16. "Young Love"

And for a moment, she just closed her eyes and sat there in the dark, thinking about the one she loved. She thought about how brave and yet how foolish he was, so chivalrous and yet so blind. She believed he thought loved her, but he didn't know how to properly show it. Why did he run off like that? What was he trying to prove? What did he think he could change? Now she feared she would never know. Would she ever again hear his voice? Would she ever again know the touch of him putting his arm around her shoulder? Would she ever again look him in the eye and see her reflection in his pupils as the light refracted through his smiling chestnut irises?

And what of herself? Was she a fool for waiting on him? Would a self-respecting woman sit and wait for the unassured return of a man who had left her side to go and blindly fight something he didn't fully understand himself? Could he even know she was waiting? There were some who she respected who would say yes, and there were some who she respected who would say no. She would have liked to imagine both parties would agree that this was a lamentable situation. Where was the line between watching out for her own best interest and simply being heartless? She told herself that she was not waiting on just any man, but a specific man; there were few other men she would wait on as she waited on him. And though he had abandoned her there in a flurry of well-intentioned naïveté, she believed that he would only get better if someone who loved him very much showed him the way. Perhaps that would be her, perhaps not. Therefore she decided that she would wait for him to return to her world until the moment that something possessed her to not want to wait on him for even a second longer, and when such a feeling did come, she would not fight it; but for now, she wanted to wait for him, and so she did.

She opened her eyes, just to make sure he was still there. It wasn't that she thought he would be able to go anywhere in his present state; it was that recent events had been so traumatic, and in such a bizarre way, that she wouldn't be surprised if she had opened her eyes to find the inside of an examination room in a psych ward. Nazarene, you've been in a car accident, and you've suffered a brain injury that has caused you to experience wild, fantastic, elaborate hallucinations. In some ways, she would almost prefer that. At least then her recovery would be in her own hands. She couldn't fight for him. She couldn't wrestle with whatever thoughts were going through his comatose mind; she couldn't just will for him to wake up. She could only sit there and wait and hope that he had the strength to pull through. And she believed he was strong enough to do it, but she didn't believe he was strong enough to make it a certainty. Nobody's strong enough to make a guaranteed recovery from something like this. She knew he could; she didn't know if he would.

If she did wake up in a mental hospital, she hoped it would be a nice one. When her mom told her that her little cousin from Lemon Brook had wound up in a psychiatric facility after that incident (whatever it had been) had left him virtually catatonic, it opened up a discussion between the two of them about the state of modern American mental hospitals. While neither of them had never been admitted to one as a patient, her mom nevertheless had some insider information via one of her ex-boyfriends and one of the guys from the shop. She had told her that even though all the old-school hospitals were closing, their archaic attitudes were making the jump to the modern facilities, and while contemporary medical etiquette was slowly but surely taking over, the medieval ways of old were still clearly visible. Whether you were treated like a sapient person or a thoughtless anomaly was entirely a case of luck of the draw: which hospital was closest to your house, and which doctors were on staff that day? And then there was the gray area; for example, apparently mental hospitals still used electroshock? In Twenty-First Century America? And they were allowed to do it because… it actually kind of works? Fuck that. She would rather see constant and eternal visions of the apocalypse than let someone stick jumper cables on her head, even if it did make any yet-unseen demons go away. And for one calendar day, her chief concern was that her cousin would get lucky with how he was treated during his stay. But he was a cousin she didn't see very often, since his parents and her mom didn't get along very well, and as much as she cared about him as a person, she didn't have much more of a connection to him than that. Blood be damned; the kid was an acquaintance she'd met a few times. Therefore when the clock ticked past midnight and Saturday melted into Sunday, and she witnessed someone with whom she shared a more intimate connection be tested for his life, her concern was redirected toward her boyfriend instead.

Martin would probably be fine; once his wealthy parents were done with their own stay in the hospital, they could probably see to it that he be transferred to a top-of-the-line facility, assuming he wasn't already in one. But Kevin would not be receiving such support. A mere thirty-six hours after the incident and Nazz and her mom were the only ones in his hospital room with him, and even Mercedes was standing in the hallway to give her daughter room to breathe. Mr. and Mrs. Lafferty both had some rank at their jobs - they weren't CEOs, but they had middle-class middle-management roles, and they probably both had the leverage to miss a few days of work without penalty, especially for a situation like this. And yet they were nowhere to be seen. Martin had a fair share of Nazz's sympathy, but Kevin needed more, because evidently he wasn't getting it from anywhere else.

Did they blame her? She had had thoughts in passing before that Kevin's parents weren't the fondest of her, but while she used to be able to dismiss such thoughts, it may have been that now their opinion of her had a tangible effect. She thought that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the Laffertys secretly held something against her for being a bobcat, or for being lower-middle-class; in the case of Mr. Lafferty, Nazz had had the slightest inklings that he didn't like her for being a girl. It wasn't anything that his parents had said or done that had given her the thought that they had a problem with females, felines, or the financially-behind; it was what they hadn't said. They had always been perfectly polite to her; perfectly, stoically, disinterestedly polite. The kind of inauthentic politeness one would put up go get an unsavory social situation over with quickly. It could have also been the politeness of someone who felt too awkward to stray from the beaten path of politeness; it could have also been the politeness of someone who was just genuinely bored with the person they were conversing with but pretended not to be for politeness's sakes. When she would tell them anything about herself, they would listen attentively, nod along and ask the most basic questions, like "How do you like that class?" or "Are you enjoying playing on the softball team?", but they would never dig beyond that. The Laffertys were the family that all the other families on the block hated because they were brash and boisterous and prone to guffawing at the most inappropriate of moments, and yet here they were, completely dull and straightlaced when she was in their presence. Maybe they didn't like her, or maybe they just felt awkward around the girl that they knew was having relations with their son. It used to be that she didn't care that she couldn't get a read on them, but now it suddenly felt important that she figure them out.

