“I don’t know what’s happened to you. You don’t even seem like yourself anymore,” she told me over a plate of kale and seitan salad last week. “It’s like aliens abducted the real Cal and left this shell behind.”
“Um, okay. Wow. That’s harsh,” I muttered, feeling a stab of hurt even though I’d seen this coming. Not this, exactly, but something. We’d barely seen each other all week, and then all of a sudden she texted We should go to Veggie Galaxy tomorrow. I had a bad feeling, and not just because I hate kale. “I’ve been a little distracted, that’s all.”
“It doesn’t feel like you’re distracted. It feels…” Noemi tossed her braids over one shoulder and scrunched her nose up, thinking. She looked really cute, and it hit me with a pang how much I used to like her. Still did like her, except…it wasn’t that simple anymore. “Like you stopped trying. You’re doing stuff because you think you’re supposed to, but it’s not real. You’re not real. I mean, look at you,” she added, gesturing toward my plate. “You’ve eaten almost an entire plate full of kale, and you haven’t complained once. You’re a pod person.”
“I didn’t realize criticizing your food choices was a prerequisite for being a good boyfriend,” I grumbled, stuffing another forkful of kale into my mouth. Then I almost gagged, because honest to God, only rabbits should eat that crap. A few minutes later, Noemi signaled for the check and insisted on paying it, and I was single once again. Sort of. Truth is, Noemi was probably picking up on the fact that I’ve been interested in someone else for a while, but she didn’t have to pummel my self-esteem into the ground in retaliation.
“Take some time for yourself, Cal,” my dad said when it happened. Well, one of my dads. I have two of them—and a biological mother I see a few times a year, who’s a college friend of my dads and was their surrogate seventeen years ago—but I call both of them Dad. Which is pretty straightforward—to me—but a certain subset of my classmates finds it endlessly confusing. Boney Mahoney, in particular, used to ask me all the time in elementary school, “But how do they know which one you’re talking to?”
It’s easy. I’ve always used a slightly different inflection on the word with each of my fathers, something that started so naturally when I was a little kid that I don’t even remember doing it. But that’s not the kind of thing you can explain to a guy like Boney, who has all the subtle communication skills of a brick. So I told him I call them by their first names, Wes and Henry. Even though I don’t, unless I’m talking about them to someone else.
Anyway, Wes is the dad I go to with personal stuff. “There’s more to life than romantic relationships,” he said when Noemi and I broke up. He’s the dean at Carlton College, and I’m pretty sure he spends half his life worrying that I’m going to have a marriage certificate before a bachelor’s degree. “Focus on your friends for a change.”
Yeah, right. Spoken like a man who’s never met my friends, which he hasn’t, because my Carlton High circle is one of convenience. We’re all people on the fringes of school who drop one another as soon as something better comes along, then go skulking back when it ends. The last time I had real friends was middle school. Wes, who knows way more about my social life than any self-respecting seventeen-year-old should allow, claims it’s because I’ve been a serial dater since ninth grade. And I maintain that it’s the other way around. It’s the ultimate chicken-egg conversation.
At least my new girlfriend likes the same things I do: art, comics, and calorically dense breakfast food with zero nutritional value. Well, girlfriend is probably a stretch. Lara and I haven’t defined things yet. It’s complicated, but I’m all-in enough that I drove forty minutes in rush hour traffic to eat weird doughnuts with her.
I hope I did, anyway.
Ten minutes later, my doughnut’s getting stale. My phone buzzes, and Lara’s name pops up with a string of sad-face emojis. So sorry, can’t be there after all! Something came up.
I tamp down disappointment, because that’s how it is with Lara. Something comes up a lot. I knew when I got into my car that there was a fifty-fifty chance I’d end up eating alone. I pull my plate toward me and take a huge bite of my Cheeto-dusted Bavarian cream and chew thoughtfully. Sweet, salty, with a strong hint of processed cheese. It’s magnificent.