When the World Tips Over, page 21
Miles closed the door, quickly put his hand over his mouth to check his breath. His heart raced. What were the rules anyway? Should he tell him before what he did and didn’t want to do? He wasn’t ready to try certain things. Not with someone he didn’t know. Oh man. What the hell was he doing? And doing it when his brother was in a coma!
Rod and his cloud of aftershave climbed in. His arms were streaked with grease or dirt. Miles wanted to ask where they were going to go but he couldn’t even manage that.
“You’re really hot,” Rod said.
Stop hissing at him! Miles told Sandro.
He smells funny and I don’t think he has your best interests at heart.
Who does?
I do.
Miles petted Sandro and it calmed both boy and dog. Rod reached over, tried to pet Sandro. The dog growled.
“Don’t seem to like me.”
“It takes him a minute.”
Ah, he spoke! Now that his vocal cords were working, he and Rod began discussing heading down Hidden Highway, but when he glanced out the window, he saw a sight: The thirty-foot-tall maniac from Denver with the handlebar mustache on a glittering pink kid’s bike charging across the dirt lot, waving at Miles with one hand.
“What the—”
“What is it?” said Rod.
“Nothing, let’s head out.”
Sandro started to bark. Rod lit up the engine. And … there was loud banging on the bottom of Miles’s door. Miles looked out the window. Colorado guy had ditched the pink bike and was standing below, windshield-wiping his arms and shouting, “Miles! Miles Fall! Miles Fall!” Sandro got up on his hind legs, put his paws on the window ledge.
We’re being rescued! He started to bark loudly.
“Sorry, just a sec,” Miles said to Rod, opening the door. Sandro bolted out. “What the hell? Did something happen to my bro—” Miles said to the giant guy, his cheeks burning.
“Oh, what? No. Everything’s okay I think, as far as I know,” he said – Felix, that was his name. Felix was now opening the door further and stepping up onto the platform. He lifted his sunglasses. Whoa. Those eyes again, now up close. The contrast of the light gray irises and dark inky lashes was startling. Felix gave Rod a death stare.
“Look. Don’t wanna get between anyone,” Rod said. “Don’t want any trouble. This your boyfriend, I’m presuming?”
“Boyfriend? No! I don’t even…” Miles realized he was being hoisted out of the truck by Felix, very much like Felix was his jealous and quite berserk boyfriend. Sandro had his paws up on the platform: Get out while you can, Miles!
Miles said to Felix, “Why are you doing this?” which wasn’t the real question. The real question was why Miles was allowing it, no, actually helping Felix get him out of the truck. “Really sorry, Rod,” Miles said as Felix guided more than manhandled Miles off the platform and onto the road, where Miles flung Felix off more for show than anything else. “Seriously, what the hell?” Miles said to Felix. “Who are you? Why is this any of your business? What’s wrong with you?”
Felix slammed the truck door. His shades were down again. “What’s wrong with me? What’s up with you getting in a truck with a total stranger? He is a stranger, isn’t he?”
Rod revved the engine and pulled out as Miles sputtered, too exasperated to get out the words to express the irony of this, Felix being a total stranger as well! A huge and more unpredictable stranger in the most bizarre getup Miles had ever seen. Not to mention the mustache! “I know he’s a stranger,” Felix scolded. “I saw that awkward greeting. Ever hear of meeting in a public place first? You could get killed. Is this something you do? Like the secret life of the high school football star? Been done. He could’ve been homicidal. He looked homicidal. He could’ve been an ax murderer. He could’ve been a rapist. He could’ve been a kidnapper. He could’ve been a strangler. He could’ve been a … oh damn.” He looked up. His mouth bunched to one side. He twirled his bonkers ’stache. “Damn, damn it, totally tapped out early.”
“A cannibal,” Miles said.
“Oh wow. Good one. Thanks. A cannibal. He could’ve been a cannibal. Or … a slasher.” He looked at Miles, his eyebrow raised expectantly above the mirror of his glasses.
“He could’ve been a serial killer,” Miles offered.
“He could’ve been a chainsaw massacre-er.”
“Vampire.”
