Honey Grove, Texas, United States

July 14, 2024 | 6:04 PM | 58 degrees

3 days after The Blink

While the town was enjoying a fish fry at the First Baptist Church, Joey Draper pedaled his bike along the dark streets in the opposite direction. He figured thirty people—many of them much stronger and much more capable than him—could take care of whatever disaster was unfolding at the church. He would undoubtedly just be in the way.

So rather than hopping into a car with the others who peeled out of the parking lot, Joey stood at the doors and watched pairs of taillights shrink away from him like red-eyed monsters backing into the fog. No one had waved him toward their car or asked if he wanted a ride or so much as looked his way, they hadn’t even noticed him, but he didn’t mind. To be honest, he preferred it that way. It was so much easier to be a part of the background. That way you couldn’t mess up or say the wrong thing because no one even knew you were there. Most people hated feeling like they were invisible. 

Joey loved it.

Once the sound of engines faded down the street, Joey tucked Howell’s notebook in his pocket, the little memo pad he’d been using to keep track of the school’s inventory all day, and walked his bike off the sidewalk. In the rush that followed the ringing church bell, the mayor hadn’t remembered to ask for it back. It was technically Joey’s anyway now that he had been made the mayor’s official assistant. That had been unexpected, but at least it meant he didn’t have to smash his thumbs with a hammer. Things had gone in his favor, all things considered.

The church bell stopped ringing once Joey reached the edge of the high school’s parking lot. See? he thought, problem solved. Whatever danger there had been was over now and they hadn’t even needed him.

He clicked on the flashlight duct-taped to his handlebars (it didn’t do much, but it was better than no light at all) and pedaled away from the school. He looked both ways despite not needing to and followed the street south until an intersection, then made a right on Poplar Street and even coasted a little ways before realizing where he was going. A pang of sadness reverberated in his chest as he made a wide U-turn in the middle of the road and returned back to the intersection. His mind had been on autopilot, guiding him instinctively along the path he had biked every day for the last ten years. A mile to school through the gray morning, a mile back home through the fading evening sunlight. But that life was over now. Joey would never make the trip from school back to his Dad’s house again. His house, technically. Or was it? He wasn’t sure how inheritance worked with the world being over and all that, but he didn’t think anyone was going to come asking for proof of ownership in any case. The only person in town who might have disputed it died two days ago.

Died. It was strange how fast Joey had come to accept that idea. His father was dead. Gone. Packed up his things and moved on to the next world.

When the Sun disappeared Joey had been at the Bois D’Arc lake just outside of town. He spent a lot of his time there during the summers, most often hanging out with his best friend Devin. But Devin and his parents had moved to some town in Oklahoma three months ago, so now Joey went to the lake by himself and sat under some shade trees near the boat ramp. Sometimes he would bring a book to read by the water or put his headphones in and listen to music or whatever podcast he had going at the moment, but most often he would just waste time as the Sun made its rounds above him. It felt good just to be away from the house. 

No. That was another lie he had come to accept. There was nothing wrong with the house. What felt good was being away from his Dad.

Three days ago he had gotten into a particularly bad argument over the whereabouts of “My Glass,” as his father called it. Joey had still been half asleep when he barged in and demanded he hand it over. The glass in question was a cheap, novelty pint glass his father had bought at some beach a number of years back, and it was the only thing in the entire house he would drink from. Like most things from beach shops the glass was shaped like a naked woman, equipped with protruding breasts that his father’s thumb would rest just beneath as he drank his mixed concoctions in front of the TV. It was a beer glass intended to be used at crowded frat parties, but that didn’t stop him from sipping bourbon and Coke from it in the living room by himself. Sometimes minus the Coke.

Joey hated that glass.

“Haven’t seen it,” he’d mumbled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as his Dad dug through dresser drawers and threw socks and underwear on the floor. “Hey, I don’t have it.”

His Dad spun toward him. “Well it didn’t grow legs and walk away.”

It wouldn’t have to grow legs, Joey thought sleepily. It already had a pair of curvy thighs that extended from the glass’s ridiculous-looking ass cheeks. He obviously didn’t say this out loud. That was one thing you learned early on in the Draper household: you don’t argue with Dad. Especially not on weekends. And especially not when the kitchen had that tangy maple syrup smell in the air that meant the amber had been flowing.

