Just pretend to be Bobby. Without the hair, or the glasses, or the voice, or anything that made Bobby the cute go-getter she was.
This was a disaster. This was a fucking disaster waiting to happen. No, it was a disaster already happening and, oh God, when had Rob gotten to his feet and started walking over to Dylan? He hadn’t decided to walk over to Dylan, had he? How was he already halfway across the classroom when he hadn’t even decided to go there? Could he still turn around? Pretend he’d meant to go to the bathroom? God, no, that would look so lame and there was no way he could get away with it. No way—
“Hey,” Dylan said, pulling out the chair next to his own.
Oh. Well. That wasn’t so bad.
“Hey,” Rob replied. Okay, nothing too weird there, either. Good start. Keep it going. “So, I, uh . . . I didn’t actually hear why we were pairing up?”
“And here I thought you were a front row keener,” Dylan said, a twinkle in his eyes.
And even though it was clearly meant as harmless teasing, Rob couldn’t help but bristle. You don’t know me at all.
“Aaanyway. We’re supposed to do this gallery tour . . . thing. I’m Dylan, by the way.”
“Yeah, I know,” Rob said, and immediately started to blush.
“Didn’t know I made that much of an impression.”
Yeah, well, apparently I haven’t made much of one on you.
“I’m Rob, by the way.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dylan mimicked, bobbing his head side to side with a sneer.
“You do not. You’re just trying—”
“Rob Ng. N-G, pronounced like I-N-G.” Dylan gave him a smug stare. “Ceramics, right?”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah.”
“Dude, don’t get all weirded out, it’s not like I have a shrine to you in my closet or something. Just a good memory for faces, that’s all.”
Hmm, well, it was true that Dylan had surprised him once, but Rob had an inkling his memory for faces wasn’t quite as good as he thought if he could be tricked by a pair of glasses and some hair extensions.
Unless, of course, he hadn’t been tricked.
Rob stared at him hard, trying to find any hint in his expression—a smile, maybe, a crinkle at the corner of his eyes, a sneer?—that Dylan knew about Bobby. But there was nothing, just Dylan’s big round face, completely open and completely Bobby-awareness-free.
Which made sense, of course. Hadn’t Rob pinned Dylan as someone with no filter, right on that first night they’d met, when Dylan had gone off on some tangent about his sister’s porn career? Was the guy even capable of keeping a secret?
Rob thought not.
“So, gallery tour?” he said.
“Were you just checked out of this entire class? Are you some kind of secret super slacker?” Dylan teased, but he was grinning like a maniac, so Rob didn’t bother apologizing.
“Kinda, yeah. In my defense, I do feel like I have a cold coming on, but, uh . . . in the interests of transparency, I also have a Kingdom of Elves account.”
Dylan punched his palm, the motion like a valve for his excess energy. “No shit, man, me too! Well, I did. They lost me on that last expansion . . . racist fucking panda army. Well, that, and the subscription fees were killing me.”
Rob tapped his cheek with his index finger, turning his eyes ceiling-ward. “Aw, the pandas aren’t all that bad. They just speak English worse than Jackie Chan . . . and are all martial artists . . .”
Dylan raised an eyebrow, and used his palms to mimic scales weighing invisible racism.
“Well, at least they don’t have cars to crash into shit,” Rob finished with a grin.
“My man, you set a low bar,” Dylan said, almost like it was a compliment, and clapped Rob on the shoulder companionably. “Anyway, I’d really like to get a head start on this assignment, so are you free to maybe go to the gallery tonight? The one in Surrey has a pop art exhibit. You’re not busy, are you? No raids or anything?”
Not since Mike, not that Rob was going to admit that aloud. “Nah, I’m taking a break right now, focusing on school and work.”
Dylan bobbed his head, like he was only half listening, and the other half was music with a rapid beat. “Cool, cool, okay, so tonight? Or hey, we could just meet up after class, get some dinner, then hop a bus?”
Dinner? Art? With Dylan? Rob found himself nodding back before he’d even considered the implications.
“Great, so it’s a date, then,” Dylan said.
