Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (4 page)

“And I guess you weren’t invited,” Brian said to Oliver. “Which is great. It’ll just be Rusty and his family staring at each other. I’m pretty sure after tonight, nobody else is going to want to have a damned thing to do with you, either.”

And he turned and walked off to his car. I watched him go, feeling empty and dumb.

“You know,” I said into the warm night, “you’re really the only person I would want to come.”

Oliver reached up and patted my shoulder. “That’s okay. I’ll show up anyway. You tell me where and when, and I’ll be at your party.”

I was planning to tell my mom, but she brought it up first. She’s like a ninja. I was walking out of my room after my post-work shower, going to hunt up some more food in the kitchen. I swear that woman heard the floorboard creak as I passed her office, because her voice shot out like an arrow and stopped me in my tracks.

“Rusty, have you had a falling out with your friends?”

I turned around and looked into her office and saw the back of her head. Mom had blonde hair. I think it was dyed, though, because if she missed her stylist appointment, her roots were brownish gray. But I rarely got to see that, it was almost always perfect. Some guys had moms who went running in public or sometimes wore sweats or went camping and didn’t wash their hair for a week. My mom only sweat at the gym, and since she went to one of those women-only gyms, we had to take her word for it. Every day: slacks, a twinset, and pearls. I don’t think I remember her wearing jeans.

Right now, she turned the chair away from the dark-wood desk to face me and brushed her blonde hair from her eyes in a way that looked like ballet.

“Yeah, Mom,” I said, because apparently being not bright meant I couldn’t lie either. “They were being mean to Oliver.”

Mom blinked and adjusted her summer cardigan. This one was pink. “The little dark-haired boy?”

He wasn’t
that
little. Five six? Five feet seven? Sure,
I
was almost six feet tall, but Oliver wasn’t child-sized.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“What would they have against him? I mean, I know his father’s in construction, but I don’t think any of your friends are that poorly mannered—”

“He’s gay, Mom—”

Mom jerked her head back. “I did not know that,” she said. Her voice didn’t really rise, but she gave the impression of a big ocean wave: same thing on the surface, but a vast swell of power underneath. “Why is he here so often?”

I swallowed. I reminded myself I’d suspected this. I’d thought my friends were decent, and I’d been wrong, but I’d always known my parents were dicks, and I’d been right about that.

“He’s my friend. He helped me study for the SATs. And his father gave me my job.”

“Oh,” she said, and her eyes were narrowed. She was doing some sort of calculation, I could tell. “You owe a debt. I understand. Well, then . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I could see that she was struggling with the sham of the “surprise party.” And then an odd look crossed her face. Her eyes got big and shiny, and for a moment her chin wrinkled. She took a deep breath, and everything smoothed out. “You should invite him to your going-away dinner,” she said simply, as though this was something I’d always known about. “It’s Tuesday, in two weeks. We’ll be going out. Make sure he dresses appropriately.”

I heard her later, cancelling caterers and fighting for her deposit back, and I felt bad. Maybe
that
had been what the shiny eyes were all about. She was going to lose money on this deal. That sucked, but I wasn’t going to go make up to all my shitty friends and drop Oliver. For one thing, I was almost done with that
Crime and Punishment
book, and I needed to talk to Oliver and find out if that really scummy guy was a bad guy or just doing that stuff because he felt like he was supposed to.

So Oliver came with us. He was wearing an old suit jacket and jeans, with a white shirt underneath, and he looked good. His wrists stuck out of the sleeves, though, like he’d grown since he got it, and the color was blue. I don’t think the fabric was that good. But that was okay. We sat through dinner while Nicole teased me about how I was supposed to send her all the skinny on the professors and the quad and the good places to hang out. I rolled my eyes and asked her how I’d know these things anyway.

