15
The Bro Reunion
ACCEPTABLE DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION: Fist bump, loose back pat, presents?
EXPECTATIONS: Your friend, exactly as you left him a few months ago, all inside jokes and lengthy arguments rebooting precisely where you left them.
WORST-CASE SCENARIOS: All chemistry has disappeared, one of you has joined a new Caucasian Enthusiasts Association, “I brought along all my new friends from school now that I don’t have to babysit you at the loser table; I hope that’s okay.”
Spring break finally arrived, and, after a lot of hugs and disclaimers, and packing, and digging through still-packed boxes in order to get ahold of his thermal underwear, Norris found himself 39,000 feet above Texas—a welcome buffer between him and the Austin heat. Judith had been in the thick of grading midterms and had a three-day window to turn around three lecture sections, or roughly 244 students’ assignments. Picking up the slack on her department’s undergraduate workload had apparently been an unadvertised requirement of her new position. Norris had left her at the kitchen table, where he practically had to place his head under her lips for their customary goodbye kiss.
“Call me when you land,” she said, her face twisted in disdain as she crossed out a particularly offensive paragraph in the essay she was reading. “Say hi to Eric for me—don’t leave his uncle’s condo in a mess—and don’t break anything! Furniture, appliance, or bone.”
Solid advice.
His latest text from Aarti had been a photo of the outfits she was planning for a gallery opening that evening. No one would ever call Norris fashion forward, but he agreed with her that the middle one, a dark red sweater that could double as a dress and ornate purple leggings, was probably the most “Aarti” of the looks she had photographed laid out on the bed.
texted:
Send me your snow suit options! Curious 2 see u in ur natural habitat
Norris: I only have the one snow suit
: Are u one of those guys that only buys new clothes when the old ones get too small
Norris: Or get ripped.
: You tragedy
Norris: I try
He had made it to the Vancouver airport, only halfway to Whistler itself, and already he missed Aarti.
“We’ve got to go, Kaplan,” Eric greeted him suddenly, popping out of absolutely nowhere and grabbing Norris by the arm. How did people keep doing that?
“What the fu— Hello to you too!” Norris exclaimed. He hadn’t expected a tearful reunion, but maybe some acknowledgment that they hadn’t seen each other in so many months?
“Yeah, yeah,” Eric said, dragging him through the Vancouver airport without a hint of slowing down. “We have ten minutes to get to parking lot E before they charge me for another hour.”
His tone reminded Norris of when they went to the faraway sandwich shop for lunch back in Montreal and needed to hightail it back to school to avoid late slips.
“It was a good flight, slept the whole way, thanks for asking,” he said, falling into a half dash with Eric toward the luggage carousels.
“There!” Eric said, reaching for Norris’s familiar red-checkered luggage the second it passed through the thick, dirty plastic curtains on a stream of luggage.
“That’s yours, right? Why didn’t you just carry it on the flight?” Eric demanded, popping the handle on the bag that had carried their science projects on presentation days for two years.
“Three pounds over the carry-on limit,” Norris sighed, finding a seat and removing his backpack. Burn in hell, TSA.
“What now?” Eric asked impatiently.
“I’m putting on my coat, Jesus,” Norris snapped, pulling his bundled winter coat out of the bag.
“Well, why didn’t you do that before?”
“Texas: hot. Canada: cold,” Norris explained slowly. “And can you chill out? Because I’m not doing this for five days.”
That was when Norris finally saw it.
Oh. My. God.
“Oh my God!”
Eric must have heard it in his tone. His best friend’s hand twitched as though his first instinct was to hide . . . it.
“We don’t have time for this.” Eric tried to distract him, refusing to make eye contact like a misbehaving child. Too late.
“Listen,” Norris giggled as he zipped up his coat. “I don’t care if there’s a Zika outbreak at the Hudson News. This will be properly acknowledged.”
“You are such a pain in the ass,” Eric groaned, melodramatically bending his knees and throwing his head back. “Honestly, America can fucking have you!”
Now that he got a chance to take a longer look, it stood out so much more given that nothing else was different about Eric. He was wearing his same old go-to purple hoodie with a Collège Français volleyball T-shirt peeking out at the collar. It was the factory line definition of Eric, right down to the pubescent baby face that would always look four years younger than his actual age. In another reality, we would be hugging hello, Norris thought. But in this one, there were at least fifteen minutes of relentless mockery to squeeze into the eight minutes left between wherever they were now and parking lot E.
