09-12-2019, 01:32 PM
Truth: his money was on the kid being clueless. Reception, what’s that?. Or, The people whose basement I escaped from stole my phone. Or, They don’t allow us to have those at The Home. But Jude just hadn’t brought his along for the nocturnal jaunt, which was a jarringly mundane answer at the same time as it wasn’t, because who walked around on a rainy night phoneless? Right: this one did. And even though there were a dozen more important things on which he could have expended his mental energy, Near wondered what kind it was, the phone he hadn’t brought.
“You didn’t see me” got an automatic “Yeah, of course,” as if there was a snowball’s chance he’d keep this to himself. Elide over some of the details, maybe: the shitless feeling that came over him when the bottle reconstituted, nobody needed to know about that. Maybe all the magic talk, depending on the audience. But, assuming he was still alive by the end, someone would be hearing about the rest, about the time he went to his dead dad’s house and got accosted by a guy ranting about the end of the world. And whether “someone” was a friend he was trying to impress, a tipsy raconteur he wanted to one-up, or the next person who came knocking at the door trying to find a runaway (in his mind’s eye, a Tolkien-style wizard cloak; he couldn’t help himself) remained to be seen. But if anyone did come around asking, he was absolutely turning Jude in: the reasons he’d been given not to were outweighed a thousand times by the ones he had to think it was probably better for the universe if whoever might apparently be looking for him got him back.
But since the opportunity hadn’t arisen yet, he agreed to secrecy and squinted, flicking through the first dozen or so messages on his screen: varying degrees of concern and outrage from various people because of course Isa would recruit all of their mutual friends and a few names Near didn’t recognize into a grassroots campaign for justice, and this all felt more relevant, or at least more actionable, than any chance of the world coming to an end. He flicked another box away, remembered in the motion:
“The asshole texted me a couple of times. Months ago. Like eight, nine months ago. I stopped reading when I found out it was him, Hell if I know how he even got my number.” He hadn’t deleted the messages, though; hadn’t blocked the sender; just labeled him with a 0 and left his words to rot. They’d stopped coming eventually. He’d thought about it when he got the news about Courtland’s death, figured he’d known and indulged in a last-ditch effort to reconnect and felt proud of himself for not succumbing to the temptation to look. Afterward everything had been too hectic to worry about old texts.
“You didn’t see me” got an automatic “Yeah, of course,” as if there was a snowball’s chance he’d keep this to himself. Elide over some of the details, maybe: the shitless feeling that came over him when the bottle reconstituted, nobody needed to know about that. Maybe all the magic talk, depending on the audience. But, assuming he was still alive by the end, someone would be hearing about the rest, about the time he went to his dead dad’s house and got accosted by a guy ranting about the end of the world. And whether “someone” was a friend he was trying to impress, a tipsy raconteur he wanted to one-up, or the next person who came knocking at the door trying to find a runaway (in his mind’s eye, a Tolkien-style wizard cloak; he couldn’t help himself) remained to be seen. But if anyone did come around asking, he was absolutely turning Jude in: the reasons he’d been given not to were outweighed a thousand times by the ones he had to think it was probably better for the universe if whoever might apparently be looking for him got him back.
But since the opportunity hadn’t arisen yet, he agreed to secrecy and squinted, flicking through the first dozen or so messages on his screen: varying degrees of concern and outrage from various people because of course Isa would recruit all of their mutual friends and a few names Near didn’t recognize into a grassroots campaign for justice, and this all felt more relevant, or at least more actionable, than any chance of the world coming to an end. He flicked another box away, remembered in the motion:
“The asshole texted me a couple of times. Months ago. Like eight, nine months ago. I stopped reading when I found out it was him, Hell if I know how he even got my number.” He hadn’t deleted the messages, though; hadn’t blocked the sender; just labeled him with a 0 and left his words to rot. They’d stopped coming eventually. He’d thought about it when he got the news about Courtland’s death, figured he’d known and indulged in a last-ditch effort to reconnect and felt proud of himself for not succumbing to the temptation to look. Afterward everything had been too hectic to worry about old texts.