Page 49 of Finding Noah

Mom and Dad had taken us to the Mystic Aquarium a couple of years ago. Miles was one, maybe two, at the time, and they thought he'd be into it. He didn’t give a single fuck. But I thought it was pretty cool. The octopuses especially. One of them had even crawled out of its stony little cave to press itself to the glass, waving its tentacle at me, then crawled back into its home.

It said hi, I remembered thinking, and I thought about it again now with eyes widening more and more by the second.

“What if … what if octopuses are …” I sat up on the bench and leaned forward, smacking my palm against my forehead. “What if they're aliens? And they were just … sent here to observe us and-and-and to be friends, and … share their knowledge and resources, and we're just over here, like … shoving them in tanks!”

Holy fuck. It was all making so much sense.

“I gotta tell Dad,” I decided, nodding affirmatively.

Dad usually agreed with me on things like this. He was smart. He was sensible. Mom liked to roll her eyes a lot. She liked to laugh and say things like, Oh, Noah, you're ridiculous. But not Dad. He got me. I had known he would the second I saw him sitting there in The Fisch Market. I’d just known.

Tears pricked the back of my eyes.

Man, I loved him. God, I really did! I loved him so much. Mom, too, but Dad … shit. There was something so wild about knowing he'd chosen us. We'd chosen him. He had seen us and decided to put his life on the line, like his life was worth nothing.

“He fucking died,” I muttered, wiping a hand over my mouth and realizing my cheeks were wet.

I was crying. But of course I was. We'd almost lost him. I almost didn't have a dad at all. We’d almost not had Miles, and, damn, I loved that little kid. Yeah, he pissed me off, and I hated knowing that everything he had right now was something I’d never had at his age. God, I hated that so much—so fucking much—but that didn't mean I didn't love him. He'd never done anything wrong. He was just a kid.

So was I. Once.

My eyes fell to the ground at my feet.

I was a kid too. A little kid. A kid who was dragged to … somewhere and asked to grab a bag from some place and … someone was …

BANG!

I squeezed my eyes shut to the phantom sound, and I was six years old again, standing outside that house on crumbling stone steps. Shaking but frozen, covered in my own puke.

He shot someone. He killed someone. God, he killed so many people, probably, and we don’t know who or how many.

What was that kid’s name?

“Noah?”

I jumped at the sound of my name, gasping and shifting backward two inches on the bench until my spine pressed painfully against the wooden slats. My eyelids snapped open to find Meghan Kinney, my angel with curly blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, watching me with utmost concern.

“Meg!” I cried, jumping to my feet and brushing invisible crumbs off my shirt. “Whoa, man.” An immediate wave of dizziness barreled through me, and I held a hand to my forehead, as if to steady my swimming brain. “That's crazy. Wow. Okay.” With an exhale, I dropped my hand to my side and forced a smile at the woman of my dreams. “Hey.”

She blinked up into my eyes, hers narrowing with judgmental speculation. “You're high,” she stated.

“What?” My voice rose in pitch as I pressed a hand to my chest. “No! No, I'm not. I'm just … fuck, it's a beautiful night, isn't it? Like, where the hell is the moon? It's so dark.”

Her brow furrowed. She looked angry. “If my dad catches you sitting here, stoned out of your mind, he's going to write you up. You know that, right?”

The mention of her dad reminded me again of that night when Seth had killed Soldier in a showdown before Mom pumped my biological father full of bullets. Meg's dad was one of the responding officers. He was there. It was her stepmom who gave my mom clean clothes. Mom was covered in so much blood—blood Officer Kinney saw. I had heard it was everywhere, but nobody had let me back into the house until it was cleaned up.

Officer Kinney had helped with that too. Made it so we could come back to a nice, clean house.

“Noah, are you listening to me? You have to—”

“I never thanked your dad,” I mumbled, looking up and down the street, like I might find him at this very moment.

“What?”

“I never thanked him,” I said again. “He was there. He … he helped my mom and dad. I should thank him. He's gotta be around here somewhere. Dude's always working.”

Meg released a sigh that sounded a little sad. Then she took a step closer, wrapped her hand around my arm, and tugged me along. At first, I thought she might help me find her dad, but then I remembered that night at the party, when Ash had led me away just like this to her room. I thought about being in Meg's room. I thought about being in her bed, between her legs, and I wondered if maybe she was thinking the same thing.