Here the Whole Time(10)

“Of course, I bought a thing or two for you so you wouldn’t be jealous, now that I have a second son!” my mom says while rummaging through the bags for my presents. “Here!” she yells in excitement, and hands me a bag.

“Thanks, Mom,” I say, a bit uncertain, because that’s what Caio’s presence does to me.

I stick my hand in the bag and feel like dying when the first thing I pull out is a pack of underwear.

“I got you new briefs,” my mom starts, “because I went to wash one of yours, and for god’s sake, Felip—”

“THANKS, MOM!” I repeat, almost shouting in order to get her to stop talking. Caio muffles a laugh.

I hide the briefs under the couch pillow and go back to exploring the clothes in the bag. One gray shirt, one black sweatshirt, one pair of jeans, as if I were the most boring participant in the history of a fashion TV show. But the last item surprises me. At first I think it’s a tablecloth, but it’s a checkered flannel shirt. It’s black and red, kind of like a lumberjack Kurt Cobain. It looks nice, but it’s not my style.

“Caio picked that one! I wanted to get you something a little more dressy. But Caio liked the color,” my mom explains, and I don’t know how to react.

“I hope you like it. I think red will look good on you,” Caio says, a gigantic smile on his face. I try to smile back and lower my eyes to look at the checkered shirt.

I feel my face burn and realize that if there were a contest between my face and this shirt to see which is the reddest, my face would definitely win the grand prize.

I try to process the idea that there exists in the world a color that looks good on me that’s not black or gray. Red. I was wrong this whole time.

The house goes silent for a few seconds until my mom resumes her chatter all over again.

“Help me organize these bags, and, Felipe, order a pizza for us. I’m not getting in that kitchen today, not even to paint!”

She’s laughing, and so is Caio. But this time I’m not jealous. I’m happy. Because the two of them are, officially, my favorite people in the world.

We have pizza for dinner and play three rounds of Uno (my mom wins twice, and Caio wins the other one), and it’s late by the time I decide to retreat into my bedroom to sleep. I give up on the beige pajamas and am back to my old habits: old shorts and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt that I can’t wear outside anymore because it has a hole under the armpit.

I leave the bedroom door open one more time, feeding the little bit of hope I still have in me. I don’t know if it’s luck, destiny, or Venus in the house of Mars, but for the first time in my life, things start to go the way I was hoping.

I’m lying in bed, checking what’s new on Twitter, when I hear a slight knock on the door. I lift my head and see Caio standing there, holding a pillow and looking like an abandoned puppy.

I don’t know what to say, so I keep staring at my phone and tweet my reaction: Houhfjkxhfdoduighl. Send tweet.

“So, um … Hi. Can I sleep here tonight? It’s … the couch, you know? It—” Caio starts to explain himself.

“It’s terrible. I know. You can say it,” I interrupt, trying to sound funny. But I think my answer ends up sounding a bit rude, so I try to fix it by being cute: “Of course you can sleep here! It should have been that way from the beginning, but I … well, you know. I’m sorry. Make yourself comfortable. I’m sorry, again.”

Caio just stands there looking at me, and I almost break out into a rendition of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, when I suddenly realize that I put away the guest mattress. I get up to pull out the retractable bed where Caio is going to sleep and apologize three more times. Two because I bump into him in the process and a third one for no apparent reason. I do all that in darkness because at no point did I realize that it might be a good idea to turn the lights back on. But Caio doesn’t seem to mind.

When the guest bed is all set, I go back to my own bed and try to assume a position in which my belly won’t flop to the side, so the hole in my shirt won’t show. The room is still dark, so I honestly don’t know why I even care. Caio throws the pillow onto the mattress, lies down, and lets out a sigh of relief. I can imagine him saying, “With god as my witness, I’ll never sleep on that couch again!” like in that scene in Gone with the Wind.

But he doesn’t say a thing.

Neither do I.

I keep staring at my phone screen. Surprisingly, I got two likes on my last tweet. I start typing “How to start a conversation” in Google, but even before I hit search, Caio breaks the silence.

“Thanks, Felipe.”

“For the bed? I told you. It’s fine.”

“Also for the bed. But I meant the book. That you left for me. Thank you.”

“Ah. Yes. The Two Towers. A good one. I hope you like it.”

And there I am, thinking this would be another standard-issue dialogue in my collection of standard-issue dialogues with Caio, but he keeps going:

“I’ll take good care of it, don’t worry! It looks like it means a lot to you. It even has a personal dedication. Who’s Thereza?”

“My grandmother. It was the last present she gave me before she died,” I say, swallowing hard.

My grandmother, Thereza, would always give me books as Christmas and birthday presents. Most of them were classics that I never felt like reading, but after she was gone, I ended up reading all of them to feel closer to her. In all the books, she always wrote the same dedication: