Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (15 page)

“Rusty?”

“What?”

“Have you given any thought to which one of us is going to top?”

“I don’t even know what you mean by that,” I said, and he chuckled. “What?”

Oliver held out his forefinger. “Top.” Then he made an O out of his other forefinger and his thumb. “Bottom.” And then he inserted his pointy finger into the O and pulled it out and put it back in and pulled it out and . . . I had an immediate hard-on that could punch through the side of the truck.

“I have no idea.” My mouth was so dry I almost couldn’t say it.

His grin got bigger, and his finger kept fucking. “Well, think about that while we’re moving boxes.” And with that he hopped out of the truck, and I joined him, trying not to walk funny.

It took us about ten minutes to throw the remains of what I’d thought of as a happy childhood into the back of the damned truck, and the entire time I was thinking of the very grown-up things Oliver and I were going to do to each other when we got alone and naked.

There ought to be some sort of award for that, right?

When we were done, I turned back to look at the house, thinking my parents might want to at
least
come out to talk to me again. There was nobody there. I looked some more, and then looked toward Nicole’s room, which was on the end. She had her window open and her face pressed up against the screen.

I walked up to the window and smiled. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Estrella brought me tamales for lunch. That way I don’t have to sit out in the front room for dinner that long.”

“Anyone else coming for dinner?”

“Mom’s douche bag brother and his perfect kids.”

I winced. Uncle Richard and his wife, Debbie, were every mean stereotype about snobby white people, ever, but then, I guess so were my parents. My cousins were both girls who wore a size two, and the oldest had already had her first nose job. She was sixteen. “Excellent. Tell me what sort of lie mom cooks up about me, okay?”

Nicole’s laugh was really sort of unpleasant. “She can’t. Douche bag already called to tell me that they were going to be exactly on time, and I told him Mom couldn’t come to the phone right now because she was moving your stuff out because you were gay.”

I don’t think my laugh was any better, but it sure did feel good. “You’re really sort of awesome, did you know that?”

She stuck her nose in the air. “Of course!”

I forget how deep my voice is, and how much it carries. There was a noise from behind Nicole, and we both jerked and looked back. It was my dad.

“Rusty?”

“I’m sorry, Dad—I got all my stuff. I was telling Nicole Happy Thanksgiving—”

“Rusty, you don’t have to go. You can stay—”

“Just not with Oliver, right?” Because his voice had risen up and I knew there was a big as-long-as attached to the end.

“Rusty, you know how we feel—”

“No,” I said, feeling absurd about having this conversation through a window screen. “No, I don’t. You never talked about it. Bigotry is rude at the dinner table, isn’t it?”

Dad took a step back. “That’s a really harsh word.” He sounded almost hurt.

“And ‘we’ll kick you out’ isn’t?”

I saw something in his eyes then, in the way his jaw went slack, like he’d never thought of that before. A thing, a fragile wall made of translucent glass, broke behind my eyes. Moms and dads are supposed to know better, right?

“You didn’t think about that, did you?” I said quietly, and then I remembered that Oliver’s dad was waiting for us.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, and then wrangled the SIM card out of it. “I need that,” I said needlessly. “You can wrestle me for it if you want, but it’s got addresses and shit, and I don’t think you own that, right?”

Dad opened his mouth and closed it, and I set my phone down on Nicole’s ledge and turned around.

“Rusty?” Oliver said as I got near the truck, “We can stay longer if you want.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to be here today,” I told him. “I . . . I just don’t.” I didn’t cry on the way to Oliver’s house this time, but I didn’t say anything either.

I helped with dinner again, and this time it was bigger, with more stuff, and more of Oliver’s family. There was one more uncle—Jorge—and he had a little wife with giant eyes in a pale face and three tiny girls who took one step inside and went apeshit over the dogs.

It was loud.

I had this sort of double vision. At my house, there would be candles and a beautiful place setting right out of Martha Stewart, and tiny plates of gourmet turkey with some sort of spice that made me gag or break out or something like it had last year. I could imagine my parents having stilted dinner conversation and my Uncle Richard and Aunt Deb talking about all of the trips they’d taken and how their bulimic daughters had been asked to model or excelled in the science fair or grade-bombed the AP exams or something. Nicole would be casting poisonous glances at the girls (who were actually so reserved I didn’t know if they were nice people or not—they could have been sainted virgins, but you get stupid prejudices against stick-skinny women who don’t talk), and my parents would be talking about how I just needed to get my focus, get my grades up, play football a little harder, something, and I would be that perfect son they’d always needed.

And then, on top of that vision, there was Oliver’s house. The girls kept slipping away to pet the dogs, and Joey and Sal would
not
stop swearing, and Jorge and Maria-Athena were messing in
everyone’s
business. I think that being the one happily married couple of all the siblings gave them a license to pry. I could see that. Mr. Campbell may have been the older brother, but Jorge was second, I think, and all of them sort of looked out for Mr. Campbell, while he tried to mother all of the rest of them. It was cute.

What was also cute was the way they didn’t ask me a damned thing. They talked about everything from birth control to how much debt they were in (Mr. Campbell was in the black, Jorge was above water, and Manny was upside down in everything), but they didn’t ask me why I was eating dinner here instead of at my parents’.

I leaned over to Oliver at one point, when it was Maria-Athena’s turn to go chase one of the girls, and I meant to ask him if his dad had gone all phone tree on everybody so they wouldn’t ask any awkward questions, and what I ended up asking was why all the little girls were named Maria-Something. There was Maria-Rosa, Maria-Cristina, and Maria-Felicia, and when I asked Oliver why they didn’t just call them Rosa, Cristina, and Felicia, he said it was because Maria-Athena was Mexican and very traditionally Catholic about all the girls being named after Mary and all the boys being named after Joseph. I was sort of glad that I already knew Oliver’s family was from Venezuela, so I didn’t totally embarrass myself by saying something stupid like, “Aren’t you guys
all
Mexican?” Oliver had sat down once with a globe and showed me that all of South America was fucking huge and that the countries were way different, like, even more than California was from Georgia or New York, so I sort of got that some traditions were stronger in one place than they might be in another.

