Generation Why Bother

Chance, sitting on the armrest of the couch, turned to face me and Tegan and said, “That went about as terribly as I expected.”

“Yeah, I know right?” Mick laughed airily, forcing it. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, blowing his bangs out of his eyes.

“I can’t wait to have to work with them,” Tegan grumbled. “They seem like regular rays of sunshine.”

Mick haphazardly punched her shoulder and said, “C’mon, don’t be mean. They might be the best people ever. Who knows.”

“Not much of a first impression,” Chance said. “Then again…Anthony and Andy didn’t give a real good one, either…”

“Exactly!” Mick said, pointing both pointer fingers at him with a grin. “There. Everybody loses. When they come home, it’s probably going to be torture. I’m not looking forward to that.”

“We’re gonna bail before they get home, aren’t we Oshie?” Tegan eyeballed me, pleading “yes” with her eyes.

So I nodded. “Yeah, I’d rather…not get mixed up in that.”

“Ugh, you guys suck,” Chance groaned, leaning back on the armrest and running his fingers through his fauxhawk. “We’ll just make sure to torture you tonight by messaging you their exact words right as they say them.”

Before we could object to that variety of slow torture, Mick groaned loud enough for all of Chicago to hear and said, “Oh, God, now that all eight guardians have been chosen, we can officially find out what our powers are…”

Everybody froze, but it was Chance who spoke up again and materialized all of our thoughts. “Man…I don’t even really wanna know anymore…I thought this would all happen a lot later on…”

Tegan twiddled her thumbs and avoided looking up as she said softly, “Well, how do we find out what we got?”

Mick sat next to her and spoke in a hushed voice. “We don’t even know that, man. The stars didn’t tell us that.”

“How far are the intruders?” I asked.

Chance nodded toward the screen, where the map was once again blinking. Of all of the numbers racing across the monitor, not a single one made sense to me, but there was a huge number blinking in one corner that I assumed to be at least somewhat important. “They’re still light-years away. It’ll take a few months for them to get here. That’s still not a whole lotta time.”

It was always “months.” Not a concrete number of months. They could have been talking two months or thirty, and we’d never have known. Sometimes I wondered if they even knew the specifics of what they were talking about and it was frustrating, but then I remembered that we were all in the same boat, bobbing along in our own seas of problems and worries.

Tegan spoke up hesitantly after a pregnant pause. “Sometimes I think this is all a hoax.”

Nobody outright objected and lectured her about how real the situation was. In fact, I’m pretty sure that what she said had crossed everybody’s mind at least once – even Andy and Anthony’s minds, I’d have bet. Not that they would have admitted it.

“Me too, girl. Trust me,” Mick mumbled. “But after witnessing the crap I thought I’d only ever see in dreams in that hospital bed, coming home to see this giant monitor sitting our apartment, watching my own scars get deeper and darker every day…I can’t help but think that we’re a part of something that we’re just not meant to shrug off like those two kids just did.”

“It always felt kind of outlandish, all of us being rounded up like this,” I put my two cents in. “I don’t know. I sometimes wondered if we were all getting pranked. But you said it yourself, Tegan – it’s like we’re Johnny Cool. That’s a neat feeling in itself, you know?”

My voice shook as I spoke and I didn’t feel like I expressed my thoughts as clearly as I wanted to, but what was said was said and I couldn’t take it back.

But Tegan smiled at me sweetly and said, “I wish we could be that cool and composed.”

No matter what emotion is going through your head at any given time, there’s nothing quite as reassuring than knowing that somebody else in the world is feeling the exact same thing. Happiness loves company, misery loves company, loneliness loves company. Sometimes you don’t need reassurance that everything is going to be alright. You just need to know that somebody else is going through whatever you’re going through, because if you can’t get through it, you might as well make a friend in the process.