Yet another evening had gone by without any substantial progress made toward ascertaining the whereabouts of NGA’s secret age-manipulating technology. The ride home from the waterpark had been a quiet one; neither the snarky Ernesto nor the jovial Jackson cared to release the van from the palpably unbearable tension between their younger colleagues in the back. Dinner had proved even quieter than that… It wasn’t until the boys’ bedtime, Scott and Kai requiring an earlier one than their comparably mature housemates, that Scott dared utter a word to the victim of his selfish, short-sighted crime.
Scott took no great pleasure in seeing his crafty rival relegated to the same elementary status as himself. Nor did he enjoy the agent’s further descent into fully fledged boyhood, cartoon briefs and all. It had actually come as a mild disappointment to him, seeing his once towering, confident crush now completely devoid of even a semblance of masculinity. The newly minted 8-year-old lied still in bed, his soft features bathing in the warm, golden glow of the nightlight between their beds.
“Kai, I’m so—,” Scott started.
“Shut up, Scott,” the other boy hissed.
“Can we please just talk?” Scott wanted desperately to apologize, to say sorry a thousand times for his terrible transgression.
Kai rolled his eyes, relenting. “Fine. You wanna talk? Let’s talk.” He rolled over to the hidden side of his bed, falling from beneath the covers and landing deftly on the floor below. Scott emerged from his own bed, scuttling across the dimly lit room.
His face was wholly indistinguishable from a third grader finding himself in the principal’s office for the first time. “Kai, you have to understand, I—”
“You what, Scott?” Kai was practically spitting in his face. “You fucking forgot the one goddamn job you had here?”
Scott flinched, taken aback by the boy’s willingness to return to such adult language, even if their conversation was hidden from Barrie and the audience.
Kai continued, relentless in his castigation of his shame-ridden counterpart. “Care to explain why you thought it was a good idea to completely tank my age advantage, especially after they gave Jackson an even bigger one?”
Scott’s head couldn’t have sunk any lower. His shame manifested in small, anxious writhing, wishing he hadn’t instigated this conversation in the first place. He wasn’t sure how to tell Kai the real reason. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know… but he just couldn’t stop himself in that moment. His impulsive, childlike behavior had won out over the years of cautious planning and execution in his very precise profession.
“I just… You were asking that guy for his number… and it made me feel weird.” Scott explained, wincing at each pause, fearful that Kai would cut him off to resume his rightful lambasting.
Kai’s eyes widened in realization. “Oh Christ, Scott! You actually have feelings for me?!”
Scott tilted his head up just a bit, enough to meet eyes with the other boy. “Umm, maybe, I guess.”
“SCOTT. WAKE UP,” he spat in a frantic whisper. “You’re telling me I’m 8 years old because you got jealous of a kid who could barely pass his driving test? Did they give you a little boy brain to match your body because I can’t imagine a man of your prestige being this fucking stupid!”
“Kai, I’m sorry!” he stammered.
“Your apology doesn’t change the fact that both of us are this much closer to a lifetime of diaper changes!” Kai countered.
A puzzled furrow of Scott’s brow told Kai that his remark had not gone unnoticed.
“Oh, please. Don’t tell me you didn’t consider that possibility!” Kai accused. “After that little show at the waterpark, it’s obvious that the tech isn’t confined to being used in the house. In fact, it was probably still in this house that whole time, attuned to our DNA, functioning in a long-range, remote capacity. And how do you think the NGA production team is going to feel when they review all of this season’s footage—and I mean really comb through it—and they discover the two of us snooping around doing what they can only assume is contract work to infiltrate the show and snatch the tech?”
Scott gasped, the implications finally clear to him.
“You think they’re gonna just let you and me grow up after that?” Kai shook his head. “We’ll be eating in highchairs and riding in strollers until our minds turn to mush.”
“No, people would notice!” Scott denied.
“And they’d play it off as a terrible, sad, and exceedingly rare side effect of the tech. The world would move on, and we’d be watching the next hundred seasons of NGA from our playpens…” He paused, letting out a long, exhausted sigh. “Now leave me alone. I obviously don’t need your help if this is what it looks like.”
The words resonated and echoed in Scott’s head. As Kai shooed him back to his bed, willing him to reflect upon these words and take his job more seriously, Scott felt as though a resolution hadn’t really been reached, as though Kai was disinterested in him now. He wanted so badly to let the imminent threat of an unending toddlerhood, or even infancy, be a more daunting motivator than the chastisement of the rival agent, but little Scottie couldn’t quite discern which of the blows had hit harder. He slinked under the covers once more, shielding himself from the searing scrutiny of the embattled Kai, who hadn’t even bothered to tell the boy goodnight.