Invincible Summer
📅 Summer 2011
【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴇᴅ sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍs, sᴇʟғ-ɪɴᴊᴜʀʏ, ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ】
The arrival of summer vacation was a relief, even more so than the previous one had been, because Athena didn’t have to take extra math classes this time—miraculously—and she didn’t have to worry at all about her parents, aside from when Seth finished defending his thesis and officially became a doctor.
Athena’d already tipped him off that their mom had been planning on throwing a celebratory party in his honor so large that it could rival the Macy’s Day Parade, so he politely called their mom up beforehand and requested that she limit the fanfare, “should he pass.” Of course he appreciated the support, he said, but he’d much prefer if she took them to dinner instead and let him bask, more intimately, with just the family. Besides, he wouldn’t want anyone to have to deal with cancelling plane tickets should he fail.
Then he took Athena out and they both got their ears pierced, because she wanted her upper lobes done, and maybe a cartilage piercing—which he happily indulged her on—and he wanted to upset their mom and wasn’t quite up to moving in on the face tattoos she’d floated the year prior “as of yet.”
It turned out, in his words, splendid.
He of course passed his dissertation defense, just as everyone expected, but it was something of a delight to witness him showing up for his doctorate dinner with pierced ears, which their parents certainly had not expected. He’d told Athena that she, of course, did not need to attend the dinner, and that if it would hinder her recovery at all then he’d rather she skipped out and took care of herself, but she’d wanted to support him—and honestly, she just had to see what would happen.
The small silver studs in his earlobes drew their mom’s eyes nearly magnetically as soon as they’d exchanged greeting embraces, and she reacted as though he’d arrived for supper at a multi-Michelin restaurant with a fresh gunshot wound.
“Oh, Sethfire, whatever have you gone and done to yourself?” she woefully asked, essentially collapsing into her chair, while he was still handing his jacket off to some kind of attendant, not even yet in his seat.
“Pardon?” He tucked a couple loose dreadlocks behind his ear and gave Athena a fleeting smile.
“Your ears! What of the professionalism, darling?” their mother all but pleaded, visibly distraught.
Seth expertly feigned ignorance as to what the issue could possibly be, seeing as his mother herself had earrings—and yet, of course, no one would call her unprofessional. He asked if it was that he ought to wear pearls instead, as she was, and reassured her that he could certainly change out the studs for them once the holes were healed. He smiled politely across the table at her while she openly struggled to come up with a response.
Athena wished she could give him a high-five, but it would have been poor etiquette, so she discreetly tapped his ankle with the tip of her shoe instead and shot him a rather gleeful look.
“Well—at least you managed to get her dressed for the occasion,” their mom blustered, attempting to collect herself by directing disdain in Athena’s direction, despite the fact that she’d indeed worn a “proper” black dress in compliance with the restaurant’s dress code.
“Thankfully, Athena is able to dress herself, being fifteen,” Sethfire responded blithely, and Athena was spared any further comments by the appearance of their waiter, who congratulated Seth on his doctorate—apparently their mom had noted the occasion on the reservation, because they’d gone ahead and printed personalized tasting menus that read “Congratulations Sethfire” across the top in tiny, tidy caps. The waiter read through the ‘menu’ with them, explaining supplement options and upcharges and maybe trying to make it all seem appetizing, despite the fact that everything on it which wasn’t pretentious gibberish sounded pretty disgusting, at least to Athena.
Her father talked over the only part that sounded edible, aka the desserts, in order to ask rather rudely about the vintages of the wines, despite it being printed clearly on the wine list in front of him—which when pointed out, caused him to complain about how dim the restaurant was.
Once the wines arrived and they each had some microscopic amount of “food” placed in front of them that everyone called “amuse bouche” and failed to actually identify—but which was potentially fish, or had at one point been fish—their father started going on about the surgical robots again. He’d barely gotten through two sentences about robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery being a ‘positive firestorm of a field at present,’ though, before Seth cut him off.
“I, if I must put it simply, am never going to be a surgeon,” he stated unequivocally, waving a dismissive hand. “I’ve no desire for it. I’ve never possessed any desire for it.”
Athena glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye, deeply impressed by his newfound assertiveness.
“I intend to go into counseling and social work. I dare say it’s an equally important field,” Seth said, and took a sip from his wine glass with an air of finality.
