When the World Tips Over, page 4
Cannot wait until next week. You are my favorite child on earth.
Chef Mom
Dear Theo,
Dreamt of you again last night. We were spooning, your arms tight around me. I could feel your breath on my neck, your hand on my hip. Your thoughts in my head. Your soul in my body. Love ripping through me all night like a storm. Desperate heartache ever since. Been telling everyone at the restaurant I have allergies to explain the tears.
When I made your nightly meal this evening, my goal was to get the dream on the plate:
Starter: Steak Tartare with a Smoked Quail Egg and Tamarind Dressing – ecstasy
Main: Duck Confit with Roasted Garlic Sauce and Pommes de Terre Sarladaises – safety
Dessert: a Gâteau Marjolaine – my new recipe, the almond meringue is light and crisp, the dark chocolate ganache robust, the hazelnut buttercream, preposterously rich and velvety, then the fountain of sauce anglaise poured over it – it will kiss every inch of your mouth
Paring: Sage Farms Private Reserve Cabernet – pure joy, you lucky duck
Miss you like the earth misses rain.
Bernie
Miles
Encounter #2 with the Rainbow-Haired Girl
No one would ever suspect it, but Miles Fall could see the souls of dogs.
He kept this to himself.
Along with the part about how he communicated with one dog telepathically, a black Lab named Sandro from the Bell Ranch next door, who was barking now as he peeled through the grapevines toward Miles. Sandro always found Miles when he hid in the vineyards, which was what he was doing instead of going to school, because … well, that was the question.
An answer: He was hiding from Wynton, who surely wanted to kill him now for breaking that bow. (For the record: Wynton deserved it and more.)
Another answer: There was this guy. His mother called him her voice of reason, her steady Freddy. Teachers called him their prize, coaches their star, teammates their bro. His siblings called him Perfect. Girls sent hot pics to his phone. Unsigned love notes found their way into his backpack, were posted on social media, scribbled on bathroom walls. When he arrived at school – always late to avoid the morning melee where he’d have to pretend to be a person who said person things – he’d have leaves in his hair from running in nearby woods and girls named Emma or Demi or Morgan would pick them off of him. Here let me get that for you, Miles, they’d say, then keep the leaves until they were ashes in their pockets.
There was this guy who glided down the hallways of Western Catholic Preparatory High School, talking and partaking little or not at all but no one seemed to notice that or care. No one seemed to notice that he was always trying to get away, that he ducked out of rooms, out of conversations, that he ran so fast at practice because, out there in front of the pack, he could be alone. This was why he climbed walls too – literally. Often, he was halfway up the brick façade of the school the moment after the bell rang, which made him weird, but also cool.
He was weird. He knew this. He suspected he was in the wrong body, family, town, species, that there’d been some big cosmic mix-up. Like maybe he was supposed to be a tree or a barn owl or a prime number. He only found himself, his real self, in novels, not even in the stories and characters, but in the sentences, the lone words.
He also never cried, and this made him feel even less human. Not once that he could remember in his whole life. Though sometimes when he woke his pillow was damp and he’d wonder if he’d cried in a dream.
Early on, Miles had figured out how to be by himself and with people at the same time. There and not there when he sat with the track/cross country teams at lunch, there and not there when he made out with girls at dances or parties. Mostly not there.
Once this all worked fine.
But: Not. Any. More.
His mother didn’t know yet. Not that he quit track, the math club, the animal refuge, the academic decathlon. That the grades that were supposed to get him into Stanford were tanking.
That he couldn’t get out of The Gloom Room.
She didn’t know that two weeks ago at an away track meet (right after the suck upon fucksuck night with Wynton), on having the baton slapped into his palm, an entirely newfangled kind of frantic came over Miles, and he’d taken the baton and then he’d run the hell off the track and jumped the fence and then kept on going. And going. And going going going. He’d hitchhiked home and hadn’t been back to school since.
