He fished in his pocket, then tossed his key chain on the floor. It had a small flashlight on the end, which switched on when it hit the ground. “I don’t need your car. I don’t need you to help me get a job. I don’t need a shrink. I need some quiet, and I can’t get it here.”
He was out of the house before she could say another word. Unlike Sophie, he didn’t slam the door; he left it open, so she could see him walk away, shoulders soldier-square, never looking back.
She watched him go, replaying the conversation in her head. Had she really said anything that bad? Was he already on edge and she’d hit a sore spot without realizing it? She shouldn’t have given him a hard time for living in the house or using the car they’d been about to junk in any case. Had she kicked him out? She’d told him to get a job. Had she told him to leave? She didn’t think so. She’d only been trying to help.
Val would be furious. All either of them wanted was to know the kids were safe, and now she’d driven Davey out in the middle of the night. Hopefully he’d go to Milo’s, or else he’d walk it off. Maybe she’d even said something he needed to hear, and catalyzed change. That was the optimistic view, anyway. She waited a few minutes to see if he’d come back, then left the door unlocked so he’d be able to return if he wanted to.
She slipped into bed beside Val, who stirred and shifted over. “Everything okay?”
She should tell, Julie thought. Instead, she spooned herself around her wife. “I love you. Go back to sleep.”
She’d tell in the morning. She’d find a way to frame it so she hadn’t driven their son out into the night, or she’d find the thing to say to bring him back before she had to tell. They always came back; they usually did. She played the argument over in her head again and again until the sun rose.
“Did the kids come home last night?” Val asked as she got out of bed.
“I don’t think so,” Julie lied. She realized why Val had lied that time years ago when she’d had her narwhal meltdown, and why sometimes lies embedded themselves before you could tell the truth. Some truths were too painful to look in the eye.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
DAVID
Milo and Karina said David could stay while he found a place, and he added an apartment hunt to his job hunt. He should have moved out of his parents’ house while things were good; nobody would rent to him now that he was unemployed. He should have canceled the appointment with Dr. Pessoa, too, held off making his prospects worse by turning off the light, but the day came, and he committed. For one moment that night, peeling back the bandage, he imagined his Pilot had finally been silenced, but the fantasy didn’t last any longer than the thought.
In the first weeks after leaving BNL, he’d applied for the kinds of job he thought that position had prepared him for: communications, outreach. Whether because he didn’t have a college degree or because he couldn’t explain why he’d left BNL, nobody bit. He needed a different approach.
The first place he applied after getting his light turned off was the prison where he’d promoted Pilots not long before. He could be a compassionate guard; his parents would flip at the danger, but it was one option. He applied for jobs at the VA, security guard positions, a few others where his military experience might be valued.
When he came across a listing for a safety officer at his high school, he threw an application that way. The interview request came two days later: his first in weeks, with radio silence on all the others.
He arrived for the high school interview twenty minutes early, which put him squarely in Lunch Period One. He hadn’t taken a pill that morning, though he craved it. He waited in the car as long as he could, knowing the school would be all noise at this hour, from the second he exited the car, and his mission through the entire interview would be to hide that it bothered him; he’d forgotten how much it had bothered him as a student. He’d learned coping mechanisms that came back to him now, though none had been as effective as Quiet: count the tiles as you walk, or the bricks, or the lockers. Focus on that and only that. Tune out the voices, the chaotic movement, the knots of students everywhere. Sweat pooled in the small of his back, and he was glad his moms had insisted that if he owned only one suit it should be a dark one.
The interview was in the vice principals’ office. He didn’t recognize their names and didn’t remember whether any of them were the same as when he’d attended. It hadn’t been that long, even if it felt like a lifetime; they probably still had access to his student records. Would that affect his chance at the job, if they saw he’d been a mediocre student whose teachers always wrote that he was strangely distracted for someone with a Pilot?
The receptionist looked at him like she was trying to place his face.
He smiled, to confuse her, since he never smiled in the commercials. “I’m here for an interview with Mr. Redding.”
“The chemistry teacher position?”
He shook his head. “Safety officer.”
“Ah. Great. Fill this out, please, and he’ll be with you shortly.”
The application she handed him basically asked for all the same information that had been on his résumé and the online application he’d already filled out. He had copies of both those documents with
