“Where?” Aunt Deedee said. “Where would you go? You can’t go live with your mother, even aside from the fact that she doesn’t have room, I won’t have it. I won’t have you living there. Are you talking about living with— your man friend?”
“No,” I said, “I was thinking I would look into staying at a shelter until I could save enough money to rent an apartment.”
“Oh, Michael,” Aunt Deedee said, her hand raised to her cheek like I had slapped her.
“Well, where did you think I would go?” I shouted.
“I don’t fucking care where he goes,” Jason said.
“Calm down, Mountain Dew,” I said, but Aunt Deedee was already shouting him down.
“What the good goddamn is wrong with you, Jason Clark? I mean, for heaven’s sakes! He’s your own cousin. And you don’t care where he goes? You want him to live in a shelter? Shame on you. I can’t believe I raised you. I should have taken you to church more because you don’t know the first thing about how to be a decent human being.”
“Yeah, they teach that a lot in church, how to love faggots,” Jason said.
“Go to your room,” Aunt Deedee said, pointing at the ceiling.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he told her.
“Go.”
He went. She sat back in her chair with a great sigh and idly smoothed her pants again.
“I’m just so tired,” she said.
“Your shoulder okay?” I asked. Aunt Deedee had something vaguely wrong with her left shoulder. She’d never been to a doctor about it. But it had to do with being on her feet too much and being too tense and lifting things that were too heavy, and I often rubbed her back for her. I got up behind her to do so now and I could feel her relax under my hands as all her quivering little bird muscles, in her neck, in her shoulders, webbing her spine to her scapulas, almost hissed with release.
“I can’t let you move into a shelter,” she said. “I can’t have you live with Jason. He’s too—”
“Annoyed,” I said.
“Hateful,” she said.
I was beginning to come around to the idea that Aunt Deedee was going to let me stay, even though it made me feel servile and weak. There was something daring and beautiful about the idea of storming out, packing a single bag of my things, going to a shelter and quitting high school and starting my own life. I had even been fantasizing about it on some level. But when the reality of being kicked out had been so naked in the room, I found that I was terrified. If Aunt Deedee had kicked me out that night, I would have simply gone to Bunny’s house like a child playing at running away. I would never, it occurred to me, actually have gone to a shelter. I would have been too scared. And now, as I rubbed Aunt Deedee’s back, the nodes of her vertebrae so unpadded with fat that they felt like sharp rocks through her skin, I was willing to do anything to stay.
Aunt Deedee put her face in her hands and breathed in and out. “I have to give Jason his own room. The question is where to put you where you’ll be as comfortable as possible. You could room with me?” she said, but the look on her face was reluctant.
“Oh, no, no,” I said. “I don’t think that would be—I mean, I could sleep on the couch.”
“I don’t want you sleeping on the couch,” she said.
I made a sympathetic sound as I thought: I’ll get to keep going to high school. Even the sense memory that flooded me of the odor and weight of my textbooks seemed like sweet ambrosia.
“I’ll think of something,” she said, and patted my hand on her shoulder, a signal that I could stop rubbing. But I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want her to think of some way of fixing it later because I was certain she would change her mind.
“I could just sleep on the couch,” I said. “Really.”
“No, I mean, like, until I graduate. And then I could get out of your hair. I’m already practically full-time at Rite Aid.”
Aunt Deedee motioned for me to return to my seat on the ottoman, and then she took hold of both of my hands and she began to speak to me in a manner so earnest it seemed old-fashioned and at first I almost got the giggles.