They went back and forth for a few minutes, his Dad throwing accusations at him and upturning every inch of the room and Joey still trying to unjam the gears of his groggy mind and defend his innocence without letting anger slip into his tone. There was no point in trying to stop the search. The room was his father’s room because it was his father’s house, and that included Joey’s room and anything in it. Privacy wasn’t a right or a privilege for anyone who didn’t pay the bills.

Once the whole bedroom had been searched and his father had moved to a different part of the house in the quest for his grail, Joey picked his clothes up off the floor and reorganized some of the mess. He could tell it was going to be a lake day, the kind of day he learned long ago to make himself invisible for. It wasn’t just that his Dad was in a pissy mood over His Glass, it was the fact he was already looking for it at 10AM. And that he didn’t have to work tomorrow. It was the perfect storm, and Joey didn’t trust his own temper enough to sit quietly in his room all day while his Dad steeped in bourbon downstairs. So he got dressed, grabbed his backpack from beneath his bed, and crept downstairs to the front door. Before he closed it behind him, he looked back and saw his father muttering to himself and taking every cup down from the kitchen cabinets, so absorbed in looking for that stupid glass he didn’t even notice his son was leaving. 

It was the last time Joey ever saw him.

The ride to the Bois D’Arc hadn’t felt any different than the other times he made the four mile journey, but looking back he thought it should have. He rode through town, under the Highway 82 overpass, and across a patchwork of farmland and empty fields, and he did it without even looking at what he passed. Had he known it was the last time he would see the world bathed in sunlight, he would have paid more attention to it, to how blue the sky was, how the shadows stretched across the hot pavement. All the colors. Each time he thought about that last ride to the lake the memory looked a little brighter than it had actually been, the details a little more vibrant. The act of remembering was mostly imagination, Joey had read once, each summoning of a memory painting it over and redefining the details of the experience based on the feelings attached to it. He believed that now.

By the time Joey rode past the boat ramp and walked his bike to the treeline, all thoughts of his father had been replaced with the glittering sunlight on the lake, the sigh of wind in the trees above him, the gentle lapping of water against the sand and stone shore. Let him drink himself blind, he thought, leaning his bike against a tree and dropping his backpack on the ground. He told himself he didn’t care and in that moment he didn’t, but the truth was he missed the man his father had been before His Glass became the most important thing in the house. The way life had been before he’d gotten old enough to know how shitty it really was. Before his Mom had walked out on both of them all those years ago without so much as saying goodbye. He didn’t know which of these events came first, his Dad’s drinking or his Mom’s leaving, but in the end it didn’t really matter, did it? Knowing which parent to blame wouldn’t change his Dad’s habits and it definitely wouldn’t bring his Mom back, so he settled for compromise and decided to blame both.

Over the next few hours Joey didn’t do much more than scroll on his phone. He wasn’t in the mood to read, he didn’t feel like focusing on playing a game, he just wanted to exist in the most nonexistent way possible. Let his mind hop on the endless treadmill of the internet and just be. A few times he got up and walked along the beach looking for cool rocks, but always he returned to the safety of that little lakeside forest. He dozed there, too, drifting in and out of naps whenever someone out on the lake laughed or the sound of a boat’s engine droned by. The lake was a place of total freedom in that way; Joey could do whatever he wanted and not worry about someone saying he was just wasting time. Everyone was wasting time at a lake.

At around four he opened his pack and had lunch. Or dinner, he guessed. The Sun had arced its way across the cloudless sky and shifted the shadows along with it, placing Joey in a golden-green splotch of sunlight that filtered down through the trees. He ate two granola bars and a bag of chips, then washed it down with a Sprite he got from one of the vending machines by the boat ramp. Feeling content, he dug through his pack in search of something to pass the time. He set aside the book he’d been chipping away at over the last few weeks—Homer’s The Odyssey, a book he knew would be assigned when school started back and one he wanted to get a head start on. He set aside his Nintendo Switch after a long pause of consideration. He set aside his headphones. A graphic novel (not a comic book). Finally he reached his hand in the bag and withdrew the last item he’d brought with him.

A novelty beer glass, shaped like a naked woman.

