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It’s Saturday. A “fend for yourself” day on base. Meaning that: no one has breakfast or dinner duty today, and if you get injured, Medic can turn you away and let respawn take care of it. There are no battles, and you get to sleep in as long as you want. The only things still enforced on weekends are chores, and even then, the general rule (besides dishes, which have strict weekly rotations) is: if you made the mess, clean it up. If it’s your space, keep it clean.
Scout’s room is not clean. It never really has been, since he moved in. The clutter used to be caused by him and his brother Charlie, who was just as messy as he was dumb, but now he has no excuse for the state of things. The mess actually makes Scout more comfortable; it makes him feel like he’s at home. The same can not be said for his teammates, however.
Scout’s attempting to tidy up the clothes on his floor when he stumbles across a box underneath a sweatshirt he hasn’t worn since he moved here. He kicks aside the sweatshirt and picks up the box to inspect it. It’s a dinky little wooden thing, cheaply made and scuffed up like knees that have been torn by the pavement. On the front, glued to the lid just above the lock, is a piece of scrap paper that reads “Jeremy’s Box of Things."
Scout sits down on his bed and holds the box in his lap. He’d forgotten that he had brought this along with him. He hasn’t put or taken anything out of it in years, but he remembers the reason he used to keep it. His important stuff would always get lost or stolen by his brothers, so he kept his favorite things inside this box.
The old lock clicks loudly underneath his thumb. He pulls back the lid and reveals the inside. It’s full of pictures, postcards, bottle-caps, rocks, shells, and a few paper drawings from when he was much younger, before he ever owned a sketch-book.
He spends a few minutes looking over each thing. There are polaroids of him and Charlie, a few of him and Anthony, and a picture from his tenth birthday, when Ma made him a special cake with his face drawn on it in icing. The face is more eerily realistic than he’d remembered—Ma was certainly an artist. There’s a postcard from his aunt Maurie, which she sent to him from Hawaii, and a matching flower necklace that he was too embarrassed to ever wear. A large volume of the box is the rocks and bottle caps he used to collect, and some shells from family trips to the beach. Some of the shells have been crushed into sand by the weight of the other items.
At the bottom of the box, on top of a stack of drawings, is a red lollipop. It has cracked and melted back into shape inside its plastic. Scout picks it up and studies it in confusion. Why would he keep a sucker? He doesn’t remember how he got it, or why he put it in the box. Maybe he wanted to hide it from Charlie so he couldn’t steal it. But why wouldn’t he come back for it later? He must have forgotten about it.
Tentatively, Scout removes the plastic cover. Candy can’t go bad, right? He shrugs and pops it into his mouth. A dull cherry flavor washes over his tongue. The candy is stale and tainted with the taste of plastic, but, other than that, it tastes fine. He would never let candy go to waste, so he pushes it behind his teeth and continues to suck on it as he cleans up the clutter from his Box of Things.
Bored after cleaning, he places the box and its items atop his dresser and leaves to go find something fun to do. Maybe there’s a card game going. If not, he’ll just go bug Sniper.
He walks through the hall and out to the rec room, playing with the sucker between his teeth like a toothpick. He remembers pretending the ends of his lollipops were cigarettes, so he could fit in with his older brothers. They would just laugh at him.
He’s actually tried smoking once, when he was thirteen, but he hated it; the cigarette tasted like burning plastic.
The rec room is surprisingly dead. The television was left on, but there’s no one watching. When Scout steps further in the room, and glances towards the sofa, he spots the sleeping body of Sniper. Just as he is awake, he is silent. Scout sighs. How can a Saturday be so boring?
Not content with just the sugar from the lollipop, and void of anything better to do, he decides to make his way into the communal kitchen to grab some Bonk! .
He walks through the kitchen doorway and freezes. There’s nothing unusual—Spy is sitting at the table reading a newspaper, and Heavy’s sat across from him, writing a letter—but when Scout’s eyes land on Spy, he’s hit over the head with a dizzying amount of déjà vu.
