The Fine Art to Hating Absolutely Everything

seventeen: japanese gardens

The first thing I noticed, when Myles unlocked his clean apartment, was that it was no longer clean. The entrance hallway had dust in it, and someone else's old, floppy shoes. It smelt of microwaved food and stale human body. It couldn't be his older sister - I thought - at last removed from her stifling bedroom to teeth at the world; Myles's disrupted face told me this wasn't the case. We ventured further into the apartment, carefully, hearing the sounds of shooting.

Lights flickered across the wall in the living room, against a grey darkness. The unearthly sounds of death and struggle bounced off the walls. Myles was metres ahead of me, and I almost felt the urge to leap forward and pull him back into the hallway, drag him out the door. But he stopped in the living room, and said,

"Reddington?"

Reddington paused the video game and swiped his headphones off, whipping around with a petrified look on his face. "Myles! You're back."

"How are you playing that?"

"George lent me his Play Station."

Myles sat down in the club chair across from Reddington. He lent the back of his head against the backrest, looking up at the ceiling. I looked from him to Reddington. Reddington seemed to notice me for the first time.

"Arlo?"

"Hi."

Confusion. He looked from me to Myles in the silence. There was a certain tiredness in the air. "Where - "

"Have you been going to school?" Myles interrupted.

"Nah. How does that matter? You haven't been going to school, either." Reddington sat forward on the sofa. "Where have you been?"

"We've been on a journey," Myles said.

"And... why are you dressed like that?"

Myles looked down at the ripped fishnet tights he wore, and the white slip which, while sitting down, exposed most of his thighs. He did not flinch. He simply looked back up and said, "Why are you dressed like that?"

"What's wrong with it?" Reddington touched his t-shirt, which was ripped at the collar and had musty stains spattering it. He also wore red boxers with a cartoon character all over it.

Myles stood up and walked past me, into the hallway. "It's gross." he went into his room. I scampered after him, and shut the door behind us. Myles sat down on the edge of the bottom bunk. "This is the fourth time he's done this," he said, looking quite upset. "Whenever I was away in Omingha or Saddle Bridge or Westervile. If I missed more than three days of school he'd let himself into the apartment and squat here."

"How does he get in?"

"I think my sister lets him in. I don't know. It doesn't matter."

"Should I tell him to leave?"

"No," he said firmly. "I don't care that he's here. But whenever he's here, he doesn't go to school. And that's the problem. That's the fucking problem, Arlo. And I know that he's depressed, and that's why he lives like he's been the last man on Earth for eight months, and why he can't get off the couch. I've seen what depression does to people and I wish I had the superpower to fix it in every single person on this planet. Isolation is a side-effect of depression, and eventually it becomes part of what causes it. Connections can be a stepping stone to fixing it. Reddington can't make connections if he's isolating himself."

"He probably can't help it," I reasoned quietly.

"And I can't help it either, and that's what makes me so angry. It's gotta be him."