“Right, and Pete was all?—”
“And this ishim,” Luke says, giving Ben a brief once-over, “and he thinks that you andPete…” He, too, puts a hand over his mouth, but Ben realizes with a sinking feeling that he is concealing laughter. “God, I’m sorry, I’m going to go stand over there until I can get myself under control.”
He walks off as Chris puts his hands on his hips and stares at Ben.
Ben wilts under the 5,000-watt intensity of Chris’s stare; he thinksglasswould probably wilt. “Okay, I can see I’ve read this wrong somewhere, but I was?—”
Chris, looking irritated, holds up a finger. “Stop; I’m trying to work out the fastest way to explain the enormity of your mistake, because I have things to do, shockingly enough, with my time. So, you know Pete pretty well?” Ben nods. “You know about him changing his name, back in the day?” Ben nods, wincing slightly. “You know what his name used to be?”
At Ben’s final nod, Chris nods back, then makes a thumbs-up, points it at himself, and says, sounding very annoyed, “Chris Castillo. Hiscousin.”
“His…cousin.” Ben stands for a long, silent moment, horror seeming to have turned all his blood to an icy sludge. Then,hideously, before he can stop it, what comes out of his mouth is, “Are you sure?”
Though Ben can’t see him, he hears an enormous whoop of laughter from somewhere nearby that sounds suspiciously as though it came from Luke.
Chris does not look amused. “Am Isurethat he’s mycousin? Well, let’s see. His father’s my uncle, check.Myfather’shisuncle, check. But, wait, are our fathers brothers—why, who could believe it, they are! Like, what doyoumeanam I sure? He’s my cousin! He’s been my cousin since the day I was born. Are you asking if I think he’s been bodyswapped? Because my answer is no!” There is another peal of laughter at this point, which confirms for Ben that it’s coming from Luke, wherever he’s gone to, since Chris snaps, “You shut up, Luke, this isn’t that funny!”
“I don’t know,” Luke calls back, “I think it’s at least medium funny.”
“I personally would like to die about it,” Ben says, in the brightly brittle tones of someone who has moved past simply being mortified and into a plane of existence where mortified is the only thing they’ve ever been, or shall ever be again. “If that’s helpful at all. I’m going to go and, um, stop having this interaction as fast as possible, if it’s all the same to you. Thanks so much, and sorry for the, um, interruption to your morning, and is there any chance that maybe you won’t tell?—”
“Pete? About this conversation? No,” Chris says, flat, one eyebrow up. “There is no chance of that. None whatsoever. I’m already anticipating retelling this story at every family holiday for, and this is an estimate, the rest of my natural life, so. Nice seeing you—what was your name? If you give me a fake one, I’ll just tell him that, too, you know.”
“Ben,” Ben says, on a sigh, “I’m Ben, and I’m sorry, and I’m leaving,” and then he’s hurrying away to one last peal of laughter from Luke, before he can screw up anything else.
The flight that follows is punishing, in that Ben tries to close his eyes and get some rest but can’t quite manage it. Either he’s treated to a Technicolor replay of everything that happened with Chris,orhe experiences two or three moments of exquisite memory of his evening with Pete, before the thought of how Pete willreactto what happened with Chris crashes in to spoil his fun. All in all, by the time he lands in Michigan, weathers an uncomfortable Uber ride, and lets himself into his parents’ building around 5:45 a.m., Ben is vibrating with tension, semi-hungover, and sure to his bones that he’s ruined everything. He crashes onto the twin bed in what was once his childhood bedroom and is now ostensibly the guest room, expecting to lie awake in anguish until he hears his family start getting up. Since this room’s actual purpose has become housing his father’s model plane building hobby somewhere his mother doesn’t have to look at it, there is, if nothing else, plenty for his exhausted eyes to behold. It’s reminded him for years of a page from anI Spybook.
But to his surprise, Ben finds himself blinking awake three hours later to the sound of his phone ringing instead. Rolling over as though he’s in his full-size bed at home, and nearly pitching off the mattress as a result, he scrambles around looking for it. It could be his cat sitter saying something happened to Roux, or Mrs. C calling to say she’s fallen and she can’t get up, or?—
—Ben swallows hard, having found the phone.Pete.
He almost doesn’t answer, but the thought of letting it go to voicemail makes him feel like such a coward he forces himselfto pick up the call. Still, he’s hoping as he lifts the phone to his ear that maybe Chris had a change of heart and this is a work emergency—a follow-up from last night—anythingbut Pete calling to say that he heard Ben’s a total freak show and so he’d like to strike everything that happened between them from the official record and, also, file a restraining order.
But when he’s finally got the little speaker in range, Ben realizes that Pete is laughing. Not a mocking laugh, or a mean one—a breathless, wildly entertained laugh, a laugh that sounds like it has survived several attempts to get it under control. He gasps, “Do you haveanyidea how manyweirdconversations this explains,” and then, “I’m sorry, it’s not that I don’t see why you thought—Ben, I can’t tell you how many times I watched him eat rubbercementas a kid! You couldn’t have known but—I mean, even theideathat we’d be—” and then he’s howling again, clearly too amused to speak.
