What to do next?

Matt and Karen stuck out their thumbs in an attempt to get home.

Matt's brain whirled. He really had thought that doing perfectly legal things while above the age of eighteen would have been ignored by the school. After all, at Aaron Burr, they had kids who showed up for school after holding up 7-11s.

"What are we going to do?" Karen asked. "If they make us shut down our streaming service, we'll lose our homes."

He hugged her. "We'll figure something out." Big words but it seemed to him it was normally Karen who figured their way out of problems. Now she was throwing the problems at him.

She hugged him back, her soft breasts pressing against his chest. Damn, he could not let her down.

"This hitchhiking is stupid," she said. "We're going to get picked up by some serial killer. Let's go see mom."

Matt wasn't sure bringing his mom into the problem was a great idea. She was having enough problems dealing with her husband leaving{if ****=true} and having an affair with both her son and daughter{endif}. Still, he guessed they could take her out to lunch.

Mrs. Phuan's office was about a mile from the school, so they arrived hot and sticky from the walk.

All of the staff made a big deal about the kids, with Mrs. Phuan handling introductions and bragging on how Matt was boyfriend to both of her daughters. She insisted on shutting down the office early and taking Matt, Karen, and his mom out to lunch.

"So," she said when they'd been seated at the Red Onion restaurant, "Cindi tells me that you got called to the principal's office and now you show up here. What happened?"

Matt gave a brief description of his problems with Dr. Dyle and the meeting with Conner.

Their mom went into a predictable dither.

"Well," she said, "I'll talk to my lawyer but I'm not sure how long that would take."

Karen perked up. "You know, maybe we could find some info on Conner... I won't say the word '****,' but if we could arrange a tit-for-tat kind of thing, she might back off."

"I can't believe that a teacher said those things," his mom said. "**** sterilization? That's the kind of thing the Nazis did."

Matt nodded. Those all sounded like reasonable thoughts. The more he thought about it, though, the more he believed that the football thing was the easiest lever to work. The football team wasn't as central to the Hill as it was in small towns but it was still a big deal. And Freddy hadn't been blowing smoke about the team dominating the league... that seemed to be a consensus feeling among sports writers. Having the entire team suspended would create a revolt among alumni and parents... which wasn't something Conner was likely to want.

"Okay," he said when the cute waitress delivered their food, "Mrs. Phuan, if you are willing to contact your lawyer, I would appreciate that. Karen, if you and mom could follow up on the **** angle, if we could get info on Dyle or on Conner, we could threaten to embarrass the school. I'm going to talk to Jordan and see if we can get the football jocks to support us."

"I thought you hated those jerks," Karen said.

"Yeah? Well, I confess they didn't exactly give good first impressions. And the fact that Tanya is worried that Jordan might actually **** her if she breaks up with him is a definite concern. But I have a feeling there's something deeper going on and I think it's worth pursuing."

"You know," Mrs. Phuan said, "We have a couple of extra bedrooms. If you end up not being able to pay your rent, you could certainly move in with us. I would love to have a man around the house."

"That's a nice offer," Matt said. "But for now, let's see if we can keep our business alive."