Athena accidentally made eye contact with her mom in the aftermath of Seth’s comment, and experienced an uncanny moment of kinship in their shared quiet as they both cast furtive glances towards her father, whose brow furrowed and temple twitched. He simply did not get interrupted, much less outright brushed off, and despite his efforts to appear otherwise, his rather loud rebuttal broadcasted his having been downright offended at having his exceptional career in neurosurgery treated as comparable to “sofa chatter.”
“Even the most skilled brain surgeon on earth could not hope to alleviate a mood disorder or a phobia, however—unless you suggest we as a society return to performing lobotomies, father, so I do feel my point stands,” Seth replied, raising his eyebrows and waving off the waiter attempting to exchange his undirtied napkin for a different undirtied one.
Athena ended up having to hide her giggling over her dad’s sour expression by faking a coughing fit, which her mother shushed, and, yeah…Seth was right: It was kind of splendid.
Their parents didn’t seem to know what to make of their newly uncompromising son, who dismissed their words rather than simpering; with the earrings and the dreadlocks he insisted on continuing to grow out, despite his mother’s vocal opinion that the close-cropped hair he’d had as a teenager made him look more “clean-cut,” and that he really should consider returning to the style.
“As you have shared, without solicitation, innumerable times since I started growing it out,” Seth breezily replied, cutting his already miniscule portion of “gateau” duck foie gras in half and probably risking nuclear fission by doing so. “For the umpteenth time, I am content with my hair as it is, mum. You may do as you like with your own.”
The rest of dinner went similarly, with Seth being only as polite and tolerant as the environment required him to be, and their parents continually stopped short by his lack of deference whenever they made the oblique comments they were so prone to making. They couldn’t seem to celebrate his doctorate without either kneecapping him somehow or casting comparisons, which meant that he ended up quite nearly defending his thesis a second time, or elsewise, defending Athena. Or, more, talking right over a sentence halfway out of his mother’s mouth in order to share various skills and positive characteristics of Athena’s which he’d been able to more fully appreciate now that she lived with him, as though he’d not heard whatever had been said and was simply overtaken by the compulsion to sing her praises. Apparently she was an absolute joy to have around; breathed life and inspiration into the air around her, and had greatly helped him in improving his cooking skills.
He maintained a pleasant tone even when the words themselves he used to shut down a sideways comment seemed downright icy, so their parents couldn’t quite seem to make up their minds about if their golden child had yet tarnished and needed polishing, and eventually ended up just talking about themselves a lot, which Seth seemed to prefer, because he smiled and nodded as usual about their aggrandizement and only redirected them again if they seemed to be inching towards critique of either his or Athena’s academic, life, or aesthetic choices.
Athena did feel a little bad for the waiter who had to return to their bizarre, bipolar table every five minutes to swap out the bread so that it stayed hot during the torchon course, but was immensely grateful for their dedication, because the bread was about the only thing she found worth eating, other than the forkful-size serving of “compressed peach salad” she got at one point earlier in the dinner. She wondered what her dietician would have to say about the portion sizes.
As if able to read her mind, Seth did slip her his desserts when they finally came.
Despite starting dinner at 6, it was half past 10 by the time they could escape the restaurant, and even then it felt like it had been three times as long. At least it had been entertaining.
“Thank you for dinner,” Seth told their parents when they parted ways at the end of the overlong evening; “It was…beyond compare.”
“Just don’t show up next time with a lip ring or something hideous,” Namibia said, giving him a rather stiff hug.
“I was of the mind that I would do my eyebrow next, actually,” Seth replied evenly, and their mom’s look of unabridged horror forced Athena to cover her mouth and stifle a snort.
A splendid night, indeed.
Athena finally burst out laughing after clambering back into Seth’s car. “I can’t believe you shut dad down like that; where did that come from?” she asked, kicking off her shoes and beaming. “I thought he was gonna shit. He was so mad.”
“I suppose I’d just reached my limit,” Seth replied as the car rumbled to life to take them home to Brooklyn; “It has been two years now of nonsense about still doing bloody surgery. I needed to draw the line somewhere.”
“You drew so many lines tonight, I think it qualified as a picture,” Athena laughed.
“Ah, well…I don’t necessarily need to play nice with them for your benefit anymore, do I?” he asked. “Not that it ever truly managed to benefit you anyhow. Perhaps I was acting out a little in regards to that.” He gave a small shrug.
“Yeah, you really let them have it,” she teased; “You were going crazy.”
