Just My Type(42)

Lincoln scrambles around me, racing into the living room as we follow behind him.

“It’s a hedgehog! Oh my gosh, it’s a freaking hedgehog!” Lincoln screams when he gets to the coffee table, dropping down on his knees to look in the cage. “They’re so cool, and awesome, and we learned about them last month in science class, and they like to cuddle, and take naps, and they don’t really have quills even though it looks like it. They’re just stiffer hairs, and they can eat dog or cat food!”

I nudge Ember with my elbow as Lincoln continues to rattle off every fact about the hedgehog that we spent the last few hours learning from the internet.

“See? Cool and awesome. You’re welcome,” I whisper to her.

“At least that little fucker isn’t hissing at him,” Ember whispers back.

Moving away from her, I walk over to the coffee table and turn the cage slightly away from Lincoln, so I can reach the door and unlatch it.

“This little guy kind of hates your mom at the moment,” I explain as I pull the hedgehog out, both of us looking back at Ember and sharing a laugh at her expense. “Just be careful with him at first, and see how he does with you.”

“There was a cow on my grandparents’ farm that hated her too,” Lincoln tells me as he inches closer to me on his knees when I sit down on the couch with his new pet resting on top of my thighs. “Mom, remember Beefy?”

“You named a cow Beefy?” I chuckle. “No wonder he hated you.”

“He’d spit on her whenever she walked by.” Lincoln giggles.

“Pipe down, both of you. That cow was a jerk. And his name was Buttons. I only renamed him Beefy to put a little fear into him that he might get demoted from milk cow to dinner,” Ember complains.

“Does he have a name?” Lincoln asks me, holding his fingers out in front of him for the hedgehog to smell, just like he would to a dog.

“Of course. Of course he loves you too,” Ember complains good-naturedly when the hedgehog starts immediately licking Lincoln’s fingers, waddling down the length of my legs to get closer to him. “And no, he doesn’t have a name. But I’ve already come up with Lucifer, Beelzebub, Voldemort, or Bob.”

“Bob?” I ask her over my shoulder, unable to stop laughing that she has to stand so far away in order to keep the animal from hissing at her.

“Have you ever met a Bob that wasn’t squirrely?”

When she takes a tentative step closer, the little shit perched on my knees, loving on Lincoln, immediately tenses up, looks back over his shoulder at Ember, and starts clicking and hissing.

“You mothereffer,” Ember whispers under her breath as the two of them stare each other down before she finally relents with an annoyed huff and takes a step back.

“Jeez, he really does hate you!” Lincoln laughs, squatting down to the animal’s eye level as he soothingly runs his hand down its back. “It’s okay, little cutie guy-guy. You don’t have to be afraid of her. She’s really loud sometimes, but she’s nice. She’s the best fort builder in the whole world. Do you like forts, Ron Jeremy?”

It’s like that moment in the movies when the record screeches on the jukebox and silence fills the room, right before some epic shit is about to go down.

“Did… did you just call him Ron Jeremy?” Ember asks tentatively from behind me, where she’s pressed up against the wall.

“Yep! I’m naming him Ron Jeremy. Isn’t Ron Jeremy a great name!” Lincoln exclaims, scooping the porn star hedgehog off my lap to cradle him to his chest and walk around the room.

It’s like I’m twelve again, and at a great uncle’s funeral who I’d never met, sitting next to my cousin Max, and every time the priest said “Virgin Mary,” we couldn’t stop fucking giggling. But we were at a funeral, and people were crying, and we knew we couldn’t giggle. So we held our breaths until our faces turned bright red, and our bodies shook with silent laughter, tiny little snorts escaping every once in a while when we couldn’t contain it, which just made everything funnier.

A tiny little snort comes out of my mouth that I’m clamping shut as hard as I can, each time Lincoln says Ron Jeremy.

“You can’t name him Ron Jeremy,” Ember says, walking around the couch to stand next to me now that Lincoln has moved to the other side of the room with the animal that hates her. “Where did you even hear that name?”

“Declan at school told me his grandma has a bunch of movies that star Ron Jeremy, but she won’t let him watch them, and I told him it’s probably because there’s guns and blood and stuff in them, and he said she always sighs when she says his name, so that must mean Ron Jeremy is awesome,” Lincoln rambles, holding the hedgehog up in front of his face to study him.

Oh, God, it hurts! How am I not supposed to laugh at this?

“What the hell kind of school is your father sending you to?” Ember mutters.

“He even looks like a Ron Jeremy,” Lincoln adds from across the room.

“Did I completely miss a nine-inch dick on that thing?” I whisper to Ember out of the corner of my mouth, another choking snort breaking free.

“I don’t know how you missed it, considering he smacked you in the face with it while you tickled his balls all afternoon,” she fires back under her breath.