The thing that probably inspired her original suspicions that they weren't fans of hers was when she put the pieces together that Laffertys had made the jump from blue-collar to white-collar lives - or, rather, they had wound up with lives that blended them together: Karin was a manager at a comedy club downtown, where she had many working-class wait staff and ushers in her charges, and Patrick was a manager at a literal factory. Something about their story blending elements of a gritty hard-working life and a pampered money-focused life just gave off the suggestion of trace amounts of social conservatism. The "I'm fine with felines, but I don't want my son marrying one" kind - not that they had ever said anything like that to her knowledge, but it just seemed like something they might have said once over the years. They had given her so little to work with that if they said that in front of her, she wouldn't have been surprised, because there wouldn't have been anything else that she would have expected them to say instead. Of course, it could be that they were some of those people who acted awkwardly around people of other races not because they were racist, but because they were aware that racial tensions did exist and therefore were too paranoid to say much for fear of stepping on toes. That was also a possibility. This was all just getting more confusing.

As she thought about it, Mr. and Mrs. Lafferty as individuals probably would have other issues with her before the canine/feline thing. (Hyenas were canines, right? Nazz was pretty sure they were, but now was certainly not the time to ask.) Karin seemed like the kind of woman who was proud of her work ethic but also liked being financially comfortable, and therefore would probably not have liked how Nazz's mom had relinquished the wealth she was born into in exchange for a blue-collar tomboy career which she simply enjoyed more despite it paying less. Nazz didn't think Karin wanted to be a pampered princess, per se, but rather, she seemed like she would have thought Mercedes blew a great opportunity to build higher from an already-high starting spot. Karin seemed like she saw Nazz and Mercedes and just saw a living embodiment of wasted potential. Never mind that Mercedes was one of the higher-ranking mechanics at the shop (which, fittingly enough, did service Mercedes-Benzes among other high-end European imports) and she made enough money as a single parent to live comfortably on Rethink Avenue, but Mercedes wasn't raking it in like Karin and Pat were. And Patrick? Well... again, it wasn't that he had ever said or done anything blatantly chauvinistic, it was just that he seemed like the kind of guy who would be. A domineering macho-man who always pushed Kevin to be a good physical specimen and commander of men; a fifth- or sixth- or seventh-generation Irish-American with enough of a drinking problem to call it a problem but not enough to justify entering A.A.; a guy who liked the Flyers and the Eagles and the Phillies and - because of the Irish connection - the Boston Celtics. Just a guy who seemed like he had less than zero interest in challenging traditional gender roles. A guy who seemed like if his beloved son got his ass kicked by the cops while trespassing in the woods at night, he'd probably say it was the chick's fault for leading him into the forest preserve with the promise of a story with a happy ending. And she was aware that she was implementing her own prejudices as she pondered their thoughts on her, and it made her uncomfortable to confront that she was doing that, but… was she wrong to do so? With such little information to go off, it was another tough situation. If she posited that there was prejudice occurring when there really wasn't, it would make her look unreasonable and tarnish the reputation of her judgment for long afterward; if she dismissed her hunch that there were some prejudiced thoughts being harbored when said hunch was actually correct, she would be risking letting them get away with their bigotry toward her unabated. She almost wished they would do something egregiously racist just so they could give her some clarity, but she knew better than to wish for such a thing.

Okay, here's a question: if she decided once and for all that they had an issue with Trash-LiteⓇ bobcat girls, what would she do then? Confront them and yell at them for it? And then what happens? They magically feel bad and repent? Or do they think she's a malcontent bitch and double down in their hatred? The second one seemed more likely and wasn't worth the risk. But what else could she do? Try to win them over and dissolve their hatred that way? Would that be being the bigger person, or would that be bending to their rules until she was presentable in their eyes? She couldn't use Kevin as an intermediary because, well…

She didn't want to spend her time at Kevin's beside ruminating on how it seemed like there was no foolproof way to remedy bigotry or undo prejudice; she already felt helpless enough staring at his lightless body laying before her.

