InsaneJournal

Apologies back at home involved fear, begging and pain. Apologies at home were all about one of his brothers twisting his arm up behind his back till he said sorry, but god help him if he folded and said it too quickly, god help him if he showed too much pain. Mostly it was Barak. Barak liked being apologised to, liked the groveling, liked the cementation of his place at the head of the family. Cy just liked the pain.

Kaden knows that apologies in Burlington ain’t gonna be like that, but, in some ways, his brothers methods had been more straightforward. Couldn’t he let Connie’s dad shut his hand in a door and call it quits or something?

He doesn’t say this out loud to Marcie. He knows Marcie’s world doesn’t work that way. She made the world a whole lot more complicated with her apology yesterday; no one has ever said they were sorry for hitting him before. It means he has to work out some new way of being and new ways are hard because they’re so damn fragile. The old ways are easier. Ground into him by fifteen years of… well, grinding.

Only (and this fact is hard in its own kinda way) everyone else who understood the old ways is dead.

So. New ways it has to be.



There’s compassion in the cop’s face when she shows up in the morning, social worker in tow. Compassion and empathy. She and Marcie had been talking before Kaden dragged himself downstairs and he wishes he’d been eavesdropping, to know what exactly Marcie said to make her look like that. Compassion and empathy are two expressions that don’t work on a cop’s face. Don’t work against that uniform. Don’t work against the bruise, faint but there, that he gave her last night. She has no right to strip down his defenses like this and Kaden sits down at the dinner table where Celeste has made a pot of coffee and he tries to work out how to exist as a boy in the daytime, with all the things he’s done piled up in a smoking wreck behind him and apologies that can’t possibly fix anything (but that he has to do anyway) standing in front of him like one of those lines of men with sticks and swords. Whatever that’s called. The gauntlet. He’d rather run the gauntlet. At least then he can kinda numb his mind out and do the thing where he isn’t really in his body till its over. With apologies, and talking, he has to be present. Has to see the expressions on the people he’s talking to, even disarming ones like compassion and empathy.

It’s a clear day, the sky is blue, clouds are super high, the flag in the neighbors yard is flying with a kind of triumph that feels like it’s mocking him. The coffee’s good and strong and he spoons in three teaspoons of sugar before everyone starts looking at him, kinda wishing it was coke but he doesn’t want to ask for something different and he definitely doesn’t want to get up from the table and help himself to the fridge like he’s almost gotten used to doing, before now. So he drinks sugary coffee and the social worker catches his eye. “You like it sweet too?” she says, adding her third spoonful to her own cup, winking at him. Kaden’s sure it’s supposed to establish some kinda rapport, but it just makes Kaden feel watched.

As awful as his night barely sleeping in the playground was, at least no one was looking at him. At least no one was expecting him to face his own future (terrifying) or face his past (impossible).

But Marcie stays at the table with him and the cop and the social worker. She doesn’t leave him to talk to them alone. Celeste gives them space (and he can hear her telling Adrian to come and help her in the garden so he can’t listen, and he can hear Adrian protesting about it, loud enough on purpose because he knows Kaden can hear him and there’s things he wants to Kaden to hear about what an asshole he is) but Marcie sticks around and Kaden remembers the time back in New York that she’d called him her kid, and today he really feels like she’s proving it.

There are three adult women drinking coffee around the table in front of him and together they are laying out a plan for his life, and half way through Kaden’s own coffee he realises how much he sort of wants this. Underneath the terror of it, he wants it. Three adults with their attention on him, three adults as like, weird human scaffolding. He isn’t sure he trusts the structural integrity of it all but, at least he’s not sweeping the dishes off the table and running, right?

It’s kinda a three point plan. Each point branches off into a whole mess of other harder more complicated issues that threaten to overwhelm him, but the social worker keeps bringing it back to the one-two-three.

Number one, school. He has to attend some kind of school and because he’s not staying in Burlington it’s complicated, but the social worker knows her stuff, she knows complicated and she knows inter-state regulations and she’s already got the forms he and Marcie need to fill out printed for them and by the time she leaves, Kaden’s on the way to being enrolled in a correspondence course that starts in two weeks. He’s gotta get some kinda transcript from his old school and that’s probably gonna be a Hecate job, isn’t it (if she can produce a fake ID she can materialise a school transcript right?) but there they have it. School is back on the table.

