My father sighs, a little.
Todd tunes the radio to a news station and settles back into his green beans. The radio switches from weather to local news. A few car accidents, a stabbing, and two shootings, both in Glenmont. One was through the window of this craft store, Michael’s, about a quarter mile from the Glenmont metro. The bullet didn’t hit anyone. An hour later and two miles away, a bullet did—someone in the parking lot of the Shopper’s Food Warehouse. He’s dead.
My father shakes his head while he drinks.
“Weird it made the news,” Todd said. “People get shot all the time.”
My father says, “Not while they’re shopping,” which is pretty representative of his world view. My dad’s old enough that even September 11th didn’t change his mind that violence only happens to violent people. The only people who get stabbed are in gangs. The only people who get shot, shot someone else first. As much as my bleeding heart wants to convince him this is wrong, the truth is most of the violence here is revenge-driven or gang-related. I should know, I mean, I go to public school.
The first shooting was at 5:20. That was when Lio kissed me, that was the exact minute. I know because I checked my watch afterward because I wanted to see how long it lasted, then I realized I hadn’t checked my watch before he kissed me, so I’d never know. But I don’t think it was very long, really.
No one died in the 5:20 shooting, which would have been kind of crazy romantic in this horrible way, and it would have given me an excuse to call him. But I don’t think he would like the symbolism of “so, we’re just a like a bullet that didn’t hit anybody” any more than I do.
God, I hope he wouldn’t like it any more than I do.
My mom finishes her dinner and stands up. “Ready, Craig?”
I say “Yeah,” and pull on my jacket. I hope I don’t get shot. That’s pretty weird. I’ve never thought anything like that before. That kiss has me all screwed up.
We swing our flashlights back and forth, whistling and calling out names. Mom checks behind bushes and under the railing of the walkway to the metro. There’s a couple making out on the bridge above us. I think it’s one boy and one girl. Todd swears that he saw two homeless people having sex up there once—one boy and one girl.
“There are a lot of frogs here,” I say. “We could get a frog.”
She laughs in this way that says she doesn’t know if I’m kidding.
“I only go for the fuzzy ones,” I tell her.
“All right.”
I take my comment out of context in my head and giggle a little. I only go for the fuzzy ones. Heh. This is a gross thing to be laughing about in front of your mom.
She’s wearing the brown patchwork jacket I got her a million Christmases ago. She blows on her hands and runs them through her hair. “I hope we find Casablanca,” she says. “She’s my favorite.” Casablanca is a Labrador retriever. She’s old and missing a leg.
“We’ll find her,” I say. “She’s easy. Easy to describe in posters and stuff. Easy to hear coming.”
But the cold is making my nose run and making it a little hard to breathe, and right now nothing sounds very easy.
I wipe my nose.
Mom flicks her flashlight beam to me, and I look away quickly. “It’s cold,” I say stupidly, and crunch some of the leaves on the ground. It’s not like she’d get upset if I were crying. I cry like three times a day, so it’s the opposite of a big deal. It’d be like getting concerned every time I eat a meal.
Mom says, “I called the shelter this morning. They have all their descriptions, and they’re all looking out, just waiting for someone to bring them in.”
“Okay.”
She says, “I’m so sorry this happened, sweetheart.”
“We’re going to find them. We’re going to find all of them. That’s right, yeah?”
“Yes.” Mom cups her hand around the back of my head. “That’s right.”
I felt better when Lio comforted me, but it’s still nice to be here for a minute, with Mom, searching for animals that she never even wanted.
We find Jupiter, who’s this amazing Chihuahua-pug mix, trying to pick a fight with some bigger dogs a few blocks away. We start to head home with him, and my heart is pounding against his little body, and then we find Caramel, and just when everything feels so, so amazing, we find my parakeet, Fernando, except he’s dead.
It’s like a punch in the chest.
But Caramel and Jupiter scurry out of my arms as soon as we’re home and go rub up against the couch and chew on the rug, and everything feels a little more possible again.
I leave them for a minute to go outside. I make a cross out of sticks and scratch Fernando’s name in the dirt, then I cross it out and write Flamingo instead. He would have liked that.
But he isn’t buried here. I didn’t move his body from where we found it by the side of the road. I was too scared. I didn’t want to touch it. I suck.
We’re still missing:
Three dogs.
Three cats.
Three rabbits.
A guinea pig.
I close my eyes and listen to the animals inside my head and the memory of his chirping and the silence all the way around me.
LIO
CRAIG IS THE ROCK IN MY PROVERBIAL SHOE.
He’s completely unavailable. He told me himself.
“I’m like sold-out movie tickets, is what I am,” he once said. “I’m, like, at that same level, is the thing, and I’m not saying you would care or anything, but just in case like, that friend of yours wanted to hit on me or something, you should maybe just let her know that I’m completely unavailable. And gay, but that would be like such a lesser problem than how unavailable I am, because I am that unavailable.”
And then he sticks himself right onto my life. And onto my mind. He is unavailable and inescapable.
A while ago, he had this boyfriend. Cody. Stuff didn’t work out. I have a feeling the guy treated Craig like shit, but I don’t know details.
