“I know you’re pissed. There’s nothing I can do or say that will make you feel better, so just trust me that had I come clean with you back on the road? Things would have turned out a lot worse. What happened here? This is the second-worst-case-possible scenario. Believe it or not, things could be worse. And it still could get worse, so you need to leave.” And he’s right. He’s a monster and an asshole and a liar, but he’s right. He gives us a beat to figure this out, then he tells us, “You need to take Greta with you and leave the island.”
“And why the hell should we trust you?” says Stan, and Bobby immediately jumps to respond, but Stan won’t let him. “No, I get it. We all saw you with your megaphone, trying to wave off those soldiers.” Bobby looks at Stan in confusion, as if to acknowledge that yes, he was trying to call them off, and yes, he did do all of those things, so can Stan just try to give him the benefit of the doubt? “But who gives a shit? What does any of that prove? That it bothers you that your men, the people you’ve been planning this whole thing with, tried to slaughter our brothers and sisters? That’s great, it’s great that you give a shit about them slaughtering Icelings after it happens. But what about your role in everything that just happened should make us feel safe right now? That you were a spy this whole time? That you were prepared to take an order and then kill Greta and Ted and Callie and Tara and whomever else at a moment’s notice? That you never really told us what really happened to your brother, Alex, who was the one who was actually close to Greta, the one who was actually her brother, and that it’s awful convenient that she’s stuck with you now that he’s out of the picture? That it’s one thing for you to come up here and get involved with a group trying to exterminate all these kids, but to use your sister, who is one of these kids you people think are monsters, as a way of studying and getting closer to that group, so that you’ll be able to carry out your orders to kill them that much more easily? It’s great. It’s really super compassionate of you. No, I can tell. I can tell how, like, the death of your brother really made you and Greta super close, really made you want to bond with her and look out for her like the sister your brother always saw her as. No, dude. You’re super compassionate. I get it.” And I place my hand on Stan’s arm, because I can see that this is going to get us somewhere, though I don’t think it’s anywhere we really want to go.
“Don’t talk about Greta, Stan. Or Alex. You wouldn’t dare talk about either of them or make presumptions about my love for my family if you’d seen her that day, lying next to his body, his nose and fingers and toes black, his skin way too pale, and Greta staring at him, and Alex staring at nothing at all because he was dead. She didn’t kill him. She had nothing to do with him dying. It was a stupid accident—he was walking to a friend’s house in the middle of a snowstorm, and he got lost. He didn’t tell my parents he was going. But Greta found him. She found him and tried to save him. She gave him all her warm clothes, her coat. But he was already gone. He was eleven.”
The way he says all of this, it makes me think he means it. But even if he doesn’t, even if this is a lie like everything else anyone claiming any authority has ever told us, I can’t help but think about being eight and wanting to Rollerblade like my babysitter, and going to the garage and illegally strapping on my dad’s pair, which were way too big, and falling as soon as I hit the driveway, skinning my knee, and Callie running up to me and holding me and trying to grab the hose, and me getting it together enough to stop crying, to wash it with the hose. I think about Callie tugging me out of the bathroom when I slipped in the tub, about Callie holding me at night when we were four and five and eight and ten. And I think about losing her, or her losing me, what that would be like for either of us. And I look over at Bobby, and a part of my heart just breaks.
“So don’t talk to me about Alex, Stan,” says Bobby. “You wanna hit me? Fine. But remember that one of us knows where and how to hit a bone so that it breaks in an instant, and the other one is just seventeen and righteously pissed off.”
I can tell Stan was moved by Bobby’s story, which is why I feel so ashamed of him and his stubbornness when he actually responds.
“Back at that rest stop,” he says, arching his shoulders up like he’s trying to shrug off Bobby’s story and everything he felt about it, “you were trying to take Callie and Ted. Weren’t you? When you kept talking about how your shitty car had so much room? You were hoping we’d be stupid, that we’d either leave you alone with them or fall for your nice-guy act and let them ride with you.”
The look in Bobby’s eyes says yes, and now Stan’s the one who looks like he has the right to feel right about everything.