Free We Are All Completely Fine by Darryl Gregory Page B

asked. “Are you looking at my tits?”
    “That’s beside the points. Point. See what I did there?”
    “Everybody thinks I’m the quiet one,” she said. “But you’re the one who never talks.”
    “I do so. I talk all the time.”
    “No, you comment . What have you shared about yourself? We don’t know you, we just know that guy in the books.” She always turned the conversation back around to the paperbacks. “Jameson Squared,” she said. “Monster Detective.”
    “And that is such a misleading title,” he said. “It makes the kid sound like he’s the monster. Like ‘child psychologist.’”
    “Child psychologists are monsters,” she said.
    “No, I mean—”
    “I know what you mean. Jesus, Harrison.”
    “Now that would be a good series character. Jesus Harrison, Divine Detective.”
    “You also deflect through humor,” Greta said.
    Every pub session, after they’d finished diagnosing the problems of the other people in the group (including Dr. Sayer), Greta would hound him about the books, trying to nail down what was real, what was made up, what was only exaggerated. She seemed to have memorized the entire series.
    The mundane facts—the NPR facts, he called them—were that the town of Dunnsmouth was reduced to kindling by a hurricane. Hundreds dead. It was quite a story for perhaps a week, and then the world moved on. Then, two years after the tragedy, a wife-and-husband team of “paranormal investigators” published a “nonfiction” book about the true, unreported supernatural intrusion that was only interpreted as a hurricane. One of the main characters was a teenage boy, the transparently named Jameson Jameson. Harrison had made the very bad mistake of talking to the couple while he was recovering in the hospital. Soon after, he made it a life goal to someday punch the paranormal investigators in their pair of normal faces. The list of punchees later expanded, first to the editors at Macmillan who ginned up a “fictional-but-what-if-it’s-not-eh?” series of adventures featuring a character named Jameson Squared, then to the producers at the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) network who created a homegrown movie he would have called unwatchable if so many people hadn’t told him they’d watched it.
    “You can’t blame people for wanting to tell your story,” Greta said. “You’re a hero.”
    “That’s bullshit,” he said.
    “Not total bullshit,” she said.
    “You’re an optimist. Let’s agree that the glass is half full of shit.”
    “You saved an entire town!”
    “If by ‘saving’ you mean that slightly fewer people died than every single fucking person, sure. Totally saved it.”
    “That’s not what—”
    “Dunnsmouth was a clusterfuck, top to bottom,” he said. “The books don’t tell you how close we came to losing everything. I was seventeen, Greta. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I didn’t know how far out of control the situation was. Everyone should have died. Not just everyone in town— every one. ”
    She stared at him.
    “I’m not being dramatic,” he said. “Okay, maybe a little. I’m sure there would have been a few survivors, somewhere. But not on the eastern seaboard.”
    “But that didn’t happen,” she said. “You must have done something right.”
    “Sometimes fortune favors the stupid.”
    She shook her head. “You keep doing that. Making quips.”
    “‘Quips’? Who says ‘quips’?”
    “Mocking quips is also a quip.” She frowned. “And trust me—I am not an optimist.”
    On the June night Martin was beaten, Harrison and Greta had left the meeting and walked to the pub as usual. They did not notice that Martin was following them. Greta was upset that Martin kept pressuring her for details.
    “He has a point,” Harrison said. “You know what happened to the rest of us. It’s your turn.”
    “I’m not interested in taking turns.”
    She had already told him fragments of her story. She’d grown up on some kind