Out of Position (25 page)

“Even video soccer?”

“Even table soccer.”

He nudges me. “I play table soccer. Put that in too.”

“You spin the guys.”

“That’s how you play!”

I snort, typing it in. “That’s how
you
play.”

“Just ’cause you can’t beat me…”

“Come on down to Smokey’s and play pool with me sometime.”

He shakes his head. “Oh, wait, though. If you teach me to play pool, I could list that too. That’s good, right? The more things, the better?”

“There are limits.” I search for more tags. “I’m not sure whether playing pool is a good thing or not.”

“Good paw-eye coordination?”

We go on like that for over an hour. By the end of it I realize that even though we’ve barely said anything, we’ve said enough. I’m feeling good enough to go out to dinner with him, good enough to stay in and watch a movie, good enough to sleep in his bed for the first time and wake up at his place for the first morning. For some reason, that both bothers me and relieves me. There’s a nagging edge to it, that I’m now depending on him
(because I couldn’t finish college),
but the intimacy of being here is enough to override that. I suppose I could thank Brian for helping me relax enough to get my head on straight, but given the context, I doubt he’d appreciate the credit.

We go out to breakfast, talking more about what he can do to appear attractive to teams. It’s a good talk, as long as I shut down the part of my brain that asks what’s going to happen to our relationship when he gets drafted, immersed in the hyper-masculine homophobic world of pro sports. That’s months away; in the present, he’s here with me.

Until he goes to class. Then I go back to the computer lab and do some more research for the Dragons. Dev offered me the use of his laptop, but using his machine to do team work feels like a conflict of interest to me. Anyway, I kind of like the computer lab, sitting amidst the other students. Eventually, they’ll pull my computer access and I’ll have to do it all from my home laptop, but for now I like being here, feeling as though I’m part of them and yet apart from them. My deadlines are at the same time more flexible and more important than theirs. I get my work done when it gets done, not when a professor tells me it’s due (though the draft is there at the end of it); if I don’t complete it, though, I get more than just a bad grade. The back of my mind is pretty free while I’m doing this routine scanning, so I have a lot of time to think about this and decide that maybe it isn’t all that bad. The question of what it says about me, what it means, is not going to be solved in a day, and that’s a good thing.

By the time I get back to my place, I’m feeling more at peace than I have since I had the talk with Jason. This is my course, this is my life, and Dev is right. I need to focus on what I’m doing, not what I haven’t done or can’t do. Stepping back into my apartment, with the books on my shelves and the draft of an essay I’d printed out still on my desk, I feel a twinge of the depression return, but I quell it easily. After all, I need to go to work. I try to take a page from Dev’s book and just focus on being me, not worrying about all the existential and practical implications of what it means to be me, hyper-aware of each little part that makes up the composite.

Now, if Dev could only do something about my parents.

They arrive two days after I get an ego-boosting pat on the back from Morty, at a dinner out for the whole team. With the draft three weeks away, things have shifted into overdrive, and my insecurities about quitting school have not so much been resolved as shelved. I come into the office for full days now, three times staying the night, so the positives of not having classes are blindingly apparent. The negatives of the whole thing are boiled down to one: less time with Dev. Since my first visit to his apartment, I’ve spent the night once more and he’s spent the night at my place twice, about a quarter of our previous three-times-a-week average. He’s keeping busy as well, not just with his classes but with physical workouts, with maintaining his online presence, and with calls from agents.

There aren’t many. The ones he lets me hear on his answering machine sound desperate, like Morty without a steady job. Dev narrows his choices down to two, asking my help in choosing between them. I’m not a lot of help; when I call them as “a concerned friend,” they assume I’m a relative of some sort and they ooze unctuous charm without giving any information at all. What we do get out of them is the names of some of their other clients, though they won’t give contact information. By luck, one of them happens to be on the Dragons, a third-string defensive lineman. I’m able to wheedle his cell number from Morty to give to Dev. I’m not around when Dev makes the call, but by the time of the pre-draft dinner out, Dev has settled on that agent to represent him, a weasel named Hal Ogleby.

