We Are Totally Normal - Rahul Kanakia Page 0,54

me a merry smile. Dave never looked at me like that. His eyes always held something brooding, sad, and a little bit anxious.

We hadn’t quite defined what we were to each other. Everybody thought of us as boyfriends, I knew, and Mari once used that word, talking about us on the phone to her mom—she said, “Oh yeah, Dave is Nandan’s b-boyfriend, I guess,” although she grimaced at me while she said it.

The word made sense. We did spend a lot of time around each other. I started coming over openly to his house, although his parents were weird about things. One afternoon we timed things wrong, and his dad opened the door to the basement, sending us scurrying into the storage room, where Dave called up, “Hey, I’ll be out in a second,” as if he were alone down there.

A few minutes later, the two of us appeared upstairs, and his dad didn’t breathe a word about why Dave hadn’t mentioned I was at their home. I’d met both his parents by then, and they knew Dave and I were together, but they still treated me like an old friend who’d dropped in for dinner. They didn’t ask me anything about myself—not a word about my studies or my plans or my activities—and instead just included me in their table banter about politics and television. Whenever Dave and I mentioned spending time together or having plans, they got a strained look and skipped over the subject as if I hadn’t said anything.

My mom’s response, on the other hand, was more awkward (though less painful). She rushed up to Dave and grabbed his face and hugged him really deeply and made jokes about how he was “civilizing” me. She got his telephone number, and if she wanted to know where I was or how I was doing, she actually texted him! He in turn texted her once when he had a stomachache, and she rushed to his house, without me, to see if he was okay.

In comparison to Avani, whom she’d always loathed, she openly praised Dave and even asked what his college plans were and whether we’d considered going to the same university.

I did actually like the sense of being settled. And I really liked, oddly enough, meeting his friends! Dave had a whole circle of nerdy Mars Club friends who met twice a week in a room at school. Dave was the president of their club, and they were well into developing their proposal for the Mars Society annual meeting.

They didn’t have any overt reaction to Dave’s coming-out, but their interest in me was sweet, innocent, and very undisguised. They were like a litter of puppies crawling over each other to investigate some shiny new object. One guy in particular, who obviously worshipped Dave, sat next to me and explained, in his nasal monotone, everything Dave was talking about, and afterward the guy volunteered to work with me on the day’s project.

I made some jokes. They weren’t my best, but they went over pretty well, and in general I enjoyed the complete lack of judgment or difficulty. They already liked me, just because I made Dave happy, and whenever I had lunch with them, they accepted me without problems. But their conversation was always about superhero movies and obscure science fiction stuff, like downloading your brain into robots or the possibility of a killer AI arising. At times I laughed, not thinking they were serious, but they didn’t even notice.

Eating with Mari’s friends was more awkward, but much more fun. The awkward part was that they didn’t understand who I was or even the concept of the Ninety-Nine. They were just three friends who’d met freshperson year and ate lunch together each day and liked to talk about their lives and their crushes and what videos they’d recently watched online. They weren’t isolated, precisely, but they were so much tighter with each other than with anybody else. And I think when Mari and I talked about people like Avani, or about the parties we’d gone to, it aroused a strange sense of jealousy in them, as if we were saying we were better than them.

I learned to redirect the conversation, to ask about them and their shared history, to say nice things, to text them, and to slowly work my way into their group. And that was pretty easy. They were open to having me around, and a few times I even ate with them when Mari wasn’t