He had her on that point; they would never have been able to afford to send David to the boys’ school without the faculty waiver. That was the main reason she worked here.
“But, Nick, aren’t we just sending the poor kids off to be cannon fodder again? Isn’t that what keeps happening, over and over again these last few wars?”
“I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think so. They’re offering the senior-year deal to the scholarship kids, sure, but they’re offering the college-tuition deal to everyone, and there’s more than a few nonscholarship kids who need to consider that. They’ve said there’s a training program for kids with Pilots, that they’re going to be specialists. They’ll learn to use the Pilots better than they do now. I don’t think it’s a bad option to present.”
Val rubbed her shoulder, where she felt a knot forming; that was where her stress usually settled. There was no winning this argument, in any case. It was too late. The recruiters had come, and she hadn’t even known about it. She hadn’t known the military was helping to subsidize Pilots. She hadn’t known, and she hadn’t prepared, and they had stolen her son.
David hadn’t even used the money argument. She wondered if that had come into it for him, if he thought he was being pragmatic, if he thought this was a way to help the family; that sounded like David. Or was he just looking for a way to silence what he called the noise in his head? None of her students had ever mentioned noise.
She could pretend her upset was on behalf of her students, good students like Joshlyn, who deserved a full array of options, but all she could think of was David, who had been given a full array of options and made his own terrifying choice.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JULIE
It wasn’t so much a decision as an inevitability; Julie just had to find a way to tell Val. She predicted the conversations: Could they afford it? Yes. She balanced the family finances; with David not heading to college after all, with the GI Bill as an option if he eventually did, they had some money to spare. She was still furious with the recruiters, furious with David, but the irony didn’t escape her that her anger directed itself at his unilateral decision while she longed to make a unilateral decision of her own.
It was an investment in their future. She could do her job twice as well with a Pilot. She’d be faster, more efficient, listening to messages and performing constituent-issue triage and updating the budget and listening to the congressman’s podcast and sending him talking points on the constituent issues she’d heard and answering her staff’s questions without the hopeless whirl of what was I doing ten minutes ago before the phone rang? She could get stuff done while simultaneously calming a caller, instead of watching minutes tick by that she’d intended for something else. It all made perfect sense.
Part of her wanted to go ahead and schedule the procedure, telling Val only after the installation. She wasn’t that kind of person. Was she? Val’s concerns were getting old. They’d seen how well David’s Pilot worked: so well he’d been recruited by an elite military unit, like something in a bad action movie. If he complained sometimes, it wasn’t enough to worry about, and the good points far outnumbered the bad. She liked living on the cutting edge, or at least somewhere on the blade.
Better to be the blade than the chopping block. If you fell behind, you fell behind forever. Like her father, solid on e-mail but uncomfortable with social media and video calls, still insisting on a landline and physical albums as if records weren’t grooves in wax, and CDs didn’t convert music to ones and zeroes. She found the ones and zeroes reassuring. They were proof that it was important for her to adapt and stay ahead.
Before she’d brought it up with Val, before she could tell the congressman her plan to get one, Evan Manfredi called her from the DC office.
“We’re not allowed to require that people get Pilots,” he said. He leaned toward his computer’s camera and rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair, bringing her attention to his own Pilot, consciously or not.
“But?” He was always so obvious.
“But we’ve found a way to subsidize the procedure for any employee of more than three years. I know you may be nervous about it. A lot of people your age are, but I can promise you . . .” She let him drone on about the painless procedure, how easy it was to get used to the enhancement, how much more productive she would be once she had it. Better to let him think she needed convincing than to tell him she’d already decided to do it. He’d probably find a way to renege on covering the cost if she admitted she’d been prepared to pay for it herself.
If she acted put upon, he would owe her one for taking the chance. “Let me talk it over at home and get back to you later this week, Evan. I’ll consider it, but I want to make sure my family is on board.”
He nodded, though she knew those words were foreign to him. She sensed his skepticism whenever she came back from family medical leave. He had no place in his world for external distractions. At least he was so transparent she knew exactly where she stood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
VAL
Another night together, apart. Apart together. David was in his room killing monsters with his friend Milo. Julie sat at the dining room table, intent on some project spread in front of her. Sophie occupied the table’s remaining corner, doing one of those obnoxious 3-D puzzles, which she’d insisted
