Weird Girl and What's His Name (2 page)

Sometimes Lula came in to browse the Used Paperbacks shelves, or just to bug me by ordering the most complicated coffee she could think of, but she usually had to work. She had a job as a caddy at the golf course. Aside from her infrequent appearances, there weren't that many customers in the afternoons. Most people got their books online and their coffee from the drive-thru Starbucks over by the mall. I sat there beneath the faded framed picture of Kurt Vonnegut and the yellowed
Bloom County
comics pinned to the wall and watched Andy's thin, tanned arms installing the speakers. He was pretty handy with repairs around the shop, but he was really an outdoors guy. Always hiking and biking and kayaking. We'd been camping a couple of times together already that spring. I thought if we were characters in Tolkien, Andy would definitely be a ranger. Or maybe an elf. He would be totally happy just living in the woods, sleeping under the stars every night. Around town, Andy drove a Prius, like Mrs. Lidell. Unlike Mrs. Lidell, though, Andy's gay, which would probably come as a surprise to most people. Considering that most people think that all gay men ever listen to is Judy Garland or disco or show tunes. With Andy, forget it. He'd been going on for days about how, with the satellite radio, he could finally listen to Bob Dylan's radio show. Andy was probably a letdown if you were looking for some kind of stereotypical example of a gay guy. Like, he never cared about going to nightclubs or dissing everybody's gowns during the Golden Globes pre-show. Andy was more like the kind of guy who would take you on a nature walk and teach you the scientific name for crawdads.

Not to get all detailed about it, but . . . well, remember how I said that Lula and I told each other almost everything? Andy was my almost. And it was killing me that I couldn't tell her. But it could've gotten us both in a lot of trouble. I mean, aside from being my boss, he was way older than me. Technically, he could've gone to jail. We both knew this, so we had to be really careful. We weren't sure what we were going to do when I was legal. Andy kept saying I should go off to college and meet guys my own age, that he was only a steppingstone in my life, and he didn't want me becoming attached. But I wanted to stay with him. I wanted us to live together and run the bookstore together, and have a family together, once a few years had passed and there wouldn't be any question about it. Andy was a little touchy about the whole our-future-together subject, so I usually kept all that stuff to myself. It had taken him a long time to realize he was gay, so he already had a family. Two girls, eight and fourteen. Just three years younger than me, the oldest. Still living with their mom in Winston-Salem. So, that was the deal with Andy.

Also, Andy was the one who got me started going to the gym, and he paid for the membership. He didn't expect me to be one of those six-pack-ab guys, but he was concerned for my health. Last summer, when I went with him to an estate auction, I got seriously out of breath loading all the books he bought into the Beast. But it was, like, ninety-five degrees in the shade. Still, Andy got worried and told me I had to stop eating so much junk food and start working out. He wasn't totally wrong. I was five feet, ten inches back then, and clocked in at 317 pounds. I used to eat fast food every night, because my mom hardly ever cooked. Andy gave me a natural-foods cookbook, so I started buying my own groceries and cooking my own meals. (Of course, I didn't stop going over to Lula's whenever Janet made her insanely overboard Polish feasts, which was fairly often.) That spring, after my growth spurt, I was six foot two, and down to 280 pounds, with some actual muscle underneath all the fat. I told Andy I could bench press a car; he laughed and joked that I'd probably beat him at arm wrestling now. The first time Lula caught me at home post-workout, in my dumb baggy shorts and sweat-drenched T-shirt, I lied and told her that my mom was the one who suggested I start going to the gym. Lula said she thought I was fine the way I was and that the whole thing was ridiculous.

two

L
ULA AND
I
WATCHED ALL THE
same movies and TV shows, usually together in Lula's bedroom on the weekends. Most of the TV shows we liked were old, like the original
Twilight Zone
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
so we watched them on DVD from the library. When a show we liked came on during a school night, like
Lost,
we watched together on the phone, mostly silent during the show, then muting the commercials so we could argue and exclaim and generally go nuts about what we'd just seen. But Friday nights were special. Friday nights were reserved for Our Show.

“Rory! Come in! You're just in time for
The Way We Were.”
Janet closed the door behind me. In the living room, there were two identical white leatherette recliners, parked in front of a huge flat-screen TV. She and Leo had this obsession with Barbra Streisand. Janet must've been picking me up on her gaydar, because every time I came over, she was asking me if I wanted to watch a Streisand movie with them, or showing off her Streisand box set, or whatever. It'd become like a ritual—I always politely declined.

“Ahh, no thanks—I'm holding out for
Yentl.”
I headed upstairs, to Lula's room, which was the only non-white room in the house. In fact, it was all black. But you couldn't really see that it was black, because the walls were covered with posters from her favorite movies. And by “favorite movies,” I mean there were posters from
Blade Runner
and
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
somewhere among a collage of posters of Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And, of course, she has an entire wall devoted to Our Favorite TV Show of All Time:
The X-Files.

