“I know that. But—it’s. Argh. You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it,” I told him. “We can’t understand unless you tell us.”
“I resented you,” he blurted, then looked immediately horrified. And even though I knew I had to let him finish, it still hurt to hear. “Not like—god. Okay. I need you to listen to me, okay? Like, without in
terrupting me. It’ll be easier that way.”
“I never interrupt you.”
“Sometimes,” Otter said, patting my hand.
“Not when it’s important.”
“Sometimes,” he said again. “You’re just… forceful.”
“That was a euphemism, wasn’t it.”
“A little. It’s endearing. Mostly.”
“Fine,” I said. “I won’t interrupt.”
The Kid stared at me for a moment like he didn’t believe me. Then, “I want to go back to Seafare.”
And that wasn’t something I expected. And there wasn’t going to be a problem with me interrupting, because I couldn’t think of a single goddamn word to say.
“I know—I know it’s… weird,” he continued. “I get that. After… well. After everything. But I think it’s time, you know? It’s been almost four years, and I… I don’t know. I think I need it. And this isn’t spur of the moment, okay? This is—I’ve thought about this. A lot. Maybe more than anything else. And I know things are a little bit better, but I’ve still got this fog in my head, and I don’t know what else to do to clear it. I feel like I’m still floundering, you know? Like I’m out in the middle of the ocean, and I can’t seem to find my way back.”
Oh, yes, it whispered. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Bear? Drowning in the ocean. It’s a good thing to know your crazy is apparently genetic. Either that or it’s a learned behavior. And Otter wants to have kids with you? What could possibly go wrong with that?
“I don’t know what else to do,” Ty admitted. “Sometimes I think I’m getting better, and other times, I feel myself sinking right back to where I was before. I’ll be lucky at this point if Dartmouth lets me continue at all. And that’s… I know that’s on me, but everything I do to try and make it better only seems to make things worse. I can’t focus in my classes. I can’t do what’s asked of me, and if I keep on how I am now, it’s going to just make things worse. There has to be a change, and I don’t know if I can do that here.”
“But you think you can do that in Seafare?” Otter asked. “No offense, Kid, but there’s not a lot of happy memories there.”
He shrugged awkwardly, looking down at his hands on the table. “Maybe. But there are some, right? I mean, Anna and Creed and JJ are there. Mrs. P. She’s a good memory.”
“The best memory,” I said quietly.
He looked up at me, smiling just a little. “Yeah, Bear. The best.” He glanced at Otter. “And it wasn’t all bad. We got you there. And even with everything that happened after, we still have that.”
“Package deal,” Otter said, though I could see how much that had moved him. “Couldn’t get one without the other.”
The Kid laughed. It wasn’t the sound I remembered before we’d come here, but there was still a note of familiarity to it, and I thought maybe it’d be enough for now. “Yeah. Like you’d ever want just one of us.” He shook his head. “I think it’s the right thing to do. At the very least, it’d give me a chance to… I don’t know. Clear my head, maybe. It’d be something I know, something that’s not here. Corey’s going back to Arizona in the fall, and I need to be able to figure things out. How things are going to be without him here.”
Ah, yes. Corey. There’d been a light in the Kid’s eyes I hadn’t seen in a long time the day that Corey burst into his life with a sharp tongue, or as Kori with perfectly manicured nails. They’d given something to the Kid that I couldn’t, and maybe I hadn’t been too excited at the prospect of a relationship between them so soon after everything the Kid had gone through, but I couldn’t micromanage everything, as much as I’d wanted to. Well, Otter said I couldn’t. We’d kept a close eye, especially after they’d broken up. But the Kid was made of strong stuff, stronger than even I’d given him credit for. But this felt like too much.
The fact that I’d met Corey already never came up. And maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be that way. The day he’d knocked on the door to tell me about Ty, I would’ve never thought he’d eventually be involved in our lives as much as he was. There were days I thought Ty should know, but I realized that it didn’t matter. Sometimes secrets were meant to be kept.
“You have other friends,” I said. “It’s not just going to be—”
He snorted derisively. “Yeah. See? I don’t know if that’s really true. For the longest time, I was the oddity, the sixteen-year-old anomaly that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It felt like I was in a zoo and everyone just wanted a look at me, the little kid who was smarter than everyone else. That tends to put a damper on things. And then with… my issues, it sort of alienated whatever was left when the newness wore off. I’m lucky Corey stuck around for as long as he did.”
“Ty,” Otter warned.
“Right, right,” he said quickly. “No talking bad about myself, I promise. And I’m really not. Or at least I’m not meaning to. I’m just trying to show you how it is. I have classmates. I don’t have friends. And I don’t know that I’m in the best position to try right now.”
“This isn’t just running away?” Otter asked. “Because if that’s what you’re doing, it’s not going to work. If anything, it might make things worse. The problems are still going to be here when you get back.”
“No,” he said. “I promise it’s not that. And I know my promises don’t mean much these days. That’s on me. You guys don’t trust me yet. And that’s okay, because I don’t know that I trust myself.”