Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (2 page)

Not like Oliver. There’s a quickness to him.

When he walks, his elbows come out from his sides in fluid, graceful little motions, and when he talks, his hands dart around his face and shoulders like fish. He can tell jokes, stupid ones but really funny, and rattle off the joke, and then the punch line, and before I have a chance to laugh, surprised because he’s always surprising, he’s on to the next joke.

“Hey, Rusty, why did the chicken cross the road sllloooowwwlllly?”

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t believe in cars. Why did the squirrel haul ass across the road?”

“Heh heh . . . doesn’t believe in . . . wait—why?”

“Because he
does
believe in the ghost of chickens past.”

“Wait, is that because the damned things are always getting killed on the—”

“What did the werewolf say to the vampire on the night of the full moon?”

“I have no idea.”

“Things are about to get hairy. What did the vampire say when he got the power vac?”

“Hairy! Hah! Uhm, I dunno—”

“I vant to suck your mud.”

And so on. We could spend an entire lunch, and Oliver would be dropping one-liners like firecrackers behind him, and the rest of us would be dancing in his wake. Most times, he knew what the class assignment was going to be before Mr. Rochester finished his usual joke about his own name.

“We’re going to find the allegory in
Jane Eyre,
right?”

“Very good, Oliver. How’d you guess?”

“’Cause no one names a guy St. John unless they’re making a point about saints—
especially
if he’s the guy who gets
dumped
for some guy whose name sounds like a rock.”

The whole class laughed at that, me included, but I’d had to spend some time in the bathroom the next morning, contemplating God, before I finished, flushed, and said, “Wait. That St. John guy wasn’t real warm, and Mr. Rochester was really solid and good . . . Is
that
what Oliver meant?”

So Oliver—hellsa quick. Me—hellsa slow. He should have laughed at me, right? Written me off as a dumb jock and gone and huddled with the coven of übergeeks who watched anime, or the girls who read yaoi. But he didn’t. I guess because I’d been nice to him when I hadn’t needed to be, he’d spent our entire senior year returning the favor.

By the end of senior year, after he’d helped me study for the SATs when my football friends were out getting drunk, I was really fucking grateful.

I also felt bad, because I sucked
ass
on the SATs. My scores were (and Oliver said this, and I’d had to spend another morning in the bathroom to get it)
toiletastic
! I’d applied to Berkeley and Stanford, because my grades were pretty good and my old man made me, but it wasn’t until I saw the second round of SAT scores that I realized just what a meatloaf I really was. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t look Oliver in the face for an entire day. I bailed on him during lunch, and most other guys, they would have been hurt and bitchy and whined to their friends about what a conceited asshole I was, but not Oliver.

“What the fuck is up with you?”

He cornered me in the locker room of all places, because I was taking PE sixth period for elective credit like the dumb jock I was.

“What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t email me this weekend, you don’t talk to me today—c’mon, Rusty—I thought we were friends.” His black eyebrows were drawn together over his eyes, and his mouth was all pursed and pillowy. He looked cute, like a little kid, and I wanted to hug him and tell him it was okay and make the tantrum go away.

I looked down at my toes instead and clutched my towel tighter around my waist. I wasn’t afraid of him checking me out—I’d been naked in front of girls before, and, well, I’d stopped caring—but I felt naked inside too, and that was new.

“Nothing, I . . . you know. You . . .” I had a lightbulb then—a
truth
I could tell him that would mean he didn’t have to waste his time with me. “You have smart people to sit with.” I looked up and met his eyes then and smiled, because I was proud of that—it made me sound like an asshole, but it meant he didn’t have to waste his time with me neither.

Something funny happened to his face then. He squinched one eye and wrinkled his lip and sucked air through his teeth. His front teeth were a little big, and his canines a little crowded back—like he
maybe
could have had braces, but it wasn’t so bad that he
had
to, so he didn’t. He opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it, and then opened it again, and
then
he narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“Didn’t you get your SATs back?”