Oh, and speaking of prejudice. She had complicated feelings about Kevin's insistence on using that word he used when he came upon the strangers. For one thing, unless she was completely deplorable at communicating her feelings to him, he ought to have known that she wasn't a fan of such epithets. He ought to have known that because they'd discussed it at least a few times. She had told him that she didn't like him cavalierly using that word, whether it be derisively describing his enemies like the Eds, matter-of-factly describing sensitive males like Jimmy, or even playfully describing his friends like Rolf; she made clear that she thought that was a homophobic and hateful word that had no place in anyone's mouth. He responded that it was just a guy thing to speak in such a way, and that there was no homophobia involved, citing that there was no controversy over the term cocksucker even though to call a man that would effectively be the same thing as calling them the other thing. She said she disagreed with his argument but conceded that she couldn't understand male social circles any more than he could understand female ones, and she told him to either stop using that word or stop using it around her. He said he would, but he never said which one. For the longest time after that, she never heard him say it, and she had thought he had agreed to the first option, but now it seemed like he had meant to promise to the second one. And to be fair, he had kept his promise; he hadn't used it around her, and even that night in the woods, she wasn't really around him when he was using it.

But it just sounded so seethingly hateful when she heard him say it - no, scream it. And those sounds she heard, like the splashing of large objects… was he throwing stuff at them? Literal sticks and stones with the intent of breaking bones? Granted, it sounded like whoever he was confronting eventually started fighting back, but it also sounded like Kevin started it. She had no idea who or what Kevin saw there; maybe it was really two adults actually copulating, maybe it was two older boys having a secret moment together for the world to never see… or maybe, considering where they were heading, it was the crazy crew of homeless people who lived near the waterfall, in which case Kevin might argue - he had never said this, but she knew him well enough to know that this just sounded like something he would say - that throwing rocks at them and calling them the three- and six-letter F-words regardless of their actual orientations would likely be an effective strategy to scare them away. But even if he really was using that word independent of bigotry as a tactic to disperse some shady characters… did that make it alright? She truly believed that he had the best intentions, but dammit, where does credit for good intentions end and responsibility for consequences begin?

The thing wasn't that she was surprised he had a negative side to him; it was that she thought he had erased much more of it by now that it seems he had. She had been working on him - they had been working on each other, she would say to others - for quite awhile and she was hoping by this point she'd made more progress on him than this. She knew Kevin was a dominating personality, sometimes to the point of being troublesome, but she did not know that he may have been the kind of guy to see two guys alone in the woods and immediately think to start hurling rocks and slurs at them. But again, she didn't know what he saw.

This might be a good example of the way she understood Kevin to be: some regarded him as a bully. If the sample size was restricted to Ed, Edd, and Eddy, she could understand why someone would draw that conclusion. But - it absolutely destroyed her to think thoughts that vilified the victims, but she just couldn't shake the feeling - the Eds kind of deserved it. They were always running shifty schemes to swindle the kids of the cul-de-sac out of their money and then had the gall to wonder aloud why they didn't have any other friends besides one another. Eddy was troublingly insecure to the point that it made him an asshole, Ed (who may or may not have had the capacity to know better) had severe issues understanding social and physical boundaries, and Double-D, poor sheltered thing that he was, was on the hook as well for the sheer fact that he didn't seem to grasp that guilt by association was a rule that society practiced, for better or worse. Indeed, many times that Kevin assaulted the Eds were prompted by their scams victimizing himself, herself, or any number of people on Rethink Avenue; he always painted it as defending his, her, or their honor, and - was it primitive to think this about a guy? she was honestly afraid to ask - she kind of found that heroic about him. Furthermore, Kevin had never outright beat up anybody else except for those three guys after they did something to instigate conflict - at least as far as she knew about him, which she was starting to worry wasn't as much as she thought it was. Her understanding was that Kevin was a jerk, but manageably so, and only at his worst when duly provoked.

But this was the same guy who could charm her like no one else. This was the same boy who bought her flowers and begrudgingly painted her claws for her pleasure. This was the same man who wrapped his arm around her and made her feel safe as they sat on lawn chairs in his backyard staring at the summer night's sky, talking for hours about the nature of life and how they wanted to spend theirs together. This was the same person who was accompanying her to find a legendary waterfall in the woods when he sensed a call to duty to protect his love. This was the only individual who time and time again fought to defend her honor.

She knew well that he had character issues. But she also knew that she had seen enough of his good side to think he was more than worthy of her time to help him overcome those issues. And she also knew that she had been warned by women and men alike to not waste her time trying to fix a guy; the men always told her that a woman trying to fix a man showed the woman in question misunderstanding the male psyche and how the vast majority of men are too prideful to change until they themselves decide that they wanted to, and the women always told her that a woman trying to fix a man was a waste of time because men were too stupid and a man who needed fixing in the first place was completely lacking self-awareness at best and quite possibly dangerous at worst, and men and women alike always told her that a woman trying to fix a man could lead to the man becoming possessive and entitled and using the woman like a crutch for his flaws. She heard all of these warnings and said to them, I acknowledge your warnings, but I want it this way. Her personal idea of a perfect romance was a story wherein two flawed but fixable individuals get together to learn from one another and make each other better. She didn't think she was a saint; she thought she was just another flawed individual looking for someone whose hand she could hold as they walked down the road to self-improvement. She'd help him prove to the world that he was more than just a tough guy and he'd help her prove to the world that she was more than just a pretty face. She wasn't doing this as a woman trying to fix a man; she was doing this as Nazz trying to fix Kevin, and hopefully getting some help for herself from him along the way to assuage her own flaws. She would never claim that her goals and dreams represented anybody else except for herself. And she wouldn't be doing this for any old boy who came along, only this one boy who had a long and proven history of pouring his heart out for her and no history of behavior that would suggest he didn't respect and dignify her as her own person. If anybody would have deserved her loyalty, it would have been him. And perhaps she may still decide that his character wasn't improving enough and that he was no longer worth her time, but until that doubt arrived and overshadowed her hope, she would stay steadfast by his side. In a world full of unique individuals, she had never quite met anybody like him, and she hoped that he would never meet anybody quite like her, but as she stared at him unconscious in his hospital bed, his head bandaged and his limbs in casts, she became afraid that he would never have the chance to do so.

