Hannah had read Calvert pretty young. She was probably eight when she first started A Year On Mars, though she'd put it down after not too long to finish her consumption of the Wrinkle In Time books and the Narnias and the Tolkien and the Dahl. All that had left her somewhat peeved; back then she couldn't quite put her finger on it, but something was pissing her off in the aftermath, so it was a couple of years later that she picked up Calvert again, and it was the book that she carried around with her to read when her assigned reading was done. Once she finished, Mick got her the book Andrew Glasner had written about Calvert and A Year. Glasner was probably a little too close to the subject, but he did an excellent job, Hannah thought, becoming Calvert's Ellmann more than anything else. Now more than 20 years later, Calvert seemed to be the most widely read author in human existence. Of course her father had read him, but so had Tom and Eric and most of the others. It was a prep school thing, a New York State and New England college thing. 20 plus years on, she almost thought she was living it. Nothing had been lost, of course, and anything she wanted to read or see was available, but she was amazed that the maudlin and insufferable book she had been strangely unable to resist, partly because it spoke to her about her father, was now some sort of horrible, annoying prescience.
Hannah was blessed that she had completely ignored Harry Potter. Mick had advised her to read more before she wasted her time with that shit, and by the time she picked up Calvert again, she'd read enough to skip it entirely for many years. Weary curiosity made her pick it up three or four years after the whole thing started, but she was so horrified that she was 15 before she blew through a few of them because some of her friends at Hotchkiss were reading them, but it wasn't her bag. Her father encouraged her to read anything, even that shit if she wanted, but to keep reading. She read his books and Con's few books when she was bored growing up, so she was able to tell what was worthwhile early on--and her father had warned her when she was around eight that the years before she started high school would go quicker than she could know and that she should be taking all the opportunities to read widely while she could. She was served well by the two or three or four books going at once habit as she got older, but she fortunately acquired her father's music and literature snobbery so that she had no stomach for wasting her time with or committing her precious attention to hackneyed garbage.
Though the MD/PhD idea had been hers, mostly to get a shitload of school for free, Hannah would have wanted to get a literature degree if she had been completely honest at 17 and would have had she known how things were going to play out. Her father had started before she was five, encouraging her to focus, make her own decisions, and live with the consequences. His only option for her had been medical school unless she came up with a better option. Hannah always suspected that he was 50% fucking with her, but as the years went by she saw that he was not going to let her off easy. The singing career wasn't gonna happen. 6'4" 210 lb. ballerinas weren't a thing. Engineering seemed more than a little limited. She had options for athletic scholarships. She was good at math and had a talent for science. Mick recognized years before Hannah did that she would be extremely interested in intimidating her peers in ways that weren't height-related. At every step of the way Mick was there to encourage her, push her, help her and support her. He was very clear: he'd do anything he could he do to help her, and he expected nothing less then 100% success. He did not tell her what to do. He asked her what she was going to do. How was she going to get it done? With that, he kept her on track.
She'd started her plans in high school. After a couple of years her grades were good and she started talking about them. She was actually not that interested in medical school or being a doctor--until she got there, and then she found it far easier than she thought, and was honestly curious about how she would like dealing with patients--but she kept science and the med school and doctorate plan as her focus. Mick recognized immediately that she was making an MD/PhD program her fallback position, which made him so proud. Her grades stayed good. Her plan worked exceedingly well. And now she was here. What could be less useful than a PhD in biochemistry or a medical degree? Between the two of them, she and Dillon had an MD, a PhD, a JD, and an MBA. An existential joke? No doubt, but if she was ever going to be a painter or a poet or something equally as ephemeral, she now had the time to find out.
For the next few years, Hannah was going to be working on taking care of the twins. She had a feeling there would be more fully human children soon enough. The Berottis, Olivia Park and her husband, Julienne and Genevieve and their husbands, Melissa--both Melissas--Rachel, Cynthia, but mostly the older women, they were going to be shocked. Maybe her mother, too. There was a lot of fucking going on, and more all the time, so there were going to be babies. That's what they would be doing for quite awhile. They'd be having babies and reading and eventually creating. That was what Mick had said he was so curious about. He had told Hannah that he was curious to see what would be created by the last people. What sort of legacy would the last cohort leave behind? Mick was sure that the children born would not be solely human, but Hannah wasn't sure about that.
Both moons were up now, energizing the purple glow of the sky with a vibrant reflected light, and the water was glowing brightly at the horizon line. Hannah was watching the fires below from her balcony and listening to the patterns of the voices. She had finally had the shower she been skipping, and dressed in a nearly threadbare genuine Hotchkiss swimming t-shirt and amazingly stretchy shorts, she watched Tom carrying out a huge tub of ice to Kevin and Con and turned away from the scene below to join them.
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