the otter and the ostrich

chapter 16

Nov 17, 2024

While he couldn’t run track that spring, Tommy was able to attend our junior prom upright and ambulatory, although I’m sure Emma would have accommodated him if he could not. The issue was whether he would accommodate her, as it seemed Tommy would be fine with a broken leg if it meant he did not have to go to prom.

We were at Emma’s parents’ house, where it was agreed we would meet for pre-prom pictures.

Emma’s house matched her somehow. It was as though she were a princess, and it was her castle, or so it seemed to me, its beauty and elegance rivaling even Tommy’s. It was right on the edge of the Veddersburgh and Smithson school district border, out near farm country, enclosed on three sides by dairy cow-grazing land. It was a big, white colonial house with an addition over the two-car garage, black shutters, and a green door. It even had a picket fence that wrapped around the whole house, front and back, and the Lightfoote family had a pair of pure-bred dogs, a Golden Retriever and a Burmese Mountain dog, who roamed within it like kings.

The sloping, perfectly manicured lawn with its hydrangeas, lilacs, and tiger lilies, and the view of the valley made for the perfect backdrop for taking prom pictures to post on the increasingly (and frustratingly) popular new social media site called “Facebook.”

Emma was putting on Tommy’s corsage.

“How did this dumb tradition even get started? It’s exclusionary and wrong. Like, think about how many of our classmates aren’t going because they couldn’t afford it. How many have parents that can’t buy them a tux? More than a few, I bet. What, like, 200 kids are going? That’s less than two-thirds of our class. I’d like to see what the average prom attendance is,” Tommy said.

“Excuse me for not wanting to be left out of the defining moment of our high school lives,” Emma said. “I know what you mean, Tommy, but please, for me, put aside the ideology for once—just for today, alright?”

“The ideology, huh? You’re pretty smart, Emma, but I’d expect you to know that, by definition, ideology can’t be put aside. And it’s funny because you’re the one with the ideology—it’s all class warfare this and socioeconomic status that, but when it comes to something you want...”

She shook her head and finished pinning the corsage.

“So, you wish I went with someone else then? Maybe I should have gone with a boy who couldn’t afford it and paid for his suit and everything—is that what you wanted?”

I thought this was a masterful response. Cynthia was pinning my own corsage.

“No, what I want is to not go to this dumb thing,” Tommy said.

“I think you need to dig deep for what really bothers you about prom, figure it out, and suck it the fuck up, because I am not going through tonight with you being miserable,” Emma said.

“I hate wearing this,” Tommy replied in defeat, adjusting his cuffs.

I was also uncomfortable in my rented suit. For some reason, I had chosen pinstripes, proof of the transient, in-fashion styles that reveal themselves at proms across the country, only for us to be aghast at them a few years later. Like every other article of clothing I owned, no amount of tailoring could fit it properly to my small frame.

Our parents came by, and Emma and Tommy stopped their bickering.

“Wow, look at this—is this Jude Harris? My god, he’s a movie star,” Mr. Goodspeed said, assessing me. I had on big Ray-Ban sunglasses I’d bought with my Big T Grocery money.

“I know, right?” Cynthia said as my mom straightened my tie.

“Okay kids, how about we line up in front of the lilacs here,” my mom said. She was still wearing her scrubs and had a digital camera, which in a few short years would seem an unwieldy and unnecessary device.

Danveer was with us too. He had found a date elsewhere and somehow wound up bringing a beautiful Dominican girl named Tiana Rivera, although they were not dating, nor would they ever be. We all lined up in front of the bushes and adjusted our faces into the well-practiced expressions we knew from our mirrors were acceptable versions of ourselves, showing off our best smiles.

It was very hot for June, almost ninety degrees, and the humidity was making my hair frizz out into its default bush-like state. I flattened it reflexively, probably making it worse.

Then we had to take individual couple pictures as well, and I began to feel the exercise was as exhausting and pointless as Tommy did.

“Let’s take one together, Jude-dude, just me and you,” Tommy suggested. “Mom?” he called out. His father was across the lawn with Mr. Lightfoote, probably talking about taxes or something equally turgid.

Mrs. Goodspeed was by the hydrangeas, peering into them like she was looking for something. Tommy called out again, but she remained unresponsive. We went over to her. The digital camera around her neck hung like it was forgotten.

“Mom?” he said again as we approached.