But now Craig isn’t open to affection from anything that doesn’t have fur. This explains why, even after an afternoon looking for his animals, I’m home instead of with him. He didn’t ask me to stay. It doesn’t explain why I kissed him.
I guess his face explains why I kissed him. I’m weak.
And I like that he wants me to talk. I’m not really going to talk. It’s nothing personal, and it’s not deep or exciting. It’s just something I don’t do.
But he wants me to. There’s something interesting about the way he wants me to, because his reasons are different from my family’s and my teachers’ and my therapist’s. They want to know that I’m normal. When I talk, they feel better.
Craig wants to know what I have to say.
I wish he knew that, the truth is, I don’t have much say. I’m not an enigma. I’m just talked out, probably permanently. I said all I needed to say when I was a boy made of sticks and radiation and half-digested oatmeal. I don’t feel good. I want to go home. Make it stop. It’s been seven years, and I’m still out of words.
Kissing him also probably has something to do with the fact that I’m so bored that I either want to die or jump on the next plane home.
My sister Jasper says, “Weren’t you in Glenmont today?”
I don’t know how she knows this. Maybe she analyzed the gravel samples from my sneakers.
I shrug and turn back to my computer. I’m trying to write an email. It’s really irritating emailing with Craig, because he responds a few seconds after I hit send. It’s gratifying, but problematic, as it takes me an hour to write a few witty paragraphs.
And what do I say to him now? How am I even supposed to explain?
Craigy—
Funny story, I saw a little chocolate on your lips and realized I was ravenously hungry. Sorry for attacking your face.
Hell no.
“Two people were shot in Glenmont today,” she says.
Sometimes it’s like Jasper neve
r lived in New York.
And I saw the news too. One person got shot, and one store full of people watched a bullet glide harmlessly onto the floor. Jasper wants to be a writer, and she can’t even get her facts straight.
She sighs. “Come on. I’m taking you to therapy tonight.”
I make a face because it’s my duty to, as her little brother, but the truth is I don’t mind Jasper all that much. Growing up, we used to have all these family talent shows, and Jasper and I always won. We were the true rock stars of the family, since my twin brother, Theodore—yeah, Theo and Lio, it’s a problem—preferred being in the audience. The rest of our sisters were too young or too old to qualify for our fantasy band. I can sing, and Jasper knows how to shred an air guitar.
Theodore never participated in the talent shows. He was a whiny kid and always said he wasn’t feeling good enough, even though I would be up there singing my heart out in front of the fireplace, if it was a good week, or on top of my hospital bed, if it wasn’t. I sang even more as I got well, which is something else Theo never did.
He’s the reason I’m in therapy. My mother’s abandonment and the cancer as a whole and September 11th also have something to do it with, but Theo is the reason everyone knows I need therapy. Theo is the reason I don’t like to talk.
There isn’t some long, drawn-out, tortured explanation. It’s really pretty basic.
My brother and I had the same face.
My brother and I had the same voice.
For some reason, he was born to talk and I was born to sing. We always knew that.
For some reason, we both got cancer.
For some reason, here I am.
Yaaay therapy. I’ve been in it for seven years. That’s almost half my life, and longer than any human has any excuse to be in therapy. It’s a testament, at the very least, to the longevity of my . . . something. Whatever it is that’s wrong with me. Not cancer.
When we decided we were moving, no one even considered not finding me a new therapist. It was a priority nearly as high as finding a place to live.
“You’re a little fucked up, aren’t you?” this therapist said in our first meeting, after she’d finished reading through my file. She’d skimmed it already, she said, but she read through it twice again while I sat there, since it was probably clear I didn’t have much to say. She then told me I was a little fucked up, and I decided I liked her.
Her name is Adelle. We’ve been meeting for two months now, so, in therapist-time, we’re basically best friends. She’s not so hard to talk to, probably because I know she can’t get bored of me and walk away. She doesn’t care that there isn’t much to me. She still gets paid.
So today I tell her about Craig, and looking for the animals, and kissing him. She says she didn’t know I was gay. I say that’s pretty stupid, since I’ve definitely mentioned my Gerard Butler dreams, and did she think those were purely metaphorical?
“I was practically there when that man got shot,” I say.
“Really. In Glenmont today?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting,” she says, and then doesn’t speak for a minute. “So, do you feel like you escaped something?”
“Not really. Why would someone kill me?”
“I don’t know,” she says, in this way like she’s leading me, but what else am I supposed to feel? I’m not going to walk around worrying that someone’s going to shoot me.
She lets us sit there in silence for a minute. Then she says, “So how do you feel about kissing Craig?”
I chew on my fingernails. No words are coming to me.
“Are you interested in him?” she asks.
This is a euphemism. Do you like him? was the euphemism in grade school. Now it’s Are you interested in him?
I’m interested in Craig because Craig is interesting. He’ll talk forever, and he never worries about saying something stupid. I once heard him have an entire conversation with himself about whether he should bring his biology book to history or come back and grab it between classes. He didn’t know I was listening, but once he realized I was there, he wasn’t embarrassed. He went right back into his conversation, his head, his world. Seriously, five minutes on whether to bring his biology book.
