Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Hey, are you going to Boston for Thanksgiving?” I asked Charles an hour later as we walked back to the dorm. I had not, in fact, ended up getting soaking wet, since apparently the sprinklers Charles had run through earlier were on a timer. He’d never told me exactly why he needed to take pictures of me in various locations outside an unmarked building, and I hadn’t asked, content that I was serving some greater, mysterious purpose.

“No. Even if I relished the idea of spending time with my family, I can’t countenance a celebration of the violent slaughter and subsequent systematic oppression of Native Americans in the service of a massive land grab, followed by sexual violence, cultural negation, and acts of inhumanity perpetrated under the guise of constructing a national identity. Besides, I don’t even like turkey. The meat cleaves disturbingly. Are you?”

“What? Oh, no. Can’t afford the plane ticket. Besides, Thanksgiving is when my grandparents come over, and they aren’t really down with the whole gay thing.”

That was an understatement. My dad’s father looked at me like I was scum and wouldn’t hug me hello, like maybe I was going to try for some action or something. My dad’s mom mostly just shot me side-eye and didn’t answer me when I talked to her, so I’d stopped trying long ago. On my mom’s side, my grandparents acted like they didn’t know I was gay.

My grandmother would pat my cheek and say how handsome I was. Then she would ask if I had a girlfriend yet. She always managed the question with such sincerity that I had no clue whether she was legit delusional, being passive-aggressive, or possibly just displaying early-warning signs of Alzheimer’s. Except that my grandfather, who was sharp as a tack, did the same thing, making comments about the women we encountered that would’ve made me uncomfortable even if I had found them attractive.

Like, okay, none of it was The Worst—I knew that people had it way worse with being out to their families. The part that stung the most was that my parents never corrected them, reminded them I was gay, or called them on it when they made derogatory comments about queerness in general.

Sometimes my mom would shoot me apologetic or guilty looks when they said these things. Looks that said, It’s so unfortunate that this is a thing that has to happen. Like it never even occurred to her that she could intercede. That maybe she should care more about my feelings than about keeping the peace.

Janie and Eric were better. Eric would roll his eyes at them, and Janie’d sometimes say, “He wouldn’t have a girlfriend, Nana, he’d have a boyfriend.” Of course, she inevitably followed this up with, “if he ever actually spoke to anyone instead of acting like a freak,” under her breath to me. She meant it affectionately, though. I think.

It had been just this kind of family gloominess that I’d managed to escape when Daniel had invited me to have Thanksgiving with him and Rex the year Will was in Holiday. I’d said yes immediately, even though I’d known that my mom would be upset. She had turned out to be surprisingly understanding, though, and at first I’d wondered if maybe I’d underestimated how bad she felt having to watch me navigate the uncomfortable family conversations.

But another part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I’d actually underestimated was how awkward she felt watching it. How much easier it was if I just wasn’t there and she could say, “Oh, Leo’s spending the holiday with friends.” And I’d wondered if that was how things would be from then on: my absence making things easier for everyone.

“Well, it’s fine—the dorms stay open, so it can be just like any other weekend,” Charles said.

It was true, and it’d be good to have some quiet time to get a lot of work done before the last push leading up to finals. Still, maybe it made me pathetic, or a terrible person, given the whole slaughter, oppression, inhumanity issue, which I knew was true. But I was still kind of bummed at the idea of having nowhere to go for Thanksgiving.

I shot a quick text off to Daniel asking him what he was doing for Thanksgiving. The idea of spending it in with him and Rex in Philadelphia seemed perfect. Hey, maybe I could even convince Will to come.

Rex is taking me to a cabin, he wrote back, with one of the suspicious-looking crooked mouth emojis that looked laughably like the expression I’d picture him having to accompany that statement in real life. Good to see he’d mastered the smartphone. In a state park, he texted, this one accompanied by a straight-line mouth emoji, also eerily accurate. My heart sank.

Omigod, you have total emoji face! I wrote back. And, Have fun!