by Eileen Sharp
By the end of the movie she’d wiped her tears and put on at least a semblance of cheerfulness.
Mr. West got ready to drive Joshua home, and Mrs. West went to find his jacket. Joshua was alone with Caina in the foyer, though he knew it wasn’t for long.
She stared out the window while they waited for her parents to return.
“Caina,” he said, low enough so that her parents wouldn’t hear from the other rooms.
She looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.
“Whoever wrote that about you needs a serious….” he stopped to revise the profanity that came to mind. “Are they from school?”
She nodded mutely. Tears poured down her face now and he could see her struggling to keep her chest from heaving. Her quiet courage tore at him and he wanted to punch someone again. He leaned down. “I know what it’s like.”
She shook her head at him as if to deny that he did. Then she ran to the stairs without looking back.
On the way home, though he enjoyed his conversation with Mr. West, he kept thinking about Caina, and how much he wanted to fix her problem for her. He considered telling Mr. West, but he didn’t want to jump in where he didn’t belong.
He realized as he went to bed that night how little he cared about his own loneliness now. He was taunted at school for his eyes sometimes, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. Caina was just a twelve-year-old girl who probably believed everything someone said to her. He fervently wished he went to her school, but he was pretty sure her school didn’t have “displaced children”. It was probably a private school with a waiting list.
The next week the Wests invited him over again, though this time it was for lunch and a trip to an indoor water park. He began to realize that though they might not know everything about the kids picking on their daughter, they understood she felt alone. They weren’t fostering a friendship with him only because they felt sorry for him; it was for her as well.
They picked him up at Dr. Calloway’s office after his weekly appointment. He got in the transport and sat next to Caina in the backseat.
She sat cross-legged, playing a vid game. She looked up when he got in and handed him a second vid game player. “I’m probably going to beat you,” she warned.
He took the game and said in a dead, slightly threatening voice, “We’ll see.”
She did beat him, the first time, but then he caught on. He beat her once and then let her have the rest, making the score close so she couldn’t guess that he was letting her win.
“I told you,” she said after her third win.
“I bow to your superiority,” he confessed, smiling at her.
Her eyes met his and she held his gaze. He waited, wondering what she was thinking. “I still like your eyes,” she said.
“Ditto.”
She laughed.
He put his fingers on her wrist and turned it over. She stopped laughing and her eyes darted over to her parents in the front seat. He scrolled through her messages and shook his head. “Why don’t you let me answer these?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered, her face going pale.
His fingers quickly moved to make up a username. “Like?” he asked.
She leaned over to read what he’d written. “DarkRed. Nice.”
He offered a response to the taunts in her messages, careful to avoid cruelty, yet annoying enough to catch their attention. Someone was paying attention because they jumped at him.
You’re probably as ugly as Caina.
He smirked. Twelve-year-olds. Thank you.
She’s a little snot that nobody cares about. She sits alone at lunch—so sad.
.Caina looked away, but not before he saw her flush red. Did she sit alone at lunch? She probably didn’t want him to know, worried he would think less of her. Nothing could be further from the truth.
She’s not alone now, he wrote.
Are you another ugly friend with no social life too?
Another? You mean she has more than one? I’m jealous. I thought I was her only ugly friend.
All her friends are ugly, just like her.
Being Caina’s ugly friend has to be an upgrade from being yours.
Why don’t you shut up? I wasn’t messaging you!
Things devolved into pissed off swearing which pleased him immensely. He closed out the messages when they stopped answering.
She sighed. “I wish I could answer back like that.”
“Well, you can’t, and the reason you can’t is because you care, and they know how to hurt you. So do me a favor and don’t read these. It’s what they want.”
She shrugged and looked out the window. He pulled at her wrist until she turned back to him.
“Okay?”
She whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “They send them all the time. I can’t help it.”
“Trust me?”
She nodded.
He took the cell band off her wrist. “This is gone today. It’s just your mom and dad and me, your ridiculously tall sidekick with the freaky eyes. Totally at your beck and call. Unless I want to kick your butt at something.”
She smiled for real this time. “Good luck with that.”
“Also, since I have amnesia, I don’t know about water parks. You’ll have to show me around.”
Her eyes sparked with interest. As usual, she liked being in charge. “Maybe.”
She handed him the vid game. “If you win I’ll show you around. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck in the locker room wondering where the rest of us are.”
He took it. “You know I lose this game most of the time.”
“Enjoy the locker room then.”
When they arrived they all changed and went to the first pool. It was so huge it looked like a pond, with some of the water slides several stories high.
“Whoa,” he said, looking up at it all.
Mr. West wore a water shirt and swimming trunks that accentuated his spindly legs. Mrs. West wore a mom bathing suit that somehow looked chic on her round figure. “I’m not going on those,” she said, pointing up at the taller slides.
Caina grabbed Joshua’s arm. “Joshua is. He can’t wait.”
He smirked down at her. “You sound scared.”
“I like heights. Maybe you’re scared.”
“No, that’s excitement.”
At the top of the tallest slide, he felt a shiver of fear or common sense. He wondered how many accidents the park had. Caina shoved him down before he could think about it for too long. He howled on the way down, slipping through turns and screaming though loops until he shot out at the end, flying into the water. Caina landed nearby, screaming her head off.
They spent the day laughing at nothing and everything until they were completely exhausted. That night when her parents dropped him off at the agency home, he put a hand over her wrist before he got out of the car. “No reading.”
Sleepy, she smiled over at him. “Okay.”
He began to wonder what it would be like to be in the West family. He liked how Mrs. West asked about what he ate at the agency home and how Mr. West asked about his grades. It was comforting somehow.
Over the next few months, he became a regular at their house. Caina talked to him every day now, and he found himself depending on her. She’d become part of his life and a distraction from all the questions he couldn’t answer about himself.
One snowy afternoon, Mr. West picked him up from the agency home to go on a ski trip. Joshua hopped in the car, his canvas shoes damp from the snow and his jacket a little too light for the cold, but he was happy to go with them.
Mr. West eyed the thin coat as Joshua closed the door and folded his arms around his chest, the warmth of the transport seeping into him.
“Thanks for the invitation,” Joshua said. His conversations always began with some kind of thank you.
“Oh, of course. Thank you for joining us. We were thinking of getting some extra gear for the trip. Would you mind if we stopped by a s
upply depot to pick up a few things?”
“No, that’s fine,” Joshua said. He liked shopping, something that he didn’t get to do without the Wests because he had no credits, and he hadn’t acquired a skill certification yet for a job.
The giant supply depot was one of the largest buildings in the valley, it’s brightly lit colors glowing in the snowfall. They parked their transport in a parking conveyor that picked up their transport and moved it onto a conveyor belt. They took the elevator up to the depot levels. Joshua had no idea what kind of gear Mr. West was talking about, but they ended up at the outerwear section. Standing in the coat racks, Mr. West asked what size Joshua wore.
“Oh, that’s not necessary. I have a coat,” Joshua said.
“I know, but where we’re going you’ll need something warmer, and we wouldn’t want to be responsible for damaging the coat you already have.”
Joshua had already accepted numerous expensive items from the Wests, but he tried not to take too much from them. He also realized they were pretty determined to help him out if they saw a need, and they were good at coming up with excuses for why they needed to get him things.
“Okay,” he conceded.
Joshua found one that he liked and slipped off his thinner coat to put his arms in the sleeves of the new one. “Feels nice,” he said.
“Looks good on you.”
“Thanks,” Joshua said, giving it one last admiring look in the mirror before taking it off.
“Joshua, I hope you don’t mind,” Mr. West said. “But I did some research into your background. I know we asked you about it some time ago.”
His heart jumped. He’d wondered if Mrs. West had forgotten her promise to help him find his past life. Apparently they hadn’t.
“No, it’s okay. There probably wasn’t much to go on.”
Mr. West gave a dry smile. “There wasn’t. I waited to talk to you about it because I wanted to have some information.”
Joshua hadn’t felt hope in a long time. It was a peculiar sensation, lifting his mood instantly.
“I started with the crash and then any details about you that might give me clues.”
They paused the conversation to purchase the coat at a kiosk and went back to the parking garage to pick up the transport. Once they were seated inside, Mr. West continued his conversation.
“The data from the crash indicated that you’d definitely come from another system, but that’s all I could tell. You aren’t from around here, which I’m sure you’ve suspected.”
“I have no memories of anything like this planet,” Joshua agreed.
“I researched the color of your eyes, since that is a definite clue from your past. I didn’t know if you altered them on purpose or if you were born with them, but going on the assumption you were born with them, I researched genetic similarities, but couldn’t find anything that made sense. Albinism affects all aspects of pigmentation, not just eye colors. So I looked at places where altering eye colors is common, and I looked at different planetary environments that might have affected the color.”
Joshua had wondered the same things. “I could have altered them myself, but honestly I don’t know why I would do that, unless maybe it was a trend.”
“That’s what I thought. There are quite a few places, so I checked them out for any missing persons reports. Two colonies have a fair contingent of young people where red is the dominant alteration choice.”
Mr. West pulled a small rolled up screen from his pocket and rolled it out to show Joshua the pictures.
The young teens in the picture all had red eyes, so that could be where he was from, he supposed, though some information would have popped up by now. “Did you find anything in the missing persons list?”
“No DNA matches, I’m afraid, but that doesn’t mean we should stop checking. The other possibility was the environmental effect on the color of your eyes, but any environments that affect iris pigment were harsh environments with small populations that are carefully tracked. If you left a place like that, someone would have noticed.” He paused and Joshua waited, hoping there was more. “I’m sorry, Joshua. I wanted to have some positive news, but I haven’t found anything yet. I’ll keep trying.”
Emotions crashed into him—disappointment, frustration and hopelessness. He hadn’t cried since the crash, not when he’d been alone in the hospital or the agency. He looked out the window as his eyes watered, betraying the loneliness he tried so hard to hide. His past was lost somewhere in the universe, along with anyone he had ever known.
The transport slowed and stopped, and Joshua felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. “We’ll keep searching, but we can do it together.”
Joshua wiped his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Thanks for doing all that. That was nice.”
“Well, I did it because I care, Joshua, not just to be nice. You deserve better.”
Touched, Joshua only nodded. A lot of people were nice to him, but there was a difference between being nice and caring. If someone was nice to you, it was because they just wanted to be a good person; you didn’t have to matter to them. If someone cared about you, it meant you mattered.
“I’d like to ask you a favor,” Mr. West said. “I did the research because I wanted to help you, and I’ll keep doing that, but I—we—wanted to offer you something else. You don’t have to say yes. I’m asking you when it’s just you and me so you can say no if you want.”
Joshua’s heart hammered in his chest though he didn’t quite know why.
“We want to ask if you would be in our family. We’d like to adopt you as our son, and Caina said she would love to have you as a brother. If you wanted.”
For a moment he didn’t feel anything but shock, but then a warm happiness filled his chest, flooding through his body and making him light-headed. “Are you sure?” he asked, hardly able to believe it.
Stewart West laughed. “Yes, very. We can’t wait to have you, if you want.”
He couldn’t say a word, paralyzed by the onslaught of happiness and the weight of his yearning to belong. He dropped his head to his knees, covering his face with his arms as he cried, so overwhelmed with happiness and relief that he couldn’t move.
“Is that a yes?” Mr. West asked.
He kept his face hidden, the tears falling down his face. “Yeah.”
Stewart West put his arms around him and drew him in a tight, wiry hug. It was a few moments before Joshua realized Mr. West was crying, too. When could he call him dad? He would have a mom. And a little sister. He would have a home, and a bed that didn’t belong to anyone else. He would be a West, wouldn’t he? Joshua West.
“Oh, man,” Joshua said, but he still couldn’t talk. He tried anyway, his voice cracking. “I’m really happy. This is like Christmas. Not that I remember what that’s like…but you know what I mean.”
“We’ll have lots of those. Let’s go tell the girls. They’re about to explode waiting for you.”
Joshua wiped his eyes, laughing.
When they pulled up to the big house the doors flung open and Caina ran out to the transport. “You said yes, didn’t you?” she said, dancing on her toes, her green eyes huge.
“Of course.” He was going to say something sarcastic but his emotions got the better of him and his eyes teared up again. She threw her arms around his neck, her face scrunching up so hard as she cried on him that he was a little worried, but he guessed she was probably okay.
He hugged her and patted her head. “It’s all right, kid. I’m with you. I’m not going anywhere.”
She just bawled some more.
He looked up to find his soon-to-be-official mom holding her hands tightly together, waiting for her turn, her eyes just as teary as his. He smiled. “I don’t think she’s going to let go,” he said.
Mrs. West went to him and wrapped them both in a hug, Joshua towering over her. “This makes us so happy, Joshua. I hope you can call me mom, someday, when you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She laughed, looking up at him. “I like it already.”
They were all giddy and not sure what to do next, walking into the house, wanting to talk about everything, but not sure where to start. Caina recovered enough to start first. “You can have the room next to mine. It has a game room and a balcony. You can see the mountains from your room,” Caina said. “You can decorate it anyway you want. We waited to see what you wanted. Come and see it. Well, you already have but lets go look at it anyway. Now that we know it’s yours.”
It was different walking through the house knowing that it was going to be his home.
Mr. West—his dad, said, “We’ve got some schools to look at. One of them is an academy off-world, or you can stay here.”
“You should stay here,” Caina said, pulling him up the stairs.
“Now let him decide,” his mom said. Somehow everything she said now sounded like a mother, and it made him happy. He could hardly wait for her to tell him to pick up his socks.
By the time they’d made their way downstairs, his dad had talked about getting him a transport of his own, and they’d decided he could get his things from the agency after the ski trip. There were documents to sign and a judge to meet and other documents he didn’t know much about, but he loved it all.
The cabin in the mountains was waiting, so they piled into the transport, still talking and planning about what was to come.
In the back seat with Caina, he took her wrist and checked the messages. There weren’t as many this time.
“They’re giving up,” he said.
She pushed the cell band around her wrist, not looking at him. “That’s because I don’t care anymore, and the reason I don’t care is because I have my very own ridiculously tall, freakishly red-eyed sidekick.”
Her eyes met his, and he decided that his first school choice would be her school, and everyone would know who he was. “No, you have a big brother who will kick anyone’s butt who is stupid enough to hurt you.”