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At this point, John is certain that his life is a joke. He can picture himself as the punchline in a bad comedy. He can hear the laugh track making fun of his every step.
He knows he’s right the second he says it.
“Matthews?”
A curly-haired head is limply hanging down over some hands in what looks like sadness and surrender. The figure is sitting on the curb and the cold lighting of the 24/7 shop behind him draws his silhouette vaguely. In the darkness of New York City at night-almost-morning, it could’ve been anyone.
John wants to take the word back because it could’ve been anyone, and he doesn’t know why he’s so talented in finding the one person that isn’t anyone.
Cory Matthews looks up because of course he does. His eyes are glassy and they take a second or two to focus but when they do, when he recognizes the merely familiar voice and the owner of it, his face lights up.
He hasn’t changed in the slightest, and it’s been a good four years. John waves.
“Mr. Turner,” the boy says in wonder like he’s seeing a ghost. That makes John reconsider his life decisions. “Are you—You’re—”
The boy gestures and John takes a step closer.
“This is New York,” is what comes out. John snorts. He feels younger, again, and in his apartment in Philadelphia or the classroom in John Adams High. “You know this is New York, right?”
“Really,” he deadpans. “I must’ve taken the wrong train.”
Cory stands up and laughs mockingly but immediately goes to hug him. John decides that it’s stupid to be so surprised—he hasn’t ever met a person as loving as Cory Matthews.
He thinks the boy mumbles something about so long and thought you were dead and a name that makes John’s gut twist and wrench, but John simply pats his shoulder and dusts it off slightly before parting.
Which is worse, because now Cory is looking at him. Boy, does that kid have eyes.
“So,” Cory coughs after what could’ve been ten minutes of silence. “What’re you doing in New York?”
John shrugs, one hand in the pocket of his jacket. He’s severely underdressed for a city so nice. “Eli got promoted.”
The eyes light up like two lanterns once again. John has to look away. Wasn’t Cory crying until moments before?
“Really? That’s so cool!” He enthuses. “So, why are you here?”
“Well,” John says, “Eli’s been around for so long, and he’s always followed me. When I ran from my family, when I moved to Philadelphia, when I—” abandoned a semi-orphan kid after a car crash and dropped off the map for years. He clears his throat. “I figured it was time I followed him, for once.”
Cory nods solemnly and his face shifts. He moves to sit back down in the curb and look at the pavement. John frowns, looking.
“You’ve been here for five minutes,” the boy explains. “And you’ve already given me advice. How do you do that?”
“Oh, I don’t,” John hurries, sitting next to Cory. “That’s Feeny. I wasn’t trying to give you anything.”
“Well, you did,” Cory says. He sighs. “I really screwed things up, Mr. Turner.”
He shouldn’t get involved. He shouldn’t be involved.
His life is funny.
“Is this about Hunter?”
“Is what about me?”
John closes his eyes and for three painful seconds, he thinks that maybe he doesn’t have to open them. Maybe he’ll pretend to suddenly fall asleep and they’ll leave, or maybe he’ll play dead and— ah.
A lanky but considerably taller Shawn Hunter is standing before him when he stands up and turns around slowly. He’s holding two cans of beer and John does the math—it’s April, so Shawn must’ve been twenty recently. Twenty.
He doesn’t care about the small crime because Shawn Hunter is standing before him. What is he supposed to do? Wave, smile, laugh, run?
Not run. Not this time.
“Hey, Shawn,” he says. He doesn’t know if he sounds as weak as he feels, but with Cory’s big piercing eyes carving two holes into the tangible scene and Shawn looking like he’d seen a dead body, the entire situation allows him to feel dizzy.
“John?”
Cory rushes to the rescue and gets the two beers from Shawn’s grasp a split moment before he lets go of them. He stands with the cans and doesn’t move to leave Shawn’s side.
Shawn shrugs. John thinks he must know how little the act has of believability, but he lets it pass. The hard face comes on and the words leave his mouth in a monotonous voice.
“I thought you were dead.”
And, fuck , that stings. Of course, Shawn knew he wasn’t dead. But John hadn’t even let him go visit him after he woke up. And then, he left. Didn’t even leave a note, or anything at all behind. He faded. He very well could’ve been dead, and it wouldn’t have made a difference, except maybe the actual act of dying would’ve made Shawn feel like his grief was justified and not childish, immature, lame.
“Shawn—“
The step forward he takes gains a step back from the boy, who by the pain in his face doesn’t trust him half as much as he did at age sixteen.
“What are you doing in New York?”
John fumbles with excuses, which makes no sense because he has a real reason. He hadn’t gone out looking for the boy whose life he had helped further ruin. His life was just that funny.
Cory helps along, beers now resting by his feet on the pavement and one hand carefully finding Shawn’s shoulder. John almost expects him to startle or flinch away, but Shawn barely moves.
“Mr. Williams got promoted in his job. Mr. Turner joined him and moved here.”
Shawn nods absently.
“Look, Shawn—“
“How’s the bike?”
Ah. “I don’t drive anymore.”
“Right, because of the accident. So, that happened, right? I didn’t just imagine it?”