“Oh, stuff it—it’s my shoddy spine that I’m working with, after all,” he replied easily, and it was a joy to see her older brother smiling, really smiling. He’d seemed to get old too young, with the college-at-ten and his Marfan syndrome messing up his back and hips and everything; skipping over adolescence entirely and winding up 21 years old already walking with a crutch at times; talking like a professor and studiously wrapped up in their parents’ web. Now, he seemed like he might have half a shot at clawing some of those years back, with his defiantly-studded ears and a nearly rebellious glint in the eyes behind his round-framed glasses while he rolled down the car windows and let the warm summer air whip past them both like freedom.
When Kato came over, he noticed Seth’s new earrings just as swiftly as their mom had, but he reacted with a half-smirk of a smile and “Oh, sick studs, Seth. Finally got bored of life in the cookie cutter?” instead of draping himself across the furniture and acting like he’d been run over.
“Something of that nature. I needed a way to upset my parents,” Seth answered.
“Well, if you need to again and find yourself low on material, I’m your guy.”
“Much appreciated. What would you advise as to my next move?”
Kato flipped his hair out of his eyes and hooked his thumbs into his pockets. “Buy a motorcycle and start talking like a normal person,” he said; “But if that’s too much for you, maybe just gauge your lobes. The olds fuckin’ hate it.”
Kato himself had been steadily sizing up his own tunnels since the previous summer and now could stick a finger through the holes in his ears, so if anybody knew anything about it, yeah, it would likely be him.
He said his mom was “sitting a lot but not pissing herself,” this summer around, and he’d at least somewhat defused his father with the uncannily quiet last couple months of school—“He still thinks I’m a lazy retard, but you know”—so he invited himself over more often than he’d been able to last year, to Athena’s delight. She hardly ever had to turn him down because Seth was happy to have him over whenever—“I’m not mum and dad, you’ve no need to ask permission to have your friends visit,” he said— and her only commitment was to an occasional kickboxing class, which she’d gotten permission to explore as an alternative to the sports she used to play, having already had track shot down for being “too close to generic cardio.”
Seth did move forward with his pursuit of getting a license in counseling, which unfortunately meant he ended up having either trainings or work to attend most weekdays, and a decent amount of paperwork on weekends, so the three of them didn’t get to spend quite as much time together as Athena would have preferred, because the chance of having her two favorite people around at the same time and actually getting to really know one another better felt positively utopian—but still, they got to have at least some of it. Kato, already armed with the alarming amount of reading he’d done on serial and mass murder, took a keen interest in some of Sethfire’s psychology books and even recommended Sethfire read a couple of the more analytical and less sensationalized texts that he himself had indulged in over winter, “just in case any of your clients are whackjobs or something.”
When they weren’t engaging in a quasi-book-club, Seth floated the idea of figuring out how to rent a studio space somehow so that she and Kato could get back to playing music together properly, but it would take some logistics and Kato seemed ill at ease over being included on a favour with such a price tag, so they compromised with the agreement that “if they managed to finish writing a whole album” Seth would be allowed to make good on the offer.
“For Athena, though,” Kato impressed. “I don’t wanna owe you like that. And if you’re footing the bill you gotta be in on the gig, so maybe take another swing at the piano. It can be y’all’s band: Brookes & Books.”
“What, with you doing all the actual song stuff?” Athena protested, then laughing, “And that’s a terrible band name.”
“I’ll be your ghost writer,” Kato grinned. “But yeah, probably a different name, if it happens.”
They did continue to play some music together, with Athena getting a better handle on guitar and downloading a music application on her computer that let her sort of play digital drums, at least, and it was fun enough. They weren’t out at the suburban edge of Long Island and Queens anymore, though, sitting in Seth’s Brooklyn apartment with a bus stop at the nearest curb and the Cleveland St station only a couple blocks away. The city just outside the windows thrummed with summer, with life, and it beckoned.
Kato especially seemed almost antsy, with some contemplative fringe. “I wanna make more memories,” he said, turning back from a look out the window. Last year he’d been stuck nursing his mom while Athena duked it out with Algebra and then got hauled off to England. But weren’t these meant to be the best years of their lives? They were going into 11th grade in autumn; time was running out.
“Let’s make the most of it,” he said, “We’re here in the city already. Carpe diem.”
As opposed to his focus during the final weeks of the school year, Kato frequently seemed more distracted in the structureless-ness of summer, but when they went out, any inattention fell away and he drank it all in right there with her. There was so much to do.