“Eight minutes to parking lot E,” Norris prompted. “Out with it. Explain that thing in your ear, please.”
“Yes, fine, I got an earring,” Eric confessed theatrically, turning his head to defiantly place it in Norris’s direct line of sight.
“Well, it’s obviously ridiculous,” Norris concluded, unfolding a beanie and stuffing it over his head. “But then again, I predicted you missing me would lead you to act out and rebel in some way. Common among teenagers.”
“Whatever, Marc-André likes it,” Eric complained through a smile as he snatched Norris’s luggage and walked away. “And you’re paying for the extra hour of parking if we’re late.”
The first day in Whistler was a quest for survival. The condo—despite having fresh towels and a kitchen stocked with every packaged snack a bachelor might imagine two teenage boys could want—lacked one critical component: Wi-Fi. After casually searching every surface of the apartment for a Post-it with the network and password, then ransacking the entire space for a router, the pair came to the realization that Eric’s uncle lived an internet-free lifestyle, deviant that he was.
“I can’t eat, dude!” Eric proclaimed. “It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I can’t eat until my other, more urgent needs are satisfied: Wi-Fi, shelter, Wi-Fi again!”
“You’re telling me,” Norris groaned, joining in his friend’s anguish. “Aarti is halfway across the world, and my mom will kill me if I run up the international texting bill!”
Eventually, the pair agreed to trek eight blocks through two feet of rising snow to a coffee shop they spotted on the drive in. Norris at least needed to let Judith know he’d arrived safely in Whistler. Something about trudging through snow with Eric at a pitch-black six p.m. in the evening, both cursing the wind under their breaths, filled Norris’s stomach with a fuzzy sense of nostalgia. Who says you can’t go home again?
Norris immediately pulled up his inbox the moment they settled into the coffee shop.
(4) new emails.
Judith Bien-Aimée: Hi, sweetie, hope you landed okay!
Madison McElwees: Hi Norris, can you switch schedules with Julio on the 17th? He needs to buckle down on his thesis. Hope the maple is pouring up north.
Dad: Happy spring break! Have fun in BC. I attached a photo of your little bro.
Liam Hooper: Hope all is good in Canada. I’ve had a few people ask about our hockey sessions and I’ve been thinking. . . . Might be time to expand?? Talk more when you get back.
Uh.
Liam’s “hockey team in Texas” pipe dreams aside, Norris was disappointed by his inbox. He immediately deleted his father’s email because really, all babies looked the same to him and he liked keeping his inbox lean. It wasn’t that he had been expecting a flurry of new messages; he had never been, and would never be, that popular. Still, a check-in from Aarti—or another outfit update, even a random emoji—would have been nice. Weren’t they dating? Wasn’t regular contact kind of the point?
“So,” Eric began, numbering the topics they’d already covered on the drive over on his fingers. “New girlfriend, my monk-like replacement, a squad of feral cheerleaders, restaurant job . . . am I missing anything?”
“That’s plenty!” Norris laughed. “So, out with it: Marc-André is not, in fact, straight?”
Eric’s lip twitched. “He’s, um, yeah . . . He’s good.”
“How did you two even get together in the first place? I’m gone for less than a term and Collège Français sprouts a second gay guy for you? Who has my old locker, no less?”
“I told you.” Eric shrugged, still smiling. “We just started hanging out and talking. I can’t really pinpoint it.”
“Talking about what?”
“Movies, parents, hockey a little bit, you,” Eric listed after a moment of ruminating.
“Me?”
“He asked if you were my ‘boyfriend or something’ considering the amount of time I apparently spend talking about you . . . I guess your best friend ditching you halfway through the year sort of stays on your mind as far as conversation topics go.”
Norris frowned at that. “Eric, I didn’t ditch you. My mom—”
“I know, I know,” Eric said, raising a hand. “We don’t need to do the whole hugging, crying, and learning thing. It wasn’t rational. It’s passed, don’t worry.”
The idea that Norris had hurt his best friend in the process of leaving bothered him. He realized then that he’d never asked about it in all their chats. To him, having to move to Texas had been his problem. He’d never even considered the ripples it would cause for his best friend.
