Dear Pa,
I just don’t get people. Including me.
I ended up in a towering rage all of yesterday afternoon. I was standing around the hallway at the end of lunch period with a book in front of me when they appeared: Rusty and Gonzo, walking down the hallway together, both of them laughing. Were they laughing at me? Was Gonzo giving Rusty some juicy dirt on me? Or—and I couldn’t decide if this was better or worse—were they talking about something else entirely?
We wandered into our classroom for math class, but I didn’t hear a fucking word Ms. Montrose said. I hate to admit this, even to you, but I felt betrayed. After school I hid inside my locker until everyone else had left, and then I walked home. It was raining, but my fury kept me warm. And I kept my phone turned off.
I was still wrapped in rage by the time I’d walked through the door, but I needed to get ready for my birthday dinner at Uncle Scott and Uncle Joe’s. Since I was soaked to the skin—I caught my reflection in the mirror and thought a wet rat was looking back at me—I took a long shower, shampooed my hair, and put on another layer of aftershave, even though I hadn’t shaved again. I even used gel to create that hair wall I sometimes go for on special occasions, the kind of style that’s the male equivalent of a Victorian woman putting her hair up. I put on an outfit that made me look like a church organist, which I guess was fitting. I mean, in a way I didn’t have much of a choice: Uncle Scott and Uncle Joe are just about as yuppie as ever, and the only reason you’d wear jeans to their house is if you were going to help them clean out their garage. But it was nice to ditch my school clothes. It felt like shedding one skin and putting on another.
It was also a distraction from the headache I felt coming on. I went upstairs and chit-chatted with Ma and Helmut in the kitchen while they made dinner together. Gonzo wasn’t due to arrive until after supper, which was great since that meant I didn’t need to concentrate on keeping my monstrous fury in check.
And so, as soon as I heard the doorbell, I made a beeline for the front door. But when I opened it, it wasn’t Uncle Scott or Uncle Joe waiting on the other side.
It was—you might want to sit down for this—none other than Russell Friesen.
With his red hair flipped up, like mine.
Smiling at me like I was his long-lost friend.
Wearing the jacket he’d worn to Sophie and Jenice’s wedding and a shirt that was slightly too tight on him so that it opened at the front, like he knew just how much his chest hair makes me salivate.
I was so stunned that I couldn’t figure out how to form actual words to make a sentence that would ask him what he was doing there. It didn’t even occur to me to invite him in. We stood on either side of the open door, playing this weird game of chicken. Seconds or minutes later, he jumped in.
“Hey. Did your phone battery die again? I left you about fifteen thousand messages.”
“Um—yeah. That’s exactly what happened,” I said. By this point I couldn’t even remember what the truth was. “What—um—what brings you here?”
His eyes bulged out at me as though my question had blown his mind—which it had.
“What are you talking about? Your uncles invited me over for dinner to celebrate your birthday.”
I staggered back—literally and figuratively. Rusty must have interpreted this as an invitation, because he stepped inside the house and closed the door behind him. I kept backing up and he kept following me, like we were doing this hands-free cha-cha, until finally we were halfway in the living room and I knocked into the edge of the sofa behind me.
“How exactly did this come about?” I asked, trying to sound casual, even though a jackhammer had started to drill away at my skull.
“Uncle Joe friended me on Facebook, and then he messaged me to let me know you were going to their place for dinner tonight and to ask if I wanted to come along,” he said with a shrug, like what he was telling me wasn’t completely insane. “It was sort of last minute, so I don’t have your present ready. But it meant a Friday night with you and not at home with my parents, so I said sure. Didn’t they tell you?”
“No. Um—” By this point I had to massage my temples in order to remain capable of coherent thought. “Didn’t you find it odd to get a dinner invitation from total strangers?”
“They’re not strangers—they’re your uncles,” he retorted. Then he snickered. “Anyway, what’s the big deal? It’s not like they’re trying to seduce me.”
The idea of my uncles putting the moves on a friend of their teenage nephew was so ridiculous that it made me snort, but doing so somehow dislodged some of the bile that had been building up in my esophagus and made me tense up again. If this had happened literally any other day in my lifetime, I would have found it all a fun surprise. But it was like either my uncles or the universe had decided to fuck me over by making Rusty appear on my doorstep after I’d been secretly furious with him for the last five hours, and I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d done to deserve this.
