as he began reading.
June 3
I thought that I already had the worst day of my life. Obviously, I was mistaken. Yesterday was the worst day of my life. And today is pretty terrible, too. I’ve been sitting in an interrogation room at the police station and no one will talk to me. I don’t know what else to do but write.
My parents are dead.
I woke up yesterday morning, threw on jeans and a t-shirt, ran to school, banged on the door until the janitor let me in, and waited outside the guidance counselor’s office until she arrived. I made her look up my grades, make a copy, sign the copy, and then took off for my house. I can get to and from school faster if I’m not in my car because of all of the stop lights. And I can cut across the baseball fields on foot. So I ran home with all seven of my 100s or better, but I never made it home.
I was climbing the Cohen’s fence when I suddenly found myself face to face with some kind of semiautomatic handgun and a police officer who looked just as startled as I was. He yelled at me to hit the ground and lay face down, hands behind my head. I complied, mostly because I thought he might accidentally pull the trigger. He cuffed me and pulled me to my front yard. I saw Russell and his mom, standing in a crowd of people on the street. I actually wondered what gossip my mom was offering the neighborhood that morning. But she wasn’t standing there.
Russell’s mom grabbed my face and demanded that the police officer remove my cuffs. She said that I was Baylor Burton and this was my house. And thank God I was okay. The officer called over someone, who called over someone else, who finally got a man over in a trench coat. A detective, I assumed. I thought we’d been robbed.
I repeatedly asked where my parents were, and when I saw the yellow police tape I began demanding to know. The detective put me in the back of his car and I ended up in this interrogation room. They uncuffed me at least, but I’m still clueless as to why I’m in here.
They can’t actually think that I did anything.
- Two detectives just came in and did a classic good cop bad cop routine. First, they tactlessly tell me that my parents are dead. Murdered. Then I hardly get a chance to react. They seem to think that I had a hand in killing my parents. That nosey bitch Mrs. Cohen told them that she’d been looking into my dad’s study while she was gardening, and had seen him spanking my bare butt bright red. I told the detectives that it was what it was, and I wouldn’t even consider ending someone’s life over something like that. I told them that if I was going to kill anyone it would have been Mrs. Hilberger, the moron, because her mistake led to my dad’s anger and disappointment.
They didn’t seem to buy it. I’m still in this room by myself, though I think that mirror is two-way and they are observing me. I give the mirror the finger.
- Some simple-minded lady from Child Protective Services just brought me pizza and tried patronizing me for an hour. I ate the pizza and proceeded to antagonize her until she cried. Seriously, she’s the best our government can do for this country’s children?
Yes, it has occurred to me that I am a minor, and without a parent or guardian now. I suppose it doesn’t matter since they think I did it, so instead of foster care I’ll go to prison. From what I understand, there isn’t much difference.
- Detective Gamble seems to think that I’m innocent now, mostly because they found fingerprints or DNA in the house that didn’t belong to a Burton, but also because of the character testimonies my friends and parents’ friends were flooding into the station. I think the poor guy was still trying to squeeze a confession out of me, but I couldn’t crack because I didn’t do it. And he was a little bit quaint in his tactics. He actually asked me why I wasn’t more broken up about their deaths.
I couldn’t really answer him. I was sad, I knew that. Then it hit me that someone had murdered my parents, and I proceeded to cry for about 10 minutes. He thought I was upset that they were gone forever and I would never see them again.
I was sad because they were gone forever, and they had died thinking that I was a failure. I never got the chance to show them my real grades. That’s why I cried. I was so frustrated and so disappointed with myself. Why couldn’t I have been perfect for them?
- I still don’t know what time it is, but they just told me that I can leave as soon as Russell’s parents arrive to take me back home with them. I suppose I’ll be living with them until my 18th birthday, seeing as all of my dad’s relatives are dead and buried and my mom’s still haven’t forgiven her for marrying who she did.
Connor sipped his beer and set the book on the grass.
“You always allude to who you are in here, but you never come out and say it.”
Burton rubbed her neck as the sun sank further down in the afternoon sky.
“My parents kept telling me how important our family was, and how I should always honor our name. I guess writing in this journal helped me just be me. Come on, I was only seventeen. I knew about Trotsky and Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution but I never really connected to the gravity of begin Leon Trotsky’s granddaughter, you know?”
He nodded and jotted down that this was the first time he’d ever heard her acknowledge who she was. Trotsky was such a key historical figure, but he couldn’t ever remember hearing much about his descendants. He wondered how many people actually knew of her existence. He sighed and then he handed her another beer.
“Were you really not that sad about losing your mom and dad?” he asked, opening it as he handed it over. He didn’t blame her. They didn’t sound like the loving, doting parents he had.
She took it and squeezed the can.
“Of course, I was. It was just a confusing time, that’s all. Notice how there wasn’t another entry until the day of the funeral? It hit me when I saw Russell and his parents interacting,” she choked, as her voice trailed off and she cleared her throat and sipped her beer. “Why couldn’t my parents love me no matter how I performed in school? Or just, you know, no matter what?”
“Burton, I’m sure they did.”
“Did you interpret June 1 differently than I did?” she snapped, holding out her arms.
“If spanking your kids means you don’t love them, then my parents must absolutely despise me and my sisters,” he grinned, shaking his head at her as he drank his beer.
She frowned at him for a second and then broke into a giggle. He made a good point, though she couldn’t imagine him with sisters. They must have been giants.
“You’re imagining me in a wig, aren’t you?” he asked, shaking his head. “Both of my sisters are very tall, yes, but they don’t look like me, all right?”
“Can we put this therapy session on hold?” she asked, giving him a pleading glare, her hand resting on his thigh.
“It is getting kind of late,” he sighed, looking over his shoulder as the sun disappeared. He turned his head back around and found that she was moving into his lap. Nothing wrong with that. He wrapped his arms around her as she laid a kiss on him, and he didn’t mind that in the least, either.
It
was completely dark by the time they got back to his house, but they didn’t bother to turn on any lights when they got inside. He made quick work of getting her into the bedroom, losing articles of clothing on the way. Connor tipped backwards as her hands pushed against his chest, his back bouncing on the bed and her body crawling over him.
She kissed him slowly, her tongue playing with his as she ground her hips against his erection. The sounds he made when she teased him was a total turn on, as was the feeling of shock she got when his hand slapped against her ass.
“Quit teasing me, baby, and ride me,” he breathlessly said, his hands now at her hips.
“Mm, I like teasing you,” she softly said, kissing around his jaw as she shifted against his cock. “And you get to spank me, so let me have this.”
His eyes opened, and he flipped them both over, hovering over her with his strong frame.
“I spank you because you need it, baby,” he growled in her ear, kissing her deeply when she tried to argue. He let her catch her breath as he continued a few seconds later. “You need me, and only me, to bend you over and spank you every shade of pink. And you need me, only me, to give you that orgasm you start chasing the second my hand connects with your ass.”
She tried to argue again, only to find that words eluded her and she could only squeal as he grabbed her hips and pushed inside of her, thrusting over and over and building them both up. Her squeal turned into a scream when he rolled his hips into her and instructed her to come, which led to his release as well.
Christ, he would never get enough of her. How could he let her go in two weeks?
Revolutionaries and Wire Dengas
