WHO: Kaden WHEN: Monday morning WHERE: His school in Queens WHAT: It’s careers day! WARNINGS: Mentions of domestic violence and the Peitho situation
In the echoing school corridor, Kaden lined up waiting for his first class, surrounded by other kids in various states of wakefulness and various states of excitement over their weekends. He didn’t join in with that – his weekend had been spent feeling shaken to his core and he didn’t want to talk about it.
First up was chemistry, and Kaden hoped it would be a practical kind of day. That’s what he needed, to focus his brain on careful titration, to stare intently at different kinds of meniscus, play with bunsen burner flames and to burst into celebratory cheers as things changed colour and fizzed, or even overreacted and exploded. He wouldn’t even mind being kept after to clean up some mess, he really didn’t feel like hanging with his friends. If the conversation turned to sex (and it would) he’d just…
Well, he’d rather be picking up broken glass in a chemical spill, that was all.
But the luck of something distracting and physical wasn’t on his side. “We’ve got assembly first thing,” his teacher said, popping his head around the corner to speak to at his class. “Come on – phones off, and get over to the hall.”
Fuck. The last thing Kaden wanted to do was sit inactively and listen to people talk. He glowered, arms folded, and stomped his way across the basketball court with the rest of the class. If he’d remembered about careers day, maybe he would have bunked off. Yes, he was desperate to get out, to start uni, to forge his way to becoming a vet, but he was also struggling a lot, these days, with the vast expanse of time that he had to get through before his real life could begin.
Three more weeks of March, then all of April, all of May, and twenty five days of June.
And then summer. Then Sophomore year. Then Junior. Then Senior.
Then out.
Three more months then three more years.
Considering that there had been three whole days since Peitho had kissed him and Luna had fainted to stop it, and that each of those days made him feel a whole year older… yeah, Kaden did not know how three more years were gonna go. He was feeling a little bit hopeless about it all. How old was he going to feel by the end of school? Thirty?
Kaden managed to slide into the row of seats first so he could shuffle over and sit on the aisle, and once Ruth was sitting beside him, he shuffled over a tiny bit more to give her space, and to make sure that no part of him was touching any part of her. He didn’t want the heat from her body, the pressure, light as it was, where her shoulder touched his.
As the principle stood to introduce their speakers and ask for attention and serious consideration, Kaden focused on the way his leg overlapped the edge of the seat and how uncomfortable that was going to get sitting down for this long.
And as the first speaker began to talk about the path he’d taken toward a career in medicine, Kaden thought about Peitho’s bath-warmed hand on his cheek and her voice when she spoke his name. A shiver, or a shudder, invaded his body and the worse part was it wasn't unpleasant. Beautiful boy, she’d said.
He’d spent a while peering into the mirror (in an empty bathroom at school, not at home, where Cy was about) trying to see what she’d seen, but he couldn’t help but think of how attractive Luna had been, her lovely face and long hair and longer legs. Sure, he looked… okay, he guessed, on a good day, but he hadn’t slept much through the whole weekend and honestly he looked a little haggard. By Monday a breakout of zits over his cheek made the memory of beautiful boy feel like cruel mockery. He lifted his hand and rubbed his cheek, over one sore pimple, and wondered, if she saw him now, maybe her eyes would glance right over him.
Even this imaginary rejection hurt.
The speaker finished up to unenthusiastic applause and Kaden wondered, with a vague kind of hope, if any of the people talking to them this morning would be vets. He already knew the pathway he would take – the marks he needed and the colleges he wanted to apply to and the cutoff dates for the scholarships he could get. He had this all planned, but still, it’d be nice to hear someone talking about what his life might be like on the other side. A little ray of hope. Maybe?
“I always wanted to be an engineer-” began the next speaker, a guy in a charcoal gray suit, and Kaden tuned right out.
-You should be smart enough to know you shouldn’t be here- Luna’s voice berated him.
Maybe these voices were never gonna leave his head. Maybe this was one of those things that was gonna be ingrained in him forever.
Undress for me.
Kaden squeezed his eyes shut.
A couple more speakers did their thing, and then came the clomp of Army boots against the wooden stage. Kaden stiffened – those boots were a dead ringer for Barak’s – and he couldn’t look away. The camo the man wore and the way he stood like he was armed – even if he wasn’t, he stood like a weapon was part of him – did something to him, and Kaden felt right on the verge of dissociating again. Barak was gone. Barak wasn’t getting better. Why couldn’t he hear boots without wanting to disappear into the floor what a coward what a coward what a coward -
That particular talk went on longer than the others, and there were a lot of questions at the end, about money and travel and freedom and – Kaden turned to Ruth, who mouthed at him I hate this country and Kaden managed the barest of smiles. She frowned at him, reading something on his face, and Kaden turned firmly away and tried desperately to be interested in a powerpoint about something to do with genetically modified corn, like it would get the sour taste of cowardice out of his mouth.
It didn’t work. Corn was irrelevant. Kaden’s brain was turning over and over like an engine trying to catch, cycling through Peitho, Luna, Barak, Luna, Barak, Peitho -
After corn man, a stocky woman with close cropped hair and high jeans and big strong arms was talking about helping women, and Kaden thought about Luna unbuttoning her shorts again and wished he was anywhere else.
