Calling Calling Calling Me

by Natasha Washington

  Isaiah led Josh into the kitchen. “You were looking peaked, dude.”

  “That guy,” Josh said, “is the worst.”

  “Not worse than Melvin,” Isaiah said. “Do you remember Melvin?”

  Melvin was a sixty-five-year-old lech who spent every Dirda party he was invited to harassing anyone under the age of twenty, regardless of gender. After an unfortunate incident involving cream cheese, Melvin had been banned from future parties.

  “Oh, yeah, okay,” Josh said. “He isn’t Melvin-level, that’s for sure.”

  “Who are all these people?” Isaiah asked.

  “I have no clue,” Josh said.

  “I would totally take one Thanksgiving that’s just us,” Isaiah said. “Any holiday, really. Why do we have these parties?”

  “Because our parents are weirdly popular,” Josh said. “I don’t understand it, but people like them.”

  “They do,” Isaiah said, and then added, in his snootiest voice: “No accounting for taste, I suppose.”

  Josh snorted. He poured himself a stiff drink and swallowed a good portion of it in one gulp before saying, “You know, I almost skipped this year and went down to Fresno.”

  Isaiah, who had been eating canapes off a silver platter, froze with his hand halfway to his mouth.

  “What,” Isaiah said, “is in Fresno?”

  Josh remembered then, with a start, that he hadn’t even told Isaiah anything about Patrick. Not about their Halloween hook-up, or their club-hopping shenanigans, or even that at this point, he was thinking about making it Facebook official. Part of it had been Isaiah had been busy as hell with moving stuff, but also, this wasn’t really a thing they talked about anymore. Not since high school.

  “Um,” Josh said.

  “Hey, no,” Isaiah said. “You let that cat out of the bag. You can’t stuff that kitty back in.”

  Josh flushed. He could actually feel the heat in his cheeks.

  “It’s a guy, isn’t it?” Isaiah said, a smile starting to tease at his mouth. “A girl? Someone genderfluid? That genderqueer person, Freed or Jeed or whatever, that you brought to one of our shows, they were hot—”

  “It’s a guy,” Josh said. “My roommate. Patrick.”

  “Patrick,” Isaiah said, and the name suddenly sounded filthy. “The new roommate. Going hyperlocal, I see.”

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” Josh said. “It kind of…”

  “Just happened?” Isaiah said. “Oh, yeah. I know how that goes with you, buddy. You are one of the few people in the universe where I would believe it if you said you hooked up with someone because they tripped and fell on your—”

  “Isaiah,” Josh hissed.

  “So this Patrick,” Isaiah said. “He’s hot enough that he’s got you making Central Valley vacation plans?”

  “I said I almost—”

  “He must be pretty hot, dude.”

  Josh gave up and gave in. “Yes,” he said. “He is very, very hot.”

  “Not Jewish,” Isaiah said. “Given that super-goyish name.”

  “Seriously?” Josh said.

  “Hey, look,” Isaiah said. “I dig that you are going outside your usual pool. It was kind of inevitable, right? I mean, how many people have you slept with in the city, anyway? At some point, you had to run out.”

  Josh felt ill. He could take Isaiah’s ribbing, usually. They were brothers. They said stupid shit to each other all the time. But this felt vicious and unfair. They’d made different choices, yes. Josh had certainly made some bad ones. But right now, it felt like Isaiah wanted him to feel like some kind of a…

  “I have to go,” Josh said.

  He turned away.

  “Oh, come on,” Isaiah said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I have to go,” Josh said, and walked out of the room, down the hallway, and out of the house.

  Isaiah didn’t follow.

  * * *

  Josh’s family always had Thanksgiving super-early, more of a luncheon than anything else. The streets around his parent’s house were quiet. San Francisco emptied out during the holidays, all the transplants gone home. Those that could go home, anyway. This was a city of runaways, after all. Some stuck around and had their own celebrations, the collective liberated together celebrating their escape. Josh had been invited to those kinds of Thanksgivings a few times before, but he never went. He, after all, was not a runaway—his family was here. How could he explain that sometimes he wanted to run away from SF, from the memories and the history that trailed him wherever he went? Nobody wanted to hear that story. Not from him.

