“I don’t know if I’m turned on or frightened,” I admitted.
“Ew,” the Kid said, making a face. “What a terrible thing to say. We eat at this table.”
“I’m funny,” Otter insisted.
“Eh,” the Kid and I both said at the same time.
“I’m divorcing you,” Otter said. He glanced at the Kid. “And I’m putting you up for adoption.”
“Good luck with that,” the Kid said.
“If you tried to leave, you’d be sorry,” I said. “I’d find you wherever you went.”
“Ah, marriage,” Otter said. “If it’s not love, it’s threats.”
“We trapped you,” the Kid said. “Forever.”
Otter looked rather pleased at the thought, and not for the first time, I thought of the binder hidden away in his nightstand next to the bed. It’d been on my mind more and more lately.
“So, I’ve called you both here today to discuss my future,” the Kid said.
“This should be good,” I said.
“Remember when he was nine and did this?” Otter asked me. “He made me give him five dollars but refused to tell me what it was for.”
“And I never will,” the Kid said. “You will go to your grave never knowing what I—”
“He ordered Sea Monkeys out of the back of a magazine,” I said. “He said he needed to study how they built the castles like advertised. It was really rather adorable, how gullible he used to be. I miss those days.”
“Bear! You vile betrayer! You promised you would never tell anyone.”
“I found him in his room talking to them,” I said rather gleefully. “He was telling them how when they became sentient, he was going to become their supreme ruler, and that any dissent against him would be met with swift justice.”
“You bought Sea Monkeys so you could become a dictator?” Otter asked with a frown. “That’s… frightening. And really not unexpected, actually.”
“I would have been benevolent. A loveable dictator, like Thomas Sankara.”
“We have no idea who that is,” Otter reassured him.
“He overthrew the government of the African Nation Burkina Faso in the eighties and promoted women’s rights and launched a vaccination program to eradicate polio.” The Kid frowned. “Granted, he had his faults, like when he fired a couple of thousand teachers when they went on strike—”
“I don’t like him already.”
“—but he was still pretty awesome.”
“What happened to him?” Otter asked, because he couldn’t not.
The Kid waved a hand at him. “He was killed in a coup organized by his closest ally. Them’s the breaks, I suppose. I assume being a dictator is hard.”
“How did we get to talking about this?” I asked, staring up at the ceiling.
“We don’t ask that question anymore,” Otter reminded me. “Remember? Because it makes us sad.”
I sighed. “Right. Dammit. I’m a little sad now.”
The Kid scowled at us. “Okay, so you know when I call for a meeting and then you two do that thing where you banter back and forth and you’re in love and gross and nobody wants to see that?”
“Sea Monkeys,” Otter said. “We were talking about Sea Monkeys.”