Chapter 11 #2
Oscar pulled out his phone and found the picture he’d snapped for Lucas at the café, tilting the screen so Grandma could look.
She raised her tortoise-shell cat-eye glasses to her nose, leaning in, then turned back to Oscar, giving him an expression that suggested he might have summoned a demon to her living room.
“And you didn’t think to lead with how absolutely adorable he is?” she asked.
“Grandma, he’s…” Oscar lowered his phone, smiling to himself as he caught another glimpse of Aaron, head tilted, freckled face aglow. “I feel like Papa’s alive when we’re together.”
Oscar’s voice shook, and he had to look away, fixing his eyes on Grandma’s TV, on the muted word-guessing show in which a contestant seemed to be having trouble filling in the last two gaps to complete the phrase “a stitch in time saves nine.”
“It’s literally m and v,” he muttered at the screen.
A warm, familiar hand slipped into his, calling back his attention, and when he finally mustered the courage to look, he found Grandma’s eyes trained on him, waiting.
“We haven’t said anything yet.” Oscar thought about Jack on the mountain, tumbling around with Ennis all summer, then marrying Anne Hathaway. “I don’t want to spook him, but I don’t want him to think that I—” Oscar groaned, leaning back into the couch. “Should I be asking whether we’re boyfriends?”
“Well, does it feel like you are?” Grandma took her hand back, reaching for something from behind the throw pillows. Oscar melted into the cushions as her crochet hook slid through the stitches, glinting blue as it caught the light of the TV. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He’s a knitter,” Oscar said. “Maybe he crochets, too, but he knits. He made Luigi a trans hat.”
“You have to lock this boy down. I must have him over for dinner,” Grandma replied.
She inclined her head, looking at Oscar over her glasses, a knowing smile on her slim lips. Papa had always looked more like Grandpa, but this was an expression that brought him to the room. Oscar wished he could ask Papa for advice. But Grandma was as good an alternative as any.
“Ozzy…darling…you kids complicate your lives too much for your own good.”
“What do you mean?” Oscar asked, picking at the hem of his T-shirt.
“In my time, you’d see someone you liked, you asked them out, and if you liked each other, you went out again.
If things went well, then that was that.
We didn’t have all these definitions you do now.
Friends with benefits and fuck buddies and all of that complicated stuff. ” Grandma carried on crocheting.
“We are definitely not anything like that!” Oscar said.
The heat in his stomach split two ways, rising up to warm his cheeks and pooling in his depths.
He and Aaron had kissed until it was late late, and then Aaron had stayed over and they’d slept right there in the living room with Luigi curled around their heads on the arm, but they hadn’t slept together.
Oscar wanted to. He wanted to touch every square inch of Aaron, to know him biblically, to transcend the bounds of human connection and merge their souls. Oscar wanted to have him, to be had by him.
But he didn’t want it like that. Aaron wasn’t a job to come with benefits, and they were far more than buddies; they had to be.
“Just tell him you don’t want to see anybody else, Oscar,” Grandma said. “And whenever you’re ready, you can have him over for dinner.”
And Oscar wanted that, too. Before he could confirm, Lina appeared in the doorway, a big smile on her face. She glanced between them, settling at last on him.
“Ready to go?” she asked.
And Oscar wasn’t, because he needed to ask Grandma more about her time and how people built marriages that lasted until one of them died. He needed her to continue making this sound far simpler than it felt.
But in the end, he nodded. And five minutes later, he and Lina were kissing Grandma goodbye, and it was back to the winding road with the pretty houses from his childhood.
“I really could have taken the bus back,” Oscar said for perhaps the seventeenth time as they passed the cathedral.
His eyes snagged on the gargantuan structure, pictured the graveyard at its back, the buildings across the street, the attic apartment in which Aaron would be watching movies with Joe and Anna, playing his game, eating junk food, not kissing Oscar.
“I know you could have,” Lina replied. “I wanted to drive you home. Is that so bad?”
“No.” Oscar glanced at his sister in the driver’s seat. He’d missed her. “Thanks.”
“You should have asked me for a ride over, too.” She tapped her fingers against the wheel, shaking her head. “But you always were a stubborn ass, weren’t you?”
“Blame your mother for her awful genes,” Oscar replied, sticking his tongue out.
She must have caught him through her peripheral vision because she smiled.
“So…what were you and Grandma talking about?” A blue iris slid to the corner of her eye, her smile twisting into a smirk. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you? Grandma was far too excited for it to be about anything else.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Aaron.”
There it was again, that word. Oscar wondered if the man who’d coined abracadabra would feel foolish if he heard the word Aaron and realized how much closer to magic each letter felt.
