Who We Are

by T. J. Klune

  That led to two minutes of peace and quiet before he launched again into how barbaric the pilgrims were in taking the lands from the Native Americans, how now we celebrate that horrific tragedy by shoving bread up turkey asses and then taking it back out again and putting it in our mouths.

  He contemplated quite loudly on whether or not there would ever be a turkey revolt, and that he believed that one day there could be, and wouldn’t we all be sorry when we had bread shoved up our asses and we were put in the oven until our juices ran down our sides and our skin swelled up nice and brown. I told him that was a horrible thing to say. He told me that I would probably enjoy said treatment by turkeys because I like stuff like that now. I asked him quietly to elaborate what he could possibly mean. He told me that while researching gay history, he was able to discover that the smaller man in a gay relationship is normally the bottom, and even though he didn’t quite get the subtle intricacies that the position held, he was quite sure that I fit the bill to a T. I asked him politely to stop researching gay history because I was afraid it was going to warp his fragile little mind. He told me it was already too late, and didn’t I know that my name, Bear, was wrong because that implied that I was a big, hairy man in the gay community? And that Otter was too incorrectly named, because apparently an “otter” is a small gay man with body hair. He mused on the fact that it must be fun to be gay because you get to change your names, apparently quite often, whether you’re a drag queen or a hairy individual. He came to the conclusion that it must be even more wonderful to be a hairy drag queen and said he was going to keep it on his short list of prospective career possibilities, along with astronaut, physicist, and furniture store salesman.

  Sometimes, it’s easier not to ask.

  Other times….

  “Furniture store salesman?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Why do you want to do that?”

  “I like couches,” he said. “Duh.”

  “You’re very odd, Kid.”

  He grinned. “Learned from the best, Papa Bear.”

  I made sure I added a couch to my mental Christmas list for him.

  So, somehow, the turkey caught fire, and by the time I pulled it out, it was black and smelled like death, and the Kid sauntered into the kitchen, whistling brightly before stopping and staring at me and Otter trying to salvage anything we could that didn’t look like it was suffering from fourth-degree burns.

  “Oh gosh!” he said a little too loudly. “Whatever happened here?”

  “The turkey burned,” I said, frowning at him. “Where have you been?”

  “In my room,” he said, smiling widely. “Just… hanging out, you know?

  Doing… stuff. And things.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to eat the edamame,” Otter sighed, dumping the remains of the turkey in the garbage. “The best part of Thanksgiving is having leftovers. I’m the saddest person in the world right now.”

  “We’ll have plenty of edamame,” the Kid promised him. “I’m sure you can put it on a sandwich if you’re so inclined. Wow, wait till I tell everyone on the PETA message boards that we’re having our very first true vegetarian Thanksgiving. Huzzahs all around!”

  “You did it, didn’t you?” I accused him.

  He looked moderately offended, his hand coming up to his throat. “How dare you? I would never do anything like turn up the heat on the oven just to burn the turkey so we could eat whatever I wanted to. That’s a little extreme, Papa Bear. Give me a little more credit.”

  Have you ever had mashed potatoes and gravy and edamame?

  Don’t. It’s way gross.

  Christmas approached, and Otter and I made the decision that we’d do the family thing on Christmas Eve and start our own tradition of having it just be us three on Christmas Day. We went over to his parents’ house, where the Kid was lavished with gifts upon gifts of stuff he didn’t really need but couldn’t live without. Mrs. Paquinn somehow, someway, had ironed a print of Anderson Cooper’s face onto a backpack, and the look on the Kid’s face when he saw it was one of such extreme ecstasy, I worried he’d literally just shit himself in the middle of the Thompsons’ living room.

  Mrs. Paquinn looked pleased with herself as she smiled at him, telling him that she’d also written to Mr. Cooper and asked for his autograph, and when it came in, she’d have it blown up into a print to iron on to the backpack as well. You would have thought that Mrs. Paquinn had gifted him PETA itself with the way he ran around the house screaming.