“No way. Different list,” Felix said.
“Okay, an escaped convict,” Miles said.
“Nice. Out of the box.” Miles felt a flash of pride. “Hmm.” Felix’s mouth bunched to the side again as he thought. “A gunslinger.”
“A gunslinger?” Miles shook his head. “I’ll allow but barely … I’m out.”
“Me too.” Then Felix snorted as he said, “Um, did I hear you call him Rod? Seriously, tell me that guy’s name wasn’t Rod?” Felix started to laugh. It had a lot of giggle in it for such an enormous person and Miles had to bite his cheek so not to smile as they watched the truck chug slowly down the fire road. What had just happened? It was like the novel he’d been reading got switched mid-sentence.
Felix bent down. “And who’s this?”
Sandro was doing joy-circles at Felix’s feet.
“That’s Sandro.”
And this is the biggest human being I’ve ever encountered. Are you sure he’s in your same species? He’s ginormous, humongous, gigantastic, gigantor, a big old badonka, mongo man!
Sandro’s tail wagged as Felix scratched his ears and Miles took in the glittering pink bicycle with flowered banana seat and white basket with flowers woven in it. “Nice ride,” Miles said.
“Yeah,” Felix replied, standing and nearly brushing a cloud with the top of his head. “I knew it would put the fear of God in Rod the Cannibal when I chose it.” He twirled the mustache, his lips curling upward. Miles noted the wide planes of Felix’s cheeks, one of them dimpling with the grin. Then tried to unnote it. He loved a good cheek dimple on a guy.
As they walked back to the rack from where Felix had “borrowed” the bike, Felix said, “So do you do that a lot? I think you need to develop a better sense of Stranger Danger.”
“You’re a stranger!” Miles blurted finally.
“Yeah,” Felix said dismissively. “But I’m me.”
“In the fifteen minutes since I met you, you’ve stalked me, stolen a bike, and you were about to start a fight with Rod the Cannibal. Plus, you’re like three of me.”
“Yeah, dude, but I’m me,” Felix said again, smiling and dimpling. Despite himself, Miles caught the grin and unbelievably raised him some. It was a little alarming how charming this guy was.
What’s going on, Sandro?
I think you’re making a friend.
I don’t have friends except you.
There was Cassidy.
There was.
Also, Miles, maybe he’s queer like us. The real human McCoy, not an honorary like me.
Straight as they come.
Could be bi?
He’s just city. A hipster or whatever.
Miles didn’t want to go back to the hospital, especially after the dean’s visit, and Felix didn’t seem like he had anywhere to be, so Miles led them down a path to the river, the temperature luxurious, no longer trying to broil or suffocate them. Walking with Felix on the trail, he quickly discovered, was like hiking with a wildly enthusiastic (i.e., off his rocker) nature guide. He stopped repeatedly to bellow and whoop at what he was seeing. Miles kept trying not to laugh each time he exclaimed “Wooooooooooow!” at a redwood, “Hooooooooly crap!” at the mossy oaks gathered together like circles of hunched old men, “Amaaaaaaaaazing!” at the bougainvillea bushes bursting with red and purple blooms, “Do you freaking see this?” at the sunlight reflecting off damp boulders.
“How old are you anyway?” Miles asked, catching Felix between exclamations.
“Nineteen, took a gap year last year, and to answer your next questions, I’m six feet, seven and a half inches, and no, I don’t play basketball.”
Those had indeed been Miles’s next questions.
“You came all the way from Colorado to work at my mom’s restaurant?”
“Kind of,” Felix replied, but Miles couldn’t ask for elaboration because Felix got distracted by a hawk circling above them. “Are you seeing this, man?”
The three of them ambled through the trees, Felix exclaiming and Sandro chasing critters through the brush. Miles tried not to laugh out loud at Felix’s outbursts while in his head he began rewriting his family history with Wynton as hero, not villain. For one reckless moment, he imagined himself as a little kid not secretly spying on his siblings from the stairwell but flopped on the red couch with them watching movies, doing puzzles, clobbering each other with pillows. And then he found himself swept into a cheesy movie: He’d go back to the hospital and put his hand on Wynton’s chest, Wynton’s eyes would open, his first words, “Little brother.”
