His Master’s Voice, Brandon thought. It was an adult thought in its wryness; he enjoyed them when they occurred. Brandon had, in fact, since many years ago, wanted to be an adult. He had wanted to be larger; to drive a car, to talk about Important Things; to be — so it seemed — free. To be in control.

And now, he sat on a torn ottoman in a cluttered living room in a run-down house in a tiny, odoriferous, lower-income seaside community that — as he had overheard — his mother and stepfather could barely afford, watching his mother silently battle a woman she barely knew, and a man she had discovered that she knew even less, seeking said woman’s approval as if he were Brandon’s age. And he began to wonder what, exactly, he had been yearning for.

And with mounting fear, he began to affirm what he had suspected: that the world of adults was no fundamentally better than his own; no more predictable; no more moral, or honorable, or believable.

And it terrified him. It terrified him as a matter of course, and it terrified him most acutely in this moment.