“Fuck you,” Scout said, and Nada smiled.
“This is getting weird even for us,” Eagle said.
“Oh really,” Scout said. “Now it’s getting too weird? It sounded like Armageddon out there last night on the golf course.”
Moms had her arms crossed. “To short the pool light, someone would have to get into the water. And probably end up however the squirrel ended up.”
“I vote for the kid,” Roland said.
“I’ll do it,” Nada said before he thought it through, which really scared Moms.
And that’s when everyone finally accepted that Yada Yada Nada, with the glass half-empty and who hated everyone, really liked the runt with the blue hair.
“You’re so brave,” Scout said and Nada smiled, something as strange as squirrel-eating water.
“Just kidding,” Scout said as she did a backflip to punctuate the moment.
“I hate to rain on everyone’s solemn moment,” Doc said, “but electricity doesn’t kill water. Water conducts electricity. As far as we know, electricity has no effect on a Firefly.”
“There we go with the Firefly again,” Scout said.
“We could drain the pool with a shaped charge,” Roland said.
“Brilliant,” Moms said. “Our first priority is containment and you want to disperse the Firefly who knows where? Into the water table? Which flows where?”
“Cape Fear River Basin,” Eagle said, as always knowing his geography.
“Let me think,” Roland said.
“Oh, that’s going to work,” Scout said, and Roland’s lips tightened in anger.
“Could someone shut her up for a minute?” Roland pleaded to Moms.
Scout started humming the theme song to the final Jeopardy round, and Nada took her by the arm. “Let’s you and me get something to eat while they work this out. I’m hungry.”
As they left the garage, Eagle and Roland were arguing about how to kill water, Mom refereeing, while Doc just sighed continuously.
As the garage door shut behind them, it drowned out the words.
“I don’t eat during the day,” Scout said as Nada went over to his rucksack.
“Give me a break,” Nada said.
“Hey. Every woman here in Senators Club is size two. We either eat and puke or don’t eat at all. I’ve got a lousy gag reflex.”
“That will cause you problems drowning,” Nada said as he opened the ruck and rummaged in it.
“What?” Scout said, taken aback for once.
“I used to teach at the Special Forces Scuba School in Key West,” Nada said. “Everyone in scuba school drowns at least once.”
“That sounds like fun.”
Nada paused. “Well, Special Operations takes a lot of things that other people do for fun, teaches you how to do it on the government tab, then makes it miserable. I learned to scuba dive, parachute, ski, and some other things in the army. And it was rarely fun.”
“And you’re not in the army anymore, right?”
“Nice try,” Nada said, pulling some meals out of his ruck. “Let’s just say no one is in Kansas anymore on this op.”
Nada couldn’t figure it out as he read the labels on the meals. The kid was rubbing everyone the wrong way, especially Roland, and even Moms, but the kid rubbed him right. He had no idea why he gave a shit about her. Then he remembered the really smart dog he’d had as a child. It was brilliant. He could tell it which of the tattered stuffed toys to bring and it knew which one. Everyone thought it was just this barrio half-breed mutt, but it was smarter than most of the people wandering the streets shooting each other.
It bothered him that it bothered the rest of the team that he liked the kid. Like he wasn’t supposed to like anyone? Didn’t any of them think he could be normal? He knew he had more time on the team than anyone else, but that didn’t make him abnormal. Did it?
“Hey,” Nada said, holding up his favorite freeze-dried meal. “Eggs and ham.” Everyone else on the team hated that one so he always had plenty. In fact, everyone in every unit he’d ever been in hated them. Which started worrying him again. Was he abnormal?
“Yuck,” Scout said. “Gross me out.”
“Give it a try,” Nada said, and there was something in his tone that made Scout pause.
“All right,” she said reluctantly as he led her to the kitchen.
He put a pot on the stove to boil water, something even he could manage in a kitchen. They waited in silence. Then he searched through way too many drawers and cabinets before he gave up and pulled out his mess kit and split it, one part for Scout and the other for him, although he did find a spoon for her. He broke the freeze-dried glop into two parts, one in each, then poured boiling water on it.
“I do have to admit,” Nada said, “everyone gives me their eggs and ham.”
“Gives, not trades?”
“Gives.”
“And you gave Roland your other meal.” Scout leaned over as the solid mass began dissolving in the boiled water. “Smells like someone already ate it and gagged it back up. Like mother birds do.”
“I know,” Nada said, and his face felt like it was breaking into a million pieces because he was smiling and he wasn’t used to it.
“Oh,” Scout said. “I get it. You eat it ’cause no one else likes it. You give them your other meals.” Her feet were drumming against the wood base of the kitchen bar.
Nada froze, never having thought of that. It actually was kind of a lousy meal.
But Scout took a spoonful and put it in her mouth. She didn’t start spewing, which he took as a good sign. Nada took a mouthful. They sat across from each other, eating the one meal everyone hated.
“Nada?”
He froze with his plastic spoon halfway to his mouth, which reminded him of how during Isolation before an op they used to tear apart their meal packages, tossing away the extra plastic spoons because they weighed too much and you only needed one spoon to eat. They stripped the meals down to the very basics before mission launch because they carried everything, and when it came between choosing to carry an extra meal or extra rounds or an extra plastic spoon, it always went in favor of the rounds. For the first time he also realized how weird that kind of math was.
“I can call you that, right?” Scout asked, bringing him back to the room and the present.
“Sure,” he mumbled.
“Gross. Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
He sealed his lips and continued chewing, happy that she wasn’t ten years older or else he’d be signing off another chunk of his pay to more spousal support. Maybe he should get a dog, he fantasized for a moment, but that made him think of Skippy and he swallowed hard.
“Where’s the trash?”
Scout pointed to a cabinet.
“How can you tell? They all look the same.”
“It’s all in the placement,” Scout said. “Are you going to throw out your eggs and ham?”
Nada nodded.
Scout smiled. “Great. Me too. But we’ll use the garbage disposal. And you should have known it was bad when they couldn’t even call it ham and eggs.”
She took both parts of the kit and turned the water on. She scraped the food off and turned on the grinding disposal. When she was done, she washed them and dried them, then handed them back to Nada.
“That was an experience,” Scout said as he put the kit back in his ruck.
She was twirling her hair with one hand and gnawing on the fingers on the other. “You aren’t that different from this place, you know?”
“What do you mean?” He picked up his camouflage Camel-Bak and took a few deep slugs from the end of the blue hose.
“Can I have some of that?”
“Use the sink, I’m sure it’s better water.”
“I want that.”
Nada stared at her, then walked over and handed it to her. “What did you mean?”