“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.”
He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. “Didn’t work real well,” he said. “Did it?”
“Didn’t,” Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both hands. “I was scared, all right? I thought you’d beat hell out of me.”
“Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?”
Jeremy shook his head and didn’t look at him.
“I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life. Was that it? Just having such a great time we can’t be bothered with telling me the damn truth , is that the way things were?”
“I didn’t want to spoil it!” Jeremy’s voice broke, somewhere between twelve-year-old temper and tears. “I didn’t want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn’t want it to go bad, and I didn’t know how mad you’d be and I didn’t know you’d beat up on Chad, and I didn’t know they’d search the whole ship for it!”
Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.
“I didn’t know,” Jeremy said in a small voice. “I just didn’t know.”
Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he’d lost, what he’d thought, who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who’d latched onto him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn’t see the expression; he felt it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest so that he didn’t know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his acquaintance.
Jeremy couldn’t change families. They couldn’t get tired of him and send him back for the new, nicer kid.
Jeremy couldn’t run away. He shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on the ship, always would be.
The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn’t go away, either. No more than people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding on the deck.
Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.
And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own. Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this ship.
What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.
He stared at Jeremy, just stared.
“You said you weren’t going to give me hell,” Jeremy protested.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to give you hell. I said I wasn’t going to throw you out of here.”
“It’s my cabin!”
“Oh, now we’re tough, are we?” If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.
“Jeremy.” Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. “Let me tell you. That stick’s sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but because it is. It’s like a wish. And what I wish, Jeremy, is for you to make things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because I was wrong. You may have set it up, but I was wrong. And I’ve got to set it straight, and you have to. That’s what you do. You don’t have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The real mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so.”
“We were having a good time!” Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.
But it wasn’t in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day, when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.
Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat would die down.
House of cards, hell. He’d made it a castle. He’d showed up, taken the kids on a fantasy holiday; he’d cared about the ship’s three precious afterthoughts.