After I ate, I left the lunchroom to find an empty classroom so I could make some calls.
My first was to my dad, but he was with a member at the club, so I called Ms. Dixon, my lawyer.
“I wanted to give you a heads-up. Wolf got a message from his mom saying he received a letter putting his eligibility on hold.”
“I’m assuming that you and Tim got something similar?”
“I haven’t been home to check the mail, but if Wolf got one, then I’m sure Tim and I will, too.”
“When you get home, scan it and send it to Mr. Morris and me. I’ll get started on what we planned to do in response.”
“Please do. I’ve played along with Stewart’s games long enough. It’s time to end this. Do whatever it takes, and let me know when and where, and I’ll be there,” I said.
“Okay. Let me go be the scary lawyer you hired me to be. I’ll get back to you once I have the meeting set,” Ms. Dixon assured me.
I hoped that this didn’t mean we were going to war with the NCAA, but I wasn’t going to let that derail my plans.
◊◊◊
After school, I suffered through another workout geared to jump-start my physical development since Ms. Marshall was worried that I’d plateaued. Then Cassidy made me wear my weighted vest and ran everyone through sixty minutes of hell for good measure. Between the two of them, they were going to kill me.
After I’d finished, I drove to Dare’s. He was done with the drone and wanted to show it off. When I knocked at his door, he opened it and showed me he had the drone and controller ready. Dare pushed past me and we went outside.
“Did you have any extra parts?” I asked.
“I did at first, but I figured out where they belonged,” Dare admitted.
“You happy with how it turned out?”
He just smiled in response.
Dare carried the drone to the middle of the parking lot and put it on the ground. He stood back, messed with the controller, and started its electric motors.
The first change I noticed was that the blades were bigger, which allowed them to spin slower than my other drone, but it was still loud. I started to have doubts until it rose above my head, and the noise level dropped significantly. As it continued to rise to about twenty feet over my head, the noise faded to where I could barely hear it.
Dare started to tell me all he’d done.
“Hang on. I want to video you lifting it off again and then you explaining it. There are a few people I need to show this to,” I said, thinking of both Fritz and Grace.
I didn’t want to get Dare’s hopes up that he might earn some money from this before I knew if he had something or not.
He explained how both the rotor design and the sound-dampening material around the blades sent the sound upward into the sky. With the new blades he obtained, he was able to slow the rotation speed, further reducing the noise. He’d also added dampeners to minimize vibration noise.
“When can I start using it?” I asked.
“Give me until this weekend. I still need to program it so it’ll link with your Bluetooth and send a live feed to your security people.”
“I want you to know that I’m impressed. It turned out better than I expected.”
I didn’t expect him to hug me. The poor kid was starved for positive attention. I gave him a fierce hug back. Then, in typical Dare fashion, he was done with me. He had a drone to go work on.
◊◊◊
On my way home, my phone chirped with an incoming call from a good friend. I punched it on and was about to say something, but an excited voice beat me to it.
“Ohmygod, David!” Halle James squeaked. “Did you see the news?”
“Uh …” was my brilliant response.
“The Academy just put out their announcement of the Oscar nominees. Both your films got nominated,” she said in rapid fire and then took a deep breath, “and you’ve been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for
I didn’t need a video chat to tell how excited she was. I let her ramble on with the news, even while my phone was showing incoming calls from Saul, Frank, and Kent.
It turned out
What puzzled me was that after the initial media discussions that I would be up for awards for my role in
