Both Lett and I watch as Holly storms out of the room and slams the door behind her, which I suppose gives me implicit permission to stay as long as Lett will have me. To clarify this matter, I turn to him. “So, um…” I start, but quickly fall silent.

He beams at me with equal parts pride and awe. “Never before have I succeeded in prompting her to leave so quickly,” he says. “Once more, I can offer you nothing but my deepest gratitude.”

Unsure how to respond, I give him a little nod, turning to the door again. Wow. She seriously slammed that thing. He really made her upset. “Do you dislike her?”

“Of course!” he pipes up. “She always brings me lukewarm soup, not to mention that she tends to…” He looks down at his tray, eyes moving between the bowl of soup and the loaf of bread placed beside right. His gaze hops back up to me, eyes wider and brighter than ever before. “Is this your merit, mister?”

“What, the…?” I gesture at the bread. “Um, it really wasn’t…”

“Thank you! I so despise the needless mixing of consistency… It makes the food unpredictable in loathsome ways.” Turning his attention to the object of his joy, he digs in with odd enthusiasm, dipping the bread with care to avoid it becoming mush, and eating each piece of the soup separately.

Smiling, I step closer to him. “I had the feeling that was the case,” I say, taking a seat on the chair next to his bed. “That said…” I knit my hands and twiddle my thumbs together. “Don’t you think she also deserves a thank-you?” Mouth full of soup, he can’t exactly respond, but I can tell exactly what he’s thinking simply by the look on his face. “Bringing you food like this… It’s a nice thing she does, no? She didn’t have to. If she wanted to, she could have made one of the other kids do it. But, probably recognizing the tense relationship you have, she decided against it, and instead took time out of her busy schedule to make sure you had something to eat. Sure, you had reason to be upset with her, and just now you were trying to protect my character or something, but… You still really hurt her.”

He swallows down his food and wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his pajamas. Frowning, he takes a look out at the garden—at the old, withered tree. “She’s the one who got all furious over something as small as me deciding who I want to keep as visitor.”

“Sure, but…” I move my hands, trying to figure out my own thoughts. “To her, she was only trying to protect you, and you reacted by…” Saying he screamed at her would be correct, but I have a feeling he won’t take it too well. “—By rejecting her concern. First, you didn’t acknowledge her efforts, and then, you made her feel like her care for you was ill-placed. It’s only natural she got upset. Anyone would be.”

His face remains turned to the window, shoulder relaxed, hands folded neatly atop his lap. “She…” He swallows audibly. “It’s not like I wanted to make her angry.”

“Of course. People seldom want to hurt each other.”

His ear twitches. “I didn’t hurt her,” he says, in a small, childish voice. “Getting all mad… that was her choice. If anything, she hurt herself.”

“You hurt her,” I reaffirm. “Even if you didn’t mean to, and even if you think this is a silly thing to feel hurt about… Ultimately, you did hurt her.”

“That’s stupid,” he grumbles. “How can I hurt her by not doing something?”

I smile at him, even if he can’t see it. “Yeah, it’s real dumb. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes with other people. More often than you’d like to think, you’ll hurt the people around you, through no ill will on your end. And when that happens, even if you can’t understand why they would feel hurt, even if you don’t think what you did or didn’t do should be hurtful to anyone… The reality is still that they got hurt.” I lean in closer to him. Noticing my sudden proximity, he turns to look at me, eyes slightly red. I let my smile grow warmer. “But, I’ll let you in on a little secret… Some people don’t want you to know you’ve hurt them. Holly, for example… I doubt she’ll ever admit even to herself that you hurt her.”

“Why not?”