John gives up the idea of having any type of peaceful conversation and thinks it’s only fair, all things considered. He nods.
“That happened.”
The second Shawn’s fingers start twitching he shoves his hands furiously inside his pockets. He doesn’t squirm away from Cory’s touch even as he retreats further into himself.
John has seen him do that enough times to know that it’s a train that needs to be stopped before it departs.
“Listen, Shawn,” he takes the shortest step forward with both hands in the air to show peace. “I didn’t know you were gonna be here. Really. If I did, I would’ve—I don’t know—written cue cards or something. I owe you a talk.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” the boy shrugs defensively.
“No,” John cuts him off. “I owe you a talk. I owe you way more than that. I owe you not running when you needed me most. I owe you signing those papers when I had the chance. I owe you being a parent. I owe you a dad.”
“I have a dad,” Shawn whispers. His eyes don’t meet John’s but there’s enough bitterness to those words to push the message forward: Shawn has always been an orphan, but John wasn’t in any place to shame him for that.
Cory is beginning to shake his head, but it isn’t clear enough to stop John from asking: “Really? Where is he now?”
A beat. “Six feet underground. Why? Wanna send flowers?”
He’s not kidding, because Cory’s hold of him tightens and Shawn is now looking at him defiantly. He has a way of finding a spot in the bridge of his nose so he doesn’t ever have to look at his—or anyone’s—eyes, but it works. He’s angry.
John just wanted a beer.
There’s a moment of silence where John mourns desperately the time when he was the wisest guy in the room and had seemingly all the answers. Shawn isn’t looking away. No one speaks for long and the air is solid.
Then, Cory perks up. A gift from above.
“Hey, why don’t you two open these up,” he goes to grab the beers, placing one in Shawn’s hand and one in John’s, “and sit down over there while I go inside to buy me another one?”
For a second, John thinks Shawn is going to shrug him off, scream and curse, run from the scene, but he turns to Cory with sparkling eyes and his face softens so fast and easily that he looks high.
“You think they’re gonna let you buy alcohol with that face?”
“Oh, shut up,” Cory sticks his tongue out before looking at Shawn in silence for one second longer and nodding. He goes close enough to peck his cheek and then whisper something in his ear, and then turns to stroll inside the 24/7.
John blinks. So, something had changed.
He’s suddenly sitting on the curb of a cramped empty street in Manhattan and the boy he had spent the past four years running from in his mind was sitting next to him, sipping from a can and looking ahead at nothing.
He’s almost expecting there to be a piercing silence until Cory comes out, which is why it catches him off-guard when Shawn turns to him.
“Can we start fresh?”
There’s a feeling in his stomach. A feeling with a name. John doesn’t deserve a fresh start. He doesn’t deserve to be in Shawn Hunter’s life again, even for the length of one conversation. He doesn’t deserve Shawn’s forgiveness. No one in the world deserves that.
But Shawn deserves a fresh start, if anything, to feel a little bit at ease. So, John nods.
“Yeah. Let’s start fresh.”
“Cool,” Shawn mirrors him, nodding as well. He has his hands in his pockets and is shifting his weight back and forth slowly, but John guesses it’s not from the coolness in the air.
The boy mulls over the past four years of his life and struggles to make conversation. John looks at him, gives him time while he studies how Shawn Hunter in the turn of the century is different from Shawn Hunter in 1996, and, in a way, he’s also exactly the same.
He’s taller, for one. In case that was even possible. He’s as tall as John, now, which had to have added at least one head of height to him. He’s still painfully thin, if not even skinnier than the last time they’d seen each other. He’s a little bit less pale and a little bit less sad. He’s a winner in a life of losses. John remembers him just like that.
“I’m seeing someone.”
The words make John frown because Shawn couldn’t possibly think he was that dense.
“Huh,” he mutters, perking an eyebrow. “I thought you and Matthews—“
“No,” Shawn shakes his head. His lips are curved upward and red splatters his cheeks. “Yes, I mean. That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh,” John nods. Then, he understands, and his eyebrows meet his hairline. “Oh.”
He’s not sure of why, but Shawn seems almost embarrassed. As if John is about to pick fun at him, or laugh, or shame him, or do anything but what he does:
John smiles at him and ghosts a hand on his shoulder, tempting. Shawn tenses, but doesn’t move.
“That’s great, Shawn,” he says, and he means it.
Shawn shrugs, but he’s close to beaming. “I mean, Cor and Topanga were gonna force me into it, anyway. I haven’t been doing so well,” he starts to shy away. “Or, well. Until a few months ago.”
There’s a split second of silence, and John nods along. He wants to know as much about Shawn’s life as he’ll let him, but he’s not going to pry.
Cory’s voice reaches both their ears. He’s either asking or negotiating for the beer. Shawn breathes.
“You know,” he motions. “I had all those problems with sleeping. And how I get overwhelmed when there are too many people in a room. And how I do this—“
He brings his hand out of his pocket and shows his fingers, picking at each other, twitching nervously.
“And then, well, Dad died. And I had my fair share of issues with him, already, so that wasn’t good. And then, I stopped eating—not, like, stopped. I just wasn’t eating that much. Cory noticed.”
