1
Career Day
This story takes place before The Same Blood.
When Tean got home, Jem was still on the couch.
In his underwear.
Surrounded by takeout bags from McDonald’s.
Actually, surrounded wasn’t the right word. Covered came closer. Or maybe buried. One bare foot protruded. So, the part about the underwear was more of a guess. An educated guess. Based on the last couple of weeks’ worth of evidence.
Somewhere, a tail thumped against the floor—rustling the paper bags in the process.
“Uh, hello?” Tean said.
The tail thumped faster.
“I’ll clean it up,” Jem said from under the mountain of takeout bags. The sounds of crinkling and crumpling accompanied what appeared to be shifting and moving on the couch, but then the sounds stopped. Still no Jem. “We built a fort.”
“Oh. That’s nice.”
“Well, Scipio did most of the work.”
“Hm.”
“I was the supervisor.”
“Uh huh.” But because Tean couldn’t help himself, he asked, “Don’t people usually make forts out of blankets?”
More movement—a little closer to thrashing, this time, and the crinkling was definitely agitated.
“Well, yeah, but that’s boring. And then we thought of using the bags like, you know, bricks.
Sheila was super nice and said we could take as many bags as we wanted.
And then we tried taping them together like bricks, but that took way too much time, so we just piled them up. ”
“I see.”
Tean moved around the coffee table. The hidden tail began to whip back and forth more vigorously. Hints of an excited Lab’s head appeared from under the mound of paper bags: brown eyes, a pink tongue, the muzzle with a hint of white.
“Scipio,” Jem said, “you’re ruining it.”
Tean sat on the coffee table. The Lab surged to his feet, dislodging an avalanche of bags, and pressed his head against Tean for loves.
As Tean scritched his ears and let the dog smell his breath, he considered his boyfriend.
Enough bags had fallen to expose Jem in his old Monster Truck T-shirt, with a pair of Beavis and Butthead boxers.
His beard was starting to lose its perfect trim.
He hadn’t bothered to do his hair—no side part, just a messy fall across his forehead.
“Hi,” Tean said softly.
Jem pulled a bag in front of his face.
Laughing softly, Tean scooted around Scipio to sit on the edge of the couch. He reached through the crinkling mass of paper bags until he found the back of Jem’s head, and then he rubbed softly. Not all that different from Scipio, maybe, except Jem didn’t want to smell his breath.
“Did you have a good day at work?” Jem mumbled.
“I got out of the office,” Tean said. “That always makes it better. What about you? How was your day?”
“Okay.”
They sat there, Tean scratching lightly at Jem’s nape, Scipio nudging Tean’s other hand until Tean gave up and resumed petting the Lab.
Scipio’s tail continued to sweep away bags.
In the quiet came the sound of TV voices.
It was some sort of daytime talk show. An old daytime talk show.
That Jem had somehow found online. Across the bottom of the picture ran the chyron: Fix my lazy son!
On the stage, a sullen teen dressed all in black stared at the floor while a man in the audience shouted into a handheld microphone, “And show some—” A loud bleep interrupted. “—respect!”
Cheers.
Jeers.
The sullen teenager made an obscene gesture, and the talk show audience dissolved into boos.
“I’m going to turn this off,” Tean said.
“No, wait, they’re going to send him to military academy!”
Tean found the remote and clicked the power button.
Nothing happened.
He pressed it again.
Still nothing.
“That’s for the Apple TV,” Jem said.
“But you use it to turn on the TV.”
“I know, but this is the TV’s built-in browser, so you have to use this one.” Jem flailed around for a moment, bags whispered against each other, and then he held out a remote.
Tean took it. This time, the TV went dark.
“Jem,” Tean said softly.
“I know it’s weird. I know I made a mess. We were just trying to have fun. I promise this place will be spick-and-span by the time you get home tomorrow.”
“I’m not worried about the bags. Well, I am, because this is a lot of wasted paper, but—” Tean took hold of the bag that Jem was still using to block his face. He gave a few tugs, and Jem surrendered it. “—I am worried about you.”