She was staring into the flowers. “I can’t believe Grandma went and chopped these down. Oh, I’m so glad they’re back,” she said, touching the blue petals like they were fabric samples.

“Grandma?” he asked. His mother’s mother had been dead for years.

“Yes, she cut them down when Grandpa died—they reminded her too much of him. But they’re back now, oh how lovely!” Mrs. Goodspeed said.

Mr. Goodspeed snuck up behind us.

“Grandma’s? Your mother’s bushes? Kathy, what the hell are you talking about? We’re at the Lightfootes’. You know them. C’mon, move so we can take a picture of the boys,” he said, taking the camera from her.

“She’s been getting worse,” Tommy said to me as we posed. “They still have no idea what it is. Last week she was up in the middle of the night trying to change a lightbulb that hadn’t even burned out.”

“Uh, why?” I asked, remembering the way his mother’s hair had lifted before the bang of lightning at the lake house.

“Don’t know. She’s been doing and saying funkier stuff lately. Dad’s going to take her to a neuroscientist in Boston,” Tommy told me.

Eventually, the painstaking process of picture-taking was complete, and we awaited our ride to the prom, which was a limousine paid for by Mr. Lightfoote.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” my dad told me, which was a poor piece of advice I’ve always heard from older males to their impressionable younger equivalents.

What would my dad do? Do I know what actions he’d deem pertinent in any situation? Are these the choices of my dad now, or my dad when he was in high school? I was pretty sure the appropriate guidance would be to continue not doing the things my dad did do, which was to say, mostly smoking weed and not doing schoolwork.

“I’m just saying,” Tommy spoke again as we got into the limousine, one last fusillade of angst. “This whole thing is so pointless.”

“It might be pointless for you, but it’s not for me,” Emma said.

Tommy smirked. “This is what we are, after all—limousine liberals, right?”

“Just shut up, Big T,” I said. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t want to think about it right then. What were we supposed to do—just not go?

Emma used the word defining with regard to the prom and our high school experience, and I have to confess that Tommy was probably right about us not needing to go for one simple reason: Less than a decade later, I would be hard-pressed to remember significant details about what happened at prom, certainly not enough to consider it defining.

I remember being surprised that Tommy and Emma didn’t win king and queen. It was, in a sign of the changing times, won by Danveer and his date Tiana, the sole Indian guy and one of many Dominican girls who were—perhaps, as Tommy had guessed—underrepresented at the prom in relation to their numbers in our school’s population.

I remember being perturbed by the style of bump-and-grind dancing that was prevalent in those days (perhaps still is now), the four-on-the-floor dancing that led to a dance floor of teenagers dry-humping each other and me having to hide my boner by tucking it into my waistband.

I remember singing “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.

That’s all, though. Like most ‘big’ life events, I remember little of the actual event and more about everything around it, and in the case of the junior prom, especially what came afterward.

When it was all over, we left in the same limousine that had taken us there (I couldn’t even tell you where it was held) and went back across the river to Emma’s house, where it had been pre-determined that our post-prom hangout would take place.

There were other options available to us. The school held an official post-prom party in the gym (even we weren’t nerdy enough to attend that), and we were invited to parties hosted by other kids, none of which we trusted to be a good or safe time, since alcohol would be consumed in quantities we weren’t used to, which was more than none.

When I thought about why all of us were so reluctant to drink when so many of the other kids our age seemed to regard it as—if not a necessity for a good time—at the very least a rite of passage, it seemed clear to me that the common denominator was our parents, who were all domineering in some way, if not intimidatingly so (Tommy’s dad), then emotionally (my mom and dad), or traditionally (Cynthia and Danveer’s immigrant parents).

Which is why it took the unplanned outsider influence of Tiana Rivera, Danveer’s date, to bring the chaotic influence of alcohol to our post-junior prom proceedings.

We were all changed into the swimsuits we’d left at the Lightfootes’ earlier and chilling in the hot tub. It was the only hot tub I knew anyone to have. The night was a bit warm for hot-tubbing, but the novelty and coolness factor overcame that, and there was just enough room for all of us to sit comfortably.

Tiana, no stranger to drinking, had apparently brought two large flasks of tequila in her clutch to the Lightfootes’ and, to avoid the strict screening process at the prom venue, had left them hidden under a bush by the picket fence to retrieve when we got back.

“Oh my god, you’re incredible,” Cynthia fawned. She was the most willing to partake, and I was proud of her for that. “That’s like some Soviet spy, Berlin Wall shit.”

