Gone, Gone, Gone(6)

I nod.

He leans in and kisses me.

It’s soft and small. It’s 5:20 p.m.

My parents decide we need to have BLTs with our pork chops in honor of Sandwich’s return. It’s weird, because we usually eat in front of the TV, but now we’re all sitting at the table together, and it’s so quiet without the news in the background or the animals underfoot.

Sandwich paws at my shoelace.

My father has this way of chewing that makes it look like a job. It’s like he’s considering every muscle in his jaw every time he uses it, like he’s constantly reevaluating to make sure he’s working at the right pace and pressure. When he was sixteen—only a year older than me, but when I imagine it he always looks twenty-five—he was a big-shot football player who got sidelined with a major head injury and had to do rehab and staples in his head and all of it. He and Lio should start a club of people who shouldn’t be alive, and Mom and I can start a club of people who shouldn’t be jealous but are, a little, because we will never really understand. My ex-boyfriend could be in that second club too. Or maybe he’s my boyfriend. This isn’t the kind of thing I want to think about.

Anyway, Dad says he recovered all the way, and Mom didn’t meet him until years afterward, so we have to take his word for it, but whenever he does something weird like chew like a trash compactor or leave his keys in the refrigerator, I always picture these football-shaped neurons on his head struggling to connect to each other.

I can’t believe Lio kissed me. Well, I can, but I think it’s weird that he asked me “Happy?” first. If I had said no, would he have kissed me? Was it a reward for being happy, the same way I reward him when he talks? Was he thanking me for being happy?

It’s been ten months since my last kiss. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve really been happy, but ten months is a good guess.

Todd rubs the skin between his eyes. I think his head is still bothering him.

Mom didn’t have any luck finding the animals, but we’re going to go back out tonight after dinner and keep looking. Mom says if Sandwich was out there, safe, the others must be too.

Dad says, “It’s probably for the best.”

I frown.

He says, “This isn’t a barn, Craig. Maybe now you’ll get out of the house, hmm? Start going out with your friends again.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Are there any nice boys at school?” he says, in that way, and I guess I should be thankful that he says this no differently from how he asks Todd about girls at work, but I’m not, I just want him to pretend I’m a eunuch or something, especially since I pretty much am at this point, anyway.

Mom gives him a stern look. “We’ll find them.” She looks at me. “You know, your friend could have stayed for dinner.” Now she’s totally giving me a chance to tell her that Lio’s more than a friend, and I have no idea what to say. The fact that my parents are entirely okay with my homosexuality makes talking about it kind of difficult, because when you’re gay and single the only thing you have going for you is imagined shock value. The reality is that it’s pretty boring to be like, hey, parents, I’m gay, and there’s absolutely no reason for you to give a shit right now.

So I just say, “That’s okay,” and concentrate on cutting my pork chop.

And to be honest, calling Lio my friend seems wrong, probably because I don’t remember, really, how to have friends. That sounds so pathetic, because I used to have friends, but then I had a boyfriend and sort of ignored everybody, and then after the boyfriend exploded I stopped being fun and started blowing people off when they asked me to hang out. It’s not like everyone hates me, and I have people to talk to in classes but not once we’re out in the halls, those sorts of friends. And I spend a lot of evenings here with the animals, and they were enough, in a way my parents could never appreciate and could barely tolerate.

Now what? Now I don’t know, I guess maybe Lio’s my new animal. And Sandwich, of course. And Zipper. I should make a picture book about us or something. Two teenage boys and two animals—this is the 2002 version of the blended family.

I can’t believe I’m thinking of him as a familial candidate. I mean, come on, I barely know the kid. What do we even do together? Sometimes we go skateboarding because, I don’t know, I guess we think we’re eleven. He smokes clove cigarettes and I pretend I don’t hate the smell. We drink Slurpees and . . . we do stuff like push each other on gates, I guess.

I wish I knew what was going on.

I really can’t get into this right now. I probably shouldn’t have kissed him back. But I’ve sort of wanted to kiss him ever since I saw his f*cked-up hair that day in Ms. Hoole’s class, and really since the conversation right after, when he told me he cuts it when he’s nervous, and I immediately wanted to know everything in the whole world that makes him nervous, and everything in the whole world about him.

I should have invited him to stay tonight. He’d fit well into this silence at the dinner table. I think it’s bad when I’m allowed to dwell in my head for this long. Someone should be dragging me out into conversation, but usually it’s someone on TV and tonight there’s no TV.

It’s not that we don’t get along—my parents and my brother and me—it’s that we don’t have a whole lot in common, and we all have these different ideas of how to use this house and this family. My dad wants a house full of books and rousing dinner-table discussions about whether or not Lolita was a slut. My mom is already talking about arranging a Secret Santa thing among the four of us, won’t that be fun? My brother wants this to be his airport, his temporary base in all his running around, complete with full-service restaurant and four-dollar massages, and he’ll pay for us by the hour, no problem, if we will just treat him as well as he deserves. But we never do, even I know that.