He stared down at it as if it were a defanged snake, unnerving and strangely beautiful but not nearly as dangerous without its toxins. The sunlight caught its crystalline curves and refracted it into prismatic colors that rolled and shifted as he turned it, a striking crystal ball effect he had never noticed before. Probably because he had never actually held The Glass until late last night when he decided to steal it. Or maybe he was just imagining the colors as he recalled the memory, trying to justify his theft by painting over the scene with a divine sort of beauty. There was nothing inherently bad about the glass, outside its tackiness, at least. It was just a container, a thing designed to hold other things. In the hands of another man it might be filled with the morning’s orange juice or with sweet tea on a hot day. Joey thought if he’d encountered it in those situations he wouldn’t feel the uneasiness he did when looking at it. But he hadn’t. To him it would always be tainted by what his father filled it with, the sickly sweet tang of maple syrup forever clinging to the inside of the glass, as if the crystal woman he held in his hands would always be possessed by that evil spirit.

So there was only one thing he could think to do. He walked to the edge of the lake, looked at The Glass one last time, and threw it as hard as he possibly could. It glittered and spun through the air as it took flight, arcing high and brushing up against the afternoon Sun before its wax wings melted and it dropped down toward the water like a stone.

Two things happened just before The Glass crashed through the surface of the lake. The first was that Joey’s vision became blurred and sparkly like he was seeing the world through crystal. It took him a second to figure out he was crying. How long had it been since he’d done that? 

The second thing was that a heavy cloud moved over the Sun. 

Joey wiped his eyes and blinked tears away just as the glass splashed into the water. He looked to the epicenter of ripples in time to see the crystal woman bob once, twice, and then drop beneath the surface forever. Now she would only ever be filled with pure, clean water for as long as the lake lasted. He stared at the spot for a few seconds as the ripples dispersed, wondering if he had done the right thing and what his father would do if he ever found out, then the blue-green water of the lake darkened as even more clouds moved to cover the Sun. It occurred to him that the sky had been perfectly clear only seconds earlier, not a single strip of cloud to be seen. Shielding his eyes with a hand, Joey squinted up as the Sun gradually grew dimmer, its bright disc steadily becoming obscured the way it had during that solar eclipse a few months back. He couldn’t explain why he thought to do it, but he opened his phone’s camera and snapped a few pictures of it as it happened. At that moment he had thought it nothing more than an unexpected eclipse, something fascinating instead of terrifying. Something temporary. 

Less than two minutes later, the Sun had disappeared for good.

By the time Joey had pedaled the four miles from the lake back into Honey Grove, the whole town had fallen into chaos. People ran down the sidewalks crying, screaming, shouting into cell phones made useless by cell towers clogged with more calls than they could handle. Cars were scattered around the streets, several of them wrecked and smoking after their drivers had lost control while looking at the sky. He coasted past one house that had an entire truck sticking out of the wall.

His own house was unscathed, but once Joey jumped off the bike and dropped it in the yard he realized something was missing: his father’s truck. He opened the front door, which had been left unlocked, and ran inside. All the lights were off, which wasn’t unusual since it had been day half an hour ago.

“Dad?” No answer. Joey went room to room but he was the only one in the house. “Dad!”

He tried to recall the trip from the lake. Had he passed his father on the ride here? He didn’t think he could have picked out the truck from the indistinguishable headlights that blurred past him on the road, and surely his Dad would have seen a kid on a bike and realized it was his son, right? Maybe if he had gone to the lake to look for him, sure, but Joey had no way of knowing that was what his Dad had done. It was just as likely (if not more likely) that he had gone on a trip to the liquor store to mourn the loss of His Glass when the world fell apart.

He called his Dad’s cellphone and he heard it ringing from the living room where it had been left abandoned on the coffee table next to an empty bourbon bottle and a regular drinking glass that had overturned. A second drinking glass lay shattered on the floor beneath a small dent in the wall across the room. An image of his father drunkenly trying to hold on to each glass popped into Joey’s mind, a thumb expecting the ledge of two crystalline breasts but finding nothing but smooth glass. He could sense the frustration in the room, his father’s rage rising up from the amber puddles surrounding the shards of glass. He could smell it.

