Who We Are (The Seafare Chronicles 2)

“For a while, yeah,” he says, a little louder, his voice sounding gruff, as if just the act of those four words is more force than it’s exerted in a very long time. This is almost a foreign concept to me, as I never shut up, not even if I want to. The Kid looks expectantly between us, the grin still on his face like this is the greatest thing he’s ever experienced. I wonder, if only for a moment, why the hell I haven’t met Dominic yet, why I really haven’t even heard of him aside from the brief mention at the Most Awkward Dinner Ever, especially if he’s got the Kid grinning the way that he is, a smile almost solely

reserved for those that know him best. Jesus Christ, who the hell is this kid and how did he knock down my Kid’s walls so quickly?

I look at him with a new appreciation, knowing that if he’s got the Kid’s loyalty somehow already, then he is someone I have to make sure I watch closely. It’s strange, though, and it causes me a slight unease that Dominic is obviously far older than Tyson, yet the Kid is making proclamations about best friends like he’s known the guy for years. So maybe Dominic is a loner, but why the hell would he want to hang out with a nine-year-old? I assume even loners have some kind of social status they are worried about. I can’t say it’ll do much for his popularity if he’s hanging out with a kid who doesn’t shut up about anything and is surrounded by people older and bigger than he is.

Then I catch another of those sneaking glances aimed at the Kid, who has decided to fill in the silence with a running diatribe of our family history. I hear Ty say, “And then she came back and said she was going to take me away with her, but Bear was like ‘oh, hell no’, and we got an attorney named Erica who is soooo awesome,” and I notice the way the area around Dominic’s eyes tighten, the way his mouth flattens out to a thin line as soon as he heard about our mother’s actions. It takes me a second before I can really understand what I’m seeing on his face, but then it’s gone, and he stares at the Kid, nodding every now and then. I swear what I saw was anger. Like he was angry at our mother, not so much of her abandoning us to begin with, but the fact that she came back and tried to take Ty.

Strange guy, this one is.

“… and now Bear is trying to adopt me, but he’s still going to be my brother, not my dad,” the Kid continues. “I don’t have a dad. Okay, well I do have a dad; I’m not, like, Jesus or anything. I just don’t know who he is, but that’s okay, ’cause I’ve got Bear and Otter and now you, so who needs anything else?”

Dominic mumbles something I can’t quite hear, his eyes again going hard.

“No, I don’t think so,” the Kid says quietly.

“What did he ask?” I say.

The Kid looks up at me. “He asked if there was a chance that Mom could get custody of me.”

I snort. “Like hell. There’s no fucking way that’s going to happen.

You’ve got my word on that, Kid. I’d die before I let that happen.”

The Kid grins at me in that adoring way he has sometimes, and I have to remind myself that I can’t cry in front of strangers and that I need to stop my eyes from leaking so much as it is and that I would die before I let Julie McKenna know any part of Tyson. She might have given him life but she has nothing to do with who he will become. She is not his mother. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t need one. He’s got me. And Otter… and now apparently some random kid named Dominic, who again has just said something that I couldn’t hear. If this guy is going to be around, we are going to have to have a little talk about what it means to be audible.

“Yeah, we know how it sounds,” the Kid replies, glancing at me. “We don’t understand why she came back either. Maybe we’ll never know. But there’s no point in worrying about it now, right? If you worry too much about what could happen, you’re never ready for what does happen.”

“Jesus, Kid, you sound way too much like me,” I tell him. “That can’t possibly be healthy.” But he’s right, of course, right about so many things.

It’s been weeks since our mother came back, and for the life of me, I still can’t understand the whys and the hows of what had happened, what her intentions were. Why had she come back? How had she known about Otter being in San Diego? What was her end game? When we’d met with the attorney for the first time, she’d asked us if we’d seen anyone around that we hadn’t seen before, someone that could have been following us, checking into our lives. That thought had chilled me like no other, the thought of someone following us around, digging into our lives, trying to stir things up that are better left dead and buried. We have too much on our plates already to be worried about looking over our shoulders or finding someone digging through our trash. The unfortunate side effect of all of this is I’m convinced that every new person I meet is her spy (my imagination tends to be overactive, in case you haven’t noticed), and if I could have my way, the Kid would be locked in his room until the custody situation was resolved.

