More Than This by Patrick Ness Page A

at Gudmund’s ceiling. “No, I don’t.”
    “You sure about that?”
    Seth laughed, quietly. “No.”
    “You were just a kid. You shouldn’t have had to face that by yourself.”
    “I was old enough to know better.”
    “No, you weren’t. Not to have that kind of responsibility.”
    “It’s just me, Gudmund,” Seth said, catching his eye. “You don’t have to pretend to be all wise. I’m not a teacher.”
    Gudmund took the rebuke with grace and kissed Seth lightly on the shoulder. “I’m just saying, though. You were probably as weirdly self-contained back then as you are now, right?”
    Seth nudged him playfully with his elbow, but didn’t disagree.
    “And so your parents were probably happy they had this strange little kid who acted like an adult,” Gudmund continued. “And your mom thought – against her better judgment, we’ll give her that – she thought it’s only a few minutes and it’s an emergency, so our little Sethy can watch our little Owen for just a second while I run back to the whatever –”
    “The bank.”
    “Doesn’t matter. It was her mistake. Not yours. But it’s too big and awful to blame herself, so she blames you. She probably hates herself for it, but still. It’s a bullshit bad deal, Sethy. Don’t buy into it.”
    Seth said nothing, remembering that morning more clearly than he wanted to or ever usually tried to. His mother had delivered a curse word so loudly when they got back to the house that Owen had grabbed Seth’s hand in alarm. It turned out she’d managed to walk all the way home without realizing she’d left a thousand pounds sitting on the counter at the bank.
    Seth wondered now, for really the first time, what that money could have been for. Everything was done electronically, even then, cards and PINs and debits from your bank account. What was she going to do with all that cash?
    “I’ll be right back,” she’d stressed. The bank wasn’t the one on the High Street, it was off of it and up, a lesser bank his mother had never taken them to before on any other errand. “I’ll be ten minutes tops. Don’t touch anything and don’t open the door to anyone.”
    She’d practically sprinted back down the hall to their front door, leaving Seth holding Owen’s hand.
    Ten minutes came and went, and Seth and Owen had only moved from their spot to sit down on the floor beside the dining-room table.
    Which is when the man in the strange blue jumpsuit knocked on the kitchen window.
    “I let him in,” Seth said now. “She specifically said not to open the door to anyone, and I did.”
    “You were eight.”
    “I knew better.”
    “You were
eight.”
    Seth said nothing. There was more to the story than just the opening of the door, but he couldn’t tell even Gudmund that part. He could feel his throat straining, felt the pain rising up from his chest. He turned away and lay there on his side, shuddering a little at the effort of crying and trying not to.
    Behind him, Gudmund didn’t move. “I gotta tell ya, Sethy,” he finally said. “You’re crying and I don’t really know how to handle that.” He stroked Seth’s arm a few times. “I really don’t know what to do here.”
    “It’s okay,” Seth coughed. “It’s okay. It’s stupid.”
    “It’s not stupid. It’s just . . . I’m an idiot about these things. Wish I wasn’t.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Seth said. “Just the beer talking.”
    “Yeah,” Gudmund said, agreeing even though they’d hardly had four bottles between them. “The beer.”
    They were quiet for a second, before Gudmund said, “I can think of a few things that might make you feel better.” He pressed his body against Seth’s, his stomach against Seth’s back, reaching around to grab parts of Seth that responded with energy.
    “That’ll do,” Gudmund said happily into Seth’s ear. “But seriously, though, why does there even have to be a problem? He survived and they caught the guy and Owen’s a