“Easy!” Bucklin said into his ear, dragging back at him. He was sorry to have hit Lyra, who’d warned him in the counter-attack. Chad never had laid a good hit on him, but Chad’s face was bloody. And Jeremy was in the way now.
“Easy,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, Fletcher,—easy. It’s all right. We’re getting out of here, all right? We’re getting out of here… we’ll go home.”
“Name’s Bucklin,” Bucklin said, and put pressure on the arm. “Lieutenant over the juniors. This is officially over. It got way out of hand. Way beyond what anybody intended. I’m going to let you go, now, Fletcher. I want you to stand still a minute. I want you to hear apologies, and I want everybody involved in this to stand and deliver loud and clear. Do you hear me, Fletcher?” There was a pat on his shoulder, and he was trembling, partly with the strain on an arm he didn’t want broken and partly from unresolved nerves. “They’ll apologize. No more fighting. Have I got that, Fletcher?”
“I don’t want anything from them,” he said, out of breath. Bucklin’s hold on his arm let up anyway. “Let him go,” Bucklin said, and had to repeat it: “Let him go,” until the other guy—it was Wayne—let go from his side.
“Apologies,” Lyra said before he could bolt. She was limping. “Major sorry, here, Fletcher. Bucklin’s right. Way too much.”
It was hard to walk out on a girl he’d kicked in a fight by accident. He stood still, burning mad. Linda apologized, a sheepish mumble. Sue did. “I threw the water,” Sue said. “Bad judgment.”
Damn premeditated, he thought, regarding Sue. Liquid water? Out there in that cold? She’d brought it down here, with clear intent to use it.
The rest of them, the guys, he wasn’t even interested in hearing. He opened the door and walked off, blind in the dark except for the dim glow of the lift call button that guided him across the gratings. He hit ice. His foot skidded, costing his knee on the recovery.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy called after him, but he kept walking. Jeremy came clattering over the grids, overtook him and tried to hold his hand from the call button. He had such an adrenaline load on he hardly felt it, and could have brushed Jeremy off, oh, three or four meters into the dark without half trying.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, we’re all sorry.”
“That’s fine,” he said, and the lift door opened. He saw the choices, RIM, A, and B. He took A, and rode it up alone to an astonishingly normal corridor, where nothing had happened and two seniors walking by didn’t notice anything unusual about him.
He went to his cabin, took off the clothes he’d just put on, and showered until he’d both warmed up and cooled off.
When he came out of the shower, still with the trap replaying itself in shadows in recent memory, he found Jeremy had come home, and was sitting on his bed shuffling cards.
He gave Jeremy the cold eye and picked up his clothes and started dressing.
“I’m sorry as hell,” Jeremy said. Expressions like that jarred, from a twelve-year-old’s mouth. But Jeremy was twelve. He hadn’t bucked his cousins to warn him, but what could he expect of a twelve-year-old?
Still, he let the silence continue, if only to learn what would fall out of it.
“They always do it,” Jeremy said plaintively. “To welcome you in.”
“Is that what it is?” He fastened his coveralls and sat down to pull on his boots. The adrenaline still hadn’t run out. He could put his fist through something, but Jeremy was the only target he had.
“They shouldn’t have thrown the water,” Jeremy said “That was pretty stupid.”
“The whole thing was pretty stupid,” he said, with a bitter taste in his mouth. “I know the game. You could have said something to warn me. You know that? You could have said something.”
“You aren’t supposed to know,” was Jeremy’s lame excuse.
“So everything’s fine now. You just beat hell out of me, damn near suffocate me with the tape, cut my arm so I bleed all over a pair of coveralls, play a hell of a nasty joke and finish it up by throwing ice water on me, and now I’m your long-lost cousin and glad to be one of the guys, is that the way it works? You’re not damn smart, you know that? Even for twelve, you’re just not damn smart.”
“You didn’t need to hit Chad like that,” Jeremy said.
“What do you expect? What in hell did you expect, if you jump on a guy?”
“I’m sorry, Fletcher. You were supposed to say our names and we’d welcome you in and nobody was supposed to get hurt at all. Not you, not anybody. It’s just what they always do when you come in.”
“Well, it didn’t work, did it?”
“No. I guess not.”
He was mad. He was damned mad, and sore, and his hands were bruised and he still wanted to kill Chad, who’d set him up with his room-cleaning and the card game.
Probably Jeremy had been in on it for days. Probably if there was somebody to be mad at it ought by rights to be Jeremy. But Jeremy wasn’t principally responsible and Jeremy had been scared spitless and upset at the turn things had taken. So had Wayne.
Of all of them he didn’t choose to hate, Jeremy and Bucklin were on his list; Bucklin who’d broken it up, Wayne, who’d used his common sense, and Lyra, whom he’d kicked hard, not meaning to, and who’d taken it in stride and not held it against him. Lyra, maybe.
Sue with her water-bucket was right on his list with Chad.
He drew a calmer breath. And a second one.
Jeremy sat there, dejected, in a long, long silence.
“Got a bandage?” he asked Jeremy, his first excuse to break the silence. “I ripped my arm.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, and scrambled up and got him a plastic skin-patch. Jeremy put it on for him. “There.”
“Got my knuckle, too.” He had. He didn’t know whether he’d caught it falling or cut it on Chad. “Chad better keep out of my way,” he said. “At least for right now. It’s a long voyage. But right now I’m pissed. I’m real pissed.”
“I think you broke Chad’s tooth.”
“He had it coming.”
“If the captain finds out there was fighting, we’re all going to be in his office.”
“It’s not my problem.” He stared Jeremy straight in the eye. “And if he asks me I’ll say be damned to the whole ship.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why shouldn’t I say it? You ambushed me. I don’t recall it was the other way around.”
“I mean don’t say that about the ship.”
“The hell with the ship!”
“No,” Jeremy said with a shake of his head. “No! You never say that about a ship. You never say that, Fletcher! We’re your Family. You’re in, now. Maybe it was screwed up, but it counted, and you’re in, you’re part of us.”
“Do I get a vote about it?”
“Come on, Fletcher. Nobody meant anything bad. Nobody ever meant anything bad. You were supposed to say the names and learn what they tell you—”
“No.”
“Well, you were supposed to.”
“That wasn’t what they were after, Jeremy. Wise up. They wanted me to kiss ass. That it was Chad and not me that got a broken tooth, no, Chad didn’t plan on that, did he? But that’s what he got.”
“Nobody meant you should get hurt.”
“Oh, let’s add things up, here. Vince wouldn’t shed any tears. Chad wouldn’t. Sue—”
“Oh, Sue’s an ass. Vince is an ass. They know they’re asses. They’re trying to grow out of it.”
From the twelve-year-old mouth. He had to stare.
“I’m an ass, too,” Jeremy said. “I try not to be.”