be ridiculous, of course there are,” his mother said. “Eric, you know where the albums are, right?”
“Under the television?” I asked. She nodded yes.
It had been a long time since I looked at any of the old pictures. For a long time after my mother died, they were too painful for any of us to look at. Being hit with her beautiful, smiling face somehow made her loss even harder to bear.
After Carson left, it was even harder to look back. There had been so much loss in a short period of time.
But now I was overcome with nostalgia. These last few days had been an Alice-in-Wonderlandesque trip, part nostalgia, part what could have been, part what might be. It would be good to see where it all started.
Flipping through the albums was like traveling through time, like watching the evolution of my family. My mom and Aunt Momo as teenagers, looking impossibly young. My dad occasionally appearing with one or both of them. His arm around my mom’s shoulders. Then Mom and aunt Momo pregnant and glowing, pregnant together.
Blinking away tears. I cleared my throat and turned the page.
There were so many pictures of me and Jake. We were seldom apart. Gap-toothed six-year-olds and chubby twelve-year-olds. Then as awkward teens, and my personal favorite phase, Goth Jake and jock Eric.
Carson was quiet, shaking his head at his younger self.
“You were babies!” Breck squealed, thrilled. “Oh my God, Carson. Look how adorable! I want to squeeze your face.”
He moved towards Carson as if to do just that. Carson’s look froze him in place. So I did it instead, squeezing his cheeks so that his lips pouted out. The contrast between the glare in his eyes and the duck lips was hilarious. I kissed him. “You’re still adorable, babe.”
There was one photo I distinctly remembered taking. It was in our ‘artistic’ phase. Jake decked out in full emo-glory with tight black pants that we’d gotten from the girl’s section of J.C. Penney, a Misfits T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, his collarbones as delicate as the wings of bird, shoulder-length hair dyed dead flat black and enough eyeliner to make Gerard Way jealous. He was sitting in a tree, long rays of the setting sun illuminating him from behind and casting a golden glow around his neck and head.
“Oh, oh, my. My. God,” Breck said, almost doubling over with laughter. “Oh. This is…” Words failed him and he pulled out his cell phone, holding it over the page.
“No,” Carson said, reaching for the phone. “Hell, no.”
“Shh. Shh. Stop. Let it happen,” Breck said, doing an excellent job of keeping the phone away.
“Pfeiffer, if you don’t put that phone down right this instant…”
“Jake,” his mother scolded. “Stop it.”
Carson glared at Breck and then the other two boys, all of whom seemed to be trying very hard to hold back laughter, and sat back down hard. If he had crossed his arms over his chest, he would have looked very much the way he’d looked at fifteen.
We flipped through the pages. A lot of pictures of both families in different combinations. Parties, holidays, school and sporting events. It was the pictures of me and Jake that caught my eye.
We didn’t look like we should have fit. We looked like the poster children for bullying, starring me as the bully. But while Carson glowered his way through his middle-teens in any forced photos, the few candids of us told a different story.
One in particular made my heart thump. Carson let out an audible gasp and I swear the whole room got quieter.
It had been a high school hockey game where I scored the game-winning goal. After being piled up by my teammates, I’d skated right up to the glass where Carson had been sitting, whooping and cheering. We’d leaned our foreheads together, as close as we could get. The look in our faces. My lord. Anyone could tell we were in love. How could we have ever thought we were hiding anything from anyone? And this had been before our first kiss.
“You guys weren’t subtle,” Steele said with a grin.
“No, they weren’t,” Bob said dryly, but a small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. My father, making a joke about me and Carson? Things really had changed.
Wedged between two pages was a piece of paper. “Places for Eric and Jake to visit” written across the top in childish handwriting. It was a misspelled list of locations around the world with pictures cut from