I Brake for Christmas Page 2

  “Oh.”

  “But there’s a keg in the locker room.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah,” he goes on, as if quoting the team motto: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how drunk you get while you play the game.”

  “There’s a T-shirt slogan for you.”

  He unzips his hoodie. The front of the green T-shirt underneath is emblazoned with three Greek letters and the English words, It’s not whether you win or lose…

  “Ha!”

  “The rest is on the back,” he promises. “I’ll show you.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “You don’t really strike me as a football fan,” he remarks, his turn to make a gratuitous generalization having rolled around.

  As has my turn to shrug one off. “Yeah, well…I’m less a fan of the sport…”

  “Than of the players?”

  I blush. Shift my attention to the tweaking the delicate balance between ketchup and hash browns. I’m obviously way too gay to deny this, but I also feel too new to the whole making-friends-with-a-frat-boy thing to have a grip on how fervently it’s okay to nod.

  He backs off, immediately and effortlessly. “You’re a music major, right?”

  I smile, overly grateful. “Piano. Performance.”

  “Which makes me think you should go around with a garter on your sleeve.”

  “You mean like on my way to my saloon job in the Old West?”

  “Where else do piano players perform?”

  “Cruise ships and department stores, I guess.”

  “Geeze. I don’t know where you shop. We don’t see a lot of that in Green River.”

  “It is pretty far inland for cruise ships.”

  He laughs. “They’re very rare in Utah, it’s true.”

  “So you want to hear a piano getting’ played, it’s the saloon or nothing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m a little more jazz, a little less ragtime,” I say.

  “Isn’t that a Donnie and Marie song?”

  When the bill comes, he buys. I have cash out and ready for my share, but when he says, “It’s gas money,” I shove it back into my pocket. On our way back through the gift shop, he buys a couple pieces of what he calls “road pie,” and we climb back into the car.

  “So it turns out, I love strawberry pie,” he says, picking at the first of the road pies as we pull away.

  “You think you know a guy…” I tease.

  He looks at me. We laugh. He’s dribbled a little red splatter of pie-jelly onto his chin, and instantly my Purpose in Life becomes clear: I’ve been brought here—to this life, to this country, to this half-forgotten stretch of desert highway, to the driver’s seat of this very car—to clean George Cortner’s stubbly moon-cheeked face with kisses. Involuntarily, I lean toward him. He raises an eyebrow.

  I hand him a napkin and gun it up the on-ramp onto the 15.

  Miles of brown desert and big blue sky unfold into many more miles of more brown desert and bigger blue sky. The 15 freeway unspools before us in great, uninterrupted lengths, and we follow it around curves and through map-speck towns because by this point in the drive, once we’ve blown past Zyzzyzx Road, alternatives are few and unappealing.

  George finishes the first piece of road pie, singing along with a couple of country songs on the radio. He shifts his ass in his seat, puts his feet in their mostly-clean white socks up on the dash, and plops the second piece of road pie on the shelf created by the swell of his spare tire. “Want some?” he asks. He means pie, but the way it sits, wobbling on his belly as the car putts along, nestled against his flannelled crotch, I can barely gag out a dry “No, thank you.” And in a way it’s true. I don’t want “some.” I want all of it, including the dang pie.

  I don’t know what it is about his body that gets me so worked up. I’ve never been a chubby chaser, and anyway, if I was, it’s not like he’s fat. Necessarily. But there’s been something about watching the dude with the cutest face on campus let the Commons get the best of him. It makes him seem so vulnerable; he’s quite literally gone soft.

  I just know the guys in his frat—God, especially the guys on his rugby team—have to give him a huge ration of shit for letting himself get so buttery—I picture him blushing, struggling unsuccessfully to suck it in while his so-called brothers heckle him, mocking the bounce of his belly as he tries to laugh along. But knowing this, as I imagine I do, also makes him seem stronger than any of these gym-body jocks. Surely more confident. It takes a certain amount of nerve to carry yourself like the most crush-worthy guy at school with your stomach sloshing around like water in a bucket.

