In the Middle of Somewhere (Middle of Somewhere, #1)(131)

“That’s nice of you.”

“But, um, I invited him… here. Is that okay?”

Rex smiles again.

“Yeah. It’s great.” He eats a few more bites. “Listen, about that.” My head shoots up, sure he’s about to say that actually I shouldn’t have invited Leo over. “I know you and Ginger have plans for Chanukah, but will you be here for Christmas?”

“Oh, um, I guess so. I hadn’t thought about it. Why?”

Rex slings an arm over the back of my chair.

“I thought maybe we could have Christmas together. You know, like, decorate and make dinner and….” He looks down. “You think it’s lame.”

“No! No, I don’t. I just… honestly, the closest to Christmas decorations I’ve come in the last twenty-five years is shitty seasonal ale. No, that’s not true. Brian did stack all the beer cans into a pyramid that looked like a Christmas tree one year.”

Rex strokes my cheek.

“What would you like for Christmas dinner?”

I immediately look at the remains of the chicken on the counter and Rex laughs.

“You really like roast chicken, huh? Okay, we can do that. I think I might have some decorations in my workshop somewhere.”

He starts to clean up, but I wave at him to sit down and gather the plates. Doing the dishes is the least I can do since Rex always cooks.

“Actually, Ginger made these awesome ornaments out of beer cans a few years ago. She used Bud Light cans because they’re blue—you know, for Chanukah. She cut them into these little angels. They were pretty awesome. She had a tree in the shop that she put them on. She gets very pissed off that Chanukah doesn’t have a tree so she just does one anyway. Don’t even try and call it a Chanukah bush, though, or you’ll get an earful about f*cking Adam Sandler.”

Rex raises an eyebrow.

“Adam f*cking Sandler, I mean. She hates him.”

“My mom used to collect ornaments,” Rex says, staring out the window behind me where snow has started to fall again. “They were all these Marilyn Monroes. Lots of different poses. The one where her dress blows up from The Seven Year Itch, one from Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, some of just her face.”

He looks back at me and smiles self-consciously.

“What happened to the ornaments?” I ask him, but he just shakes his head.

“I don’t know.”




“HOLY SHIT,” I say, as I look through the pile of Leo’s transcripts and SAT scores that is scattered over Rex’s kitchen table. “I mean, I know test scores aren’t everything, but, shit, Leo, these scores are amazing.” I frown at his transcripts. “I don’t understand. You aced calculus your freshman year; why did you take geometry and algebra after that? You should have been taking college-level math.”

“My parents wouldn’t pay for it,” he said. “And the school district wouldn’t pay to bus me to Traverse City for Advanced Placement classes, so. Besides, you don’t know what I looked like as a sophomore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t have gone to college classes; I looked about ten.”

“Aw, a little Doogie Howser!”

“Seriously, Daniel, update your references.”

“Okay, well, I see why you graduated early. You took every class your podunk little high school offered.”

“Dude, I think ‘podunk’ is, like, totally ethnically offensive.”

Rex walks in from his workshop before I can google “podunk” to see if Leo’s right. He smells of fresh wood shavings and sweat and it’s only the fact that there’s a teenager in the room that keeps me from jumping his bones.

“Hey, Leo,” Rex says.

“Hello, Rex,” Leo says, his flirtation-o-meter apparently tuned back to Rex’s frequency now that Will’s out of town.

“Um,” Rex says, “I’m gonna make lunch; you guys want something?”

“Oh, thank god,” Leo says. “Yes, please. I’m starving, but I didn’t want to say anything in case Daniel offered to cook.”

“Hey!”

“No offense,” Leo tosses over his shoulder at me, then he’s back to watching Rex’s muscles flex as he pulls food out of the fridge. I understand the impulse.

“You know, Leo,” I say, shuffling through the stack of applications he’s printed off, “I can’t help but notice that most of these schools are near New York City.” Rex gives me a look over Leo’s head that says Be nice.

“Ermghm,” Leo says, blushing.

“And I can’t help but remember that Will lives in New York City.” Leo’s hands twist into a complicated formation behind his back. Rex is shaking his head at me, amused. “I just meant that if you go to New York to look at schools, maybe Will could show you around,” I say innocently.

Leo shakes his head and drops back into his chair.

“Will doesn’t give a shit about me,” he says with more bitterness than I’d realized he was capable of, and I feel instantly bad for teasing him.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Rex says, but I can tell he won’t outright lie to the kid so he can’t say anything more than that.