Everything made sense. The aquarium tape Jeremy turned out not to have. The music tapes. The last-minute dash to the dockside stores. The thief had made off with every purchase Jeremy had made at Mariner, Jeremy had broken records getting back to their cabin to create the scene he’d walked in on.
But he wasn’t sure yet he’d heard all the truth. Fletcher’s heart was pounding, from the fight, from Jeremy’s confession, from the witness of everyone around them. Silence had fallen in the corridor. And JR’s hold on him let up, JR seeming to sense that he had no immediate inclination to go for Chad, who hadn’t, after all, been at fault. Not, at least, in the theft.
“God,” Vince said, “that was really stupid, Jeremy!”
Jeremy didn’t say a thing.
“Somebody took it from your room in the Pioneer,” JR said.
“Yes, sir,” Jeremy said faintly.
“And why didn’t you own up to it?”
Jeremy had no answer for that one. He just stood there as if he wished he were anywhere else. And Fletcher believed it finally. The one person he’d trusted implicitly. The one whose word he’d have taken above all others.
Jeremy was a kid, when all was said and done, just a kid. He’d failed like a kid, just not facing what he’d done until it went way too far.
“Let him be,” Fletcher said with a bitter lump in his throat. “It’s lost. It doesn’t matter. Jeremy and I can work it out.” “This ship has a schedule,” JR said. “And it’s no longer on my hands. Bucklin, you call it. It’s your decision.”
“Fletcher,” Bucklin said. “Jeremy? You want a change of quarters? Or are you going to work this out? I’m not having you hitting the kid.”
Anger said leave. Get out. Be alone. Alone was safe. Alone was always preferable.
But there was jump coming, and the loneliness of a single room, and a kid who’d—aside from a failure to come out with the truth—just failed to be an adult, that was all. The kid was just a kid, and expecting more than that, hell, he couldn’t expect it of himself.
He just felt lonely, was all. Hard-used, and now in the wrong with Chad and the rest, and cut off from his own age and in with kids who were, after all, just kids, who now were mad at Jeremy.
“I’ll keep him,” he said to Bucklin. “We’ll work it out.”
Lay too much on a kid’s shoulders? It was his mistake, not Jeremy’s, when it came down to it: it was all his mistake, and he was sorry to lose what he’d rather have kept, in the hisa artifact, but the greater loss was his faith in Jeremy.
“You don’t hit him,” Bucklin said.
“I have no such intention,” he said, and meant it, unequivocally. He knew where else things were set upside down, and where he’d gotten in wrong with people: he looked at Chad, said a grudging, “Sorry,” because someone once in his half dozen families had pounded basic fairness into his head. The mistake was his, that was all. It wasn’t Jeremy who’d picked a fight with Chad.
Chad wasn’t mollified. He saw it in Chad’s frown, and knew it wasn’t that easily over.
“All right, get your minds on business,” Bucklin said. “A month the other side of this place maybe you’ll have cooled down and we can settle things. Honor of the ship, cousins. We’re family, before all else, faults, flaws, and stupid moves and all; and we’ve got jobs to do.”
By now the crowd in the corridor was at least twenty onlookers. There were quiet murmurs, people excusing themselves past.
“We have”—Bucklin consulted his watch—“thirty-two minutes to take hold.”
JR. said nothing. Chad and his company exchanged dark glances. Fletcher ignored the looks and gathered up his own junior company, going on to their cabin, Vince and Linda trailing them. He tried all the while to think what he ought to say, or do, and didn’t find any quick fix. None at all.
“Just everybody calm down,” was all he could find to say when they reached the door of his and Jeremy’s quarters. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right We’ll talk about it when we get where we’re going.”
“We didn’t know about it!” Vince protested, and so did Linda.
“They didn’t,” Jeremy said
“It was a mistake,” he found himself saying, past all the bitterness he felt, a too-young bitterness of his own that he spotted rising up ready to fight the world. And that he was determined to sit on hard. “Figure it out. It’s not something that can’t be fixed. It’s just not going to happen in two happy words, here. I’m upset. Damn right I’m upset. Chad’s upset. Sue and Connor are upset and all the crew who froze their fingers and toes off trying to find what wasn’t on this ship in the first place are upset, and in the meantime I look like a fool. A handful of words could have solved this.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said.
“About time.”
“He didn’t tell us,” Vince said.
“You let him and me settle it. Meanwhile we’ve got thirty minutes before we’ve got to be in bunks and safed down. We’re going to get to Esperance, we’re going to have our liberty if they don’t lock us down, and we’re all four of us going to go out on dockside and have a good time. We’re not going to remember the stick, except as something we’re not going to do again, and if we make mistakes we’re going to own up to them before they compound into a screwup that has us all in a mess. Do we agree on that?”
“Yessir.” It was almost in unison, from Jeremy, too.
Earnest kids. Kids trying to agree to what they, being kids, didn’t half understand had happened, except that Jeremy was wound tight with hurt and guilt, and if he could have gotten to anyone on the ship right this minute he thought he’d wish for no-nonsense Madelaine.
“To quarters,” he said. “Do right. Stay out of trouble. Give me one easy half hour. All right?”
“Yessir,” faintly, from Linda and Vince. He took Jeremy inside, and shut the door.
Jeremy got up on his bunk, squatting against the wall, arms tucked tight, staring back at him.
Jeremy stared, and he stared back, seeing in that tight-clenched jaw a self-protection he’d felt in his own gut, all too many times.
Puncture that self-sufficiency? He could. And he declined to.
“Bad mistake,” he said to Jeremy, short and sweet. “That’s all I’ve got to say right now.”
Jeremy ducked his head against his arms.
“Don’t sulk.”
Back went the head, so fast the hair flew. “I’m not sulking! I’m upset! You’re going at me like I meant some skuz to steal it!”
“Forget the stick! You don’t like Chad, right? You wanted me to beat up Chad, so I could look like a fool, and it’d all just go away if you kept quiet and you wouldn’t be at fault. That stinks, kid, that behavior stinks. You used me!”
“Did not!”
“Add it up and tell me I’m wrong!”
Lips were bitten white. “I didn’t want you to beat up Chad.”
“So what did you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, do better! Do better. You know what you were supposed to have done.”
“Yeah.”
“So why didn’t you tell me the truth, for God’s sake?”
“Because I didn’t want you to leave!”
“How long did you think you were going to keep it up? Your whole life?”
“I don’t know!” Jeremy cried. “I just thought maybe later it wouldn’t matter.”