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CHAPTER 14:
Loss and Love

Simon Q @TheExtremeIronMan
Twenty-five percent faster than the best human record with DARPA’s new prosthetics? Where can I get some?

USSF Office of Scientific Integration

@OSIGenBoatright
@TheExtremeIronMan, I thought you said that was cheating?

Simon Q @TheExtremeIronMan
@OSIGenBoatright, gotta get out in front of the curve, man.

ChirpChat, April 2042



Chip Hairston hadn’t intended to spend the first day at his new school in the principal’s office. It wasn’t his fault, really, it’s just that when the teacher got to the end of the roll and called his name, he didn’t answer. Ms. Stuyvesant looked at the sheet of paper. Hairston was the last name on the roll, it had just been added this morning. There were twenty-nine names and only one of the thirty desks was vacant; the only person not to answer roll call had been the dark-haired sixth-grader in front of her.

She called his name again, “Chip Hairston.” She looked over the top of her glasses with her most intimidating look and addressed the boy. “Chip? Is that your name?”

“No, ma’am,” was all the answer she received.

By now she was feeling uneasy about the boy who had just transferred in from out of state. “Well then, what is your name?” she asked, with just a hint of sarcasm.

“Glenn Armstrong Shepard, ma’am,” the boy answered. Again, he fell silent and just stared toward the front of the classroom.

“Well, if your name is not Chip Hairston, you do not belong in my classroom. Why are you here?”

“I was told to come to this classroom.” He sat perfectly still. There was no malice on his face, just a faint . . . determination.

“Do you have a class schedule?” Perhaps there was a mix-up and he was supposed to be in Mister Frangelico’s class.

“Yes, ma’am.” The boy reached into his backpack and pulled out a much-folded piece of paper. He handed it to the teacher and she unfolded it to read his classroom assignments.

“The name on this class schedule is Chip Hairston. Did you take this from him?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did he switch schedules with you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well then . . .” She started tapping her foot. The students who had been in Ms. Stuyvesant’s class for the prior two months of the Fall term knew that this was the sign of imminent trouble. There was a faint sound of whispers and giggling.

Someone was going to the Principal’s Office!

“Well then, how do you explain having Mister Hairston’s schedule?”

“That’s my schedule. That’s just not my name.”

Sure enough, Chip Hairston ended up in the principal’s office. He was sitting on one of the student-sized hard plastic chairs outside the office of Doctor George Kali, Vice Principal, while his mother, Rosemarie Hairston, tried to explain young Chip’s . . . eccentricity. Chip could hear pieces of the conversation, mostly because his mother’s voice kept rising in volume. He wasn’t interested in her part of the argument, though. His future depended on what the vice principal had to say. Unfortunately, Doctor Kali didn’t seem the sort to raise his voice.

A little while later, Chip’s stepfather, Vernell Hairston, came in. Despite continual urging to call him “Dad,” Chip had never been comfortable with the idea. Mister and Missus Hairston were showing Doctor Kali a bunch of papers, but the vice principal just kept shaking his head. Finally, he stood and walked to the door, opening it and summoning Chip into the office.

“Young man, what is your name?” Doctor Kali seemed nice enough. He asked in a nice tone of voice, after all.

“My name is Glenn Shepard, sir.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” He pressed a button on his deskcomm and spoke after it clicked. “Mrs. Riley, please come and take Master Shepard back to Ms. Stuyvesant’s room. Glenn Shepard is the new student she was expecting, not Master Hairston.”

As the lady from the outer office entered to collect Glenn, the Vice Principal turned his attention back to Glenn’s mother and step-father.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hairston, absent adoption papers or a court-approved name change signed by a judge, you cannot register him by any other name than what is recorded on his birth certificate. Moreover, you have falsified documents . . .” That was all Glenn could hear before Mrs. Riley closed the office door behind them.


“See? Shep was a troublemaker even at a young age.”

“No, I wasn’t. I didn’t start it,” Glenn retorted. “I wasn’t really angry over the attempted name change. It just made me sad, because it was her last attempt to suppress the memory of my father. Aunt Sally was the one who told me the most about him . . . that he’d died a hero.