At this point Joey dropped onto the couch and cried for the second time that day. Not because he missed his father, not because he was scared that the world had ended, but because he felt completely worthless. Like some useless thing left discarded on the side of the highway, not important enough to be given so much as a second glance. His mother had left him. His best friend had left him. And now his father had left him. It was a pattern of absences that defined who he was, pockets of emptiness painting his portrait like an image made out of negative space. And how could he not feel like it was his fault? He once heard someone jokingly say, “If you feel like everyone around you is the problem, then maybe you’rethe problem.”

He was the problem.

He knew this was an irrational train of thought but couldn’t stop himself from hopping on board and taking a seat by the window. His best friend hadn’t abandoned him; Devin’s mom had taken on a new job in Oklahoma and the whole family had to move as a result. That wasn’t Devin’s decision nor was it Joey’s fault. And his Dad was a high-functioning alcoholic with a temper, it wasn’t like Joey had pushed his father into his addiction. His Mom was a different story. He had no idea why she had left, but even if it had been because of him that was still two out of three in his favor. He had no reason to feel like he was the central strand in this web of constant abandonment.

And yet he did.

And each hour his father didn’t walk back in through the front door was more proof of Joey being the problem. It was because he stole the glass. His Dad had found out somehow and decided he’d had enough of his rebellious behavior, enough of the backtalk and smartass remarks. He was done. Gone. And until Joey heard his pickup pulling into the driveway, his Dad would be no different than his Mom: a Schrödinger’s parent, neither dead nor alive.

That was when it dawned on Joey that his father must be dead. He had driven his truck out onto the road and crashed into a tree out in the middle of nowhere, or gotten into a head-on collision somewhere. Driving drunk wasn’t something his father usually did—he “knew his limits,” he would say, but would he know that limit without having His Glass there to measure out his doses? Part of Joey had perhaps irrationally believed his father would be unable to make himself a drink if he couldn’t find it, as if that pint glass was the only cup in the whole house. As if a cup would even be needed to transport bourbon from a bottle to a mouth. If anything, that stupid glass had slowed his father’s binges down by setting a cap on how much he could take to the living room at a time. Without it, the limit was defined only by what the bottle held. 

Without it, his father might have drunk more than he realized. He might have thought he was within his so-called limits when he climbed into his truck, might have said to himself I’ve only had one drink when the reality was that one drink from a normal glass equalled two from His Glass. Or three.

Joey had killed him. By trying to stop his father’s drinking, he had inadvertently killed him.

The realization brought with it a brief panic attack and an unexpected moment of clarity. Maybe his father was dead and maybe it was Joey’s fault, but that meant he hadn’t been abandoned again like he’d thought. His Dad hadn’t left him, he had died. Why else would he leave his phone behind? It wasn’t that Joey was some problem child who ran off anyone who got close to him, it was just the result of a freak accident. As far as drunk driving could be called accidental, anyway. Joey wasn’t the problem. He might be the reason his father was dead, but that somehow made him feel better than being intentionally left behind by a second parent. It was a selfish thing to think, he knew, but there were other things to worry about right now, things like the apparent end of the world.

But rather than doing anything to prepare for that looming apocalypse, Joey just sat on the couch and turned on the TV. He watched newscasters stumble over their words and replay clips of the Sun’s last moment, the whole time casting glances toward the front door but it never opened. He went upstairs and scrolled through internet articles and Reddit posts speculating on what had happened, not daring to let his mind off the internet treadmill for fear of where it might run off to if he did, but still his Dad didn’t come home. He fell asleep and woke up twelve hours later so hungry his stomach physically ached, then ate two bowls of cereal and a pack of Pop-Tarts in front of the TV but still, his Dad didn’t come back. By that next morning the news had become more unhinged, each channel bouncing between “We don’t know what this is” and “President Bradshaw is behind this” until Joey didn’t know if the eternal night outside was the biblical rapture or just a hoax. 

At some point a sound from outside pulled him out of a sleep he didn’t remember falling into. He opened his eyes, not entirely sure if the Sun really had disappeared or if it had been some bizarre dream, but the dark window and his phone’s clock reading 10:28 AM told him all he needed to know. 

The sound came again. A low rumble. The high squeak of brakes.

Joey bolted upright on the couch and strained his ears. No reason to get his hopes up just yet, it was probably just a passing car. No, it was definitely a truck. Ok, then maybe it was just a passing truck. No again, it’s still idling in the driveway. He listened for a few more seconds, then the truck’s engine shut off, a door opened, slammed shut. A sound he had heard countless evenings as his father returned from work. Relief flooded through him and he threw the blanket off his body and got to his feet. The doorknob rattled—Joey had locked it sometime earlier—and two seconds of silence passed.

