"I told you I needed to go."
Jude looks like he thinks he's Bobby Fischer pulling off a checkmate to the onlookers' applause, but Jude's onlookers are a janitor pushing a mop cart, three teenage boys who turn the corner moshpit jostling one another down the hall, and Near, so all he accomplishes is opening up a direct line to such questions as So why didn't you go before we were stranded in the woods?. But steady on. Near doesn't ask. He doesn't.
What's the point in asking?
Here is one of several conclusions he arrived at while he was still playing the whole Reaches incident over and over and over in his head, not so much a favorite movie but one he was sure was concealing, in background patterns and in cut-in frames, answers to questions he didn't know to ask: Jude is congenitally incapable of giving a shit about anything outside of himself. He is like the handful of four year-olds that Near has met, whose brains have not yet developed the capacity to think outside of their own needs, concerns, knowledge, emotions. It's absurd, of course, because Jude is ostensibly a grown-ass man and looking growner with the new 'do, but he is in fact not the first grown-ass man to have stopped maturing at toddlerhood whom Near has known; he was just too taken aback by most of their previous encounter to recognize it, much less come to terms with it the way you have to if you're going to deal with people like that.
Near is petty. Jude is a toddler. These are the facts.
So he doesn't ask, because it would be the equivalent of asking Jude to look outside of himself, which is the equivalent of asking a man with no legs to roundhouse kick a watermelon off a fence post, and even Near knows that's stupid.
"You sure did," he agrees instead, blandly and punctuated with a tiny click of his tongue against his teeth. Yep, you got me there, kid.
Then, "Yeah, I guess I did. You know, I always thought it would kind of nice to have a sister. A brother. Whatever, somebody to talk to. I think that changed my mind. They ever find you?"
Jude looks like he thinks he's Bobby Fischer pulling off a checkmate to the onlookers' applause, but Jude's onlookers are a janitor pushing a mop cart, three teenage boys who turn the corner moshpit jostling one another down the hall, and Near, so all he accomplishes is opening up a direct line to such questions as So why didn't you go before we were stranded in the woods?. But steady on. Near doesn't ask. He doesn't.
What's the point in asking?
Here is one of several conclusions he arrived at while he was still playing the whole Reaches incident over and over and over in his head, not so much a favorite movie but one he was sure was concealing, in background patterns and in cut-in frames, answers to questions he didn't know to ask: Jude is congenitally incapable of giving a shit about anything outside of himself. He is like the handful of four year-olds that Near has met, whose brains have not yet developed the capacity to think outside of their own needs, concerns, knowledge, emotions. It's absurd, of course, because Jude is ostensibly a grown-ass man and looking growner with the new 'do, but he is in fact not the first grown-ass man to have stopped maturing at toddlerhood whom Near has known; he was just too taken aback by most of their previous encounter to recognize it, much less come to terms with it the way you have to if you're going to deal with people like that.
Near is petty. Jude is a toddler. These are the facts.
So he doesn't ask, because it would be the equivalent of asking Jude to look outside of himself, which is the equivalent of asking a man with no legs to roundhouse kick a watermelon off a fence post, and even Near knows that's stupid.
"You sure did," he agrees instead, blandly and punctuated with a tiny click of his tongue against his teeth. Yep, you got me there, kid.
Then, "Yeah, I guess I did. You know, I always thought it would kind of nice to have a sister. A brother. Whatever, somebody to talk to. I think that changed my mind. They ever find you?"