I chuckle. “Heh, well, that’s a bit too complex for me to explain. It might be pride, it might be concern… In her case, she probably pities you too much to point out when you hurt her. Instead, she’ll hide it by being upset. Anger, I’ve found, is an excellent replacement for sadness. If she’d burst into tears, we would’ve felt sorry for her. But she didn’t want that, so instead, she got mad. This is pretty common. If you let people pity you by being sad, it shows that you’re hurt, and therefore that you can be hurt. When I was your age, I was often very angry, because I didn’t want to be sad. It stuck with me for a long time, until I stopped being angry, and started being… Nothing, I suppose.”

“Are you still nothing?”

I look down at my hands. Knotted, pale, and purplish. Claws to fit any movie monster. I scoff at myself, and look up at him instead. “Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve grown past it. Who knows? In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Being mad all the time was my mistake, but if you’ll let me act as a cautionary tale, I hope it won’t be yours.”

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With eyes as cold as dead stars, he watches me. His hands lie curled atop his lap, alongside his lukewarm soup and stale bread. In a light, quizzical voice, he asks, as simply as one could, “What do you mean?”

“Heh, well…” I gesture at the whole of myself. “I’m not exactly the picture of health, am I? Be it mental or physical, the way I’ve interacted with the people around me… The way I continue to act… It’s hurt a lot of people in ways that I will never be able to comprehend. I’ve lost friendships, my family… Of course, I can’t blame my anger for all of it. There were other issues down there, but chief among them was my reluctance to face the fact that I was hurt. And, in turn, since I refused to be hurt, it meant that I basically had free license to hurt the people around me. If I could do it all over, I would. But I can’t. All I can do is tell you that keeping it inside won’t help.”

He smiles, as light and airy as a butterfly on fire. “Okay,” he says. His eyes gleam oddly. “Then, I ought to release it?”

“The hurt?” I ask, to ensure we’re both on the same page. Despite my question, he keeps sitting there, as still and immobile as a piece of marble on display. Right. It’s not like he objected though, so… “Yes, I think. You should try to do it in a healthy way, of course, but…”

“And if the reason why I feel this way is because I’ve been hurt… What should I do about those who have hurt me?”

I frown. “That’s…” My gaze falls down to my hands again, clasped tightly. “I’m not sure, really. It depends on who they are. Sometimes, the people who hurt you don’t realize that they have, and even when you tell them, it doesn’t change anything. What really helps, and what Holly would probably appreciate, is a sincere apology. And nothing that excuses what you did, no, you have to accept responsibility, recognize how and why what you did hurt them, and assure them that you’ll do better in the future. That’s critical.”

“And…” His voice is strange now. Mature, but innocent. Confused and certain, all at once. Like a dissonant chord. Tentatively, I chance a look at his face. His eyes burn like frozen metal. “Is this enough?”

A bitter chuckle escapes me. “No, it seldom is,” I say. “But… isn’t it nice to have your pain recognized by someone, even if it is by the one who inflicted it?”

Something thaws in his gaze, and he turns back to the soup, watching the surface of it with a strange melancholy. “What then?”

“After that…?” I thumb my lower lip. “Normally, you’d forgive them, but… It’s not like you have to. If you can’t find it in yourself to forgive them, or if they don’t offer any apology, or if there’s no way to make up with them so that you can coexist, then…” Deep in my mind, I recall Simel, his shadow passing over the ice. Likewise, I put to mind Moleman, even though it hurts. Taking a deep breath, I turn to Lett, and place my hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to let go.”

“Let… go?”

“Yes,” I say. “In some contexts, with some people… There’s a disconnect. Something deep and fundamental that separates them. And those people, even if they really want to, simply won’t get along.” I squeeze his shoulder a little. “When I was your age, I attended school for humans, back on my planet. I was young, and I was angry, and I felt like no one understood me, not even the teachers. So I escaped into fiction because I couldn’t bear to be in contexts where I was less than a shadow. They didn’t like me, I didn’t like them…”

I can see Lett watching me, waiting, hoping for a good end. His whole little heart, anxiously awaiting the moment when I tell him the secret to getting along with people—how to mend his relationship with the other kids. It’s all he wants. Even if he rejects it himself, I can tell that he wants to fit in. More than that, he wants to know someone like himself—someone with his interests, who shares his perspective…

I wish I could give him a good answer. I wish I had a solution.

