1
Austin
IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS: Abundance of food trucks, strip malls, and concert T-shirts worn by grown adults.
HABITAT: 104 degrees. Generally inhospitable to human life.
OTHER FACTS: Observed slogan “Welcome to Austin: Please Don’t Move Here.” Hypothesis: environmental insecurity masked as pride.
Twenty-three minutes after landing at the Austin airport, Norris Kaplan could confirm that life in Austin, Texas, really did come with “a unique flavor,” as had been aggressively promised by all his mother’s tourism pamphlets. Unfortunately for Norris, and just as he’d predicted, none of this flavor, tang, zest, piquancy, whatever you might call it, was hospitable to your average Canadian.
No, to your average Canadian—black French Canadian no less—Austin, Texas, blew baby chunks.
From the moment he left Montreal, people had been squinting at Norris’s T-shirt. Only one little kid, back at their first layover at JFK, had appeared to approve of the insignia, giving Norris a big grin. Since then, it had been a sea of neckbeards whose glances went from confused to hostile at the fact that a sports team logo had stumped them.
This was offensive to Norris on multiple levels. Specifically, three:
The white-rimmed navy C with an H in its mouth left no doubt to the team—especially against the red of the worn-out shirt.
These people were way too comfortable gawking at a teenager’s chest in public.
The Habs—or Canadiens of Montreal—were an iconic, nay, historic team. These people ought to be ashamed of their ignorance.
As Norris had learned over these past few hours, one of the ways in which Airport People interacted was by recognizing each other’s self-branding. College shirts, home state visors, high school rings. He’d witnessed nods of approval, high fives, and fist bumps occur without the two parties even slowing down from their respective paths. His mother, Judith, was less skeptical.
“Honestly, Nor, even you can’t write off an entire state—”
“Country.”
“—country because your T-shirt didn’t get recognized in an airport. You’re being ridiculous.”
“I wasn’t writing off anything,” Norris had grumbled, pulling up his headphones. “I’m just saying it doesn’t bode well. Like seeing a white dove before going to war.”
All his life, Norris could count on his ability to strike up a conversation with anyone—French or English speaker, black or white—based on this sigil. Hockey was a third language back in Montreal. Where they were headed now, it would apparently only be a third eye in the middle of his forehead, as would most things about him. Black. French. Canadian. Based on sitcom jokes alone, Norris knew Americans were predisposed to dislike all three of those things. Why his mother couldn’t see—or at least acknowledge—that was beyond him.
Now that they had landed, however, the biggest offender was unquestionably the Texan heat.
“. . . I mean, good God! This is inhuman!” Norris groaned loud enough to be a bother to bystanders as they exited the airport and entered the taxi line. The heat hit him like a wall. “Who did this?!”
“Norris . . .” Judith sighed, fanning herself with some Wonders of Sixth Street! pamphlet she had grabbed somewhere along the way. “Please don’t start.”
“No, Mom. I want a name,” Norris said, pulling out his phone and navigating to the Wikipedia page for Austin, Texas. Subcategory: History. “Who decided to build a city here? What sick wagon of explorers stopped here and went: Guys, the surface of the sun is looking a little out of reach for the horses; let’s just settle here.” Norris pinched the fabric of his shirt and fanned himself. They were naturally sweaty people, both of them. Norris knew he could get his mother to break on at least this one point.
“‘Stephen Fuller Austin’!” He read aloud as the page finally loaded. Even his phone hated him here. “‘The Father of Texas. 1793 to 1836.’ Burn in hell, Stephen Fuller. Or, actually, he’d probably enjoy that, the degenerate. I hope you’re in heaven, enjoying a cool breeze. How’s that, Stephen?” Norris asked. His last hope was annoying his mother to the point that Judith might throw her arms up, turn them around, and book two direct overnight flights to Quebec.
“It’s not that hot,” she said, earning her a deadpan glare from her son.
It was the lying from one’s parent that really offended Norris.
“I will take a vow of silence for forty-eight hours if you raise your arm right now,” he said, nodding to the pit stain rapidly spreading under the arm of his mother’s blouse.
“That’s—I don’t—” Judith sputtered, self-consciously tightening her grip on her armpits. “Do you know what my mother would have done to me if I talked to her that way back in Haiti?”
He smiled. “Now, Mom, don’t joke about that. They take child abuse seriously here in America,” he said, steadily raising his voice with a smirk. “Right up there with beer and the second amend—”
“Norris!” Judith snapped, a whisper of a scream delivered through gritted teeth. Of all the things Norris disliked about leaving his life behind, his mother’s paranoid insistence that they become apolitical while living in Texas had provided Norris with the most enjoyment. It’s not that you can’t have an opinion, she had told him. You just need to have less of them. People won’t always know when you’re joking.
Norris was just wondering how far he could go into an off-the-cuff firearms reform rant when they made it to the front of the line and a taxi miraculously appeared.
“About time!” Judith exclaimed. “I’ll grab the left one, you grab the right,” she said, hauling the suitcase into the trunk.
Maybe it was the new country, the new job, but Norris had to admit that it was pleasant to see his mother so . . . peppy, after months of watching her refresh her inbox every morning with too much hope. Creole and Patois scholars weren’t in high demand in North America, as it turned out. Her smile would dim with every inevitable rejection of her candidature for adjunct vacancies, but as soon as she noticed Norris watching her, she’d turn it back on. A full tenure-track offer was a rare stroke of luck; Norris knew that too. It’s just, God, why did it have to be freaking Texas?
