Chapter 614: Jonathan XXVI--Child Sized Solutions

Chapter 614: Jonathan XXVI—Child Sized Solutions to Child Sized Problems

 

 

            Jonathan woke up angry. Silently he ate his breakfast and looked at Mom coldly, cringed at the sound of Dad’s voice and he even hated Freddy for looking so calm and cheerful. After all, this was Freddy’s suffering, wasn’t it? Why should he look so at peace with it? It pissed Jonathan that he should feel so horrible after this and Freddy should suddenly, so placidly have given up on it.

            Mom even pulled on Jonathan’s arm when he was the last person in the car at the school-yard. “What?” He made sure to sound frigid and cutting. He wanted Mom to hurt just as much as she’d hurt Freddy.

            “Stop with this attitude right now, eh?”

            Jonathan shrugged. “What attitude?”

            She squeezed harder and he shrunk underneath her hand, his boyish fear of his mother taking over the feisty youth in him. “Jonathan, stop it right now.”

            Jonathan felt his face pull and wrinkle, and this time he couldn’t take the whine from his voice when he answered her. “But Mom, how could you do this to Freddy? How? It’s the worst thing you could ever do to him! Don’t you get it? He’s going to miss the most important tournament of his LIFE and for what? To punish him for something Jana and I did? Is that right? Even if Freddy seems okay with it now he’s going to look back and blame you! He’ll hate you! Count on it!”

            Mom’s brow creased, and she blinked. “Jonathan, I understand how important this is to you children. Frederick understands completely how much it means to him, and therefore how much it means to us for him to assent to what we ask of him. It is his decision whether he goes or not. And anyway, ten years from now you will all see what child sized problem this tournament is.”

            “Mom!”

            “Jonathan, stop it.” She let go of him and he rubbed his arm. “Stop it now. This is Frederick’s problem and his alone. You should not take it upon your own shoulders because it doesn’t belong to you.” Jonathan slid out of the car and when his feet touched the pavement, he turned and ran into the school without looking back.

            Elena stared at him all through English and through history. He refused to look at her directly but he could feel her gaze on his shoulder, and against the side of his face. Columbine Figure Skating Club….BAH! It pissed Jonathan off that he even knew how prestigious that club was to begin with! And there was Elena, first all pissed at him for ruining her life as she knew it and now all miss happy-happy princess in her fancy little figure skating club. Now she could be all nice to him and be all sad for Freddy and PFFT! He didn’t want to deal with her sympathy dispensed as charity.

            Between classes, he walked swiftly, and kept his attention focused solely on his friends. They were as pissed as he was about what happened to Freddy. It felt good to hear some decent friends he could count on spewing all the verbal hate against Mom that he would have loved to voice. Scott said it all in just one sentence. “Man, that’s just not right, she has no right.”

            “Exactly!” Jonathan spat. “What does she know about how important this is?”

            “She’s a girl!” Nick cried, throwing his hands in the air. “A GIRL? What does a girl know about the things that are really important? She’s really messing things up. It sucks. I used to think your mom was cool.”

            Jonathan crossed his arms and snorted. “Well sooner or later all girls really SUCK.”

            “Amen to that brother,” Scott said solemnly. “I’ll drink to it!”

            All of the boys nodded soberly and then took long swigs from their milk cartons.

            “If all girls suck then why do boys get so obsessed over them?”

            Jonathan turned around to see Elena, her hands on her hips and a smile on her face. Oh great!

            “Well… all girls suck except you Elena,” Scott offered.

            Elena rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Jonathan can I talk to you, please?”

            Jonathan sighed. “Uh…no?”

            Elena pursed her lips and tilted her head to one side. Jonathan had seen his mother strike this pose before, he’d seen friends’ mothers do the same, and it absolutely ate him alive to realize that how compelled he was to respond to it. “Okay, okay, what do you want to talk about?”

            “Come on.”

            Elena led him only to the other end of the cafeteria; Jonathan glanced at his friends who were all staring intently at them. He tried to shrug off their gazes and he turned his back to them. “What?”

            Elena tilted her pointy chin forward, fixing her striking Spanish eyes on him. “Listen, I’m really sorry for everything that’s happened, Jonathan. But you gotta admit, you’d have been real pissed as well if one of my siblings screwed things up for you on your team. Okay? Just give me that?”

            Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care. I’m not thinking about that right now. There are more important things going on besides you and me. Okay? I haven’t even thought about it since like, days ago.”

            “Oh, good,” Elena said, nodding with false earnestness. “Then I guess I can stop worrying about that then. So why have you been avoiding me all day then, if not to punish me for your hurt feelings?”

            “What!” Jonathan exclaimed and he held his hands out. Oh, God, a spat with Elena right in the classroom was not the thing he was looking for today. “Are you kidding me? My feelings aren’t hurt! I SAID have fun with your new skating club, didn’t I? That’s really great for you. Okay?”

            Elena frowned. “Yeah and then you logged off right after you said that Miss Pissy. Like I didn’t get that messege.”

            “My DAD woke up! I told you I was grounded! Geez what do you want?”

            Elena blinked rapidly and then shook it off. “Fine. That’s fine, actually I just wanted to talk to you about the grounding thing. That was my main purpose; I was hoping to talk to you about it this morning you dork!”