Or maybe until he turned eighteen.

This, of course, leads to horrific thoughts of the Kid at age eighteen, realizing that by having him skip a grade, we’ve now put him on a track to graduate before he turns eighteen, which means he’ll go to college before he’s eighteen, and oh my God, what if he gets to skip another grade? What if he graduates high school when he’s only twelve and then gets accepted to Harvard or Yale and he has to move across the fucking country? There’s no way in hell he’s going to go by himself because I will be sitting there with him in every fucking class he’s taking, glaring at the blonde busty coed named Tiffani who flirts with him and invites him to the first big kegger of the year at Phi Beta Gamma, asking him if he’s ever tried a shot called a blowjob. She’ll lick her lips when she says it, running her tongue over her bubblegum lip gloss because she’s in college and has no inhibitions because she no longer has to listen to daddy (which means she’s a whore).

And of course he’ll want to live in the dorms, and he’ll be roommates with some guy who calls himself Tugboat and who will want to share doobies with him, and everyone knows marijuana is a gateway drug. Soon, the Kid will be hooked on crack and meth, and then he’ll make the biggest mistake of his life while high on PCP and will sleep with that blonde and busty Tiffani (who’s undoubtedly waiting for the Kid to get so fucked-up that he won’t say no) and get her pregnant. He’ll have to drop out of school so he can support his bastard family by working nights at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and then he’ll go home every night to his trailer in a trailer park known for getting hit by tornadoes at least four times a year.

By then he’ll have at least three more kids, and he’ll start getting a beer gut from drinking too many PBRs, and Tiffani (that bitch, I hate her!) will gripe and complain that he needs to take care of her, that he promised her a life filled with wonder and adventure, but instead they live in this shithole, and she had plans for her life, didn’t he know that she had plans? She was going to become a professional cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys! But she can’t now because Tyson has dragged her down with him! He’ll come home one night after getting fired for refusing to sell beef jerky to a trucker in a sleeveless shirt because didn’t that trucker know how they process the jerky? He’ll find her in bed with a rough trick named Desmond who has tattoos on his arms that say neat things like “Fuck” in Aramaic (because that’s how Jesus would have said it) and “Mom” in cursive letters because he is a momma’s boy at heart.

Ty will pack up the kids (by now there’s six of them) and hit the road, going from town to town, performing with traveling circuses as part of his band The Kid And The Kids, where he and his children sing and dance, covering songs from such classic bands like Journey and Destiny’s Child.

One night, in the middle of performing an a capella rendition of Hanson’s

“MMMBop” somewhere in Nebraska for folks in an elderly assisted-living community, he’ll feel a stutter in his heart and will drop down dead, his children gathering around him, tears on their little faces (my poor nieces and nephews!) and some scary carny will start singing “Dust in the Wind”

horribly off-key. Tyson’s children (Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Randy, and Michael) will pack up their belongings and start hitchhiking across the country, still trying to perform as just The Kids, but even they can see that there is something missing without the Kid, and so they’ll disband and go their own separate ways.

And this will all happen, I know, before Tyson turns eighteen.

“Don’t worry,” I hear the Kid tell Dominic, who’s watching me with concern in his eyes. “Bear’s just being Bear. Sometimes he gets these thoughts in his head,

and they sort of take on a life of their own. You can tell it’s not a good one this time because the skin under his left eye is twitching like he’s trying to wink. Trust me when I saw he’s not winking at you. Just give it another second and you’ll see what I mean.”

“You are not allowed to sing ‘MMMBop’ to old people in Nebraska!” I almost shout at him. “Tiffani is nothing but a whore! I don’t care if she gives you Tito!”

The Kid sighs. “See?” he says to Dominic. “Don’t even try to figure out where that came from. I assure you the logic chain in Bear’s head makes sense if you actually know him, and by ‘makes sense’ I mean in a Bear way, but for a newbie like you, it’ll probably just break your mind.” He turns back to me and glares. “Are you trying to scare him?” he scolds me. “I thought we could save the family crazy for another day. This is why I don’t have many friends, Papa Bear.”

“Oh, please,” I scoff at him, hearing Tito in my head trying to convince my other nieces and nephews to get the band back together again. “You don’t have many friends because of your own weirdness. Don’t blame it on me.”