So I sat on the arm of the living room sofa to try to calm down, but Rusty was standing over me, which made me start to suffocate, so I jumped up again. I probably looked like a cat who’d just finished a saucer of coffee.
“What’s with you today?” he asked, sounding more curious than annoyed.
I told him I had a headache in a tone that even I didn’t find convincing, but thankfully he dropped it. When Ma joined us from the kitchen, I ran upstairs to her and Helmut’s bathroom, rummaged through their medicine cabinet, and downed a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols. Then I stared at my reflection in the mirror for a moment and ordered myself to suck it up.
“You’ll have a great time,” Ma was telling Rusty as I made it back downstairs. They were sitting on the sofa like old friends. “Scott and Joe are wonderful hosts, and I know they’ve been looking forward to getting acquainted with you.”
Were they? That was news to me.
At that point Uncle Joe pulled into the driveway and honked, which meant he wasn’t planning to get out of the car to ring the doorbell. “Okay, Ma—I’ll be home at some point,” I said as I got up, trying to sound pleasant. And then—and then!—Ma took out her camera and insisted on taking about seventy-five photos of us. She kept encouraging us to stand closer together and to smile, like Rusty was my prom date. At one point she suggested that each of us put an arm around the other’s shoulder and kept badgering us until we did it. From the way she was acting you’d never have guessed that we were two platonic friends going out to dinner together.
So we left the house and made our way to Uncle Joe’s car. I made Rusty sit in the front. He tried to insist that because it was my birthday I should ride shotgun, but I climbed into the back seat anyway. Just then the idea of small talk made me want to screambarf, so I thought it would be better for everyone’s sanity if I sat by myself in the back and pretended I couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Uncle Joe kept glancing at me in the rear-view mirror as he drove, his eyes narrowing at me in a what the hell is your problem? kind of way. When I shook my head at him, he shrugged and backed off.
It’s strange how well Uncle Joe and I are able to communicate with looks in the rear-view mirror. It’s cool, too.
Of course I know I was being ridiculous—I knew it then. The thing is, I don’t like these kinds of surprises. I’m not thrilled with losing control of a situation. I like calling the shots, or at least knowing what’s ahead so I can brace myself for it. I know you can’t control or predict everything in this life; I’ve been aware of that since the day you died. But the fact remained that I wasn’t ready—no—let me be truthful here—I wasn’t willing yet to forgive Rusty for talking to my stepbrother, something only I would see as a betrayal.
But I could see the bigger picture, too. I mean, Rusty and I are friends. I haven’t figured out how to talk to him at school without ditching my Quiet Guy persona. He’s obviously free to talk to whoever he wants, including a classmate who happens to be my stepbrother. It’s not like he turns into an inanimate object whenever I’m not around. But I was still angry. And I’m not good at putting anger aside because of some crazy situation I have no control over. Years ago Jordana and I had a fight the day before we were supposed to play together in a recital, and I knew that I should forget about the nasty things she’d said about my singing ability and concentrate on our performance. But I couldn’t. Pretending nothing had happened felt like such a weakness.
I should have been an Aries—like you. Yet I hope I don’t end up mellowing with age.
Eventually we made it to Uncle Joe and Uncle Scott’s place. They still have their split-level house near the university. Their neighbourhood has been overrun by students, so they often talk about moving, but so far it hasn’t come to anything. I’m glad. Some of my earliest memories are of visits to their house when I was little, including the sandbox that they kept just for me. A few of those memories aren’t so nice—like getting stung by wasps when I was five—but the rest are.
By this point it was almost suppertime, and as my headache cleared, I discovered that I was so hungry I was probably starting to digest my stomach lining, but when we got inside, we discovered an empty kitchen with several bags of groceries on the table.
“He must be in the study,” Uncle Joe said with a sigh. I found out later that he’d picked us up on his way home from work, so he was wiped out and as surprised as we were that dinner hadn’t yet been started.
