Flynn

I was wired and tired and tangled up in all kinds of thoughts and feelings I didn’t want to be having. It felt kinda dumb that I’d walked away from seeing what I saw and spent the next little while of my life sleeping on the floor of the nursery and I’d been pretty much fine, but now that things actually were okay it felt like my emotions were a ghost that wouldn’t stop haunting me.

Having nothing just wasn’t actually that hard, I guess. Or not having much wasn’t, anyway. I’ll admit, being able to stay at the nursery when I was between places had helped a ton. That was way better than really not having anything, better than being out on the streets or hopping through shelters.

But still, having things was what really kept you awake at night. Knowing you could lose them. That I probably would, because I had a way of messing things up, and even when I didn’t do anything wrong, life just seemed to go like that. The one thing life had offered me that’d never disappeared out from under me was Dean. As fucked up as that relationship had been, it’d been hard to give up the life I knew for another round of rolling the dice.

They say that it’s better to have loved and lost, but I didn’t think that was true. The human mind took loss a lot harder than just not having. All of a sudden, I felt like I had so much to lose. A house—no, a proper home, two housemates who were insanely kind and patient, and I was even starting to wonder if maybe Ethan wasn’t the fair weather friend I’d given him credit for. If maybe he didn’t just think of me as someone who was barely tolerable sometimes.

Cam and Justin had been so nice, and I’d wanted to be able to just throw on a smile and be a simple airhead who took everything they said at face value, who just naively believed all of that shit, but I couldn’t. I knew life wasn’t really that easy. I knew people didn’t really forgive over and over again with no limit. Pretending they did would only mean that the limit of their patience would sneak up on you. That it would come all at once, without warning, when that final straw landed.

And even then they wouldn’t really admit it. That’d been my experience. Foster parents who were sweet right up until the day they decided you weren’t a ‘good fit’ for their family. Then you’d go back to the kid pound to get given to another set of foster parents.

I’d never even been bad, really. Not in the way some of the other kids were. I didn’t shout or punch holes in the walls. I was just too much, or not enough, and I didn’t know how to not be that or if I’d even still be myself if I wasn’t. The funny thing was that my self esteem was in the trash, but I didn’t hate myself. I wished I was a little bit more in control of my own self, but I had this thing, this spark that most people didn’t have, and maybe that wasn’t much but it was what I had to lose. 

Dean had taken that from me in bits and pieces, had stomped it down until it got real quiet, but it’d still been there the day I’d stepped out of his house for the last time. It’d been the thing that’d kept me going, that’d helped me beat the statistics and make the first time I tried to leave the only one I needed. So I didn’t hate myself, because I’d saved myself, and I’d tell myself I was a hero even if nobody else ever did.

It was a long night of thoughts like those, circling and circling and never really landing on anything that mattered. Unfortunately you couldn’t just decide to stop thinking your dumb little thoughts at two in the morning. It never worked.

But I was pretty okay at it at six in the morning, once I was up and moving, a little high off of not enough sleep. I used the last of my meal replacement shakes, so I’d have to figure out something new for breakfasts. Something cheaper. In the movie Oliver, they’d fed the orphan boys gruel, so I figured that must be cheap. I didn’t know what that was, but a quick search told me it was basically porridge, which didn’t seem that bad. I’d expected way worse for all the fuss and singing there’d been about it in the movie.

I didn’t have work today, so I took a bus into the city, got off at a random stop, and walked. I ended up at South Bank, walked along the river, stripped down to my shorts and went for a swim in the lagoon pool, then walked around some more to dry off.

I skipped lunch, because I hadn’t seen any musicals with budget-friendly suggestions for that, but I dropped into a supermarket and picked up some oats for my gruel plus rice and beans because I remembered Rue saying that was what he’d eaten when he was short on cash. With my shopping in hand, I took the bus home.

Home. That was something I had now. It wouldn’t be forever because nothing was, and that was okay. It had to be, because if it wasn’t, how could you ever be happy? Good things weren’t worth anything at all if all you did was sit around and worry about them one day being gone.

I was just making my way down the front path when Cam pulled in. I followed him into the garage.

“Ah, perfect,” he said as he got out of the car. “Would you help me carry the groceries in?”