What I was thinking instead was really a little more local, and a lot more personal.

“What?” Oliver asked, because I guess my thinking face isn’t subtle.

I shook my head. “I’ll ask you later.”

“No, seriously, what? You can’t offend us, Rusty. You’ve
heard
our dinner conversation.”

Yeah. It was true. Joey had just burst out with the fact that you had to remember to change the rubber in your wallet at least once a year because those things expired. Gloria had responded with, “Yeah, and if you use one with spermicide, make sure you change that up every three months, or it starts to
itch
,” so I knew this family actually talked about stuff, which was great.

But nobody liked to talk about this.

“C’mon, we’ll think you don’t like us if you don’t say something totally embarrassing!”

I smiled stupidly at him. He was the same guy I’d known in high school, but it was like that big, white smile and those giant, brown eyes had grown on me, until now they were the only things I could see.

“How come your family’s so nice? My family’s not even Catholic, and they won’t let me in the house. Your family’s all up in your grill about attending mass, but you and me, we sit here and they just . . .”

I trailed off, mostly because there was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t get past. God, it was so very after-school special, wasn’t it? Everyone was okay. The black kid, the Hispanic kid, the Jewish kid, the gay kid—they were all okay. All the other kids had to do was accept them. I’d seen six
thousand
movies that told me not to pick on someone who was different, and I couldn’t figure out how
I
got what those movies were saying, but my parents who should have known better did not get it at
all
.

“I don’t know,” Oliver said, but like he was thinking about the question seriously. “It’s a good question, Rusty.” He looked at his family, who had all fallen completely silent, even Maria-Athena and the tiniest little Maria who was all wobbly and sad because she’d had to abandon the Pomeranian who was now her total love slave.

Maria-Athena shrugged. “We love you,” she said. “We ignore the preaching people on television who say it’s not good, so we can love you.”

I smiled at her. “
That
,” I said sincerely, “is some thinking I can get behind.”

The table laughed, and suddenly Mr. Campbell wanted to know why his brother hadn’t gotten his little girls a dog, or a cat, or
something
with fur, because they
obviously
were hungering for that. Jorge was right back in his face with how come the great building contractor with a license in landscaping couldn’t trim his own damned jasmine as it died around him, or rip out the morning glories before they came back and regrew over each other and made that mess along the fence deeper. Mr. Campbell responded by saying he was working against a deadline, and he’d be working his crew Friday, Saturday,
and
Sunday just to get done when he’d promised, because the rains had come in and kicked their deadline’s ass.

Right there and then, I knew what I was going to do that weekend.

Since all the men had cooked, the two women stayed in the kitchen to do dishes and gossip, and suddenly the wide-screen TV was on and everybody was on the couch watching a football game. The little girls were sort of disconsolate, but I’d set up my computer in Oliver’s room, and I’d seen
Brave
peeking out of the youngest one’s diaper bag.

When Oliver came in to find me, I was backed up in the corner of his bed with four sleeping dogs and three sleeping princesses draped around me, and the credits of the movie rolling on my laptop.

He leaned against the doorframe, crossed his arms, and grinned. “Niiiiice!”

I felt my face heat. “Who won the game?”

Oliver shrugged. “I neither know nor care. It was enough that Sal’s team beat Joey’s, and we could watch Joey pay up.”

I laughed. I’d heard some of that. It had sounded epic. Oliver came in then and ejected the movie from my computer and put it back in the case.

“You didn’t have to play babysitter, you know.”

I shrugged. “You guys were really nice to let me sneak away.” Oliver smiled, but he wasn’t really buying.

“It’s because of my grandparents,” he said suddenly, and my eyes got really big.

“The fact that you let me sneak away?”

“No, the fact that everyone’s really all nice and accepting and the gay doesn’t bother them, and Aunt Gloria’s sex life doesn’t bother them, and Manny didn’t catch shit because of the divorce. It’s because of them.”

Okay. Family tradition. “Were they just super nice people?”

Oliver shook his head flatly. “No. Not really. Grandma was from a family with a lot of money, and she married a poor American, and from what I can gather? She was one pissed off, bitter old lady. She was miserable to everybody. Gloria told me once she had to see a shrink for five years before she could lose enough weight to fit behind a steering wheel in a car. She showed me pictures. It was scary. She had to get her stomach stapled. And it was all Grandma, bitching in her ear about how she was so fat, and she needed to eat less, while all she did, day and night, was cook for the family.”

I grimaced. I’d watched Nicole catch shit for her weight, and I’d watched how she ate to feel better about it. “That sucks.”

Oliver nodded. “Yeah, and Grandpa was an asshole and talked down to women and shit. It was ugly. They both died early—car wreck—and the whole family, they weren’t that broken up about it. My dad never talks about them, and Jorge, Manny, Gloria, they act like Dad raised them.”

I smiled then. “Your dad is really nice.”

Oliver nodded. “Yeah, he is. So anyway, my grandparents weren’t, and my dad, he sort of . . . I don’t know. Caught the niceness bug and decided to infect everyone else. And everyone else—they’re just so grateful he’s not Grandpa, they try to live as far away from all that as they can. Things like Manny’s divorce and Gloria’s sex life and Oliver is gay are things the family has decided not to pick on. I don’t know if they had a sit-down and talked about it, or if they read each other’s minds, or maybe they listen to my dad and spread the word—but I told my
papi
when I was twelve, and not a soul in this family has been shitty to me since.”