John remembers for the first time in so long a nearly-summer night of 1993, and a thirteen-year-old Shawn Hunter looking at his half-eaten dinner with longing eyes. He remembers him devouring the plate and almost the napkin that came with it. Shawn was so small, and yet he looked bigger than the boy in front of him, now.
He sighs. “So, you’re seeing someone.”
Shawn nods. He looks like he feels guilty, and John wants to fight God.
“And you’re eating alright, now?”
“Yeah,” the boy says. “Cor makes sure I do. It’s hard, some days, I guess, but—yeah. I’m getting there.”
His voice is the most hopeful John has ever heard from Shawn, and he’s thankful that Cory steps out of the 24/7, because that might’ve been the only thing to stop him from bursting into tears.
Look at him. Jonathan Turner, the sentimental.
Cory walks out of the shop with a happy look on his face, a can of beer in one hand and a bag of gummy bears in the other. The boy walks his way to the curb and sits by Shawn’s side.
Shawn smiles easily. Cory hands him the bag.
“For you, my love.”
John remembers being twenty and disgustingly in love. He thinks of the person he’s going home to that night and feels a bit of that, too.
The older boy laughs, happy, true. He shakes his head as he takes the bag.
“This is why you never make rent.”
Cory shrugs.
“So,” he says, leaning against Shawn’s arm for warmth. Shawn wraps an arm around his shoulders. “Did you two get to talk?”
John nods. “Shawn told me he’s seeing someone.”
Then, Cory scoffs. “Mr. Turner, please. We’ve been together for most of our lives. You really didn’t know?”
Shawn is shaking his head with a smile. “Not that, Cor.” He looks the most calm he’s been in a long time.
And John explains that he and Eli are still adapting to the city, and Shawn mocks that after over a year he and Cory are still struggling with the changes, and Cory remembers that Feeny had advised them to move in together, but that was easy to say because Feeny’s house was huge and his wife was very tiny in comparison. And then they’re laughing, and John never stops looking at Shawn because he needs that part of his brain to take him in now, to know that he’s okay now.
The beers are finished and Shawn throws a blue gummy bear at Cory, which he catches with his mouth. John stands up and his knees whine. He reminds himself that he’s no older than thirty-four. He reminds himself that he was once twenty-eight, and Shawn was once thirteen, and then he was once thirty, and Shawn was sixteen.
And then he was gone, and Shawn was just a kid.
He watches as the boys stand up, somehow still in each other’s arms. He flattens his jacket with his palms and clears his throat.
“So, uh, Shawn,” he goes to say.
Sobered up, Shawn looks at him. He extends a hand. “It was good to see you, John.”
And that should be enough. That should be the end of it, and John should accept the handshake and march off to his apartment, and then life would take its path once again.
He thinks, however, about being twenty-eight and learning about the importance of doing things for other people. Six years later, he learns to be selfish, too.
John’s life is very funny.
“D’you have a pen?” He asks, and Shawn materializes one from one of his pockets. He eases a piece of paper, too, like he was expecting to have to write. John adds that to the list of things he has to relearn from Shawn Hunter.
Cory peeks impatiently over his shoulder as John uses his palm as support and scribbles words and numbers.
“There’s my address,” John folds the paper into Shawn’s hand. “And my phone number.”
Shawn looks down at his palm and blinks.
“Okay,” he says, slowly.
“I’m free next Friday,” John adds. “If you wanna have that talk I told you about.”
John is playing with fire, and he knows it. Shawn has every reason in the world to not want him in his life. He’s twenty, now, not sixteen and not thirteen. He’s grown more than John could have ever imagined. If he thinks he doesn’t need John, then he’s probably right.
Shawn’s eyes flicker up and they’re sparkling again. He doesn’t smile. He fights that.
“What if I don’t wanna talk?”
“Then,” he shrugs. “You can bring Cory along. We’ll play Monopoly.”
“Game night?” Cory says, voice young and happy. “Like a family tradition?”
John goes to shake his head, but Shawn looks at Cory and then back at him, and he’s smiling with his eyes.
“I’m fine with tradition,” he says.
He figures he spends too much time studying those words in silence because a red gummy bear lands on his hair and two laughs he would recognize anywhere snap him back to reality.
“Tradition, then.”
And then, they’re talking about Friday night. And then, they’re talking about Eli. And then, Cory suddenly remembers that he had a reason to be upset before John came barging into their night. And then, Shawn is being pulled by his sleeve and Cory’s exclaiming that Topanga and Europe and something about closets and being the friend she needs.
John goes home that night and finds that it’s freeing to cry, even if he’s a grown man, even if it feels a little pathetic.
He then straightens up, because Eli is starting to look worried, and because Shawn is fine, and he’s fine, too, and he has no real reason to be crying other than relief and years of guilt starting to pay off. He finds himself suddenly in front of a computer and looking up the words Monopoly game rules and adult adoption in two separate tabs.
Eli asks about the beer he had gone out to get so many hours earlier, and John doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
He thinks that his life is funny. He then thinks that maybe that’s just life, in general. He thinks he’s okay with that.