Soon we heard a door click open, and Uncle Scott emerged, still wearing his suit jacket from work. He looked about as jumpy as I had been at home fifteen minutes earlier. Even though he’s much more of a talker than I am, as far as personality goes I sometimes think I should have been his son instead of yours. He basically started to unleash what can only be called a block of words. I can’t do justice to it, but here’s the best reconstruction I can come up with: “Oh my God, Joe, you’ll never believe in a hundred thousand years who I bumped into at the grocery store. I was on the phone with Tina—she just couldn’t get over it. Happy birthday, kiddo! You look so grown up! I must be getting old to have a nephew who’s practically an adult. So I’m standing there in the cheese section trying to decide between two kinds of feta when I notice this guy looking at me, and at first I don’t recognize him, but then he says, ‘Excuse me, but are you Scott Cardigan?’ and it’s this asshole who used to pick on me in high school. Oh, it’s nice to meet you, Rusty—I’m Uncle Scott. I used to have panic attacks about this guy, right? Although we didn’t call them panic attacks back then. I don’t think we called them anything. So when I finally piece together who he is, I figure I’m going to freak right out, because obviously, he won’t say anything about it even if he does remember, and he probably doesn’t, right? I mean, if I’d been that kind of douche to somebody as a teenager I can only assume I would have repressed it by now. Oh, I didn’t make any dinner—I called Tina the minute I got home. But you know what? He really surprised me. First we did the whole what have you been up to the last twenty years routine, as if he reasonably expects me to give a rat’s ass about how his life has unfolded since high school, and then, just as he’s in the middle of telling me about his company—he builds computers or fixes computers or something like that—he stops himself, then says he doesn’t know if I remember any of this and blah blah blah, but he’s always regretted the way he treated me! And then he apologized. I mean an actual apology, not that oh, we were just young and stupid back then, weren’t we song and dance you get sometimes. And then he hugged me—not a real hug, of course—just one of those manly half hugs where you shake hands with your right and whack each other on the back with your left. I know—it’s dinnertime already, so I think we should just put the groceries away and go out somewhere—my treat. What kind of food are you boys in the mood for? Oh, let’s just get in the car and drive around till we find something. It might be tricky at six o’clock on a Friday night, so we’ll have to look for those out-of-the-way places that won’t be too busy. Can we take your car, Joe? I forgot to fill up the tank and I can’t remember how long the gas light’s been flashing. I was so amazed to get an actual apology from that guy that I agreed for us to go out for drinks with him and his wife. Can you fucking believe that? Me, going out for drinks with the guy who made my teenage life such a nightmare? I told him the twentieth would work for us, but I know I should have checked with you—I couldn’t remember if we have your work thing on that night or on the twenty-first. Anyway, we can reschedule if we have to.”
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that he said all this without stopping or breathing. By the time he was done, we’d already driven away in Uncle Joe’s car. He kept talking, and Uncle Joe nodded occasionally as he drove, and both of them seemed to have forgotten that Rusty and I were in the back seat. I turned to Rusty, who was watching all of this with fascination in his eyes, and at that point I realized I wasn’t mad at him anymore. It’s like the sky in my mind had cleared. Which was great, because I had zero interest in trying to explain why I’d been mad at him in the first place.
His head pivoted toward me in the cutest possible way, and without taking his eyes off my uncles in the front seat, he whispered, “Um—who’s Tina?”
“Uncle Scott’s platonic wife.”
“I see.”
Then Uncle Scott turned around in his seat to look at us. “What kind of food are you boys in the mood for? There’s a great Thai restaurant that we like to go to. Or there’s that new Egyptian–Moroccan-English fusion place that seems promising. Is that the one that’s attached to the mall without being in the mall, Joe?”
Uncle Joe responded by turning on the stereo. It was playing a choral piece that erupted into the most climactic moment—I think it was something by Handel—and then, after a quick wrap-up and a pause, the choir launched into what was clearly the third movement of something epic.
“Um—either one would be fine,” I called out over the sound of two hundred people singing at the tops of their voices. “Right, Rusty?”
“Yeah—sounds great.”
Uncle Scott turned his head and nodded before falling silent. I couldn’t understand what was going on. When I turned in Rusty’s direction, he leaned over and said, low enough not to be overheard, “Why does everyone keep calling us ‘you boys’? Your mother did it ten times during that photo shoot. And what was up with that photo shoot?”
He looked so appealingly earnest, and I felt so comfortable being that close to him that I unleashed the truth without running it through the filter first. “Yeah—sorry about that. It looks like my whole family thinks we’re dating.”
