Thanks to Consensus technology, looks can now be changed at will. The people of earth are still getting used to that concept, but they’ll come aroun... eventually. What can’t be altered is a person’s intelligence, and yours, my son, is off the charts. Once the girls at your school realize that, you won’t have a single slot left to fill, which is why I need to get to you now ... while there’s still time,” Mom added cryptically.“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.“Well, honey ... you see, your. At the five-hour mark of the night’s festivities, everything stopped and Juliana was picked up and put against one of the walls, the one that said ‘gutter skank’ in large black spray paint across it. A garden hose was brought in and for the next ten minutes she was spray-rinsed and hosed down. The water was very cold and it made her scream a little.Juliana: “AHHHHHHH! That’s fucking cold! What the fuck???”The man with the hose kept spraying and ignored her cold water screams until her body. I missed the sheer fun of the parties. I was building a future, though, and I kept that in mind when I sat in my room on a Sunday afternoon and reflected on what I could be doing.LSU had gone through the stupid fad of students having to do "community service" before graduation. I'd never bought into the concept. The idea of a college education was to prepare you for those futures that needed levels of intelligence and skill you couldn't get at lower levels in the school system. Now bringing. I thought about how much I'd come to love Cassie and how much I still missed her since she died carryin' our baby. I could see her white gravestone almost shinin' in the moonlight a little ways up the hill near the woods. I thought about all these years of raisin' her kids, and how well they were doin' in spite of the hard life that had been handed to 'em. I thought about the feelin' of loneliness I got sometimes, in spite of the kids and the business keepin' me busy all the time. I sure wasn't.