Tell Me It's Real (40 page)

“Okay, well, let’s get this intervention started,” Nana said gleefully.

They all started forward into the room, forcing me to take steps back until my legs hit the bed and I had to sit. Nana pulled out my desk chair and sat in it with a grunt, scooching closer to me until our knees bumped together. Mom sat to one side of me and put her hand on mine, and Dad sat on my other side, pressing his leg against mine. Sandy sat on the floor near my feet, and I suddenly understood what it meant to have your family smothering you.

“Who would like to begin?” Mom asked.

“We’re not really doing this,” I snapped. “This is ridiculous!”

“I will,” Nana said as she pulled a massive pile of paper from her purse. She began to read in a flat monotone. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d—”

“When in the hell did you have time to write this?” I asked, dropping my jaw. “These things
just
happened! Sandy
just
called you!”

“I already had something written,” Nana said, affronted. “I modified it on the way over here. Can I finish, please?”

“Of course you can,” Mom said, patting her hand.

“No, she
can’t
—”

“Paul,” she shouted over me, starting to read again, “when you do stupid things, it makes me sad! I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cry!”

“I didn’t
cry
—”

“It hurts me to see you like this! I want you to be happy, but you keep sabotaging yourself! You need to allow yourself to be happy and to stay off meth and—Wait… I don’t think I got this far to change it. Hold on a second.” She pulled a pen from her purse and squinted down at the paper, starting to scratch off words and muttering to herself.

“You know,” I told her, “I don’t know what’s more unreal: the fact that you already had an intervention speech written out in case I got strung out on
meth
, or the fact that this is actually happening right now.”

“I like to prepare for every eventuality,” Nana said.

“I told you to open the door,” Sandy said mildly. “Since you didn’t, this is what had to happen.”

“We’re here because we love you,” Mom said.

“And because Vince is pretty great,” Dad said. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to let him go.”

“He
made
me go,” I reminded them.

“You probably just surprised him,” Mom pointed out. “He wasn’t expecting you to be there and it freaked him out.”

“Okay,” Nana murmured to herself in concentration. “I should also probably take out the part where I ask if I could have your stuff if you ever overdosed. That doesn’t seem applicable here.” She crossed out even more. I wanted to ask her how many pages her intervention speech ran, but didn’t think I wanted to know the answer.

“You probably would have done the same thing,” my dad said. “Scratch that; I
know
you would have done the same thing. But it’s not
about
you. This is about him. This is about how he’s going to lose his mother very shortly. This is about how he’s going to need someone to lean on and that someone should be you.”

I tried to stand, but they wouldn’t let me. I was starting to get pissed, but at who, I didn’t know. “You know,” I growled at them all, “everyone keeps
saying
that to me, that he’s going to need me, that he’s going to depend on me, but that’s bullshit. If he needed me, he wouldn’t have sent me away. If he needed me, he would have told me what was going on. If he wanted me as much as he claimed, he would have fucking let me in instead of allowing me to act all stupid and do what I did. So you’re right. This isn’t about me. This is all on him.”

“That’s not fair,” Mom said firmly. “It’s not fair and you know it. Everything around him right now is heightened to an extreme.”

“Exactly,” I snapped at her, trying to ignore the hurt look on her face. “
Everything
is heightened. There’s no way he would have fallen for me that quickly. There’s no way I could love him this fast. Everything is just moving at light speed, and it’s because of what he is going through. That’s all it is. It’s just that and nothing more.”

Dad snorted. “You were always such a terrible liar.”

“That’s a good thing, though,” Mom said. “Rather him be bad at it than good.”

“He tried to tell me once that this singlet I found at the thrift store looked good on me,” Sandy said. “But he kept twitching like he’s doing now and it totally gave him away.”

“Did you buy it anyway?” Dad asked.

“No. Paul made the very good point that most likely someone else’s balls or vagina had been smooshed in that before I got my hands on it, and I couldn’t in good faith wear it without getting grossed out.”

