Junior Year Box Set

I turned to see both my dad and Halle staring at me. I almost blurted ‘it wasn’t me,’ because I’d obviously done something wrong. Then it dawned on me: I had let the cat out of the bag.

“Oh, shit!” was my witty announcement.

“Did you say something about skydiving?” Dad asked.

“You signed me up,” I said, panicked.

“What?” Dad asked.

“It’s part of a photo shoot I’m doing for Range Sports,” I started to explain when my mom walked in the door.

Halle got up.

“I think I need to leave you so you can talk to your parents,” she announced.

Of course, that caught my mom’s attention. I jumped up and put Halle between my mom and me.

“I love you,” I said to my mom.

Halle broke away when she saw the expression on my mom’s face. Coward! Halle scampered out the back door. My mom gave me an evil look. Mom’s interrogation was interrupted when Halle stuck her head in the back door.

“Give me your Jeep keys,” she said.

I had brought her to my house and planned to give her a ride home. Halle didn’t need to witness what was about to happen, so I tossed them to her, and she made good on her escape.

The timer went off for the biscuits, so Dad pulled them out. I’d already set the table but hadn’t plated the stew. I prepared a serving for everyone, and we all sat down as if we were having our usual family dinner.

“How was your day?” I threw out.

“Pretty good, until I heard something about a photo shoot and everyone started acting weird. Is Devin trying to kill you again?” Mom asked.

“Lou has a new invention called a wingboard. They’ll be here next Saturday to shoot me using it. It sounds like it should be a lot of fun,” I said, putting the best possible spin on it.

My mom tilted her head to look at me and then turned to my dad. I swear the man has no backbone. She took a quick glance at him and then her eyes darted back to me. Mom wasn’t sure what a wingboard was, but she knew there had to be more to this. Then she got a cagey look.

“I’m sure they have a video. Show me,” Mom demanded.

I might try and sugarcoat something, but years of indoctrination had taught me to never to lie to my mother. I got my tablet and pulled up the video of the model test. As far as I knew, I would be the first one to ever actually use it.

Both Mom and Dad watched the video without comment. When it came to the part where it showed how you jumped off the wingboard and parachuted to land, they both stared up at me. When the video ended, my mom glanced at me and then gave me a hard look.

“What else have you been up to?” she asked.

“Good question!” Dad said with a big smile.

I gave them my ‘poor me’ look and sighed. The German judge gave it an eight out of ten. I logged onto my Dropbox account and started the video of me doing motocross. I figured if I was going down, best to get it over with. When the video started, it was my dad who was pissed.

“What did we say about motorcycles?” he asked.

“That I couldn’t buy one, which is why we rented these,” I said.

“Who’s we?” Mom asked.

“Crud!” I said, ready to kick my own butt. “Brook Davis.”

“And how did all this start?” Mom probed.

“Brook and I go on adventures. We went skydiving on our first date,” I said.

“You did what?” Mom exploded.

I pulled up the video files and played her our first tandem skydives. Unfortunately, I played the whole video that showed ‘the kiss.’ It was good that Greg and Dad had scared me about having images or videos of underage nudity or I might have accidentally shown my mom a video of me having sex. I seemed to be on a roll tonight.

My mom was starting to figure out the secret life I’d been leading. I think what shocked her most wasn’t that I was doing things that might get me killed, it was that she had no clue I was doing them. I had decided to not share everything with my parents anymore, but wouldn’t lie if directly asked.

“I have some questions,” Mom started. “How did you get them to let you skydive?”

“We said we were 18.”

Dad actually flinched.

“Have you skydived solo?”

This started a series of questions that ended up with me revealing that Brook and I had in fact gotten our licenses and that it entailed a minimum of twenty-five supervised jumps. Range Sports had insisted we do that before they would let me do the photo shoot. I think Dad appreciated that I didn’t expose his part in this and tell Mom he’d signed off on it. This was part of my ‘if it wasn’t asked, I wouldn’t tell’ strategy.

Then the evening turned to the penalty phase. I debated about turning my father in when he suggested that he and Mom should volunteer to be chaperones at the Homecoming Dance. My look of horror was enough to get my mom laughing. Then they gave me the absolute worst punishment a parent can give a kid. Believe me, I would rather be beaten than receive this:

“We’ll have to think about what we’re going to do,” Mom said.

Aw, shit!

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Chapter 23 – Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly! Friday October 16

When I got to school, Mona was waiting for me in the parking lot.

“What happened to our deal?” she asked.