“How’d you meet him, then?”

In the middle of junior high, my dad took on a new position at U of Kansas in Lawrence. He wanted us to have a “decent” house, and he wanted to keep Missouri residency, so we landed in this home too big for the two of us in Gladstone, MO. The thing about him is that he’s like having a very quiet, very absent roommate. I don’t think I saw him for the month leading up to second semester in 7th grade. I don’t think I saw him at my high school graduation.

So I spent a lot of time in and around the area by myself. I was really quiet then, a reserved kid who wouldn’t answer to his own name in attendance. Maybe I was just shy, but this gnawing discomfort would well up within me every time I tried to speak. So I didn’t.

And one day, near the end of 7th grade, walking alone to an empty home in the big heat, I saw him. The kid I sat next to at my first of many detentions in the new school.

The kid I saw wasn’t a loud jock, nor was he much too weird to befriend for most of the others, it seemed. He was in my class, and back then on the football team, but from the view of the bench. He hung out with a girl often, who I saw hand him a letter, kiss him on the cheek, and run away. I thought they were dating from that moment til I saw her crying behind the bleachers with the note in hand. They still hang out to this day, though, so I guess it was on good terms.

After witnessing all this, quietly and from afar, I saw him sat on the curb -  at the house next to my dad’s. We were 12 years old.

“...Forgot your key?” I asked. Bold of me.

“What?” he said. “No, dad forgot to leave it for me.”

Frustrated and head-in-hands.

“Mm.”

I took a seat beside him, tired from the heat and not wanting to go indoors, where dad had yet to turn on the A/C this year.

“You’re in my class, right?” he says. “The transfer from St. Louis.”

I nod.

He gives a slight smile, sweating in the late spring, and he extends his hand, and he says: “I’m Allen. Don’t think we met proper, yet.”

My offered response: “...Nice to meet you.”

“What’s your name?”

“...”

I almost think I won’t say it, or I’ll lie and say I’m someone else, but then... 

“It’s Roy.”

With a confidence that, until this point, was unlike me.

He grips my hand and with a firm shake says, “Nice to meet you, Roy.”

I point to the open window by the side of what must be his house.

“There,” I say. “You can get in there.”

He looks, confirms, and then he grins - and says, “Thanks a bunch, Roy!”

“Sure thing,” I tell him. “I’ll help you up…”

---

By 8th grade, Allen and I were fairly exclusive lunch buddies. In my absence, Allen would tell me about who he was hanging out with from the team. The funny things they’d tell eachother. In his absence, I ate alone.

By soph or junior year of high school, Al had made it on the track team, and it’s by this point that we were close enough that his dad invited me to the family get together. 

So that makes me sixteen the first time it happened.

“The first time what happened?”

Oh, I mean like. The first time, y’know, well. I guess what I’m thinking of is this.

The first time I got it, in 1994.

It was at the reunion of sorts, held by Uncle Lewis at the big park just shy of Lawrence, KS. Lewis is Al’s cool and weird uncle who is really into foreign media. He had all these mixtapes of obscure Kansas City radio stations from the 70s. He was a Marine or something, I knew because he’d traveled pretty extensively in places that happened to have prominent U.S. Bases, and because he acted like one. 

Lew didn’t have any kids. He never got married. Instead, he stayed in touch with his old Marine buddies. They played Dungeons and Dragons together. They all seemed to live in nearby apartments in Lawrence.

Anyway, Uncle Lewis was holding the annual Fletcher family mini-reunion get-together with Al’s dad Gary, Al’s younger sister Tammy, their aunt Erica, and the twin cousins Catherine and Jonathan coming in from the East Coast. I had yet to meet aunt Erica and the cousins. My dad was away doing a lecture series in fuck-off California, and I wasn’t invited, but I was asked instead by Al’s dad Gary if I wanted to go to this shindig. So I went. 

Being sixteen sucks, generally speaking. The twin cousins were already adults at 25, so Allen and I had almost a full ten to go ‘til we could reach them. Not much in the way of mutual conversation, on my part at least.

The introductions go like this.

“Who’s the boyfriend, Al?” Jonno teases.

