Who We Are (The Seafare Chronicles 2)

It’s probably something I’ll never know.

THE holidays came, as they do every year, but even with all the uncertainty hanging above our heads (though it did seem to be getting better day by day), it was a brighter time than it had been in years past. Thanksgiving was an unmitigated disaster, as we tried to have it at our house for the first time, which led to a suspicious accident involving the turkey that the Kid said he had nothing to do with, nor could I prove that he did. I’d prepared him an impressive spicy roasted edamame casserole which he raved about when I had him test it to make sure it wasn’t too much for him.

That led to two minutes of peace and quiet before he launched again into how barbaric the pilgrims were in taking the lands from the Native Americans, how now we celebrate that horrific tragedy by shoving bread up turkey asses and then taking it back out again and putting it in our mouths.

He contemplated quite loudly on whether or not there would ever be a turkey revolt, and that he believed that one day there could be, and wouldn’t we all be sorry when we had bread shoved up our asses and we were put in the oven until our juices ran down our sides and our skin swelled up nice and brown. I told him that was a horrible thing to say. He told me that I would probably enjoy said treatment by turkeys because I like stuff like that now. I asked him quietly to elaborate what he could possibly mean. He told me that while researching gay history, he was able to discover that the smaller man in a gay relationship is normally the bottom, and even though he didn’t quite get the subtle intricacies that the position held, he was quite sure that I fit the bill to a T. I asked him politely to stop researching gay history because I was afraid it was going to warp his fragile little mind. He told me it was already too late, and didn’t I know that my name, Bear, was wrong because that implied that I was a big, hairy man in the gay community? And that Otter was too incorrectly named, because apparently an “otter” is a small gay man with body hair. He mused on the fact that it must be fun to be gay because you get to change your names, apparently quite often, whether you’re a drag queen or a hairy individual. He came to the conclusion that it must be even more wonderful to be a hairy drag queen and said he was going to keep it on his short list of prospective career possibilities, along with astronaut, physicist, and furniture store salesman.

Sometimes, it’s easier not to ask.

Other times….

“Furniture store salesman?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Why do you want to do that?”

“I like couches,” he said. “Duh.”

“You’re very odd, Kid.”

He grinned. “Learned from the best, Papa Bear.”

I made sure I added a couch to my mental Christmas list for him.

So, somehow, the turkey caught fire, and by the time I pulled it out, it was black and smelled like death, and the Kid sauntered into the kitchen, whistling brightly before stopping and staring at me and Otter trying to salvage anything we could that didn’t look like it was suffering from fourth-degree burns.

“Oh gosh!” he said a little too loudly. “Whatever happened here?”

“The turkey burned,” I said, frowning at him. “Where have you been?”

“In my room,” he said, smiling widely. “Just… hanging out, you know?

Doing… stuff. And things.”

“I guess we’ll just have to eat the edamame,” Otter sighed, dumping the remains of the turkey in the garbage. “The best part of Thanksgiving is having leftovers. I’m the saddest person in the world right now.”

“We’ll have plenty of edamame,” the Kid promised him. “I’m sure you can put it on a sandwich if you’re so inclined. Wow, wait till I tell everyone on the PETA message boards that we’re having our very first true vegetarian Thanksgiving. Huzzahs all around!”

“You did it, didn’t you?” I accused him.

He looked moderately offended, his hand coming up to his throat. “How dare you? I would never do anything like turn up the heat on the oven just to burn the turkey so we could eat whatever I wanted to. That’s a little extreme, Papa Bear. Give me a little more credit.”

Have you ever had mashed potatoes and gravy and edamame?

Don’t. It’s way gross.

Christmas approached, and Otter and I made the decision that we’d do the family thing on Christmas Eve and start our own tradition of having it just be us three on Christmas Day. We went over to his parents’ house, where the Kid was lavished with gifts upon gifts of stuff he didn’t really need but couldn’t live without. Mrs. Paquinn somehow, someway, had ironed a print of Anderson Cooper’s face onto a backpack, and the look on the Kid’s face when he saw it was one of such extreme ecstasy, I worried he’d literally just shit himself in the middle of the Thompsons’ living room.

Mrs. Paquinn looked pleased with herself as she smiled at him, telling him that she’d also written to Mr. Cooper and asked for his autograph, and when it came in, she’d have it blown up into a print to iron on to the backpack as well. You would have thought that Mrs. Paquinn had gifted him PETA itself with the way he ran around the house screaming.

“Is there even a point in giving him my present?” Creed grumbled, looking down at a badly wrapped present that was obviously a football.

“Oh, I’m sure there is,” Mrs. Paquinn said. “But for the life of me, I can’t think of what it would be. You just got Paquinned.”

“Paquinned?” Creed said in surprise. “You can’t just make up words like that with your own name! That’s not fair!”

“You’re just jealous,” she said with a smile. “If you try to say someone got Thompsoned, it sounds like they just were engaged in an unfortunate sex act with an elephant.”

Creed just scowled, knowing he’d lost.

I watched him and Anna closely, trying to discern without being too obvious where they were at in their relationship. They seemed more aloof than Anna and I had ever been, and I wondered if they were making a conscious effort to avoid touching each other in front of the rest of us. But then I walked into the kitchen and interrupted them making out, and I blushed furiously and turned and walked out, hearing Creed call after me.