The same boy who had risked his own safety - and ultimately lost it - to forge ahead alone and protect her from mysterious entities was the same boy who used language which he should have known she found repugnant, probably initiated violence against strangers, and possibly even harbored thoughts of hatred and disgust against an oppressed demographic that in all likelihood had never hurt him in any way. What was she supposed to think of a person like that? She really wanted to know what he saw in the woods before he ran into the cops. She needed to know; it was driving her insane. Was it an actual gay couple that inspired hatred in him, or was it just some people doing non-intimate activities who he thought he could disperse by playing the part of a violent bigot? The context was going to make a big difference in how she thought of him. It wouldn't be the first question she asked when he woke up, but it would certainly be toward the top of the list.

She didn't want to be thinking these thoughts. Not now. She didn't want to be thinking ill of someone who had just been brutally harmed by people sworn to serve and protect him, and she definitely didn't want to think about whether she should be forcing herself to think these ill thoughts of him anyway as a consequence of his character. Heck, maybe she did need this. Maybe she needed this moment to think critically about him and her relationship with him. Maybe she needed to know that such a side to him existed. If he really was as evil as she was afraid he was - but he never directed that evil toward her - would it be worth it for her to try to guide him on the right path, or should she just abandon him anyway as punishment? Again, there were people she respected who would say yes to one and people she respected who would say yes to other. Suffice it to say that she was usually alright at making tough decisions, but not decisions quite this tough, and she was hoping that strength in times this trying would be one of the skills she could learn from him.

One tough decision she could make, however, was that it was about time to get out of there for the day. She had been sitting there in silence for nearly a couple of hours; she couldn't conceive of what might be accomplished by staying there any longer. All she was doing was making herself feel hopeless and miserable.

Of course, there was the one reason why anybody stays at the bedside of an unconscious loved one: to be there for them the moment they woke. But she was fairly certain that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. The morose attitude of the doctors and nurses that would come in every so often wasn't inspiring any hope in her; they didn't even say much more than "hello" and "excuse me" to her as they came and went. Really, it would be for the best that Kevin didn't awaken just yet; his parents should be there for it, too. Part of her worried for how afraid he might be if he awoke in a hospital room just to find he was completely alone, but she worried even more that if it was just her, it would draw more attention to the fact that nobody else was there. At least waking up in a hospital room alone might seem in some way normal, considering the circumstances.

As she did when she left him yesterday, she went to hold his hand in hers. She wanted to believe that even though he had no way of communicating with her, he would be able to feel her fingers laced through his. She imagined him trapped in a dark void with nothing around, nothing to see or hear or smell or taste or touch, absolutely no stimuli anywhere, but then him feeling a familiar touch and sensing her warmth pulsing into him to bring warmth to that cold, dark emptiness. No matter what she thought of him, or what he had done, or what she was supposed to think of him with regards to what he had done, she believed that he deserved some compassion in a moment like this, and if nothing else, it would give her comfort to give him comfort.

...Wait a minute. This didn't feel right. She remembered stitching her hand through his fingers the day prior and holding his hand like that for a few minutes. She remembered how it felt. This didn't feel the same. She would have remembered if the bones in his hand and fingers had felt so… jagged. And upon closer inspection, she didn't remember his fingers looking that... huh?

Years later, the doctors, nurses, receptionists and janitors at Bethlehem General Hospital still tell new employees the tale of that one time that the bobcat girl visiting her comatose hyena boyfriend shrieked so loud that a brain hemorrhage victim down the hallway woke up out of his own coma.

-IllI-

She really shouldn't have been driving. While her daughter was shaken on the passenger seat, Mercedes was fuming on her behalf. And she wasn't faking it. It was the kind of pissed where you remember how they tell you in Driver's Ed that you really ought not drive when you're feeling particularly emotional, but then you remember that everyone else on the road is ignoring that advice so you throw it in first gear and wish good luck to everybody else. How does a hospital just miss that the kid had his hand crushed? She knew that Bethlehem had a reputation of being another one of those crappy inner-city hospitals, but that was just ridiculous. And then it took a fourteen-year-old-girl to make the discovery, surely traumatizing herself in the process.

She turned right off of Peachtree Parkway onto Grove Street, rolled through the stop signs at Bedford and Harris Streets, and went straight ahead as Grove Street turned into the Rethink Avenue cul-de-sac. She wheeled the cherry-red GTO into the driveway and came to a complete stop before pressing the button on her sun visor to open the garage, having been too consumed by frustration to remember to press it from further out. But as soon as the car lurched to a halt, her daughter unbuckled and started making her way out of the car.

"Hey kid, where you going?" asked Mercedes. "I'm putting the car in the garage."