The X-Files,
in case you've never seen it, is about these two FBI agents who investigate paranormal phenomena, like UFO sightings and telekinesis and Bigfoot. They also investigate the government conspiracies to cover up so-called alien abductions. One of the agents, Fox Mulder, is a guy whose sister was one of these alien abductees. She disappeared when they were kids and he was supposed to be looking out for her, so it's his obsession, this quest to find her. To find out the truth, whether she was taken by beings from another world or government scientists performing top-secret experiments. Lula and I were born two years before the show came on, so we didn't see it the first time around, back in the nineties. We both caught it in reruns a couple years back, during a marathon on FX or the Sci-Fi Channel, and we were hooked. In case you haven't noticed by now, yes, the rumors are true—we're sci-fi geeks. It's another one of the things Lula and I have in common. My mom's older sister, my Aunt Judith, is sort of a cranky hippie. Like, she knew I was into
Star Wars
as a kid, but she would send me books by Ursula K. LeGuin and Madeleine L'Engle for my birthday instead of Luke and Han action figures. Lula got most of hers from Leo's secret stash on the homemade bookshelves down in his workshop; Leo had apparently harbored a secret desire to work for NASA when he was a teenager, before he went to war and stopped believing in utopias on Mars. He still had all his old paper-backs—short story anthologies with titles like
Dangerous Visions
and
Weird Heroes,
plus all the major classic guys like Asimov, Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Arthur C. Clarke, and he let Lula borrow whatever she wanted. We traded back and forth and argued passionately about our favorites—she didn't like my Anne Rice phase; I didn't get Philip K. Dick. I made her read Orson Scott Card; she turned me on to Neil Gaiman. We both loved Douglas Adams; the year we read
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
we gave each other towels for Christmas. On the last day of school in eighth grade, Lula gave me a stack of Xerox copies, organized with different-colored paper clips. They were all her favorite stories by her favorite author, Ray Bradbury, copied because she couldn't bear to part with her books, and, according to Lula, summertime was the best time to read Ray Bradbury. She said he was “swoony.” Pretty quickly, our reading habits bled into our watching habits, and Lula and I spent many a wee hour engaged in passionate debates regarding the superiority of Captain Kirk versus Captain Picard, the evil mastermindery of the Cigarette-Smoking Man versus the evil geniusosity of Benjamin Linus, and whether
Serenity
was a worthy successor to
Firefly
or just kind of a letdown. But when it came to
The X-Files,
there was no argument at all.

We were both obsessed. We'd already watched the entire series on DVD. All nine seasons, plus the movie. For a while we were just re-watching our favorite episodes, but now we were watching the whole series again, in order, from the beginning. No skips allowed. We didn't even skip the whistly-sounding opening-credit theme song, which we tried to whistle along with and see who made it longest and loudest without breaking into giggles. I usually won, because Lula was terrible at whistling and also at not giggling. (I mentioned that we're geeks, right?)

We were up to season three, which was probably my favorite. It had my favorite non-mythology episode, which was “Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.” And my second favorite, tonight's episode, the seventeenth of the season, called “Pusher.” It's about a guy who controls people with his mind, due to a temporal lobe brain tumor, and also due to his study of Japanese mind-control techniques. He ends up controlling Agent Mulder's mind—and trying to make him shoot Scully. Dana Scully, in case you've never seen the show, is Mulder's skeptical female partner. She's also a doctor and a forensic pathologist, so she's always debunking his out-there theories with actual science. But even though she was originally assigned to the X-Files to poke holes in Mulder's work and discredit him as an investigator, she ends up becoming his ally. Well, more than allies. Over the course of the show, they pretty much become soul mates. But they're too professional, too dedicated to their quest, to go off and have a wild fling in the copy room or something. Mulder and Scully have huge amounts of what we fans call UST: Unresolved Sexual Tension.

“‘Cerulean is a gentle breeze.'” Lula and I both quoted the lines during the show. We were totally annoying to watch this with. Since we knew what was going to happen, we hardly ever stopped talking through the whole thing.

“‘Please explain to me the scientific nature of the whammy,'” Lula recited. She said that Dana Scully was probably her favorite character in all of fiction. I think Lula identified with her because Scully's stern, Navy Captain father reminded her of Leo. And also because she was short.

“‘Mango Kiwi Tropical Swirl. Now we know we're dealing with a madman,'” I echoed.

“Good gravy. Is it just me, or is Fox Mulder in a bulletproof vest, like, really hot?” Lula asked. She was not, at that point, quoting any line of dialogue from the show.

“It's just you.”

“Liar. You love it when he's all Action Mulder. Jumping on trains. Going into the line of fire.”

“I'm sorry, I don't find body armor a turn-on. I prefer Informative Slideshow Mulder. Preferably with the glasses.”

“Hah! You would.”

“Wait, shh! Shh! . . . Here comes the hand!”

We grabbed each other's arms, paralyzed. There was a three-second shot of Scully holding Mulder's hand after the final, life-or-death confrontation with the Pusher. They have a “moment.” Lula and I didn't breathe. At the end of it, Lula let out this sound, something between a sigh and a high-pitched squeal. She wasn't normally so girly, but
The X-Files
had this effect on her.

