Fall in May

~51~ Don't jump on the couch Tom.

"And how old is Dean?" Buzzy dead eyes the cause of his second biggest mistake of the summer.

"I don't know ...seventeen, eighteen?" Chad shrugs off the irrelevant details.

"He barely just turned sixteen," Buzzy informs evenly.  

"Okay...and?" The idiot blinks back in incomprehension.

"And that fact doesn't strike you as problematic? That you felt the need to get even with a sixteen-year-old student? For what, talking trash on me?" Buzzy snorts and shakes his head.

"News flash Chad, all teenagers talk trash. I did it. Brad here is kind of a circumspective guy, so maybe not him. But I'm positive you did Chad, because you're still doing it today." 

"Not me. I talked smack right up until the day one of my sisters decked me and knocked me out cold." Brad nods along positively. "I think I was about ten? So after that...not so much."

"Aside from Bradley's childhood sister sibling trauma, let's be honest for a second, shall we? And about talk what this is really about. Not this bull about defending my honor." Buzzy shakes his head sadly in remembrance of the dress down he wss forced endured the night before at the hands of this very self-same sixteen-year-old. 

"No, this is about what that kid can do in the water, with that crazy fish kick? What neither one of you have ever been able to do in the water, on your best day." Buzzy eyes the Plunger boys. "And you know why you hate that kid so much, Chad? Because he's pretty much everything you'll never be in the water and then some."

"Just as I'm sure the fact that he just smashed your best time in the 400 hundred. In a freshmen PE class without trying, had nothing to do with this, right? And what really galls you, because I know it galls me off. Is that he doesn't care one whit about that fact at all?"

"Seriously." Brad scowls down at his flip-flops.   

"That contrary to popular belief that I owed his grandfather Aces some poker debt? Or that Pat and Iris Irish go back to when they were kids? I hired Dean because he had all his certifications and scuba certs." He glares down the boys to make his point. "Which means he's actually got triple the training of you two combined."   

"Oh, and on top of that, he has three red cross awards for lifesaving under exceptional circumstances, in open water." Buzzy heaves a long sigh of disbelief. "Hell, he even jumped off a pier into the ocean to save some poor kid from a shark, when he was fourteen years old."

"No shit?" Brad intones impressed. "Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I always thought he was way too confident for his age."

"No kidding, Brad." Buzzy frowns at the bad word. "So I am going to ask this question one more time. How did Corky, Bobby and the boys come by the information about Dean's mother? Because I know damn well it didn't come from me. Which means it had to come from one of you two?"

"I don't know maybe Brad said something to Bobby?" Chad deflects the obvious away from himself. 

"I wouldn't and I didn't." Brad turns on his former teammate with a deep scowl. "And you know I didn't, because you knew I wanted him to swim for my teams this year, not your water polo team. You also knew damn well that put your brother in a bit of a bind. Because he would most likely lose his spot on the roster to Darren. I did talk about that fact with Bobby ...but never Dean's home situation."

"Chad?" Buzzy bounces the blame ball over to the Cap't. 

"I couldn't say." Captian Midnight casually shrugs off the accusation.

"So if I call Corky, Moran, and Bobby in here? Sit them down and ask them who told them about Dean's mother's situation? You're telling me that your name is not going to come up in this mess?" Buzzy throws down the gauntlet.