But that’s receded pretty far from my mind on the day after the dinner, when mostly I’m feeling headachey and wobbly, and it’s not on my mind at all when Dev takes me to dinner that night at Goose’s. I’m snappish and nervous, but to his credit he realizes it’s not at him. After a couple minutes, so do I, so I start snapping about my parents, trying to be funny and mostly failing. Example: “Maybe if I tell them I’m a failure right when they get here, it’ll cut out all that awkward ‘conversation’ stuff they’re going to want to do.” Or: “I’m sure they’ll still love me even if I don’t graduate. It’ll just be the kind of love like you have for someone who’s crushed every hope and dream you ever had for them.” To which Dev says, “Like rooting for the Dragons,” and I have to laugh and tell him he isn’t allowed to be funnier than me in front of my parents.

“They think you’re funny?” he asks.

“Don’t you?”

“Well, sure.” He grins into his drink and lowers his voice. “But I don’t think you joke with them like you joke with me.”

“I don’t.” I shove a piece of chicken meatloaf around my plate. “And you’re right, they probably don’t.”

“So I’m going to get to meet them? You decided?”

I nod. “Course. There wasn’t ever a question. I just hope you still want to be with me after you see where I came from. And when you see where they want to eat. I guarantee it’ll be P.J.’s.”

“They can’t be that bad,” he says. “They raised you.”

“Most of what I am I became in college,” I say. “You might not believe this, but I was kind of a prick in high school.”

“You’re still kind of a prick,” he says. I flick my ears at him, not wanting to rise to the bait. He sees it and says, “It’s okay, though. You’re my prick.”

“I thought I was just a place to put yours,” I say.

That makes him laugh. “See,” he says, “you should just be funny like that with your parents.”

I glare across the table, but can’t keep from cracking a smile. “Let’s get them to meet you first and work our way up to the smutty jokes.”

He shrugs. I know he’s thinking about telling his family, and how and when and where and how in the hell he’s going to do it. His mom would just be in complete denial, but he has no idea how his father would react. His father’s always been this paragon of masculinity — played football in high school, works in a garage, subscribes to porno magazines — and Dev spent a lot of his childhood trying to live up to him. His family had this whole weird attitude about football, that it was a must-have for high school, but that he shouldn’t be wasting his time on it in college. I don’t think his father went to college, because he sees it as a place where Dev should be getting skills so he can “do better than his old man.” He knows about college football, of course, and Dev’s last stunning year seems to have quieted that talk, but before that he seemed to think of college football as something you watched on Saturdays, not something his kid participated in. Now he’s got the same roadblock with the UFL, where he just can’t believe they’d pick Dev, can’t place his kid in that same bracket with Russell and Kinnic (names he knows). But none of that is because he doesn’t think of Dev as all male. ‘All male,’ in his mind, being basically someone who likes cars, sports, and females of his own species, in any order.

At least my parents are okay with me being gay. At least I have that much. They still don’t want to meet Dev, but they’re going to.

Not right away, of course. I don’t meet them at the airport, because they’re going to rent a car and they said they’ll come by my apartment and pick me up. They call from the airport, and again from the rental car counter, and this time I answer my cell phone, keeping the conversation bland: “Doing fine,” and “See you soon.” From the time I woke up and realized they were already in the air, I’ve been flagellating myself for letting things get to this point. I should’ve just told them, let them cancel the plane ticket and be mad at me far away, where I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Now I have to figure out how to tell them in person, watching both their reactions as I do.

Of course, we have dinner at P.J. McGovern’s, the only restaurant near campus that they approve of. The one time I talked them into Goose’s, they said it was “interesting,” and later my father told me Mother’d had diarrhea (“your mother didn’t enjoy the food there, during or after the meal”). I put off conversation by pretending to be buried in the menu, but once I’ve ordered the roast beef sandwich and the drinks have arrived, I can’t really postpone things any longer.

“We got the schedule,” my mother says. She’s dressed formally, in a yellow satin dress with fancy gold trim. My first thought when I see it is that I bet I’d look good in it. “We’re so excited. I saw they have a place for parents to stand during the march. You’ll wave to us, won’t you?”

“No,” I say.