Then the door exploded inward, splinters of wood spraying out from the deadbolt.

Joey cried out and fell backwards as three men filled the doorway, flashlight beams all converging on him trying to hide behind the couch. They came inside and one of them knelt beside him and asked if he was okay, said he didn’t mean to scare Joey and he thought the house was empty, said he worked at a place in town called Andisol Agricultural and that all the employees were teaming up to use the company’s warehouse as a base. 

That’s where my Dad works, Joey had said.

We know, the man said. Is he here?

No, Joey answered. I think he’s dead.

The men had briefly discussed this with one another, sounding shocked but not entirely surprised at the news, and the first man returned his attention to Joey and asked if he needed somewhere to stay. While Joey considered this, the man stood up.

You don’t have to decide now, he said. But if you need a place, pack a bag and make your way to the warehouse. You know where it is?

Joey nodded.

I’ll come back to check on you tomorrow if I don’t see you at the warehouse, that way you can help us load any supplies you have here to bring back with us. And if you don’t want to go you can stay here. It’s up to you.

The men turned around and walked back out the way they came. The first paused in the doorway, looked back, and said, Sorry about your Dad. And your door.

---

Joey stopped pedaling and coasted down the street, keeping one hand on the bike’s brake in case a parked car jumped out in front of him. His other hand again moved to readjust the flashlight that dropped a bit lower each time his front tire hit a bump in the road. Being left outside the school in the rain all day had loosened the tape’s grip on the handlebars. Maybe someone at the warehouse had managed to find a bicycle headlight, though he wouldn’t hold his breath. Half the group seemed more interested in scoring jewelry or gold plated watches left behind than they did in surviving.

The glow of the warehouse’s lights came into view right as Joey’s bike approached the gravel road. It was a good thing, too, because as soon as his bike rattled onto the driveway the flashlight swung down and illuminated nothing past his front tire. He kept the building in front of him as he pedaled and the glow grew larger, details emerging from the fog the closer he got. A tall plastic sign lit from the inside that read “Andisol Agricultural” in blocky green letters. A large grid of window panes taking up most of the warehouse’s upper walls. A chainlink fence topped with barbed wire silhouetted against the light from the windows.

Joey brought his bike to a stop at the gatehouse, the only place where there was a break in the fenceline. Two men approached from the other side of a segment of fence that could be rolled side to side along a track. Their flashlights turned up to Joey’s face and he held up a hand to shield his eyes.

“Go back,” one of the men ordered. Joey heard the metallic cl-chnk of a handgun, the slide being pulled back and snapping forward.

“It’s me,” Joey said, wondering if he knew who the guards were. What if they didn’t recognize him? And since when were they armed?

“Move your hand,” the man said.

Joey obeyed and held up his hands palms out, squinting against the bright LEDs.

The second man said something to the first, a muttered question Joey couldn’t fully make out. 

“Is your name—” the first started to ask, but the second elbowed him in the ribs and he started over. “What is your name?”

“Joey. Joey Draper? I left from here earlier this morning.”

The flashlights moved from his face and the men grabbed the gate and began pushing it open. Joey walked his bike through and they pushed it closed again.

“Sorry for the scare,” the first said, holstering his sidearm. Joey thought his name was Aaron. “Bossman said to start turning away new arrivals. Place is getting full fast. Guess you joined up just in time.”

“It’s okay,” Joey said, though he didn’t really feel that was true. When he’d gone out the gate earlier, there had only been one guy standing guard. Now there were two, both with guns? What would have happened if they hadn’t recognized him and sent him back the way he came? Where would he go then? Back to his empty house? Would they have shot him if he tried to argue back?

Joey pushed away the what-ifs and continued walking his bike toward the warehouse. One of the loading bays was open, which meant the scavengers were out doing their thing. Not looting, of course. Just taking stuff that didn’t belong to them from homes left unattended. Joey never imagined it would take less than 72 hours for a 21st century town in America to devolve into tribes hoarding resources in various buildings. Even more unlikely was the fact that these tribes still had some semblance of organization, not scattered individuals but little pockets of different societies, each with leaders and workers and an endless list of tasks to ensure survival. Joey hadn’t even had the foresight to think about surviving theweekend after The Blink happened, let alone the next couple months. He guessed that’s why he was following orders and someone else was calling the shots.