“Yeah, no probs,” I said.

Cam opened the boot and reached for a bag. I grabbed the handles from his fingers. When he tried to pick up another one, I took it as well. He stepped back and laughed, holding his hands up in surrender. “Okay, fine. You do it.”

“You gotta let me have this, man. Being a pack mule’s about all I’m good for.”

“That’s not true.”

“Eh,” I said, unconvinced, but I didn’t challenge him to come up with a list. Sometimes kind people just said shit because it was the nice thing to say. There wasn’t much underneath it if you started digging.

“You’re lovely,” Cam insisted, which was another nice thing that didn’t really mean a whole lot.

But nobody had ever called me that before, and I liked the word, so I flashed him a grin. “Thanks!”

I tried to help Cam put the groceries away, but I didn’t know where a single thing went, so mostly I just got in the way. When we were done, I asked, “Mind if I use the kitchen?”

Cam stopped and just looked at me, that tight little frown on his face, and I knew I’d done something wrong. “Flynn, you live here. You can use the kitchen, you can sit on the furniture, you can have all the ice water from the fridge you want. You can even make your own profiles on our streaming services and watch something on the TV. That’s what sharing a house means.”

Was I going to be paying my share for those streaming services? Fuck knows. I’d give them whatever they asked for when the bills came due and hope I’d scrimped enough to make it work.

“Right, thanks, cool,” I said as I pulled out my phone to send a text in the group chat. I’d shared my dinner plans on the bus ride home and Ethan had agreed to a video call to walk me through the process of making the beans and rice. He was deeply invested in me not dying of malnutrition for some reason.

The call connected to show Ethan sitting on a bed next to—of course—Rue. I hadn’t expected him to do this unchaperoned. Not that I was trying to get him away from his boyfriend or anything weird like that, and I liked that Rue was here too because I liked Rue, but sometimes it did sting a little that Ethan needed that buffer between me and him.

But that was the price of being friends with someone like Ethan. Man fled at the sight of customers. There was a kind of mythology building up around him at the nursery because a lot of people liked the stall he’d put together at the back of the shop, but none of them had ever met the mastermind behind the creations he stocked it with. So it was an honour just to know him, really, when all just about anyone else got were glimpses like he was some kind of cryptid.

“Welcome to my kitchen!” I said cheerfully, turning my phone to pan the camera around the room. “See anything that we can cook beans and rice with?”

“Microwave,” Ethan said. “Saucepan. But they have an Instant Pot, so we’ll use that.”

“Great!” I said, stomping down on an impulse to go ask Cam if that was okay. He’d just give me another one of those sad looks. “How do we do this?”

It was actually pretty simple, in the end. You just washed the rice, then you put it in the pot with the beans and some water and set the timer. Though apparently I’d bought the wrong kind of beans and the wrong kind of rice, and I should have bought an onion and broth and all sorts of shit which kinda defeated the purpose of this whole thing being super cheap and easy. But Rue said all he’d ever done was just the beans and the rice, and he hadn’t bought the kinds Ethan said were best either, and he’d managed, so maybe Ethan was just being a bit of a fusspot. He was good at that.

We ended the call and I went to hang out in my room while it cooked. I’d completely forgotten about it by the time my phone rang again. The Instant Pot started beeping as I took Ethan and Rue back down the hall and past the living room, flashing them a confusing, quick tour of my surroundings as we went.

Ethan told me how to vent the steam from the Instant Pot and then repeated “don’t put your hand in the steam” over and over as I stood and waited while it hissed out. I didn’t put my hand in the steam, but I made no promises about what I might do when no one was watching.

I scooped my food into a bowl, set my phone up on the counter, and sat down so that I was in frame. I ate a mouthful, chewed thoughtfully, and said, “Yuck.”

Rue laughed.

It didn’t taste of much, and what it did taste of, I didn’t love. And the texture wasn’t doing it any favours. It stuck in my mouth when I chewed.

“Did you add salt?” Ethan asked. “You should at least add salt.”

“It’s not my salt. My strategy is that if people offer me things, I say yes, but I don’t ask them for anything. Then I can’t owe them anything, because hey, they offered.”