No. Miles cringed, shook it off. Wynton was a venomous striking snake. Who cared if he did one brotherly thing in seventeen years? He’d terrorized Miles. He’d kicked him out of his own family, out of his own life.
“You okay?” Felix asked. Miles realized he’d stopped and was staring at his feet. He looked up. Felix’s sunglasses were resting on his head and Miles was once again taken aback by the guy’s amazing eyes – the color of wet slate, he thought, no no, oh no, his eyes were the color of mist like Jericho effing Blane’s! Made even more lethal because of the intensity of Felix’s gaze, which was currently x-raying Miles, shifting things around in Miles’s stomach, making his neck warm. Could Sandro be right? I mean, did straight guys eyeball gay guys like this? Not at his school, they didn’t. He sure didn’t want to look away, so did precisely that.
Also, how had he not noticed right away how good-looking Felix was – he must’ve gotten thrown off by the outfit, the mustache, the strangeness of their first encounter. But now, well. Hot Hercules definitely had appeal. This guy looked like he ate three other guys. There was so much of him to imagine naked, which was what Miles was doing. Was it true what they said about foot-size? Because whoa.
“All good,” Miles said.
Felix smiled, then dropped the shades, and continued down the path. Miles followed, thinking about Felix stealing some kid’s bike, then practically forcing himself into the truck to pull Miles out of it. Should he be mad about it? He wasn’t. Ashamed? Not in the slightest. Should he be freaked because this was the first person besides Nico the sauté cook and Rod the Cannibal who knew he was gay? He wasn’t. Like not at all. In fact, he felt a little lighter, relieved. It probably would’ve been fine with Rod, but maybe Miles wouldn’t have been so fine after? Maybe it had been a bad idea. Miles caught up to Felix. “So, um, thanks for—” He was going to say “caring,” but the word sounded so corny, he stopped himself.
Felix nodded like he heard it anyway, then rested a – friendly? – hand on Miles’s shoulder. Miles hadn’t known there were so many nerve endings in his body. Oh man. A swarm of bees took residence in his stomach. He was feeling it. Rest in peace, Miles Fall, he thought as Felix took his hand away and they pushed on deeper into the forest.
The Heart-Wrenching Love Story of Alonso Fall and Sebastian Ortega Begins
(As Told to Felix by Cassidy on the Drive to Paradise Springs, a Week Earlier)
Back in the time of forever, Alonso was twelve years old and strolling down a quiet wooded road, when, looking over a stone wall, he saw a boy reading under a tree in a rose garden. The boy had long, curly blond hair, a cascade of it, and his eyes were the faraway kind of people in paintings gazing at horizons. His cheeks were freckled from the sun. He was so immersed in his book that he didn’t even stir when a butterfly landed on an eyelash. Alonso climbed a tree so he could watch the boy unnoticed, and only then did he realize that the boy’s body was not touching the ground.
A floating boy.
The floating boy read and read and Alonso stared and stared until a man’s voice rang out from the stone house. “Sebastian, put that book down! Your sisters left for school over an hour ago.” The boy – Sebastian – rose to his feet, which still didn’t mean his feet touched the ground. Alonso watched an old man come into the garden. He handed Sebastian two rocks and Alonso observed, mouth agape, as Sebastian, now with a rock in each hand, gently lowered to the ground.
The older man was thin and pale with a stooped, spindly posture. He said to the boy, “Keep them in your pockets all day at school. Not letting you float up to heaven like your mama.”
“Don’t worry so much, Papa,” the boy said, his voice lazy and loving. He smiled at his father. Alonso had never seen a smile like this boy’s, so open and unselfconscious, so lovely. It made something in his chest come loose. It seemed to have the same effect on Sebastian’s father, who patted the boy’s head and said, “My sweet boy.”
Alonso’s body and soul contracted. To have a kind father like this.
Sebastian walked to the gate, opened it, then continued down the quiet dirt road, holding the book in front of his face with one hand, perfectly adept at reading and walking at the same time.
