The Kids Aren't Alright

Chapter 1: Finn

"Your friend Anna told me you'd be here," dad says quietly. A pair of calloused fingers reach for the radio, and the tinny sound of Tom Petty singing 'Breakdown' begins filtering through the speakers, turned down so low that I can barely make out the lyrics. "She told me what you'd be doing."

"Anna did?"

"Yes," he says solemnly.

I sink further down into my seat. "Fuck."

"Don't curse in my car."

I want to say something snappy and rebellious like, well, ex-fucking-scuse me, but suddenly I feel so tired. Just exhausted. And a little hollow on the inside, too. There's no space in me for arguing. Hearing dad say her name like that, Anna, knocked all of the fight out of me with a single blow.

There is no sense in pretending, Petty advises, his soft voice as balmy as the summer air. Your eyes give you away.

No shit, I think to myself. If there's anything this night has proved to me, it's that I'm the world's worst liar.

Dad asks, "Are you upset?"

This strikes me as a stunningly stupid thing to say, and a very dad thing to say, too. My anger floods back just as fast as it left me. "What kind of question is that? Of course I'm upset! My best friend just sold me out to my dad!"

He gives me another cool look. Petty sings, we said all there is to say, but dad isn't done with me yet. "There's no need to be smart. I just wasn't sure if this was a surprise to you or not."

Of course it's not a surprise. I knew that telling Anna about my plans was a bad idea, but I couldn't bear not telling her- she's my best friend. Or was. I don't really know how this, betrayal, is supposed to work.

And now Petty is singing about how it's all right, it's all right, but I know that it's not. Nothing about this is all right. I should have realized Anna was lying when she promised she wouldn't tell. Or maybe I did realize, and I just ignored the inevitable and plowed onward anyways, blinding myself to the unstoppable truth.

So it's not a surprise. But just because it isn't doesn't make this any easier to accept.

Dad relapses into silence. After a few more minutes of this- driving slowly, cautiously through the neighborhood, stopping obediently at every single fucking stop sign even though there's absolutely no one else on the roads- the song changes to a vaguely familiar tune, one that I'm sure I've heard before but I can't place. Something by The Cure, I think.

"So," dad says, his low voice cutting across the mournful twanging of a solitary guitar, "you stole the papers."

"I did."

"Did you steal anything else?"

"No."

"Break anything?"

"No."

"Commit a crime other than trespassing and theft?"

I scowl at him. It sounds worse when he says it like that: trespassing and theft. So serious, when in reality it was just a little fiddling of the locks with the butt end of a nail file. "No. I didn't."

Dad sighs loudly, drowning out the radio for good. "You're better than this, Finn."

As if he knows what I'm better than. I don't suppose Anna told him that.

It's silent again. I hate silence. I ask dad what time it is, just to break the stillness; he tells me that it's one thirty-two. A.M.

Later than I thought. "Doesn't your shift end at nine?"