Trouble is not back at school on Monday. At lunch, Bella sits with Andi who sits with Robin who sits with Ethan.
"It probably helps that he's not the primary custodial parent. We can avoid him if we want. We'd be in a much less pleasant spot if Renée were doing it. Fortunately, she thinks the Sharing is uninteresting because it fails to be about any specific thing - she'd rather learn crafts and thirty words of sign language and volunteer at the animal shelter."
"There's press about them. Nice newsy 'the Sharing cleaned up this highway' or 'the Sharing is raising money for cancer research'. Some negative press, especially from the earlier days. Almost invariably followed by retractions. And the same article authors saying nice things later."
"I am also creeped. I did find, yesterday, a single website by an anonymous raving person who claims that the Sharing is a front organization for brain-eating zombifying creatures. But I'm pretty sure if I looked hard enough I could find someone claiming that about everything from the Girl Scouts to the De Beers cartel, which I am pretty sure just sell cookies and diamonds respectively."
"Nobody lives forever, right? So what matters to me isn't how long I can hang on for, it's - I don't know, something else. Dying doesn't scare me. Another ten years in Reggie's house, that fucking scares me. Loving somebody who doesn't want me to. Having to live without being able to hurt. Those things are scary. Death just isn't."
"Yeah," says Trouble. "That's scary, sure. But there's no way out of it. It's not that I don't care that I'm going to die, exactly. It's that worrying about it won't make it go away, and since I can't just not die - and there's some ways it might turn out pretty awful if I could - I don't care that much whether it happens when I'm sixteen or when I'm sixty. What I want is for it to be - my choice. For it to happen because of a risk I took on purpose, or because I decide I'm done, and not just sneak up on me out of nowhere."
"Look," says Bella. "You haven't known me very long, you're scared of me, you're prematurely cynical, etcetera, you have no reason to believe I'm good at anything except writing school essays - I understand you have no reason to believe I'm going to be able to accomplish anything remotely interesting with my life - but do you think you could stop steering our conversations straight into how very functionally worthless you think I am at anything except having charmingly naive good intentions?"
He takes a breath.
"It's part of the same reason I was scared of you. I wouldn't be so scared if I thought you were just talking big. But you're not, are you? When you wanna get something done, you don't just sit on it. So fine, yeah, when I say 'good luck with that', it means I don't think you've got a hope in hell of finishing the job. I don't think anyone does. I think it's an impossible fucking job. But shit, can't I still hope I'm wrong? Can't I still be glad you're trying? I mean you, like specifically you, because you are the kind of person who could start a job like this and get somewhere. You're the kind of person who could start the job. I wouldn't give most people even that much."