Oh God. It was like he’d read my mind. I looked at my toes again—I had
really long
toes, to match, well, you know. Not to brag. “Uhm . . .”

“How bad?” he asked, and his voice was absurdly gentle.

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” I said, crossing my big toe over my middle toe. I could wiggle them from that position too.

“That’s pretty bad. What’d your dad say?” Because we both knew my dad had this vision: me in some big college with a letterman’s jacket or something.

And this was the part that
really
made my toes curl on the wet concrete. “He said he could pull strings. Get me into Berkeley anyway. Told me I’d have to
really
study when I got there, because this slacking shit wasn’t going to cut it.”

I was surprised when his combat boots snuck into my field of vision and a hand came out and touched me awkwardly on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Rusty.”

I shrugged away, feeling
worse
than shit now, and ignored the shiver down my arm where Oliver had touched me. “I don’t know why
you’re
sorry. You’re not the idiot who sucked up all your time trying to learn to fuckin’ read and write. You’re the kid who
should
be going to Berkeley, but you gotta go to junior college instead.” I turned to my open locker and tucked my towel tight around my waist and started to rip out my cargo shorts and tennis shoes and tank top so I could get dressed and give him a ride home. He lived sort of far from my neighborhood—in fact, I’m pretty sure he’d transferred to my school for the AP classes only—but the house itself was cherry. It was small, but painted white, with red and pink flowers growing up the white fence that surrounded the yard. From where I usually sat in the car when I dropped him off, I could see four tiny dogs, who always about lost their minds with pure joy that Oliver was home, and it was getting so I could relate. Anyways, our pattern was for me to let Oliver off outside the gate of his little house, and since I had the car, and it meant
he
didn’t have to take the bus, I didn’t have a problem with that.

“Yeah,” Oliver agreed, back here in the locker room. “Berkeley would be great. Ain’t gonna lie. But a JC will give me a chance to get my skills up and running, and I’m damned grateful. Rusty, you’re gonna get
killed
if you go there and you’re not ready. Can’t they see that?”

I leaned my forehead against my locker and swallowed, trying to breathe past the panic. “I’ll be fine,” I lied. “You know me. Time and an instruction book, and I can conquer the frickin’ world.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t sound optimistic.

The week after that, he asked me if I wanted to work for his dad that summer, part-time or full-time, my choice. His dad was a contractor, and I’d get to do real simple stuff—carry boards, push brooms, run water to the guys with nail guns and screwdrivers who were framing houses or sanding drywall. It wasn’t a lot, but, well, my other job prospect was pushing papers for my old man or someone else’s old man (cause we were swapped around like action figures) in an office.

Guess which one sounded better, right?

Not that the old man saw it that way.

“Rusty, this job could get you valuable contacts in whatever field you pursue—” Dad’s hair had gone brown and gray, but I’ve seen pictures. It used to be blond like mine, streaked by the sun, with undertones of red-brown. His cheeks used to be wreathed with smiles too, but his mouth was a lot thinner now. I couldn’t remember seeing his smile for a while.

“But Dad, this job doesn’t need a suit.”

“Well, maybe you’re old enough to actually think about your future instead of the next girl or the next sunny day. Have you thought of that?”

I hadn’t had a girlfriend since the girl who’d rather have had dick than dinner. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble, really, explaining to them that they didn’t need to put out. And getting some wasn’t as much fun as it used to be—but then, having a friend at the movies had always seemed to be the best part of girlfriends anyway. But, well, Dad had this vision of me, and football-jock-superbanger seemed to be it.

“Dad,” I said, trying to sound grown-up. “You know, maybe this . . . this thing you’ve got set up for me in the future, maybe it’s not really a good fit. You ever think of that? I mean, a college education, I get that, but maybe not Berkeley and the whole nine yards—maybe a JC and some life experience, you think?”

“Russell, we’re not screwing around here—this is your life. You go to a good college, you network, you move on to graduate work. Why would you think that’s changed?”

