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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 48: Takano 99
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 15
Overnight it occurred to Tommy that Davey didn’t have his choice of three girls. Of the hundred people, there must be fifteen, possibly twenty, who were unattached and marriageable, if you considered that girls frequently thought they were marriageable when they hit fourteen or fifteen, and there wasn’t any law here to say they couldn’t.
Of course, there was also her.
She would be a bad choice. She was never going to get older, and according to Lauren she was never going to have children. Also, whenever she died, whether tomorrow or a century from tomorrow, she would take him with her--well, that is, if he was still alive, which he wouldn’t be in a century. He was needed here, though, and while his skills would certainly be useful here, and maybe in worlds ahead, she didn’t really need a husband at this point.
That was awkward anyway. She hadn’t even begun to think seriously about marrying anyone when she was home. She was going to finish high school, go to college, maybe take a year off to travel somewhere (Japan had not been on the list, but now maybe she would have considered it), get a job, and then once she was a bit older--most of a decade--she would meet someone and get married.
Varlax was right, though. Davey was the kind of guy you could grow to love. She always imagined that she would marry someone with whom she had fallen hopelessly, tragically, in love, but was that realistic? Would that be mutual? Even if it was, would that be a good basis for a marriage? Whoever she married was likely to be with her for a long time. She should be smart about that.
Somehow that sounded terribly unromantic. Varlax could be sensible. She’d had her romance; she needed something practical.
Maybe that wasn’t fair to Davey; but then, Davey was unlikely to be socially able, given his background.
In any case, Tommy was certainly the wrong girl for him. Maybe Varlax wasn’t right either, but just because Varlax was the wrong choice didn’t mean that Tommy was the right one, or that there wasn’t a right choice among the rest of the girls out there. Maybe it wasn’t one of the first three who had approached him; maybe whoever it was had been scared off by the competition. Or maybe Davey was going to be the kind of guy who had to choose a girl and pursue her, not the kind to be pursued. What was that expression she had heard? He chased her until she caught him? Something like that.
She wished Lauren were here. But then, Lauren had about run out of things to teach them, and Davey was here, and knew all the things Lauren wished she knew.
She rolled over and went back to sleep.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #503: Versers Progress. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
