looking at his phone, somewhat suspicious.
“Felipe, you were on the phone for twelve minutes. No one takes twelve minutes to say hello, no matter how important it is.”
“She asked me for comic book recommendations,” I lie.
“Oh, yeah.” Caio seems to believe my lie, and then my mom calls us to dinner.
Monday is Takeout Night, and we vote to decide what we’ll eat just for the simple pleasure of turning anything about our routine into a TV game show.
I vote for Chinese because I urgently need some advice from Grandma Thereza. But Caio and my mom prefer Mexican, and I have to accept that tonight I won’t get any supernatural help from a fortune cookie.
As we eat our sophisticated Mexican dinner, sharing the tight couch and watching an episode of Hoarders (a really gross show to watch during a meal), Caio’s phone starts ringing. He rolls his eyes and lets out an impatient sigh, but when he looks at the screen and finds out it’s not his mom trying to call, his face lights up.
“It’s Becky. I’ll take it in the bedroom.”
And off he goes, leaving half a meat burrito on a plate balancing on the couch’s arm.
My mom and I continue eating in silence, completely focused on the TV. In today’s episode, we’re following a hoarder addicted to wedding artifacts and cats. She’s never been married but has hundreds of white dresses. When the show crew finds a dead cat under a pile of bridal magazines, my mom and I exchange a look of disgust and decide it’s time to watch something else.
It’s been half an hour and Caio still isn’t back. I can hear his voice from the bedroom but can’t understand what he’s saying. Sometimes he laughs out loud, but mostly it sounds like it’s a serious conversation.
My mom is exhausted. She kisses me good night and goes to bed. Then it’s just me, the TV, and Caio’s burrito. I feel tempted to finish it, but I put it in the fridge because that seems like the right thing to do.
I go into the bedroom quietly, and Caio keeps talking to Rebeca. I try to gesture the question “Can I come in?”
“What’s that?” Caio asks, taking his attention away from the phone.
Apparently, I suck at sign language.
“Can I come in?”
He smiles at me, nods, and goes back to his conversation.
“So, yeah,” he says. “I’m going to hang up now. But thank you for the talk. You know exactly how to pat my head and slap me in the face at the same time.”
I laugh, trying to imagine what that must feel like.
Caio hangs up and hands me a piece of paper. “I circled my favorites.”
It’s the list of cat names that I left on my desk.
I let out a sigh of relief, because on the top of the list I wrote only Possible Cat Names and not Possible Cat Names for the Cat Caio and I Will Adopt in Our First Year of Marriage.
I scan the list and see the names Caio circled: Nesquik, Jonas, Nugget, Beyoncé, and Bagel. The last one is the common denominator, so it’s official. Our adopted cat will be named Bagel.
It’s not even ten o’clock yet, but Caio is already turning off the light and getting ready for bed.
“It was exhausting today. Those kids drained all of my energy,” he explains. “They won’t stop for a second.”
“You weren’t very different,” I say, remembering the afternoons I spent playing with Caio at the pool. He could run and dive for hours, never stopping to rest. But if I got tired (which happened very often), he would calm down and swim slowly with me.
Caio goes quiet for a moment and I’m starting to think he fell asleep when I hear him say in a whisper, “It was cool, wasn’t it? When we were kids. At the pool and everything. Too bad it didn’t last.”
“It was. I don’t even remember why I stopped going,” I lie for the second time in the last couple of hours.
“We can go back there one of these days. I never say no to pool time. Just let me know!” he says, and I can feel a drop of sweat running down my forehead, nervous just to imagine going to the pool with Caio. “If you want to, that is,” he adds, when he notices I got a little awkward.
“Tell me all the things that I missed by not being your friend for the last few years. Only the best parts,”