He didn’t hear anything the woman really said until she said this: “I got into this job because I lost my mother,” and Kaden’s attention was caught.
Bang, like a car backfiring, shutting up the whole neighbourhood.
Kaden’s early life had been shaped by his mother, and after her death, her absence shaped him just as much. There was a deep and silent grief in him, one he carried alone because no one talked about it. He was instantly drawn to anyone else who’d lost what he’d lost, especially those brave enough to talk about it, and he sat up straighter, listening.
“I lost her years before she died,” said the woman – Kaden wished he’d listened to her name, now, to who she was, to why she was talking about losing mothers. “Later, I came to realise that my mother never stood a chance. She’d lost herself a long time ago, maybe even long before she was your age. The household she grew up in was in a deeply isolated rural community, toxic, lonely. I remember the stories she told me about loving her parents, about her parents loving her, and they were stories she desperately wanted to believe because believing they loved her made all the abuse worthwhile; if they loved her, her life wasn’t a prison. But listen, love and abuse cannot co-exist. You cannot love someone and control them, you cannot love someone and hurt them, and anyone who tells you otherwise, no matter how much they believe it to be true, is wrong. My mother never learned that, she never believed it, and the only reason that I did learn it, that I do believe it, it because I got out.
“I realised eventually, after years of therapy of my own, that if I became anything in life, I needed to become the thing that would have saved her. That’s why I got into social work – that’s why half the people in my office got into this work, to be honest. It is hard work, it will always be hard work, but the way I see it: consider the alternative.”
And Kaden’s view of the world cracked right open.
It cracked along the lines weakened by Luna’s words if you’re smart enough to know that then you’re smart enough to get out, by the dark, dark shadow of Tragos latest concussion, by the things Marcie had suffered, even by Barak’s non-verbal dribbling -
His mother was dead. She’d been dead for eight years. But it had never occurred to him that he could stop other people’s mothers from ending up murdered on riverbanks. And maybe if that was true, maybe just maybe there were other things he could stop…
For years his biggest – his only real dream of the future was that maybe he could change the world so that other people’s dogs wouldn’t rip open their side on a rusty nail and get sick and die. He’d never thought he could change people. People were so immovably powerful, people, all the ones he’d ever known, were already stuck in their ways. People hit you if you tried to change them. People hit you before you tried to change them, so the thought of it would never even cross your mind. He thought of the time Cy had hit him so hard for calling him Connor, a few days after his initiation into the War Dogs, hit him so hard he should have got stitches (he still had the scar) where he’d bitten down on his cheek in his shock. No, he’d learned real quick, bleeding heavily from his mouth, not to try change people from what they were.
But what if there were things he could do to stop them becoming that way?
What if he could stop boys joining gangs that controlled their lives?
And what if there were things he could do to stop people like his mom getting trapped in families that would lead to them getting found on riverbanks?
What if there were things he could do to stop girls like Marcie ending up threatened and hurt by her boyfriends older brother, by the men who followed her father?
What if there were things he could do to stop girls like Luna pretending to faint so she didn’t have to finish unbuttoning her shorts?
He’d never, ever thought that was a power he could have, but here was this stocky woman suggesting maybe he could, because she had.
Kaden didn’t hear a thing anyone else said that morning. His eyes unfocused on the cracked wooden seat of the row in front of him, mind racing off into sudden new possibilities.
As soon as assembly let out, he was off. Dodging through the crowd of people who were desperate to get to lunch, because he needed to get out into the car park and find that woman before she got away. He spotted her at her jeep, running up to her as she unlocked the driver’s door. “How can I do what you do?”
“Well hello there - take a breath,” she said, looking at this rattled young man keeping himself on his feet with one hand on her vehicle. Kaden breathed and nodded, trying to keep himself together while also trying to read the entire backstory of this woman in a moment. “You alright?” she asked. Kaden nodded frantically.
“Yeah I just – I just want to – I want to know… how you did it.”
“The courses I had to take?” she asked, but didn’t think that was quite was he was asking. “Or the therapy I needed to do, to break out of the cycle?” she added, tapping her temple lightly.
Kaden nodded, a lot. “The… the courses,” he said, because that was the easier question. “I’m sorry if you said already – Um, I wasn’t listening. Not, uh. Not till you said that thing. About saving your mother. Can you… can you tell me how to do that?”
“Well-” that was going to take a whole lot longer than the time she had. “Here,” she said, pressing a brochure into his hand. Instantly his face fell – the answers weren’t going to be found on a folded bit of paper, but she said “Look at the resources link, on the homepage. That’s a really good place to start, it should answer some questions. Then you can give me a call, and we can talk about it.”
A call? Haha, she was funny as well, Kaden couldn’t remember the last person he’d actually rung instead of messaged. But he shoved the brochure into his pocket, spotting a couple of his friends coming round the corner looking for him. He couldn’t explain this to them, it was one of those things that meant too much, that he was still working out, that... he just couldn't tell them.
“Gotta go,” he said, and took a last look at her, tried to cement her in his mind for one long second before he turned, and went of running to meet up with Kami and Ruth.
“You hitting on social workers now,” Kami asked, eyebrow raised and teasing.
Kaden flipped her off and grinned. It was a little shakey, but it was his first real smile since Thursday.