It’s a date.
It’s a date?
Shit.
By the end of the day’s classes, Rob had obsessed enough over Dylan’s phrasing that “date” didn’t even sound like a word anymore. It had split into two syllables, stretched out, had a long a and a short a, had morphed into four individual letters that didn’t come together at all, swimming around in his head like all the Chinese characters he’d never bothered to learn . . . And after all that, he still wasn’t any closer to understanding what Dylan wanted from him.
Never mind Dylan, did Rob even know what he wanted? Did he want it to be a date? Sure, there was the evidence that he’d been relieved that Max was working the night shift tonight, leaving him free to accept the invitation. Rob was lonely, after all, especially without his guild-mates on Kingdom of Elves, but did he want to do the whole dating thing with Dylan, specifically? And the timing? Thanks to his adventures in cross-dressing, Rob’s life was a confusing fucking mess. Even so, Dylan was one constant in that mess, the sole person who’d seen Rob in both roles. And not only that, whether he was with Bobby or Rob didn’t change Dylan at all. He was just as flirtatious, just as funny, just as completely uncensored.
Rob . . . liked that. There was no guarantee that Dylan would continue that behavior if he ever found out that Rob and Bobby were one and the same, mind you, but in the meantime it felt so much more genuine than anyone else. Even a socially challenged creep like Charlie VIP had changed his behaviour when faced with one or the other, not to mention Hollister Cap Guy’s complete 180 from abusive toolbag to friendly but fetishizing one.
Dylan was different. Rob or Bobby, he was the same dead honest, refreshingly plain-faced guy, with the same jokes and inexplicable flirtation and inability to control his mind-to-mouth processes.
No pretence. No act. No hidden bias, positive or negative.
Ah, shit. Rob was into him. Not to the point of doodling their names on his Trapper Keeper, but the prognosis on that front wasn’t good.
Rob was doomed, in other words.
But when he looked up from slotting away the afternoon’s work in student storage and saw Dylan standing in the door of the studio, hands in his pockets and head tilted, waiting for him to finish up, Rob couldn’t help but think that maybe doomed was too harsh a word for it.
Destined, maybe?
Damn, cheesy.
He flashed Dylan a tight smile, hoping it didn’t give anything away or suggest anything Dylan didn’t want it to suggest, and finished packing his bag. Took a deep breath. Whether this was a Date or not, he’d let Dylan make the first move. Thankfully, he knew just the way to test the date factor. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he walked straight up to Dylan like a man not ashamed or nervous of anything, and before Dylan could get a word in edgewise, he said, “So! Dinner. Ninety-nine cent pizza?”
Totally not date food. If Dylan refused it, well then—
“Fuck yeah, sounds great. I know a place that does huge slices. Big as your puny head.”
Not a date then. Of course not. Shit, why had he ever even thought that? This was a class assignment, for fuck’s sake. Going out to dinner first just made sense when the alternative was to go home and eat and then try to arrange to meet up later. Going straight from school to food to gallery was just a measure to prevent group-mates from flaking. Of course.
Inwardly, Rob fought back from collapsing like an imploding star into the black pit of disappointment sitting where his stomach should be, but outwardly, without eve
n thinking, he riffed back, “Puny? You think this is puny? This is normal—although maybe not to a bobblehead like you.” He rapidly tilted his head back and forth on his neck to illustrate, and it was only when Dylan started laughing that he realized. He’d joked back. Joined in. Been a normal, social human being. And it hadn’t been painful at all.
Was that Bobby’s influence on him, he wondered?
Or Dylan’s?
Turned out, the pizza slices were the size of Rob’s—totally not puny at all, thanks—head. And delicious, too, even tasted through a stuffed nose. Dylan got his slice fully loaded and slathered in that garlic sauce in the squeeze bottle. Rob, a little less adventurous, had pepperoni and cheese, picking off the pepperoni and eating it first as Dylan talked his ear off.