No one knew anything. He’d made sure of it, erasing all email messages and voicemails from his school to his mother. Oh—
Here was Sandro! The black furry fella in a yapping yipping wiggling frenzy despite his advanced age. In human years: eighty-seven. Luckily it was decided by Miles long ago that Sandro would be the first dog to never die.
You don’t look good, Miles, Sandro remarked right away. Like crap actually. This was no surprise. Miles had hardly been sleeping or eating. Like bugly-mahfugly, Sandro added. The old dog loved slang. He picked it up everywhere.
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know, Miles said to Sandro, though really, he didn’t know. He never looked in mirrors if he could help it.
Okay, here’s something you don’t know, Sandro said, his tail stilling. He looked up at Miles so forlornly, it made Miles’s heart skip. Miles kneeled down so he was face to snout with the dog.
What is it? Miles asked. Sandro put both paws on Miles’s thigh.
I’ve been having dark thoughts, Sandro told him. Sometimes I don’t want to be here anymore, here as in Here, as in anywhere.
Miles put an arm around the dog and stared into his plaintive eyes. No, you’re okay, we’re okay, we’re in this together, two bugly-mahfuglys.
Sandro wriggled out of Miles’s touch, stuck his nose in the dirt. I couldn’t get out of my bed this morning. Even getting to my water bowl overwhelms me. I feel so alone all the time. I’m way too anxious to go to the dog park. I curl up into a ball and pretend I’m sick, so I don’t have to go. He picked up his paw and waved it in the direction of their houses. The other dogs don’t get me. No one does. Ever since Beauty left, my life is empty.
Beauty was the love of Sandro’s life who ran away years ago. I do, Sandro, I get you, Miles told him, rubbing him behind his ears until the dog lifted his snout high into the air and met Miles’s eyes. I understand how much you miss Beauty. Miles stroked beneath Sandro’s chin. And getting to the water bowl overwhelms me too, Sandro. Everything overwhelms me. I just want to curl up into a ball too. Don’t worry. You can always talk to me. We have each other.
Sandro nuzzled his snout into Miles’s face, his cold nose touching Miles’s warm one. Miles felt his body relax. Sandro was the only one who took the doom out of him. The dog bopped Miles’s cheek with his paw. Maybe I was being a little overdramatic.
“What else is new?” Miles said aloud, standing. “You’re the biggest drama queen in Paradise Springs.”
Takes a queen to know a queen, Sandro quipped.
Miles laughed. Sandro had known Miles was gay since Miles knew, which was pretty much always, though nothing exciting had ever happened about it outside the privacy of Miles’s mind until a few months ago when a cook at The Blue Spoonful followed Miles into the walk-in refrigerator at a restaurant party his mother made him go to and kissed him until his mind reconfigured into a bonfire.
Until that moment, Miles’s religion had been: imagining boys lying beside him, imagining boys walking beside him, imagining boys running beside him, imagining boys naked, imagining boys clothed, imagining boys who imagine boys who imagine boys, and then suddenly there was a way better religion: making out with a boy in a restaurant refrigerator in secret in a hurry.
Even though Miles never felt at ease with anyone, not truly, he had certain ideas about love because he’d been devouring his mother’s stash of romance novels since he was ten, particularly Live Forever Now, which he secretly reread every few months. He wanted to drown in love like Samantha Brooksweather. Really, he wanted to be Samantha Brooksweather.
And suddenly in the walk-in refrigerator that night, he was!
For weeks he replayed the kiss, this Get Out of The Gloom Room Free card. He replayed it while eating tacos with the track team. He replayed it while brushing old horses at the refuge. He replayed it when Amy Cho surprise-kissed him at the dance. He replayed it to get out of bed the mornings when he felt like mold and could barely move.
The night of the restaurant party, he’d been on a lime run for the bartender. He’d had a white plastic container in one hand and was heading into the walk-in refrigerator when someone came up behind him. Miles felt a hand fall on his shoulder, saw another on the walk-in handle in front of him. “Can I join you in there?” he heard. Miles knew who it was right away, not the name of the sauté cook, but the velvet voice that went with a tall lanky body that went with black straight hair that fell into dark sleepy eyes, eyes that had been tracking Miles around the party all night long, making Miles’s neck hot. Miles had sucked in air at the words – Can I join you in there? – wanting to holler yes! Scared to. Stunned that something he’d imagined – he was an expert on these kind of imaginings – was really and truly happening.
