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He rolls his eyes. “What’s there to be nervous about?”
“Oh, right,” I tease. “You’re only the youngest valedictorian in the school’s history, and you only have to give a ten-minute speech in front of hundreds of people that, knowing you, you haven’t even written yet.”
The Kid grins and looks so much like his brother did at his age that I feel a pang in my chest. “Eh,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. “So I wing it. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Uh, you’d use it as a platform to promote several of your ideological views and end up causing riots in the streets of Seafare?”
He looks interested. “You think that could happen?”
I wrap my arm around his shoulder. “I wouldn’t bet against you any day of the week.”
He seems distracted as we wander around the mall, and there’s something in his posture, something about his demeanor that lets me know that something is weighing h
eavily on his mind. I think about asking him what’s wrong, but I know by now it’s better to wait for him to come to me.
He brings up his thumb and chews on the fingernail, and so I know it’ll be soon.
We’ve passed the food court when Ty asks his Very Important Question.
“Oliver?”
“Yes, Ty?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
He sighs. “You can’t tell any of this to Bear, okay? Not until I’ve figured it out.”
I hesitate but only for a moment. Bear’ll forgive me. “Promise.”
“How do you know when you’re in love?”
I hide the smile that threatens to rise. I’m reminded of a time that the Kid had asked that question before, right after I’d come back home. He’d been only nine then, and had asked that question of his brother. Bear had told me later that it’s questions like that that cause his brain to short out because he doesn’t always know how to answer without coming across as a douche bag. His words, not mine.
But love. How does one know? I think of Bear. His voice. His mind. His body. His soul. And I just know, like I’ve always known. I gently twist the ring on my finger, remembering how we’d gotten legally married three years after that first attempt that day on the beach. Oregon had finally passed gay marriage laws, much to the displeasure of the Republicans, and much to the great pleasure of the Kid, who immediately began planning an overtly egregious ceremony, saying that the only way to get the point across is if we rub their noses in it. But, in the end, it was a quiet thing with a justice of the peace and our family, Bear looking like the happiest man on earth, my heart swelling so much I thought it’d burst. That was a good day.
“I guess,” I say slowly, “that it’s when you figure out that you can’t live without another person. That somehow they complete you and without them, you’re not whole. You always feel like something’s missing, no matter what you try and do.”
He watches me for a moment, absorbing my words, thinking them over in his unique mind, which is undoubtedly categorizing, dissecting, cataloguing, and inspecting each and every syllable that I’ve just uttered to him. I wait to see what his reaction will be, if I need to explain further, if I should joke around with him, tease him about whatever girl he’s focused on now. There’s a few in his class and in classes above him that follow him like he’s the greatest thing in the world, and there’s this little blonde, especially, that he seems to laugh a lot more with than most.
And then his face grows weary, his eyes resigned, his forehead scrunches, and I know he’s reached his conclusion. “Shit,” he mutters. “So that’s what that is.”
I can’t help it: I laugh, reaching over to ruffle his hair. I don’t know how serious it can be, obviously, with him being so young, but I cautiously remind myself that the Kid is different in so many ways, so why shouldn’t his emotional maturity be right up there with someone much older than him?
I feel a slight chill at this. He doesn’t look worried, per se. Perhaps
“fatalistic” is a better description. Like it’s inevitable, how he feels, and while he can’t change it, he’d rather not have it be as it is.
“Do you think people would wait for each other?” he asks me almost wistfully. “Like, if the other person felt the same way, that they’d wait for each other until they could be together again?”
“I suppose,” I say, shrugging. “But if we’re talking about you, and we’re talking about after you’re done with college, you have to understand that that’s a long time, Kid. For anyone. And unless there’s already a history there, it may be harder. Like if it was me and your brother, of course I’d wait. I’d wait for the rest of my life if it meant I got to be with him again one day.”
“Shit,” he says again as his shoulders slump. “I can’t ask him to do that.
It’s not fair. And it’s not like I know anything would come of it.”
“It’s hard to ask anyone to do that. It’s hard to know if someone feels the same way unless you ask them. Sometimes, bluntness is the only way to go. You gotta ask those… those….” Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up.
