Red Clover Read Online Free Page B

eventually get there.”
    “First of all, I never mentioned Nelson or Bennett.”
    “You didn’t have to—I know what you’re thinking. Can’t you recognize the merit in his furthering his education when he’s struggled his whole life with his schoolwork? Could you give him just a little credit for that?”
    “I don’t get it, Abbey. I will never get it. The boy has an IQ of 132, for god’s sake,” he mumbled under his breath.
    When Lee was a sophomore in high school, his mother had asked Dr. Jerry to arrange for an IQ test. To everyone’s surprise, he had tested very high.
    “Don’t forget what we were told, Henry, about children in the genius range.”
    “What hogwash are you referring to this time?”
    “I don’t understand why you’re so hard on him when we know he has what often accompanies a high IQ—a difficult time with social relationships, frequent bouts of feeling inadequate, and an obsession with being different.”
    “Those are just excuses. Face it, Abbey, he is different. Just excuses.”
    * * *
    Lee entered the community college in Des Plaines, about ten miles away, and continued to live at home. He joined the karate team the first semester. But while he managed to maintain decent grades in all of his classes, he still had made no friends after two months and feared he would always fail miserably when it came to relationships with his peers. One of the problems was that he avoided talking to people—afraid he would say the wrong thing, afraid of what they might think of him, afraid they would immediately see his flaws and judge him. And girls were the scariest.
    One day during his second semester, after sitting through a long, monotonous biology class, Lee walked down the hall behind one of his classmates, Trevor. He was close enough to overhear him ask the pretty blonde by his side out on a date, obviously for the first time. The boy made it look easy, so normal. Lee remembered something Dr. Jerry had told him many years earlier: “To not try new things guarantees you’ll never be able to do them.”
    The next day, as Lee strolled across the campus on his way to the library, he spotted a girl named Catherine Tynes a hundred feet or so in front of him. Catherine was in the same horticulture program, a year behind Lee but in many of the same classes. With honey-colored hair, sleepy brown eyes, and a nice figure, she may not have been the prettiest or hippest girl in school, but she was a good student.
    “Hey Catherine,” he called to her. “Wait up.”
    She turned around and smiled. “Hey, Lee. What’s up?”
    “Nothing much. That was some exam we had in botany yesterday. How do you think you did?”
    “I’m pretty sure I aced it. And you?”
    “I think I did okay.”
    They walked side-by-side for several minutes without saying anything.
    “Would you like to go out with me sometime?” he blurted out, forgetting everything he had learned from observing Trevor the day before.
    “Sure,” she said without turning her head.
    “Would you be free for dinner this Saturday?”
    “Mm-hm.”
    One of the few things Lee did know about asking a girl out was not to assume too much. “Do you want me to pick you up, or would you prefer we meet somewhere?”
    “You can pick me up.”
    They exchanged phone numbers, and once he had her address and they had agreed on a time, they parted ways.
    Damn. That wasn’t hard at all.
    As he drove home from school the following Thursday, Lee started having second thoughts about his date with Catherine. It didn’t feel right, and he was afraid the only reason he had asked her out was because he wanted to feel more normal, more like Trevor, more like just about every other young male on the face of the earth.
    He pulled into a gas station to use the payphone. He hadn’t told his parents or anyone else about the date and didn’t want to take a chance of getting caught cancelling it from their home phone. After picking up and then putting down the