He's out mowing the law for his parents every Sunday.)Ĭharlie told Memo she was starting to think her mother had Hank by the balls and had threatened him into never hiring her. She repeatedly asked Charlie whether she'd seen 'that nice young boy' lately. Mom was waving nursing school applications in her face again, and Charlie wasn't happy about it. 'You know what I really need is someone to help me with the books.'Ĭharlie leaned on his desk. The day after Christmas, Charlie walked into Hank's office and threw her certification onto his desk. She was fixing everything: From broken farm equipment, to passing lorry,s to private propeller planes, to motor boats, to stranded foreign cars from the playboy mansions down the coast. She left home every day at four, worked like a dog, got home after dark, and dropped dead almost upon arrival. Two thousand hours roughly amounted to a solid year of forty hour work weeks. At the end of a very humiliating and sexist job hunt, the mechanic laughed, said he remembered a time when the Union used to turn away people like him, and gave her the job on the spot.ĪSE certification required two steps: Passing a test, which she'd aced with flying colors, and accumulating two thousand hours of work experience. One of Hank's old mechanics worked an hour out of Brighton. The whole experience of trying to find a mechanic to apprentice her had left Charlie self-conscious about her breasts. 'You don't even have your ASE certification.'

'What do you mean I don't have the experience,' Charlie leaned on his desk.

She pulled out of the scrap yard, got on the freeway headed out of little Brighton Falls and down to the County Vocational School.įour classes tested out of twelve classes taken six at a time bam, done.Ĭharlie walked into Hank's office, threw a two-year Associates Degree onto his desk, and demanded: Then she turned out of the shop without another word. 'Listen Uncle Hank,' Charlie leaned on his desk, 'I'm sick and tired of squirting ketchup on hotdogs. So less than twenty-four hours after its maiden voyage, Charlie took it down to her uncle's scrap yard, parked where he could see it's bright new coat of wax, and came in with one demand: The Corvette was up and roaring like a puma, right? But seeing as he'd just finally brought her to an auction and let her help with a number of salvageable car purchases, Charlie was feeling pretty vindicated in all the hell he'd put her through. Well! Heh, there might have been one person to whom Charlie had still wanted to prove herself after all that: Uncle Hank. She could just let go and coast to wherever her life took her. Charlie didn't have to be special, or the world's best high-diver, or snag a hot date. She had nowhere to be that was more important than the present.Ĭharlie's coming of age had been a realization she'd had nothing to prove to anyone: Not her classmates, not 'the boy,' not her mother, and not even the ghost of her dad. Right after I get out of this traffic jam and help Hank lock up. Charlie sank back into her seat. She glanced at the back but, nope, nothing else was listed there. 'Milk' it said, and Charlie raised her brows. After getting it back and stopping a broadcast that would have brought the entire Decepticon army to Earth, he'd been gone: Off to find his commanding officer and report in ready for duty.īelatedly, Charlie remembered something: She scrabbled in her glove compartment and found the shopping list Ron had passed her on the way out the door. They'd been quick to realize Bee had only ever been in a small California Beach town in the first place because his memory had been missing. The Chosen One, Charlie was not.Ĭharlie was just the girl stuck in traffic behind Uncle Hank on their way back from a car auction.Īnd Sector Seven hadn't bothered to check in on her house in over a year. She certainly wasn't The Reluctant Boy Hero who’d blundered in, fallen on his face a few times, rescued the girl, saved the world, and driven off into the sunset to live happily ever after. She wasn't the bearer of The One Ring, she had no super powers, and there were no magical artifacts in her grandfather's basement. She wasn't a member of a special bloodline that had been dealing with giant alien robots for (allegedly) generations. Bum da da da bum, whoa, bum, bum bum da, da, da.

'-that's right Phil, the weather is a balmy 65☏ here in downtown San Francisco, but that's not the only good news! This is just in: Last night our brave men and women isolated, attacked, and destroyed one of those alien robot invaders known colloquially as the Dece-'ĭrumming her fingers on the corvette steering wheel, Charlie pretended to find a tune in the endless honking of the San Francisco rush hour.

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