Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it. I'm just saying maybe we should have been more realistic about what we knew was going to happen. My mind is still just doing backflips over the whole thing.
Would you believe it if I told you Thomas and I slept peacefully in his bed all night long with two feet separating us, the same as we've done for twelve whole years? Well, that's exactly what we did. Picture him and me, best friends just keeping that childhood arrangement alive for yet another night like nothing happened. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. And when I woke up in the morning, and everything was just so goddamn familiar, it actually took me a second or two to remember. Once I did, and I looked over at him and he was still sleeping, I had this crazy, warm feeling wash over me. I guess you could call it euphoria. I felt a strong desire to reach out then and put my arms around him, but of course I didn't actually do it. All of this has been such an unpredictable shitshow, who knows what the result of that would have been.
I stood there beside his bed for a good minute or two, though. I was trying to decide if I should leave without waking him up, which I normally wouldn't have any qualms about. This time I decided it might not be the best idea. I said his name softly and he rolled over and looked up at me.
"I'm going to work now," was what I said.
He gave me this kind of shy smile that make me feel really good about everything and said, "See you later on."
Well, now it's back to reality, and I'm standing in this dumb little booth, and I need a little time to process all of this, you know? And I know he does too, no matter what he says, no matter what kind of one-eighty he's made in the last couple of days.
The good news is that he's texting me back—he was the first to say something, actually. It's not like I was really worried about that, though, since he seems to have completely moved past his whole doom-and-gloom phase. It helps me get through the day, along with the fact that my prison cell is now air-conditioned.
The first thing he says is, "How did you sleep?"
"I slept well," I text back.
"No regrets," he says.
"No regrets."
We're just sort of texting about nothing for a while. And then I say, "We need to keep this under control though."
His reply comes in right way. "No fucking shit." A pause. "We can't just go and do that shit whenever we want."
I type the words "The girls" and then just stare at my screen trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to finish that thought. And then I give up and hit send. I'll let him deal with it.
"I know," is all he texts back.
Things go quiet between us for a while. As I'm serving cars I keep opening our message thread and it just looks so sad and pathetic they way we left it. We're the ones who are pathetic, is what I'm trying to say. A while later, determined, I pick my phone back up and type, "You know it counts as cheating right?" But I only put the words down on the screen. I don't send them. I look at them for a little while, and then I erase them. Half an hour later, I write them again. Then I erase them again. I'm the craziest piece of shit. I wish I understood myself better sometimes.
It's getting close to four. I'm just cleaning up some stuff and throwing a few rags into the laundry bag when that beat-up old Lexus just grinds up and lurches into a parking space nearby. Thomas gets out and he's wearing the red variety of his famous sleeveless shirt. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and comes over.
"Did you work out without me?" I say.
"No. I thought we could, if you want to." He folds his arms on the little order counter. "Hey, so I was thinking we should actually quit doing that other stuff, for now."
"I agree," I say. And It's true. I do agree. He's exactly right. Look at all of this other shit we have going on right now. That kind of behavior is totally incompatible with either of our situations, and we both know it.
"Like, actually fucking control ourselves," he continues, "and not just say we will."
"We've been friends for years," I say. "So I mean, we know what it's supposed to look like, just being regular friends who don't do that stuff. We'll go back to how it was before."
"Exactly," he says. "Man, I knew you would think of the perfect way to say it."
A straggler pulls up in a white Buick. It's a sweet old lady with a mile-long order. Thomas waits in his car until I'm done. I close up the place and go over to his car. I get in and shove some stuff in the back seat. We go back to his place and run through our whole routine in the garage. It feels so good to be working out with him again, I'm telling you. And when we finish and he pushes his protein on me, I accept that shit. I'm like a new man.
