I had never felt as angry as I did when I left Dr. Yamato's office. I was consumed by a rippling hateful anger that needed to destroy everything in its path.

I went home right after leaving the adoption centre, and found my siblings huddled in front of the TV, watching some old cartoon movie on VHS. It was grainy, and I tried to sit down to watch it with them for a few minutes. I couldn't focus. The wavy lines and crappy picture were making me crazy.

"Why are we watching this?" I barked. No one turned to face me. I was being ignored. "Guys! Why are we watching this?"

More nothing. It was like I wasn't there.

"You guys want to watch something else?"

My middle sister pointed the remote at the TV and turned it up.

"Really nice. Really mature. You guys are really being a bunch of—"

"Stop it, Will." Melody slowly turned her head to face me, but left the TV volume nice and loud with the movie still playing. "Just stop it. Let us watch this movie in peace, and go and find somewhere to be where the people actually want you to be there. You've been gone so much lately, we know you don't want to be here. We've finally gotten used to the idea, and we'd like to return the favour."

She turned back to watch the movie, leaving me spluttering and popping like an overfilled kettle, my mouth wide open and my eyes watering with fury.

"What did you just say?" I muttered.

"You heard her,"said Madeline.

She lay on the ground on her belly, legs up in the air and her head resting on her chin. If I didn't hate her more than wasp bites right then, I would have said she looked very cute. Unfortunately, that is precisely how much I hated her, and how I hated all of them. I had done all this work for them. Everything I'd done over the past few months had been for them, and this was how they repaid me; turning their backs and watching the damn TV. I stood up and walked to the door.

"I know where I'm not wanted," I said, in as dramatic a voice as I could possibly muster.

I even looked back at them to get one last chance at reconciliation. None of them even blinked an eye as the movie spooled on.

"Whatever then!" I spat, and slammed the door behind me as I stormed out. I slammed it really hard, and heard something tinkle as I strode away. It was an extremely satisfying sound. I hoped that something one of them held very dear had smashed into a million pieces, and no amount of patience and super glue would ever put it back together again.

The satisfaction I felt was the same sort of satisfaction that I assumed bullies felt after they'd intimidated some kid half their size into cowering before them as if the bully was the sun itself and was threatening to melt the poor kid's bones into adobe. It wasn't real. I hadn't done anything to earn the satisfied feeling. I'd acted like a real dick and pissed my family off to the point where they told me they didn't want me around any more.

What really chapped my ass was why they hated me so much in the first place. I thought things were getting better. I'd obviously been busy lately, but to outright despise me enough to not talk to me at all seemed like a bit of an overreaction to me. Did they think I'd abandoned them, or left them to survive through this hell without me? Did they want me to help Mum more? I was doing my best. It wasn't my fault that Ernest Hemingway set impossible standards for manhood. I wished I could have explained it all to them. I nearly stopped at the end of our road and turned around with the full and honest intention of telling them exactly what was going on and why I'd been so busy for the past long while. They thought I was trying to get away from them, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

They weren't going to listen to me. I'd been a bastard, and they'd told me where to go. Even the little one had used the edge of disdain in her voice, learned all too early from her elder sows. Home was supposed to be the one place where you could recharge and get going again, but that last jaunt home was anything but recharging. Maybe it was a man versus woman thing. Maybe they were taking their anger at Dad for dying out on me because I just so happened to be a dude, too.

I didn't know what to do or where to go. I couldn't go home. I didn't have work today, and if I went to work, they'd make me work, and I didn't feel like working. In fact, if I was to go into work feeling the way I did, I was liable to dump the fryer contents out on some fat kid's head if he asked for a refill of anything. Actually, I think the first fat person that I saw come into that place would get the contents of the fryer dumped over their head. I didn't know why I had a vendetta against fat people right then, but they would be my target.

I decided against going into work.

Viktor was off with his dad on some insane hunting day trip, actively pursuing a Kodiak bear in hopes of fighting the bear in hand-to-hand combat. Viktor was more the eyes of the journey, because his dad wasn't going to let him fight the bear. No, that special right was reserved for daddy dearest, and it was intended to be a fight to the death. Viktor didn't have the heart to tell his dad that Kodiak bears lived several thousand miles to the North, and I knew he was kind of enjoying the bonding time with his old man.

There was one person that I hadn't talked to for a few days, someone who made my stomach and heart mix into one organ every time I thought about her. I hadn't even called her since the day I'd asked her to have a kid with me.

I knew every back way to her house, but today I felt it was fitting to go the proper way, along the streets and sticking to the road. I'd asked her something pretty huge, and had forced an answer out of her. There was bound to be some weirdness between us, so hopping through her backyard and letting myself into her kitchen wouldn't go over well.

I really hoped her dad wasn't there. I hoped he was at the restaurant, working away without a worry about stupid little Will running through his head. Maybe the fryer that I'd so gleefully pictured emptying onto fat people was broken down and he was hip deep in paperwork and fryer bits.

Her house was green with light blue trim. The lawn was a little long, by anal retentive lawn standards. Dandelions poked up here and there, which reminded me of how close to the summer we were getting.

Her door was yellow.

Jodi's dad was a bit of a colour madman, and had painted his house with bold primary colours, making it look very much like the inside of a basic set of crayons. I reached up to the knocker, which was a smiling gargoyle face with a huge iron ring shoved into its ears. I knocked three times, and waited.