He’s unscared and he’s interesting. He has a menagerie and funny clothes and a good sense of humor.
That’s not what Adelle wants to know. She wants to know if I’m interested in Craig.
I shrug. Yes.
I like him.
I want to share my lunch with him. As long as we’re talking grade school, this is how I feel.
Back when we used to IM all the time, before I met him, he told me this, in a series of messages—so just so you know, im not really a fifty-eight-year-old fat guy or anything, but i thought you should know, in case my appearance was of any consequence to you, that im not exceptionally gorgeous or anything and i really couldnt win people’s sexiest man alive, no matter what that cashier at the supermarket said. youre probably straight, so i doubt this is real important to you, but i kinda thought you should know, just in case you thought the school chose me as an ambassador for my eight-pack or golden blond hair or something.
So I said okay. But then I saw him. His hair might not be golden blond—he’s black, so that would be a little weird—but his eyes kind of are. That zip-up red hoodie he wears makes him look like he just got back from apple picking. And God I need to shut up because I might be growing a vagina.
Adelle says, “Lio?”
“I’m listening,” I say. But she isn’t saying anything.
She laughs a little. “That’s not exactly how this is supposed to work.”
Sometimes I hate therapy.
I pick up the Play-Doh and start building a snowman. Therapist’s offices always come equipped with things to do besides pay attention.
“Looking forward to the holidays?” she asks, watching me.
That’s sort of a stretch. Snowmen are really easy to make out of Play-Doh. “I’m Jewish.”
“I didn’t say Christmas.”
That’s true. Damn.
“I don’t care,” I say.
This is a bad session, and it’s my fault. I try very hard to use my therapy time well. That’s why it’s all the more depressing that I still need it.
Get better. Get better. Everyone wants you to get better.
“Do you want to talk about the shootings?” Adelle asks.
“Two random shootings.”
“If you think they’re stupid, why did you bring them up?”
“Thought you’d be interested.”
“Why?”
I pull my snowman into pieces. “It’s the kind of thing people always care about. I almost had a near-death experience.”
“And?”
She has me talking and she knows it.
I say. “Almost having a near-death experience is the next best thing to actually having one. If you want to be interesting.”
“And having a near-death experience is the next best thing to actually dying?”
I shrug.
Adelle makes a note on her pad. It looks like a check mark. She says, “So do you feel like it was a near-death experience?”
What? “No.” I step on my shoelace and pull it out of its bow. “But . . .”
“Talk.”
“Just . . . I didn’t almost die in nine eleven.”
“Yes?”
“Neither did my friends. But . . . for a long time, we kept comparing. Who was closer to almost dying. Closer to the towers. Trying to beat each other.”
“And you didn’t like that?”
“Proximity isn’t a merit badge. It doesn’t actually mean anything.” I put my snowman back together. This time, I give him a hat.
I waste our last five minutes by thinking about Craig instead of talking. Eventually, Adelle says, “Okay, Lio. I’ll see you on Friday.”
CRAIG
I COME IN FROM FLAMINGO’S NOT-QUITE FUNERAL, and I spend so much t
ime hugging the animals that it takes me a while to check my email, which is weird, because it’s usually the first thing I do, and then the second thing, and then the third, refresh refresh refresh.
I got an email from Lio. I don’t think I’d know anything about Lio if not for emails and those IMs. But I’m not sure how much he would mean to me if all I saw was the confident, kind of douchey boy who writes these emails and IMs, as much as I like that boy. I don’t know how all the parts of Lio manage to mash up and work for me, but somehow it happens. Somehow the bits and pieces of him keep coming together in my head again and again, like when you watch The Wizard of Oz while playing The Dark Side of the Moon, and somehow it all fits together. Even though it’s probably not supposed to.
Anyway, I got this email.
Craig—
Hope your house is a little noisier already. Let me know if you need to borrow a TV. My sister Veronica’s set is still here in some box. She’s too holistic for it now, or something.
But really, I hope it’s louder because there are more animals.
Went to therapy. You’ll be happy to know I’m still a little fucked up. We didn’t talk about DEAD BROTHER this session. Kind of a gyp. Veronica would hit me if she knew I said gyp.
Can I be honest with you? I like talking about DEAD BROTHER with you a lot more than I like talking about him with thera thera therapist (that’s her full name). So if you want to talk about it or whatever? If you ever need a reason to feel depressed or you want to feel thankful for your lymphocytes or whatever, yeah, I can hook you up.
I liked that shirt you wore today.
We can talk about me getting all cougar (you’re more than six months younger than me, you know) on you if you want. Or we can pretend that it’s just that thing where two gay boys kiss because they’re the only two gay boys around. Like on sitcoms. And then we adopt a Vietnamese baby.
I’m not delusional enough to think this is a sitcom. It’s not like I have wedding bands picked out or something.
See you tomorrow.
Lio
I’m not sure I can deal with this tonight. The self-awareness of it is kind of killing me—how many times did Lio edit this email? It’s so fucking carefully constructed, and that’s not the kind of thing I can handle, so I always just reply as fast as I can without thinking and right now I’m just so tired.