  It’s this combination, the unmistakable assets of his welcoming face and his engaging personality, coupled with his seeming refusal to be restricted by what the dominant collegiate culture sees as a swelling sign of weakness, that flags him as His Own Man. And if he’s prepared to go his own way with his body where his weight and shape are concerned, what other declarations of independence is he prepared to make?

  Every time the wheels go over the slightest bump in the road, the box of pie sloshes on its unstable base, and I’m mesmerized by his unselfconscious jiggle. It looks like he’s trying to sneak a trash bag full of cream cheese across state lines under his sweatshirt. Clearly the joy of a few good pieces of pie is worth more to him than the effort of keeping their effects at bay, and I wonder, does he even know his stomach’s gotten this sloppy? Does he realize how much it shifts and ripples? I imagine what a heavy handful of it must feel like; his nervous laugh the first time I work up the nerve to give him a teasing pat and say—

  “Brent!”

  My little car’s already zooming off the road when I tear my eyes from George’s stomach. I try to correct our course, but I’m going eighty-five miles an hour—my choices are basically to over-compensate back into traffic or to stand on the brake pedal and hope the onrushing ditch isn’t as deep as it looks. We stop before I bottom out in the worst of it, although they’re a couple scary feet of off-roading. The car settles in a patch of grass between northbound and southbound traffic, and I take a big breath, then a second, while the cloud of gravel dust and grass clears around us.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “We’re down one pie,” George laments. “Otherwise yeah, I’m okay.”

  The car has stalled, but my fervent prayers are answered and it starts back up without incident. When I left for school a thousand miles from home, my mom insisted on getting me a AAA membership, and I’ve certainly been grateful when it’s gotten me out of a scrape or two—I’m not what you’d call an obsessively cautious driver—but now I’m equally grateful not to have to stand around on the side of the highway on Christmas Eve while George’s Holiday Homecoming slips through his fingers again.

  “What were you looking at?” he asks around a laugh.

  Beautiful you is the only answer that swims around my rattled brain. It takes me a second to dig up, “Nothing, I guess. I must be tired.”

  “Yeah, well, not anymore, I bet. That woke me the fuck up, anyhow.”

  “Yeah. Right? Wow. Sorry, man. I just…yeah. Sorry.”

  He’s laughing. We’re both unhurt, and only ten feet from the highway. All’s well that ends well, as the man said. This is more of a momentary blip to break up the monotony of a long desert drive than any kind of incident, what-might-have-been notwithstanding. I laugh too. His stomach’s shaking again, and as soon as my adrenaline levels pool back around a non-aneurism-inducing level, I quickly forgive myself. There are worse ways to die than from ogling a body like George Cortner’s.

  I feel obligated to take him up on his offer to drive. “So I can rest,” never mind that I’ve only been out of bed for five hours and I’ve had like ten cups of coffee. Hell, I’m as grateful we’re all okay—George, me, and the car—as I am that I didn’t wet myself when we flew off the road, as much caffeinated liquid as I’ve got in me.

  “Let’s stop at the state line, can we?�
�� I say once he’s negotiated the rickety roadside ditch and maneuvered my trusty little car onto the highway and back up to speed. The Welcome to Nevada sprawl of first—(and last—) chance casinos is already visible on the horizon. “I’m dying to take a pee.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, after that I should probably check my pants, too.”

  “Sorry,” I say again.

  “I’m just messing with you. It’s cool. You owe me some pie,” he says with a grin, “but it’s cool.”

  “Cool.”

  “Cool.”

  Cool. I almost killed us both thinking about touching him someplace other than his hair-scratchy back. If I ever actually get my hands on his naked body, my head’ll probably explode. Real cool.

  Among his other sensational physical characteristics, he’s got a lead foot; we’re in Nevada in no time. The border between California and Nevada is clearly delineated, brown scrub on one side, garish neon signs and $3.99 prime rib dinners so close to the state line on the other you’d swear you can see the black map line staking out the west end of the casino parking lots.

