He also spent a while working out whether he could go back to the Border for just one more year, say good-bye, see mermaids, sort out what he could, and then come back and catch up and have that normal life with electricity and without mortal danger. He thought he could. Then he forced himself to stop making those calculations.
The next day he packed for the Border again, in a frantic terrible hurry, hardly putting in any electronics at all, wanting to keep his pack light so he could move fast, so he could just go now.
Eventually he left the bag on the floor, and fled to Jase’s. It was late enough so Jase was already at a bar, and he met Elliot outside. Jase was barely outside the door when Elliot launched himself at him: backing him up against the large glass window. Jase’s mouth opened under his, slick and hot with a sting of tequila, and it was a long time until they disentangled enough to go back to Jase’s.
In the morning, Elliot devoted himself to multitasking: buttoning his shirt, making toast, and attempting to tell Jase that he was sticking around.
“I’ve been thinking that I want to make some changes,” Elliot tried out.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing. With your dad knowing and all. It’s kind of heavy,” said Jase. “I think maybe . . . we should call it quits.”
“Oh,” said Elliot. He put down the toast and did up his shirt: he only had one task now.
Jase seemed to warm to his theme. “You’re a different person than I thought you were, and maybe we don’t mesh that well together, yeah?”
Jase had said much the same thing before, but Elliot hadn’t paid attention because Jase had clearly liked him. Elliot stared at Jase over the kitchen counter and the cooling toast, and believed two things: that Jase still liked him, and that Jase was a coward. Elliot remembered Jase not wanting to hear about college, about his band, about Elliot liking girls as well, about his uncle, about everything that Elliot had found understandable and forgivable but which taken all together formed a tower of things that Jase had not wanted to deal with.
Jase liked Elliot being the way Elliot was, but he didn’t want to like it: he was looking for something that wouldn’t push him out of his comfort zone. Jase didn’t want to be challenged.
It was strange how different the same thing could feel. Serene had dumped him, and he would’ve done anything to get her back, had missed her every day for months. Now Jase had dumped him, and suddenly and simply, Elliot didn’t ever want to see him again.
“Okay,” said Elliot. “Goodbye, then.”
Jase didn’t seem to like that either. “It’s just the way you are,” he said. “It’d be difficult for anyone to put up with.”
“That’s true,” said Elliot.
Jase softened, hearing what he wanted to hear, but Elliot saw it now as condescending instead of affectionate. “If you were a bit more grown up, maybe . . .”
“Oh my God,” said Elliot. “You can’t handle me now.”
He found himself almost laughing in Jase’s baffled face. He knew what was wrong with him: awkward, spiky, occasionally cruel, inherently unlovable, all of that. But he’d always had a certain intense belief in what he could do: write treaties, end wars, throw all the knives away, make people listen to him, accomplish whatever he wanted. He was getting better at it too: by the time he was twenty, someone like Jase would be a haystack in the path of a hurricane.
Jase looked angry. Elliot felt nothing but that strange amusement and cold contempt, for Jase and for himself.
The key scraped in the lock of the front door, and Marty and Alice walked in.
“Oh my God,” said Marty, giving Jase a sad look. “Don’t tell me you’re doing this here.”
Jase was a terrible roommate, Elliot realized. They were probably counting the days until they could be rid of him. But that didn’t mean they would want to be friends with Jase’s latest castoff, either. He didn’t have anyone in this world, but he never had.
“I’m just leaving, guys,” he said. “Marty, please, please take a course in something that will be useful to you when you are trying to gain employment in the future. Alice, thanks so much for teaching me about lights. Everybody have a nice life.”
He walked out. Jase made a discontented sound, almost fretful, as if he’d pictured it all differently, but it was Alice who chased after him, who leaned over the rail to call down to him as he was making his way down the stairwell.
“I really do think you’re a nice kid!” she said.
“I’m really not,” Elliot called back up.
Alice smiled. “Well, I definitely think you’re going places.”
“I definitely am,” said Elliot.
He stopped off at his house and picked up his bag. He thought about leaving his dad a note explaining where he had gone, but the thought made him laugh. He just went.
He’d already worked it out. He could go for one more year, and see mermaids.
Elliot climbed the wall alone. Usually he saw someone else in the distance, going to the Border camp, or thought he saw someone else coming, but this time there was nobody in sight. Everyone else was already gone.
He climbed high gray stone steps into a bank of cloud that was like a white cliff he could disappear into. When he came walking out of the cloud and down into the Borderlands, the whole sky had changed. It was bright, light blue, sparkling as if it had been freshly washed. Elliot knew it was weird magic sky business, but it felt symbolic.
He went striding through the long green grass of the meadows that led home. It was an easy walk, though it had seemed farther when he was a child. With every step, he was gladder to be back.
There was time to become whoever he chose. There was still time.
There was even time to see if Jase and Alice and Serene and his father and everyone else he’d ever met so far was right, and nobody could put up with him for long. Serene had liked him for a while. Jase had liked him for a while. There might be someone who would like him for longer than that. Thinking of Jase made Elliot remember Jase’s reaction to Elliot saying he liked girls as well, and that made his lip curl. The odds were better for Elliot than other people: he could look for a boyfriend or a girlfriend.
Surely he could get this right, one day.
The sun was seeping through the thin material of his shirt, warm as a welcome. He approached the Border camp, the cabins and the tower, the practice grounds where unfortunate souls were hurling javelins and having swordfights, and he checked his watch. It was about time for the first Trigon game of the season. Elliot was so sad that he knew when the games were.
Luke would be playing and Serene would be watching, so Elliot shifted his pack from one shoulder to the other and made a beeline for the pitch.
He could hear the hum of the crowd as he approached the little scooped-out valley, with artificial hills at its center, and saw the filled benches with people leaning toward the game like flowers to the sun. Elliot looked for the people who had been knocked out, and saw there were four gone from the other year’s team already. So Luke was winning and all was as it should be.
Elliot was so sad that he knew the rules of Trigon.