Page 99 of Bears Behaving Badly
“Zero shit.”
“What happened?”
Caro set her pencil aside and propped her chin on her palm to listen.
Pat stopped pretending to sort his nail polish art wheels. “Clichés happened.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna need more than that. Please, por favor, s’il vous plaît.”
“Angry loner fell in with wrong crowd, blah-blah, stupid decisions followed by something-something, which culminated in more blah-blah, which I should have seen coming but didn’t, and Annette stumbled along just in time to get them off me. Literally. There was a rough chunk of sidewalk and she tripped.”
“Who were they?”
“SAS.”
“The species-ist guys?”
“The inbred morons who got so pissy about Stables calling themselves alpha predators that they decided genocide was a sane alternative. And this would normally be the part where I say ‘Don’t judge me’, except joining them was monumentally stupid and hateful so judge away.”
“Well.” Dev, nonplussed, cast about for a positive. “We all do dumb things when we’re kids.”
“It was six years ago.”
“Oh. When you were…”
“Nota kid.”
A short silence, and then Caro held up her pad:
Were you scared?
“Yes.”
Thought you’d die?
“Counted on it. But I consider myself lucky.”
Because you lived.
“Sorry, I’ll need a question mark on that.”
Because you lived?
“No. Well, that’s what I thinknow, but back then, I simply didn’t give a shit if they killed me. Death sounded like a vacation.”
Dev was shaking his head. “That’s messed up, Pat. Death is detention. Forever! And you don’t have anything to do and you can’t talk and you can’t leave your seat and the room smells like sweat and dust and there’s nothing good to eat. Forever.”
“Thanks for a fascinating glimpse into that bundle of neurons and synapses you call a brain, and I’m not being sarcastic. And you’re right—I had a fucked-up mind-set back then. But what I mean was that fortune intervened when they decided to kill me behind an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. If they’d tried it behind a rice-cake manufacturer, I’d be dead.”
Caro snorted, then clapped a hand over her mouth while Dev bit his lip, hard, so he wouldn’t laugh.
Pat grinned. “It’s fine. Even bigotry and felony assault have their lighter side.Nevertell Annette I said that. Anyway, she saved me, we got to know each other, I moved in to recover and never left,fin.”
“Is that why you have this silo? It’s your den, like the house is Annette’s?”
“Something like that. I’ve found since the attack that I’m…not agoraphobic, exactly. Agoraphobic-adjacent, I suppose. Apparently a near-death experience averted by a friendly stranger left me with a pile of PTSD. So I work from home, and if I feel the urge to shift, I stay on Annette’s land.”
“What did she do to them? The guys who hurt you?”
