California, Brother

1.

Two summers before the summer Samson brought Eric along to Mexico, I'd watched the first Lord of the Rings movie with my dad. Legolas was my sexual awakening. I was sent to bed just as the plot was picking up towards the third act, and I remember vividly getting under the covers, my whole body buzzing.

It was late, and a school night at that, but sleep would not claim me for hours. I'd just witnessed a beauty I thought was impossible, and my mind was abuzz with the potential of it. Matter of fact, I could feel it. The mileage of the fantasies it would induce. How often I would recast them into new moulds and how good my body would feel responding to them. I thought I had this mind-body-control thing going on. A superpower that excited me and frightened me.

We weren't a religious household, but my parents had been late with 'the talk,' overcorrecting for their approach with my older brother, Samson. To make matters worse, I was already thought of as an absent-minded kid.

I was scared and I knew I had to hide this superpower because I was beginning to enjoy it a lot. More than sleeping, and more than computer games, and more than skating with Kyle and Jonah. I would fantasize about Legolas's face and his hair and body, his thighs squeezing the saddle as he rode with his bow and arrow drawn heroically, and it would make me feel good in ways I didn't have the words to describe. Relaxed and excited like the most comfortable roller coaster ride taking place inside my body, unbeknownst to the people around me.

I was a menace to anyone who'd so much as caught a whiff of the movie—which in the year 2003 was approximately half the world's population. I was Dad's personal nightmare, come to haunt him from the seventh ring of hell as I begged and pleaded to watch it every single movie night. The store clerks at our local BlockBuster knew me by name. And then, somewhere during those two summers, I found out Orlando Bloom was in fact not an elf, but a human brunette with short hair. It didn't crush me as much as it might have because by then I had bigger fish to fry—like the fact that girls did nothing for me physically. The F-slur being the favourite adjective of every kid my year and above, I knew what that meant, and I did not want to unpack that bag, ever, if I could avoid it.

I wasn't expecting Eric Westmark to happen. I don't think anyone ever expects a person like him. He was feral. Like literally. The guy hadn't had Dr. Pepper before he came to California. Somehow my mind concocted the rumor that he'd fled from a religious cult, but I swear Samson or Mike or someone must have planted the seed. The story was ridiculously easy to believe. Eric had a good ol' cornfed Midwestern look—strong, healthy, tall. He was kind enough and more well-mannered than all of Samson's other friends. Always ready with a 'yes, ma'am,' 'no, sir,' which in our household, with my mom dressed in recycled PET bottles, barbecuing tempeh while my dad pampered Greta, our Pomeranian, should have been pretty easy to drop. But Eric wouldn't for some reason that everyone but me found endearing.

I'm not going to lie, I thought Eric was weird. I thought his long, past-the-shoulder length hair was weird. I thought his choice of clothing—like he'd rolled around in a pile at Salvation Army—was weird. I thought his mannerisms, relaxed and yet principled and awkwardly people-pleasing were weird. Most of all, I was bewildered at his inability to self-assess. He could've been good-looking. He had the face for it—that is if he could school it into something serious for .3 seconds. He looked better when he wasn't smiling. His teeth weren't the straightest. Dad owned a dental clinic where he worked as a specialist, these were the sort of things I was subconsciously programmed to notice.

At first, when Samson had brought Eric around I didn't think much of it. Samson, who'd dropped out of college one semester in to pursue music, had the debilitating trait that he couldn't leave something wounded on the side of the road. When he was younger this quality had been restricted to small animals that he would tuck under his shirt and nurse in his bedroom. That gradually progressed to larger animals, including classmates that had been kicked out of home, and friends that had been broken up with and needed a couch to crash on. He was always bringing people around. They took a mild interest in me, but our acquaintance was always brief. They'd sleep out in the pool house for however short a period and then we would never see them again. Eric was different.