Everyone was fine. The drunk falling off his bar stool was fine. The guy bleeding in the alley was, too. And so was Jude.
It was one of those getting-through-life scripts: people learned it by rote, understood they weren’t really supposed to answer any other way, that all the other apparent routes were just painted on the wall. Lucky, too, that Jude knew enough to know that he was fine, because the truth was, for all that he had asked, Near would have been up a creek without a rejoinder if he had responded with anything but. The thought, the small relief, sent him on a quick mental shuffle through the deck of his own stray-cat lovers, most of whom had skipped that day of normal human interaction school. “You okay?” No That’s how things got messy, going off-script.
“Yeah, sure, me too,” he added, promptless, a turn in his voice suggesting his appreciation of their mutual understanding of social mores and also this: whatever his issues, his dead dads and home invasions, he was probably closer to actually resembling “fine” than the kid.
The books made no sense to his eye. Irritating: Courtland should have let him muck around in here more often if he was going to send cryptic messages that might or might not have been about the library later in life. “Know any Boers?”
It was one of those getting-through-life scripts: people learned it by rote, understood they weren’t really supposed to answer any other way, that all the other apparent routes were just painted on the wall. Lucky, too, that Jude knew enough to know that he was fine, because the truth was, for all that he had asked, Near would have been up a creek without a rejoinder if he had responded with anything but. The thought, the small relief, sent him on a quick mental shuffle through the deck of his own stray-cat lovers, most of whom had skipped that day of normal human interaction school. “You okay?” No That’s how things got messy, going off-script.
“Yeah, sure, me too,” he added, promptless, a turn in his voice suggesting his appreciation of their mutual understanding of social mores and also this: whatever his issues, his dead dads and home invasions, he was probably closer to actually resembling “fine” than the kid.
The books made no sense to his eye. Irritating: Courtland should have let him muck around in here more often if he was going to send cryptic messages that might or might not have been about the library later in life. “Know any Boers?”