What happened next took about two seconds to happen but will need several sentences to describe. First, Rusty broke into a smile, chuckled, and nudged my hand with his knuckles, as though the idea of us dating was hysterical. But then his smile faded and he gazed into the middle distance, looking increasingly puzzled. He started to say something, then stopped himself, looked back at my two uncles, glanced at me again, and then turned right around to look determinedly out the window like I do whenever I’m in the car with Ma. And throughout all this was the sound of a shitload of people singing their devotion to a god that probably none of them believed in.
Somehow we were all back to normal once we arrived at the restaurant, like someone had hit a giant reset button as we were getting out of the car. I caught a glimpse of a cardinal as we crossed the parking lot, which also helped. The restaurant was pretty nice, set up with all these dividers and booths that gave the illusion of intimacy, even though it was so loud you had to shout to be heard. I made sure I was sitting on Rusty’s left rather than his right so we wouldn’t knock elbows like we had throughout Sophie and Jenice’s wedding reception. As we each contemplated what we wanted for supper, Uncle Joe asked Rusty about school and his family, I asked them about work, and Rusty asked about the Fauré concert coming up in a couple of weeks. It was pleasant, but bland. We did that thing that I’ve never understood where everyone muses aloud about what they’re thinking of ordering and comments on everyone else’s deliberations. Rusty turned to me and said, “I’m thinking of getting the fish and chips—unless you’d like to split a hen with me.” Then, after we’d ordered, Rusty excused himself to go wash his hands. Both my uncles stayed silent, following him with their eyes without turning their heads as he walked away, but as soon as he was gone they became incredibly agitated.
“I really like him.”
“So do I. He’s so cute!”
“And polite! He has a good heart.”
“He’s a keeper. Don’t you just want to eat him up?”
“Susan and Helmut gave him rave reviews.”
“I don’t want to be nosy, but seriously, Dale, if you ever have any questions about sex—”
Until that point I’d been kind of amused, but that last comment pushed the entire conversation right over the edge.
“Okay—shut up! Both of you!” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know why everyone thinks this is all a foregone conclusion. Rusty and I are friends. We’re classmates at school. That’s it! We’re not having sex—we’re not dating—none of that’s going to happen.”
My uncles seemed stunned by my outburst, as if I’d announced that I was going to be a missionary on Neptune. Uncle Scott recovered first.
“Why not? Don’t you like him?” he asked, looking at me kindly.
By this point my heart had started to pound, and when I looked down at my hands I discovered that they had strangled my napkin. “That’s not really the issue here.”
Uncle Scott and Uncle Joe turned to look at each other before turning back to me.
“Then what’s the problem?” Uncle Joe asked. “Is he straight?”
“I don’t know. Probably? He likes cars and sports and hiking. He calls me ‘dude’ and ‘guy’ and ‘buddy.’ He sucks at math. His room is so messy it ought to be condemned. He was a Boy Scout. He and his dad won a prize for a wooden birdhouse they made together.” I started to tell them about his comment about the woman at the wedding with the side boobs, but it was too complicated to explain, so I gave it up.
At this point Uncle Scott’s eyes were still kind, but he also looked like he thought I’d gone insane.
“Dale,” he said—and I remember this so clearly because of the way he said it, the way he looked at me when he said it, like he could really see me—“what does any of that have to do with being gay or straight?”
“Or anything in between?” Uncle Joe added.
They immediately leaned back in their seats before I could ponder their question, which I figured meant they’d spotted Rusty on his way back to the table. Sure enough, a moment later Rusty sat down, spread his napkin on his lap, sipped his water, and asked my uncles about work. When the food arrived, we did that obligatory thing of asking each other how everything tasted. Not to pull a Burt and Beverly, but my entree was a bit of a dud.
My uncles seemed to be having a good time, except after a while I noticed that they were speaking more to us than to each other. And Rusty—well, he was acting a bit weird all evening. Or maybe not weird, but off. He’d be pretty quiet for a while, and then he’d revive, only to sink back down again. He was acting like a campfire that was having a hard time staying lit. I saw him check his watch a few times, so I was pretty surprised when my uncles invited us back to their place for dessert and he said yes.
It turned out to be a low-key evening. I was afraid my uncles would start looking at me significantly after everything Rusty said or did, but thankfully they backed off. We ended up sitting in the dining room eating ice cream and playing a board game that required you to crack these alphanumerical codes in the quest for world domination. I didn’t like or understand it, but I didn’t suck at it either, so that’s something.