  We park as close to the door of the first casino as we can get, and I skip across the gaming floor with my knees together, desperate to keep my bladder scrunched closed for these last hundred yards. I’m done and washing my hands by the time George swings in and handles his own business. I’m absently feeding quarters into a slot machine by the time he strolls back out.

  “Can you do that?” he asks.

  “I’m doin’ it.”

  “Don’t you have to be twenty-one?”

  I shrug. “So who says I’m not?”

  “Wait…are you?”

  “Binh Vo is.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The dude on the expired Connecticut driver’s license in my wallet.”

  “You have a fake ID?” he practically shouts, apparently scandalized.

  “Shhh,” I scold him with a giggle. “It’s not like a slot machine’s gonna card me. I won six dollars and seventy-five cents—I think the casino can spare it.”

  I push the cash out button on the machine, and twenty-seven quarters clunk into the pay-out tray. I scoop them up and shove them into my front pocket.

  “You’re such a renegade,” he says, faking admiration as we head back toward the parking lot. “It’s those quiet ones you gotta watch out for.”

  “Yeah, I’m trouble.”

  “How much did you win?”

  “Six seventy-five.”

  “Sweet. In ‘n’ Out’s on you.”

  Vegas is another forty miles. Another twenty-five minutes with George at the wheel, and we’re getting off the highway again, this time for “road burgers.” George misses the on-ramp to the 15, and by the time he’s found a spot to flip a U-turn, it’s on the Strip, and we opt to give it one good cruise for the novelty. The Judds are playing at Caesar’s Palace, according to the sign; tourists clog the sidewalk in front of the new Mirage hotel.

  “Oh, isn’t that the one that has that volcano?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is it erupting?” I ask, squirming in my seat in hopes of some kind of view.

  “Doesn’t look like it. Must be getting ready to, though. Look at all those people.”

  Farther along, the jumbo digital signs give way to the more retro neon signs in front of places like the Sands and the Riviera. The kind of place you half-expect to run into Dean Martin or Sammy Davis, Junior in the lounge. The kind of place where “female impersonator” is still a job, and shrimp cocktails cost fifty cents. Following signs for the 15 takes us past the World’s Largest Gift Shop, and a drive-thru wedding chapel.

  “There’s a line at that wedding chapel,” George points out.

  “No way.” But he’s right. A woman with a beehive hairdo and a sweater set is leaning out of the drive-up window, presumably officiating at the union of the happy couple in the back seat of an idling taxi, while a couple in matching Santa hats waits their turn behind them in a red convertible.

  “I guess when it’s time, it’s time,” I muse.

  George shrugs and guides us back onto the highway.

  My turn to settle in. I slouch into my seat and kick off my shoes. “It’s noon,” I announce, reading the dashboard clock. “So what is it from here, like six hours?”

  “Little less, maybe. I think it’s like four hundred miles.”

  “You’ll be home in time for dinner.”

  He nods. Sighs. From what I’ve seen of him over these last couple days, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy whose morale would flag at the prospect of a home-cooked holiday meal, but he’s not exactly buzzing with anticipation.

  “Is Christmas a big deal for your family?” I ask. “You got brothers and sisters and all that?”

  “Yup. Two brothers, one older, one younger; two sisters, one older, one younger.”

  “Middle child.”

  “Yup.”

  “Me, too. Of three. Five kids, huh? You guys Mormon?”

  “What, ‘cause I’m blond?”

  “And from Utah,” I say. “What? Sorry. Is that stereotyping?”

  “Pretty much the definition of, yeah.” He rolls his eyes. With a little smile, but still he says, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have blond hair and be from Utah? Literally everybody asks me that. ‘You Mormon?’ Then usually a question about secret underwear.”

  “Secret underwear?” I ask. “Is that a Mormon thing? What does it have, like a logo on it? Wait—are you wearing some now?”

  He laughs. “I can’t answer that.”

  “Right,” I say. “Secret.”