Lett leans in closer to me, his eyes brimming with cruel hope. “And…?”

I lean back in my chair and let my hand leave his shoulder. “I left. We graduated, I moved onto a different class…” My smile is strained. Hopefully, he won’t notice the tremble in my voice. “There was nothing else for me to do. Moving on was the only solution. That’s what was best for me, and also for them.”

“They never asked for forgiveness?”

“Never,” I say, giving a meek shrug. “Why would they? They didn’t know how much pain I was in, being left out of everything. All they saw was a weird kid who did weird stuff and got mad at people for no reason. So, I get it.”

Lett turns to look at his hands. Silently, he pulls at his covers, bundling them up in tight fists. His eyes slowly move across his covers to look at the knotted bumps his legs make. “And, when you left… The hurt went away as well?”

That gives me pause. Outside, beyond the window, a gust of wind blows through the treetops, making all the leaves flutter. “Not really,” I say thoughtfully. “If anything, it’s probably still there.” The hollowness of his eyes deepens. “But, when I left… Eventually… I was able to find people I did fit in with. People who were also weird. Some of them I lost, but… A few remain. Rice. Goss. You.”

He jerks at being mentioned, turning to me as though suddenly dunked with ice water. “Me?”

“Yep,” I say, smiling brightly. “You. I didn’t really recognize it when we met the first time, but… We really are alike. Though, honestly, you’re probably a fair bit smarter.”

“Why do you…?” In response to his dumb question, I gesture at all the books. The acknowledgement that he’s surrounded by books seems to physically pain him. “No, this is… Mere entertainment. Frivolous escape.”

“I disagree. Your language is very well-developed.” He looks as though he wants to refute me even further, but I know he’ll beat me in a battle of wits, so I defeat him by talking first. “I’ve met a lot of people, Lett. Some I’ve befriended, others I’ve had difficulties with… But there were people out there just like you and me. It’s a big world. There isn’t a single doubt in my mind that if you simply went out into the world, eventually, you will find people who see you and appreciate you for the person you are. People just as weird as you. All you have to do is find them, and the rest will come.”

Hearing my words, his eyes fill with such a strange clash of hope and despair that I can’t be surprised when tears begin to well from them. His whole body trembles, his lips twisting into an almost-frown, though with some inhuman effort, he’s able to swallow it down. What remains is a smile, strange and thin, contorting his bony face into a grimace of hope. “Are you certain? Are you certain that I can…?”

“Duh!” I say, punching his arm very, very lightly. “You’ve already got someone, don’t you? Finding true weirdos isn’t any easy feat, so the fact that you’ve already got one on hand is actually pretty impressive. If you’ll allow me to butcher a human expression—drakes of a feather stick together. Does that still rhyme?”

“Is it supposed to?” he asks with a weak giggle.

“Aw, shoot, it doesn’t rhyme anymore? Bummer.” Since his cheeks are still wet from the tears, I grab my handkerchief from my inventory and hand it to him. He accepts it, but doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, glancing between it and me with stark confusion. “For your…?” I gesture at my cheeks.

“Oh! You have my gratitude,” he says, wiping his eyes and cheeks.

With the conversation turning marginally lighter, I take the moment to point at his bowl. Much like a puppy, he simply tilts his head at me. “Would you like me to grab you a fresh bowl?” I ask. “Seeing as how it’s gone cold, that is.”

Eyes on the bowl, it takes a moment for my words to sink in. In the end, smiling, he hands me the bowl. “Yes, thank you.”

“Alrighty, then,” I say, accepting it and standing up. “I’ll be back in a jiffy!”

“Thank you,” he says, very earnestly.

“Save it for Holly!” I warn.

“Will do, mister.”

I wave goodbye, closing the door behind me.