For lunch, I bought zucchini fritters. I’d gotten lucky with my restrictive eating in that it was easy for me to eat healthy and if you took me out to dinner, I could order off the adult menu. But below the surface, it was… complicated. I wasn’t a strict vegetarian, but I wouldn’t eat most meat due to texture issues, and my stomach was too sensitive to handle too much junk. Mostly it was fine, but eating meals at other people’s houses was an ongoing problem. Personally I would have rather just not done that, but my grandparents did like to see me occasionally, so it couldn’t be completely avoided.

Rue devoured a burger and washed it down with a Sprite. We didn’t talk while we ate, but we sat so close together that we brushed up against one another whenever we moved. That had been my doing, but Rue hadn’t moved away. 

He seemed more settled now, less pensive. At least as far as I could tell.

“Home?” he suggested when we were done eating.

“Gift shop?” I countered.

“Damn, you are rich,” he murmured, but he led the way up the path towards the gift shop.

I went straight to the plush toys. Even though Rue hadn’t seemed to hate me talking about my mum—probably, maybe, I don’t know, people are complicated—I wanted to show him that I appreciated it. Just saying thank you might have been the right way to go about that, but those particular words wouldn’t come out of my throat just then. So… I was going to buy him a gift.

I browsed the plush toys, examining them one at a time. Which animal had been Rue’s favourite? I hadn’t really noticed. I’d like the dingos. They’d looked so much like dogs, but they’d completely ignored us. No territorial barking, no bouncing along the fence for attention.

And the emu, with its big beady eyes and its dinosaur feet. And the little albino kangaroo on the far side of its enclosure, sleeping in the shade. But which ones had Rue liked?

I turned to him. “Which was your favourite animal?”

“Uh… I dunno,” Rue said, lightly tossing the tiger plush he was holding up and down, the beans shaking in its butt. “Some of the kangaroos were awake?”

I frowned at the plush in his hands. “They don’t even have tigers here.”

“They can’t afford to limit themselves to only animals they actually have.” He threw the tiger up in the air and caught it again. He seemed to enjoy the sound the beans made. “Floppy tiger is just obviously the cutest plush.”

“Hm,” I said as I took the tiger from him and turned it in my hands. It had a satisfying weight to it. Maybe he hadn’t liked the zoo animals, but there were pictures of cats on his phone. Perhaps he just liked felines. “Okay.”

It cost more than it should’ve for a simple plush, but that was fine. My savings only ever seemed to go up because my dad kept reimbursing me for my purchases. I threw out the receipt as soon as we left the shop even though I knew there was no reason to think my dad would try to pay for something that had nothing to do with him, our home, or the nursery.

“Okay, home now,” I said, holding the tiger close against my chest.

I’d decided not to give it to him yet. I was going to give him an opportunity to make fun of me for buying it, and if he didn’t, he could have it. If he did make fun of me, I’d just keep it for myself and never talk to him again. Simple.

He didn’t make fun of me while we waited for the bus, but he did keep looking at the tiger. Maybe because he thought it was weird. Maybe because he wanted it. There was no way of knowing.

When we got on the bus, I set the tiger across our laps, tail end on Rue’s and head on mine, looking out the window. Rue’s fingers tangled with its tail. He didn’t make fun of it.

I wanted to give it to him, but now it felt awkward. Because I’d have to communicate that I was giving it to him somehow and the speech centre of my brain had already declared that it’d have no part in this. 

It wasn’t until he was rising from his seat to get off at his stop, hand lifting to wave goodbye, that panic set in deep enough to drive me to action. I shoved the tiger forcefully against his chest.

“Huh?” he said, his hand lifting to catch the tiger as I let go. He looked down at it. “You want me to…?”

I nodded.

Rue hesitated, holding the tiger up. “To have it? For me?”

“A gift for you,” my vocal chords finally helpfully allowed me to say.

He looked so beautiful when he smiled. Not like a serial killer or a domestic abuser at all. It was like his big, dark eyes were smiling too. 

