Chapter 10
The Alfaro home is two stories with a stucco veneer and a circle driveway. The houses in this neighborhood all look the same and lack the sort of characters that live on my side of town.
Felix's parents moved here from Argentina after he was born.
His mom transferred to some oil and gas corporation in Houston and climbed the ladder there.
His dad is a chef who works at a hotel downtown, so he always cooks dinner for the family.
Every time I go over, the house smells like actual food, instead of frozen dinners and boiled eggs.
When we pass through the living room, his parents are watching TV. His mom gives me a weak hello. A quiet nod from his dad.
“I told Wade he could come for dinner,” Felix says.
“Sure,” his mom says. His dad flips through different channels with the remote.
“Felix, when you come back down I need to talk with you and your sisters in private,” Mr. Alfaro says.
Felix takes me to his room first and tosses his backpack on the ground. His cat is on his windowsill, staring intently at something. She spreads her mouth wide open and her jaws tremble while making an eck-eck-eck-eck-eck sound.
“Is your cat okay?” I ask.
“It's the universal cat battle cry. She does that whenever she sees a bird or fly or something she wants to murder,” Felix says. He tells me he'll be right back and closes the door behind him.
One wall is saturated with posters for bands he likes, like the Cure and the Midnight, and another has an Astros banner hanging above the fancy stand-up desk his parents bought for him.
His bed is immaculately made and his shoes lined up perfectly underneath.
Whenever I sleep over, the first thing he does in the morning is make his bed because it's the house rule.
I'd be lying if I didn't say I prefer the chaotic freedom of living with Dinah than living with Felix's lemon-shitting army parents.
Out of boredom, I look up the name Viola Maguire on my phone, which takes me to Maguire Talent Agency, LLC.
The photo on her main page shows a glitzy but serious woman who looks like she could be a lawyer.
She's got a lot of people signed to her agency.
Holy shit, she even represents Gorehound Gary!
Mr. Alfaro raises his voice. I press my ear against the door. As much as I can't stand his parents, I hope nothing bad is going on. They're shouting about something in Spanish. It's too muffled for me to catch any words.
One step backward and my foot hits something. The cat wails and dashes under the bed. My brain freezes in panic. I'll feel bad if I hurt her, and the last thing I want is Felix's parents to have another reason to loathe me.
“Kitty! No! I'm so sorry.” I get on my knees and stick my hand underneath to offer a mea culpa massage. Instead, I feel the spirals of a notebook. Nosy as always, I slide it out on the carpet. It's got doodles of guitars on the front.
Inside, there are random drawings of xenomorphs from Alien and Jason Voorhees's hockey mask, as well as scribbles and lyrics for songs.
Freddy haunts your dreams
Jason lives at camp
Jigsaw taunts through games
Xenomorphs are damp
Candyman loves his hooks
Michael Myers stalks his kin
Pumpkinhead pursues crooks
Leatherface wears your skin.
He's a talented songwriter. Some are funny like limericks; some seem pretty deep. Like he's holding something in him that he's only telling this notebook.
On another page, there's a photo of us dressed as zombies last year, surrounded by doodles of zombies in red and black ink. On the page to the right, he's written something in big, bold letters:
I'LL RUN AWAY WITH YOU
And that's when it hits me. This mysterious, nagging feeling I've had, the super extra jealousy of Byron—it's because I'm in love with my best friend. And here in this notebook, it feels like he might love me, too. But how do I know for sure?
Footsteps barge toward his room and I fling the notebook back under his bed.
“What are you looking at?” Felix asks as he glides through the door.
“I accidentally stepped on your cat,” I say. “She's hiding now.”
“She'll forgive you. We need to go,” he says.
“What about dinner?”
“I don't care. Anywhere. Your house. Whatever.”
“What were you fighting about?” I ask him.
“I'll tell you in the car.”
We shuffle down the stairs and Felix passes his dad, who asks him where he's going. Felix waves him off and says something back in Spanish.
As Felix drives us out of his neighborhood, the streetlights turn on.