  “Is there even a point in giving him my present?” Creed grumbled, looking down at a badly wrapped present that was obviously a football.

  “Oh, I’m sure there is,” Mrs. Paquinn said. “But for the life of me, I can’t think of what it would be. You just got Paquinned.”

  “Paquinned?” Creed said in surprise. “You can’t just make up words like that with your own name! That’s not fair!”

  “You’re just jealous,” she said with a smile. “If you try to say someone got Thompsoned, it sounds like they just were engaged in an unfortunate sex act with an elephant.”

  Creed just scowled, knowing he’d lost.

  I watched him and Anna closely, trying to discern without being too obvious where they were at in their relationship. They seemed more aloof than Anna and I had ever been, and I wondered if they were making a conscious effort to avoid touching each other in front of the rest of us. But then I walked into the kitchen and interrupted them making out, and I blushed furiously and turned and walked out, hearing Creed call after me.

  It wasn’t jealousy I was feeling. It couldn’t be. It was just… I don’t know. It was weird seeing them together, and I almost felt it was like Creed had said that night at his parents’ dinner table, that someone else would know my best friend in a way that I never could. That had never bugged me before, and I only realized then it was because it was now my two best friends doing it with each other that compounded the situation. I felt strangely sad at the thought until I realized I had nothing to be upset about.

  For once, it was that easy.

  ON NEW Year’s Eve, long after Ty had fallen asleep, even though he swore he’d make it, the clock struck midnight, but I barely noticed. Otter had turned on low music a while before and started a fire and then pulled me up against him and started to sway back and forth. I started to protest, to tell him I couldn’t dance, that this was cheesy and stupid, but somehow, I just couldn’t get it out of me. I put my hands up against his chest and let him hold me and move me however he wished. It was quiet, and as the fire popped in the background and as that gold-green watched me and shone, it was almost like he was about to ask me a question, but then the clock started chiming something, and he bent down and kissed me instead, and that was all I could remember, because he was all I could see.

  I KNEW something was up after the new year began when Otter and the Kid began whispering among themselves, immediately silencing whenever I walked into the room. It was getting to the point that I started trying to catch them, but they were always one step ahead of me. I accused them of shenanigans, but they just smirked and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. It didn’t help that Otter was starting to act like he was nervous about something, and I didn’t know what the hell it could be. I wondered if I’d forgotten something important, like an anniversary, or something else.

  His birthday was the twenty-second, but I didn’t know for the life of me why he and the Kid would be plotting something for me.

  I tried working the Kid over, but apparently he’s against any kind of bribery, so much so that he seemed scandalized when I offered to pay him off if he would just tell me what they were up to.

  “What kind of a person do you think I am?” he said, sounding horrified.

  “Is that how you’re going to get through life? Buying your way?”

  “Just tell me,” I growled at him. “I’ll make it fifty bucks.”

  “You know, if these are the type of life lessons you’re going to b
e imparting on my impressionable young mind, you really should step back and reevaluate your position as my big brother. For shame, Papa Bear. For shame.” He shook his head as he started to walk away, and I did feel guilty for at least a few seconds, until I heard him loudly telling on me to Otter, and Otter loudly telling him that he was proud of him for being able to resist monetary temptation and that wasn’t I just a bad, awful man?

  If it’d just been the Kid and Otter, I think I might have been able to keep my sanity and nosiness in check. But it wasn’t. It was everyone. Mrs.

  Paquinn, Anna, Creed. Their parents. Even Isaiah seemed to smirk at me a bit more when classes resumed after winter break, even though there’s no way on God’s green earth that Otter would have called and told him anything. And then one day I came around the corner and saw him huddled up with Anna and I knew that she was a traitor, especially when I heard her laugh at something he’d said, only to realize she’d been caught by me, and she started sputtering insults at Isaiah, who replied back with only half of his usual snark.