Brooklyn was alive with music in summer—all of NYC was, really, but they were closest to the free concerts in Brooklyn, so they took the greatest advantage of those; roaming across the borough to a hundred parks and piers and plazas to sit in the grass or on the curb and listen to whatever was on offer, even though most of it wasn’t necessarily their genres. It was still a good time; good energy. Good research, even. They critiqued lyrics, band names, and musical decisions, and debated whether any country music was worth listening to. Kato thought some of it was, which she told him was probably a wrong opinion he held because there was likely lead in the water in Montana, where he’d mostly heard it.
“Nostalgia and brain damage are the same thing to you, huh?” he laughed; “Hope you don’t hold on to that point of view.”
In the evenings there were about a billion free outdoor film screenings in Brooklyn alone, scattered all over the borough, like the concerts were—but they mostly went to the classic horror ones, where they sat maybe a little too close to each other, considering the summer heat. Very few of the flicks were scary enough to justify it, but still, they’d end up there, her cheek against his shoulder, his arm looped behind her back to rest on her waist, and his breath tickled her ear when he leaned in closer during The Birds to whisper, “The guy off screen must be throwing those feathery hand puppets real hard. She looks actually terrified.”
Athena turned and snickered into his jacket. The blurry prop birds really did look rather puppet-like. “Maybe they’re full of rocks,” she said, raising her head to whisper into his ear, her lips accidentally brushing his second earring.
“T-True, it is Hitchcock…Bet he told everyone on set that one in ten were rigged to explode.”
Despite the dim evening light, Kato’s cheeks looked a little pink, to her.
Another day they went down to the New York Aquarium, where they stood in a massive glass tunnel that seemed to turn the tank inside out, and pointed up in wonder at the sharks and schools of fish that swam serenely over their heads.
“I can’t believe I’ve never been here before. This is incredible, huh?” Kato asked, his eyes made bluer by the reflection of the water all around them. She studied the rippling way the light danced over his face; his captivated expression.
“Yeah,” she said, turning quickly back to the fish before he could catch her staring.
Instead, she saw their reflections in the glass, where he looked at her while he thought she couldn’t see, and said, softly, “Yeah…beautiful, really,” without even looking at the corals. He’d already averted his eyes by the time she turned to face him again.
Despite going to see fireworks with him just three days beforehand, his 16th birthday snuck up on them, it seemed like…but maybe that was just her. Kato appeared to have been more or less lying in wait for it, because he seized his permit as immediately as possible. His mother was almost never well enough to drive her car, and his father almost never home enough to notice its absence, provided it was returned to the garage before his arrival home from work, and that was all that Kato really seemed concerned about when it came to his use of it. His extended experience with flouting the law through his fake ID and his cigarettes and selling his Adderall had acted as some sort of gateway drug to having a more or less carefree attitude towards the fact that he wasn’t meant to drive alone yet, and not meant to drive at all in the boroughs. So he did anyway, carting himself and Athena around short distances to more concerts; one hand on the steering wheel, the other dangling out the window, holding a cigarette—though he kept a travel-size Febreze in the glove box which he sprayed every now and again to keep the smell from sticking too bad, since his laissez-faire disposition about driving without a full license apparently didn’t extend all the way to a willingness to deal with the hellfire his dad would rain down on him over smoking.
“He’s gotta know you do, your clothes all stink,” Athena teased. Secretly, she’d grown to be comforted by the smell against her will. It was associated with him, now: Holding her at Seth's apartment when she was sick, protecting her at school, playing music in the garage before she moved, sitting beside her at the movies.
They parked near enough to the plaza to still hear the music and spread a blanket across the hood of the car, which they sat on instead of the ground.
“Probably, but he can’t prove it if he can’t find my smokes. I just told him he was having a stroke the one time he asked what the smell was. And I do my own laundry, so.”
He flicked the ash off his cigarette and cast her an easy, lopsided smile. Summer and his newfound freedom seemed to be doing him some real good.
They were back in the same area as the aquarium soon after, when he took her up a couple blocks away, to Luna Park at Coney Island. He wanted to see the sunset over the water, so they took the train instead of his mom’s car and playfully bumped knees intermittently through the ride after she noticed him doing his “ADHD leg bounce” thing and started mimicking it to tease him.
“Why do I even hang out with you? You’re such a jock,” he quipped fondly when she started pretending to dribble his knee and mimed a trick-shot out the window.
“I’m very funny. Also, I’m paying attention, and we’re at our stop.”
He didn’t describe any of their outings as “dates.” He bought them both overpriced ice creams and hot dogs, and laughed when she got mustard on her nose and then again when she dabbed ketchup on his in retaliation, and they were like that—laughing, blushing at the movies, exchanging mismatched glances at the aquarium, tangling their legs in the grass during daytime concerts while they took turns fanning one another in the heat, but he never called them “dates.”