“Me, I grew up in a small town, almost all white—except for me and my sister of course,” Dylan said through a mouthful of green peppers and potent garlic, in response to Rob’s boring-ass Vancouver born n’ raised spiel. “I felt like . . . well, half the time I felt like an ambassador, and the other half I felt like a prisoner of war, you know? People watching me like I’m some oddity, wishing they could just take notes while I sat in a cage. And I mean, I got good parents, and I did good in school and didn’t get into any kind of trouble, so at some point people stopped expecting me to break their windows and started expecting me to be some Iron Eyes Cody model Indian for them instead, and I still don’t know which was worse.”
He paused, took a bite of his pizza, chewed once, and continued, the perceptiveness of his words completely at odds with the fact that Rob could see the half-masticated pizza crust rolling around over his tongue. “I don’t think having white parents fucked me up, exactly, but it made me kind of mad because, you know, white government and white people put me where I was—I’m one of the last ‘sixties scoop’ kids. Which, you know, obviously I was adopted out in the eighties when I was a toddler, but I guess ‘sixties, seventies, and eighties scoop’ isn’t as catchy.”
Rob must have given him a blank look, because he took a moment to chew and gather his words, then explained, “Back before the current laws about Aboriginal adoptions, the government pawned off all the little Indian kids on nice white families because they couldn’t do the whole government-sanctioned-child-rape thing they call ‘residential schools’ anymore.”
“Oh.” Rob had invited the explanation, but it was still a hard thing to take that in. He’d heard about residential schools in history class, of course, but he’d never heard them described that way, so bluntly—or taken so personally. But then, what did some middle-aged white dude like his high school history teacher know about what it felt like to grow up Native, carrying that inherited hurt around in your heart? No more than he knew about how it felt for Rob to listen to his classmates coolly justifying racist immigration policies targeted at “job-stealing coolies” like him and his father.
“So, anyway,” Dylan continued, shrugging off that particular pain in a shockingly practiced way, “after purposely kidnapping me away from my bio-family and my home and my culture, these same white people magically expected me to turn into some kinda perfect model of . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence, just made a frustrated animal noise and took a big gulp of his pop.
“Hmm,” Rob said, because That sucks seemed pretty minimizing and I get you had to be a lie. But Dylan was sitting there staring at him expectantly, waiting for a reply. “Well, uh, I mean, no shortage of Chinese culture in Vancouver to pick up on, or even Chinese-Canadian, but I guess you could say even though my dad moved here back in the seventies of his own free will, it’s still mine and my sister’s fault if we act too Canadian.”
Dylan nodded thoughtfully, and even though he wasn’t speaking, he was still chewing with his mouth open. “I guess because I’m not a total screw-up, people want me to be their Good Inuit or whatever, but it turns out that other than the skin and the card and the bio-family across the country, I’m as white as they are. Except when I’m not white enough, you know? And don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed of who I am or where I come or anything, I just—if I decide to embrace that and get into the Indigenous art scene or pull a Dave Chappelle and take a sabbatical in Nunavut, I want to do it because that comes from inside me, not because some white people think I should.”
Which explained the hostility toward the soapstone carving, Rob supposed. He wondered how many times Dylan had been asked that, Oh, you’re going to art school? Are you doing your traditional art, then? It’d be like assuming Rob was just there to do inkbrush paintings or whatever. “Yeah,” he said with a nod.
“That’s why I like you, Rob; you don’t do what’s expected of you, either. White people look at you, and you say you’re in school and working part-time and they probably think you’re studying business or math or pre-med while you work at your parents’ restaurant or something, and there you are doing ceramics and working at a porn store.”
Just then, a piece of pepperoni must have decided to get all balled up in Rob’s throat, because he coughed loud and hard, tears pricking up in the corners of his eyes. He took a chug of his watered-down fountain pop and spluttered and wiped his eyes and croaked out, “Wh-what?”
“Are you . . . are you okay?” Dylan asked, and Rob waved off his concerned hand reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. At his silent, watery-eyed nod, Dylan went on. “Don’t you remember? I came in a few weeks back and got all weird trying to justify why I was going to a store and not getting it on the internet like a normal dude.”
OhthankGod. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Your sister works in the industry, right?”