“Oh, man,” Dad groaned. “Maybe I
should
be a homosexual. Smooshed vagina? No offense, Matty, but
yuck
.”

“I’ll support you with whatever you decide to do,” Mom told him, reaching over me to hold his hand. “I could always be your fruit fly if you do come out.”

“That would be interesting,” Dad said. “Do you think I could be a leather daddy?”

“You could pull it off,” she said. “I know you can.”

“Paul has chaps you could borrow,” Sandy said, a little bit of Helena poking through. “I would have no problem seeing that. You’d be pretty hot, Larry.”

“I probably shouldn’t add that I’d have Johnny Depp officiate your funeral,” Nana muttered, scribbling furiously. “Somehow, I don’t think that would be appreciated.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world who wishes he could be deaf,” I said to no one in particular. “And blind.”

“You don’t wish that,” Mom said. “What an awful thing to say.”

“You should probably take that back,” Dad said. “You don’t want to piss off God and wake up tomorrow blind and deaf.”

“Fine, I take it back,” I mumbled. I didn’t
really
want to be blind and deaf. “But if God is granting wishes, I wish you’d all go away.”

“I don’t think God is a genie,” Sandy said. “But if he is, I wish for those two-thousand-dollar boots I saw in the boutique downtown. In red.”

“I wish for world peace,” Nana said. “And then six billion dollars.”

“I wish for more wishes,” Dad said.

“I wish for my son to stop being so pigheaded,” Mom said.

We waited.

“And for Vin Diesel to come to my house and be my naked maid,” she finished with a blush.

“I could take him in a fight,” Dad said, flexing his arms. “I’ll be your naked maid when we get home. Do you need dusting, Mrs. Auster?”

“I am feeling pretty dusty,” Mom agreed, winking at him.

“I’m sitting right between you two! Gross!”

“Gee, thanks for pointing out the obvious,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.

“Finished!” Nana said. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cry. I wish that things could go back to the way they were before. Like the way they were yesterday. Yesterday was a good day. Do you remember? You came over to my house with Vince and we all had dinner and I showed him Slutty Snow White and Johnny Depp loved him and Vince tried to eat your face outside after he found the bike. I wasn’t supposed to see that, but it was kind of hard not to notice when you got slammed up against the side of my house. In conclusion, you should go after Vince, and never do meth because you’ll lose your teeth and get weird spots on your face. No one likes weird spots.” She looked up at me and smiled.

“That was lovely, Gigi,” Sandy said, leaning his head against her leg. “You are such an eloquent speaker.”

“Thank you, honey,” she said, preening. “It goes on for an additional sixteen pages, but I felt that was enough to make my point.”

“Paul, do you love him?” my mom asked suddenly.

I didn’t have time to think. “Yes… oh shit. I meant
no
. Of course not. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They waited.

I sighed. “Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t know how or when or why, but yes.” I hung my head.

My dad reached up and rubbed my back. “Paul, did you know that me and your mom almost got divorced?”

I snapped my head back up. “What? What are you talking about? You guys met, everything was rosy, and a week later you were married. There was no divorce. There wasn’t even an
almost
.”

“No. Not completely. Oh, I knew I loved her right away, and I knew she loved me after she tried to kill me with her car, but I didn’t know if that was going to be enough.” He smiled over at my mom whose eyes were a bit watery. “It’s one thing to love a person, but it’s another to love them regardless of their faults. And I had a bunch of them.”

“He really did,” Mom mused happily. “So many faults.”

“So many,” he agreed. “So when I asked her to marry me, I was sure she was going to laugh at me, even if she did love me. It was going to be too fast, I thought she’d say. We were too young. We didn’t really know a thing about each other. But I knew what I wanted, and I wanted her. For the rest of my life.”

Sandy sighed and wiped his eyes. “So lovely,” he sniffed.

