How to Be a Normal Person (30 page)

“Really?” Xander asked. “So what’s going to happen when you want to get fucked, Gus? Or when you want to fuck someone?”

“Xander,” Serge admonished. “Don’t be crude.”

Josiah was frowning. “Seriously, man. Casey said you shouldn’t be a dick. And you’re being a dick.”

“I’m just making sure our new friend here understands what he’s getting into,” Xander said, his eyes never leaving Gus. “I worry.”

“Well don’t,” Gus said. “Because you have nothing to worry about with me.”

“Really,” Xander said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Did he tell you that he and I dated?”

“Yes,” Gus said, voice neutral.

“Did he tell you for how long?”

“A few months.”

“Did he tell you why we broke up?’

“No,” Gus said. “Because I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business.”

“I love him,” Xander said bluntly. “I don’t know what kind of love it is anymore. Friend, family. Or more. I don’t know. But I am also a sexual person. I’m not asexual. I’m not demisexual. I’m homosexual. I like sex. I like fucking. That’s not all that I am, of course, but it is a part of me. I knew what I was getting into with Casey when we decided to try and make it more. I knew what would and wouldn’t happen. I thought I knew myself better. It was fine, at first. I jerked off more than I’d ever had in my life, but it was fine. Until it wasn’t.”

Gus wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to this, so he said nothing at all.

“It was embarrassing,” Xander said, averting his eyes. “I thought I was stronger than I was. But when it came down to it, I needed more than he could offer. So I told him this. And you know what he told me? He told me it was fine for me to go and fuck other people. As long as there were no feelings involved, it was fine. As long as I came back to him, it was fine. It wasn’t fine, though. Because even though he doesn’t want a sexual relationship, he’s just like everyone else. He got jealous. I got mad. He got mad. We broke up. We didn’t speak to each other for almost two months. But he was my friend first, so I made sure I got that back.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me,” Gus said when it looked like Xander had finished. “I’m not you.”

“No shit,” Xander snorted. “You are the furthest thing from me there is.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The
problem
,” Xander said, “is that eventually, you’re going to want to fuck. He can’t give that to you, and so you’ll look elsewhere. And it will crush him.”

“But you just said I’m nothing like you,” Gus said. “So why would I do what you did?”

“Oh snap,” Josiah muttered, looking uncomfortable.

Xander ignored him. “What do you identify as?”

Gus narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Gay?” Xander asked. “Bi? Asexual? Demisexual? Gray-sexual? What are you?”

“I’m Gus,” he said. “That’s it.”

“Everyone is something,
Gus
.”

“I know,” he said. “But that’s really it. I’m Gus. I work in a video store that no one really goes to. I own some buildings. I have a pet ferret. I read an inspirational message off a calendar every morning even though I don’t want to. My friends are all two times my age or more. I read encyclopedias. I miss my dad. And I think I might worship the ground Casey walks on. That’s it. That’s who I am.”

“That doesn’t cover your sexual orientation, Gus.”

“Maybe,” Gus said. “But why does it matter? Why do I need to be defined as anything? Why can’t I just be who I am without some asshole trying to make me into something I’m not?”

Serge laughed, but covered it up with a cough.

“Look, Xander,” Gus said, trying to ignore the way Xander was glaring. “I’m not you. I’m not any of you. Maybe I don’t quite know what I identify as. And maybe it really doesn’t matter. I’ve had sex. It was fine. But I don’t need it to be a person in a relationship. I jerked off last like four months ago. Maybe I have a low sex drive. Maybe I don’t want it at all. And maybe all I can think about is how when I get to hug Casey, it feels like the best thing in the world. And maybe,
just maybe
, none of that concerns
you
. So do me a favor and back the fuck off.”

“Dude,” Josiah breathed. “So fucking badass. This was like
Mortal Kombat
. Finish him!”

“Just be cool, yeah?” Serge said to Gus. “Casey really likes you. Honestly, I’ve never seen him that way with anyone. You’re a cool dude, Gustavo. I have mad respect for you.”

“Thank you,” Gus said nervously. “I also have mad respect for you as well.” Well, as much as one could have for a stoner hipster yoga instructor with imported Italian tiles. Gus kept that part to himself, though. He wasn’t one to rock the boat, and he thought he’d used up his bravery quota for the day.