“Yeah,” Dylan said, settling back in his seat again and seeming pleased that Rob had remembered him after all. “Sorry if I freaked you out that night. And sorry for pretending I didn’t know you when we were in class. I just wasn’t sure if knowing I knew would weird you out even more.”
So you kept your distance and waited for me to make the first move. “Aww, that’s sweet! You’re looking out for me.”
“Dylan Ford knows how to be discreet!” Dylan announced with pride, tapping his nose.
Rob snorted. “Uh-huh? So what’s your sister’s stage name, again?”
“Ha-ha.” Dylan folded his arms over his chest. “S’not indiscretion if the person doesn’t mind who knows it.”
“Point,” Rob said. Dylan hadn’t said as much, maybe was too nice to point it out, but it was really shitty of Rob to assume she’d be keeping her career a big dark secret. She didn’t have to keep it a secret if she didn’t want; she had nothing to be ashamed of.
“You really wanna know, though? What you gonna do, look her up in your little computer system, watch her videos and picture me instead?”
Rob resisted the urge to spit out his mouthful of pizza in disgust. “That is fucking vile, Dylan.”
Dylan smiled sheepishly. “It kinda was, wasn’t it? Damn, here I was just trying to flirt and instead I get all Flowers in the Attic on your ass.”
Flirt. It was all Rob could do to keep from outright melting. “And—like the fact that both of us have apparently read that crazy chick book—let us never speak of it again.”
“Deal,” Dylan said, and they both reached over the table and shook on it.
It was twilight by the time they reached the gallery almost two hours later, and there was a light but ice-cold drizzle in the air. Dylan stepped off the bus and pulled his hood over his ears, his body vibrating with something that seemed halfway between a shiver and a wet dog shaking off. Rob, behind him, dug through his bag and pulled out his compact umbrella. Took his steps two at a time until he could open it over both their heads.
Dylan turned, his look of genuine surprise quickly shifting into a wry smile as he pulled his hood from his head. “What a gentleman!”
“Just you wait,” Rob said with a wink. “Because once we get inside, I’m buying you a coffee, too.”
“What? What the hell for?” Dylan’s face turned tense, and he picked up his
pace as they crossed the parking lot together, as if trying to escape the shelter of Rob’s umbrella.
“As a thank-you for the stimulating conversation? For getting me out of my shell? To bribe you into being my friend?” Ah, that last one was supposed to sound self-deprecating, but it had come out pathetic and desperate instead. Rob fell back a step, letting Dylan make his intended escape, but instead of taking off, Dylan just stopped and turned and squinted at Rob through the rain dripping from his hair.
“You don’t have to bribe me, Rob. I mean, for someone doing ceramics, you’re actually pretty cool.”
“Oh, um.” Rob blinked. Shook his head. Dashed forward and held his umbrella up high so it covered Dylan again. “Thanks. I think you’re cool too.”
“Shit, I don’t need you to tell me I’m cool. I am so cool. For one, I draw indie comics. For two, have you seen these sneakers?” He held a leg out for Rob to see. His sneakers were huge skate shoes, the kind that’d been popular in the early 2000s, two sizes too big and worn absolutely ragged, with wagging fat tongues and undone laces. They looked like absolute shit. “Had these since high school,” he said proudly.
“I have no idea how those make you cool, but you have a point on the comics thing, so I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Yeah, guess you will.” Dylan put his foot down and started walking. “And about this coffee thing . . . you know I’m gay, right?”
“Uh . . . Yeah? I kinda guessed from seeing your jerkoff material. And since you can’t see what I jerk off to, I’ll level the playing field. I’m gay too. But what does that have to do with the coffee?”
Dylan got to the front door of the gallery first, and stood aside, holding it open for Rob to walk through. “Just putting it out there.”
Well, that didn’t clarify things at all. Rob frowned, pretending to be superfocused on the task of shaking out and folding up his umbrella. Was Dylan warning Rob that buying him coffee would turn this into a date? Was that the signal Rob was sending, in Dylan’s eyes? Did Dylan mind that Rob was sending date signals? What in God’s name was Dylan “putting out there”?
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