A memory grapples him and forces him into the past. Suddenly, he’s three feet shorter, and rubbing the tears out of his eyes with little hands.
“Hey, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
He looks up. The tears distort his vision, but there’s no denying the man looming over him is Spy. He has the same fancy suit and mask like a bank robber.
Time jumps forward.
Spy’s crouched down close to him, holding out a red lollipop. Scout takes it from his hands, but it feels weightless. Then church bells ring, and he looks over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy.”
Scout screams. He stumbles into the door frame and grasps at the walls desperately with his fingernails. He barely manages to stay upright. Air leaves his lungs faster than it can enter. His heart bangs like a drum and shakes his entire body.
He blinks.
Spy is staring at him with the same blue eyes as decades ago. His cigarette with it’s glowing tip like a sparkler threatening to fall from his lips.
Scout sucks in a deep breath and traps it inside his chest. He rights himself and shoots off into a sprint. He doesn’t stop until he’s inside his room, with the door slamming shut as he pushes his back against it hard. He releases his breath in a deep shudder.
First the dream. Now this.
Numbly, Scout peels himself away from the door and treads towards his bed. He lowers himself down to sit, feeling fragile like a small child.
“Why are you crying?”
Scout puts his head in his hands. He’s trembling like he’s hypothermic. The unlocked memory replays in his head over and over. He wants to deny that it was Spy. But there’s nothing to doubt.
Blue eyes.
“You have blue eyes, just like your father. I know you never got to meet him, but you look more and more like him every day.”
The week he moved into base and met Spy, he was haunted by the feeling that they’d met before. But he’d chalked it up to coincidence. After all, there was logically a chance he’d seen him or someone like him in passing; the guy was a Spy. Master of disguise. He could have seen his face a million times, with different make up or different hair or different outfits.
And then he had the dream.
He couldn’t be more than four, but he still felt old, like he was when he was nine or ten. He was stacking letter blocks on the floor, ignoring the letters and instead constructing a tall tower.
When he looked up, he saw Ma sitting in that old ratty recliner that they replaced when he was eight. And for some reason, Spy was standing beside her, leaning down and giving her a kiss.
When Spy looked over at him, he smiled. The kind of smiles only parents give their children. It looked strange and unreal like dream expressions do, because Scout had never seen Spy smile like that before.
He’d woken up from the dream screaming. And for the following week, Scout couldn’t look Spy in the eyes. Or be in the same room as him. The smoke had already been reminding him of his brothers, but the dream made Spy’s presence unbearable.
He eventually brushed it off as his brain creating nonsense. Probably inspired by the enemy Spy’s obsession with claiming he had intercourse with his mother. But now he’s doubting the dream’s unreality. If he’d forgotten about meeting Spy when he was younger, what else was he forgetting?
Anthony leans against the brick wall and holds his cigarette. He doesn’t smoke it. He just lets it burn between his fingers and stares at the sky.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time.”
Jeremy watches him intensely.
“Your dad isn’t really dead.” Anthony lowers his eyes to look at him. “I saw him every month until you were three. Then he disappeared. I never got Ma to tell me where he went, but I know for a fact he’s not dead.”
Jeremy’s throat goes dry. Anthony’s gaze is intense and serious. He’s not a joker even at the best of times, so Jeremy knows he’s telling the truth. But he can hardly bring himself to believe it.
“What?” He croaks.
“I hate seeing her lie to you,” Anthony says. “You’re going to be leaving soon. I just want you to know there’s a chance he’s out there. What you do if you find him will be completely up to you. But I wanted you to know.”
Anthony averts his eyes to the sky again. Ash falls from the burning cigarette.
“It’s not fair that we got to know the truth about our dads and you didn’t. I still don’t know why she tries to hide it from you. But now you know.”
Jeremy gulps. He wraps his skinny arms around himself.
His dad is alive. He could find him.
Too bad he’s heading off to war next week.
Jeremy’s dad is alive. And he’s found him.