Kevin couldn't form a single word after witnessing himself grow up as an entirely different person. It was like suddenly everything made sense, and therefore nothing made sense. His stomach stewed with too many emotions—confusion, astonishment, rage, gratitude, disgust—time hollow or not, he felt ill.
"Nice going, Mr. Psychology major," Katherine said to Jonah. "You sent Kevin into a—what do you experts call it?—a dissociative state?" Her voice sounded warped and distant. Kevin parted his lips to respond, but his tongue was numb.
"What would you have done, Katherine?" said Jonah. "Would he have believed you if you tried explaining it all in words?" He sounded defensive, but his Adam's apple quivered as he spoke.
Jordan ignored them and looked directly into Kevin's eyes. "You okay, buddy? Just take a few breaths." Jordan scooted beside him and gave his hand a little squeeze. The slight pressure of his brother's fingers pulled Kevin back into his body and in an instant his senses returned, sharp and oppressive. The white walls around him made the colors of his siblings' holiday sweaters loud and abrasive. The stale nothingness of the air tasted like mold on his tongue, and the bickering between Jonah and Katherine assaulted his ears.
"Everybody, shut up!" he blurted finally. Everyone immediately fell silent. That was much better. Now he could think, take a moment to process everything he'd just watched, and come to terms with what it meant. "You kept everything secret because you didn't trust me. You thought I might turn out deranged just like Second Chance if I knew too much."
"What? You think it's because we didn't trust you?" said Jordan. To his credit, he sounded genuinely baffled. "It had nothing to do with trust. We just thought you deserved to live like a normal kid."
"Does any adopted kid ever truly feel 'normal' if their families keep secrets from them?" Kevin shot back. "What about all those adoption books Mom and Dad are so horny for?"
"Hey, inappropriate, Kevin!" Katherine interrupted. "Who even taught you that word?" She sounded appalled, but her poorly suppressed grin gave away her amusement.
"I'm thirteen, Katherine," he said, "and don't change the subject. Mom and Dad's adoption books are always talking about how it's important to be honest and open with adopted kids, but that's not at all what any of you did."
Jonah stood up and scowled at Kevin. "Do you think Mom and Dad wanted to keep secrets from you? It was one of the hardest decisions of their lives. They poured over those books and went back and forth, agonizing over how to give you the best life possible. There are no books out there on raising a kid under such circumstances. They opted to wait until you were eighteen to tell you so you could have the opportunity to develop with minimal trauma."
Kevin stood up too and yelled back, "Minimal trauma? Do you know how hard it was watching you three whisper to each other for years and feeling like I wasn't worthy of knowing what it was about?" He felt his voice crack at the end of the sentence, and for once it had nothing to do with puberty. He hated sounding so vulnerable when all he wanted was to prove to his older siblings that he was grown up enough to handle the truth.
It didn't help that Jordan squeezed his hand again and lowered his voice to a gentle pitch when he said, "Don't blame Mom and Dad for that. They had to constantly remind us to be discrete. In fact, everybody who knew said we sucked at subtlety. They just didn't realize we still had an elucidator and that Whiskers always managed to find its hiding spot and leave it somewhere out in the open. Most of those secret conversations were Jonah and me telling Katherine it was stupid of her to adopt a cat just two months after JB gave us the elucidator."
"How was I supposed to know Whiskers would go after something so important?"
"Because she's a cat!" Kevin and the twins replied at the same time. Kevin giggled despite himself, and it felt good. He liked being part of something.
"Hey, could we maybe try and figure out why we're here?" Katherine reminded them once the tension had fully dissolved. "Hello?" she called out to the empty room. "If you didn't summon us here for any reason, could you send us back to our Christmas party?"
As soon as she said those words, someone materialized into the far corner of the room next to where the elucidator had projected the scenes from Kevin's old life. The person was hunched over and very frail-looking—an old man, Kevin observed—with thick forehead lines that almost folded over his pale green eyes. His twiggy limbs wobbled and the few hairs that remained on his head sprung out in all directions. He looked nothing short of pathetic. When the man spoke, however, his voice was strong, though somewhat melancholy: "I thought the four of you might need a little more time to process things, but if you insist, Katherine. I'm the one that brought you here. And I'm so, so sorry."
Kevin hardly had a second to wonder how the man knew Katherine's name before she and the twins gasped in unison, "JB?"