“You’ve gotten gayer,” Norris noted after a long comfortable silence. Eric gasped and moved an exaggeratedly limp wrist to his chest, feigning dramatic outrage.
“Oh, shut up,” Norris said. “I just mean . . . I don’t know what I mean, actually.”
“Is it the earring?”
“The earring is part of it,” Norris mused, a thought forming on the outskirts of his mind. Eric just seemed . . . calmer. More confident. More himself, maybe? “Wait, did you come out? As in, out out? To everyone?!”
Another thing Norris and Eric had always had in common in a school that catered to mostly white and Catholic families was that dread that at any point their entire existence might get reduced to a single-letter word. N-word. F-word. Norris never judged Eric for wanting to avoid that if he could.
“No . . . Yes? Sorta?” Eric said. “Andréanne doesn’t want to be my beard anymore. She’s dating Morissey now. I know: it offended me to my core too.”
Back in fifth grade, Jean Morissey had popped a pimple in class and then wiped the pus against her desk, thinking no one had seen. However, even from across the classroom, Norris and Eric could barely contain their mutual urge to vomit.
“I was at the dinner table and my dad was just drilling me about chicks, and that I should hurry up and tap some ass because otherwise kids would start thinking I was a . . . y’know. I just got so sick of it. And you weren’t there, and I just told him that his son is a ‘one of them.’”
“Jesus fuck, dude, congrats! I guess. . . . Do you congratulate a coming out?”
“Gift certificates are preferred.”
“Did he have a heart attack, your dad?”
Eric shrugged.
“There were a couple of rants,” he admitted. “Seventeen-day silent treatment.”
Norris didn’t feel the need to ask why none of this had been disclosed in their text chats. There was plenty he hadn’t shared with his best friend too, simply because he didn’t see him every day and his life now needed exposition. His exchanges with Eric were too rare and precious to get bogged down in all that grim detail; Norris preferred to enjoy them. Eric was basically a white gay version of himself, so it made sense that he’d have had the same impulse.
“But I actually think he’s coming around now,” Eric added with a smile, as they gathered their stuff and headed out of the coffee shop. That was enough laptop-ing for the time being. There were mountains to be enjoyed. “Mom bought him a stack of books on how to cope with a gay child. Thin ones; big fonts. He definitely thinks I’m here having gay interracial winter sex with you, but he still drove me to the airport, so y’know, baby steps.”
“The earring does look good.” Norris grinned, earning him a shove back into a fresh snowbank on their way back to the condo.
“Shut the fuck up, Kaplan.”
Norris didn’t say it, but the outcome could have been far worse. Eric’s dad was a raging ass. Whenever he gave Norris or other kids from the team a ride home, he was never short on nasty comments about new minority-owned stores or families. All Asians were Chinese to him and black was a communal noun. Vous autres, les noirs (“You blacks”) was a common preface to many of the man’s fascinating observations about the specific way black drivers misbehaved on the road or about P. K. Subban, the lone black hockey player on the Canadiens at one time. He also wasn’t a fan of Quebecers who did not know the native French, even though his wife was from Toronto and his son one of those bilinguals—forgetting his Quebec roots by mostly speaking English now. Norris had often wondered what the man said about him or his mother after begrudgingly dropping him off at home.
“So, you’ve told me about Liam. Have you made any other friends down there?” Eric asked.
“Nope,” Norris said swiftly. “Not a one. I think it’s the biting I do. The guidance counselor says it’s off-putting to classmates, but I’m like: they could wear oven mitts.”
“Kaplan.”
“A couple.” Norris sighed and then continued as Eric glowered him into submission. “I work with some cool folks at the restaurant. This girl Maddie . . . I wouldn’t really call her my friend, but she helped me out a bunch with the Aarti stuff. And Liam’s super-chill. He sounds like he’s always high out of his goddamn mind, but he’s, um, he’s really good people, actually.”
“That’s good.” Eric grinned. “Glad to hear it. All that and a lady friend that takes you to indie movies and drives like a maniac. Dang. Maybe Austin, Texas, was where you belonged all along.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. . . .” Norris protested, but as they walked on into the sparkling snow, he couldn’t help but think that Eric might have a point.