“After school one day. After the last bell. You were at tutoring,” he explains. Like that explains anything.
“Why?” I say.
“Why what?”
“Why did she tell you?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Why did you?”
A pause, our breath all around us like evidence.
Instead of answering, I ask my own question. “Why did you tell your father?”
Mirabel has already told us how he apologized for this when he met her at the bar. I thought he went to her because I was avoiding him. But that turns out not to be why. And who knows how much Mirabel’s told me that wasn’t actually true?
“I don’t know,” he says again. He doesn’t know anything. “He’s my father? If Belsum fails, what will we do? I was scared?” It’s like he’s asking me. “I got impatient?” We couldn’t wait anymore, any of us. “I’m sorry,” he says.
But that doesn’t make it better. I start walking again.
“I told him I’d been helping you,” he offers.
I’m getting colder. Shouldn’t I be aflame by now?
“And I told him I thought he was being a jerk. But he’s not a jerk, you know? He’s an okay guy really. So I thought it was worth a shot. Talking to him.”
“Did it work?”
“I asked him how Belsum could do this to you again after what happened last time. I told him I thought he had a responsibility to make it right and then leave you the hell alone.”
I keep walking, one foot in front of another, careful, matching my steps to my breathing, knowing both will falter if I take my mind off them even for a moment. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Do you want to become poor?’”
“And?”
“I don’t.”
“No one does,” I agree, and when he doesn’t say anything, I add, though it seems obvious, “We don’t.”
“I know. I said that. But he said—” River stops, which is how I know, though it doesn’t seem possible, that what he says next is going to be even worse than what he’s said already.
“What?”
“He said you can’t become poor because you already are poor.”
“So?”
“You always were.”
“What do you mean ‘always’？”
“He said you were poor before we—before Belsum—even got here. You would have gotten rich if the plant had been successful. That was the plan before, and that’s the new plan too now that we won the election, and that would have been—will be—great.”
He stops again and seems to be waiting for me to—what?—express excitement? Gratitude?
“That’s not what happened,” I say. Again, this seems both obvious and somehow necessary to say anyway.
“No,” he agrees, sadly, “last time it didn’t work out, but my dad’s point is now you’re right where you always were. You didn’t make any money, but you really didn’t lose any either. Why should we?”
“Why should you what?”
“Lose money,” he explains. “He says Belsum took the risk. Why should we be punished?”
“Why should we?” I ask.
“You’re not being punished,” he says. “You just didn’t … get better.”
I take enough deep breaths to be able to say without my voice shaking, “You destroyed us.”
“My father says that wasn’t us.”
“Who was it?”
“Someone before us. My mom says Bourne wasn’t that great to begin with.” His shoulders rise, fall. A shrug or a sigh. Resignation or regret or defeat. I don’t know. “Plus my dad says sometimes bad things happen. It’s no one’s fault. It’s nothing anyone can control. Anywhere you go, some kids are born okay and some kids are born with problems, some people are rich and some people are poor. That’s just how it is.”
“What do you say?” My teeth are chattering.
“Me?”
“Yeah. You said what your dad said, and you said what your mom said. What do you say?”
“It never matters what I say.”
“It matters to me.” Mattered, I think.
“I guess I’m just trying to keep everyone happy.”
“Not everyone.”
He winces but has nothing to say to that, and though I would like to walk away with some dignity, I would rather walk away with some answers.