Page 146 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

This isn’t at all what I expected Rory’s wise words to be, but he pushes on, as if to unanimous cries for more.

“What do we all have in common? Parents who didn’t care about us beyond our potential for power. That’s it.” He pauses, magnanimously allowing us to ponder this in our intoxicated states. He peels off his black socks and sags backward onto the bed, his feet sticking off the ends like a corpse. “If we’re supposed to be the best of the best, to be launched into positions of power once we graduate uni,” Rory declares with a dark, philosophical lilt, “then I’m starting to think the whole world will be run by unparented children.”

Unparented children. It doesn’t seem real, but it’s a phrase that lingers in my mind until I suppose it fits. Mothers who use and abuse their positions of power, fathers who snap both words and deeds. Mothers who neglect. Fathers who fight. Unbidden, I think of my own family… of all the batshittery I’ve hidden from the chiefs. Of the fluttery, sick-inducing creep across my stomach, as though thinking of the past, as though thinking of them, is an act of brutal violation.

Slowly, Rory rises from the bed, perching back onto the edge again. “I’ve decided,” he says with the finality of one finished ruminating the multiple angles of a difficult subject, “that I want to punish my father.”

Finlay watches him carefully.

“Because what he’s done is tantamount to the most grievous betrayal there’s ever been. I’ve long considered him a man of his word. He’s had a difficult job to clean up the country. I gave him leeway and so did voters. He loved my mother fiercely, and yet unbeknownst to me decided to fuck younger women as though it were his part-time job. He even came onto…” He pauses, his glance drifting over me, and then thinks better of it. “Instead, he leapt into bed with Antiro. Antiro, who’s currently out there, tearing up the country I love. There are ways and means to evoke change, for revolutions to be peaceful, and this isn’t one of them.”

It’s a dramatic catalog of wrongdoing, and Rory ably fills his speech with long, theatrical pauses so that we hang onto his next words.

“I want to make him disappointed in me. I want to fuck over his plans and dreams.” For a long minute, he says nothing, and then, quietly, adds, “I don’t want to be his pet political project anymore. So I won’t. I’m going to become my own person.”

“How?” Finlay asks, whip-quick.

Rory looks in my direction, still filled with that soft warmth I’d never have associated with him before this summer. “I want to get married.”

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