“I’m fine.”
Tean nodded.
“I’m great,” Jem said. “This is like a vacation. Do you know how long it’s been since I could just lie around and not have to do anything, watch all the TV I want, hang out with Scipio, go for walks whenever we feel like it—”
The Lab’s tail thumped at the word, because apparently he felt like it now.
“My whole life, I’ve had to worry about how I was going to get my next meal, where I was going to sleep, what I was going to do. And I don’t have to worry about any of that because you’re being so generous. For the first time ever, I can just be a bum.”
Tean decided now wasn’t the time to bring up certain other days, like Jem’s days off, Jem’s weekends, when spending eight hours on the couch watching Power Rangers had been nonnegotiable.
“Hey!” Jem said. “I saw that look!”
“Jem,” Tean said. “I know you’re stressed. I know you’re having a hard time figuring out the next step. I know this has been a discouraging process.”
“It’s not discouraging.” And then, sounding more miserable than ever, Jem said, “I got a job, actually. So technically, we’re celebrating.”
“Jem, that’s great.” But then Tean said, “Why is it not great?”
“It is great. It’s got benefits. Good pay.”
“Doing what?”
“It’s easy. It’s a piece of cake.”
“Doing what, honey?”
“A stupid call center. I could do it in my sleep.”
Tean pushed fingers through Jem’s messy hair.
Jem made an unhappy sound and flopped onto his back.
Scipio nuzzled into them, probably to see if a walk was still on the table.
“It sounds like maybe you don’t want to take the job,” Tean said.
“Tean, I have to take the job. The Subaru made the weirdest sound today, and you’ve been saying some truly disturbing shit about downgrading Scipio’s kibble, and I swear to God the dishwasher hissed at me.”
“We’re fine. None of those things is an emergency. You can take some more time, look for something you really want to do—”
“Yeah, great, I’ll check out all those places where nobody wants to hire me because I have no education and no skills and no work experience, and so I’m just a worthless piece-of-shit leech sucking my boyfriend dry.”
Tean ran his fingers though Jem’s hair for a pair of quiet minutes.
“I know it’s been hard,” Tean said. “I know you’re trying. It’s okay to feel frustrated. But I don’t want you to make yourself miserable with another job you hate.”
Jem pulled another bag over his face.
Tean plucked it away. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” Jem said, and his voice was rough around the edges.
After a few moments, Tean said, “You’ve been watching a lot of Geraldo.”
“Not that much.”
“And those parents are very unkind to their children.”
“Not that unkind.”
“Yesterday’s episode was ‘My Daughter’s a Slut’.”
“Babe, did you see the clothes she was wearing? And after her mom bought her that nice sailor-collar blouse she could wear to school!”
“No more Geraldo.”
Jem’s glare was more of a squint, but it still packed a punch.
“Maybe we try something besides filling out job applications,” Tean said. He said the next bit as it popped into his head: “We can do a career day.”
“Career day is what they call it in middle school.”
“You know what I mean. Try to figure out what you’d like to do. An aptitude test, maybe. Go to a networking event.”
Jem propped himself up on one elbow. “You’re going to go to a networking event. You.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because when I asked you about going to your office Christmas party, you disappeared into the back room for the rest of the night.”
“I didn’t disappear.”
“You spent two hours looking up statistics about people being trampled in public.”
“Did you know there was this cinema in Kansas—”
“Yes, I know. Obviously I know. You brought up the cinema three times.” And then, for some reason, Jem grinned. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making me feel better.” Jem got himself upright, kissed Tean’s cheek—and brought a whiff of McDonald’s special sauce with him—and then said, “Come on, let’s go.”
“I didn’t mean a networking event right now, necessarily.”
Jem was already scrambling over him, kicking through the paper bags until, with a triumphant sound, he picked up a pair of joggers. “No, on a walk. You promised Scipio.”