Brenda Redmond didn’t like having to do homework in a crowded module lounge. However, she’d had enough trouble getting the kids to sleep after an all-too-brief FaceTime call with their dad that having a screen on in that apartment was not an option.
So here she was, trying not to listen to Lou Corlin tutoring a couple of teens. Differential equations, from the sound of it — stuff that dirtside kids didn’t even start studying until their third or fourth year in college. Up here, students moved forward as fast as they could master the subject material, rather than being forced to advance in lockstep with the rest of their agemates.
A lot of Alan Shepard’s problem when he was that age was probably being bored to tears by regular classes in grade and high school. Even at Annapolis, he didn’t really hit his stride until his third year.
How many times had her own father grumbled about the difficulty of keeping Spruance Del Curtin motivated to put out his best work? Brenda knew a lot of those remarks hadn’t been meant for her ears, but when she was still living in her folks’ apartment, it had often been difficult to avoid overhearing her dad’s remarks to her mom about problems in Engineering.
Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday that she was still living with her natal family, and sometimes it felt like another lifetime. Heck, the craziness of the last few weeks sometimes seemed to stretch backward through her memory far further than it had any right to.
Speaking of which, she realized that she’d become so occupied with Kitty Margrave’s friend Amy that she’d completely forgotten about the message she’d gotten from Robbie Sandberg. Sure, she’d sent some kind of very basic response right away, of the I’ll be praying for you type, but she’d never followed up with anything substantial.
And now enough time had passed that she had no idea what Robbie’s situation might be now. Had she been able to find some kind of accommodations with a friend or trusted mentor? Or had she been left with no choice to return to her parents’ home, told it was her problem to deal with the breach between them? In which case, would it even be safe to send her a message?
If her parents were reading her e-mails, checking her phone, on the grounds of under our roof, under our rules, discovering a new message from a former friend thought to be banished from her life could cause trouble. Anything from a shouting match to beatings, confiscations of belongings, even things that would leave her wishing there weren’t a stay-at-home order keeping them from tossing her out on her ass.
Was there some way to contact Robbie, buck her up if necessary, without revealing her identity? All of a sudden she wished she knew a whole lot more about hacking.
Lou was winding up his tutoring session. On the other hand, he was a typical Chaffee straight-arrow. If she asked him, he’d probably aver that they shouldn’t be trying to go behind the backs of someone’s parents when those parents were putting a roof over that person’s head, not to mention that a lot of the necessary hacks were a bit sketchy if you weren’t doing them under the direction of appropriate authority. And while it made sense for Kitty Margrave to go to her aunt when it was clear that Amy was in danger, Brenda wasn’t sure she wanted to go to Betty about an old friend’s situation with so little to go on.