“His last appointment wasn’t great,” Corinne added. “She’s not going to want to stress him out over a big family argument.”
Julian knew that too, because that’s what his mother always did—because it always worked. His dad called him on schedule, every Wednesday night to bullshit over baseball, new pizza toppings, and his health. He wasn’t dying, Julian knew. At least, not yet. But he was finally at that age where all the small things were big things, and each day was like a countdown to the moment they were over.
Fredric wasn’t ancient. He’d been a young father, and he had at least another twenty years before retirement, but it was a reality he was forced to think about more now than before.
“God, I hate her,” he muttered.
“You don’t,” Corinne said, and that was also true. He didn’t hate his mother, he just deeply disliked her methods of manipulation. She loved her children in her own twisted way, but she was also overly fixated on both of them growing up to her standards of perfect.
And Julian spat in the face of her expectations the day of his birth when he came out with hearing loss and a cleft palate that extended to the tip of his nose. After seven plastic surgeries before he was three, he still caught his mother occasionally looking at his faded scar, and the way the left side of his lip always lifted a bit higher than the right. He saw the look of disappointment in her eyes, though it had been years since that look actually hurt him.
He always thought about how the very state of his body was sort of a protest against her rigid, perfectionist standards, and it guided every decision he made in life. Like how he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps to become a lawyer, and instead got a lowly literature degree so he could beg teenagers to read Orwell, and Bronte, and Austen, and to refrain from making dirty dick jokes in class unless they came straight from the Bard. Or how he was gay, and how he had no desire to get married and produce children that would be forced to live under his mother’s cold scrutiny.
He had money in his account from a slowly releasing trust, and he had a little condo near the downtown art lofts, and he was happy. He was happier now after Bryce left him, because his cheating had vindicated that still, small voice that told him the marriage wasn’t right. He was lonely, of course, but not enough to bother with dating again because he didn’t trust himself to stick around for love rather than obligation.
“She wants us over for dinner tonight,” Corinne said, and then she rolled her eyes when he pretended to adjust his hearing aids. “She’ll have Dad call if you don’t show up. And yes, they’re going to be there, along with Ashton’s parents.”
“Fuck my entire fucking life,” he groaned, fighting off the urge to bash his head against the classroom door until he knocked himself unconscious. His aunt and uncle were just as bad as Jacqueline, and he wasn’t sure he had the strength to put up with their quiet passive aggression for the length of a formal dinner. “What time, because I am definitely going to be late.”
“Show up at seven.”
He nodded, then leaned in to buss a kiss against his sister’s cheek before heading back in. All eyes were on him, and all pencils were down, which meant the essays were thoroughly plagiarized but hopefully finished so he could call an end to this eternal day.
“Are you okay, sir?” Alyssa asked.
He sank into his chair. “Hell is empty, and the devils are here.” When the class just stared at him, he sighed again and shook his head. “Never mind. We’re getting to The Tempest in March. Leave your papers on my desk, have a good holiday. Make better choices than I made at your age.”
There was a mad scramble and dash to his desk and to the door, but only two students were trampled and no one was maimed, so he considered it a successful Friday as the door slammed shut behind the last straggler, and he was finally alone.
The morning Julian had woken up to a stack of freshly printed court documents on his table with a polite, orange post-it written in blue ink asking him to sign the divorce papers, he’d waited three days to say a word. And it was possible Bryce thought