Owen trudged his way towards school, missing the crunch of fresh snow under his hooves. There were streets in Philadelphia that were well-kept and pretty, but those all lay far from where he lived, and instead of snow all he got was a cold, meager drizzle that didn't even have the grace to pause for rainbows every now and then. Such a pitiful display would have evoked a full apology from the Fillydelphia Weather Department—possibly, given how abysmal it was, a song and dance number.
After he'd been forced awake, he'd wondered if his father was going to keep him home from school, but—whether it was because he knew CPS would look poorly on it, or he just wanted Owen out of his hair for a while—he had been all but thrown from his room and told to get to school. He'd heard the sounds of furniture moving as he left, and grabbed his boots to put on down the hall rather than linger in the apartment for a second longer than he had to.
All along the walk to school, he reminded himself that his mother was curled up around him, and that the first chance he got he'd be waking up under her wing.
Brightening his day considerably, Jaime and Aisha fell into step alongside him. With their dark clothing and gothic accessories like matching bracelets and ankh pendants, it was easy to see why people like Tim thought them crazy. Despite being born nine months apart, they acted more like weird twins than any of the actual twins who went to their school.
To Owen, it just made them awesome. In his mind, they were just the human equivalent of the vesper ponies back at Light Breeze's school—spooky and fun all rolled into one.
"Hey there, Ohz," Jaime said with a smile. "We're looking forward to the fruits of your labor today."
It helped that, whenever Jaime smiled at him like that, it didn't matter how cold he felt inside, he just couldn't help but smile back. "Yeah. Plan still stands."
"You okay?" Aisha asked. Her hair was in dozens of braids that morning, each with a series of beads. "You're looking particularly, uhm, wrung dry."
"I…" He glanced towards the sidewalk, hopping over the cracks. "I wasn't supposed to come back. I tried to stay away as long as I could, forever, but Silver Dust didn't let me. My parents definitely weren't having any of that." He sighed. "Frank is on a rampage. He didn't hit me, but I kinda told him he wasn't my dad, and he's flipping out."
They went quiet for a bit, exchanging looks as they often did in their silent way. Owen liked to imagine they were telepathic, though real telepaths likely wouldn't have doubted his story.
"Yes," Owen added with a bite, "I know he is physically my father—"
Jaime laid his hand on his arm with a light touch, and that stilled him as though he'd snapped his jaw shut. "No, we know."
Aisha nodded vigorously. "No one who does what he does deserves to be called a dad."
They glanced at one another, quoting in unison. "'You need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish! But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.'"
From anyone else, it would have irritated him, but he could never be entirely unhappy with them. He giggled helplessly. "What was that from? Another movie that was decades old before I was born?"
"Yup. 80s Keanu Reeves movie."
"He was more of a side character."
"Bullshit, he stole the show."
Their bickering formed the backdrop to his death march, and it helped put aside his anxiety—never completely, though. He kept his mind on the last few days, needing to refresh himself. There would be no napping in the periods before physical education, not if he wanted to get it all down. It made it stronger, kept it fresher, as a side benefit.
Besides, it also served to remind him that his mother would be waiting for him. He had promised to be strong for her, and so he would be. He was a pegasus where it counted, and pegasi didn't back down from what mattered.
"And why don't you feel you can participate in PE today?" Mr. Henry asked in his deep voice. A big, heavyset Black man with knuckles swollen from having been repeatedly broken, Mr. Henry James had been a heavyweight contender long before Owen was born. Though he'd gone to seed, he could still punch like a cobra, and he demonstrated it gladly to whomever asked.
Owen fixed him with a hollow gaze. "The man people call my father is abusive. I've reported it to the school, but the CPS people just gave him a warning. I feel dead inside, and I would like to spend the rest of the period with my friends today, please."
Mr. Henry absorbed that for a second before nodding. "Okay. You're excused for today." He leaned in and nodded towards one of the back doors. "And, Owen, you ever need to work some stress out, you can always use the punching bags. They don't hit back as hard, and you don't go to prison for whaling on them, neither. Just putting that out there."
"Thank you, Sir. I will keep that in mind." Owen might actually have taken him up on that if his hands didn't always hurt. Then again, maybe it would remind him of hooves. He could always find out later, given that he seemed to be stuck in the human world.