“Come off it,” Lew says. “You don’t ask, and Roy? Don’t tell!”

A joke, but one that had me feeling a way. Everyone’s laughing light, though. It’s not quite at my expense, no, he’s just like that with everyone, but it feels a way nonetheless.

“Name’s Roy,” I offer with a smile. “Roy Angelo. Nice to meet you too.”

“Oh,” Al says, “Yeah, Cathy? Jonno? Aunt Erica?” 

They all look to Al.

He points to me, and says: “Formal introduction. This is Roy Angelo. He’s my best friend, back from middle school.”

Something about that feels good to hear. Something about that feels weird. I take it for the former and leave the nest unwrangled.

“Nice to meet y’all,” I say.

They smile in unison, and Jonathan says “Nice to meet you too!”, extending a hand out for a firm shake. Cathy nods and says her hello also. Aunt Erica smiles, and hands me another serving of potato salad.

And yeah, they’re smiling, and it’s open bar for anyone who can reach, and yeah I’ve drank long before this but I know it’s not my town, so I’m cooled off on it. ‘Only beer for me tonight,’ I informed Al that morning. And Al integrates well with his cousins, making talk about the track team, about class, about the shit we’d get up to in censored detail. I’m standing there forcing myself to nurse a now lukewarm beer so’s as to not be a dick in front of the guy whose family invited me.

And conversations peter out, and people migrate, and I’m in and out of it, here and there, chiming in but not really melting with the rest. So Lew is telling this story about his brother Gary, them as kids, Lew being the oldest, sliding down a snowy bank on an innertube, and by the by this is the story where Gary breaks his arm, and then Lew asks:

“So Roy!”

He has kind of a bellow to him, so I know that he talks like this, but I still nearly drop my beer.

“Yes sir?” I say.

“Drop the ‘sir’, I work for a living!” Laughs around the picnic table. I’ve heard it before. “You got any siblings?”

“Sure do,” I say, and down the rest of my beer in one. I reach for the next. “Big brother, little sister.”

“Nice!” he says. “Good mix. They got names?”

I nod. “Brother Dave,” I say, “and young Julie. She’s about Tammy’s age.”

Jonno asks, “What’s your brother do?”

“Oh, he’s a Marine.”

“That’s crazy,” Catherine says.

“A marine!” Lew laughs. “Semper fuckin’ fi!”

“Lew!” Gary chides, tilting his head towards Tammy. “Language.”

“Where’s he stationed?” Lewis asks.

I shrug. I don’t really keep up with him. I don’t express my intense distaste that brother Dave joined Uncle Sam’s Motorcycle Club. They don’t need to know.

“You know, when I was your age,” Lewis continues, “I was already talkin’ to recruiters. They wouldn’t have me ‘til I graduated. What are you two’s plans after high school?”

The thing about plans is, I don’t talk about mine. The future’s crazy, and I have too many. They probably wouldn’t like any of them.

“I dunno!” says Al. “Probably college, somewhere. Thinking of majoring in English.”

“Well,” I say. “I think I’ll take a year or two off to work before college. See the States or something.”

Lew laughs, and says, “Good man.”

And he pats my back, and the conversation diverts and continues. Onto more siblingly stories.

The next one is from Al’s sister, Tammy. She’s 13 or 14, and I think she has a weird fascination with me. I wouldn’t go as far as to say a crush, but it’s something. She brings up a semi-funny story, about when I went to sleep over while the dad, Gary, was away, and we went to the QuikStop for hot dogs and came back to find we had locked ourselves out of the house. She teased us for two hours, and made us do a dance before she would let us back in.

“I bet you locked us out!” Al says, teasing.

“Did not!”

And I’m finished with that beer, and onto the next. Something about this whole situation feels so god damn normal it’s like a slap in the face. I guess I always knew my life wasn’t like that, but it never stings until you see the contrast.

And this is when I figure it. How different my life might be.

The night goes on, and I’m chatty enough with the rest, feeling like I’ve made it into the fold, even if on a probationary basis. Like they accept me, not for who I am but for the person I’m very pointedly pretending to be.

When I get back to my dad’s empty house, the first and last thing I do is get royally trashed.