Suddenly there’s a real path in front of him again. He doesn’t know how he feels about it, he doesn’t trust that something’s not going to bulldoze through it the second he steps onto it but… Marcie puts her signature next to his (even though it says, in awkward handwriting: Matthew Selznick, and not Kaden Murphy) and Kaden knows he’s going to walk the school path – the future path – even if it is all going to blow up in his stupid face, cos her name written next to his like he belongs to her is everything.

Number two, counseling. He’s gotta check in with the social worker at least once a week, gotta do a regular phone call till they leave town. She’s got ideas about how to tackle counseling and that’s complicated as well, since he’s not staying here long enough to build up any trust with anyone new. She notices that straight off the bat, too; that he’s not likely to start trusting anyone quickly. Notices it as easy as she noticed his third spoonful of sugar. Kaden feels seen, and it sucks, but he has a creeping awareness that being treated like he was invisible would be worse.

Marcie suggests they find someone in New York, and everyone at the table agrees it’s best because he’ll need someone he can form a long term professional relationship with. Kaden’s never had a long term professional relationship with anyone in his life. He knows the unspoken truth behind Marcie’s suggestion; they don’t just need to find someone who lives in New York, they need to find someone who lives in New York who will get it, and there’s a little security in that…

Cos, like that is ever going to happen? Like there’s someone Marcie can find who will be cool with him talking about gods and kidnapping? It isn’t going to happen, so Kaden can pretty confidently ignore the fact that he has to go to counseling, and can pretty confidently promise the social worker and the cop and Marcie that he will, he will totally go, but he’ll go back in New York when they can find someone suitable. And then they can put number two firmly aside and move onto number three.

Number three; reparations. Connie, Mrs Hasanovic, Cathal, Adrian.



Connie’s angry. Really angry. She sits in silence between her mother and her father who explain to Kaden just how angry Connie is, and how betrayed, taken advantage of, and hurt she is, and also how she never wants to speak to him again. They talk about how badly she could have been hurt, they talk about how much the car would have cost to fix if he’d damaged it, they talk about mental scarring.

And if Marcie wasn’t there (her presence reminding him his future wasn't entirely on fire) Kaden thought he would have snapped that he wished he had crashed their stupid car, and if Connie was really mad why didn’t she say something, but Marcie is there and they have a plan with how to push forward. Marcie does most of the talking, explains how Kaden’s lost his whole family, and Kaden’s flushing dark with the shame that comes from not being stronger than his pain and not being able to stop it from making him harmful, but he’s not in it so deep that he misses it when Connie’s mom loose her steam, or when her dad look at Marcie like he suspects some kind of trick.

When Kaden tells them he’s sorry that he freaked out so hard and risked hurting Connie (he’s not apologising for risking the car, fuck them) they’re not quite sure what to say.

They stick with telling him not to come back, and Connie’s mom puts her arm around Connie’s shoulders, and Connie shoves herself back from the table and storms out.

They agree not to press charges so long as they don’t see him on the property again. Kaden doesn’t think it’s because of his apology so much as it’s because Connie’s mom doesn’t want to be the one prosecuting a boy who’s lost his family. This way they can paint themselves as generous and kind and understanding and do that photorealistic photo of (white) Jesus on their wall proud.

He supposes he feels relieved about the whole thing, but mostly he just feels dirty for using all that death to explain himself.

“I’m the one who ate those extra slices of gluten free bread,” Kaden adds as they’re leaving, stopping by the front door. He knows he sounds snarky and says it anyway. “Not her. By the way.”

Connie’s mom purses her lips together. “Good luck with him,” she says to Marcie, and shuts the door.

Marcie mouths what a bitch to him, and Kaden is struck with the urge to hug her, but doesn’t, and they get outta there.



He hears his name as they reach Marcie’s car, and Kaden turns around as Connie sprints barefoot across the pavement to reach them. His stomach does a complicated lurch, he feels awful he didn’t get to actually speak to her without the two parental gargoyles at her shoulders, and then Connie slaps him.

The surge in his stomach feels like relief. Oh thank god.

“Why didn’t you say anything about your family?” she snaps, furious. “You are such a boy.”

Kaden stands there with one hand on the roof of the car. There’s no easy answer to her question and maybe she’s already provided an answer for him anyway. Her eyes search his and it reminds him of the drones at the border, tirelessly hunting. It’s the first memory that’s slipped back about the border and it doesn’t have a chance to freak him out because Connie’s got his attention gripped.

