He starts down the steps, and I hold up my hands and move toward him.
“It’s fine. You don’t need to do it again. I was sitting on the couch that first night. Why does that matter?” I ask.
“Just thinking,” he says.
He walks back up toward the front door. As soon as he gets onto the porch, he suddenly collapses, landing facedown, sprawled across the wood.
The three of us gasp and run toward him. But before we can even get up the steps, Xavier lifts his head and turns to look at us.
“What the hell?” Dean demands. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking.” He gets to his feet to go inside.
Chapter Seven
I expect to walk into the cabin and find Xavier sitting back on the couch reading his book again. Instead, the living room is empty, and I hear the sound of the bathtub in the bathroom towards the back of the building.
“Is he getting ready to take a bath?” I ask.
“Yeah, he does that,” Dean says. “Must be something on his mind.”
“Is there ever a time when there isn’t something on his mind?” Sam asks.
“More than usual. When he’s thinking through something or something is really bothering him, he sits in a bath. Sometimes all day. A couple weeks ago, he spent so long floating around, he came out looking like a corpse.”
I cringe. “That’s graphic.”
Dean shrugs. “It is what it is.”
I look down the hallway again. “So, he just sits in there? For however long he’s going to?”
“Yep,” Dean sighs, dropping down onto the couch. He yanks one of the blankets draped over the back, covers himself, and reaches for the remote sitting on the coffee table.
“That doesn’t bother you?” I ask.
“He does what he needs to do,” he shrugs. Dean turns away from the TV to look at me. “Emma, he isn’t like you. He isn’t like anybody I’ve ever known.”
“Me, neither.”
“Then let him do what he needs to do.”
“You’ve really gotten attached to Xavier, haven’t you?” I ask.
Dean nods. “I have. It’s funny. I moved in with him and started hanging out with him because the court said I had to. I like him, and it felt as if we had hit it off, but I didn’t realize how much he needed me. Now, I feel as if I need him.”
I sit down beside him. “Me, too.”
We watch TV for the next couple of hours, but I’m not really paying attention to what’s on the screen. I’m trying to figure out what he could have been doing outside. The bathroom stays quiet, and finally I get up and go stand outside the door.
“Xavier?” I call.
“Floating,” he calls back.
“Okay,” I say. “I just wanted to check and make sure you don’t need anything.”
“Answers,” he says.
“Answers?” I ask. “To what?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “My brain hasn’t asked me yet.”
“Oh,” I say. “Do you want to talk through it?”
“Too busy,” he says.
“Floating?” I ask.
“Listening to the water,” he says.
“Okay. Well, if you need me, I’m right out here,” I say.
I go back into the living room and notice Dean isn’t sitting on the couch anymore. A few seconds later, the smell of popcorn fills the air and I realize how hungry I am. He comes back in the room with a massive glass bowl piled with what looks like several microwaved bags’ worth of popcorn. Tipping a smaller bowl he holds in the other hand over the popcorn, he drizzles golden melted butter over the fluffy kernels.
“Do you think this counts as a well-balanced dinner?” he asks.
“Defend,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “as a result of a very long conversation with Xavier, I am now the proud owner of the information that according to food anthropologists, the contemporary food we refer to as corn is not anywhere near the food that would have been grown by the natives hundreds of years ago. That particular food, known as maize, was far coarser and would not have been eaten the way we eat it.”
“I applaud you for your ability to present information with the same level of ambiguity and confusion as he does, but I don’t think I see what that has to do with dinner,” I say, reaching into the bowl to fish out several of the puffs with my fingertips.
“Hold on, I’m getting there,” Dean says.
“Give him a minute, Emma,” Sam says, moving from the chair where he has been sitting next to the sofa and reaching around to grab some popcorn. “You let Xavier go all the way into questioning whether the sign in that corn maze was developed under the assumption of an alternate reality, where we were a living history museum being studied by pilgrims encountered by time travelers and being educated in the future of humanity, before you photoshopped a new version on your phone and made him use that as the instructions to get out.” He tosses some of the popcorn into his mouth. “Through the exit we could clearly see.”
I shake my head. “I swear, people should be required to have basic spelling skills before they paint anything onto a sign being used in a puzzle. It would save so much time and hassle.”
Sam shrugs. “Well, to be honest, it would probably really only save time and hassle for us.”
“That’s true,” I admit.
“Anyway,” Dean says. “In the same conversation I learned that modern nutritionists studying the food we know as corn have widely and extensively debated what food group to consider it,