Miles looked left and right. It was just them, two shadows in the shadowy back corner of the kitchen. Miles nodded, nervous as hell, like before a race nervous, and then he felt the guy’s chest press against his back as he gently guided Miles backward, pulling open the door and then releasing Miles into the chilly air.
The heavy door thudded behind them, cutting off the music, cutting off the rest of the world. They were alone in the cold with stacks and stacks of eggs, sacks of onions, trays of marinating grass-fed beef filets, crates of zucchini, sheets of fresh herbs. It smelled like chives. It smelled like meat, like blood and bleach. And now hope, excitement, sweat. Miles’s heart pounded through to his fingers as he turned around, his hands damp despite the chill, his breathing quick, his erection straining. He smelled alcohol on the guy’s breath as he approached Miles (the scent familiar from his uncle, his brother). He heard the words: beautiful boy (normally words Miles would’ve unheard immediately, but here now they were flying embers) and then it happened: the collision of their mouths, this guy’s skin so much rougher than the handful of girls he’d kissed in his life, sending currents of yes to his heart, to his head, to his groin, to his former self and to his future one, until they were interrupted by the expediter, a guy named Pete with tattoo sleeves who said, “What the hell? Hands off or I’ll tell his mother and you’ll be out of a job, Nico.”
Nico.
A name that was turquoise because of Miles’s kind of synesthesia – words came in colors. (When he was little, he’d play this game where he’d pick out the yellow words on a page and rearrange them to make a purely yellow sentence. Or an orange one. Or a striped one. He loved words that didn’t belong together. Like him.)
Anyway, Miles hadn’t known how to make it happen with Nico again – he couldn’t find him online – so he wandered into the restaurant after school daily and stared at the guy like it was an Olympic sport. He was too shy and uncertain to do anything reasonable like talk to him, so staring it was, but Nico, when not drunk, seemed to keep his sleepy eyes on anything but Miles. Still, Miles stared. While he was helping out (Mom: Even with your volunteer work you find time to help out, thank you, always so thoughtful) doing roll-ups or garnishing soufflés or bussing half-eaten plates of coq au vin, he stared. While marrying bottles of homemade aioli and ramekins of lavender butter, he stared and stared and stared like a psychopath. And when he wasn’t staring, he’d go into the walk-in alone and wait, re-enacting the kiss, pressing his hot lips to the cold refrigerator door. He even wrote a poem about it and submitted it to his school’s literary journal. It was called “Finding Religion in a Walk-in Refrigerator” and they’d accepted it. Everyone, including Hot AP English Teacher Mr. Gelman, thought it was about God, not a hot, sleepy-looking sauté cook, probably the only other young gay dude in the whole stupid town where Miles lived – a town that was mostly all yokel with some wine and hippie thrown in. This was why, long ago, Miles made Sandro an honorary member of the human queer community.
I love communities! the dog had told Miles that day. Miles had been ten.
Another walk-in encounter never happened, and soon after, Nico was fired for drinking on the job, but that was the kiss that changed everything.
Meaning: The Season of Porn – Miles not only devouring it whole but stopping and starting, rewinding and replaying, again and again, trying to figure it all out.
Meaning: He couldn’t get through a run in the woods without ducking behind trees, his hands plunging into his shorts as he dive-bombed into all that would’ve could’ve should’ve happened in that refrigerator, had expediter Pete not barged in.
Meaning: He felt guilty all the time of some unspecified crime, and like he was lying even when he wasn’t.
Meaning: He feared that instead of saying “Please pass the salt,” or “Nice race, dude,” he might, by accident, say “I’m gay. I mean, super-gay. Like you have no idea how gay.”
Meaning: the dating app Lookn. (More on this later.)