  He flicked through his phone. Everybody was busy traveling or eating or ignoring him. He wrote Alan a message: You got that draft almost done?? and then felt like an asshole. Even degenerates like Alan deserved a day off.

  He glanced at the last text he’d sent Patrick. Something about Freddy’s weird chili. It was amazing how easy it was with Patrick sometimes: that back-and-forth, that give-and-take. It was like that when they were together and when they were apart. It had always been like that. How incredible, to have that sort of repartee with someone from the first moment you met.

  He let his hands hover over his phone. He wanted to text Patrick, but he had no idea what he wanted to say. I told my brother about us, and he was a total dick.

  No. Patrick didn’t need to know about any of that. It would mean talking about his past, and the less time spent dwelling on Josh’s romantic history, the better. Josh wasn’t that confused freshman anymore, freaked out and fumbling. He wasn’t the guy obsessed with having the ultimate college experience because fuck everyone in high school. He wasn’t the person convinced that the ultimate college experience meant saying yes, always, whether they were a boy or a girl or genderqueer or trans, or to alcohol or weed or mushrooms or the occasional Adderall stolen from his roommate, yes to anything and anyone that made him feel like someone else, that altered his reality.

  It had taken him so long to get to this place, the place where he knew how to say no sometimes.

  He wished he’d said no to Isaiah. No, that’s not me. That’s not who I am anymore.

  There were so many things Josh wanted to tell Isaiah about Patrick. How hard it was, sometimes, to believe that Patrick truly liked him. How easy it was to be with him, and how he never got tired of being around him. How he missed him every time they weren’t in the same room together.

  Yes, Patrick was hot, but Josh had been with tons of hot people. None of them made him feel like this.

  So yeah, he would have gone down to Fresno. He’d still do it if he needed to. Patrick was worth that. He was worth everything.

  Josh typed out a text, then stared at it. He was so tempted to backspace. He took in a deep breath.

  He pressed send.

  21

  Patrick watched California flit past the windows, watched the landscape go hilly and then empty out and flatten and dry. The drier it got, the less air filled Patrick’s lungs. He curled his hand around the armrest and closed his eyes and pictured his room in the apartment: the posters from the De Young; the panda hat from that Giants game; Freddy’s leather wrist cuff watch he “borrowed” and “forgot” to give back; index cards with scribbled scenes for his screenplay written on them, indecipherable notes like lightning thief no stealing and sardonic evangelist and creepy but funny-creepy not creepy creepy.

  At some point the motion of the train lulled him into sleep, and when he woke, they were almost in Fresno.

  “Oh, Patrick!” his mother screeched when she saw him on the platform, and burst into tears.

  His whole family was there, his mom and his dad and Katie and his grandmother, oh my God, unfair. When his mother was done squeezing the stuffing out of him, his grandmother smiled up at him. He stooped down to hug her, and she was so small and tough and beautiful that Patrick nearly lost it.

  “Hello,” Patrick said, and for a couple of seconds the only thing he could think about was what Josh did to him last night wh
en they got home, tongue and teeth and pressing in—dear sweet Jesus no, why why why why. He was grateful that it was kind of stuffy and warm in the train station because that might justify the fact that his skin tone suddenly matched his candy-red suitcase.

  “Oh, honey, are you sick?” his mother asked, pressing one cool palm to his forehead. “You look feverish.”

  “I am…hot,” he managed. “Let’s get out of here. It’s like a sauna.”

  “You’re wearing a scarf,” his mom said. “No wonder you’re so warm.”

  Patrick bowed his head and shuffled after his dad.