I know this might be hard to believe, but we go the whole rest of the week just being normal friends, like before. The thing about Thomas and me is that we care about our friendship more than anything. I'm hanging out with Lexie too, on and off, and things are going pretty good for us. Damn, that girl loves to smoke weed. You should see her. Now that summer has arrived, she's really relaxing about a lot of things. She gets a job as a cashier at a store called Lazy Afternoon that mostly sells crafts and shit like that. She tells me she can do it with her hands behind her back.
Thomas's job starts next week. He's a shop assistant to a mechanic in West Downtown. He did it last summer, too. He's all over that kind of stuff.
My mom starts showing up around the house a lot again. She's brought a bad mood back with her. I mostly avoid her, but sometimes I get the sense that I need to talk to her and make sure that nothing too serious is going on. It's Saturday afternoon and we're both at home. She's in the living room and I sit down on the chair next to her. I turn down the TV and she slowly turns to look at me.
"Everything okay?" I say.
She's just kind of reading my face for a while. "When was your high school graduation?"
"A couple weeks ago," I say.
"But you just finished."
"I know," I say. "They do it before. But it's contingent on passing your finals." She never even asked me how my finals went. She's always taking it for granted that I do well on that stuff.
"Why didn't you tell me, Niko?"
"It's not a big deal," I say. This is going to be a bad one, I can already tell.
"Of course it's a big deal," she says. She's still putting on the calm front. "A mother should go to her own son's graduation ceremony. Don't you think so?"
I'm already feeling pretty exasperated. I wish there was something I could do to keep my nerves under control in these situations. "I don't have an opinion on it," I say calmly.
"Of course you do," she tells me. "I'm sure everyone else's mom was there. I'm sure it made you feel terrible that I wasn't there."
She's wrong. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have gone at all. The only reason I attended and walked is because all my friends did, and it would have looked super weird to them if I didn't show up. The point is, I didn't want to be there, so why would I care if I my mom showed up or not? I take a breath. "If I wanted you to be there, I would have asked you to come." I know right after I say it that I didn't choose the right wording. I can be so goddamn stupid sometimes.
"How could you do that?" she says. She's not even looking at me. She's lying on the couch, looking at the wall. "How could you go and do that, and not even think to invite me?"
It just doesn't even make sense, what she's saying right now. The school sent out invitations to every parent. I remember exactly what the envelope looked like when it came in the mail. I brought it in from the mailbox and set it on the kitchen table. I left it on the top of the stack. I know she saw it. I know she opened it.
You have to understand, I didn't bring it up with her at the time because of the way all of those conversations have gone in the past. First she'll run through a series of excuses, and then, at the very end, say some shit like, "But no, really, I should go," and then I'll say okay, and then she'll just start going through all those excuses again, and finally I'll say something like, "You know what, mom? It's really okay with me if you can't make it. I promise, it's okay if you don't want to go." I'll dress it up for her. I'll get really convincing about it. Because I know that will make her feel much better in the end about not going.
She's always doing this stuff. She's always saying things that don't quite work with reality. I'm so sick of it.
"If you cared about me at all, you would have invited me," she says.
"I care, Mom." She's getting me pretty worked up inside. "You know I care."
"Times like this make me wonder," she says.
That's it. She's triggering me like you wouldn't believe, saying something like that. I do her the biggest favor I possibly can in that moment: I get up and leave. I stomp back to my room like a child and throw some shit in my backpack, then unplug my phone from the wall. I walk right out the door without saying another word to her.
The thing is, if I had stuck around, I probably would've ended up saying something hurtful. I can't do that to her. She just doesn't have the tools to handle it, if that makes sense. Every now and then I catch myself thinking that if I do talk back, it's because she deserves it. But the truth is that no matter what kind of dumb shit she says to me, the woman has clothed and fed me for years. We've lived in that dumpy little two-bedroom apartment my whole life. Can you believe that? I've always had a place to call home, because of her. In return, during moments when she's being like this, the least I can do is not mouth off to her. No matter how tempting that can be, it's always better to walk away, to refrain from saying some dumb shit of my own that I know I will later regret. I don't always succeed, but today I pulled it off.