Xander said, “You’re all right, Tiberius. I guess we can see where this goes.”

Gus huffed. “Thanks. Now that I have your approval, I can rest easy tonight, oh my god.”

Maybe not quite
all
his bravery quota for the day.

LATER, WHEN
Casey was walking him home, Gus asked how it’d gone with the We Three Queens.

Casey paled slightly. “They can be very scary when they want to be.”

Gus grinned.

Casey said, “I really like it when you smile.”

And they hugged on Gus’s porch for a very long time. When Casey finally pulled away, he pressed a brief, dry kiss to Gus’s lips. He walked down the stairs and whistled as he disappeared into the dark.

SO! THERE
he was! Gustavo Tiberius! He’d won the approval of Casey’s friends. He’d held his own against an ex-boyfriend. He’d shown that he wasn’t going to be intimidated. He was pretty sure he was at least 97.8 percent normal. He wore colors. He smiled quite a bit more. He laughed sometimes. If that’s what it meant to be normal, then Gus was as normal as they came!

He had a boyfriend who liked him.

He had friends that had his back.

He had a job and was financially comfortable.

He had a ferret named Harry S. Truman.

His life was pretty darn wonderful and—

His alarm went off at two thirty in the morning and he groaned, “Oh my god, I hate everyone, fuck my life, goddamn hipster yoga instructors.”

Of which there was one knocking on his door exactly thirty minutes later, looking fresh as a daisy whereas Gus looked as fresh as a dumpster behind an Arby’s in Phoenix. He couldn’t remember how he’d ended up agreeing to this. Maybe it stemmed from the slight guilt that was the if-you-hurt-him-best-friend speech. Or maybe he was just a sadist. He would have to look up sadism on Tumblr later.

“Ooh,” Serge said, pushing his way past Gus. “Someone is not a morning person.”

“It’s not morning,” Gus grumbled. “It’s very late at night. I am not a very-late-at-night person.”

“We’ll change that,” Serge said. “Now, go put on your yoga pants and we’ll start with some basic poses.”

“Put on my what now?”

“Yoga pants.”

“Right,” Gus said. “I don’t have those.”

Serge looked slightly horrified. “You don’t? But…
everyone
should have yoga pants.”

“I don’t do yoga!”

“What does
that
have to do with anything?”

It was either way too late or early to argue. Gus said, “I do have Yasser Arapants. That might be the same thing.”

Serge scrunched up his face. “Isn’t he a dead Palestinian leader?”

“Exactly.”

Serge nodded sagely, like the wise yoga instructor he was. “I can work with this.”

GUS LEARNED
three things during his very first (and most likely very last) yoga session.

First, he could not contort his body in the slightest. Serge commented on his lack of bendi-ness. Gus asked him politely to never make up words in his house again, oh my god.

Second, Serge wasn’t that bad for a hipster. Gus never thought he would reach a point in his life where he would have multiple people he could say that about. It made him feel slightly warm and fuzzy and also slightly disgusted that so many hipsters seemed to have wormed their way into his daily life.

Third, Serge didn’t like it when people were annoyed and/or pissed off with each other, and he tried to apologize for Xander’s behavior the night before. Gus just shrugged it off, telling him it wasn’t that big of a deal, that he’d been through worse.

“That’s no excuse,” Serge said, after trying to get Gus to do an
astang pranam
pose, which would have had Gus facedown with his ass in the air like he was a cat in heat presenting himself. Gus had politely refused, saying it was against his religion to do sexual poses in front of someone he’d just met. Serge had asked what religion. Gus had said priapism. Serge had said he thought he’d studied that while in his chakra tour in India. Gus had tried very hard not to bang his head on the nearest available surface. “Xander just has his own issues he’s working through. He didn’t need to take them out on you. I think part of him is jealous over you and Casey. Not so much that he wants Casey for himself, just that you make Casey happier than Xander ever did.”

If Gus were a lesser person, he would have allowed himself to gloat gleefully over such an admission. Thankfully, Gus was
not
a lesser person, instead choosing to gloat internally over such an admission. Outwardly, he chose to smile in such a way that he hoped was not coming across as smug, but knowing he failed by a large margin.