“You’ve always been better at knowing the cool stuff,” I told her, and it was true. Nicole
did
like to shop, but she liked to shop vintage music stores and antique shops and stuff. She went to poetry readings in her spare time and could tell you who on the bookstore shelf had actually grown up in our little spot in the foothills. Before our town exploded into feeder suburbs to Intel, it used to be a little artsy place with windy roads and lots of trees and big stretches of nothing. A lot of our local authors wrote about the evil of industry and the soullessness of the suburbs, which did absolutely nothing for me. At least Raskolnikov
killed
people, right?

Nicole sighed and rolled her eyes. “At least look for the places that
Oliver
would like to hang out, okay?”

I grinned at Oliver. “That’s easy. The library.”

Oliver grinned back. “I even think that’s on the campus map,” he conceded.

I was suddenly struck by a thought. (Which, you know, gets me into trouble.) “Wait, Oliver. Where
do
you like to hang out?” I couldn’t remember him ever being anywhere besides my house except for his house or the library.

Oliver’s face did a weird thing then, and in a way, it reminded me of my mom’s face when she’d had to cancel my party. “With you, dumbass.” He said it with a smile, and for a moment, I thought he was going to zing me, but he pulled back somehow.
Dumbass
didn’t sound like an insult when he said it. It sounded like
sweetheart
or
baby
or one of those other gross words that girls liked us to call them.

But because it was
dumbass
, it didn’t make me gag.

“Oh my God!” Nicole rolled her eyes. “That’s gross. Men should never talk to each other that way. Ever. I don’t care
who
they sleep with!”

“Ni
cole
!” my mother snapped, and my sister turned to her chicken and asparagus with a meekness I did
not
believe. Sure enough, she looked up at me under her lowered brows, and I stuck my tongue out at her. Her shoulders shook and her look shifted to a glare, and then she looked next to me, to where Oliver was sitting (he got the end on account of being left-handed), and I saw him sticking out his tongue
and
crossing his eyes.

Nicole burst into giggles, and Oliver and I joined her. My parents glared at the three of us, but they weren’t going to start shrieking about manners in the middle of the restaurant—that would be rude.

So it was a good dinner. I thought I might miss Nicole when I was gone. When we were little, she used to sneak into my room at night and sing silly kids songs to me. I don’t know where she heard them—kindergarten, maybe? Preschool? Our mom wasn’t one for singing nonsense songs, but Nicole remembered every one she heard. Probably why she loved vintage vinyl records so much. Anyway, as we all walked through the balmy air to the parking lot, I remembered that.

We’d driven in two separate cars so I could pick Oliver up, and my Prius with the moonroof had a decent backseat. I thought maybe some company would be nice.

“Nicole, you want to ride with us?” I asked all of a sudden. “We can go for ice cream, and then get home.”

Nicole looked up at me with a smile on her round face while she pushed brown hair out of her eyes, and for a moment, it looked like she was going to say yes. Then she grew thoughtful, and she said, “No, Rusty. You go ahead. We’ve got tomorrow before you leave, but you’ve only got Oliver for tonight.”

I shrugged and got into the car, but, as dumb as I am, there were a few things I didn’t miss.

I didn’t miss the way my parents glared at Nicole, and I didn’t miss the way she looked at them, innocent as pie, which is how she usually looked when she’d been robbing my drawers for those awful white T-shirts.

And I didn’t miss the way Oliver beamed like a dark sun, either. It made me feel good, right? Because he was my friend.

I meant to take us to ice cream, but as I neared the turnoff for the strip mall that had the Ben & Jerry’s in it, Oliver made a
no
sound.

“Just keep driving,” he murmured, and so we did.

We rolled down the windows and the wind was perfect. It smelled like cut brown grasses, because the hills were scorched, and we drove the long straight highways through Amador, listening to music and talking about what we
thought
college was going to be like.

I said, “You know, it’s probably going to look like the inside of my dorm room. I’m never going to cut it.”

Oliver sighed, and then I sighed too. It would have been nice if he could have lied to me, just once, but that wasn’t him.