If everything went my way, Jodi would open the door, look at me in a way that made me feel as if she hadn't lived a full life since we last saw each other, and she'd take me in full embrace and kiss me as if the world was ending. That was the ultimate scenario. In the realistic scenario, crafted by the logical side of my brain, Jodi would open the door, invite me in awkwardly, offer me some cold beverage and a snack of a savoury and crunchy variety, and then we'd talk until the sun came up again.

I prayed for either of those scenarios.

I heard footsteps from within. They were shuffling footsteps, as if the foot owner couldn't be bothered to lift their feet from the ground. As they got closer to the door, my breath became short, and I wanted the footsteps to go away. I wanted the person to turn back around and go back into the house. No matter who it was, I wasn't ready to see them.

I shouldn't have knocked.

It was too late to run away now; they would see me for sure. I was going to hyperventilate. If I passed out and Jodi opened the door to see my unconscious, sweaty body sprawled all over her front stairs, it would take more than a night of talking to get her back. I tried to calm my breathing. I closed my eyes and began counting. It didn't work. I counted in Spanish. I could only go up to ten, because I stopped taking Spanish in Grade Nine because the girl I liked in the class decided to go into band the next year. I kept my eyes closed as the door opened, so I didn't see the punch that came straight at me and broke my nose.

I stumbled backwards and awkwardly fell down the stairs. Luckily there were only three, so it wasn't that bad, but because of the shuddering pile of blood and gooey cartilage that was now my nose taking most of my attention, I got a huge scrape on my right knee on the last step. The puncher was still standing in the doorway. I hadn't looked yet, but I could feel them there. 

It was Jodi.

It had to be Jodi.

"Sarah Bilkworth?"she cried.

It was a terrible voice. I knew right away how she'd found out about the Sarah Bilkworth plan, because there was only one way she could have found out. Viktor was going to have to die.

I blinked the tears out of my eyes and cleaned some of the blood away from my nose. Jodi was looking down at me from the top step. The hand that had punched me was still balled up in a fist. I'd never seen her so mad.

"This is going to sound really stupid and really dramatic, Will," she said, her voice shaking with rage. "But I never want to see you again. Ever."

I tried to stand up.

"Jodi..." I gargled.

She whipped around and went back inside the house. She slammed the door without looking back.

"Jodi!" I called.

She didn't answer.

I painfully limped up the stairs and pounded on the door until my hands were two giant bruises.

"Please, Jodi! Just let me explain!" I cried. "It's all part of being a man!"

Looking back on what I'd said, 'it's all part of being a man' was possibly one of the worst choices I could have made. It didn't paint me in a favourable light at all. I could hear her crying somewhere deep in the house, and I longed to go and comfort her. Up to that point, Viktor and I had sworn by the code that if a girl needed comforting, and you provided that comfort, you were five hundred points closer to making something happen with that girl. Right then, Jodi crying her eyes out somewhere in her parents' house was stirring some natural comforting instinct that I hadn't used in a very long time, and I didn't care if comforting her would get me seventy-five billion points closer to making anything happen with her; all I wanted to happen was Jodi to stop crying and to feel better.

"It's a really silly thing, actually," I shouted at the door. "Sarah Bilkworth has huge mum boobs already, so I just thought that it would be convenient to ask her to be my mum of choice. There was one little snag, though, and that snag was the fact that I've never been on a date in my whole life. I thought you'd be a good one to try dating with because I felt safe with you. Then something really inconvenient happened. I realized I've been in love with you my whole life."

I didn't hear anything from within the house, so I turned away from the door and started down the stairs.

I felt like crap.

"I just wish we'd started sooner so we could have had that much longer together," I muttered, only loud enough for me to hear.

I thought about what would have been like if we'd even started going out a few months ago, and had had a chance to really get know each other in more ways than just as friends. We would have made a great couple, and we would have been the greatest parents that ever walked the planet. We wouldn't have spoiled our children, the kids would have been amazing at everything, and we would have supported them in anything they wanted to do, as long as it didn't hurt anybody, unless it was a contact sport and everyone agreed that getting a little bit injured from time to time was all a part of the gig.

None of that was going to happen now. Jodi hated me so much, she was probably going to have to change her to name to 'The Hating Girl' because that was the only emotion she had room for anymore. Hopefully she would get over it someday and be able to have kids with someone else.

I turned back to face the house that I would never see again, unless one day Jodi and her parents moved out, and I got countless thousands of dollars, and then decided to buy my ex-girlfriend's parents house in some sick and lame grasp at what could have been.

I breathed heavily and took one last glance around. I was going to miss Jodi and her house. The pear tree that was now gnarling around half of the front yard had been planted there by Jodi herself years earlier, when Jodi's grandpa had visited and brought some pear seeds for planting. He'd been an insane old man with war stories that didn't go anywhere, and he missed Jodi's grandma dearly. He passed on a few years ago, and I'd been the first one Jodi called.

"What have I done?" I whispered, clueless to the answer.

Maybe there was no answer.

I turned around to walk away, but as I did, I caught sight of one of the curtains in a top floor window. The curtains were fluttering violently as if a heavy wind was whipping it around, but the window was closed. I looked for a few seconds longer, but the curtain didn't move again.

Jodi had said her goodbye.