Instead he described whatever they were doing as “hanging out” or “making memories,” and Athena wondered if he’d get the balls to ask her out for real at any point. She figured she maybe should just go ahead and take the plunge herself, but something kept tripping her up about it, as though she’d truly made some promise about not drawing any conclusions at all that day back in spring, and needed to leave the choice point in his hands.
Still, she didn't know what other conclusions she could possibly be expected to draw by now.
They rode the roller coasters until the sun truly started to dip, whooping in the wind, which sometimes whipped his hair into his mouth—and once, into hers, which cracked him up. He leaned across her on the Wonder Wheel, an arm across her shoulders, and pointed out the sunset colors as though she was at risk of missing them.
He couldn’t seem to quite take her hand when they were walking down the boardwalk, but his knuckles kept bumping hers.
They watched the water glinting gold and pink as the sun kissed it at the horizon, the technicolor twinkle of Luna Park’s rides and signs dancing with reflections of the city lights across the gentle waves, and his eyes glimmered.
“Do you think you’ll remember this?” he asked, “Like, remember today?”
“...Yeah,” she said. She looked up at him and his eyes left the sunset to find her gaze, instead. It was an echo of a moment, and she thought he might finally work up the nerve to seize it this time around. He looked like he was considering it, because he dropped his head by a degree—but then he bit his lip instead of bringing them to meet hers, and returned his eyes to the water.
“...Good,” he said with a somewhat anxious tilt to his voice, looking rather emotional.
Sure, maybe it was a little disappointing, but he did let her finally take his hand afterward, while they walked back to the station, and gave hers a gentle squeeze every so often. She figured he’d get around to everything else eventually, once he got over whatever self-sabotaging nerves fringed his voice and kept him bouncing his leg.
Fortunately there wasn’t any lingering weirdness or anything afterwards, and he did hold her hand more often. When he was driving and not holding a cigarette, his hand found hers instead, or rested on her leg, where he tapped out the rhythm of whatever metalcore song he was blasting through the abused old speakers.
For her (month late) “half birthday” he took her out to get another cartilage piercing—she figured her first one was healed enough for a twin—and he slipped his fake ID through to get his septum done, which looked really painful, but he claimed it didn’t feel like anything at all. Or at least no worse than getting hit in the face, which he’d gotten unfortunately familiar with the sensation of. Apparently unwilling to shell out another $80 for further professional guidance, though, he did get ahold of a home piercing kit afterwards and gave himself only very slightly crooked snake bites. At least she had more of an excuse for looking at his lips so often, not that he ever called her out on it.
They put his driving skills to more work and eventually ventured out of Brooklyn, over to Central Park, to see a UK rock band called Friendly Fires at Summerstage in early August.
It was swelteringly hot, but even the soaring temperatures and humidity couldn’t suppress the crowd—and it was crowded: The temperature of the park itself had probably hit triple digits due to the number of warm bodies packed in around it. Some people sat in the grass, like Kato and Athena, but more milled around and cheered and danced; thronged around the stage and reached up towards the music. A guy in there somewhere had a squirt gun, which increased his popularity immensely, and when he wasn’t being enthusiastically crowd-surfed around, his location could be guessed at in the same manner as with whale-spotting, what with the intermittent spurts of water which everyone received so gratefully. The band, despite pouring sweat, jumped around beaming and joking and refusing to let the dog days of summer drain any of their vitality, either, however many bottles of water it required the lead singer to gulp down between songs. Athena could only guess at how badly he probably had to pee.
“This is so awesome. Do you think we’ll be playing up on that stage one summer?” she asked Kato. He looked up and his expression flickered for a moment, maybe self-consciously; then he gave her a smile, squeezed her hand, and pointed at the drummer.
“You’ll be right there, yeah.”
Over the course of August, something changed, with Kato. It wasn’t instant, really, but it was noticeable. He started to seem…pessimistic, again, or even dark. He was ‘busy’ more often, which he didn’t satisfactorily explain at first, though he said his dad had been on his case “or whatever” more frequently, which maybe added to why he seemed more brooding when they met up.
They played more music than they went and listened to, still with her on a virtual drum kit, which he described as “kinda futuristic,” if an imperfect replacement for the real deal. His lyrics, however, were somewhere back in time, it seemed like, and it worried her.
(Look at me)
I think I took too many pills
(Listen to me)
I swear my ears never stopped ringing
(Do you care?)
