"None?" His younger self wasn't quick on the uptake. He needed his nose rubbed in things. He looked at Justin's left hand. "You're not wearing a wedding ring," he said.
He'd just noticed. Justin's answering nod was grim. His younger self asked, "Does that mean we don't get married?"
Say it ain't so. Justin did: "We get married, all right. And then we get divorced."
His younger self went as pale as he had when he first saw Justin. Even at twenty-one, he knew too much about divorce. Here-and-now, his father was living with a woman not much older than he was. His mother was living with a woman not much older than he was, too. That was why he had his own apartment: paying his rent was easier for his mom and dad than paying him any real attention.
But, however much himself-at-twenty-one knew about divorce, he didn't know enough. He'd just been a fairly innocent bystander. He hadn't gone through one from the inside. He didn't understand the pain and the emptiness and the endless might-have-beens that kept going through your mind afterward.
Justin had had those might-have-beens inside his head since he and Megan had fallen apart. But he was in a unique position, sitting here in the Pine Tree eating kimchi.
He could do something about them.
He could. If his younger self let him.
Said younger self blurted, "That can't happen."
"It can. It did. It will," Justin said.
The muscle started twitching again.
"But-how?" Himself-at-twenty-one sounded somewhere between bewildered and shocked. "We aren't like Mom and Dad-we don't fight all the time, and we don't look for something on the side wherever we can find it." Even at twenty-one, he spoke of his parents with casual contempt. Justin thought no better of them in 2018.
He said, "You can fight about sex, you can fight about money, you can fight about in-laws. We ended up doing all three, and so…" He set down his chopsticks and spread his hands wide. "We broke up-will break up-if we don't change things. That's why I figured out how to come back: to change things, I mean."