Ethan

When I went to find Rue, a small pile of little orange berries I’d gathered off a nearby bush clutched in my hand, I found him sitting at a picnic table with his face buried in his arms. I didn’t really know what had brought his mood down so much other than I guess I wasn’t being the kind of company he’d expected.

Though that wasn’t exactly a novel concept to me. I kept myself to myself, and some people took that personally. I got all kinds of reactions—sometimes anger, sometimes frustration, but mostly just people deciding I wasn’t worth being around (which honestly I usually didn’t mind so much and was often kind of my goal). I could tell Rue’s self esteem was in the gutter because he’d blamed himself.

See, I didn’t have much true intuition for what other people were thinking, but I was smart enough to figure certain things out. Like, for example, that my dad probably hadn’t been wrong about things being like that with Rue because his face had gone so red when I’d asked if this was a date—redder than I’d thought someone who wasn’t nearly as pale as me could go. And yeah, he’d stammered a denial, but I’m not gay hadn’t been anywhere in it. So he probably was.

Maybe if I tried a little harder, kept a little less to myself, I could salvage this. If he was maybe into me, I really, really wanted to. This was probably my only chance to have something like this. I’d be a terrible boyfriend, but I could maybe be a not-awful person to flirt with for a week if I really tried. That wasn’t normally an option. The only kind of short term thing you could usually have was a hook up, and I definitely wasn’t interested in that. 

I greeted Rue with a gentle pat to the top of his head and he started, badly. Whoops. I ruffled a hand over the short, wavy strands of his dark hair when he stilled and then sat down next to him, closer than I’d normally sit to someone when we had a whole picnic bench to ourselves. “Cheer up, buttercup.”

Rue lifted his head as I pulled a baggie out of the pocket of my messenger bag and tipped the berries into them. “Can we eat those?”

“Duranta. No. Not unless you’re a bird.”

“Then why…?”

“For seeds. I want to see if I can grow one into a bonsai.”

“Like the little trees?”

“Yeah. I have a whole bunch of them.”

“Oh, wow. There were pictures on your phone, but I assumed they were, like… professionally made.” He twisted his lips together. “Though you work in a nursery, so I guess you are a professional. That’s really cool. Do you sell them?”

“Nah. My dad says—” I felt my lips do something that I thought was maybe a frown. “I don’t know. He says that because we’re more of a low cost bulk place, it’s hard to sell speciality stuff. But sometimes people don’t tell you the truth when it might hurt your feelings, so it could just be because they’re not that good. It takes years and years to grow and prune a proper bonsai, so really they’re mostly just tiny baby saplings that I tried to make look nice.”

“When I get a second job, I’ll buy one. Though I guess it’ll have to be after I move someplace else, because there’s shit all natural light in our apartment.”

“I’ll send you one for free as a housewarming gift.”

“Yeah?” Rue said, his face lighting up with a smile. “I’d like that.”

I picked up my phone and quickly snapped a picture of him before his expression could change, then turned it to show him the screen. “This is a good one. You have a nice smile.”

That got another smile out of him, though he tried to bite it down. “Uh, thanks. Do you think I should grow my hair out?”

I should have trusted my dad’s intuition. He was usually pretty good at figuring people out. Sure, he didn’t always understand me, but nobody did and I sort of wanted it that way. Even if being misunderstood was frustrating, I found the idea that someone might know what I was thinking without me telling them a little unsettling.

Anyway, my dad was right and Rue was definitely not straight.

I pushed myself up so that I was kneeling on the bench and looked down at Rue’s short, dark hair, my fingers flicking through wavy strands. He’d gone completely still as I touched him. “It’s curly when it’s long?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Rue said, ruffling a hand through his hair as I sank back down onto the seat. “I’ve never had it long, but my mum’s was curly, so that’s the theory.”

I nodded. “My mum’s dead, too.”

“Oh, uh—she’s not—I mean, I don’t think my mum’s dead. She just fucked off right after I was born, so…” He shrugged. “But sorry about yours. That sucks.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But yours sucks too. Especially with your dad…”

Rue let out a humourless chuckle. “Bet he would have loved to do a little child abandonment, but she beat him to it. What happened, uh, with your mum?”

Normally I didn’t talk about my mum, but I liked that he’d asked—or maybe how he’d asked. Like we were two people on equal footing and he actually wanted to know.

“Cancer, when I was ten,” I said. “Nobody’s ever understood me like she did, so… it did kinda suck, yeah.”

“I’m sorry. You must really miss her.”

I made a sound in the back of my throat that wasn’t quite agreement. “Can I say something that might be kinda fucked up?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think I do miss her.”

“Oh,” Rue said. I flicked a quick glance towards his face, but that didn’t really get me any closer to figuring out what he was thinking.

