Not Otherwise Specified (27 page)

“There's no way the animals would have gotten this far,” I say. “They don't even know how to ride the metro. We should just go home and look there.”

So we head back and get off the metro at Forest Glen and start walking toward my house. Todd's car is in the driveway. There goes my home-alone excuse.

“My brother can drive you home,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Dad's coming at five fifteen.”

“Oh.”

“And it's, um, a little past five fifteen.”

I guess that's good, because I don't think either he or Todd would really enjoy being stuck in a car together. Lio isn't known for responding well to normal social cues, never mind Todd's neurotic ones.

I guess I should invite Lio inside while we're waiting. That's not a big deal. It's just into the kitchen.

Lio says, “Craig.”

I look up as he scurries under a bush and comes out with a little white kitten. Sandwich.

She's the newest of my animals. I was at the vet picking up antibiotics for Marigold, and she was there in a little box with four sisters, her eyes begging me,
hold me hold me hold me
, and I've never been able to resist that, ever, and now I take her from Lio and I have her. She's home. She didn't go far. She was just waiting for me.

She mews.

“Yours?” he asks.

I nod, because I'm not sure I can talk right now, or that I could say anything but Sandwich's name if I did. She's so dirty, and little bits of sticks cling to her. She looks up at me and mews again. I pet her cheek with my thumb, and then I give Lio a big smile.

He strokes her head for a minute, then says to me, very quietly, “Happy?”

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 fucked-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.

And I want something to take care of.

We listen to Dad squeak his knife around for a minute. It's brutal. Todd clears his throat, then he stands up and turns on the radio. He plunks it down in the center of the table like it's something for us to eat.

My father sighs, a little.

Todd tunes the radio to a news station and settles back into his green beans. The radio switches from weather to local news. A few car accidents, a stabbing, and two shootings, both in Glenmont. One was through the window of this craft store, Michael's, about a quarter mile from the
Glenmont metro. The bullet didn't hit anyone. An hour later and two miles away, a bullet did—someone in the parking lot of the Shopper's Food Warehouse. He's dead.

My father shakes his head while he drinks.

“Weird it made the news,” Todd said. “People get shot all the time.”

My father says, “Not while they're shopping,” which is pretty representative of his world view. My dad's old enough that even September 11th didn't change his mind that violence only happens to violent people. The only people who get stabbed are in gangs. The only people who get shot, shot someone else first. As much as my bleeding heart wants to convince him this is wrong, the truth is most of the violence here
is
revenge-driven or gang-related. I should know, I mean, I go to public school.

The first shooting was at 5:20. That was when Lio kissed me, that was the exact minute. I know because I checked my watch afterward because I wanted to see how long it lasted, then I realized I hadn't checked my watch before he kissed me, so I'd never know. But I don't think it was very long, really.

No one died in the 5:20 shooting, which would have been kind of crazy romantic in this horrible way, and it would have given me an excuse to call him. But I don't think he would like the symbolism of “so, we're just a like a bullet that didn't hit anybody” any more than I do.

God, I hope he wouldn't like it any more than I do.

My mom finishes her dinner and stands up. “Ready, Craig?”

I say “Yeah,” and pull on my jacket. I hope I don't get shot. That's pretty weird. I've never thought anything like that before. That kiss has me all screwed up.

•  •  •

We swing our flashlights back and forth, whistling and calling out names. Mom checks behind bushes and under the railing of the walkway to the metro. There's a couple making out on the bridge above us. I think it's one boy and one girl. Todd swears that he saw two homeless people having sex up there once—one boy and one girl.

“There are a lot of frogs here,” I say. “We could get a frog.”

She laughs in this way that says she doesn't know if I'm kidding.

“I only go for the fuzzy ones,” I tell her.

“All right.”

I take my comment out of context in my head and giggle a little. I only go for the fuzzy ones. Heh. This is a gross thing to be laughing about in front of your mom.

She's wearing the brown patchwork jacket I got her a million Christmases ago. She blows on her hands and runs them through her hair. “I hope we find Casablanca,” she says. “She's my favorite.” Casablanca is a Labrador retriever. She's old and missing a leg.

“We'll find her,” I say. “She's easy. Easy to describe in posters and stuff. Easy to hear coming.”

But the cold is making my nose run and making it a little hard to breathe, and right now nothing sounds very easy.

I wipe my nose.

Mom flicks her flashlight beam to me, and I look away quickly. “It's cold,” I say stupidly, and crunch some of the leaves on the ground. It's not like she'd get upset if I were crying. I cry like three times a day, so it's the opposite of a big deal. It'd be like getting concerned every time I eat a meal.

Mom says, “I called the shelter this morning. They have all their descriptions, and they're all looking out, just waiting for someone to bring them in.”

“Okay.”

She says, “I'm so sorry this happened, sweetheart.”

“We're going to find them. We're going to find all of them. That's right, yeah?”

“Yes.” Mom cups her hand around the back of my head. “That's right.”

I felt better when Lio comforted me, but it's still nice to be here for a minute, with Mom, searching for animals that she never even wanted.

We find Jupiter, who's this amazing Chihuahua-pug mix, trying to pick a fight with some bigger dogs a few blocks away. We start to head home with him, and my heart is
pounding against his little body, and then we find Caramel, and just when everything feels so, so amazing, we find my parakeet, Fernando, except he's dead.

It's like a punch in the chest.

But Caramel and Jupiter scurry out of my arms as soon as we're home and go rub up against the couch and chew on the rug, and everything feels a little more possible again.

I leave them for a minute to go outside. I make a cross out of sticks and scratch Fernando's name in the dirt, then I cross it out and write Flamingo instead. He would have liked that.

But he isn't buried here. I didn't move his body from where we found it by the side of the road. I was too scared. I didn't want to touch it. I suck.

We're still missing:

Three dogs.

Three cats.

Three rabbits.

A guinea pig.

I close my eyes and listen to the animals inside my head and the memory of his chirping and the silence all the way around me.