“I don’t remember them arguing, but apparently Mom hated Dad’s job as a test pilot. That, too, was something I only learned later. Dad had been at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. I was seven when I first heard about it. Dad was lucky, but Mom often claimed that one day his luck would run out. According to Aunt Sally, there was at least one time when Mom had packed the car and threatened to move back to Illinois and live with Grandma. I vaguely remember packing, but that’s all.

“It was at the funeral that I heard about Dad being a hero. He’d walked into the bank at exactly the same time as several men who were about to rob it. One of the robbers seemed very nervous and upset, and started fiddling with something on his belt. It was a grenade, and Dad figured out that it was armed. He leapt up and tackled the man, driving him to the floor behind a desk. He shielded the explosion with his body—and that of the robber. The minister said Dad saved everyone else in the bank that day.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jen said. The meal was over and the remnants cleared away. They’d had another round of beers, and the server kept refilling their water glasses. Better yet, the crowd was light; they’d been encouraged to stay. Even though Jen wasn’t that hungry, she ordered a coconut macadamia pie to share in order to reward the server. There would be a big tip, too; Jen already planned to pay for the meal, and had taken the opportunity to talk to the manager about it.

She and Nik ate a few bites of dessert, but it was quite clear that Glenn was busy replacing calories burned by exertion. She was surprised though, he hadn’t ravenously wolfed down the food, like some athletes she’d interviewed over the years. He stayed a gentleman throughout the meal.

“A few weeks after the funeral, Mom started taking down all of Dad’s stuff and packing it away. She’d called me her ‘little chipmunk’ when I was younger, and from that point on, she never called me anything but ‘Chip.’ She also started calling herself ‘Rosemarie Seeley.’ I was too young to realize that she’d gone back to using her maiden name. When she married Vernell Hairston, she tried to put every bit of her past behind her, even if it meant changing my name.

“I was born exactly thirty years after the historic landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. Glenn was my Grampa Shepard’s name—so Dad insisted on Armstrong to commemorate the date. Mom said she wouldn’t have agreed to the names, but she was still groggy from childbirth.

“Aunt Sally and Uncle Hoop still lived in the house where she and Dad grew up. I visited often and stayed in Dad’s old room with his aircraft and spacecraft models and posters. In that house, astronauts were heroes.

“Not to Mom. To her, astronauts were victims—Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. She especially hated the last week of January, when all those events had taken place. Then Dad died that same week, and Mom considered it an omen; her family was not meant for space. Mom swore she’d never allow me to follow the same path, and lose me the same way.

“Unfortunately, she’d already lost, she just didn’t know it yet.”

* * *

Jen was moved by Glenn’s story. The loss of a father was bad enough, but to have his mother try to erase all memory of him? It wasn’t something that she could understand.

She listened closely as Glenn quickly listed off moves and new schools as Rosemarie tried new jobs, new homes, and eventually remarried. Fortunately, she never tried to repeat the mistake of forcing him to change his name. Glenn was a good student, athlete, and a natural leader. He studied martial arts, and wanted to run track for his high school. He told his aunt and uncle that he wanted to go to a service academy, but didn’t think he could get the required permission from his mother. He thought of approaching his stepfather, but they’d never been close. As time went on, Glenn and Vernell started to argue . . .

 . . . until the day Glenn came home to find his mother crying at the kitchen table. There was a folded paper in front of her, and he could see the letterhead of a local doctor’s office. Even as his mother had tried to erase the painful memories, Glenn knew that she still loved him with all of her heart. Unfortunately, ovarian cancer had been growing for way too many years, and was detected much too late to treat. Rosemarie Seeley (neé Shepard) Hairston died of cancer three weeks later, and Glenn never got to run Track for his school.

The last anchor in his life was gone . . . first his father, now his mother. All within the same week of the year.

That damnable last week of January.

Glenn was alone with Vernell and neither of them knew quite how to handle it. They grew distant and started arguing more frequently. Glenn’s grades slipped and he became sullen and withdrawn. Aunt Sally and Uncle Hoop came to the rescue, and took him in. The warmth of their household gradually brought Glenn out of depression, and Sally’s stern eye on his schoolwork helped bring his grades back up. Vernell and Glenn exchanged bland greetings at Christmas, but both of them moved on.

Glenn dug back into his studies, but with a new emphasis—pre-medicine. His grades were high enough for college, and early admission to college at that. One month after his seventeenth birthday, Glenn started college as a pre-med major at the University of Virginia on a Space Force ROTC scholarship.


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