At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “Yeah.” Christmas was only a week away—though it certainly didn’t feel that way at my house—and New Year’s would arrive shortly after. Then Renny would disappear. Even if he returned, he wouldn’t be the same person who left. I wondered if everyone would forget him as completely as they’d forgotten Tommy. “I just can’t picture him taking orders from some bull-necked drill sergeant and—”

  “He said it was my fault we broke up,” Lua said, cutting me off. “That I spent too much time with the band.”

  I tried to balance my coffee on the side of my shoe. “We’re talking about Jaime now, right?”

  Lua flashed me a “duh” face. “I mean, the band’s on the verge of something huge, Ozzie. Poe scored us time at her uncle’s studio so we can record a demo. And a record label scout e-mailed me last week. He watched a video online of one of our shows and wants to see us play live.” He squeezed his hands into fists. “This could be it—everything I’ve ever wanted—and Jaime’s acting like a needy little bitch.”

  “He is your boyfriend, Lu.”

  “Was.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Was. And you broke up with him, remember?”

  Lua pulled the lid off his drink and used his straw to scoop out the chocolate-drizzled whipped cream. “Yeah, well, I didn’t think he’d stick his pickle dick in Birdie Johnson.”

  “Let me get this straight: You don’t want him, but you don’t want him to date anyone else?” I frowned, doing my best impression of my mother’s dreaded face-of-disapproval. “How’s that fair?”

  “Nobody wins playing fair.”

  “Your music’s important. I get that.” I took a deep breath. “That’s why I don’t get upset when you disappear for days to practice, but relationships are about compromise, Lu. Jaime told you what he needs. If you’re not willing to give that to him, even if you think he’s being unreasonable, cut him loose before you wind up hating each other.”

  Lua rolled his eyes. “Like you’re one to give advice.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means, Ozzie,” he said. “You treat the rest of us like we don’t exist while obsessing after some guy who really doesn’t exist, and expect us to hang around waiting for you to come back to reality.”

  I’d wanted to talk about Tommy—needed to, really—but not like this. Not when Lua was angry about Jaime and lashing out at me because I was the only person within easy reach. “I thought we were talking about you and Jaime.”

  Lua stared into the bottom of his plastic cup and swirled the dregs of his drink with his straw. He was quiet for so long I almost would’ve preferred the yelling.

  “Lua?”

  “I love him, Oz.”

  “I know.”

  “But I love music more.”

  I kissed his knuckles. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Lua’s anger bled out. His shoulders fell. He looked like a busted tire worn to the treads.

  It’s impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won’t. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less. At least, I hoped they would.

  Lua smiled, shy and tiny. “That guy behind the counter’s pretty cute,” she said. “You get his name?”

  I glanced toward the register. Diego was talking to a skinny kid with wavy hair, grinning like mad. “I can only deal with one of our love lives at a time. Today we’re focused on yours.” I watched Diego and the other kid. Their fingers touched across the counter in a way that was too intimate. The way I’d once touched Tommy.

  I motioned at Lua’s hair with my chin. “Pink, huh?”

  Lua shifted on the couch and tucked one leg under his butt. “I wanted to try something new.”

  I held up my hands. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  “I know . . . I just . . .”

  “What?”

  Lua touched his hair. “It’s like I keep waiting to look in the mirror and recognize the person staring back.”

  I stretched out my legs and jiggled my feet, which had fallen asleep. I liked the pins-and-needles feeling as the blood rushed back in. We spend so long in our bodies that we take for granted the myriad parts and pieces of it that work in harmony to keep us alive. Any one of them could fail and we’d die. It’s crazy, really.

  “Your hair, the clothes you wear. None of it matters. I always see you. You’re always Lua to me.”

  “What if I weren’t?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Lua sighed and shrugged like I’d asked him an impossible question. After a minute he said, “What if I were different? What if I changed so radically you didn’t recognize me anymore?”

  “Impossible. You could step into a matter transportation device and come out the other end as Lua-Fly—all compound eyes and spindly legs—and I’d still know you.”

  “I’m not going to turn into a fly, Ozzie.”

  “But if you did—”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know.”

  Lua snaked his hand into mine and squeezed it. “Do you ever wonder if you’re the person you’re meant to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about when you came out? Didn’t you wonder if you’d made a mistake?”

  When I’d told Lua I was gay, he’d said he’d known since the day we met, and we moved on with our lives. We rarely discussed it; it was simply a fact of my life. But the truth was, I had worried I wasn’t gay. Or not gay enough, since the only boy I’d ever loved was Tommy. But I didn’t think that’s what Lua needed to hear.

  “Not really,” I said. “Intellectually, I understood what being gay meant, but until Tommy kissed me, I’d never wondered if it meant something to me. But he did kiss me, and it was like the first time I’d put in contact lenses: The world just came into focus.”

  Lua pulled away. “Tommy, huh?”

  “I’m not crazy, Lu.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said. “Tommy is real, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. It doesn’t make him less real.”

  Lua let out another sigh. She seemed even less interested in getting into a fight about Tommy than me. “I don’t know, Ozzie. Sometimes I wish I’d find a zipper on the back of my head so I could unzip my skin and find the real me underneath.”