After a second Ben finds, to his surprise, that he’s chuckling, too. Pete’s not laughingathim, not exactly—Ben knows what it is to be laughed at, a sad corner of his soul trapped for eternity in that auditorium when he was a teenager, trying everything he could think of to shut the feed off. This isn’t like that. Pete’s laughter is warm and delighted, so obviously tickled by the whole stupid, embarrassing thing that Ben, in spite of himself, can’t help but feel a bit better about it.
Still, he groans, as good-naturedly as he can manage. “I’m glad this is how you’re taking it. I thought maybe, instead, you might be calling to lie to me out of misguided kindness? Tell me you’re, just to give you a random example that’s definitely never been used on me before, unexpectedly moving to Nebraska in three hours, and not to worry if I never hear from you again, or if I see someone around the city who looksjustlike you but seems not to know me at all—” This make Pete’s laughter, which had been quieting down, kick off again, which is weirdly gratifying.“So, like, I’ll take this. But I amsorry, for the record. I’d like to use this opportunity to officially lay the blame at the feet of the Hot Dog Panic Attack. A wonderful, delicious, and above alldangerousdrink.”
“I’ll be sure to issue a warning when I publish the recipe,” Pete says, on a final chuckle. He takes a few breaths—there’s a sound like maybe he’s wiping tears of mirth from his eyes—and then he says, still a little amused, “I think it’s sweet, for what it’s worth. You trying to defend my honor like that. Misdirected, sure. And I guess youcouldsay alittlehypocritical, given that about an hour beforehand I had you?—”
“Iknow,” Ben groans again, though he shivers a little at the memory of the position he suspects Pete’s talking about. “Even as I wasdoingit, I knew I was being a hypocrite. I don’t normallydothings like that, for the record. I’m normally, like, chill! Low-key!”
“Are you?” Pete sounds, if possible, even more entertained. “Are you really?”
“Okay, no, of course I’m not,” Ben snaps, no real heat behind it. “But I keep it to myself! Inside! Where inside thoughts belong! I have a very good grasp, okay, usually, on that line, and I don’t want you to think this is like—myvibe—oh, God.” Ben stares, despairingly, up at the ceiling. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” says Pete, “one sec,” and, muffled as though he’s covered the speaker with one hand, Ben hears him order a cup of black coffee from what must be a newsstand. After barely a minute, he’s back, and now that Ben’s had a second to wake up, he can tell from the background noise that Pete must be walking, on his way to whatever his Sunday morning entails. “Sorry; I have to undo my sister’s purchasing spree this morning, and I can’t face that without caffeine.”
“God knows I get that,” says Ben, who, now that he is fully conscious, is already considering the fastest route to coffee. “I’m reasonably sure that at this point what’s running through my veins is more dark roast than blood.” As always when he comes back to Michigan, he remembers too late that he should have packed some of those awful canned lattes, or even some chocolate-covered espresso beans—anything to ensure that his path to caffeination doesn’t have to run through either parent. Lucia’s coffee is punishingly strong, even for Ben, and Daniel’s might as well be tar. Ben will drink either if he has to, but he won’t be happy about it.
He’s distracted from this utterly when Pete says, “Okay, you wanted something else to talk about, right? How about this: Is it too early to ask what you’re wearing?”
Ben both flushes with pleasure and, grimacing down at himself, wonders if this is the sort of situation in which a man is supposed to lie. Honesty has worked out inexplicably well with Pete so far, so he sighs and says, “Uh. The same undershirt I had on last night and…a pair of my sister’s Hello Kitty pajama bottoms from like 2004?” Ben glares accusingly down at the pants, which had been sitting on the top of a basket of Renata’s laundry when he’d stumbled inside, and which he’d unhesitatingly swiped on the theory that he was too tired to dig his own out of his suitcase. “Uh. In a hot way?”
Pete laughs again, warm, almost musical against the sounds of the city behind him, like a lifeline back to the world Ben chose. In spite of himself, and his pajama bottoms, and the room full of tiny bottles of paint and weird miniscule airplane parts and so many sticks of balsa wood that Ben half wants to call the fire department on his own father, he starts to feel like maybe his toast is finally going to start landing buttered side up.
It’s not what Ben would call agoodweek,the next week of his life. He’s not sure he and his family have ever spent anentirelygood week together, at least not since he and Renata hit adulthood. It’s never an entirely bad time, either, what time they manage to spend as a family these days; it’s not as though they’re cruel or hateful to one another, driving each other to tears or screaming. It’s just that each one of them seems, in whatever undefinable way, to be designed to subtly irritate the others, like a small-scale pearl farm.
