Going Grey by Karen Traviss Page B

getting a girlfriend — then he had to find a way to deal with it. Suddenly he wanted to scream at Gran for keeping it from him all these years, but the anger was replaced instantly by guilt and then the worst sense of loneliness he'd ever experienced. A bottomless pit opened up in his chest and his entire life plunged down it.
    He carried on mechanically, hauling garbage bags down the stairs to the back yard ready for burning, but when he went into Gran's room and opened her closet it almost took his legs from under him. He sat on the edge of her bed and tried to cry. All he could manage was dry sobs. Was this normal? Was this what you felt like when you lost someone, or was this peculiar to a monster like him?
    If only he could go back to being crazy. Crazy didn't stop him having a photo ID for a driving licence. How could he explain it if he morphed in front of someone? No girl would understand that. 
    But I never thought I'd have a proper life like everyone else anyway, did I? What difference does it make?
    He threw himself back into purging the house. Perhaps he'd find something hidden away, some letter or photo that would suddenly make things all right again. But he knew he wouldn't.
    When he went to the bathroom, he checked the mirror. His eyes were slightly different, still a muddy hazel but not quite the same shape.
    So what's me? I had to start from somewhere.
    However hard he worked on clearing the house, he still wasn't exhausted enough to sleep. Oatie crept into his room and lay on the bed next to him, making little whining noises every time he tossed and turned. Eventually Ian gave up and went downstairs to watch a movie.
    Films were still his main yardstick for assessing the world beyond the ranch. The plots might have been total fiction, but he knew the attitudes and concerns of the characters were straight out of real life, or else people wouldn't have found them so interesting. And Gran had always said they'd teach him a lot about society's expectations of men. It must have been hard for her to bring up a boy on her own. He was still feeling guilty for being angry with a dead woman who'd spent her life looking after him, liar or not.
    He paused halfway along the shelf and pulled out a very old movie called Scott of the Antarctic . Gran had said it was a true story.
    "Let's try this one, Oatie," Ian said. The dog settled down next to him on the sofa. "Maybe it's got dogs in it."
    He put his feet up on the stool. Yes, it did have dogs in it, sled dogs, not that Oatie took any notice, and guys with really weird English accents that Ian was sure no real Brit had these days. But that wasn't what drew him in.
    It was about a polar expedition. It was bleak and depressing, but he couldn't stop watching. The grim struggle to be the first to the South Pole, the realisation that the Norwegians had beaten them to it, the awful journey back – it was painful to watch. And then a guy walked out into the snow to die to give his friends a better chance of survival, no fuss or drama, a man called Oates. They just carried on in the face of certain death.
    Who was going to rescue them? Ian waited for the upbeat ending.
    But there wasn't one. Nobody reached them in the nick of time, nobody at all. They all died, still stoic and writing notes to their families to the very end, and this wasn't just a script. It had actually happened. Tears welled in Ian's eyes.
    He sat staring at the screen, disturbed and lost long after the credits had rolled. That was what real men were supposed to do. They made sacrifices. They put their friends before themselves. They faced the worst with calm dignity. How many really did that? For some reason, the polite little film hit him even harder than some of the war movies he'd seen.
    He still preferred war films to just about anything else, though. It wasn't the action and the thrills. It was the questions . Could he do that? Would he have been that courageous? What was it like to feel so much a