  It wasn’t like Lua to dance around what he was trying to say, but maybe he didn’t know what he was trying to say. So I let him dance. “Whoever the real Lua Novak turns out to be, I’ll love him no matter what.”

  He hugged my arm, squeezed it so tightly that he threatened to cut off my circulation. “Thanks.”

  We hung out at Prufrock’s for a while. It was getting late, but it was the last week of school before winter vacation, and most of my teachers had resorted to showing movies or giving us “fun” assignments to kill time, so I could easily catch up on any missed sleep during class. And I definitely wasn’t anxious to go home.

  “Did I tell you I met up with Calvin Frye at the bookstore?” I said.

  Lua sat up straight. “Uh, no. You most certainly did not.”

  I nodded. “For our physics project.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. He’s kind of a freak.”

  “What happened?”

  “We talked about our roller coaster.” Which was only part of the truth, of course, but Lua had threatened to call DCS every time I’d cried on her shoulder after Tommy’s father had hit him, even if she didn’t remember it, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to Calvin cutting himself. Besides, it wasn’t my secret to tell.

  “That’s it?” Lua said. “You worked on your roller coaster?”

  I shrugged. “Were you expecting me to jump him in the history aisle?”
<
br />   “Jump him? No. But he is cute, in a dreary, the-world-is-unimaginable-pain kind of way. And I’ve heard he’s got a talented tongue.”

  “Gross,” I said. “Also, he’s not my type.”

  “But at least he’s real.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure.

  2,000,349,000 LY

  I THOUGHT I WAS STILL dreaming when I opened my eyes and found Renny sitting cross-legged on my floor, staring at me. Which was at least as creepy as it sounds. Probably creepier.

  “Merry Christmas, Oz.”

  “Were you watching me sleep?”

  Renny nodded. “Nothing else to do.”

  “You could go downstairs and cook me breakfast.”

  “Fat chance,” Renny said. “You’re not going to believe this, but Mom and Dad are downstairs making breakfast. Together.” A cautious grin broke across his face.

  “That’s unexpected.”

  “And they haven’t yelled once. I spied on them from the balcony for a while.”

  I knuckled my sleepy eyes. “Well, damn. I figured Christmas was canceled.”

  Renny stretched his legs, flexing his hairy feet. He was practically part Hobbit. “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not like they bought a tree or put up decorations.”

  By the time I’d turned ten and Warren twelve, Mom had taken over Christmas-decorating duties. Each year she sent Dad to buy a fifteen-foot-tall tree that barely fit in the house and spent over a week hanging her expensive Lennox ornaments carefully and precisely. Mom had worked hard to transform the house into a delicate winter wonderland we weren’t allowed to touch or breathe near. When I needed my kindergarten-crafty-ornament-and-multi-colored-blinking-lights fix, I hung out at Lua’s house.

  But even though I didn’t care for Mom’s holiday aesthetic, I’d grown accustomed to our traditions, and the last couple of weeks without them had killed my Christmas cheer. If Mom and Dad had joined forces, even just to prepare breakfast, I’d consider it a Christmas miracle.

  “Did you get them a card?” I asked. “I wasn’t sure if we were doing presents, so . . .”

  Warren winked at me. “I got you covered.” He pulled a glittery card and a blue pen from behind his back and tossed me both. Our parents believed gifts should flow from parent to child, not the other way around, so cards were the only thing we were allowed to buy them.

  The cartoony smiling people on the front of the card looked too happy to be real, and the poem inside was mushy and not at all what I would have chosen. “Could you have picked a lamer card?” I asked as I signed it and stuck it in the envelope.

  “Don’t think I didn’t try,” Renny said. “But that’s the price you pay for not buying one yourself.”

  My brother had a point. I licked the envelope, wondering if my morning breath would adhere to the paper, and tossed it aside. “You think Mom’s boyfriend will make an appearance?”

  “God, wouldn’t that be weird?”

  “I can’t believe how young he is,” I said. “And he ‘bro’d’ me.”

  Renny rolled his eyes. “Our mother’s a cougar.”

  “Please never say that again.”

  We laughed even though we were both mortified.

  “Do you think Dad has a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “No way.”

  “How do you know?”

  Renny’s smile faded. “Are you blind, Ozzie?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Dad’s still totally in love with Mom. He’s going to be lost without her.”

  Mom and Dad had met while attending the University of Florida. Dad had been a teaching assistant in a Renaissance literature course, Mom the student from hell—smarter than him and not afraid to call him out when he was wrong. Dad had made the fatal error of giving her a B on a paper about Doctor Faustus, which she’d challenged in front of their professor. And won.

  Most men would have been too ashamed at being shown up by an underclassman to ever speak to her again, but Dad was shameless. The last day of class, after the final exam, Dad followed Mom into the hall and asked her on a date. She turned him down. That might have been the end of it, but the following semester they ran into each other at a party neither had wanted to attend. They started talking—though depending on which of my parents told the story, they might have also been arguing—and stayed out until dawn. Dad proposed two years later. Mom said no to him that first time too.

