This Might Be a Disaster- Excerpt
Excerpt from THIS MIGHT BE A DISASTER
Context: Evelyn has just learned that her 17-year-old brother, August, got into a physical fight with another player at his soccer game.
When she hung up the phone and shoved it into her back pocket, she was unsurprised to find Seymour nearby. She had the strangest feeling that she’d begun to be attuned to his presence, as though she could sense it whenever he stepped into her orbit.
“Is everything all right?” He was a few feet away, pink streaks in his cheeks, tired and flustered, maybe hungry, in the dusky seven o’clock light. And yet he seemed so stable, so unyielding. She knew it was a dangerous thing to let herself believe, but Seymour looked like someone she could lean on, someone who wouldn’t be disappointed when they learned what a disaster she really was.
“Do you remember what it was like to be an angry teenage boy?” she said, instead of answering his question.
Seymour drew closer– one step, two, tilting his head to look at her, his hands thrust into his pockets. It took him a while to answer, but when he did, his answer was different and better than she could have imagined.
“More than most,” he said. “I was an angry young man for centuries. It took me a very long time to learn to be anything else.”
Evelyn exhaled slowly, tension draining from her body. She had been put off by his age, afraid of it. But it was nice, actually, to think that he had seen problems infinitely greater than hers, and problems equal to and lesser than hers, a thousand times over, across centuries and cities– and yet he still cared about her small worries, her panicked phone calls in parking lots at sundown, when he could have been long gone by now.
She swallowed hard and said “Would you like to meet my family?”
He smiled. “I would like nothing better, Evelyn.”