  So the world was against me.

  “I don’t know why you all have to keep secrets,” I complained to Mrs.

  Paquinn, who’d met me for lunch three days before Otter’s birthday. “I thought we’d learned last summer that secrets don’t help anyone.”

  “If you’re trying to guilt-trip me,” she replied amiably, “it’s not working. But please, do keep it up if it makes you happy. Lord knows there’s nothing I love more than hearing you complain about things.” She sipped her tea.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You love this, don’t you. Having this… this thing over me. You’re all doing this on purpose.”

  She grinned sweetly, but I knew better. “I would think one would enjoy getting surprised.”

  “Aha! So something is happening!”

  “Really, Bear, you’re getting a tad bit desperate here, aren’t you? But I suppose it’s just a man thing to do. My Joseph, God love him, didn’t have a lick of patience in his entire body. It was always now, now, now, with him.”

  She looked out the window of the tea shop, and it was almost like she got lost in whatever went through her head. “There’s times that I wish I’d been more in the moment with him. Times that I wish I hadn’t told him to just be patient, to just wait and see. Times I….” She stopped, shaking her head.

  When she looked at me again, her eyes were clear of memory. “I know that you’re young, and that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, but it’s these moments that mean the most. Remember that, Bear.”

  I do remember that. I do. Which is why today, I have come home from work and found the house empty, a cryptic note in Otter’s handwriting, telling me that my tux has been laid out, and that Tyson is with Mrs.

  Paquinn, and that I am expected on our little beach at five thirty. Sunset. It’s going to be a little cold, but I don’t care. Something starts to buzz through my body, a sense of anticipation that I can’t quite place. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what Otter has planned, but if he’s decided to have us go back to that beach which holds one of my best memories ( Otter!

  Otter! Otter! Don’t lead cows to slaughter! ) then you bet your ass I’m not going to complain about the goddamn cold.

  I walk to our room and my tux is laid out on the bed, a single red rose laid across the front. I set it to the side and lift up the jacket, and a little white piece of paper flutters down to the floor. I pick it up and open it. A note, in the Kid’s neat scrawl, time-stamped from just a couple of hours ago: There better be good news when you come to pick me up! I’ve already pre-tied the bow tie for you. Don’t mess this up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Good news? I think. What the hell is going on?

  Don’t ask me, it says. Don’t we hate surprises?

  I think for a moment. Only when we don’t know they’re coming.

  Yeah, but we know something is coming, we just don’t know what.

  That’s even worse!

  You know, we’re really going to have to work on our pessimism.

  What, the glass is half-full instead of half-empty? Bullshit. What they don’t tell you is that regardless of how full the glass is, it’s filled with acid, and you’ll burn your face off.

  Charming.

  I put on the tux. It still fits as well as it did months ago, when I told Otter I loved him for the first time. This shouldn’t surprise me, because I haven’t changed much physically. Any alterations done to myself have all been mental. I take the rose from the bed and glance in the mirror. I look okay, I guess. My skin is a little pale, and my hands are shaking a bit. I’m nervous and I don’t know why.

  I’m in the car before I can stop myself, before I can allow myself to think. I look at the clock: it’s five fifteen. Fifteen more minutes. Why do I feel this is a big thing? Why does this feel like it’s a huge deal? I wrack my brain again, trying to remember something I could have forgotten, whether Otter and I had made plans for today, or if he’d hinted at something in a conversation I’d had with him. I wonder briefly if this is meant to be for his birthday and curse myself for not grabbing his present. As I think, I get closer to our beach and a memory pulls up from the depths, a brief statement he’d made at the gay bar a few months back, about wanting to ask me something. We’d been talking about… what? The future? Kids might have been a part of that conversation, but I think that was more of a freakout on my part. I’d told him I didn’t want to be his fucking wife, that’s for damn sure.

  Ugh. What the hell is it?