“Rusty?”

“Yeah?”

“You know, you can email me when you’re gone, right? Text, Skype, all of that.”

I brightened a little. All that shit. I’d forget. Oh crap, I should tell him that. “You’re going to have to poke me a little, okay? You know, like now? I forget.”

Oliver shook his head. “You don’t, really,” he said with an apologetic smile. “You just don’t like calling people out of the blue. Once I text you or something, you’re all okay.” His teeth glinted a little in one of the rare streetlamps, and he shook his bangs out of his eyes. “Actually, Rusty, you’re sort of a little bit shy.”

My face heated in the confines of the car, and I wished I could have stuck my head out the window like a big yellow dog.

“You say that, and now I’m all embarrassed,” I told him, and his laugh was a soft sound blown away by the wind.

After about an hour of driving out in the mostly rural country off Jackson Highway, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. Oliver trotted inside and came out with two frosties in cups, mine with lots of caramel and nuts.

He waited until I was done pumping gas and said, “Pull over to the back of the station. You can savor it then.”

I looked at him quick and saw that he was laughing a little at the idea of savoring gas station ice cream, and I laughed too. But behind the gas station, there was miles and miles of nothing. Far off in the distance, you could see the lights that meant the urban sprawl of Sacramento was starting, but there wasn’t even one light behind the store.

Oliver and I both leaned against the Toyota and “savored” our sweating ice cream. A breeze blew across all of that dried nothing and I found I was scooting up against Oliver a little for warmth. He didn’t seem to mind.

For a few moments, we didn’t say a word, and the world was perfect.

Then, into the quiet, Oliver said, “Rusty, if I try something, do you promise to still call me if it doesn’t work?”

God, I’m dumb.

“Try something like what? That thing with the computer so we can see each other? Because I can do that already.”

Oliver laughed into his empty ice-cream cup and talked about something else. “Rusty, who was the last girl you dated?”

“Jennifer Brukholtz—you remember, I told you about her?”

“No dick before dinner,” Oliver said dryly. “Yeah. Not easy to forget.”

I sulked and scooped out the last of the ice cream with my spoon, and then sucked the spoon upside down on my tongue, creating a perfect seal. Oliver turned toward me, looking up at me with those eyes that said I was all that. My tongue got sucked in around the spoon and for a minute I was stuck, Oliver laughing at me, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth like every bad dream I’d ever had about public speaking, except I wasn’t naked.

I had a sudden thought then, of me naked, and Oliver in front of me the same way.

I stopped breathing, and the spoon loosened from the top of my mouth and started to slide out. Oliver caught it before it could stop dangling off my lips and put it in his ice-cream cup. Very deliberately, he took the cup from me, put it in his own, and set them both on top of the car behind me.

“You just thought about it, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.

I’m dumb, remember? No lying. I nodded my head and swallowed. “Yeah.”

There was just enough light from behind us to see it dancing in the brown of his eyes.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” he said quietly. “And you’re leaving tomorrow. Which means if this doesn’t work out, it’ll be okay. We’ll be friends and we’ll text and—”

“If what doesn’t work out?” I asked, and his lips quirked upwards, leaving perfect apostrophes on either side of his brown mouth.

“Just close your eyes,” he said softly, and I did.

He moved slowly, reaching behind my head and pulling it down, and when I was right where he needed to be, he raised up a little. I could feel puffs of breath against my mouth, and then a tickle against my lips. And another, harder. And one more, warmer.

I gasped, opening my mouth, and his tongue swept in, teasing a little, until I teased back.

He sighed into my mouth, and for a moment it felt like he was going to pull away, but I wasn’t ready. I reached behind him and pulled him closer to me, and his tongue went deeper. Ohhh . . .
this
was kissing. I sighed back at him, and he pulled away, leaving me to suck on his tongue until the last minute, because I wanted him some more.