The House Above the Sea

6.

Neo was avoiding home in the first place because he was afraid of an awkward, tense silence—but the second he steps into the foyer, Joey's already on him.

"Where the hell were you?" he demands, barely giving Neo a second to ease the front door shut behind him. It's clear Joey hasn't been home for so long himself; he's still in his practice jersey, which is dark with sweat stains, and his hair is fuzzy and damp. "If you were gonna be out longer you should have texted me or my mom. You know how much of a worrywart she is—God, what were you doing?"

Neo starts to respond, but he's cut off by Aunt Vivian's voice, echoing from upstairs. "Joey?" she calls. "Is that Neo?"

"Yeah, Mom. Just a second," he says, and lowers his voice, a hand brushing Neo's shoulder. "You can tell me, you know."

Neo's not sure when his mood started to simmer, but it's boiling over now. He brushes Joey's hand away, shoving past him and into the kitchen. "Has it occurred to you that it's none of your business what I was doing, Joey?" Neo grumbles. He swings open the pantry, takes in the dismal selection of health food with which it's stocked, and settles for a box of off-brand saltines. "I was just in town, anyway."

Neo sort of hopes Joey has given up, but when he turns to set the saltines down on the counter, Joey's still standing there, one hand braced against the wall. The look Joey's giving him now—Neo has seen it before. The slightly rounded eyes and the pensive frown; sympathy, some would call it, but even Neo knows that sympathy is nothing more than a euphemism for pity.

Neo squeezes his eyes shut with a groan. If he has to look at that face one more time, he thinks he might scream. "Joey, don't—"

"This is about last night, isn't it?"

"Joey—"

"I'm really sorry," he goes on, as if Neo said nothing. "I mean it. It was just a slip of the tongue, Neo; I knew it was wrong the second it came out of my mouth. I didn't mean anything by it."

He's telling the truth; Neo knows he's telling the truth. Joey Irvine's many things, after all—star athlete, class pretty boy, closeted paranormal fanatic—but Neo's never known him to be a liar.

Neo drags a saltine cracker from the roll and sticks it between his teeth. "Forget it, Joey," he says, his voice slightly muffled. "It's not—I was just being stupid."

"It's not stupid," Joey says, and when Neo just raises an eyebrow at him, he just sputters and grabs a seat at the breakfast bar, leaning over the counter like an overeager child. "Look, Neo. I'm really...really privileged, sorta. Yeah, my parents have their fights and shit like that and my mom would absolutely murder me if I left wet laundry out, but that's nothing. So I'll be honest: I have no idea how you're feeling. When they told me you'd be staying for the summer, I was excited, of course, but also scared as hell. I had no idea what to say to you, to be honest."

"Joey, Joey," Neo says, waving him off. He finishes off another saltine cracker and mops the crumbs from his shirt. "I don't...I don't want you to have to tiptoe around me. I'm not a time bomb."

Joey sighs. "I know. I know you're not. That's why I thought maybe if I just acted like nothing was wrong then it would be okay. But I don't think ignoring everything that's going on is the right answer, either."

A strange, anxious knot forms at the base of Neo's stomach. He braces himself against the island, watching the little slices of afternoon sunlight upon the tile floors appear and disappear as the clouds move. He is somewhere else for a second, somewhere other than here; though he can hear the ticking wall clock and the gentle tap of Joey's fingers across the granite, his mind is all the way across the sea and the states.

"The worst thing is that no one knows when she started," Neo says, so suddenly even he is not sure where the words are coming from. "Well maybe someone knows, but no one will tell me. She could have been using heroin ever since I was a kid, or—and I don't even want to think about this—some point long before that, and she's just been hiding it. It's terrifying, Joey. Because until the fire, I never would've guessed."

He expects Joey to interject, maybe even to tell him to stop entirely. But Joey is silent, watching Neo with a gleam in his eyes that speaks less of pity, Neo realizes, but compassion.

"It was because of me."

Now Joey speaks. "Neo, it wasn't—"

"She knows I don't eat when I get stressed out, and I had this major test the next day in a class I was already flunking. Whenever I get in those moods she always cooks for me and drags me out of my room, you know? And that time—well, we all know what happened that time," Neo says. His eyes are starting to sting, but he fights it. He cried enough before he arrived, and a bit afterwards, and he refuses to cry anymore. "I love my mom. I do. I know that the only reason she did this to herself was because she was fighting something and maybe doing drugs was the only way she knew how to win. But it still just—it all makes me wonder if there was something I should've been doing."

Joey shakes his head at him, stops, shakes his head again. "Neo, it's not your fault. I know you've probably heard that from a million and one people, but you know why? 'Cause it's true. And besides, if your mom was cooking for you, then all that means is that she was thinking about you, and that's not a bad thing. She's not gone yet, you know. So you—all of you—just have to keep going."

You just have to keep going.

Neo presses his hands so firmly into the granite that his arms start to throb, as if he can somehow fuse the words into his being. Even in the cyclone of uncertainty that swept him off his feet following the fire, that was the one thing he was sure of: that he wasn't going to just let her go like that. Could it be, Neo thinks, that his father had started to make him think otherwise?

Neo grabs another saltine cracker, then flicks the pack so it swings in Joey's direction. "I'm sorry," Neo says. "For last night. And for unloading all of that on you just now."

"No, I like it," says Joey, a broad smile crossing his face as he takes out four crackers at once. "I like it when you talk to me. Makes me feel like I have friends."

Neo scoffs. "As if you, Joey, basketball star, don't have friends. You know everyone in this town."
Joey passes a hand through his hair, and though he's still smiling, something about it seems diluted now, a less authentic rendition of the original. "I don't think knowing people and being friends with them are the same thing," he says. "At least, not anymore."