“Are we sure about this?” Emma cautioned. I looked around at our fresh-faced friends, eyes glowing with danger. We certainly seemed up for it. “What if my parents come down?”

“Stop stressing, your parents aren’t coming down—it’s after midnight. When else are we gonna have this opportunity?” Cynthia said. “All of us chilling. Just us. No parents. Post-prom. No driving, no danger. C’mon!”

She had a point. Tiana passed one of the flasks around. I was the first to try. I opened it and took a whiff. To this day, I can’t smell tequila without heaving. I drank it, though, the most tentative sip ever.

I passed it around, and all of us, even the gung-ho Cynthia, took the same approach, except for Tiana, who had a big gulp. What we didn’t know at the time was the magnifying effect the hot tub would have on our drunkenness and hydration levels, and soon the small sips turned to bigger ones as our reluctance and judgment faded, until each of us had several harsh gulps.

The elation I felt that first time I got drunk has since gone unmatched, such was the warmness in my ears, the tingle in my chest. I felt like royalty immersed in those jets, like the waters had baptized me as one of the good people, one of the chosen few who could enjoy the pleasures modern life had to offer, things that just a handful of generations ago would have been equivalent to a god-like or monarchic experience.

We didn’t really know what drunk people typically did, so we all just sat there, feeling honest and open with each other, like walls we didn’t know were there had become translucent. Most notable was the alcohol’s amplification effect on Tommy and me: He had become even more verbose and unfiltered and hurried, while I retreated further into myself.

“What animal would you be, Jude?” Emma asked, after revealing she herself would like to be an eagle.

Apparently, I took too long to speak so Tommy decided to answer for me: “Jude-dude, I think you would be a dog. Yes, a dog, a friend, loyal in the best way possible. But perhaps not so obedient? A wolf, then. No, I wouldn’t say you have the sharp edge of a wolf. You don’t hunt in packs. You’re more of a bear, perhaps, yes, a great big grizzly roaming the forest and fattening up for a hibernation, that’s Jude-dude, for what is a bear but a large, omnivorous, untamed version of a dog…”

“Jesus, let me answer, Big T,” I complained.

“Or, wait, no,” he continued, “I think you’d maybe be something that can traverse both land and sea, something that can walk between both worlds. A frog! No, nothing amphibious, they seem not to confer your warm nature. A mammal, still, then, like a seal? Or a beaver. A carpenter, a builder of dreams…”

“More of an otter,” Danveer said, for some reason.

“Okay, an otter then,” I said, happy that I knew what animal I’d be if presented with the option, as if this were something important that had eluded me my whole life.

“What about you, Tommy?” Cynthia asked. I was annoyed she’d seemed perfectly willing to let Tommy ramble on in my stead.

Tommy was periodically dunking himself below the surface of the water, balling his knees up to his chest to let himself float. He returned for oxygen to fuel his answer:

“Oh, for myself…I suppose any animal would be fine, so long as I forget this human life and I’m free to live according to the animalistic and instinctual whims within myself. An otter or an eagle, it’d make no difference, I suppose, so long as I have forgotten my humanity. It’s our consciousness and the direct and unfailing realization that we will someday perish that separates us from animals. That’s really it in the end, so leaving that behind would be, I think, preferable…”

“No, no,” Cynthia said. “You have all your human consciousness in this animal body.” I nodded in agreement.

“An ostrich, then, such that I might bury my head beneath the proverbial sand!” He said.

We all laughed. “If you’re going to be a bird, at least be one that flies!” Emma said.

Tiana had enough of our quaint bullshit. “Okay, okay,” she said. “How about this. What’s one dark, dark-ass secret about yourself that nobody knows but you, that you’ve never told anyone.”

We collectively gulped and looked around, but I could tell by the others’ faces that they were game. It was a night for destruction and renewal, exorcisms and catharsis, all in the name of the most memorable post-prom we could have.

“Emma’s first!” I blurted, for no other reason than I was drunk and my fascination with her was showing. Tommy regarded this with uncharacteristic silence.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “A couple of years ago, I came down here and found my brother trying to fuck one of the water jets.”

“Objection! That’s not exactly about you,” I said when the laughter had died down. “It’s supposed to be the darkest thing about you that no one has ever heard, not the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever seen.”

“Sustained,” Cynthia said. “I know you’ve got some darkness in there, Emma.”

