glaring, Noah replied, “No, you did.”
“I didn’t get you so hard,” Lee scoffed, crossing his arms and resting them on his pregnant beer belly. “Your drama… blind, filled with ignorance.”
“Yes, you did,” Noah insisted, an edge to his voice. His eyes fleeted outside, conviction building as he saw employees in hearing range. Gritting his teeth, Noah added, “You always do.”
Lee’s fingers, like grainy sausage, moved to cover his neck. It was a nervous tick, self-conscious of the moles peppering his windpipe. Noah recognized it from public speaking, when various groups would congregate to the diner, sitting around a table and staring up at him with sour expressions, expectant.
Finally, he grumbled, “A strong boy fights. It is nature, how we survive. I make you strong. But you repay me and my wife with running around with the Glass daughter. Was it not made clear to you that the Glass man was not accepted? That he has intervened, made demands, and fought to degrade us? You ignore my warnings, you ignore”
“I haven’t ignored anything.” Noah argued, swallowing the scathing comments that roused on first instinct. It was difficult not to spit in the man’s face, to threaten to teach him the strength he claimed to share like beating a kid around was a noble act of discipline. The man was no different than Tony. Their delusions were the same.
Noah found himself disgusted whenever he gaged the situation. He and Sarah, Luke and Owen, now even Aly… they were always shoved in the middle of their games. As long as he trapped in the morbid world of Ashland, it would always be the same.
No wonder Sarah tried to get out. I don’t blame her for not waiting. Even hiding, I always play in.
Spending time with a girl made him a disgrace, but how could they not see how ashamed they ought to be? How could they all be so far gone, embedded and crystalized in the dome around the town, that this was normal, acceptable, pleasing even?
The crazies think I’ve gone mad.
“Ignored nothing? Of course you have. She is not one of us; you bear no rights to her. There is a reason for the things that we do. We take care of our own, we respect our people and we respect the creature and our lifestyles. That is the way it should be. It is the way it has always been.”
“Look, you don’t know her.” Noah defended, “You don’t even know me.”
“You keep her outside of you, boy.” Lee leveled his eyes, glowering as they slid into ominous slits.
“Oh my-” Noah stopped, his voice rising to a shout. He demanded, “What are you so afraid of?”
“You are just like your mother, always think ing you know best. She listened to none of us when we tried to save her, and you know, you know where she ended up. Do you really want that for yourself? To die alone and young so far from your people?”
Everyone is losing their freaking minds.
Noah shook his head, disbelieving. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You are just like her, always thinking you know better than everyone else, like you’re the only person that matters. It is selfish, unacceptable. You insist on making her mistakes? Then you will die as she died, and your sister will do the same. I try to help you break this cycle, yet you disobey. I pay you, I feed you, you’ve got your own bedroom, you live rent free of age in my house. You act like I’ve given you nothing? You run off with an outsider, and you’ll be in a motel when you go, just like my sister. We’ll get the news, and my wife will be so sick, you will kill her or her foolish heart. We don’t want this for you and you don’t want what we have.”
He gripped the counter, his head spin ning. He didn’t know what to spit out first and instant thoughts were muddled. Did he miss something? Did Lee kill Mary-Agnes, was he being figurative? Was he delusional, thinking Noah was becoming Maria or somehow associated Noah as her son, instead of his own, because of Lee’s opinion to mutual disgrace? He was losing his hold, the grip that contained it, that kept him from prolonging the interactions. Unable to think straight, he spit out everything in his head as it came, barely understandable in his own ears.
“Whose mistakes? Yours? I’m trying to break the cycle of angry drunks that beat their