“But she said yes. She said yes with this little laugh she has that sounds like bells. She said yes and we got married down at city hall and she moved in the next day. A week later, she moved out.”

“He was a bit of a slob,” Mom said. “And a jerk. He wanted things done
his
way and on
his
timeline. And, of course, that didn’t work for me. At all. I was used to living my own life, and suddenly I was thrust in with this man that I really didn’t know. So one day while he was in class, I packed up and moved back home.

“How long did that last?” I asked, unsure why I’d never heard this part of their lives before.

“Six months,” Dad said. “I was devastated when I came home, but I understood. Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. I went over to Nana’s house and begged her to come back but she said no. I asked her if she wanted an annulment, and she said no to that too. I asked her what she wanted. She told me she wanted to date.”

“We’d already gotten the falling in love part out of the way,” Mom explained. “That was the hard part, and we got it done before most people would. What was left was just learning about each other to make sure the love we had was something that would last. Sometimes it’s enough to love someone just the way they are. Other times, you have to work at it so that it doesn’t fade away.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked quietly. “Why now?”

“Because you love him,” Dad said. “Even with all the little voices inside your head saying it’s too soon, that it’s not enough, that he’s so much better than you are, you love him. And he loves you. And you know it as well as I do. Someone who tells you that they’re going to fall in love with you, or that they’re partway there, is
already
there.”

“But you’re not letting yourself believe it,” Mom said, admonishing me slightly. “You’re so used to what you had before that this is scaring you. And it’d be easier to walk away. It would be easier to pretend this never happened. But the things we want in life will never be easy, and if you want it, if you
really
do, then you need to fight for it with everything you’ve got. It’s only yours to lose, Paul. Only you can make it go away.”

“It’s like all of you are after-school-specialing on me,” I groaned. “I feel so cheap and used and covered in grossness, like some twink after a bareback gang bang.”

“And how would you know what that feels like?” Dad asked. “Is there something we should know?”

“Not at all,” I said quickly. “Just an expression gay guys use.”

They looked to Sandy, who shrugged. “I understood what he meant.”

I like you
, I mouthed to him because I wasn’t quite back to love yet. He rolled his eyes.

“So what now?” Nana asked. “I feel like this intervention was modestly successful. I don’t think Paul will be doing meth again anytime soon.”

“I wasn’t on meth!”

“Well, if this were a romantic comedy, this would be the part where Paul would go out searching for the love of his life,” Sandy said. “There’d be really cheesy music playing in the background while he went over to his boyfriend’s apartment to apologize for being an idiot and to hug him and kiss him and then get down to bidness.”

“Oh my,” Mom said. “I think we’ve been watching the wrong movies.”

“By ‘bidness’, do you mean Paul would be a pony again?” Dad asked. “I must admit, I’m fascinated by that idea now.” He glanced back over to my mom. “We should get a riding crop.”

“Deal,” Mom said.

“I’m not a fucking pony!”

“Language,” Dad scolded.

“I should just call him first,” I said.

“No!” everyone said back.

“It’s not spontaneous enough,” Sandy said with a sigh.

“It has to be face to face,” Mom said, a wistful look in her eye.

“He has to see that you mean it,” Dad said, patting my arm.

“You should probably dress sexy,” Nana said.

“I’m not going over to his house if I don’t even know if he’s there. I don’t want to have to stand outside his apartment and have one of his neighbors call the police three hours later because I look creepy and bored. And lonely.”

“His car was there when we drove by,” Mom said without a hint of guilt. “So most likely he’s already home.”

I stared at them. They stared back.

“This isn’t like some fucking romantic comedy,” I said finally, grasping at my only and final excuse.

“Why?” Sandy asked.

“Because, this was just a fight. I think.”
I hope
. “We haven’t done the whole clichéd big misunderstanding, breakup thing before we get back together. That
always
happens before things get better. I don’t want it to get to that. I just… I can’t.”