“Why don’t you go then?” Emma shot back at her. In the confessions that followed, neither of us realized that she never offered up another secret.

“Fine then. When my grandmother died—like, right in front of me—I felt nothing,” Cynthia said.

This was untold even to me. “Like, nothing?” I attempted to clarify.

She shook her head. “I mean, she only spoke Chinese, and my Chinese...isn’t great. I only met her a few times, and one of those times was in the hospital and she was just this bag of blood and bones to me. I was there when she let out her last breath—it was like a big ole wheeze, like a whoopee-cushion, and I felt nothing. Isn’t that horrible?”

“Ah, fuck it, I mean, you hardly knew her, right? Can’t be expected to grieve someone you hardly know, even if they are your grandmother,” Danveer said. “I felt the same way about my grandpa.”

“I agree, that’s not so bad. What about you, Tommy?” I asked, eager to take the attention away from my girlfriend.

“I don’t know, maybe most people have this figured out, or maybe it will surprise them, I’m not sure. More like they don’t just how deep it goes. But yeah, I’m a kleptomaniac,” Tommy said, as if relaying his blood type, his chin in the water. “By the way though, alcohol may be the fruit of life. And if it is, I am going to play on till I die.”

No one knew what to say to this. Least of all Emma and I, because in the way we made one of our now regular bouts of eye contact, I knew she had also noticed Tommy’s pilfering proclivities, and that it was no secret to us.

Tiana seemed confused by everything Tommy said. “Like, you steal?” she asked. “Like shoplift and shit?”

He nodded and dunked himself beneath the water again. Cynthia rubbed my leg because she knew I wanted comfort in the face of such uneasy topics regarding Tommy.

“What about you, Tiana? I know you’ve got that dark shit,” Danveer asked his date.

“I had sex with a 21-year-old when I was 14,” she said, sipping from the flask again.

Gasps from the rest of us. “Raped! You were raped,” Emma exclaimed. Her and Cynthia reflexively got closer to Tiana and embraced her.

Tiana shrugged through the blanket of their arms. “Nah, I mean...I wanted to do it, so...”

“Oh, girl,” Cynthia said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I mean, I do feel bad about it,” Tiana said. It seemed the reaction elicited from us wasn’t quite what she expected, and perhaps she didn’t realize what she had hoped to gain emotionally from doing so, as it was obvious her idea to play this little game—either consciously or unconsciously—originated from her desire to say this to us, along with what she then asked Dan. “Dan, you got something?” she asked.

“OH GOD GUYS!” Danveer yelled, rolling his head back, earning a shushing from Emma. “I wanted to do this tonight, but I wasn’t sure how or when.”

“Do what, Dan!” Emma and Cynthia said at once.

“I can’t!”

“You can!” I said, laughing.

“I’M GAY!” he yelled, louder than before, but this time there was no shushing from Emma.

“Dan! That’s not a dark secret, that’s a good one!” she said, as all of us closed in on him for a hug.

“It feels dark,” he said.

“Love is love,” Emma said.

“Not exactly a secret. We all knew anyway,” I said.

“Love of all kinds,” Cynthia said. “All love is beautiful.”

Indeed, we did already know, or at least suspect, Danveer’s orientation. We congealed into a mass of hugs around the crying Danveer, whose happy tears joined the water of the hot tub and bathed us in his relief of his ‘dark’ secret. All of us except for Tommy.

“Yeah, I mean, I would say I love Big T,” I said, the alcohol lubricating my tongue as we returned to the edges of the tub. I was annoyed at Tommy’s distance and wanted to inject some sentimentality to break whatever dourness the alcohol had put him in. “Wouldn’t you say we were in love, Tommy?”

“Some love is more equal than others,” he said, putting his mouth and nose below water and peering at me like a frog.

“What, you mean gay love is not the same as straight love?”

“No, I mean platonic love is not the same as romantic love, Jude-dude,” he said, and the way he grabbed Emma by the waist added punctuation to that statement. He dunked himself under the water again.

“Why do you keep doing that?” I pressed. “Dan just told us something very personal, and you’re just dunking yourself underwater. What is that, like a drunk thing? A drunk Tommy thing? You’re not an ostrich—you’re a frog! You turn into a frog when you’re drunk, I guess.”

“Like you said, we already guessed Dan was gay. Congrats, Dan,” Tommy said as he popped back up.