He had a very particular stride, more hop than walk.
Alonso stealthily followed Sebastian, who, now cloaked by the trees, took the rocks out of his pockets and tossed them to the ground, then continued to walk and read, only now, he was doing so inches above the ground.
It became Alonso’s ritual. Each morning before his tutoring began, he’d sneak down the hill, slip through the village, and then turn down the dirt road and climb a tree to spy on the floating boy reading in the garden, before furtively trailing him through the forest to school.
Then, one morning, halfway down the path in a thick and shadowy part of the woods, the floating boy turned around and said to the air, “Why do you follow me every day? I don’t see you. I don’t hear you. But it’s brighter when you’re nearby. It’s easier to read my book. I know who you are. You’re the boy from The Time of Light.” (This was how townspeople referred to Alonso’s birth and the illuminated years that followed.)
Hiding behind a tree, Alonso decided the best course of action was to squat down, close his eyes, and tuck his head in his knees and panic. When he glanced up a few moments later, to his surprise, the boy’s freckled face was looking down on him with that same soft smile. Alonso hadn’t heard him approach because the boy had no footsteps.
Sebastian reached out his hand to Alonso, and to Alonso’s astonishment, when he held it, he too rose several inches into the air.
The boys smiled at each other.
People in the village began calling them The Inseparables.
For Alonso, having a best friend was like having a secret suitcase full of sky, of rivers, of endless summer afternoons.
Soon they had a ceremony in a meadow so they could be blood brothers. Under the shining sun, they cut their fingers and pressed them together.
“How long do we have to keep them like this to become brothers?” Sebastian asked.
“I think it has to be a long time. Like an hour,” Alonso said, a flickery warmth spreading through him.
“Feel that?” Alonso asked Sebastian.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Alonso said, but he did know. That was the moment he knew.
Day after day, Alonso’s horrid brother, Hector, listened through the wall to Alonso and Sebastian talking, laughing, and unbeknownst to him, floating around the room. Hector fumed about how Alonso, who in Hector’s meatball mind already had everything, now had a best friend too. It was more than Hector could bear. His envy, which had been like hunger, became actual hunger. He took a bite out of the wall. Then another. It made him feel better.
That was the day Hector began eating the house.
Though The Inseparables looked a bit alike but for their hair color, they were not alike. Whereas Alonso was restless and daring, Sebastian was placid and careful. Whereas Alonso was impatient for the next moment even while in the present one, Sebastian was so calm, he made moments seem like they went on forever.
Whereas Alonso had dreams, Sebastian was dreamy.
One day, Alonso was walking home from the village through the woods with a bullfrog in each hand, having just raced them with Sebastian behind the bakery. At the creek, he placed the frogs on a rock and was shooing them back to their frog-lives when a shadow fell over him and he realized someone was behind him.
Someone enormous like he’d been eating a house.
It all happened so fast.
Alonso turned to see his brother, Hector, about seven feet tall and three feet wide now, looming above, holding a stone slab in his hands.
He dropped it murderously on the two frogs.
Without thinking, Alonso flew at Hector’s legs, catching him off guard, and despite Hector’s size, Alonso knocked him down. Alonso began punching him as hard as he could, enraged at his brutality toward the poor innocent frogs, not to mention at Alonso since the day they met. “How could you do that?” Alonso cried.
And: “You’re a monster just like our father!”
And finally: “Your mother’s a prostitute who abandoned you!” Because he’d heard the cook talking.
Alonso, however, was not prepared for his brother’s retort. Through clenched teeth, Hector cried out, “At least my father’s not dead!” Because he too had heard the cook talking.
“What?” Alonso asked, stilling his fists, not understanding.
Hector sat up, pushing Alonso off him with ease. “Your father died on a ship to America. To some horrible place called California.” Then he added, like it was the greatest insult, “He was a poet.”
Just like at Alonso’s birth, light began radiating off of him in every direction, like he was the sun.
Alonso watched Hector, blinded by light, scurry away, a seven-foot insect.
Was it true? Was Diego de Falla not his father? Was Hector de Falla not his brother? Alonso got brighter and brighter thinking of it.