He didn't know how Jaime, Aisha, or Tim had gotten out of their respective classes for the period, but he figured they had just lied. Just because he didn't allow himself to didn't mean others felt the need to be true to the Elements of Harmony.
Admittedly, one of those—Laughter—he failed at woefully, but nopony was perfect.
They gathered in a spare classroom by the gym. There was no guarantee that they would go unnoticed, but as long as they lowered the blinds on the door, left off the lights, and kept their volume down, it wasn't likely anyone would find them.
"Shame this isn't an anime," Tim said, bringing out fruit snacks, water, and chips for everyone. "We could go to the roof, or just wait until clubs after school. I guess in real life, Japanese high schools keep those roofs locked up pretty hard, though."
"We could join a club at this school, but it would probably be crowded." Owen rolled his eyes and accepted the food. He'd been deprived breakfast and had no money for the lunch they were skipping anyway. "Besides, if this were an anime, I'd have been visited by an alicorn already or at least developed my pegasus magic to the point of being able to fly."
From their own backpacks, Jaime and Aisha produced old-fashioned metal lunch boxes. "We asked Dad to fix us lunch today, plus a little extra for you," Jaime said, depositing yogurt, a hard-boiled egg divided, and strawberries. Aisha added on baby carrots, sliced cucumbers, and a box of chocolate milk.
Beholding the offerings made Owen spring a leak, and, so as not to try his voice while tears streamed down his cheeks, he opened up his backpack and stacked journals on the empty desk beside them.
As the stacks grew, their eyes widened, until three stacks of handwritten journals at least six journals high each stood between them. He gently pushed one to each person before ravenously digging into the offered food.
"Where did you find the time to write all of these since Saturday?" Jaime asked, pulling the top one off the stack and flipping through to see if every page had something written on them. They did.
"I ate, slept, wrote, and drew," Owen said after pausing to swallow. "Including in class. It's fine, not like I wasn't going to class in the other world, where the instructors were a lot better paid and motivated even without their teaching cutie marks. You'll see when you read." He nodded to the notebooks. "To you all, it's been almost seven days. To me, it's been almost a month."
Tim, as usual, barely bit back a sneer at the idea, but to his credit he said nothing other than to open the journal. Jaime and Aisha were already familiar with the early ones, so he'd been given the first set. Owen had full confidence that Aisha and Jaime would somehow be able to read and share both of theirs in the same time it took Tim to finish his one stack.
So it went for the next fifty-five minutes, with the three of them reading and absorbing his sketches aside from a few requests for clarification on smudged sections or concepts not fully explained. Owen had held nothing back, pouring out his longing for anyone who cracked one of them open to see.
Aside from accounting where, when, and what Light Breeze had been up to on any given day, he devoted whole sections to explaining different concepts as they came up. A lesson on building familiarity with the wind became a detailed explanation of flight mechanics, with pegasus magic demonstrated through expressive sketches showing the field of influence a flying pony generated on the surrounding environment. Owen was particularly proud of a series of sketches demonstrating his mother gliding through the water faster than any fish.
"You're strict vegetarians, but your, uh, horse mom is a fisher?" Tim asked with a doubting frown.
"I explain that on the next page. Keep reading," Owen urged him. "Fish are considered more acceptable as a source of animal protein than others, and there are a lot of carnivores living alongside ponies as friends or pets."
The flat model of the world got some doubt from Aisha, especially when he demonstrated the moon off-kilter one evening, rotated from its usual rising place to almost due northeast. Evidently, Celestia had been required to handle it that day for some reason, according to the radio, due to a surprise absence on Luna's part. That wasn't supposed to be an issue, but apparently she was out of practice with it.
Even with their occasional skepticism, though, one thing became abundantly clear as they read over one another's shoulders and discussed their findings quietly.
"It's just…" Tim flipped through the others' stacks as the bell buzzed for lunch. "It's just so much." He set down the last one with shaking hands, leaving it open on a two-page illustration of Light Breeze's family out watching fireworks.
Aisha licked her dry lips and drained the water bottle she had been given. "I'm sold." She laid hers open to a picture of her closest friends, Soda Pop, Silver Dust, and Jake, with her peripheral friends peeking over or around. A chibi-fied version of Silver Dust with her cheeks puffed and eyes squeezed shut in concentration as her horn lit with little stars and hearts had been scribbled into a corner.