  My nerves don’t calm the closer I get to him. If anything, they intensify.

  The butterflies in my stomach are apparently carnivorous, and they are eating through my stomach wall and fluttering around my heart. I chide myself for briefly entertaining the idea that it’s something bad, that Otter’s breaking up with me, that he’s not even going to be there when I get to the beach. I’ll arrive and the beach will be empty, and I’ll wait there for a while before finally heading home and finding the house is empty, that he’s used my absence to finish moving and I’ll be alone forever.

  It would be so awesome if you could throw me a life preserver, it tells me.

  For what?

  So I can be saved from drowning in your angst. Ha!

  So not funny.

  My palms start to sweat, and my mind starts to wander, even though I’m only a few minutes away, and I remember there once was a time—

  THERE was a moment when I was sixteen, and I’d gotten a rare night off from the Kid. Mom had decided to stay home that night, saying she wanted to spend time with her son. I’d almost asked why it sounded like she was going somewhere, but I’d forgotten it the moment Creed had called and said his parents were out of town, and he and Otter were hanging out and getting drunk.

  I kissed Ty—

  back soon ty don’t yell at me it’s just one night

  —on the forehead and promised him that I’d be back the next morning, trying hard to ignore the way he scowled at me, the way he asked—

  why can’t I go too

  —questions I didn’t want to answer, the guilt ripping through me, watching as he sulked on the couch in the way only a five-year-old can. I told Mom I was leaving, and she’d been remarkably sober, her eyes clear, and she smiled at me and told me to have fun, not to worry about the two of them because they were going to watch TV and eat pizza, and for once, I thought she was serious. I thought she was being kind. I couldn’t know then that she was probably already planning her escape. She’d already mentioned some guy named Frank. I didn’t know then just how far it would go. So I smiled back, the expression foreign on my face as it was directed toward Mom. Maybe things will be different, I thought. Maybe things will finally be okay. Just another couple of years, and I’ll be out of here. I tried not to think about what that would mean for the Kid. It was just easier that way.

  Creed opened his door when I arrived, his eyes already slightly glazed, a beer bottle in his hands, and h
e shouted happily at me as I walked through the door. I grinned at him as he grabbed me and wrapped me in a drunken man-hug, the three slaps on the back harder than they normally would be, and I had to concentrate to keep from wincing. He pulled away but hooked his arm around my neck and chattered away about something in my ear, and I listened, but I was also listening for Otter, wondering where he was at, sure that he’d have better things to do than to hang out with a couple of teenagers. He’d been home from school for a while now, working at some studio that he said held his interest, that he said was fine for now. It was that last that scared me the most, the for now. What happened when for now was no longer good enough? What—

  about me you can’t leave me i couldn’t take it

  —would happen then? I tried not to think about the future, to make myself only focus on the for now, because life was too short to worry, even though I would do it anyways.

  It didn’t take long. I laughed at something Creed had said, and Otter yelled my name from the top of the stairs, like he hadn’t seen me in years, even though it’d only been days. I looked up and saw him standing near the railing looking down at me, and something happened, something fluttered—

  he’s so big so so big

  —something that’d been happening every time I saw Otter lately. It happened when he grinned at me, when he said my name. It happened when he stood next to me, when he laughed that belly laugh of his, the one that’s deep and strong and infectious. I realized I was staring, and I grinned up at him as he padded down the stairs. Creed let me go, and then Otter was wrapped around me, and I closed my eyes—

  oh oh oh this is warm and nice and why do i care

  —and finally Creed chided us to let go, and Otter dropped his arms and winked at me.

  My mouth went dry.

  We drank that night, Creed more than the rest of us. We sat in the living room with the lights down low, watching the fog roll in off the ocean, half listening to each other, laughing and talking loudly. Creed stood up and tried to do some dance and ended up falling over and decided quite quickly that the floor was where he planned to spend the night, and within minutes was snoring away, even with Otter and me pelting him with pillows.