            Jonathan lifted his eyebrow. “Uhhh you’re not going to blame me for being…”

            “Noooo, gaw,” Elena replied. “Listen, I’m just as mad as you are for what’s going on with Freddy. In fact, I stayed up all night thinking about it. Really, I’m sorry about it. So tell me everything about it because I want to help.”

            Those sympathetic words did a lot to suddenly soothe Jonathan’s aggravated soul. He didn’t realize how much he’d been craving some female sympathy, and this was like magic. Instantly, he relaxed and the nervous pain on his stomach released and he swallowed. “Elena, that’s real nice of you, but I don’t think there’s much you can do. Freddy’s being just as stubborn as Mom is about the situation.”

            “What does Freddy’s stubbornness have to do about it?” She frowned.

            “Well, it’s like this…”

 

            Jonathan came home in such a good mood that he actually gave Mom a hug and a kiss when she picked him up from school. That seemed to throw her off considerably and he loved the way she kept glancing at him with squinted eyes all the way home. Freddy seemed normal and Jana was unusually subdued, probably still stunned at actually being grounded for something.

            Freddy went upstairs to do homework and Jonathan watched a two hour extravaganza on the History Channel about persecuted women and witchcraft as he mulled over Elena’s genius of an idea. How come some girls were so smart? Were they just born that way? The best part, Elena’s plan didn’t involve Freddy’s participation in anyway so his doggedness about maintaining his own self respect wouldn’t hinder The Plan in any way. Now he totally remembered why he was so nuts over Elena in the first place.

            “Jonathan, I don’t think you should be watching television!” Mom called out.

            “It’s the HISTORY CHANNEL, Mom!” Jonathan replied.

            Mom entered the room and leaned in the doorway. “You just turned it there right now, eh? You were watching music videos or extreme sports?”

            “I did not!” Jonathan replied indignantly. “I’ve been watching this whole time. It’s totally interesting. I’ll probably write a report on it for extra credit!”

            Mom lifted her eyebrows and grinned. “Oh yes? What is it about?”

            Jonathan sucked in a gulp of air and on the exhale spoke. “Well, it’s about witches in history and like they used to hunt women out that weren’t witches but they thought were witches cause like they could heal people with Earth magic and stuff and The Church like hunted them down and then they like tortured them and burned them at the stake cause they were afraid of women and they like killed hundreds of thousands of women all because The Church was scared of women!”

            Michele smiled. “Oh yeah? And what else?”

            Jonathan was up for the task and he sat up straight and fixed his gaze on Mom. “Well that was the first hour, and now it’s in the second hour and they’re discussing famous witches. REAL witches.”

            “Ooo,” Mom nodded. “Like who?”

            Jonathan closed one eye. “Like there was this blood drinking countess in Transylvania called Elizabeth Bathgate or something-or-other and she kidnapped girls and bathed in her blood and they buried her alive in her own castle. And they talked about this other witch from France, “the Green Eyed Scourge of Paris”, she was this beautiful rich widow named Sabet Lafet and she could like kill a man by kissing him or heal a sick person by touching them and men killed themselves over her and she like had these magical powers and she kidnapped little children and young women and drank their blood and they tried to hunt her down and burn her but they never succeeded. As they were going to hang her, she disappeared.” Jonathan held his arms out for dramatic effect.

            Actually he had been paying a lot of attention to this program because the graphic paintings and sketching of voluptuous naked women being examined and probed and ripped to pieces by torture devices was kind of cool. And he liked the pretty portraits of the Lafet woman who actually looked kinda hot for a chick back then.

            Mom tilted her head to one side. “She disappeared?”

            “Mmhmm,” Jonathan nodded. “They opened the trapdoor and she fell and POOF she vanished. And the crowd panicked and it caused the Riots of 1456 because they began to hang any young woman who had green eyes in the city. Crazy stuff!”

            Mom scowled. “And this is documented?”

            Jonathan nodded triumphantly, feeling oh so in charge here, what with his newfound knowledge of history and his close to the vest grip on Elena’s miraculous PLAN. “Yup, it’s totally documented. Of course, new evidence suggests that the Lafet woman was probably not an aristocrat but a hooker from London named Elizabeth Laffy trying to pass off as noble in France. Really she was prol’ly just a horny con-artist.”

            Mom’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “I don’t know if the History Channel is decent for you children to be watching.”

            Jonathan laughed.

 

            Mom and Dad left for the hockey game a couple hours later. None of the children were invited to attend, as part of their punishment they were to stay home, eat warmed up leftovers for dinner, do their homework, take baths and go to bed. Mom and Dad even put parental locks on the televisions to prevent them from anymore illicit History Channel viewings. Freddy did stay in his room to continue his homework so Jonathan was able to take Jana aside and explain to her in the most solemn of tones about The Plan.

            Jana, distraught over Freddy’s plight and itching to do something about it listened eagerly and seemed very excited to be a part of it. She would obey to the letter everything he’d just told her, she would stay in character; she would not let Freddy down! And, Freddy was not to be told the purpose of anything that was to take place. Jana made a fist of determination and swore an oath of solidarity.

            “How do we begin?” She whispered, leaning forward, one of her eyes big and round, the other squinted.

            “Well, first,” Jonathan said. “We’re going to start by ordering pizza… a lot of it.”

            Jana clenched her fist, grinned diabolically and pressed it into her open palm. “Excellent! It all falls into place.”