Page 56 of Freedom
Chapter Ten
“Honey, I’m home!” Jakeswung the door shut, brandishing an oversized plastic bag. “And I brought home the bacon!”
Tobias blinked, looking up from the laptop before him on the small motel room table. “Bacon? Do we have... a hot plate?”
“Nah, tiger, the other bacon. Your kind of bacon.” Jake overturned the bag on their second bed that held their duffels. Out rolled bright, shiny textbooks, with those sharp corners that stabbed like a bitch, and then a backpack from the bottom of the bag. “Honest-to-God schoolbooks, from a real McCoy schoolbook supply place. You wouldn’t believe it, Toby, those guys spent a good forty-five minutes trying to talk me into buying a gross of these babies, just because they’re the real shit they use in schools and everything. They’ve got homework assignments and worksheets and lesson plans, even the answers in the back. I got a set for ninth and tenth grade, figure you can start out there. I’m betting dollars to donuts it’ll be a piece of cake for you to catch up, but anything else you need we can scrounge for as it comes up.”
Tobias’s lips parted, and he stood, stepping closer to the bed. He moved his fingers slowly over one of the glossy covers, then turned to Jake. “All these... are for me?”
“Well, I sure as hell ain’t gonna fight you for them.” Jake cleared his throat. “Got you a backpack too, just like all the kids carry their books in.”
For a moment, it looked like too much for Tobias. He blinked fast, his breath halting. Maybe this hadn’t been such an awesome idea after all. Then Tobias turned, and Jake was almost knocked over, staggering back from the force of Tobias’s hug. In the squeeze, Tobias’s lips pressed to his cheek with a whispered, “Thank you,” before he stepped back, overcome with emotion and shy once more.
For the next few weeks, Jake had a difficult time peeling Tobias away from the books any time they weren’t actively working on their next hunt. He had to coax Tobias into leaving them in the Eldorado during meals or to put them away for bed. Tobias had no attention to spare for the television he was cautiously starting to enjoy or for fiddling with the laptop. All his hours were spent poring over the books, flipping through each one as though he couldn’t decide where to start. Then Jake got him a notebook and some pens and highlighters (barely restraining himself from a packet of gold star stickers), and Tobias seized them with unprecedented glee. He built a schedule for himself, charting out an hour per subject for every day, and kept to it with an almost religious devotion. Jake hadn’t seen anything excite him for this long before—not libraries, successful hunts, or even other books.
The unexpected fervor took him aback a little—though don’t get him wrong, he wasn’t complaining about seeing Tobias this goddamn radiant, practically bouncing with energy each morning to crack open his books. He’d even started arguing with Jake more, new defiance and obstinacy in his voice when it came to anything that detracted from his studies. The first time he snapped,I’ve got homework, Jake, it actually rendered Jake speechless and blinking long enough for Tobias to start looking uncertain and worried, but Jake pulled on a grin and threw up his hands in mock defeat.
It only clicked a couple weeks later, when Tobias was chattering away about the latest chapter in his biology textbook, and the waitress came over for a refill and Tobias gave her this brilliant, totally blinding smile. Jake remembered other times Tobias hadn’t been able to talk about school, had frozen at the mere mention of it. This was part of blending in, of ditching thatI’m a freakmindset that Jake tried to chip away at every turn and that kept reappearing in nightmares, on hunts, in the basic day-to-day interactions that Jake had stopped thinking about by the time he was five and knew Leon wasn’t going to tell him why they’d really left home and Mom had gone away.
Jake got it. Tobias studied and researched freshman algebra with the same focus and intensity he brought to every hunt, to every strategy Jake taught him to stay safe out in the real world. And Tobias saw those books, that classroom experience he couldn’t even fathom, as one less thing that separated him from other kids his age, from those skeptical and curious looks that made Jake want to draw his knife and wake up the sleepy diner.
Tobias wanted to feel normal, to fit in, even though no normal kid Jake had ever met took that sort of unearthly delight in biology (he certainly hadn’t). Jake couldn’t give him the whole normal-experience shebang, but he would sooner shoot himself in the foot than deflate Tobias’s “isn’t schoolgreat” balloon.
Jake had always known Toby was a genius. It hadn’t even really surprised him when Toby had picked up a big-ass Shakespeare anthology from that first book sale and actually made sense of it. All the books and even movies referenced Shakespeare, he told Jake. He wanted to know what they were talking about.
“That’s not English, that’s gibberish,” Jake told him one night as they were getting ready for bed. He’d sat down next to him on the mattress and propped his chin on Toby’s shoulder as he squinted at the tiny columns of text. “Are we sure this Shakes guy wasn’t just drunk all the time and everyone just pretended they were smart enough to get it?”
Toby angled his head to meet his eye, making a face that didn’t quite hide his grin. “There are footnotes that explain what words used to mean. It’s like a code. Or a puzzle. There’s actually a lot of dirty jokes everywhere. You’d probably like it.”
Jake snorted. “You gotta translate for me, then.”
And Toby did over the following weeks, walking him through the dramas ofJulius CaesarandHenry IV, into the nonsense ofTwelfth Night, and then the surprisingly gnarlyMacbeth.
Romeo and Juliethad started out raunchy as hell, but Tobias had gotten quieter as he got further into the play, his forehead knitting and expression absorbed. They were on a long drive through never-ending Texas with all their stupid dry counties and asshole sheriffs who loved to lower the speed limit from eighty to twenty in the space of half a mile, just to rake in tickets to fund their stupid rodeos or whatever they called their animal circuses.
When Toby fell quiet, Jake figured he was in a particular deep-sea dive of Shakespeare decoding. But close to dinner time, when he’d just looked over to ask if Toby was in the mood to try something local or if he wanted to stick with more reliable fast food, he saw that Toby had shut the anthology and was staring out at the window, looking too much like he had the time he’d found out that humans could be just as fucked up as supernatural monsters.
Jake frowned. “Hey, Tobito, what’s up?”
It took Toby a moment to look at him, and even then he missed the half grin, half glower that Jake usually got when he used that nickname. “I didn’t expect it to end like that.”
Jake winced. “Shit. I should’ve warned you.”
