Page 41 of Never Landing

Idecided that the best thing to do was to rent an entire moving truck. Not an enormous one or anything, just big enough for the stuff at my apartment, which...if I was honest, wasn’t much.

Hell, it was kind of pitiful when all totaled, since my apartment had come with the basic furnishings, so I didn’t even own a bed or a sofa. I did have a nicer TV than the one at Grandma’s old house, because that was a basic life requirement. And a coffee maker. And...linens.

Yeah, it was the smallest moving truck available for rent. Almost more of a van. Fortunately, I was able to pick it up at their location just outside Cider Landing, so the travel itself wasn’t complicated.

Heck, the thing even fit in my apartment’s assigned parking space, so I didn’t have to figure out how to park a moving truck on a busy city street.

Meanwhile, it was all new and exciting for Peter.

He wasn’t exactly an excited kid on Christmas, but...practically that, anyway. Picking up the truck was fascinating. Paying with a credit card was interesting. The largely rural drive to the city, past farms and fields and forests,was the most fascinating thing ever. He knew about farms and farm animals, but didn’t know much about the areas we drove through, so he started asking questions. After the first few questions, most of which I couldn’t answer, I handed him my phone.

He’d already gotten good at using Google to effect, and his reading and writing skills were better than most people I knew, so I let him at it, and before long, he was educating me on the areas we passed by, the intricacies of farming in the modern era, and the history of the state.

It was...actually a fun way to pass the drive. I’d ask random tangentially related questions, and he’d look up the answers, leading down new and different paths of inquiry.

Before I knew it, we were pulling into the parking spot in the underground lot in my apartment building, and Peter was looking around, confused and fascinated.

“This is . . . dark.”

“Underground parking is dark sometimes. This is underneath the apartment building, and it doesn’t really have windows. Only electric lights.”

He looked up at the flickering bulbs overhead, nodding. “Weird ones, too. Nothing like the ones in the house.”

It was fair, but I had no idea what the difference was, having precisely zero electrical knowledge.

The apartment, again, was interesting, but not in the same way as the rest of it. We walked in, and after wandering the room for a moment, Peter turned and looked at me, confused. “You live here?”

“Yeah. For like three years now.”

“Why?”

And that...well, I didn’t have any idea how to answer that question. I’d rented the apartment because it was cheap enough for me, and close to work. Then I’d mostly ignored it, only goingthere to sleep. Or sometimes, to do more work at home when the office was creepy and dark after everyone but me was done for the day.

Somehow, I didn’t think any of that was the answer he was looking for. I couldn’t imagine what answer would satisfy him, in fact. I couldn’t think of a single thing that made sense.

Why the hell was I living there?

Because it was what people did. They got terrible apartments, lived in dingy, unpleasant surroundings, because it was what they could afford.

But...I had Grandma’s house. Even in desperate need of repair as it was, it was better than this. Brighter, homier, and with more memories of a beloved past that I never wanted to let go of. More of Peter, and Grandma, and Bandit.

This place? It was like a hotel room that I’d existed in, but never lived. Never had friends over for holidays or thrown a dinner party or watched movies with my best friend. That fact was made even more obvious as we emptied the drawers of my clothes, and my whole life just...lifted right out of the apartment. It didn’t even take us eight hours to pack everything in the boxes I’d bought at the place where we’d picked up the moving truck. And we had boxes left over.

My whole life since college didn’t even fill the smallest moving truck available.

Peter kept shooting me concerned looks as we worked, every time he asked if something was mine or if it stayed with the apartment, and nine times out of ten, I answered the latter.

Still, he was unfailingly positive as we sat down to lunch, sandwiches I’d ordered from the deli on the corner. “This isn’t too hard at all. We’ll have you moved right into the house tomorrow, like me. All done.”

Like him.

Because he was moved into Grandma’s house. Still, part of me wanted to press on that. To be sure. “There’s nothing out in the woods you want to go get?”

He cocked his head, considering as he chewed on his pastrami sandwich. Then he shook his head. “It was...it was all kid stuff, Everett. I don’t need toys I played with when I was a kid. Wooden swords and sailor hats and—none of it is for tomorrow. It’s all for yesterday. The other lost kids can keep it. Until they realize they want to leave the woods too, and have their own lives.”

For some reason, the whole idea brought tears to my eyes, and I almost wanted to say the same of my own things. No, they weren’t children’s toys. But they were mostly cheap kitchen utensils and clothes I’d been wearing since high school and just...part of a life I felt I was leaving behind, moving into Grandma’s house with Peter.

Sort of like I, too, was leaving my childhood. Just, the childhood I was leaving was “broke college student” rather than “nineteenth-century feral child.” I’d spent the last decade growing older, yes, but I wasn’t sure I’d spent it growing up any more than Peter had. It was here and now that I grew up. Making adult decisions for the first time, moving forward instead of just accepting the hand I’d been dealt and sitting, stagnant, in my own filth.

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