The front door opens again. “Connie! Get back inside!”

“You’re an idiot,” Connie said to him, then turned to Marcie. “He’s an idiot.”

“Connie!”

“I’m going for a WALK, MOM!” Connie yells back at the house, then gives Kaden a final withering look and storms off down the street. Away from him and away from her mom, and Kaden climbs into the car. His chest smarts a little where she smacked him. It probably hurts about the same as when Marcie hit him only that felt like the end of everything and this doesn’t.

Maybe he needs to start a fight with Adrian and make sure Adrian wins. Maybe that’ll begin to straighten things out between them.

Sometimes... Kaden thinks he’s more fluent in violence than he is in English.



Mrs Hasanovic is next.

She’s way older than Kaden realised. She has some kind of European accent and her house smells of onions and some kind of warm spice and it makes him hungry and guilty. Blueberry and Coconut come rushing over to say hi and the moment is very tense because Kaden doesn’t know if he’s allowed to say hello back, but he strokes their heads anyway and no one pulls him angrily away from the dogs by the scruff of his neck.

They sit in Mrs Hasanovic’s sunroom on a low couch made of wicker and covered in faded cushions, the dogs running around in the yard outside. There’s no chance she’s gonna hit him. Or slam his hand in the door. She doesn’t look like she’s got a mean bone in her body.

(How do you survive in the world without a mean bone in your body?)

(Don’t you get beaten and broken and splintered over and over and over again?)

Again Marcie explains some of the things that Kaden can’t. But unlike the Lash’s, there’s no tide of anger from Mrs Hasanovic that needs stemming. In fact Kaden can’t read what she’s feeling at all. It is something about old people that makes them like that? Like you can hide everything you think under a face full of wrinkles?

When Kaden offers his apology he feels like sinking deep into the couch, or even down into the floor. For a long time, no one says a word, then Mrs Hasanovic nods and turns to Kaden.

“Blueberry was very hungry, when she came home.”

Right down into the floor and down through the earth. “I didn’t have any dog food,” he says, quietly, to his feet. “I'm sorry. I didn’t want her to be hungry.”

She watches him for another long moment with her inscrutable face. When she speaks again, her voice has dropped. “I was three times your age when I lost my family,” she says, and looks out the window. There’s a twist on her lips, but it’s not a smile. Not directed at him, neither. “I did not deal with it gracefully either.”

Kaden has a million questions and not the stomach to ask any of them. It’s the kind of conversation he might have inched toward having after midnight on the top floor of the Enodia, and only then. It’s impossible to ask the things he wants to know while sitting in someone’s sunroom.

She doesn’t owe him answers, anyway. So Kaden keeps his mouth shut.



Cathal’s almost the hardest of all. Kaden can feel Marcie’s energy change as they step into Cathal’s house and doesn’t know what it means, he’s just aware how nervous he is.

Cathal’s the hardest cos he wanted Cathal to like him the most. Even more than Connie. Cathal had a weird and dorky energy about him that Kaden had seen a kind of reflection of himself in, and maybe that was a narcissistic reason to want someone to like him but that’s how Kaden felt. Had felt. Now he’s not stupid enough to let himself feel it. Now he’s braced for Cathal to call him a little shit, or braced for coldness, or even disappointment which would almost be worst of all cos that’s only gonna amplify how disappointed Kaden is in himself and he doesn’t know if he can take any more.

But Cathal just asks if he’s gone to see Mrs Hasanovic yet, and asks if he hurt himself in the car accident at all (he’s too generous, calling it an accident) and Kaden spends the whole time waiting for Cathal to throw his arm protectively around Marcie and impress upon Kaden how worried or angry or hurt Marcie was like Cathal knows Marcie better than Kaden ever could and like Cathal needs Kaden to know that. But that dynamic doesn’t play out, and Cathal sends Kaden home with half a dozen more Animorphs books.



And that’s it.

They go home again.

Kaden puts the battered paperbacks down next to the school paperwork on his desk and drops his bag underneath it and lies down on the bed. Adrian’s gone out, spending the night at Teeks. It’s a relief because Kaden’s done. His energy is done. Nothing today has turned out like he expected and he can’t handle not knowing what’s gonna happen next.

Cept... Well...

He knows where he's waking up tomorrow, doesn't he?

Guess that's a good a place as any to start.