ME: I could do coffee, if nothing else.
KAINE: Swing by the ‘rents?
ME: See you in 10.
I pulled up outside my parents’ house a few minutes later. Kaine was sitting on the front steps. The crackle of the gravel under the Jeep’s tires caught his attention and a big grin lit his face. I couldn’t help but grin back. Kaine was one of those people that, when they smiled, everyone around them did, too. His whole face just lit up like a Christmas tree.
He ran around to the passenger’s side and opened the door.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, with a suspiciously low voice.
“Are you on ‘roids again?” I laughed.
“Fuck no! You know I don’t do that shit. This body is one-hundred percentau naturel!” he said, dramatically waving his hands over his fit body as he fastened his seatbelt.
“Pity the same can’t be said for your hair…” I quipped, pulling us into a three-point turn.
“Hey!” he said, the mock outrage raising his voice back up into its normal range. “No fair! Lay off the locks!” He patted his hair affectionately.
Kaine’s first boyfriend, Vinnie Avery, had dumped him right after school started in ninth grade, telling him he wasn’t good enough for him, that he never cared about his appearance, and he couldn’t figure out how someone so gay could be so ugly. He’d provided Kaine with a complete critique of the supposed flaws in his appearance, from his weight to his “shit brown” hair, and the list had devastated my brother.
I know, sounded like first world problems, right? But Kaine had struggled with feeling unwanted since he was a kid. His parents hadabandoned him when he was only ten. Like, literally, he woke up one morning alone in a rental house.
No one knew how long he was alone in the house, not even Kaine, I thought. One of the neighbors had finally called the police, because she’d noticed there hadn’t been any adults around in a few weeks, and she’d spotted Kaine stealing a box of stale cereal out of her trash.
Kaine had told me he thought maybe she had known he was alone a long time before she called the police, because he remembered finding food conveniently cleanly packaged and placed on top of the trash bin. They were always things it was easy for a young kid to eat and keep fresh, even after the electricity to the house had been turned off.
The cops had turned him over to Child Protective Services and he’d bounced around a couple of foster homes until my moms had taken him in. They’d adopted him once the legal wrangling had terminated his parents’ rights.
To be rejected by someone he loved again, in addition to his biological parents had left Kaine feeling like there was something wrong with him that made him unlovable. I couldn’t stand how devastated Kaine had been afterward. He’d refused to go to school for over a week and just hid in his bedroom. His devastation had my moms at their wits’ end. They both thought he should just brush it off and move on, not really understanding why he would care so much about the opinion of someone who was obviously shallow.
Kaine and I were close in age and had been close growing up, and his devastation had hit me hard. After waking up in the middle of the night to sounds of him sobbing in his bedroom, I knew I'd to do something.
That next morning I’d skipped school and walked the three miles to the nearest drug store, then spent most of my allowance on a home highlighting kit. I snuck back to the house and had proceeded to thoroughly fry his hair with it. By the time we were done, he probably would have been better off to just shave it off, but it did look fantastic, if I did say so myself. He walked into school the following Monday with more than just a new hair color - he had a whole new attitude.
When his douche of an ex had tried to suck up to him and get back into his good graces, Kaine had pretended like he couldn’t even see the guy. Within a few weeks he had a new boyfriend, Nicki, a kid who had been his best friend before Vinnie came along. The kid had come out of the closet because of his feelings for Kaine, and they’d been together until Nicki’s parents had moved away their junior year. A move that reopened all his feelings of abandonment.
By that point I'd finished basic training and been deployed overseas and so hadn’t been around for the fallout from Nicki’s departure, but I knew it had hit Kaine hard.
“So where to?” I asked as we pulled to the end of the driveway.
“How about Wally Waffle?” he asked. “They just opened their new place on Tallmadge Circle,” he finished.
I groaned.
“You just want to get me killed on the Circle,” I said. Tallmadge Circle was a historic area in a nearby suburb. There was literally a circle of land that had an old church on it and some old school house historical spot. It was a tiny bit of green space, and on its own wasn’t an issue, it was the traffic around it. There were at least eight streets that led on and off and navigating them all safely was a challenge. You took your life in your own hands when you drove there.
“Dude, you have lived here your whole life,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How could you not know how to drive the Circle?”
“Iknowhowto drive it,” I said a bit peevishly. “It’s all theotheridiots in the world who don’t know how to drive it. Did you hear they have so many accidents there they’ve turned it into a ‘no fault’ area? You get in an accident there and the cops won’t even ticket you.”
“Is that what you and all your Uber driver friends talk about? What areas you can have an accident and not get in trouble for?” he teased.
“No, we sit around and talk about our asshole passengers,” I said, eyeing him pointedly as he sat in my passenger seat.
“Fucker,” he laughed. “Good thing you’re driving. Otherwise I might have to hurt you for that.”
“As if you could,” I snorted.