Did I just deserve it?
Did no one hear the canary stop singing?
(Do you think that I’ve had enough?)
Do you think that I’ve had enough?Do you think that I’ve had—
(Do you think that I’m not—)
Will I ever be—
Good enough?
“I’m scared, Jules,” she finally confronted him in early September; demanding answers about his vaguely suicidal lyrics and his ‘unexcused absences.’ Kato denied being depressed—they were lyrics from last year; he just was working on the tabs now, that’s all—but she found herself feeling like Walt might have had a point for once, though, in being more overbearing, when he then showed her a picture on his phone of what seemed to be a target from an outdoor shooting range or something.
He admitted that he’d been going to one a little upstate; had started right after he got his permit, but hadn’t thought she would necessarily understand the appeal and had been concerned that she might have thought he was acting like a hick or something. He was making the trips a little more frequently now, hence his unavailability. “It’s just a good way to blow off steam,” he claimed; comparing it to her kickboxing classes. He could rent a semi-auto and pretend it was “some shitlords” down the range, “finally on the other side of it,” and it let him not feel hopeless and helpless the way he’d been when writing those upsetting songs, so it was “basically an exercise in self-care.” Like her boxing.
“Maybe they all wouldn’t treat me so shit at school if I showed them this, though,” he said about the picture.
“You are renting ’em, aren’t you?” Athena asked, furtively eyeing the collection of holes in the target at near-perfect center-mass, and feeling that it was maybe not as equivalent to the punching bags at her gym as he thought it was. “Like, you don’t actually have a gun, right?”
“Oh yeah. A million,” he drawled, rolling his eyes. “What do I look like, a Republican? See, that’s why I didn’t wanna talk about it, you’re getting all weird over it.” He studied the picture. “Man, wouldn’t they be sorry if I actually brought one in, though.” He let out a rueful laugh. “Maybe blue's an outdated color. Repaint the lockers red. Bam!”
“Woof, K…dark.”
“Ha! Not if it’s arterial.” He waved off her look of consternation. “Come on, ‘Thee. Give me a break; you know me. Black humor to deal with the fact that I’ll be getting fuckin’ rinsed again a month from now. Gotta come to terms somehow, don’t I?”
She supposed he did, but still…it felt like he was erasing something of himself along the way, or crowding out the soft-smiling, flower-picking version of himself too completely. It wasn’t just the off-putting jokes or going shooting: Having apparently tired of drawing an inverted cross at the corner of his eye in liquid eyeliner the way he’d started doing a few months back, one day he showed up at Seth’s apartment having tattooed it on; covered with a bandaid at his house to keep his dad from losing his mind.
At least his pendant he could tuck into his collar if he decided he didn’t want to offend people on the street; the make-up he could wipe off. With this, it seemed like he was committing to being aggressive at a constant. He’d bitched before about America being a Christian nation, so with that opinion, it seemed kind of like he’d essentially gone and tattooed on some variation of “don’t like me,” which didn’t strike Athena at all as an act of self-assurance. Even so, she was still stung on his behalf that a potential injury raised fewer concerns in his household than ink would.
“Yeah, well, he cares so much about my future prospects, you know,” Kato drawled through bared teeth. “How could getting my shit kicked in effect that? Nothing like a tattoo. Those are permanent.”
So were the scars on his wrists, but she knew Walt wouldn’t have been able to see the equivalence. She tucked her head against Kato's shoulder and missed the boy from early summer, with the easy smile and the thirst for life, who’d wanted to watch the sun set over the bay with her. When she’d looked him in the face then, she’d thought of kissing him. Now his lips glinted with sharp steel spikes and were, more often than not, twisted into a frown or a snarl.
She wished school’s approach didn’t wilt him so terribly, even if she understood why it did. Though they had a few weeks left of freedom, he was already preoccupied by it, certain of its impending hellishness. It was like he could feel the shackles already.
“...I don't think I'm going to college, you know,” he commented, unprompted, out on the apartment balcony around a week before the school year was to start.
“Okay? And? Is that, like, bugging you?” she asked.
“No. Just been on my mind, ‘cause my dad told me to start thinking seriously about it.” He stared off into the middle distance for a couple moments. “Always feels like I'm in the death march around this time in the season…More and more every year. Don’t really wanna keep doing it.”
“Well, like you said before, it’s 11th grade,” she attempted to reassure him. “It’s almost all over.”
He took a long drag from his cigarette. “Yeah, I guess it is.”