  They all talked over each other on the way to the car and the entire ride home, about what had been going on in Fresno: oh Lord, that city council meeting was like a menagerie, and Katie said she’d gotten a new poster of Zayn, and it was like staring at the sun, and his grandma said she was learning how to play bridge now and she was good at it, better than that old biddy Mrs. Stevens, who thought she was God’s gift just because she met Jackie Kennedy once at some garden party.

  “Welcome home, son,” his dad said when they finally arrived, and squeezed his shoulder. It was the first thing he’d said since Patrick arrived. He attempted a smile.

  Patrick felt seasick. He made some rapid-fire excuse about needing to unpack and locked himself in his old bedroom, away from the steady chorus of voices.

  The second he was inside his room he realized he’d made a terrible mistake. The place looked like it hadn’t been touched since he left. His speech team and debate trophies were lined up on his desk next to his Star Wars action figures and he was pretty sure that was a copy of his final history paper (with a big red A+!! in the upper left-hand corner).

  He sunk down onto his bed and pressed his palms into his thighs just to feel something. He should have let Josh come with him. He didn’t think he could do this on his own.

  His phone buzzed in his hand. When he touched the screen a text appeared, a message from Josh: I think I want to make this ish Facebook official. Like…boyfriends. You in?

  Patrick stared at the screen for so long his vision went blurry.

  His phone whirred in his hand again. He slid his finger across the screen to answer. He felt like he was doing everything in slow motion.

  “Are you there yet?” Josh said.

  Patrick exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Just got here a little while ago.”

  “Oh, do you need to settle in? I can call you back and—”

  “No!” Patrick shouted, then lowered his voice. “I mean, no, please don’t go.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end before Josh said, “I hope I didn’t freak you out. With my text. I thought …you were acting as if going home was like going off to fight the war, and if you were Matthew Crawley and I was Lady Mary, I’d—”

  “Give me some gnarly little stuffed animal as a good luck charm?” Patrick finished for him.

  Josh snorted. “Okay, the British are weird, and really bad at expressing their feelings. I wanted to let you know… I wanted you to know.”

  Patrick could see his neighbor’s minivan out of his window. Their old, nearly scratched off bumper sticker read: MARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN.

  He swallowed.

  “I— Thank you,” Patrick said. “For saying that. I—I want that too.”

  He could hear Josh breathe out. “I…I think you’re brave and amazing, and I know we joke around a lot, but I hope you know I’m aware of how hard this is for you.”

  Patrick felt like he was going to cry. “I wish you were here.”

  “I wish you were here, man. My parents’ house smells like this…I don’t even know, it’s some Indian experiment but with turkey, and Isaiah brought Lucy and two of his band members and they’re setting up to jam in the living room. Your voice would sound so crazy good with their mellow, electronic kind of situation, and—”

  There was a knock on his door, and Patrick called out, “I’ll be there in a minute, just changing!”

  “Were you changing?” Josh asked. “Because I like imagining you without clothes on.”

  “I’m not changing,” Patrick said. “I’m hiding.”

  “Don’t hide,” Josh said. “Your family loves you. They love you a lot, Patrick.”

  “I miss you,” Patrick said.

  Josh sounded the tiniest bit broken when he said, “I miss you too. Now go out there and be awesome with your family and then come home to me so I can show you what boyfriend sex is like.”

  Patrick closed his eyes. He was going to have to change now. These pants were way too tight.

  Also, Josh just said home. Patrick wanted to repeat that over and over too, over and over until it stuck.

  * * *

  The next few hours were actually pretty great.

  His mom and grandma spent a lot of time arguing in the kitchen over food preparations while his dad nodded off in front of some sports game, and Katie narrated the entirety of the third Pretty Little Liars book for him in graphic, hilarious detail. They made up stories about his action figures like they used to when they were both younger. Katie did not give a shit about their canon characteristics, and so Wolverine married the pink Power Ranger in a really touching ceremony officiated by Jabba the Hut.