“It’s still a huge deal,” I said before Danveer could answer.

“I can guess your dark secret, Jude,” Tommy said, ignoring me. “It’s that you never beat me in anything, ever.”

Everyone in the hot tub ‘ooh’ed’ in a way that belied the tension the alcohol had struck between Tommy and me.

“Well, that wouldn’t be my secret, because it’s not true,” I said, though I wasn’t sure about it. I was forgetting about the time at Six Flags when I had beaten him at the water gun game.

“Oh really? Let’s give you a chance now then. I bet I can stay underwater in Emma’s pool longer than you.”

“You want a breath-holding competition?”

“No!” Emma commanded in vain as we got out of the hot tub and stood by the edge of her in-ground pool.

“Guys, this is stupid,” Danveer said. “This is like one of those Lifetime movies where the drunk high schoolers do something dumb and die. You’re really going to maybe die on the night I finally tell you guys I’m gay? I mean, go for it, sure.”

“We’ll be fine. A couple of us are lifeguards,” Tommy said, somewhat presciently. He stood there by the pool, glistening and magnificent, all muscled abs and pecs. I knew even Cynthia couldn’t resist peering over at him, and it made me furious.

I was not going to lose.

“Let’s do it. First one to the surface loses,” I said. We counted to three and jumped in, and I assumed a meditative pose at the bottom of the deep end.

I’m not sure how what happened next happened, but I do know that my fury was the fuel, fixing me with a resolve that, combined with the alcohol, somehow led to a lapse of consciousness between trying to kick my way to the surface and waking up with Tommy’s mouth pressing air into mine—a homoerotic happenstance in line with the night’s proceedings.

“Did I win?” I asked after sputtering up the water from my lungs.

“Jude-dude, how did you do that?” Tommy whispered in awe. His voice was a timbre of genuine admiration I’d never heard from him before.

“Jesus CHRIST, Jude! We almost called 9-1-1. What the HELL is wrong with you guys?” Emma shouted as she and Cynthia rushed to my side.

“Where’s that other flask?” Tommy asked. “We deserve it.”

We both started cracking up and were friends all over again.

“You’re both gayer than me,” Danveer said.

Tiana and Danveer went home. The Lightfootes set up two tents out in the yard for Cynthia, Emma, Tommy, and me to spend the night in. They told us that it was boys in one tent and girls in the other, and that they’d be checking in the morning to make sure we’d adhered to the gender restrictions. Of course, they knew what might happen, trusting us to be the responsible kids they knew we were.

They hadn’t counted on the alcohol, but thankfully, our responsibility overcame it.

Cynthia and I had decided beforehand to indulge in a teenage cliché by having our first time after prom. She had lied to her parents and said that the boys were going home and only she was staying at Emma’s, which they agreed to, if only because they didn’t want to pick her up so late at night. Although the alcohol added a new ripple of excitement and passion to the endeavor, we still managed to use a condom and do the deed in a happy and awkward—if slightly painful (for her) and embarrassing (for me)—fashion.

There had been talks of Tommy and Emma doing the same, though I couldn’t get Cynthia to tell me if they were going to follow through with it.

The next morning, we had set alarms to the inconceivable time of 4:30 a.m. so that we could get up and switch tents before Mr. Goodspeed checked on us. I gathered up my clothes, kissed the still-passed-out Cynthia on the forehead (she groaned in the throes of her hangover), and shuffled over to Tommy’s tent, saying a facetious good morning to Emma as I passed her on the way, which she also greeted with a groan.

My zipping up of the tent door woke up Tommy.

“How you feeling, Big T?” I asked as I laid down on a sleeping mat.

“Fine,” he said, surely lying.

“What happened last night? Did you and Emma, uh?”

“No,” he said. “We were too tired. I just passed out.”

He had drunk almost the entirety of Tiana’s second flask himself, and I wouldn’t learn until years later that Emma had spent the night bringing him water from the house as he threw up in the stone birdbath across the lawn.

“You never went,” Tommy said after a moment, his voice hoarse and weak as he stared up at the inside of the tent.

“What? Went where?”

“Your dark secret,” he said. “In the hot tub. You never divulged a secret.”

“Well, doesn’t do much good to say it now when no one’s around, does it?” I said, by then aware that I was experiencing what was known as a ‘hangover.’

“I’m around,” he pointed out.

Before I could dredge up a secret, we both fell back to sleep.

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