"Uh… y-yeah, I know," said Nazz, having mostly regained her ability to verbalize thoughts. "I just, uh… want some fresh air, if that's alright?"

"Hm. Sure, honey. I'll unlock the front door for whenever you're ready to come inside."

"Thanks, Mom."

"Nazarene. I love you," she stressed, worried that her daughter needed to be reminded at a time like this.

"Love you too, Mom," said said as she closed the door. "I'm not going to be long. I just need to breathe."

"Alright," Mercedes said through the open window. "Love you." Just once more for good measure before she let her foot off the brake, crawled into the garage, and pressed the button again to close the door behind her.

Nazz just tried to focus on all the little details she could see to take her mind off of it. She felt she had wasted a day of her life yesterday being sad, so now began the process of weaning herself back into reality. She wanted to support him, but she couldn't stop living for herself altogether, so she needed to remember life without Kevin, starting with assessing this Kevin-less world. Baby steps. She looked at the blades of grass and took in how they collapsed upon one another. She looked at the patterns on people's roofs and observed how they were all unique despite being the same. She looked down the street and saw that Karin's car was still in the driveway.

Wait, shouldn't she have left for work by now? It was late afternoon, arguably early evening, and the comedy club would usually be setting up for their Monday night show by now. The Monday night shows were typically low-profile affairs, usually just showcases of local talent playing to a quarter-full crowd mostly consisting of people who got free tickets, but a show nevertheless, and Karin should have been at work by now. It was understandable why her car was in the driveway when Nazz and Mercedes left for Bethlehem General, because Karin often slept until 10 or 11 as a consequence of her line of work keeping her up until 3 or 4 in the morning, but now the sun was setting. Was she taking a grievance day off work anyway and just… staying home?

No, no; again, Nazz knew she didn't know the full story. For example, Patrick's blue SUV still wasn't there; maybe he left the jawbreaker factory early, picked up Karin, and they both went to see their son, just missing Nazz and Mercedes. Or maybe Karin skipped work but Pat didn't, and Karin just couldn't bring herself to go to the hospital alone. Or maybe after the Laffertys went yesterday, Karin picked up some gnarly disease (it's a hospital, after all) and just couldn't leave the house today. Nazz was trying really hard not to jump to the conclusion that they were just refusing to give a shit about their son. But it would have made too much sense.

As she was staring down the street at Kevin's house, she couldn't help but see Ed, Edd and Eddy turning the corner down by Harris Street. At first, she didn't regard this as significant. But then they saw her and she saw that they saw her, and she realized that they would regard seeing her as significant, considering the circumstances. When they were close enough for her to see their faces, she waved them over, and they seemed intrigued by the fact that she wanted to talk. You know what would have really made her feel better? Extending an olive branch.

And a brief wave of anxiety pulsed through her for just a second. It seemed like the same thing that inspired her to converse with them gave her pause. She knew that they didn't get along with Kevin, and she knew that they all had the hots for her (although most boys did). Something struck her that there may be a one-in-a-million chance that they might want to take advantage of this opportunity. Heck, maybe the odds were even slimmer than that. She knew these guys well after all these years, and while she had their issues with them, she didn't hate them by any stretch of the imagination; she liked them in the way people like their neighbors, not wanting to be their best friends or anything, but finding them perfectly amicable when they wound up in close quarters at neighborhood-wide events (at least when Eddy didn't have a money-boner, or a regular boner). They had seen her without Kevin plenty of times before and had never done anything to take advantage of that situation before - whatever "taking advantage of that situation" may entail, be that boorishly hitting on her in Kevin's absence or something far more severe. But this wasn't quite the same situation: Kevin was going to be out of the picture for a while, and they surely must have known that. An instantaneous spark of internal light gave her some clarity: she wasn't nervous because Kevin wasn't there to protect her from people she didn't have any reason to believe would do something inappropriate to her; she was nervous because finding out that there was a side to Kevin she'd never known opened Pandora's Box of mistrust as she realized that anybody she knew less-well than Kevin could have many sides to themselves that she didn't know about. Ergo, the Eds hadn't given her a reason to distrust them… yet. And she still didn't think they would, but here we are.

Nazz maintained a soft smile as the trio approached, silently cursing Kevin for giving her newfound trust issues with men - actually, scratch that, remembering that she'd also found a renewed paranoia regarding the intentions of Kevin's mother as well as his father, she could say that Kevin had made her skeptical of pretty much everybody on planet Earth besides her own mom. This would need to be another thing they needed to discuss when he woke up. But for now, she knew that if the planets aligned in the worst possible way, she could easily take the stunted fox and the candidate-for-clinically-low-testosterone wolf; the giant bear might be a bit tougher, but he was a clumsy oaf and she still liked her chances. She didn't work her way up to a black belt just to never use it.

"Hey, guys," she said as they got within speaking distance. She sounded emotionally exhausted, which may have been expected, but perhaps not for the reasons the boys would think.

"Uh, he-hey, Nazz," Eddy choked out. Nazz regarded his abundant bashfulness as a good omen.

"Hi, Nazz!" Ed beamed. He still didn't seem like he was capable of premeditated evil.

"Oh, hello, Nazz, I, uh, we, um…" Double-D sputtered, clearly lacking the confidence to pull any fast ones. "If-if you don't mind us asking… how are you?"