"I was already sold, but you knew that." Jaime flashed Owen a smile that made his stomach flutter.
They both bore their eyes into Tim, whose shoulders hunched. "My rabbi is going to have words with me if he finds out." He sighed. "I want to read the other journals, but… this is just so much. I feel like I just got hit with the mother of all YouTube conspiracy videos. Existence is a lie, ponies are the only truth. Harmony will set you free."
Owen broke into a smile at that. It wasn't much, but if Tim found the evidence compelling, then it wasn't just the sibs and him being weird.
"I just gotta ask," Aisha said, taking his arms since they all knew by then he didn't like having his hands held. "Owen, are you trans? Do you… want us to start referring to you as Light Breeze?"
Owen went as still as one of the ice sculptures outside Light Breeze's school, eyes opening wide like a deer in headlights. "What?"
Jaime bobbed his head and leaned in on his other side to take a shoulder. "What she said. You think of her family as your real family. You miss your wings and your hooves. You love being Light Breeze and, let's face it, you've always been pretty girly. I'm sure there's been a lot of hints we didn't notice, but it's a lot of little stuff, like mannerisms and the way you like your hair."
"There's that scene a couple weeks ago when you and Silver Dust went shopping for skirts and dresses, despite barely wearing any clothing on normal days, and you talk a lot about how cute you looked." Aisha nodded towards a blue journal. "You spend whole pages being jealous about her mane and tail while also following her like a lovesick puppy. You always take the time to compliment me on my outfits here, so it's not just a 'there' thing."
Tim folded his arms, leaning back. "How do we know that's not just because he's been spending all his time there getting away from his dad? Maybe he's turning into Light Breeze because he's letting her take over or whatever."
"No!" Owen squeaked. "No, not that. To Tim, I mean." He shuddered, but didn't pull out of their grip. "I… I like being Light Breeze, but… I know it's not that. I shouldn't say that, either, because I am Light Breeze. When you see me, you see her. Everything I did in both worlds was Owen and Light Breeze. You're my friends as much as any of those ponies. I just feel like I'm happier when I'm expressing the things that make me Light Breeze, and… I think that's always been true, even before I could remember the dreams."
Turning his head to stare out the window at the grey, rainy day, Owen chewed over their questions as they tumbled around in his head like rocks, smashing his delicate sense of self. "I've never even considered the question. Frank… I never could get away with anything. There was a time when I had these books about unicorns I found in that Brickbats Books place, the Firebringer Trilogy, and I read them over and over. There was a mare, Tek, who was so cool and confident. There was another filly, later, who I think was going to turn into a pegasus with her griffon boyfriend, and—" His face turned bright red as he cut off his rambling. "He threw them out, and I cried for days. The author mentioned she used to run around on all fours like a unicorn when she was little, and I did the same damned thing when I was smaller and my arms weren't so stupidly short."
He gripped Jaime and Aisha like lifelines. "I guess… I…" His voice broke up, and he couldn't continue, staring at the tiles below.
"Girl," Aisha said firmly. "Look at me, Light Breeze."
Her head jerked up, eyes watering. "Aisha?" she croaked.
Gripping her head with both hands, she looked into her eyes. Her own had been lined with heavy eye shadow that Light Breeze couldn't help admiring. "You look me in the eyes and tell me you aren't a girl if you aren't. So help me, spirits, I am going to crack this egg wide open. You're not going to suffer in silence, not as my friend."
Light Breeze quaked, but she couldn't look away. No matter how she twisted and turned in her head, Aisha was right. Owen hated nothing—not his human family, not his awful neighborhood and school, and not even his hands—more than being Owen. She hated being a boy, and even just being human was too much to bear.
For a moment, she held back, wondering if perhaps she was being too hasty, that maybe there was something in Owen’s life she wanted to keep, but, aside from his friends, there was nothing. His world had never been open to him, his family had never been there for him, and, even if he’d been allowed to be a girl, he—she—would never know what it was like to fly without her, to run on all fours like her, to gaze up at a world of magic and wonder and know that, as dangerous as it could sometimes be, it would never fail to welcome her. Never had she felt comfortable in her skin outside the confines of her own dreams.