“God, that's so intense! I totally need a cold shower right now,” she said.

“I'm making an executive decision. ‘Kitsunegari.'” “Kitsunegari” is the sequel to the “Pusher” episode, but watching it meant jumping ahead, out of sequence, to the fifth season.

“No way. We have to wait until we get there. Besides, the sequels are never as good as the originals. Except for ‘Tooms.'”

“Let's at least watch the hand again,” I insisted, reaching for the remote. There's something about it that gets to me, too, though I'm not as much of a Shipper as Lula is. Back in the day, according to the older fans online, you were either a Shipper or a Noromo. Noromos were in total denial of any hint of romantic attraction between Mulder and Scully. But Shippers wanted more relationship; they weren't happy with Mulder and Scully just having a deep platonic bond. They lived for every little moment that might give it away—a lingering look, a little hand-holding after narrowly escaping their demise. As the show went on, the Noromos pretty much got left in the dust, but I got their point. I liked all that Shipper stuff, but I didn't want to see Mulder and Scully rolling around in the sack, or whatever. I liked that it was restrained, like something out of Jane Austen. But then, I'm a sucker for the old-fashioned stuff.

“Take it all the way back to where he gives Scully his gun,” Lula said. “That part kills me, too.”

“Okay. The hand-holding, take two.” We're not sure why, exactly, the Mulder and Scully Hand-Holding is better than the Mulder and Scully Actual Kissing that happens a few times in the later seasons. It just is. I skipped chapters on the DVD player, and we watched the Russian roulette scene again, grabbing at each other in the dark when Scully reaches for Mulder's hand to comfort him at the end. The credits came up, and Lula fell back on her bed, sighing.

“Best. Show. Ever.” She sat up. “And I don't believe you're not totally fantasizing about Fox Mulder in the bulletproof vest.” Lula didn't know about Andy, but she knew I was gay. “Ooh, Agent Mulder, can I hold your gun?” she said in a low voice, giggling.

“Sorry,” I shrugged. “He's just not my type. Body armor or no.”

“Wait a minute, he's not your type? I thought that's the whole reason you got into this show. The Hotness of the Duchovny.” She starts singing, “David Duchovny, why don't you love me?” Which was a novelty single from the nineties that some girl sang about David Duchovny, the actor who plays FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder. (We'd only watched the YouTube video about two hundred times.)

“No, that's not the only reason. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not in denial of the Hotness, but—”

“You're more of a Walter Skinner type? You like 'em tall, dark, and balding?” Now she was laughing. She sent me some slashfic way back when I first came out to her, a short story she found online about Mulder having a thing with his boss at the FBI, Assistant Director Skinner. But I wasn't into it. It's the old-fashioned thing again. I think Mulder and Scully have one of those once-in-a-lifetime connections, even if we never do see them get it on.

“Bald guys are hot,” I wanted to change the subject. “But you know me. I like those sexy Lance Bass types.” Lance Bass was a boy-band singer. He just came out a couple of years ago. Big shocker there. I broke into my famous falsetto version of “Backstreet's back, all right!” which sent Lula into hysterics.

“Lance Bass was in *NSync!” She swatted at me.

“Sorry, I forgot you were a fan.”

We finished up the evening like we usually did, arguing over whether we should watch another episode or not, or whether we should keep to our strict schedule of one episode per week to draw it all out. We ended up sticking to the schedule, so I went home, dealt with my mother's latest rearrangements, and got online. Lula was already on our favorite website, the
XPhilePhorum,
so named because the fans back in the day called themselves “X-Philes.” The
Phorum
is our favorite, because even though it's been seven years since
The X-Files
was actually on TV, they still have live chats on Friday and Sunday night. Sometimes only four or five of us show up, but usually there's a pretty reliable core group that logs on to discuss the finer points of the series. And now that there's another
X-Files
movie coming out this summer, there've been a few more new people around, getting back into the show, spinning all kinds of wild theories on what the movie's going to be about. Anyway, Friday Night Live Chat goes something like this:

It goes on like that for a while.

What Lula doesn't know is that I secretly did have this fantasy about Agent Mulder. But it's not what you think. See, in the show, right before it went off the air—spoiler alert, by the way—there was this plotline where Scully had a baby. And they suggested that it was hers and Mulder's, from this one episode where they hinted pretty strongly that, yes, they actually slept together, even though all you saw was Scully walking out of Mulder's bedroom. Anyway, she had the baby, William, but he kept getting kidnapped and threatened and stuff, because it turned out that, instead of being their baby, hers and Mulder's, there was a good chance that William may have been an alien–human hybrid, or a supersoldier, or created to destroy supersoldiers. Or something like that. Anyway, Scully decided to give him up. She sent him away to live on a secluded ranch in South Dakota, so at least he'd be safe, even if it meant that she couldn't be there to raise her own son. And it's so heartbreaking, because after everything she went through, with being abducted and then not being able to have kids, you knew it was a big deal for her to have the baby. You knew that it was the ultimate sacrifice for her to give him up.