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.”
“Then I forgive you ,” he said, “Bucklin and Wayne tried to use common sense and Lyra warned me about Chad. But the others can go to hell.”
“Ashley’s all right.”
“I’ll take your word on Ashley.” He’d hit a moment of magnanimous charity and extended it likewise to the girls, excepting Sue. “Linda’s not bad.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Don’t trust Linda. Especially not if you’re on the outs with Vince.”
Jeremy was serious. And with spacers, it was probably true, there were connections and he could get himself knifed. He’d heard stories off Pell dockside. Read accounts in the news and congratulated himself he wasn’t part of it.
Now he was.
“A happy, loving family,” he said, and felt the wobbles come back to his legs. There were more than fears. There was betrayal. The captain wanted him aboard because he didn’t want to pay fourteen million. He understood that Madelaine wanted him because of her dead daughter. He understood that, too. But the two of them with their reasons had rammed him down everyone else’s unwilling throats, and he’d tried to make himself useful and get along where they put him and, sure , they were going to welcome him in. The hell.
“I think you should talk to Bucklin,” Jeremy said, “and get stuff straightened out. JR didn’t want them to do this. Everybody else thought it was, you know, like maybe it would solve things.”
“Solve things.”
“Like, you’d fit in.”
“You think that’d do it, do you?”
Jeremy was out of his depth with that. And so was he. If JR had tried to stop it, it was because JR knew it was going to go the way it did and that certain ones were laying for him, not like Jeremy, a little naïve, but seriously, to get their bluff in and make it stick. Those were the terms on which he’d have fitted in. He’d been hazed before. You got a little of it in school. You got a little of it in any new situation. But held upside-down and threatened with hypothermia? He’d punched Chad with no thought whether he’d kill him. And Chad had come after him the same way.
“Maybe I’m a little old for fitting in,” he said to Jeremy, with a bitterness that welled up black and real. “Maybe there isn’t any fix for it. I don’t belong here.”
“There could be a fix.”
“There isn’t . Get that through your head This is real. It isn’t a game. I’m not playing games. Next batch of cousins lay a hand on me is going to be damn sorry. You can pass that word along. But I think they know that.”
“You can’t go fighting on board,” Jeremy said.
“It’s not my choice.”
“Well, nobody’s going to fight you.”
“Fine. Go on to work. Get. Go.”
Jeremy lingered.