Owen breathed her last breath out.
"Breathe," Jaime urged at her back.
Light Breeze did, practicing those deep breaths her mother had taught her long ago as she drew in air that, somehow, felt fresher. She broke eye contact, her hands coming up to hug Aisha helplessly. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I do want you to call me Light Breeze.”
"It's okay." She rubbed her back. "It's okay, Light. See? We got you."
"We can't really go around calling her Light Breeze, can we?" Tim asked, and her estimation of him went up a notch for the implicit acceptance, even if he did seem uncomfortable around the display of such raw emotion. "I mean, obviously we aren't going to use the other name anymore. Uh…" He dug out his phone. "Misty… Libby…"
"Lilith," Jaime and Aisha chimed together."
"Fuck, no." Light Breeze barked a laugh through her tears. "I'm not a vesper! Besides, I like my real name." She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Pulling back, she brushed her hair behind her ears. "I guess I am trapped here for a while, so… anything you guys can do to help, I'll be grateful for. I'm Light Breeze, and I'm done pretending."
"Well." Tim looked up. "Why not just Light? Your friends on the other side use it. It's a super rare name, but who gives a shit? It means… I can tell it means everything to you, Light Breeze."
She seized him in a sudden hug, eliciting a wide-eyed squeak. "Thank you. I… I underestimated you, Tim."
He flushed, poking at his phone in lieu of a response.
Feeling lighter already, as though she could kickflip off a wall as easily in her human shape as she could in her pegasus one, she finished off the rest of the borrowed food with more appetite than she had in days on the human side. The thought of food made her wilt, though. "I'm going to have to still be Owen at the apartment, though. Maybe I could badger May into it, get some tacit acceptance, but Frank would smother me with a fire blanket."
"You come to our place after school and on weekends," Aisha said. "The teachers here are not supposed to reveal that you're identifying differently to your parents, either."
She winced and shook her head. "It would get out. There are lots of kids who would bully me. No one touches me right now because I stay out of everypony's radar. It would get back to Frank eventually, too, I know it would. Heck, he knows the police officer on campus."
Jaime growled, touching his chin. "That asshole arrested Mom and Dad at a racial injustice protest last year."
"Sorry, then." Aisha winced. "It's going to suck to have to go by your deadname in school to everyone who isn’t us, but at least you'll have us. Like our dad says, keep your heart high."
They moved to comfort her as usual, only to find her up and bustling, grabbing the trash for disposal. More than that, she was singing. Her voice hadn't yet entered the phase where it cracked and scratched like Jaime's in a way that, on him, was boyishly adorable, so it lifted clear and high.
"I may not know where I'm going, what I'm doing, and the whole grey world keeps pressing in every side, but all I wanna be is the pony that I am inside. Doesn't matter what clouds come my way, a soaring heart can summit them any day, oh, oh, oh-woah-oh!"
She spun back gracefully on a heel. "I'm sick of being cooped up inside. Let's go while we still have lunch time left."
Tim gaped like one of her mother's catches, and tears ran down Jaime's and Aisha's faces. "Light, you…"
"What?" She deflated, just a tad, but it hardly clouded her sunlight.
"This feels like… an overreaction?" Tim suggested, hand feeling at the air. "Like we should be worried you're having a… uh…" He googled quickly. "Manic episode."
Coming up, she planted her hands on the table. "No, guys… this is me. You've read the journals, you've seen how I described myself. Yes, I'm still sad that I have to be stuck here. Yes, I'm still pissed off that I'm not going to be going by my real name everywhere. But." She raised a finger. "But it doesn't matter. My name is Light Breeze, and there are people who believe in and care about me, and I'm not going to agonize over where I belong. If I can be a happy pony on one side, I can try to bring a little light here with me."
For once, they were the ones swept up by her currents, and she loved watching them hang on her words. "I'm not saying that, well, that this world isn't going to wear me down." She deflated another degree. "I'm just saying… I'm free. Even a little bit, I can stop pretending to be someone I don't like being. Every night, and sometimes at other times, I get to go back home and charge up, then I can hold my heart high here, with you guys helping."