"Oh, I… don't mind you asking, Double-D," she answered, "thanks for your concern. I…" - she sighed dejectedly - "...I'm hanging in there."

"Oh, uh… we ca-can imagine that this must be a… a difficult situation for you to, um, deal with," said Double-D. "I-i-if there's anything we can do to help, to, uh… assuage the, uh, negative emotions, please don't hesitate to ask of us."

"Uh, yeah," squeaked Eddy. "What he said." (Nazz had a funny thought: if anything, she should be worried about Eddy being cruel to Double-D rather than her, seeing as Eddy was making the poor wolf do all the talking when it clearly looked like he was about to drop dead of an anxiety attack.)

"Thanks, guys," she said. "I appreciate it."

"Y'know, uh, it's funny," Eddy piped up, suddenly seeming a lot more (benignly) comfortable in Nazz's presence. "W-we were just talking about how we'd like the idea of trying to, uh, trying to be there for our neighbors, but, uh… y'know, some people might be suspicious of us."

Nazz saw Double-D give Eddy the strangest look. Nazz didn't know what the heck to make of Eddy's statement, but it seemed like Edd wasn't on the same page, either.

"Hey, uh, if I could tell you guys something? About Kevin?"

"About Kevin?" asked Double-D and Eddy.

"Yeah, he-"

"What about Kevin?" asked Ed.

"...I think… I think you guys ought to know that…" - she couldn't make eye contact with them, instead keeping her eyes pointed toward the ground - "...Kevin had been talking to me… about you… all of you… and…" - weird, why were their shoes and pants so muddy? - "...and I think he's sorry. I mean, he didn't say the word 'sorry,' you know how Kevin is, but…" - wait, Double-D was wearing long pants? Was this a special occasion or something that they'd just gotten back from? - "...all those times that he hurt you… he didn't- he wasn't proud of it. He's told me he has trouble controlling himself. And he's trying to get better but he doesn't know if he's getting better fast enough. He regrets his actions, and, well…" - she looked back up at them and jeez, the fur on their faces was ragged and they looked like they had all been walking for six straight hours - "...if he never gets the chance to tell you himself, I wanted to tell you for him."

And she was glad that she told them that. Hopefully it would not only make them feel better about the years of pain they'd suffered at Kevin's hands, but also make them stop hating Kevin, which may in turn inspire them to stop trying to get their money at every turn if they started to see him as a stand-up guy capable of remorse. Of course, now she had to hope Kevin never found out that she told them that, lest he come back and kick their asses twice as hard for daring to believe that he in any way regretted kicking their asses, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

"...Oh!" Double-D was clearly flabbergasted. ""Uh, well, uh, if that's true, then I must say-"

"Then he'd better start controlling himself!" Eddy interrupted.

"Eddy!" barked Double-D. "You'd best control yourself!"

Eddy glanced up at Nazz, who was clearly shocked that he didn't accept the apology. Maybe she was hurt, maybe she wasn't, it was hard to tell, but she was clearly shocked.

"Uh- I'm sorry, Nazz, but… I'm gonna be straight with you," said Eddy. "I ain't gonna accept no apology from him until he wakes up, gets on his knees, tells me himself that he's sorry, and then starts treating me - treating us - the way we want to be treated. I-" - he was getting more and more flustered by emotions as he went along - "...I respect you enough to keep it real with you, alright, Nazz?"

Nazz glanced over at Double-D, who had a troubled look on his face that seemed to indicate that he basically agreed with Eddy but didn't have the nerve to say so. Which was fair; Nazz didn't have the nerve to tell them that she still thought they were always cruising for a bruising, nor would she tell them that the apology was completely fabricated.

"Well, I appreciate that, Eddy," she said. She believed that Eddy was trying to be gentlemanly in his own way, even if she didn't care for his idea of it.

"Does this mean Kevin wants to be friends?" asked Ed.

"Maybe, Ed."

"Does this mean he'll give us jawbreakers from his garage?" asked Ed, his speech deteriorating as his mouth flooded under fountains of saliva.

"Maybe, Ed."

"Ed, now you control yourself," Edd chided.

"Guys, let me just say, I appreciate you asking how I'm doing, but… don't just treat me like Kevin's grieving girlfriend, okay? Just treat me like I'm Nazz and I'll let you know if something's bothering me about Kevin."

"Oh, dear, I'm sorry, Nazz, if we've ever given you the impression that we haven't been dignifying your individuality!"

"Oh, no, no, you guys haven't been, you guys are fine, it's… I almost haven't been treating myself as myself. My own person. I think I'm gonna have to use this to try to remember how to exist without Kevin."

And she saw Eddy's eyes light up when she said that, and she was afraid then that she had said too much. But when the fox opened his mouth to speak, it was nothing she would have expected.

"Well, uh, if you say so, Nazz," Eddy said, "there's a question you can help us with. Nothing to do with you, nothing to do with Kevin, just… something we've been discussing among ourselves and we can use another opinion on."

...what? Double-D and Ed didn't look like they knew why Eddy was saying this, either.

"Uh… sure, Eddy. What's up?"

"So we been wondering - debating… is it ever okay to break rules in the name of doing good?"