“My grandfather on my mom's side left me and my sisters five thousand dollars each after he died. My dad said he expects me to use it for college. He wants me to go for computer science,” he says.
Felix's dad signed him up for some coding camps in middle school and foisted this hobby on him.
He's never approved of Felix's creative interests like music.
“Stop the car,” I say.
He pulls over to the side.
“What if we went to LA when we graduated?” I ask.
“How?” Felix asks.
“There's an agent coming to see the musical. If I land a part in it and get her attention and she sees our videos, maybe she can sign us and we can be professional content creators like Gorehound Gary,” I say, leaving out the fact that Byron is doing the same thing.
“We could use your granddad's money to survive.
I don't have to worry about storms every day. We can be ourselves there without being afraid.”
“What do you mean, be ourselves? You mean I can be myself?” he asks.
“I've been hiding something from you, too.”
Felix tenses up, looking at me nervously.
I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “I'm—oh, man—I'm in the Bill Skarsg?rd fan club. Like you.”
He laughs. “Why didn't you tell me earlier when I told you?”
“I don't know. It's scary to say out loud.”
He smirks. “Honestly, I had a feeling.”
I cock back and my shoulders hit the velvet upholstery with a soft thump. I squint my eyes and fold my arms. “Shut up! What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, the drag queen gnome was your idea. And the shirtless Bill Skarsg?rd photo on your wall.”
“For fuck's sake, it's The Crow!” I say defensively, immediately hit with memories of gawking at his abs lustfully while trying to sleep.
“But when you talked about how that Brandon Barton Buckley guy grabbed you, you sounded firmly not gay, if that makes sense,” he adds.
“Dude, he's like fifty years old with a set of grandma teeth.”
“How long have you known?” Felix asks.
“I don't know. Maybe it was always there lurking. I thought I was being weird, like intrusive thoughts or something,” I say. “So I put it in the back of my mind as much as I could. But maybe I don't have to if we go to LA. People are more accepting there.”
“How are you going to get the attention of a professional agent in your first musical?” he asks.
“That's for me to work on,” I say, grabbing his hand. “Anything is possible if you and I stick together. We could be The Gore Gays!”
“That sounds like a mountain range in France,” he says.
“Be serious.”
He's silent for the next twenty seconds, looking out the window. It's an outrageous plan. Maybe I'm overshooting here.
“Play ‘Los Angeles' by the Midnight,” he tells the car.
He takes a sip from a drink in his cupholder, then gets back on the road as the sun sets, tinting the sky pink and orange while the dreamy chords of synthwave music blast from the speakers.
The silhouetted trees we pass might as well be palm trees, and the A/C in Felix's car might as well be that fresh Pacific air he was talking about.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
Felix smiles. “I guess I should start looking at surfboards!”
This is going to be a great year. Maybe even the best year.
___________
When we get to my house, there's a Ford Super Duty in the driveway—the same one we saw at Clint's that had the stripper decal. The shrill, incompetent playing of a squeaky guitar rings from the garage.
Dinah hears me in the driveway and orders me into the garage, which she spent the whole day transforming into her very own podcast studio with all the crap she was able to afford by stealing. Clint is sitting on a chair and tuning his guitar.
“Wade! Good to see you again!” Every time he talks to me, it's like he's taunting me. He notices Felix. “This must be your friend who really likes fireworks?”
Felix's drink falls out of his hand, the straw still stuck in between his lips.
“You were right, Wade. He's pretty good. He told me we should call the show Dinahmite! Like dynamite, except with my name! Who would have thought of that?”
Clint picks up his guitar and tears into a metal riff. “It's Dinah o'clock!” he sings.
Dinah claps. “Isn't that amazing? That's the intro!”
“Dinah! Dinah-mite! Dinah! Dinah-mite!”
“Congrats,” I say tepidly, realizing I have eternally cursed myself.
“I guess you'll be seeing a lot more of me from now on, buddy!” He pats me on the back a little too aggressively, and every cell in my body spontaneously combusts.
So maybe this is definitely not going to be the best year ever.