The only really funny part of the evening that’s worth telling you about—or, let’s face it, preserving for my own benefit—was that we started talking about nicknames. Uncle Joe is legally Joseph but has always, always been Joe. He didn’t even go through a phase of being Joey when he was young. Rusty mentioned that he’d been completely bald when he was named Russell; it was only when he started daycare that he started to be called Rusty, which was fine, except for a group of kids who’d tormented him with the nickname Rusty the Rustificator, even though that didn’t make any sense. Then Uncle Scott mentioned that his parents had called him Scooter until he went away to university.
“Oh my God. Didn’t I call you Uncle Scooter for a while when I was a kid?” I asked, blown away by the fact that I’d forgotten this.
Uncle Scott started to laugh. “Yes, you did, and your dad and I had a hard time tricking you into stopping,” he said. Right after he mentioned you, his face changed, almost like he’d forgotten about you, then remembered. No doubt it’s a look that’s sometimes come across my face, too.
Someday I’d like to have a serious talk with Uncle Scott about you, but I didn’t want to open that can of worms in front of anyone else, not even Uncle Joe. So I tried to keep the conversation going.
“Well, you guys are lucky to have such cool nicknames. ‘Dale’ is epically unnicknameable.”
“I could always start calling you Chippendale,” Rusty offered, a corner of his mouth curling up in a half grin. I forget what I said in response or if I said anything at all. He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of being named after a gang of strippers, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.
You know, this memory popped into my head just as I was typing this: when I was younger, I daydreamed about having a best friend named Chip. We’d be inseparable—interchangeable, even—just like those cartoon squirrels or badgers or whatever they are. There was this one kid back in grade five that I seemed to hit it off with, and at one point I’d daydreamed about pitching this idea to him. Then I found out about Chippendales dancers, and that killed the fantasy.
Finally, once we’d turned into a quartet of yawners, Uncle Scott offered to drive Rusty and me home. We ended up going in Uncle Joe’s car. This time Rusty didn’t put up a fight when I offered him the front seat. He gave Uncle Scott directions to his house, and by the time we’d pulled up at the curb he already had his seat belt off.
“Thanks for a fun evening, Scott,” he said as they shook hands. “Dale, have a great weekend, okay?” And then he got out of the car and headed up the walk.
Something felt incredibly wrong, so I also got out of the car and followed him to his door. Apparently the bulb for the porch light had burned out, so I could barely see anything.
“Hey, Rusty? Are we—um—do you still want to see a movie this weekend?” I asked. I’d also been wondering if yesterday’s hug was a one-off because I’d been telling him personal stuff or if it was going to become a regular thing. But Rusty didn’t seem that interested even in a handshake.
“Oh—yeah—um—I think I need to take a rain check on that. My dad said something about a billion chores around the house this weekend.”
“Oh. Hey—I just thought of something. Unlikely candle scents?”
Part of his mouth turned upward, but he didn’t seem that into it. “I don’t know. Broken Washing Machine?” He exhaled, shifted his weight from one leg to the other, looked at me, looked away. “I should go in. See you at school.”
And then he disappeared into the house, leaving me alone on an empty porch in the dark, with only the sound of a car motor to remind me that reality still existed.
I didn’t want to go to bed when I got home, even though it was late. I checked my email, only to discover that Ma had sent me every single photo she’d taken of me and Rusty that evening—each in a separate email message, because she still can’t remember how to send multiple attachments. We looked so happy, in spite of how weird Ma had been acting behind the scenes. And now, I don’t know what happened, but I think I’ve screwed things up somehow. This morning, I turned on my cellphone and went through Rusty’s texts, hoping there would be a new one explaining what had caused him to act so weird. But the last one was the text saying he was on his way over to be picked up by my uncles. After that—nothing.
I skipped organ practice this morning and went to the pool hoping I’d bump into him, but I didn’t. I swam two laps, but I was so discouraged that I could barely keep myself afloat. It’s funny: before I had any friends, I didn’t mind all the time I spent by myself—I loved it. But now that I do have a friend and all this weirdness has crept up between us, I feel so lonely. And I have no fucking idea what to do about it.
Your loving son,
Dale