The Exchange Student
by Lubrican
Chapters : Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | Epilogue
Prologue
Cynthia Green picked up the next piece of paper and
began to process it. Cynthia was
thirty-two and thought quite often about how her life hadn't gone the way it
was supposed to. After she had finished
high school, she passed up college, quite sure that her good attitude and
willingness to work hard would get her a job, and the promotions she already
deserved. She did get the job, but it
was an entry level clerk position in the building that housed the school board. It was minimum wage, but she could put up
with that until someone noticed she should be an administrator. Almost two decades later, she'd gotten one
promotion and had maxed out her earning potential. Time and again she was told she wasn't
qualified for higher paying jobs, which required a college degree. Her arguments that she was fully capable of
doing the work fell on deaf ears, though.
Which was why, these days, she was somewhat less
concerned about things than she should have been. On the form she had just picked up was the
name "Ruth Cummins." The next
information was gender. There was a
sloppy checkmark closer to the "m" box than the "f" box,
but the name said it all. She processed
the form, matching that name with one from the female list the Russians had
sent. With a flourishing signature, she
completed the form and tossed it in a basket.
It would be picked up by the girl who had her old job, and mailed,
extending a formal invitation for a Russian girl to come spend a year with an
American family, as an exchange student at the Consolidated High School in
Victorville, Kansas.
Three weeks later, Cynthia Green's Russian
counterpart took the information and prepared travel documents for Nadia
Valovitski, a seventeen-year-old student in a small town in central
Russia. Looking at the American form,
she idly identified the American name on it as a Biblical name. She spent a few seconds wondering why
Russians so rarely gave their children Biblical names, even though a large
number of them were involved with the Christian religion in one form or
another. Wondering about things like that made the day seem to go past
faster.
She walked the form to her
supervisor and handed it to her.
Neither of them could know that Cynthia Green's
casual identification of the American student as a female, based on the name,
Ruth ... was incorrect.
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