From the back of their cab and through the blanket of waving heat, Norris took in the city that was now their home. Everything really was bigger here, as it turned out. The buildings, the highways, the trucks. It made sense, really. With this much heat, you needed shadows. He didn’t spot warehouses of spurs and other cowboy accessories, and there weren’t any stagecoach collisions on the highway, but he did count no less than four Keep Austin Weird signs and one Welcome to Austin: Please Don’t Move Here tag. Austin was definitely a city with a very imbued sense of self, Norris thought. Maybe the rest of America had praised it too much as a child.
“It’s an amazing city, Norris,” Judith continued, intent on selling him on the city even now. She pulled another pamphlet out of her bag and foisted it on him. “They have movie festivals, music festivals. . . . That South by Southwest thing? . . . Ooh, Elijah Wood has a house here!”
“In what universe is that a selling point?”
They drove past a high school—or rather, a ridiculously massive football field and a square building in the background flanked by yellow buses that Norris assumed to be a high school. The grass on the field was so green compared to the rest of the brown patches of lawn that Norris would bet his life it had to be plastic. For all he knew, this might even be his high school.
“It’s not,” Judith said, doing that thing where she read his mind like it was just part of the ongoing conversation. Mother’s intuition, she called it. “Your school is Anderson High, near Pflugerville, I think? It’s ranked very highly.”
“What’s with all the orange?” Norris continued, eyes on his window. Every banner, every convenience store archway was in the same exact shade. Truly, an upsetting amount of orange. Was there even any orange left in the rest of the world?
“Burnt orange,” Judith said, already in the middle of a different pamphlet. “The Longhorn football team’s official color!”
“Austin blood!” the cab driver suddenly exclaimed, reminding Norris of his existence. He was skinny and the back of his neck was peppered with brown freckles. Burnt orange freckles, Norris thought.
The man’s eyes found Norris through his rearview mirror. Going by his mother’s glare, it was clear that Norris had done that thing where he scoffed without realizing it. It wasn’t an altogether-rare occurrence.
“You a big sports fan, son?” the man asked, squinting at Norris’s shirt from the rearview. Norris frowned. When was the last time the man had used a verb?
“Oh yes!” Judith eagerly confirmed. “Boys and their sports. Some things don’t change, wherever you are.”
The driver chuckled. Norris could swear he’d detected a hint of fake Texan already slipping into his mother’s grossly heteronormative statement.
“What is that C on your shirt there, son? Colorado?” the man asked with a furrowed brow.
“No.”
“Hmm, well, I know that’s not the Carolina Panthers,” he continued pensively. Norris had apparently entered a nonconsensual game of charades. “Not Charlotte, is it? What do you call ’em, the Charlotte Hornets? Is that what the H is?”
A man can only be pushed so far.
“Actually, sir, the C is for cock—”
“Canadiens!” Judith exclaimed as she simultaneously pinched Norris’s arm. Hard.
“Habs,” Norris corrected for the millionth time. Canadiens might be the team’s official name, but any fan that had ever called Montreal home knew to call the beloved team by their alternate moniker: the Habs. Short for Les Habitants.
“Uh. Weird name,” the driver commented without a follow-up. The fun for him was apparently in the guessing.
Norris continued to stare out the window as they cut through the University of Texas’s campus, an entire neighborhood of girls in loose ponytails, baggy T-shirts, and orange short-shorts. Austin had legs going for it, Norris could concede that.
“Fifty-one thousand, three hundred and thirty students,” Judith said, eyes on the white tower that seemed to mark the center of campus. “Can you imagine?”
It had taken a few years for Norris to understand why, to his mother, Montreal, New York, Boston, Vancouver, and even London were simply points on a map when she’d been applying to positions. Deep down, she was a complete nerd. She made a living translating on the side, but being in a classroom was where her first-generation nerdy heart lay. So: Texas.
The cab took them to what appeared to be a residential area. There was dead grass everywhere. Dead and wet, as if it had been sweating. “We just had a rainstorm. It was a doozy,” the driver said. “Now, I myself like the rain. Always have! Especially after the drought we had through Christmas.”
Norris thought back to the mountain of snow left behind on their old apartment’s balcony, to the two sets of keys left behind on their old kitchen counter that morning, and something rang in his chest. He hadn’t realized until just now that he would never see it melt come spring. Nor would he be ordered to begrudgingly shovel it after weeks of putting it off. Right now, one hour ahead, in a different time zone, his best friend, Eric, was probably practicing his puck on the ice rink behind their building—a flea market parking lot that the city iced every winter for kids.
“I am not forgetting about Whistler,” Norris said apropos of absolutely nothing.
Eric’s uncle had a condo in the town, and his belated gift to his nephew had been two week-long early spring passes to Whistler Blackcomb, one of the largest ski resorts in the world, for him and his friend to enjoy during the upcoming spring break. He would be away on business and put a lot of stock in being his only nephew’s “cool uncle.” He had a man bun, for Christ’s sake.
Whistler had been one of the carrots his mom had dangled in front of him when Austin had first crept into their dinner conversations. You can absolutely still fly back for that! Judith had said. Canada is not disappearing, Norris. Neither is your friend.
Another wrinkle that made returning to Montreal for spring break a necessity was that Eric was now gay. Well, had always been gay, obviously, but had only now started telling a select few people, which, as far as Norris knew, consisted only of himself, their friend Stephanie, and two of Eric’s cousins. The revelation that the best friend who’d showed him how to get around Judith’s porn blockers had been gay was a bit of a shock. Not because Norris had an issue with it, but because with two words, a thousand conversations now would be remembered in an entirely different light. They’d finally begun to settle back into their groove when Norris was whisked off to America. And now, here he was, two thousand miles away.
Of all the casualties of this relocation, Eric was undoubtedly the biggest one. Well, second-biggest one.
“We should call Dad tonight,” Norris added.
“Of course,” his mother answered with a controlled smile set to “motherly.” “I’m sure he’d like that.”
Norris looked out the window. The rest of the drive was mercifully quiet.