or status, and yet everything he did would end up on the vids with people commenting on how he did his hair (Vote! Like it or hate it?) and what classes he was taking in school (What will the hero be when he grows up? Vote on the career you think The Wiggin should prepare for!).
What a nightmare. It wouldn't be coming home. They could never bring Ender home anyway. The home he left didn't exist. The kid who was taken out of that home didn't exist either. When Ender was here - not even a whole year ago - when Val went to the lake and spent those hours with him, Ender seemed so old. Playful sometimes, yes, but he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. Now the burden had been taken off - but the aftermath would cling to him, would tie him down, tear down his life.
The years of childhood were gone. Period. Ender didn't get to be a little boy growing up into an adolescent in his father's and mother's house. He was already an adolescent now - in years and hormones - and an adult in the responsibilities he'd borne.
If school feels empty to me, how will it feel to Ender?
Even as she finished writing her essay on Russia's nukes and the cost of defeat, she was mentally structuring another essay. The one explaining why Ender Wiggin should not be brought back to Earth because he'd be the target of every crank and spy and paparazzo and assassin and a normal life would be impossible.
She didn't write it, though. Because she knew there was a huge problem: Peter would hate it.
Because Peter already had his plans. His online persona, Locke, had already started laying the groundwork for Ender's homecoming. It was clear to Valentine that when Ender returned, Peter intended to come out of the closet as the real author of the Locke essays - and therefore the person who came up with the terms of the truce that was still holding between the Warsaw Pact and the I.F. Peter meant to piggyback on Ender's fame. Ender saved the human race from the formics, and his big brother Peter saved the world from civil war in the aftermath of Ender's victory. Double heroes!
Ender would hate the notoriety. Peter was so hungry for it that he intended to steal as much of Ender's as he could get.
Oh, he'd never admit that, thought Valentine. Peter will have all kinds of reasons why it's for Ender's own good. Probably the very reasons I've thought of.
And since that's the case, am I doing just what Peter does? Have I come up with all these reasons for Ender not to come home, solely because in my heart I don't want him here?
At that thought, such a wave of emotion swept over her that she found herself weeping at her homework table. She wanted him home. And even though she understood that he couldn't really come home - Colonel Graff was right - she still yearned for the little brother who was stolen from her. All these years with the brother I hate, and now, for the sake of the brother I love, I'll work to keep him from.
From me? No, I don't have to keep him from me. I hate school, I hate my life here, I hate hate hate being under Peter's thumb. Why should I stay? Why shouldn't I go out into space with Ender? At least for a while. I'm the one he's closest to. I'm the only one he's seen in the past seven years. If he can't come home, one bit of home - me - can come to him!
It was all a matter of persuading Peter that it wasn't in his best interest to have Ender come back to Earth - without letting Peter know that she was trying to manipulate him.
It just made her tired, because Peter wasn't easy to manipulate. He saw through everything. So she had to be quite forthright and honest about what she was doing - but do it with such subtle overtones of humility and earnestness and dispassion and whatever that Peter could get past his own condescension toward everything she said and decide that he had thought that way all along and.