The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [96]
Sometimes the starship went to places where things more strange and fascinating than anything his books had shown him existed. He heard secondhand about dangers and deaths, and now and then the pull of the unknown threatened to tug him back to the path he had left—but science fairs and alien worlds were a poor second to the attentions of Annette as Wesley’s first fumbling attempts at romance brought him into conflict with Jake. Best friends became rivals, vying for her affections in a contest that embarrassed him now to think of it as a man. And at home, under his mother’s judgmental eye, Wesley became sullen. She told him that things were expected of him, better and more important things than wasting his life on the holodeck and chasing a flighty girl whose looks concealed a dull and unchallenging nature. Perhaps, in his heart, he had known she was right, but he was a teenage boy, and everything that didn’t come from his generation was something to kick against. The only one who seemed to know him was Picard.
At first, he refused to see past the uniform and the line of four gold pips on his collar. The man was authority incarnate, he was the adult world made manifest aboard Enterprise. Wesley expected stern lectures from him, but the opposite occurred. Picard watched him make his own mistakes, let him find his own path. When he had advice, it was on the mark and it never felt like reproach. Despite himself, Wesley Crusher found his respect growing for Jean-Luc Picard. He found common ground with the Starfleet officer; Picard had grown up in a family where much had been expected of him and where he too had refused to follow the road laid out by his parents. By degrees, Wes let his barriers fall, let this man rekindle the brilliance inside him. As much as he would have hated to say the words aloud, he needed a father, and Jack Crusher was more than a decade dead and gone. Picard represented what was missing from the boy’s life—direction, purpose. The captain offered him the chance to apply to Starfleet Academy and for a while he rested on the cusp of that choice. Jake Kurland was, naturally, already in the program to become an acting ensign, making up in bravado what Wesley had on him in intellect. And Annette? Annette was dazzled by the cut and dash of a man in uniform. He was falling into the choice, dragged toward it by the inertia of his life, and perhaps he would have taken it, if not for an ill-considered argument in the ship’s mall.
Jake had found out about Picard’s offer to Wesley and he was incensed. Kurland had worked hard to prove himself capable of application to Starfleet, and the undercurrent of barely masked dislike toward Wes and his casual genius finally emerged in a furious tirade. He still remembered the other boy’s words, the sting of them fresh after all these years.
“It all comes so easy to you, doesn’t it? You could snap your fingers and be in Starfleet, but I have to work for it! I have to fight for it, just like I have to fight to make Annette notice me!” Jake’s outburst cut Wes like a knife. “You don’t deserve it, Crusher! You don’t deserve any of it! Picard’s only good to you because he’s in love with your mother!”
He remembered the punch, the impact of his fist on Jake’s face. Kurland spinning away, blood issuing from his nose in a dark fan. Annette screaming at him, disgust in her eyes. Eric’s static expression of betrayal.
He ran and found the two of them, the captain and his mother, talking over tea in the Crushers’ quarters. Picard’s face, schooled and calm, and yet without a doubt Wes saw into the man he had just begun to trust and knew it was true. Jake and the others—who knew how many others?—had seen the growing bond between the doctor and the captain while Wesley the boy genius had been blind to it. His life detonated into wreckage, crashing down around him. He felt cheated.
“Wesley,” Picard had spoken with a metered, paternal tone, “your mother and