Aisha's lip quivered. "I was just gonna say that I've never seen you smile like that before. You're a pretty good singer, too."
"Yeah." Jaime laughed. "You wanna join our band? I promise, you're going to be the best member, because we both suck."
"Sure! Like I said, I'm stuck here. Might as well have some fun when I'm not konking myself out."
"As for these…" Aisha scooped the journals into her own bag. "As promised, we'll talk to our witchy relatives and try to figure out a way to help you with magic. If there's magic on one side, there's gotta be magic here, too, right?"
"I dunno, but I almost feel it now," Light Breeze said brightly, leading the way out.
Manic wasn't the correct term. It was more like accepting herself as Light Breeze had burned away the brush, freeing her from the choking thorns of pretending to be a boy. They still lingered around her, but, if she was the same filly by night, she didn't see why she should have to stop being her by day.
Would that such realizations could slip the bonds of flesh and send her home full time. She would have to take what she could get.
With the others, she left to enjoy the limited time that remained before the next bell under the sky, no matter how cloudy.
It had been only a week since Halloween had come and gone, but already Frank Hall could feel the days growing shorter. Once upon a time, he might have taken his boys trick-or-treating himself, but those days were long gone. As an EMT, nights like Halloween were some of the busiest of the year, dwarfed only by the number of calls and reports his friends from the local precinct would get. Frank wasn’t bitter; it was a small price to pay for the chance to save lives, even if he’d originally gotten into the work for entirely different reasons.
He had plenty of time to reflect on his life, where it was going, how it had gotten to that point in the car. Traffic in downtown Philadelphia could be a real bitch, especially at that time of day. As usual, thoughts of Owen dominated his mind: the night before, the fight, and the horrible things he’d said, and not just about himself or Frank, since he'd even gone so far as to drag Remi into it.
Of course, Frank had known the boy was an odd duck, and so did May, but that didn’t mean they loved the boy any less. It just meant they had to be extra careful about what things he was exposed to and what things he wasn’t. He didn't consider it abnormal to be attracted to other men—for the most part—and maybe if Owen understood that, he could tone down his own judgemental attitude. The counter cultural movements had already gotten to him, though, filling his mind with promises of equality and harmony and all sorts of other nonsense. One day, Owen would learn the same way Frank had learned that utopian ideals don’t work when the people around you were fundamentally bad.
An EMT van pulled out in front of him at the next intersection, and Frank slowed. He wondered if there was anyone he knew inside. He’d been doing the job for as long as Adam had been alive; it was how he'd gotten started down the path in the first place, actually. It was a decision that had cost him his family—or, at least, his relationship with his father, which was practically the same thing.
Before May had announced that she was pregnant, Frank was just another cog in his father’s business, another contract worker making ends meet with whatever paid jobs they could take on. The work wasn’t unrewarding, but it was hardly stable and didn’t pay nearly enough. His father’s face the day he tendered his resignation had been burned into his mind.
“You’re gonna quit on me? Just like that? And with a baby on the way?” His eyes had been as wide as saucers, his mouth stuck in a disgusted O-shape. “What the hell are you gonna do instead?”
“I enrolled in an EMT program, Sir. I’m gonna be a paramedic.” Frank had responded, already flinching whenever his father moved a muscle. Owen didn’t know what real physical abuse looked like.
“I knew some guys like that in the war,” Frank’s father had said, sneering. Frank couldn’t tell if it was genuine contempt or just some half-baked attempt to lash out in any way he could. In the end, it didn’t really matter. “Didn’t figure you for a pansy. You know you’re just a nurse on wheels, right?”
Owen never got to meet his grandfather, or that part of his family, now Frank found himself wishing he had, then he might understand just how good his life was, how tolerant his father could be compared to the rest of the world.
The parking lot for The Prancing Pony tavern was usually empty this early in the day, a dusty old lot that hadn’t even been paved over, filled with gnarled weeds and old bits of faded trash. Frank’s job kept odd hours, and while his kids seemed content with the internet or text messaging, there was an element to face-to-face conversations that Frank found himself unable to do without, especially in moments like these. As for showing up in the middle of the day, well—life as an EMT forced him to keep odd hours. It’s something he’d always caught shit for, but what could he do about that? A man provides.