I opened my mouth, a lot like Oliver had, and closed it, and opened it again. “I . . . I mean, I’m not great at school—you know, there’s tech schools and vocational schools all over the place for guys who don’t, you know—”

“You are
not
graduating from Western Career College,” my dad snapped, and I grinned and tried to get the smile from him that I vaguely remembered from when I was a kid.

“You can do
it
!” I sang to the commercial, and apparently that was exactly the
wrong
thing to sing, because Dad rolled his eyes and walked away.

So I tried Mom.

Now in some houses, Mom would be the guaranteed win, right? “Oh, honey, of course. I understand that you’re feeling out of your depth and you’d like to see if maybe something a little less cerebral might be a better match for your much-vaunted future.” Or, you know, at least “Yeah, go out and sweat in the sun, you’re eighteen, who gives a shit?” right? But that wasn’t the way it was in my house. It wasn’t like Mom was the guaranteed win; it was more like she was better at calculating what was in it for her.

“What will you be spending your money on?” she asked, narrowing her brown eyes at me as though trying to figure the angle. I’d gotten her eyes, but there was something wrong with mine. They were wider and nothing about me looked like I had anything to do with angles. I was all about the curved muscle and brick walls.

I blinked. “I don’t know. Clothes, the car—I mean, you guys pay for everything else. Maybe I’ll put it in savings and see what I need.”

She nodded consideringly. She worked part-time from home. She had a degree in finance, and she did business for a day-trading firm. “That sounds prudent,” she said. “And I think once you spend some time doing manual labor, it might lose its charm.”

As. If.

Best summer of my life. Oh my God, give me simple tasks and a logical progression and I am a happy boy. And you know what I figured out after, like, the first month? I figured out that once I understood where I was and what I was doing, once I was comfortable with things,
I could think for myself
.

On my third day, if someone left a bucket of nails in the middle of the path I was walking, I walked around it. On the sixth, I picked the bucket up and moved it out of the way. The second week I was there, I found the guy with the nail gun and set it next to him. During the third week, I checked to see if the bucket was full enough, and if it wasn’t, I filled it. Then I asked the guy with the nail gun if he could show me how to use it, and by the second month, I could spell the guy with the nail gun, and then, when he came back to do his thing, I went and asked the guy sanding the drywall exactly what the hell
he
was doing.

They thought I was a frickin’
genius
. It was
awesome
. After the first week, I was totally full-time.

And Oliver’s dad couldn’t get enough of me. I loved that guy! When I moved the nail bucket, he told me good job. By the time I was using the gun, he was telling me I was a natural and asking my opinion and showing me how to use the equipment and shit. He was great. I mean, my dad probably wouldn’t have thought much of him. He was a short Latino guy, his black hair going iron gray, with beefy forearms and a thick middle. He had a bushy mustache and faded tattoos on his sunburned brown skin, but not a day went by without him asking me how I was doing and telling me—hell, telling everyone on the site—what a good job we were doing, or asking our opinion, or letting us know if we needed to hustle and why.

Oliver would come by the site on his lunch hour—he was working at the library, and he seemed to love the hell out of that—and brought us sandwiches and told us funny stories and made sure we drank lots of water. I wanted soda, but Oliver, he told me that shit was bad for me.

“Man, I know it, but I’ve been drinking water all my life; I want something
bad
for me that doesn’t give me a headache.” My mom didn’t let Estrella pack the good juice in our lunches. It was all this high-end shit that tasted like crap but was good for us.

Oliver studied me over his turkey on dry wheat toast. “Well, if it doesn’t give you a headache, and it makes you feel good, it’s good for you, right?”

I had a sudden thought about his little oval face, and how just looking at it, with the bright and shiny black eyes staring out at me—
that
was good for me.

“Yeah,” I said, forgetting about food. “Yeah. Good for me.”

I don’t recall what he said after that. I
do
remember talking him into going swimming at my house after work,
that’s
what I remember doing, and after he laughed and agreed, and then left for his job, his dad looked at me, head tilted to the side.