Whiteboard



  Whiteboard

  A Short Story by Eileen Gonzalez

  Originally Published in Toasted Cheese

  Copyright 2014 Eileen Gonzalez

  January

  My first thought when Kelby walked in was he looks normal enough, and I immediately regretted it. Of course he looked—was—normal, and if he was going to live with us for the foreseeable future, I’d have to stop thinking of him as abnormal or weird or non-binary or anything besides Kelby.

  Caleb set the suitcases by the door as Kelby, with his hunched shoulders and stormy features, stood there not resembling his perpetually sunny brother in the slightest.

  “Alright then, Kel, this is my girlfriend Simone Kim. Simone, this is Kelby.”

  I smiled and shook his hand and said how nice it was to finally meet him. Just the standard script, but I tried to sound like I meant it. Kelby said nothing, perhaps sensing my reticence, perhaps being an ungrateful brat. Caleb nudged him with an elbow, which only earned him a sharper nudge back.

  “Your room is down that hall, first and only door to the right,” I said. Kelby snapped up the suitcases.

  “I’ll help you unpack,” said Caleb.

  “No thanks,” said Kelby.

  He stepped more lightly than his posture would predict, like stomping was beneath his dignity, and disappeared into the guest room.

  “Your family’s nice,” I said.

  “He isn’t always like this.”

  “So you’ve told me.” And told me and told me and told me. As ambivalent as he felt about his parents, Caleb had nothing but unconditional love for his mopey sibling. So when Kel-by got tired of fighting his parents over pronouns, Caleb insisted he stay with us. Only after Kelby accepted did he think to ask me.

  “He needs a safe place to stay,” he’d said.

  “I thought he was supposed to be mad at you for saying genderfluidity is a load of bull cookies.”

  “That was years ago. I’ve been trying to make it up to him since then.”

  “And it worked well enough that he agreed to live with us.”

  He nodded, shuffling his big booted feet against the strip of hardwood between the din-ing room and living room carpets. I opened my laptop.

  “I’m not going to un-invite him,” I said. Caleb looked like he wanted to thank me, but I started typing. I hadn’t even opened a window yet, but I needed that conversation to end, so I put on my work face and faked it. When I actually worked instead of pretending to, I main-tained social networking sites for several small-to-medium businesses, including the Book Worm, a bookstore in Hartford; Fluffy Friends, a toy store with outlets in New Britain, Southington, and Waterbury; and Angelo’s, a swanky New Haven restaurant. I liked working for Angelo’s best. Their Facebook page was a constant stream of scrumptious photos and recipes even Caleb couldn’t ruin. On Kelby’s first night with us, he made lasagna rolls.

  “Lasagna’s his second favorite food,” Caleb told me. “I’d make his first favorite, but then he’d know for sure I was trying to spoil him.”

  “I take it that’s a bad thing?”

  “It is according to Kelby.”

  Sure enough, Kelby thanked his brother for dinner with a mildly suspicious dip in his brows, though that didn’t stop him from taking seconds. Caleb made valiant attempts to grab his attention as we ate.

  “You know, Simone is fluent in Korean. Learning about other languages and cultures is kind of a hobby with you, isn’t it?”

  “I prefer Scandinavian languages, but that’s cool.”

  “That sounds interesting,” I lied. “How many languages do you know?”

  “None real well.” And that was that. Well, no one could say I didn’t try.

  February

  As a lifelong Connecticut resident, I always feel obligated to tell outsiders that I can count the number of white Christmases I’ve had on one finger. White Groundhog Days, howev-er, are a semi-regular occurrence, and it was on one such February 2nd that Kelby marched into the kitchen, announced they had no definable gender today, and insisted we use they to refer to, well, them. I beat my inner Grammar Nazi into submission as Caleb and I nodded.

  The snow had largely melted two days before Valentine’s Day. Last year, we celebrated by going to Gillette Castle, the stately home of a long-dead stage actor whose idea of fun was to put guests in one room and watch them puzzle over the door’s odd locks from upstairs via strate-gically placed mirrors. I knew Caleb was The One when he said he would have used such a set-up to keep the kids out of his hair.

  Kelby didn’t count as a kid, at least not to us; they were a year into college and paid for a good chunk of it by working at a comic book store four days a week. They stayed in their room most of the time, studying or texting or whatever it was they did. So when they emerged from their self-imposed solitude to make a sandwich, I figured I might as well give cordiality another shot.

  “Hey, got any plans for Valentine’s?”

  “Study. Play Guitar Hero. Steal some of the super-expensive chocolates Caleb’s out buying for you right now.”

  I gasped and smiled at once. Kelby raised their eyebrows in a parody of surprise.

  “Was that a secret? Oops.” And if the words weren’t insincere enough, they smirked as they said them, but I laughed along anyway. I mean, c’mon. Chocolate.

  “No, but seriously, no plans?” I said. “You’re adorable when you’re not angsting.”

  “Yeah, well, no one is interested in having a girlfriend when they go to bed and a what-ever when they wake up.”

  They didn’t even have the courtesy to look upset about it. At least then I would have known how to react. No, they just smiled like we were talking about spring fashion. I tried to smile back in the vain hope it would banish the burning coal lodged in my chest.