Meaning: He began studying other boys like he was an anthropologist. This was how close they stood to each other. This was when they said “yo” or “bro.” This was the pitch they laughed and talked at. This was what they did with their faces instead of swooning like Samantha Brooksweather.
Miles bent down and buried his face in Sandro’s fur.
At least you love me, he said to Sandro.
Oh, I do! I love you so much! You’re my best friend! You smell so good!
Miles and Sandro began the trek back to the house through the vineyard, through the stifling heat. Miles would have to remember to erase today’s messages from the dean and his coach, both on the house phone voicemail and on his mother’s computer. Thank God the school didn’t have her new cell phone number. Though he supposed eventually they’d call the restaurant. Maybe they already had and couldn’t get through? Would they show up at the house or restaurant? He figured eventually they would.
I broke Wynton’s new bow, he told Sandro. He’d sold his motorcycle to buy it.
Good. He deserves it after what he did to you that night.
Yeah.
Wish you’d let me bite him already. Me and the other dogs are sick of just growling at him all the time. How about a nip on the leg?
I’ll think about it.
Well?
Yeah okay.
The air was blazing and breathless even this early because of The Devil Winds. The whole valley felt like it was one spark away from bursting into flames. Miles had already sweated through his shirt.
Hey, did you know women have orgasms from brushing their teeth?
Human dude, are you high? That is redonkulous, a soup sandwich, shit-bat mad whack, insane in the membrane.
My thoughts exactly, totally wing-a-ling.
Miles, I think you need a checkup from the neck up.
Ah, good one.
Miles learned a ton of slang from Sandro. Slang he hardly ever used except with the dog.
When Sandro and Miles crested the hill, Miles saw some kind of vehicle by the side of the utility road, which was weird. Uncle Clive was vigilant about overnight trespassers (after years of waking to naked tripping hippies). But indeed, there was a vintage orange pickup in mint condition.
He walked over to the driver’s-side window and saw that fanned across the double seat was a sleeping girl with a waterfall of multicolored curls. Green glitter swept across her eyelids. Words were tattooed all over her skin, which shined with perspiration.
Whoa. Sleeping Beauty. For real, he told Sandro.
Pick me up. I want to see. Pick me up!
Despite a persuasive bout of head-twisting and tail-wagging, Miles didn’t pick Sandro up. He gave his honorary queer, suicidal, psychic companion a love tap with his foot while he focused on the girl, who seemed to be around his age, maybe a little older. She looked like she should be spinning straw into gold in a forest or locked in a tower or sleeping like this until some prince swooped in and—
Such a hopeless romantic, human dude.
Like you said, takes one to know one. Beauty, Beauty, Beauty.
Miles checked out the avalanche of books all over the girl’s seat, seeing how many he’d read, seeing how many he’d want to. There were some books on California history, on winemakers of Northern California, but there were also novels. There was even one – East of Eden, a novel Miles mostly detested – upright in the girl’s hand as if she could sleep-read. Why was she here? Why was she sleeping in her truck? Why so many books?
Miles tried to decipher some of the words tattooed on the girl’s arms. There was true love and hummingbird and destiny. And then a bunch of words he didn’t know, maybe in different languages? A cool sentence: We were together, I forget the rest. And another: If the path before you is clear … but the rest of that one wrapped around her arm and was hidden.
Miles was in contortions trying to see the other half of the sentence when he noticed the light was on in the cab. She must’ve fallen asleep reading that awful Steinbeck book. Miles reached his hand through the half-open window and turned off the overhead, so she didn’t wake to a dead battery. As he was carefully pulling his arm out of the open window, the girl bolted upright, gasped, looked at Miles with fright, then shock, then cried out, “Oh no! Sorry, I’m going.” Her voice startled him. She sounded nothing like she looked. If they were on the phone, he’d bet she was a two-pack-a-day, whisky-swilling guy.
“It’s okay,” he said, unable to take his eyes off her. Her large, pale blue eyes were almost translucent, making her look otherworldly.
She was searching for her keys, first in her pockets, then running her hands all over the seat, in the creases. He watched her, having an overwhelming urge to get in the truck.
