Breathe, Tommy (bxb) (RE-UPLOADING)

one • fratty freshmen

~Tommy~

"Come on, sweetheart," Mom coaxes me as she gets out of our silver Chrysler Pacifica, the only family car her and Dad didn't rock-paper-scissor for. I barely hear her because the less sane part of my existence is too busy yapping:

If you plug in earphones and ignore everyone, but also attend scandalous frat parties, drizzle girls all over you like syrup on pancakes and earn the 'Fuckboy' title, then your secret could be safe.

Mom taps the window, snatching my attention. She gives me a consoling smile while ignoring the smudged glass — courtesy of Olive's (my humble little seven-year-old sister who's still oblivious to Dad's dopey-ness) fingers — and tugs open my door.

I get out and join her, Olive, and Dad who's distracted by the idyllic campus exterior. It's much more sightly than my crummy high school back in Georgia that was partially plagued with cretins.

"Baby," Mom sighs. Worried or ready, I can't tell. "We're going to be six hours away. I need to know you're going to be okay. I can't believe I'm leaving you all the way here in Florida."

"I'll be alright," I assure her. "Stop worrying," but how do you convince a mother to go against human nature?

She leans over to kiss my cheek just as Dad opens up the trunk. There's a certain whine to his tone as he says, "Tommy, get your ass back here and help me."

"There are nicer ways to tell him to do something," Mom bites at him.

"What? If I don't throw 'ass' in my every sentence to him, how will I get him to actually listen? The boy's fucking deaf when I don't," Dad defends his incompetent parenting only to execute more who gave you permission to be a parent parenting.

Thankfully Olive's gone off to explore and doesn't hear the swear word; she's always been quietly serene and to herself. I watch her sit on the mown grass and roll about in giggles in her summer dress of a Tuscan sun yellow. Her allergies are going to act up, but she loves the outside, halcyon in nature. Well, until her eyes start itching and she gets all snotty.

As I watch her, I'm conflicted. I love my dad for accepting me no matter what, but he's filter-less and bold and in urgent need of a good whack across the mouth with a non-vulgar dictionary; he needs to relearn the actual words he's meant to be using around Olive and I. With the glare that appears on Mom's face, I know she'll agree with that.

"Alex , say hindquarters or rear end, and quit it with the F-word already. We didn't give birth to Olive or Tommy to raise them around that kind of language."

"You say 'we' figuratively, right? Because I don't remember doing the giving birth part," Dad winks. All 475,936 versions of myself cringe. Mom needs a long-lasting pair of shoes to run from Dad's issues. Nike. Balenciaga. Adidas. Whatever gets her to walk on water and migrate to sanity.

She rolls her eyes, grabs one of my boxes from the trunk, and begins the journey to my accommodation.

"Freya, I love you, you are my high school sweetheart, I swear to not swear again," Dad tries.

"Oh, yeah, of course, Al. 'I swear to not swear again' is engraved on the inside of my wedding ring, right? Remember promising that two decades ago? You put that in your vow too." I'm glad Mom's joking, but then I can't tell if she really is.

Even with Dad's swearing and Mom's joking-but-not-joking, I think I've come out okay. Well, not so much to homophobic assholes, but in the light of day, I'm sure I'm the only one out of the family who appears relatively average; Olive buries dead ladybugs and it's just weird.