Love, Scars, & Shooting Stars

Chapter Eighteen

Standing on the toilet seat to see out the only window in the tiny bathroom, Finn looked down on his mother and Mr. Shep—Cameron, he reminded himself—sitting on a blanket in the backyard, their voices a faint, muffled hum through the glass. If he slid the window open just a crack, he would probably be able to make out what they were saying, but he didn't want to risk being detected. Besides, Cameron was standing up now and they were laughing, so whatever his mother had done earlier to ruin the evening had apparently been forgiven.

Finn climbed down and shuffled back to his new room where he flopped down on the bed. He probably shouldn't presume that his mother was the guilty party, but it was kind of hard not to. Everything had been great at dinner, and Cameron had been fine while they were putting up the basketball hoop. It wasn't until Cameron had gone inside to find a socket that things went sour, because when he returned with Finn's mother right behind him, both of them were acting really weird, and Finn and his mother had gone home soon afterward. If it were anyone else, Finn would think it impossible that they could have said or done something wrong in the short amount of time that Cameron had been gone, but his mother, on the other hand.... Well, she managed to annoy Finn on a pretty regular basis, so it wasn't much of a stretch to assume that she could piss off Cameron as well. Finn sometimes wondered if she was the reason why his father had left.

He knew it wasn't fair to pin the blame on his mother, but sometimes Finn just felt so damned confused, and sad, and angry about the whole 'no dad' thing that sometimes he thought he would explode! Sometimes it helped to have a reason to hold onto, somebody to blame, and his mother was just... there. It wasn't fair—Finn knew that she would do almost anything for him, and she wasn't the one who'd split—but it's sort of hard to hate someone you've never met, so.... Sometimes Finn wished he could meet his father just once, so he could stop blaming his mother for everything that was wrong in his world.

Finn didn't really hate his mother, of course. Deep down, he knew that. As far as moms go, she was actually pretty cool most of the time. But his dad had run away from something all those years ago, and Finn had to believe that it was her.  Because if it wasn't, then that only left one person....