“Oscar…” Lina said a couple of heartbeats later. Her teasing tone had lulled, smile dropping. “I…I broke up with Ryan.”
“Oh.” Oscar wanted to tell her he was sorry, and in a way he was.
If Lina was upset, then Oscar would be upset, too.
But he couldn’t be sorry that she was now opening new doors, making room for someone who would love her as he should, who didn’t care more about his boys’ nights with his friends than spending time with her when she was on her period, curled up on the couch crying and craving chicken wings and chocolate.
“I know you’re happy about it.” Lina’s wet chuckle was evidence of her heartbreak. It tore something new and awful into Oscar. “Come on…say it.”
“He was a fucking asshole. And you deserve better.” Oscar lightly banged his head against the headrest. “If I believed in God, I would have prayed every single night for you to see sense and get rid of that pompous ass.”
“I’m aware.” Lina rolled her eyes, tapping to the beat of the old Kate Bush song playing on the radio.
Oscar remembered being fourteen and listening to “Wuthering Heights” in secret, afraid that if anybody heard him singing along, they’d think he was a girl.
As though the issue in question wasn’t that he hadn’t actually told people plainly that he wasn’t.
At least not outside his home. But fourteen was a tough time, especially for a boy in a body that didn’t yet feel like his, with his fiercest supporter gone forever.
“I hope you didn’t break up with him because of what he said to me, though. If you were happy…”
Oscar hated the feeling of maggots in his chest, crawling around and eating at the muscle.
He likened this to the evening Papa had found out about the close friendship between Oscar’s wrist and the blades hidden all around the bathroom.
They’d never had the conversation Papa must have practiced, about how Oscar shouldn’t do that to himself, but that Papa would be there to help him clean it up.
He’d always imagined that in another universe, one in which Papa had survived that Saturday morning, he would have sat with Oscar over pancakes and asked him if he wanted to talk about why of all things dresses made him want to hurt himself like that.
Oscar had always imagined that Papa might have asked him whether he wanted to go shopping for more clothes, not just the suit, but hoodies and T-shirts for school.
He’d pictured in his head a moment of bravery during which he would have told his father what he already knew, that he was a boy.
And Papa would have said, I know, Spike. I love you, son.
“I did it for me,” Lina replied, leaning against the seat as she slowed to a stop in front of his apartment. She turned to look at him, lips curling. “Because what he said to you, he said about my brother. And I could never love a man like that.”
“I’m sorry I put you in positions like this,” Oscar said.
It wasn’t that he’d never thought that before.
He’d just never said it out loud. But in the back of his mind, creeping like a specter, Oscar had always wondered whether his difference had made other people’s lives more difficult.
Papa’s, maybe. Lina’s. Grandma’s. He would never change it about himself, would never choose to be anything other than what he was—anyone—but maybe they would. He wondered sometimes.
“Say it again and watch me run you over with my pickup truck and never look back,” Lina replied, cutting right through his stream of nagging thoughts. She tilted her head. “Don’t ever think that again.”
“I’ll inform my chronically anxious brain that it’s forbidden from making me feel burdensome by order of Lina Peters,” Oscar said, throwing her a dead-eyed look.
“Exactly. You tell that brain of yours I’ll turn it into mashed potatoes if it dares.” Lina smiled, but the look in her eyes was serious. “Oscar, don’t ever avoid me again. I missed you.”
“I missed you too.” Oscar crinkled his nose. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. I should have annoyed you a little better.”
Lina yawned, and Oscar glanced at the clock. It was already well past eleven, and she had to drive back to her dorm to go to work in the morning.
“Are you good to drive?” he asked.
“I’ll put on some K-pop, and it’ll pass in no time,” Lina said, waving a dismissive hand.
Oscar wondered who had turned his little sister into this impressive person who did everything so incredibly well without breaking so much as a sweat, who could break up with a boyfriend of three years and smile about it so soon after, who could take care of herself and everybody else better than anyone Oscar knew.
Maybe he was being unfair. Maybe nobody had turned her into this, and Lina was just impressive, period.
“Okay,” he said, because if Lina said she was good to drive, then he would trust her. Oscar made to go, but as he turned towards the car door, an invisible hand seemed to reach for his wrist and press it. Oscar imagined it as the same hand that had ruffled his and Lina’s hair.
Papa had always given the best kisses, and Oscar and Lina had missed him for too long. Maybe Lina could take care of everyone the way Papa had. And maybe Oscar could love them the same. In a rare show of affection, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to his sister’s temple.
“Drive safe, Minnie,” he murmured. “I’ll see you soon.”
He didn’t look back as he leapt out of the truck and ducked into his building. He didn’t want Lina to see the tears in his eyes. He wondered if she’d been tearing up, too.
How long must it have been since anyone had called her that?