  When Patrick felt brave enough to enter the kitchen, he and his grandma made stuffing together. He followed her every instruction to the letter because nobody messed with or questioned grandma’s recipes. She asked him about his classes and his friends and how is that San Francisco? I hear it’s very cold there, and Patrick felt so safe, here, now. This was always how it’d been with his grandma, and he didn’t know how he could have forgotten that.

  “You seem happy, Patrick,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re happy.”

  Patrick concentrated very hard on chopping celery. “I am happy,” he said.

  “We miss you,” she said, but with no implication of guilt because she didn’t do that. His mother had that covered.

  “I miss you too,” he said.

  “I knew you’d leave,” she said thoughtfully, and Patrick’s stomach hurt. “This town was always too small for you.”

  Fresno was hardly a small town—it wasn’t even a town, it was a city of hundreds of thousands—but Patrick wasn’t going to tell her she was wrong.

  “I don’t mind that you left,” she said, and handed him an onion to dice with a sweet smile. “I don’t mind as long as you always come back and visit.”

  “Of course, I’ll come back to visit,” he said.

  She eyed him, her expression unreadable. “People always say that,” she said. “But life takes you other places.”

  “It doesn’t matter where life takes me,” Patrick said. “I’ll always come back here because you’re here. Because my family is here.”

  His grandma concentrated on arranging the cubes of bread in the pan. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, sweetheart,” she said, her voice soft.

  Patrick froze in the middle of chopping the onion. He felt his eyes well up. If anyone asked, he would blame it on the onion.

  “We will be here for you,” she said after a heavy moment of silence. “But you can find family elsewhere too.”

  * * *

  Thanksgiving dinner proper was nice and oddly less stressful than Patrick expected, given that there were approximately seven hundred people there (or whatever, like twenty) and so he didn’t have to converse with the entire table in the way he dreaded he might. His mom liked to mix it up so different family members talked to different other family members, and so he was sandwiched between his dour aunt Alice and his bubbly teenage cousin Hilary.

  “I can’t believe you’re in college,” Hilary trilled. “You used to be so tiny!”

  Sometimes I still feel tiny, he thought, but he gave her a strained smile and said, “Yup, puberty is awesome.”

  “I can see why you’d want to go to that San Francisco,” Aunt Alice said, serving him a mountain of string bean casserole. “The
ocean views and such. But we watch the news sometimes and there’s so many strange people there. With all those parades, and the being naked outdoors…”

  Patrick had in fact only seen the infamous Castro Naked Man once, and San Francisco was really too chilly most of the time for people to routinely wander around in the buff. But he knew what Alice is saying. He knew what strange people she meant.

  “I don’t know,” Patrick said slowly, spearing a string bean with his fork. “Those ocean breezes feel awfully nice on your bare skin.”

  Aunt Alice nearly choked on a piece of sweet potato.

  After the meal Patrick escaped to his room. He had ten text messages. They read:

  * * *

  Taneisha: Do you miss your boo?

  Taneisha: I love LA. and my family but I hate explaining why I left

  Taneisha: mmm turkey

  * * *

  Alexis: NYC bitches yeeeeeeeah!!!!

  Alexis: Shit it’s cold

  * * *

  Artemis: I have your leather jacket bb

  * * *

  Eric: Middle of nowhere looks the same

  Eric: My uncle just asked me when I’m gonna give up dancing & do something real with my life

  * * *

  Josh: I want you I miss you call me

  * * *

  Patrick swallowed around the lump in his throat and texted back:

  * * *

  To Taneisha: I do miss you

  To Taneisha: Tell em you left because your gay bestie needs so much fashion help

  To Taneisha: Like srsly he’d be lost without you, it’d get ugly – literally

  * * *

  To Alexis: Jealous

  To Alexis: Not really actually the desert is kind of nice in November

  To Alexis: Don’t drink too much

  To Alexis: Who do I even think I’m talking to?

  * * *