He hugged the tiger against his chest. “I’ll text you, okay?”

I nodded.

He smiled.

The bus started moving again and he swore, dashing to the front to stop the driver. He shot me one last grin as he stepped off.

Guess he really liked that tiger.

A few minutes later, I got off at my stop. My head was very full of thoughts as I walked the couple of streets back to the house, replaying the events of the day on rapidfire as I did my best to extract all the subtleties and subtext I’d surely missed now hidden somewhere in the mess of data my brain was regurgitating. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice things—the problem was that I noticed everything, all at once. Very confusing, very overwhelming. Sometimes I had to disengage just to manage the flow.

Unfortunately, when I got back I saw our car in the driveway, so I’d need to put a pause on my mental processing 

“There’s my beautiful son,” my dad called out as I opened the front door, just a little too loud for my sensitive ears. He was sitting on the sofa with Wendy, cardboard trays of Mexican food set out on the coffee table in front of them. “I got you a burrito.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t all that hungry since I just had lunch, but I went over to investigate the food anyway.

“What have you been up to today?” my dad asked. He thought he was slick, like maybe if he asked in just the right casual tone I’d buy into the fiction he sometimes liked to play at where I was a regular teenager who did regular teenager things.

I took a small test bite of my burrito as I stood across from them on the opposite side of the coffee table. Rice, beans, salad. Good. “Zoo.”

“Did you go with your friend?” Wendy asked.

“‘Friend,’” my dad echoed, clearly skeptical.

“Yeah, you were kind of right about that,” I said as I took another nibble of burrito. “He’s definitely into me.”

Which wasn’t even flattering myself, honestly. At a certain point I’d realised he was either a heterosexual man who wanted to be my friend or he was just gay and thought I was attractive. Considering my personality, someone liking me for my looks had seemed way more likely. Plus he’d gone redder than I’d known was humanly possible when I’d asked if we were on a date, and even I wasn’t oblivious enough to miss that.

“Is that good?” my dad asked. Salsa dripped off a corn chip he’d been holding this whole time and still hadn’t eaten. “How’d it go?”

I shrugged. We’d looked at animals, looked at plants, had lunch. Standard zoo stuff. Not much to report.

“Was he a gentleman?”

“If that’s a euphemism for something, you’re going to have to be more direct,” I asked around another bite of burrito.

“Just, you know,” my dad said. “He’s not pushing you too fast or anything like that?”

I snorted. Technically, we hadn’t even really acknowledged our mutual interest. It was just strongly implied at this point.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” my dad said. “He seemed like a sweet kid, but if there is anything you need to talk about, I’m here, okay?”

I could be a bit of a teenager in the face of my dad’s overpowering love, but I’d just got back from hanging out with Rue who I learnt was abandoned at birth by his mother and had a father who slapped him around, which really put the slightly imperfect relationship dynamics between me and my dad into perspective. Sometimes it all felt like such a mess, but really, relatively speaking, things were fine.

But the best I could offer him was not rolling my eyes, because if I encouraged him too much he might start trying to teach me about safe sex again. I took a big bite of burrito so that my mouth would be too full to respond, nodded, and went to put the rest of it in the fridge.

And the fridge was much closer to my room, and then I was gone before my dad could express any more parental concern and/or abandon his nachos in favour of finding the closest cylindrical object to try to demonstrate how to put a condom on. I knew he loved me and I appreciated that he loved me, but we were always a little out of step, his feelings a little too intense for an emotional sponge like me and his efforts at care misaligned with what I actually needed. An incredible father by any reasonable standards, but we still struggled.

But that was just life, I guess. People. Relationships. None of that was ever going to come easy to me, so mostly I hadn’t bothered, but Rue was making me start wondering if maybe sometimes having someone really was worth all the struggle and conflict.

Not everyone, not all the time, but someone, sometimes.

Maybe.

At least for a few days.