But if he might say so himself, he had gone above and beyond in carrying out the orders he had been given.

Joey propped his bike against the wall and opened the main door on the side of the warehouse. Inside, he kept his eyes on the floor as some of the others stopped their conversations to look his way. He went up the metal staircase, wincing as his shoes clanged loudly on the metal and undoubtedly drew more eyes to him, and eventually reached the catwalk that overlooked the warehouse floor. Halfway through the metal bridge was a single door with the word OFFICE printed in big letters, a wide window to the right of it with its blinds barely opened. He approached it and knocked, then waited for it to open. 

The people downstairs returned to their conversations and Joey tried not to listen, but this was made difficult by the way the building’s acoustics carried sound right up to where he was standing. If they were talking about him he didn’t want to know. Before he’d left earlier that morning with his orders, he’d overheard someone downstairs asking why “the new kid” thought he was so much better than the rest of them. Someone else had agreed and called him a brown-noser cashing in on his dead daddy’s hard earned position in the group. Another said he was trying to be second in command, which was bizarre, since Joey had absolutely no desire to be second in command, or third, or even tenth. He wanted nothing to do with calling the shots or having the responsibility of overseeing a hundred other people. All he wanted to do was be useful however he could and show his Dad’s boss how thankful he was for letting him stay here. It wasn’t Joey’s fault that his duties didn’t involve unloading endless trucks of canned food.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from behind the office door.

“Me, uh, Joey.”

The door opened and Darren Turner stood in the threshold. “Hey, bud. Come on in.”

Joey obeyed and shut the door behind him. Darren’s office was large but mostly empty, containing two metal filing cabinets, a small TV mounted on the wall, and his desk. The window provided a bird’s eye view of the warehouse’s many rows of shelves, as well as the scattered piles of looted (scavenged)supplies that hadn’t been sorted through yet. Joey could even see the glimmer of all the trinkets in the corner that continued to grow larger each time a truck came back, worthless items if the world had really ended, but there was no point telling the scavengers that.

Darren leaned against the front of his desk and crossed his arms. “So, how’d it go?”

“Good,” Joey said. “Really good.”

Darren raised his eyebrows. “I take it you got a good look at their supplies?”

“Even better.” Joey pulled the notebook from his pocket and handed it over. “They put me in charge of keeping track of everything they have. And I mean everything. Food, medicine, blankets, beds—all of it.”

As Darren took the little book and flipped through its pages, his usual mask of macho stoicism gave way to genuine shock. “Well I’ll be damned.” He looked up at Joey and the corner of his mouth pulled up in a grin. “How in the world did you manage that?”

Joey shrugged. “The mayor made me his helper. I guess there were enough people doing the heavy lifting and not enough doing the bookwork.”

Darren laughed. “I guess you really were the right man for the job.”

“I guess so.”

“I know so.” Darren clapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t tell the kid that the entire reason he sent him to help out at the school was precisely because he looked like the wrong man for the job, that he knew Howell would take one look at a scrawny kid who wanted to help and give him the simplest job he had. The safest job he had. And that that job would be something tedious like going room to room and meticulously counting every item that came in through the doors, a necessary job but one far too tedious for an important politician like Howell to do himself, so why not give it to the teenager who probably couldn’t swing a hammer the right way? Politicians were nothing if not predictable.

 He also knew Howell would see Joey as a nobody. Just some pale kid in dire need of a haircut and a Bowflex. A societal outcast. He was the exact opposite of his drunkard of a father, the opposite of all the other guys who worked at Andisol Agricultural, the opposite of most of your typical definitions of “masculine toughness.” Liberals were probably to blame for that one, Darren thought, but for once in his life he was actually glad the snowflakes had been so hellbent on emasculating the American youth. Because looking at Joey, you’d never in a million years think he would be teamed up with a man like Darren Turner.

Which was exactly why Darren had picked him.

“Think you could do it again tomorrow?” he asked, holding the notebook out to Joey. “You’ve done great work already, son, so don’t feel like you have to—”

Joey took the book before he could finish. “Say no more. I’ll be there.”

Darren grinned. “I thought you’d say that.”