Julie homed in on something in Sophie’s rant. “If their parents won’t protect him?” she repeated. “Is that a dig at us?”
“I meant them. Parents won’t protect them.” Sophie flushed, then pulled herself back to righteous anger. “But you do know how I feel about David’s Pilot: the same as I feel about all of them. Yours is maybe worse, since you saw David struggle, and you decided to do it anyway. You made a fully informed stupid choice.”
Julie resisted the urge to send her daughter to her room over “stupid choice.” Instead, she threw her plate in the dishwasher and left the room. The food had helped her hangover a bit. She went back to the bedroom and climbed into the unmade bed.
Cool autumn sun filtered through the open blinds. Funny how the quality of sunlight changed from summer to fall. You would think sunlight would be sunlight no matter what, but it wasn’t so. The level of intensity, the angle, everything changed. You were more grateful for it in autumn, too. In summer, it burned your skin and heated everything to the point of unbearable. By mid-October you just wished it would play across your face a little longer. She heard Val’s chair scrape the kitchen floor, then her steps on the stairs.
Julie knew her apology long before Val entered the bedroom. “Sorry about that. It was her or me, and I thought it was better for everybody if I left.”
“I think that’s true.” Val threw herself on the bed. “I told her I’d go to the meeting with her tonight.”
Julie propped herself on an elbow. “She said you could? For real? How did you convince her?”
“I didn’t convince her. She asked me.”
“I’m guessing I’m not invited?”
“No way,” Val said. “You’re the enemy, Jules. Sorry about that.” She sat on the bedspread and took Julie’s hands. “At least I get to see what goes on. Also, I think she’ll let me drive her, so that’s one night we don’t have to worry about her on the bus.”
Better than nothing. One night of less worry was definitely a good thing, a night where her worry might still force her to look at the military sites, but not Sophie’s. She’d grown up with a sheepdog-crossed mutt, a herding dog. He had tried to gather her and her parents in the same room every night and wasn’t satisfied until everybody was watching TV or scrolling phones or reading in the same space. She hadn’t realized how much she’d become like Max. At least tonight she’d have tabs on everyone but David, even if she couldn’t be there herself. Max hadn’t been able to delegate, so she had that on sheepdogs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
VAL
Val had been angling for an invitation to Sophie’s group for ages. Since before the meetings existed, when Sophie attended her first rally and Val had played the world’s worst spy. The rally had spoken to her, and it was only the realization she’d be stepping on Sophie’s toes that kept her from going back. Gabe and his father were a team; maybe Sophie would see her that way someday, too. She wouldn’t be the one to broach it. If that meant she couldn’t be part of the movement, so be it.
She waited. When her school decided not to bring her back from suspension, they scraped by on Julie’s paycheck. It took a full year for her to find a job in a public high school on the west side, coaching and teaching non-Piloted geography, which by then was the actual class name. She made sure the students in it knew she thought they were smart and capable, and she took joy in the fact that, Piloted or not, running was still running, and students still needed her advice on body mechanics, on training, on strategy.
She was one of only four teachers at her new school without Pilots, and they all taught the non-Piloted classes. They sometimes chatted about how fast it had all happened, about the way Pilots had so quickly become the default, so that the class choices were geography and non-Piloted geography, or the fact that there were five freshman geography sections, and the non-Piloted one had only twenty students. Same in other subjects as well.
When FreerMind formalized its existence, she cheered quietly. When Gabe and Sophie got the two local jobs, which were supposed to be field organizer and assistant field organizer, but instead insisted on co-running the branch at a ridiculously low wage that split the difference, she cheered them on while defending their decision to Julie.
Val loved the idea of a meeting where you could talk with other non-Piloted folks, but she didn’t want to stifle Sophie’s participation in her own group; Sophie needed it more than she did. She celebrated proof that they’d managed to raise a competent adult capable of holding a job in an increasingly tricky economy, even if it wasn’t the job they’d envisioned, or enough money to live on.
When Sophie and Julie exploded at each other over breakfast, and Sophie asked Val to come with her and “see what we actually do, instead of whatever the two of you concoct in your paranoid brains,” and Val played it cool and said sure, she’d be open to attending, she had been hoping for that invitation for years.
Val let Sophie chart a circuitous course to the meeting, amused Sophie thought she could deceive Val, and hurt that she thought she needed to; Val had been driving and running through this city since long before Sophie existed. They skirted the neighborhood that housed the first public school she’d taught in; these were the kinds of neighborhoods she’d grown up in herself. Another parenting failure if she’d never shown Sophie she knew firsthand that love and hope and despair and rage at systemic inequality existed here, too, and needed to be looked at head-on rather than avoided. She