"Wh-what Eddy means is," Double-D jumped in, "uh, for example, would it ever be justifiable to engage in duplicitous behavior if you knew with certainty that it would bring about positive change, and that any negative repercussions would only befall people who are guilty of even more egregious sins, often with cruel intentions?"

Now, Nazz got pretty good grades in English class, but she still hadn't memorized Webster's. "Uh… 'duplicitous'?"

"You know," said Double-D. "Deceitful."

"Fakey!" said Ed.

"Full a' shit," said Eddy. "Basically, is it okay to lie, cheat, and steal if it's a good guy lying, cheating, and stealing from a bad guy? And for bonus points, let's say playing by the rules isn't working to get back at the bad guy."

Nazz briefly wondered if they knew she was lying about Kevin's apology and were trying to drop enormous hints that they were on to her, but she resolved that their methods were too aimless to be anything like that. She kind of wanted to ask for a more specific example, but she thought she kind of had a grasp on what he was saying.

"I-I mean… maybe?" said Nazz. "I-I mean, like… 'good guys' and 'bad guys' are pretty subjective…"

And Double-D gave Eddy a look that said I told ya so and Eddy looked clearly annoyed.

"...but, honestly?" she continued. "If I agreed with the person who was lying and cheating and stealing, and I hated the person they were lying and cheating and stealing from, and I could see that the lying and cheating and stealing was working when playing by the rules wasn't… then, yeah, sure, why not?"

And Eddy gave Double-D a look that said I told ya so and Double-D looked clearly annoyed.

"Well, there's your answer, Double-D," Eddy said with a smirk.

Edd turned back to Nazz: "B-bu-but, would you say that you would feel, in some way, bad for lying, cheating and stealing, even if it were in the name of good? Especially if you weren't sure that the lying, cheating and stealing was a sustainable long-term solution, and indeed may only embolden the antagonizers and just make the conflict worse?"

Nazz had to think about that one. "But we know that playing by the rules isn't helping, either?"

"Well, maybe-"

"Yes," Eddy cut in.

"Well… would I feel bad?" she pondered. "I mean, I might not be too proud of it later, but if it was working just as well as playing it safe, well, I mean… I feel kinda shitty saying this but, sometimes lying, cheating, and stealing is… it's just fun sometimes. Isn't it?"

And Ed gave Eddy and Double-D a look that said I told ya so and Eddy and Double-D looked clearly annoyed.

"I mean, that's why games like Monopoly exist in the first place, right?" Nazz was confused why the neighborhood con artists were philosophizing on the ethics of bending the rules for the greater good; she had thought to herself I shouldn't have to tell you boys how fun it is to lie, cheat, and steal, but it seems like the three of them were too preoccupied with shooting each other self-congratulatory looks to pick up on her subtext.

"By the way, where'd you guys get all dirty?" she asked, pointing at their feet and ankles.

The boys looked down at the dirt on their persons, and Double-D let out a shocked gasp.

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Why did you gentlemen not alert me that I was acquiring such filth on my legs and feet!?"

"Chill out, will ya?" said Eddy. "This is why we wore crappy clothes in the first place!"

"Did you guys just come out of the woods or something?" asked Nazz.

"Yeah!" said Ed. "We were playing with our new fr-"

"PLAYING!" Eddy interrupted. "Playing, uh, Treasure-Finders! You know that waterfall they say's in the woods? We went looking for it."

Nazz looked heartbroken.

"Are you alright, Nazz?" asked Edd.

"Uh… yeah, it's just… me and Kevin were trying to find that waterfall when... it happened."

"Oh, shit," mumbled Eddy.

"Oh, Nazz, I'm so sorry-!" Double-D began, but Nazz put up a hand.

"No, no, you're fine, you're fine, it's just… I can live with it," she insisted. "We were stupid to be going there at night anyway. But… hey, did you guys find it? I've heard that there are some really wild homeless people who hang out around there." (She didn't feel the need to mention that Kevin may have encountered such characters right before he encountered the cops.)

"Uh, th-that's the thing!" said Eddy. "We heard some angry voices - didn't see 'em, but we heard 'em - and we just high-tailed it outta there. Ran in the wrong direction and wound up in the swampy part!"

"Yes, the wetlands, on the opposite side of Sherwood Forest Road!" said Double-D. "That's where we acquired these blasted stains… though I surely didn't realize the severity of them until you pointed it out just now."

"Oh, uh, sorry about that, Double-D," said Nazz, knowing the wolf's germophobia well.

"Oh, no no, it's quite alright. I'll manage," he insisted.

Nobody else had very much to say, and the sun was beginning to set, and considering how close they were to the summer solstice, that meant it must have been very late indeed.

"Well, it was good talking to you guys!" Nazz said, reflecting that they had not done anything underhanded to her.

"Ah, yes, likewise, Nazz!" said Double-D. "And please, if you need anyone to talk to, we can make ourselves available to lend an ear!"

"I appreciate it guys, and hey, if you guys ever have any… tough questions, hey, y'know, we can talk. As friends." She felt the need to add those last two words.

"Uh, okay," said Ed, nervous all over again, and Eddy didn't look much better.

"We'll see you soon, Nazz!" said Double-D. "Come, gentlemen; we can wash off at my house!" Double-D led the way off.

