Chapter 15: Let Me Check My Schedule
The aftermath of the alley incident resolved itself the way most things did in a high school ecosystem — through rumor, embellishment, and the telephone game of hallway conversation.
By the end of the week, the story had gone through several iterations.
Version one: Owen Carter had training. Unspecified, credible.
Version two: Owen Carter had serious training. Possibly martial arts. Someone's older brother had seen something similar at a dojo in Evanston.
Version three: Owen Carter had deflected a punch from a starting linebacker without breaking his stride, smiled politely, and walked away. This version was the most dramatic and therefore the most widely repeated, and it was also, roughly, what had actually happened — which almost never occurred with high school rumors.
The practical effect was threefold.
First: the small cluster of guys who had been quietly discussing whether Owen's recent reputation warranted some kind of coordinated response quietly disbanded that discussion.
Second: John Rich, to his credit, did not organize a rematch. He came to school the next Monday, nodded at Owen once in the hallway — the nod of a person who had processed something and filed it — and that was the end of it.
Third: Owen's schedule got even more complicated, because apparently that was the detail that pushed several previously undecided girls across the threshold from interested to actively pursuing.
Marcus Webb, tracking all of this from his position as official wingman, delivered his assessment during Thursday's Olympiad practice:
"You have created a monster," he said, "and the monster is your own reputation, and I say this as someone who has benefited significantly from standing near it."
"How significantly?" Owen asked, not looking up from his problem set.
"I have been invited to two things this week that I was not invited to last week," Marcus said. "Two separate things. By two separate people." He paused. "I just want you to know I'm grateful and also slightly terrified."
It was the following Tuesday, before the last period of the day, that Karen found him at his locker.
She had the particular expression of someone who had been composing an approach and had settled on direct.
"Owen." She leaned against the adjacent locker. "You haven't come by in a while."
"I've been busy," he said, which was true.
"I know you're busy." She bit her lip slightly — the specific expression she deployed when she wanted something and was choosing her angle. "But you haven't tutored me since the parabola session. And I have a midterm."
Owen closed his locker. He felt the pull of the argument she was making and also the very clear awareness that his tutoring schedule had become, over the past three months, a logistical undertaking that Marcus had started referring to as "the operation" in a tone that was only partly joking.
The honest reason he'd been spacing out the Karen sessions had nothing to do with Karen specifically. She was, by any measure, one of his more impressive students — genuinely quick, once you got past the theater of her usual approach. The System had confirmed this clearly: one session, one Wild Card. The only Wild Card he'd earned in three months of a full tutoring roster. That told him something real about Karen Jackson that had nothing to do with the obvious surface reading of her.
But the System's accounting was also clear: Wild Cards were issued per person per meaningful threshold, not per visit. He could go back a hundred times. He'd already collected what that particular interaction could generate.
Which meant returning to the Jackson house was purely personal.
And Karen knew it, which was why she was looking at him with that expression.
"I'd have to check my schedule," Owen said.
Karen stared at him.
"You'd have to check your schedule."
"I have a lot of commitments," Owen said seriously.
"Owen." She tilted her head. "I have watched you run what is essentially a small tutoring business out of your backpack for three months. I know what your schedule looks like. Do not check your schedule at me."
Owen pressed his lips together.
"My mom keeps asking about you," Karen added, shifting gears smoothly.
Owen paused. "Sheila?"
"Yes. She says you're the most professional and reliable tutor I've ever had." Karen watched his face. "She means it as a compliment. She'd like you to come by."
"Right," Owen said, absorbing this. "Of course she does."
He thought about Sheila Jackson — her plastic bags, her cooking shows, her careful management of a household that was more complicated than it looked from the outside. And then, following that thought, Eddie. Who had not, according to Karen's casual mention a few weeks ago, come home.
Which meant the Jackson house was running a dynamic he recognized from the show — the slow reorganization that happened when a family lost its center of gravity and the remaining members adjusted around the absence.
"How's your dad?" Owen asked.
The brightness in Karen's expression shifted slightly. Just for a moment — a real moment, underneath the performance.
"He's got an apartment," she said. "He's okay." She said it the way people said things when they'd decided to be okay with something that they weren't fully okay with yet.
Owen nodded.
"I moved down to the basement," Karen added, recovering her usual register. "Got my own space. Good sound system." She looked at him with clear eyes. "Mom has the upstairs. It's fine. It's actually fine."
"Okay," Owen said.
"So you'll come?"
He looked at her — the completely unfair combination of genuineness and chaos that made Karen Jackson one of the more interesting people he'd encountered in this universe or any other.
"After school," he said. "I'll come by after school."
Karen's face broke into a real smile — the unguarded one that she didn't deploy often.
"Don't be late," she said, and pushed off the locker and headed to class.
Owen watched her go.
The Jackson house, he thought. Eddie gone. Sheila managing. Karen in the basement with a sound system.
In the Shameless timeline, this was approximately the window when Frank Gallagher entered the picture — drifting toward Sheila the way Frank drifted toward any situation that offered warmth and no immediate consequences. Owen didn't know if the integrated universe had kept that timeline intact or shifted it. He'd find out.
He picked up his bag.
Organic interaction, the System had said.
He was starting to appreciate how specific that instruction was.
After school. The Jackson house.
Sheila answered the door with the warm efficiency of someone who had been expecting him.
"Owen." She held the door open with one hand and gestured to the plastic bags with the other, the motion so practiced it required no explanation. "Come in. I made oatmeal cookies."
"Thank you, Sheila."
She beamed. She took his jacket. She offered him a plate of cookies and asked three questions about school in the particular way of a parent who genuinely wanted the answers.
From downstairs, Karen's voice floated up: "He's here?"
"He's here," Sheila called back, with the satisfaction of someone whose household had a visitor worth having.
Owen ate a cookie and looked around the living room — tidier than last time, reorganized in the subtle way rooms got when they were being maintained by one person instead of two. A framed photo of Eddie on the side table, still there. Not put away.
He heard Karen coming up the basement stairs.
"You actually came," she said, appearing in the doorway.
"I said I would."
"You said you'd check your schedule."
"I checked it," Owen said. "There was an opening."
Karen looked at him for a moment. Then she grinned — the real one, again.
"Come on," she said. "I actually do have a midterm."
Owen picked up his bag.
"Then let's get to work," he said.
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