  Mom used to say she’d given him a second chance because she hadn’t met anyone better. I’d always figured she was joking, but maybe she hadn’t been. Maybe she’d spent the last twenty-four years waiting for someone better, though I seriously doubted Ben Schwitzer was that guy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like Mom’s the only one who’s been unhappy.”

  Renny played with the hem of his pajama bottoms. “I didn’t say he wasn’t unhappy. You can love someone and still hate your life.”

  “Do you think Mom still loves Dad?”

  “You know how Mom is,” Warren said. “When she’s through with someone, she’s through. Remember when Nonna died and she and Aunt Mary fought over the antiques?”

  “Who could forget?” Even though Nonna had left a will, Mom and Aunt Mary had still waged a bloody war over every belonging in Nonna’s house, and even over the house itself. They hadn’t spoken since. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him.”

  Renny nodded. “You know they’re not getting back together, right? Dad’ll pine for Mom until he dies, but their marriage is toast.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s hard seeing Mom move on before their divorce is official. That’s got to be killing Dad.”

  “Dad’s a big boy,” Renny said. “He’ll survive.”

  I understood something about surviving. I understood the person Dad loved disappearing from his life and having to go on as if he wasn’t gutted and bleeding out. Only, that isn’t living, and I wanted more than for my father to simply survive.

  But I couldn’t explain that to Warren without bringing up Tommy, and I wasn’t in the mood to start that conversation on Christmas morning.

  “Planning any last hurrahs before basic?” I asked.

  “Not really. Brent and Kris and Emilia set up a couple of gaming nights to finish the Orb of Lokaðdyr. Don’t want to leave the campaign unfinished, you know?”

  “Dungeons & Dragons? That’s how you’re spending your last days of freedom?”

  “What? You think I should party and get shit-faced?”

  “Well, no. I guess not.” Warren was not a “get shit-faced” kind of guy. As far as I knew, he’d avoided parties during high school. He’d skipped prom and would have bailed on graduation if Mom and Dad hadn’t forced him to walk so they could live their dream of spending four hours sitting in cramped seats in a sweltering hot auditorium while they snapped a couple of faraway, blurry shots of Warren accepting a sheet of paper and shaking the hand of a principal he’d never spoken to before that day.

  “I just thought you’d want to do something exciting.” The smell of bacon and sausage had crept upstairs and into my room, and my filmy mouth began to water. “You might not have the opportunity to do much of anything for a few years.”

  “I’m shipping off to the army, not prison.”

  “Spend some time alone with Emilia,” I said. “You’ve had a crush on her forever, right? You should tell her before you leave.”

  The tips of Warren’s ears flushed red. “Do you even live in the real world, Ozzie? You think I’m going to spill my guts to her and she’ll tell me she’s felt the same and has been waiting for me to make a move, and then we’ll do it the night before I ship out?” He sneered. “That’s not even a good fantasy; it’s bad porn.”

  “I just don’t want you to leave . . . you know . . .”

  “A virgin?” Renny forced a chuckle. “What? Because all the sex you had with your imaginary boyfriend makes you an expert?”

  “Tommy’s not imaginary—”

  “I’m no
t going to ruin my best friendship to cross off a to-do on some bullshit how-to-be-a-real-man list.” Renny didn’t raise his voice, but his words still stung. “I don’t care about sex, Ozzie. When it happens—if it happens—it’ll happen.”

  “I’m not judging, Renny.”

  Warren didn’t say anything. His breathing slowed and the red drained from his cheeks. Sometimes I didn’t understand my brother at all. It’s not like I hadn’t heard him playing his online games, calling his teammates “faggots,” and hooting when he scored a kill. He wasn’t as enlightened about everything as he was—at least pretending to be—about sex.

  “So,” I said, trying to change the subject. “The universe is shrinking. Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “What?” Renny stared at me a moment before he busted up laughing. “You’re nuts, you know that, Ozzie?”

  “So everyone keeps saying.”

  Renny pushed himself to his feet and slapped my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go bask in the familial bliss before it all goes to shit.”

  “Five bucks says they don’t make it to noon without fighting.”

  “I suspect I’m going to lose that bet, but you’re on.”

  • • •

  Warren slid a five-dollar bill across the table before I’d eaten half my eggs. Mom had mentioned going on a business trip to Chicago after Renny shipped out, and Dad had asked if Ben would be joining her. Cue the yelling.

  But they pulled themselves back together long enough to open presents. Without Mom’s decorations, it felt like the Christmas spirit had taken one peek through our windows and hell-no’d it to somewhere less hostile. Mom hadn’t even hung our stockings. Instead of sitting around the tree to tear the wrapping off our gifts, we sat at the kitchen counter, where Mom and Dad handed them to us unwrapped.

  From Mom, Renny received a journal, sunglasses, and a new phone—which he told us he’d need to earn time to use while in basic. Dad gave him a new laptop, which briefly ignited another argument when Mom accused Dad of trying to bribe Renny.

  “See,” Warren said, elbowing me in the ribs. “There are advantages to the divorce.”

  “This is an advantage?”

  Warren motioned at the laptop. “Obviously.” Then he held the Doctor Who shirt I’d bought him against his chest and said, “Thanks, Oz.”