"Uh, bye, Nazz," Eddy said as he reluctantly followed the wolf, not turning away from the bobcat.

Ed, meanwhile, just stared at Nazz for a second before extending his arms. "Bye-bye hug?" he asked with a face like a child asking for candy.

"Oh, sure, big guy." Nazz couldn't deny him. She reciprocated his embrace. It was like hugging a seven-foot teddy bear that was so well-loved that the child who owned it wouldn't let their parents put it in the laundry for even an hour. She believed this creature meant well. She believed all these creatures meant well - even Eddy, duplicitous as he might be (Nazz would never forget that word again). She simply believed that they didn't know how to do the right thing, and much like Kevin, they were never going to get better unless someone loved them enough to show them the way. But unlike Kevin, they had a history of tangibly doing her wrong, so she knew many would say not to jeopardize herself by taking it upon herself to be that person for them. She hoped someone else out there in the big wide world would be able to give them guidance, because she didn't know if she had the strength to do it herself.

Ed ran off to join Edd and Eddy, Eddy fuming at Ed for getting a hug from Nazz. She watched the three of them walk all the way down to Double-D's house at the corner; they never looked back at her. When they disappeared into the Lupo house, her eyes couldn't help but wander back to Karin Lafferty's silver Oldsmobile Aurora sitting in Kevin's driveway, shrouded in shadows from the setting sun.

Seriously, fuck you, Kevin, Nazz caught herself thinking. It wasn't just that she felt betrayed that he may have been harboring deplorable thoughts, because he still might not have; it was that by even making that a possibility, it had instantaneously annihilated her trust in people. It wasn't fair to the Eds that she had to consider that they were going to do something out of line to her when they had never given any past indication that they would, and it wasn't fair to her that she felt the need to worry about the intentions of people she'd known for nearly her entire life. She almost wished she had followed after him when he ran off, just so she could have known who or what he was yelling at.

Should she go and knock on the Laffertys' door? Nah, the timing would be terrible. Even if Karin was home, she probably wouldn't be in any mood for a confrontation about her opinions on Nazz, and Nazz would rather save it for when Patrick was home too. She turned around and went into her house. She had still more thinking to do.

"She's gone, Karin," Patrick said, finally feeling safe to draw open the curtains in their upstairs bedroom window. He had been on the fence about going to work today for fear that the people at the factory would mock him for being the father of the dumbfuck who got his ass kicked by the cops; his mind was made up when he lost control of his emotions and kicked the door of his Axiom, leaving a pretty good dent in it. So he took it in to Butch's Body Shop down in Cherry Stream, his wife following in her sedan to drive him back home, and told them to take as long as they needed to fix the dent; if anything else, it might make the neighbors think he wasn't home.

Karin was laying on the bed, hugging a pillow and feeling sorry for herself; she likewise couldn't bear to show her face at work that day. "Was that ditzy little bitch just standing on the lawn and staring at our house?" she asked.

"For a bit. But she was talking to those kids who keep harassing our son." He sat down on the bed. "Course, now everybody's gonna think they're the good kids and our son's the fuck-up."

"Do you think it was her idea to go into the woods?"

"It better not've been," Pat grumbled as he glared at his feet. "I raised him to be a leader, not a follower. This better've been his own goddamn fault."

"Maybe we should have raised him to be a follower. Then maybe he'd've followed the goddamn rules."

For a second, Patrick didn't know what to say. Finally, he said, "I thought I'd done a good job with him."

"I thought you'd done a good job with him, too," said Karin. "I thought I'd done a good job with him! Where did we go wrong?"

And again, Pat struggled to think of what to say, but eventually he said this: "You know what? Fuck it. You're right. We shouldn't've taught him to be a leader. We made him too self-confident. You know… when I told him not to be afraid to beat the shit out of those retards who keep fucking with him and his friends, I told him that it was because he was the one who had to step up and protect the neighborhood from their stupidity… I guess he was just too stupid to get the hint."

"And then he was the one being stupid, and he got the shit beat out of him," Karin murmured.

"By the people protecting the neighborhood from his stupidity. We didn't raise a leader or a follower, we raised a fucking idiot," Patrick cursed at the arrangement of whiskeys and brandys on the dresser; he would fix himself a drink or two when he felt like getting up, but he didn't feel like getting up just yet. Then he let out a hyenic chuckle of confused frustration. "Ha, ha! ...And we're idiots - I'm an idiot - for not realizing that if I told him he was an authority figure in this neighborhood, he'd soon forget there were authority figures over him!"

At approximately the same moment, one town over to the south, an impala was making his final rounds as he was getting ready to leave his shift at the body shop. They had been closed for about an hour by then, and they were all just about ready to turn in for the night. The impala regarded an ultramarine Isuzu that he understood to be at the back of the line for service. He noticed that the rear license plate had a plastic frame that read, split between the top and bottom, "WE SUPPORT" / "OUR LOCAL POLICE". The impala wondered for a fleeting second what the owner of this car thought of the recent incident where some cops came across a teenager in the woods at night and beat him half to death; because the impala only worked in the back and didn't deal with customers himself, he did not know who dropped the Isuzu off, and therefore he did not make the connection.