The place was owned by Gregory Carmichael, some old ‘Nam vet with a fondness for Tolkien and a geek streak a mile wide, but he was a good man, and well liked, at least by most of Frank’s friends. Truth be told, he’d only spoken to the wizened man once or twice, maybe once upon a time he’d done the bulk of the work himself, but these days he’d left things to the younger generations while he remained sequestered away in his upstairs loft.
Frank wasn’t surprised to find the place mostly empty when he stepped inside. There was some old maid in the corner sipping at what looked like a rum and coke, her face looking more tanned than her old black leather jacket, and he figured her a relic of the 70s or 80s. He couldn’t really place the style, but that seemed right. Frank made his way over to the bar and had a seat. The woman working at the counter wasn’t much older than him, but he wasn’t a big fan of the hunt even before he’d gotten married. The whole practice of flirting and reading signals was just something he’d always found exhausting.
“I’ll have a sprite,” Frank said, drawing a nod from the woman. They’d seen each other before. “And some fish and chips.”
The drink came quickly. The food took a bit longer, and in the meantime Frank was left to his own thoughts. He couldn’t get rid of the image of Owen’s face, the look of pure outrage and disgust. Something about it had felt so familiar; if only he could place it.
By the time the fish arrived, he had. It was the same rage he’d felt whenever confronting his own father. The same offense, hoarded little bit little over the years so as to form one grievous slight, for which he might begrudge his father everything wrong in his life. If only Owen knew that, of all of Frank’s children, they had the most in common.
“Thought I might find you here.” A man said from behind, his voice rich like he’d practiced speaking in front of a mirror, with a kind of jazzy vibe one might expect to find in east Baltimore. Frank craned his neck to get a good look at him.
Lieutenant Kamdon was a Black man nearing middle age, a bit on the short side, but with the toned body of someone who still took his training pretty seriously. Most of the other cops his age hadn’t. Owen would probably be scandalized to learn that Jonah was one of his closest friends, but he was—in Frank’s estimation—"one of the good ones," with no claims to any of that victim mindset nonsense. Frank harbored no misconceptions about who exactly had filled his son’s head with the measure of nonsense that it held. Jaime and Aisha’s parents were not subtle, and he remembered their arrests during the Hell Year.
“Michael told me you called him at three in the morning, earlier,” Jonah continued, taking a seat beside him and pausing to shut off his radio. “Why the hell would you do something like that? You get into a tiff with your boyfriend or something?” He took one look at Frank’s glass and his lip curled. “If you’re light on cash, I could buy you a real drink.”
Frank gestured with his hand as if to shield his, by now, flat soda. “I’ve got another shift in a few hours.” He took another sip with the same motion from earlier. “Can’t have too much alcohol in my system.”
“...Right.” Jonah frowned, as though he'd never seen Frank refuse a drink before.
“And no, the wife and I are fine. It’s worse than that.” Frank set the glass down. “It’s worse than that; way worse.”
“Worse than an ornery partner? Now I know you’re overreacting.” He gestured the woman over and ordered a beer, some local microbrew—Frank couldn’t taste bitter, and, as a consequence, that rendered a significant amount of beers into tasteless swill. “All right Hero, spill.”
Frank would be lying if he said he didn’t get a little rush of endorphins whenever one of the cops mockingly called him "hero" or "lifesaver." What he did mattered to them—they admired it, and that’s something he couldn’t even get at home.
“It’s Owen again. He uhm…” Frank trailed off. “Caught him hanging out with Aisha and Jaime Gaines again, and they filled his head with all sorts of BS.” Frank hesitated before asking for the favor that had been on his mind from the moment he’d laid eyes on Jonah.
“Listen, maybe you could come over and explain some things to him; set the record straight.”
Jonah snorted and took a large gulp from his glass before rolling his eyes. “Listen, man, I didn’t show up so I can be your 'one Black friend.'” He shook his head dismissively. “Just because I know where my bread gets buttered doesn’t mean I’m like you and the other guys. I’m not.”
Frank positively deflated at that, and immediately started reassessing his approach in his mind.
Christ… is this where the little shit gets it? Did he learn to be a mouse from me? But that was impossible, he’d never been anything less than properly imposing and assertive in his son’s presence. Hierarchy was easy: either you’re in charge or you’re not, and everyone knows where they stand. It’s with equals that things get messy.