JOSIAH CAME
by the Emporium later that morning, handlebar mustache immaculately groomed. He wore low cutoff shorts and flip-flops that he proudly showed had a bottle cap remover on the bottom of each sole. “It’s so when I go to the beach I can just take off my shoes to open my beer,” he explained. “Because sometimes, you can’t be bothered to remember to bring one, so why not have it on your shoe?”

Gus tried not to think of the six or seven things wrong with that sentence.

“This is pretty gnarly,” Josiah said, looking around the Emporium. “I can’t remember the last time I was in a place like this. Probably Hollywood Video in March of 2006.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “So gnarly. And that was pretty specific for not being able to remember the last time you were in a video store.”

“Right,” Josiah said. “I only remember that because I had just turned sixteen, gotten a fake ID that said I was eighteen, and was going to try and rent
Wild Things
so I could see Kevin Bacon’s penis and Matt Dillon in a threesome.”

Because of course he did. “And how did that work out for you?”

“Not too well, dude. The video clerk didn’t believe my ID at all. It was probably my fault, though. The guy in the picture looked nothing like me.”

“Different hair color?”

“Nah,” Josiah said. “He was black.”

Gus fought the urge to put his face in his hands.

“Yeah,” Josiah sighed. “Didn’t really think that one through. The guy asked if I was joking, and I told him I’d just gotten really tan when the picture was taken. I felt bad right away because I didn’t know if that was racist. So I begged him not to call my mom and then ran out of Hollywood Video. For the next three weeks, I was convinced the police were going to come to my house and arrest me for trying to see Kevin Bacon’s penis. S’cool. No big deal. I saw it, like, six months later.”

“Kevin Bacon’s penis?” Gus asked.

“The movie,” Josiah said. “But yes, Kevin Bacon’s penis.”

“Worth it?”

Josiah shrugged. “I suppose. I figured out if I needed to see a penis, I could just stare at my own junk, you know?”

“How remarkably astute,” Gus said.

Josiah squinted at him. “You talk like Casey plays Scrabble. That’s, like, fate. You know? You two are meant to be.”

Gus didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he sputtered slightly.

“I can see why he likes you,” Josiah said, sounding amused.

“You can?”

“Sure,” Josiah said. “If I’d met you first, I probably would have tried to woo you into being my friend. And then, after we’d been friends for a while, I would have probably tried to bed you.”

“That’s… nice.”

“Yeah, but now I don’t have to because we’re friends already. And I won’t have sex with you because you’re with Casey.”

“We’re friends?” Gus didn’t quite know how he felt about having a friend he didn’t know he had. He wondered if Josiah had guerilla-friended all the people he knew.

“Yeah,” Josiah said. “Awesome, right? Casey told me that your dad used to smoke weed.” He didn’t say it with a question behind it, just merely stating fact.

And maybe that’s why Gus said, “Yeah.”

“Cool, man. I wish my parents were that laid-back. They think I’m a slacker because I smoke. And because I’m a waiter. It’s cool, though, you know? One day, I’ll get my big break. I have an audition next week for some commercial. They wanted to know if I was okay with full frontal nudity and I said I’ve got nothing to hide. If Kevin Bacon can do it, then so can I. That’s, like, my motto. For life and shit.”

“Full frontal?” Gus asked. “Are you making the commercial in Japan? Because that seems like something that happens in Japan.”

Josiah scrunched up his face. “No. At least they didn’t say it was in Japan. I hope not. I only asked for one day off. I think it’s for soup. Like chunky chicken or something. You want to hear my lines? I’ve memorized them already.”

Nothing on this earth could ever make Gus say no to that. He said, “Yes, please.”

“Okay, so, like, you’re my little brother, okay? And we’ve just gotten in from playing football.”

“Uh. I don’t know the lines?”

“Just wing it,” Josiah said with a shrug. “That’s usually what I do.”

“I thought you said you already know your lines.”

“I do! Mostly.”

“This is so realistic already,” Gus said as Josiah shook his shoulders and rocked his head from side to side, like he was
stretching
before he started to act. Like an
actor
.

“Are you ready?” Josiah asked.