Winter Break. A time filled with nothing but sleeping in, slacking off, and, of course, the holidays of Christmas and New Years. Two weeks of blissful irresponsibility; a student’s favorite part of the school year except for summer break and spring break. Some teachers were evil enough (by the students’ perception) to assign some sort of work or project that would be due the day they came back from break, but most of them assigned work with a wink and a nudge, knowing that their students wouldn’t so much as look at their backpacks during break. Mr. Holmes’ English class was no exception, and as the students gleefully filed out of classroom and into the hallway to hit their lockers and run for the bus, the young minds were already emptying of scholastic responsibility and was filling with holiday cheer and thoughts of some wicked partying. Chastity Bennett was one of the (few) girls looking forward to some light partying, the sort that didn’t involve heavy drinking, and hanging out with friends after dragging herself out of bed around noon. There would be the obligatory trips to see relatives over the break, but those would be for Christmas morning to the grandparents and New Years Eve to her uncle’s house. All in all, a fairly pleasant break, she thought as she walked along with a couple of friends.
John Adamson was thinking similar thoughts, but more about playing computer games online until the small hours of the morning. The terrorists and his fellow man were just begging to receive a dosage of Excedrin Headache number 5.56 millimeter from his assault rifle. One of his classmates was a fellow gamer and they had already planned to unleash various degrees of havoc upon their games like Athena Sword, Battlefield 1942, Counterstrike, and a few others. It was going to be an excellent break, he thought, as he went to the bus pick-up area of the high school. He passed Chastity Bennett along his way without so much as a second thought aside from a brief appreciation of her stunning figure. He didn’t even get that from her, since he wasn’t really a whole lot to look at, even though he was taller than Chastity’s five feet and seven inches by around five or six inches. On the way to his stop, All John—or Jack, as he was known to his friends, and a few teachers—was thinking about was nothing but complete and total slack time, aside from the obligatory trips to visit the relatives for a couple of days. No big deal, probably lots of fun had by all.
When he got home, however, he realized that most of his plans were to be quite violently derailed. “What?” he almost shouted when his mom told him the news. “Why?”
“Now Jack, calm down. This isn’t the end of the world; all you’ll be doing is spending a week doing some community service. They’re providing your meals and your room and board, plus they’re paying you something like five-hundred dollars.” She paused. “Your father and I agreed that you should get out of the house and do something for a few days, and when this opportunity appeared we signed you up right away. This will be good for you, plus we figured the money would make it a little easier for you to swallow.”
They were right about that; it did soften the blow some. But it still rankled with him that he hadn’t even been consulted on the matter. “Well, what if I don’t want to go?” he said huffily.
“We’re not giving you a choice, Jack. And if you fight us on this, when you do get back you won’t have a computer in your room anymore.”
That blow went straight home. His computer was, to some large extent, his life. Without it he’d be cut off from friends near and far, the stress relief of causing chaos and destruction… he sighed. They had him cornered and that was that. “Alright, fine, I won’t fight you on it. What sort of community service?”
Mom brightened and got him the brochure. “It’s all listed in here; go ahead and read it. Being woken up between six and seven in the morning didn’t sit well with him at all, and a day of possibly grueling work doing odd jobs as assigned to him by a team leader didn’t either. But the cash payout sat rather well with him and he figured a few days of hard work followed by a lovely chunk of money would be worth it. He did like the fact that the week of work didn’t start until Monday morning; he’d be leaving Sunday evening, which was fine with him. It gave him a couple of nights of gaming, which was better than nothing. He ceased to grumble about it and actually began to wonder what sort of work he’d be doing. Maybe it’d be something fun like tearing the guts out of a broken down house to fix it up like new.