“All right.” Frank scratched his head. “The kid and I got into a fight at dinner, and… some of the shit he said to me… Christ.”
Jonah had already finished his beer and was ordering a refill by the time he pressed Frank on. “Yeah? Like what?”
Frank polished off the last of his afternoon meal, lips pursed. “He told me I’m not his real father; threw my own words in my face. He talked about…” he pushed his basket of scraps away and rubbed his palms off with a fresh napkin. “I might have been a little rough with him earlier this week.” He explained. “Nothing serious, nothing like… my old man would have done to me.”
Jonah stared at him for a long time. “Yeah, I heard about that from some of the other guys. Heard you had child services dragged to your doorstep. Word of warning: don’t let Bryan catch you for the next week or two. He was talking about beating your ass senseless. You know how he gets when kids are involved.”
Frank nearly choked on his sprite. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. The color of your soul is between you and God, Frank, but I will say this.” He took another sip from his beer. “The world isn’t the one we grew up in. There are things our fathers did you just can’t do anymore, and it’s changing faster and faster with each passing year.”
Frank nodded, staring with exhaustion at an old photograph of a World War 1 fighter plane with a team huddled around it with bright, optimistic smiles. “The internet.” He responded, matter-of-factly.
Jonah laughed, hiding his face behind his glass. “Don’t get on your ‘Globalism’ soap box, right now, man. I ain’t got the patience.” He set the glass down again and pushed it aside. “But, look: my point is, you do all this work to keep your kids fed, to see them succeed, right?”
“Sure I do,” Frank said, defiant. “It’s all I’ve ever done.”
“My point, then, is what good is that gonna do you if every one of the little brats hates you?” He gestured emphatically at Frank’s chest. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his son? You answer me that, Doctor.”
Frank wasn’t a doctor, but he ignored the casual ribbing. “Jonah, I’m surprised.” He finished off his third Sprite. “I didn’t know you went to church.”
“I don’t.” Jonah shrugged. “Don’t believe in that sort of thing—never have, never will. Wisdom doesn’t need a holy book to lend it authority and credibility; it’s self-evident.” He stole a leftover from Frank’s abandoned basket. “You can be a bit slow sometimes, so I’ll interpet. If you alienate those kids forever, you’re going to be one very lonely, old ass man. Maybe they can make you a nurse and put you in pediatrics or somethin’. I hear the coma patients don’t talk back, but that might be more your speed.”
Frank glared, his face turning red. “Now that’s going too far, Jonah. I’ll tolerate bullshit, but only to a point.”
Jonah didn’t seem too concerned, but he motioned to mollify him all the same. “All right… all right. Then why don’t you let me make things right?” He leaned in. “See, some of the other guys and I? We bought a cabin up north, brand new, ‘neomodern’ or some shit. Absolutely no one for miles.”
Frank stared at him, bewildered. “On your salaries? How the fuck did you pull that off?”
“One word.” Jonah smirked like the cat who’d caught the canary. “Timeshare.”
Frank felt a little rush of vertigo, and immediately waved the woman working the counter over.
“Woah there, I’m not asking you to buy in or whatever.” Jonah gestured more urgently this time. “I’m just trying to do you a favor. It’s Veteran’s Day weekend, and it’s my turn to use the cabin, but, I figure, since we’re such good friends, I can pawn that over to you, and you get to take the kids on an unforgettable vacation. Not the wife, though, just you and the boys.”
Frank looked up, meeting his eyes. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch.” Jonah smiled. “But I’ve always liked the old adage of 'one good turn deserves another.' You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” Frank frowned. “But I’ve got shifts, I can’t just, like, ditch the city and camp out in the woods for half a week.”
“Oh come on man, it’s not that long, and I’m sure you’ve got some friends who could cover for you, you’re not that unlikeable. Unless you’re the damned Unibomber whenever we’re not around. Though, if Netflix doesn't lie, even he had buddies.”
Frank considered that for a moment. “I guess Carlos owes me for a few covered shifts, and Denis has another mouth to feed soon.”
Jonah finished off his last beer and smiled. “That’s the spirit, Frank!”