“We know how difficult this last semester’s been for you,” my father says. He’s wearing a nice business casual shirt and slacks, no tie. “You’ll see, someday, that finishing your coursework was the best thing for you to do.”

“We’re very proud of you,” Mother says softly.

I look from one to the other. “Been practicing your palliatives?”

I say. They exchange glances. “Look,” Father says, after a breath, “I know we were a little harsh. It’s because we love you.”

“Tough love,” I say.

“Yes,” Mother says brightly. She lifts the menu from the table. “We can argue about it later. Today’s a happy day. Let’s just enjoy it.” Her ears are up, pearl earrings gleaming in the restaurant’s lights. This is one of those places with the travel theme, the fake artifacts not plastered all over like at the T.G.I. Friday’s, but tastefully arranged for effect. The menu has fake postcards on the front, and the entrees have names like “Yorkshire Beef Sandwich” and “Croque Monsieur,” for that world-traveler feel without the kitschiness of a Friday’s or an Adventure Burger.

“Actually,” I say, throwing all my prepared remarks out, “it’s not a happy day.”

Their ears go up immediately, the smiles gone as though mailed to Yorkshire. My father catches on first. “You’d better not mean what I think you mean.”

“I think I do,” I say, pressed back against the wooden back of my chair. My tail, fed through the tail-space, is curled tightly up under the seat. “But it depends on what you think I mean.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Wiley,” my father says, his voice an ominous growl. “Are you graduating today?”

My wit dries up. My sheath is trying to crawl up into my abdomen. The wood grain of the table is intensely fascinating. Slowly, I shake my head from side to side.

I hear my mother’s inhaled squeak. I don’t hear any reaction from my father. We sit there in the longest silence I’ve ever had to endure, until my mother breaks it, anguished, “We flew all the way here! Why didn’t you tell us?”

“How could I?” Now I look up at them, from one to the other. “After that phone call… and then you just bought the plane tickets without asking.”

My father’s paw is clenched into a fist. There’s a small streak of grey down his thumb, startling against the black. I don’t remember seeing it there before. I wonder if he’s going to hit me. “I thought, after that talk, that we were clear.”

“You were clear. You assumed…”

“We assumed you’d do the sensible thing.” His voice, slightly raised, makes heads turn. He shakes off my mother’s look. “I guess we overestimated you.”

“Well, I guess so,” I say sullenly.

“Maybe you can help us understand what the hell is going through your head.” He lowers his voice a little, enough to mollify my mother.

“It just doesn’t make sense, Wiley,” she says. “You pass up the chance at a good education.”

“I’ve gotten a good education. The only thing I didn’t get is a piece of paper telling me that I got a good education.”

“You think that’s just as good?” My father leans forward. “Without that piece of paper, you might as well have gotten nothing. And that’s what we’re paying for.”

“You made that perfectly clear,” I say. “I’ll pay back my loans.”

“How are you going to do that without a degree?” my father demands. “By working for free for a football team?”

“For your information, they’re going to recommend me for a job,” I throw back at him.

“Really,” he says archly. “What kind of job?”

The sarcasm shuts my muzzle more effectively than threats could. “What’s the difference?” I say to my root beer, low.

“We’re interested, Wiley, really.” But Mother’s voice is disappointed, dulled.

“Yes, tell us your grand scheme for paying back your loans.”

Once my boyfriend is drafted,
I want to say,
then he’ll give me the money. He’ll take care of me.
But I can’t make myself say the words. “I’m going to do it, okay? Just send me the bill, or the paperwork, or whatever.”

I can hear them fidgeting around the table. I’m sure they can hear my claws scratching at its underside. Finally, my father lets out a long sigh. “So why did you let us fly all the way here? You couldn’t tell us over the phone?”

The thought of Dev is still in my head, and so I grasp at it. “I want you to meet my boyfriend.” I say the word loudly, deliberately. The skunk at the next table turns slightly, her ears perked. The coyote who’s bringing our food pauses with the plates halfway to the table, then puts on his professional smile and sets them down. We fidget silently and shake our heads when he asks if we need anything else… Mother’s paws fiddle with the silverware. She doesn’t look at either of us.