Bright Eyes

28. God Save Us All

"So what happened to Luca Burton?" Max asked, breaking Sander's train of thought. "I mean the old man, not the kid. Did he get back home?"

    Lyn shook her head. "His family and the town never saw him again. The entry was found in Arthur Shelley's journal after his death—Arthur Shelley's, I mean; not Luca Burton's—they never found any credible evidence to really confirm the old man's death. As for Arthur Shelley, news spread throughout the town, you know how rumors go. Some people began to think he was a madman and that he had been keeping his insanity a secret; others, the more superstitious population, thought he had just seen ghosts that night in Black Bird Lake."

"Yo, Damien," said Jack, poking Damien's arm.

Damien stirred, as though he had just woken from a trance, and looked beside him, at Jack. "Yeah?"

"You okay, bruh? You seem lost. Spaced out."

"Nah, it's nothing." Damien chuckled, but there was a certain lack of humor to it. "Dad just called."

A moment's silence amongst them, the kind that carried an air of concern. Over the month spent with each other, they'd learned about Damien's family—his divorced parents, his dad and his flings starting way back before the divorce, a change of women as though each one were a flavor of the week or month in an ice cream shop, his parents' nasty fights back in his final year of junior high, his decision to enroll in Ravenwood to escape the chaos . . . And he'd always talk about it like some kind of joke, a rant phrased in a supposedly light, comedic statement. Yet beneath it all was the graveness of the situation, they could sense that. Saw right through the fake nonchalance that Damien used as a facade: knew he was pissed, and still is, over his dad and what he had done and what he still does, a sin performed without shame right in front of Damien and his sister's eyes.

"You sure you're okay?" Sander asked, green eyes fixed on Damien.

Damien shrugged. "I'm fine. Just kinda gross, is all. Dad just asked for advice—if you can even call it that. Asked me what girls close to our age like. A girl fresh out of high school, in college, he said. The things that make them tick. I think he's trying to ask another college girl out. My guess someone who works part-time at the hotel restaurant in LA. Don't be surprised, this isn't the first time." He chuckled, a sound void of humor. "Hey. Guess I learned something new. Didn't know I was half-bear."

"Half-bear?" Jack asked, brows drawn together in confusion.

"You know, a bear. My dad, he's a bear. A pedophile bear." Damien smiled a wry smile, then; a look of mischief glinted in his brown eyes, beneath his thick dark eyebrows. "Pedobear."

Max shut his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. "Duuude! No! Inappropriate, man. Inappropriate!" Nevertheless, a laugh escaped him, and Max laughed as he always did, loud and animated.

Jack laughed as well. "Keep your nasty humor to yourself, boy!"

    Damien laughed, although this time there wasn't any sarcasm or pretense to it: he found his friends' reactions a great deal funnier than the joke itself.

    Lyn heard a soft patter from the window right beside the table they sat at. She turned her gaze away from the interior of the restaurant—a renovated wooden house decorated with fairy lights and a handful of large woven quilts hung upon the pine wood walls—and looked out the glass, and saw the street outside bathed in shadows, dimly lit by the soft glow of a street lamp. Droplets slid down the outer surface of the window; through the dim light she saw rain fall from the heavens, come down in needle-thin translucent streams, and crash upon the black asphalt, beat down upon the foliage of trees, upon the grass. A soft patter; then a succession of beats, loud and heavy; the familiar, soothing song of the weeping sky.

    As she gazed out the window, Lyn wondered, "We're not so different, huh?"

    "What do you mean?" Max asked, beside her. A wave of silence washed over their other friends, and they turned their attention to Lyn, who then transferred her glance over to them.

    Lyn shrugged. "We're all just messed up people," she began. "Us humans and Crystallians. We're all tainted with sin, living in a broken world that we've destroyed ourselves. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Crystallians who cheated on their wives, just like how some people do here. Wouldn't be surprised if some of them abused their wives, beat them when they're drunk, that their kids would have to hide to avoid their father's violence." (Sander swallowed a lump in his throat, felt his body warm as a certain discomfort pervaded him at the childhood memory.) "Wouldn't be a shock to know little girls were raped there by family they wrongfully trusted, or that Crystallians murdered other Crystallians for the hell of it. Perhaps their world is filled with as much deceit and hate and cruelty as our world is. Perhaps they're just as miserable as we are. And it seems like it couldn't be helped—this mess mankind and Crystallians have gotten themselves into, this lack of love. Every one of us is messed up in our own way, and that seems to be the inevitable truth . . ."

    Damien leaned forward in his seat. "So you're saying we're all screwed?" he said, with a wry smile.

    Lyn thought for a moment. Then nodded. "Seems so." She turned her gaze back to window, to the shadows and the pelting rain, and muttered to herself, "God save us all."