The Long and Winding Road (The Seafare Chronicles 4)

“Okay,” Otter cut in. “That’s good. We get it. Don’t get yourself worked up again.”

I tried not to show the relief I felt at that. Not because of what he’d said (because fuck that and fuck her too), but for the fact that he’d been able to get it out and into the open. It hadn’t always been that way. I thought it meant he trusted us. That he was doing his part. And that it was working. No matter how smart he was, no matter what he’d been through to get to this point, he was still only sixteen. When you’re sixteen, things seem much bigger than they actually are.

Well, I thought as Otter bumped my shoulder. Most of the time.

“That’s… okay?” I tried.

“Gee, Papa Bear. Thought of that one all on your own?”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

“Someone has to.”

I thought of Otter’s binder full of I WANT TO HAVE A BABY WITH YOU and decided I needed to be as parental as possible, just to show him I could. “I can still ground you, you know.”

Otter sighed.

The Kid’s eyes flashed open at that. “You can’t ground me.”

“Bullshit I can’t. I am your guardian. You are a minor. You don’t get to talk back to me.”

“You probably shouldn’t have said that,” Otter muttered.

“A minor?” the Kid said, sounding outraged. “Do you know what I’ve done in my life? I am a college student. I have convinced four people in the last six months that the cow meat they were shoving in their faces was obtained via nefarious means that involved nonregulatory practices that any normal person would have considered barbaric. Did you know that in 2000, the number of animals murdered for food was almost ten billion? And that was over a decade ago. The human virus has only expanded since then—”

“Give me your phone.”

“This isn’t going very well,” Otter said helpfully.

“My phone?”

I held out my free hand. “The kids in my classes look like they’ll die when I take their phone away, so I assume that’s an appropriate enough punishment.”

“But I just had a crisis.”

“Exactly. So you shouldn’t be looking into a bright screen for a while so you don’t… get a headache. Or something.”

Otter’s face was in his hands.

“Maybe I’m emotionally devastated and need to look up online how to cope with my feelings on message boards where people with similar issues post with awkward usernames!”

“You have your laptop,” I said. But then, “Which you can only use with supervision for an hour a night. And you aren’t allowed to use your Super Nintendo.”

“Jesus Christ, what year do you think it is?”

“He’s got a point,” Otter said. “And it’s not even a Nintendo. It’s an—”

“And you will come straight home, and you will go to bed by eight! No. Seven thirty.”

Both of them were staring at me.

I scowled at them.

“This might be my fault,” Otter told the Kid.

“I’m not giving you my phone,” the Kid said.

“I pay for it.”