  A few miles of highway unspool before I say, “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I know what that’s like. ‘You don’t look like a Callahan.’ I shouldn’t have assumed.” Half-joking, I go on to say, “I didn’t know people lived in Utah who weren’t Mormon.”

  He shrugs. “I’m not sure they do,” he teases. “We are.”

  “Oh.”

  He gives my thigh a companionable smack. “Just because you were stereotyping doesn’t mean I’m not a big, fat stereotype.”

  “So are you going to go on a mission and all that?” My heart sinks at the prospect of George in a short-sleeved dress shirt on a bicycle in some far-flung corner of the world; at the merest glimpse of my suddenly bleak future, picking at my colorless food in a George-free dining hall.

  “Nah.”

  “But aren’t you supposed to? Isn’t that, like, part of the deal?”

  He looks at me with a gentle smile. “Let’s just say I’m not quite as devout as some of my family.”

  I nod. “That would explain drunk rugby.”

  “My parents would say that explains a lot of things.”

  A moment passes in silence, then another, before he asks, “What does a Callahan look like?”

  I laugh. “Like you, probably. Doesn’t Brent Callahan sound like a beefy white dude?”

  “Maybe a lacrosse player.”

  “Right? That’s why I have a Vietnamese name on my fake ID. Otherwise too many questions, all of them pretty much code for ‘Why aren’t you white?’”

  “And why aren’t you?”

  “Because my birth parents were Vietnamese, I guess.”

  “That how that works?” He winks. He’s playing along.

  “I think so. My brother’s white. That freaks people out, too. ‘You don’t look like brothers.’”

  “What ‘people’ are these?”

  “You’d be surprised. I get it all the time. Well,” I amend, “maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. Blond and from Utah and all…”

  “It’s funny, huh? People who care about you—people whose lives you may actually influence—take you pretty much at face value. People who are never gonna see you again need to know, like, ‘what to make of you.’ Where do you fit?”

  “Right? And it’s like, you’re a lady walking by me at the mall. You don’t have to make me fit anywhere. ‘Are you adopted?’ First of all, d
uh. And second, those are like the two opening notes of my song; do you wanna hear any of the rest of it? It’s a work in progress, but it’s pretty good.”

  “If not as much ragtime as some people might like…”

  This cracks us both up, and before we even notice we’re in the corner of Arizona, we’re through it and in Utah. We stop in St. George for gas. I fill a 64-ounce Styrofoam cup to the top with day-old coffee and powdered creamer, and George buys licorice, Doritos, and a carton of chocolate milk.

  “I’m fine to drive,” I tell him as we regroup around the car.

  “Cool,” he says. “I’m fine to not.” He sets his bag of snacks on the roof and unzips his sweatshirt, then pitches it through the open window into the passenger seat. “I’m really more of a navigator, anyway,” he says once he’s back in the car.

  “Navigator? What, ‘Go straight for three more hours’?”

  “I didn’t say it was hard, I just said I’d do it.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You think you can handle it?”

  “What?”

  “Trying to go straight for that long?”

  I level my best blank look at him. His mischievous smile says we’re not talking about my driving, and that he’s pretty proud of his clever question. I mean, I’m officially “out,” at least to my family and most of the music department. I’m reasonably open, if that means my hips swish whether I want them to or not and I wear more earrings than most guys at school.

  It’s not like it’s a secret, but my sexuality has become something I try not to blare around the guys I have crushes on, since it unfailingly scares them off. George obviously knows, and what do I care if he does? If I ever do get my itchy hands on that juicy body of his, it’s gonna come up eventually, and if he’s not into me like that, what difference does it make if I’m gay, straight, or sexually attracted to egg salad?

  I settle on the non-committal, “You’re the navigator. If I start to stray, it’s up to you to get me back on track.”

  “Between the two of us, then, we should be able to get off when we want to.”

  Eyes on the road, I pull back onto the highway, grateful I don’t look anything like my brother Cameron—if I had his complexion, you’d be able to see a blush like I got going from across town. George pats my thigh, then rips into his bag of chips.