“I just… don’t feel like that’s the right word,” I explained. “I was ten, and I was really stressed when I was a kid, so it’s all kind of a blur. She was my favourite person in the whole world, but my memory of her is so fuzzy. She doesn’t really feel like someone I know anymore, so can I really miss her?”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense. My grandparents on both sides used to babysit me when I was a kid, but I haven’t seen any of them for years. It’d feel weird to say that I miss them now. If I saw them again, we’d basically be strangers.”

“Right, exactly,” I said, squirming in my seat as I sat up straighter and then hunching again. I was suddenly full of words, bursting to come out of my lips. “But when someone’s dead, it’s weird. I never really know when I’m actually feeling things in a different way from most people and when it’s just not polite to say the truth. There’s a lot of that with death. I normally just copy my dad, but it’s different for him. Like, when she died—” I stopped talking abruptly and worried my lip. Maybe I shouldn’t…

“Yeah?” Rue prompted.

I hesitated. “This one might be worse.”

“I won’t judge,” he promised.

He couldn’t possibly promise that when he didn’t know what I was going to say, but I’d come this far, and now that I was talking about this stuff, I wanted to get out all of the thoughts about this that had crowded my head over the years. 

“She was sick for a really long time. I don’t know how long, but it felt like forever. First in treatment, when we thought she might get better, and then just… waiting to die.” I kept my head down, eyes aimed at my hands, talking to the air around us more than Rue himself. “I hated it. Seeing her like that. Just suffering. I still have nightmares about her being sick like that—or my dad instead. Nothing is worse than that.”

“I’ve never been through something like that, but that sounds like a pretty normal way to feel,” Rue said softly.

“But then she died,” I said, making brief, pointed eye contact with Rue. “She died at home, and I was in the room, reading. I was listening to her breathing, and it was so loud and laboured. And then it stopped.”

“Fuck,” Rue whispered.

I hunched my shoulders and gave a tight shake of my head. He didn’t understand. “No. I—I went and told my dad.” Well, got his attention, led him to the room. I’d been going through a nonverbal phase at the time. “And he cried, and he called an ambulance, and he was really upset. He really wanted her to not be dead. And I didn’t understand, because we knew she was dying, and we were waiting for it, and she was suffering…” I gave a helpless shrug and murmured, “I was kind of glad.”

Rue’s fingertips brushed my shoulder, tentative, like he wasn’t quite sure touching me was the right move. “That’s why we put down pets when they’re sick, right? I don’t think that’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” I breathed. “But my dad…”

My dad had scared me with how upset he’d been. Just being near him, seeing him cry, his emotions an almost violent force that had bled straight through to me in a way that was somehow more raw and abrasive than my own feelings. I should have comforted him, that man who needed so much love and had just lost the person he cared for most in the whole world, but all I could do was shy away and hide.

“Different people process things differently,” Rue said. “That doesn’t mean your way was wrong. Or that his was.”

“Yeah,” I said. I kind of knew that, but it didn’t stop the frown that fixed on my face. “While we were waiting for the ambulance, he hugged me really tight and he kept saying he was sorry. I don’t really know why…”

“Why he was sorry?”

I nodded. “Maybe just that she was dead, I guess.”

“Maybe,” Rue agreed. “Or maybe that you’d been there, alone, when she died. I guess you were kind of at peace with that, but he probably didn’t know that, right?”

“Oh,” I said, running the memory back through my mind. “Yeah. You might be right, actually.”

His hand was still on my shoulder, touch still light like he hadn’t quite decided what to do with himself in this whole time we’d been talking. I kinda liked that. I didn’t know what to do with myself either. I gave the back of his hand a gentle pat. “You should grow out your hair.”

His hand slipped away as he shifted beside me. I caught the bright edge of his smile in my peripheral vision. "Yeah? You think?"

I nodded. “And send me pictures. That’s what I like about plants—watching them grow. Hair’s a little bit like that.”

“Ah. So not looking at trees, then?” he asked. I was looking up at the tree canopying us (because actually I did like looking at trees), but I could hear the smile in his voice, edged out by a sigh. “Fuck.”

“You’re still upset about that?”

“Well, yeah. Kind of. I wanted to take you somewhere fun while you were here, but it didn’t really work out.”

“It’s not you, or this place, it’s just… me,” I explained. “My vibes are extremely off. Flat affect, lack of social-emotional reciprocity. Things are never going to feel right when I’m involved.”

“This does,” he said. When I glanced his way, he continued. “It’s been a while since I’ve really talked to anyone like this. It’s nice.”

I made a sound in the back of my throat—quiet, thoughtful. Because he was right. Maybe oversharing about my dead mum wasn’t the most normal thing I could have done, but I’d reached out and I hadn’t come away feeling disappointed in what I got back. Though I didn’t really know how he’d benefited from the whole exchange. I’d just piled a bunch of heavy emotional labour on him out of nowhere. He should have been pissed.

“You’re weird,” I declared. “And I’m hungry. Do you want to get lunch now?”

He laughed. “Yeah, okay.”