"Yeah, that's no problem." He nodded easily. "I mean, hormones, the mood swings, the thinking you know a hell of a lot more than you do - I remember all that for sure. I think I can handle it, as long as I'm not expected to adopt somebody or something." There was that caveat. He wasn't ready to be a father, or a pretend father, or even a father figure. Cool uncle, maybe. "I mean, I'm not exactly Disney material."

That was just honesty. He wasn't Nani. He wasn't Jo March. He was rough around the edges, rough in the middle, and not exactly appropriate for people under the age of seventeen, if not eighteen.

"But..."

But.

"But I remember that a lot of the other guys I went to school with... No matter how bad off they were, they were usually there because of what someone else did. The root cause, I mean. What their mother or father or some other family member did, or a teacher, or older students, or... well, pick a person. Kids don't grow up to be jerks in a vacuum."