“But it’s just salt,” Rue said.

“Nah, their shit’s pink,” I said. “Nothing in this house is just anything. If I have to pay to replace something, either because I broke it or I used it all up, it’ll be a problem.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t live there,” Ethan said. “It’s given you anxiety. Maybe you can only live in terrible places.”

“You might be onto something there,” I said with a grin that morphed into a grimace as I took another bite of food.

I was on my third mouthful when Cam entered the room. I saw him open his mouth to say something, but he paused and hesitated when he noticed my phone. “Oh, sorry. I was going to get a start on dinner. It can wait if I’m interrupting.”

“Nah, go ahead,” I told him, waving him in. “I’m just giving my friends a free mukbang performance and waiting to see how long it takes them to hang up.”

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you prefer to cook for yourself, or would you rather share meals?”

“Oh, nah, I can do my own stuff,” I said. I definitely couldn’t afford to split the cost of groceries with them, and if they ate anything I cooked, they’d kick me out on the spot.

“Hey, you, guy,” Ethan said.

Cam stepped into the frame of the video and pointed to himself. “Me?” Ethan nodded, and Cam stepped forward to lean over my shoulder. “Hey, Ethan. How’re you doing?”

The look on Ethan’s face almost made me choke on my mouthful of beans and rice. Sometimes Ethan did the autistic flat affect thing to an extreme, zero emotion even when emotion was super called for, and other times, like this, he’d look at you like you just said the most vile shit to him because you dared to try to make small talk.

“Fine,” Ethan decided on eventually before swiftly moving on to what he’d actually wanted to say: “Can Flynn use your salt?”

Ah, there was that look again. Sadness and pity and just a hint of frustration, because I guess in his mind he was saying the same thing over and over and I just wasn’t listening. But I was listening, I just didn’t want to risk racking up any more debt on a bill I wasn’t sure I could pay.

“Oh—yes, of course,” Cam said. “Help yourself to any seasonings, condiments. Really, as long as you don’t use up something I’m counting on to make dinner, it’s fine.”

That was a dangerous kind of generosity. The kind that started with offering you the world only to come to an end at ‘obviously I didn’t mean—’ Everyone had boundaries. I liked it better when they voiced them. 

Ethan hated doing that. He saw it as confrontation, and something about that scared the shit out of him even though he’d never been hit or probably even really shouted at. But he’d figured it out for me, using Rue or a prod from a bamboo garden stake to get across the message he couldn’t put into words.

I liked that a whole lot better than this. It kinda felt like maybe I’d stumbled into a whole new etiquette system. Like some kinda crap rich people had, where there’s a whole dance and you’re supposed to say no, I couldn’t possibly, not get up and grab the salt and liberally grind some onto your shit food like I was doing.

But Cam didn’t look mad about it, and maybe that was because, like Justin’d said, I made it charming. The entertainment of watching me blunder around was worth the price of a sprinkle of salt.

Well, no. Probably he actually didn’t care about the salt. But if I really did start helping myself to everything in their fridge, eventually I’d find his breaking point. It was always in there somewhere, sometimes where you least expected.

I took another mouthful of beans and considered as I chewed. “Better,” I decided. “Still bad.”

“How about some other seasonings?” Cam suggested.

“I wouldn’t know what to add.”

“May I?” Cam asked, gesturing to my bowl.

I passed it to him. “Go ahead.”

Cam dug through the larder and produced little shaker bottles of this and that, which he sprinkled onto the remaining food. He stirred, got a clean spoon from the drawer to have a taste, and then added a little more of something before finally handing it back.

I scooped a spoonful into my mouth and discovered it actually had flavour now, like a food should. I jabbed my spoon at it and said around a mouth still full of food, “Good.”

Okay, ‘good’ might have been a stretch. It was no sausage roll. But I’d made Cam smile, and it was good enough that I no longer felt like I was choking down every mouthful, so I wasn’t going to complain.

Ethan and Rue stayed on the call while I finished my food, and Cam puttered around the kitchen making something fancy sounding with chicken in it that I immediately forgot the name of the second he told me.

And it was nice. That was all. It was a pretty damn nice way to finish out a day.