Sophinisba Solis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophinisba) wrote2009-01-04 02:06 pm
sophinisba) wrote2009-01-04 02:06 pm
Entry tags:
Little Miss Sunshine fic: Nine Steps in a Circle
Title: Nine Steps in a Circle
Fandom: Little Miss Sunshine
Characters: Frank and Dwayne (gen)
Rating: PG/PG-13
Words: 5713
Summary: Frank and Dwayne try to figure out what comes next
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
speccygeekgrrl for Yuletide 2008, first posted here. Thanks to claudia603 for beta and cheerleading.
1: Take Stock of Your Situation
"No! Just, fuck!" Dwayne yelled, slamming the bedroom door. Frank tried to stay very still, but he'd probably jumped a little and he dropped his book. "Sorry," Dwayne said to him and, sitting down on his bed and pushing his hands back through his hair, added, "Fuck!"
"Would you like me to go somewhere else?" Frank asked.
"No."
Dwayne lay down and stared at the ceiling. Frank tried to relax in his own bed, but trying not to make noise was making him uncomfortable, which caused him to keep fidgeting and so draw more attention to himself. After a few minutes he gave up trying to disappear and said, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Dwayne shook his head. "Same shit," he said. "Talking won't help."
"All right," said Frank. He picked up his Blanchot and pretended to read.
2: Decide on a Goal
He found out what the shouting was about a few hours later, as they settled around the table for dinner.
"So, Dwayne," said Richard, reaching for a chicken wing, "have you given any more thought to what you want to accomplish, now that flying's out of the picture?"
Dwayne remashed his mashed potatoes and gravy with the back of his plastic fork, saying nothing.
"There are a lot of different jobs in the Air Force, you know. Just because you're not gonna be a pilot doesn't mean –"
"I'm not going to the Air Force Academy."
"It's a fine education, you know."
"Yeah, I know."
"I just don't want to see you…drifting." He glanced uneasily at Frank and then back at Dwayne. "You're smart, you're talented, you're strong, and most important of all you know how to go after what you want. You're capable of great things, and I don't want to see you throw that away just because –"
Dwayne stood up abruptly, pushing his chair back from the table. He put a piece of chicken on his plate and took it with him to the bedroom. His room, where Frank wouldn't try to follow him, at least not until the meal was over.
Frank cleared his throat and said, "Maybe he could use a little time to get used to all this. You know, before you push him ahead to the next thing."
"I'm not pushing him into anything," Richard said with a shrug. "I just want him to push himself. A kid's gotta have goals."
"But maybe your goal is just to have fun, right, Olive?" said Sheryl.
Olive grinned and nodded as she picked some dark meat off the bone of a drumstick with her teeth.
"Somehow I don't think having fun is a very realistic goal for Dwayne," said Richard.
After dinner Frank spent a couple hours watching TV with Richard, Sheryl, and Olive. This was something they managed to do as a family without much arguing, since Olive insisted on silence during her reality shows.
After Olive had gone to bed to dream of manufactured drama and ecstatic contestants, Frank knocked on Dwayne's door. When there was no answer he let himself in and settled quietly on the bed.
"It was so much easier when I could just ignore him," Dwayne said to the ceiling. "I made it into this big thing, like I was making a sacrifice, but it really just started with me not wanting to talk to them."
"I wish I could give you some privacy, kid. But your mom still thinks she shouldn't leave me alone –"
"And they're sleeping in separate rooms now so there's no room anyway. Don't worry about it though. I don't really mind having you here."
Frank thought of himself at fifteen and wondered how he would have felt about having a strange suicidal gay man sleeping three feet away from him. "I'd mind," he said.
"You're not trying to push me," said Dwayne.
"I'm not exactly in a position to."
Dwayne didn't say anything for a while, and Frank had the urge to get up and pace, or pick up another book, but he resisted. If not being pushy was the one thing he had going for him at the moment he wasn't going to ruin that too.
"I'm just…I'm wondering what I did with the last nine months, but I also kinda wish I could go back to that," Dwayne said.
"Why is that?"
"Because…you can say now, it was all for nothing, I was wasting my time. But at least then I didn't know it was all pointless. I've got these notebooks." He sat up and took one off the night table, held it up to Frank's face. "I went through a lot of these fucking notebooks, but it was…efficient. I only used words when I really needed them, and the rest of the time I could just keep to myself."
"Is that really what you want?"
"Yeah."
Dwayne tossed the notebook in the waste basket.
"Oh, come on." Frank said quickly, tired of talking like a useless psychologist. He grabbed the discarded notebook. "This is our reunion, right here. This is our weekend from hell. This is your life. You really want to throw this away?"
Dwayne's stare communicated effectively that the answer was yes, but that grabbing it out of Frank's hand would be too much ridiculous effort and drama.
"All right then. I'll just hold on to it for you for a while."
Dwayne shrugged, then directed his disdainful gaze toward the wall, the chart full of sets and reps that he'd been marking every day for months before Frank arrived, keeping track of his conditioning, his progress. He hadn't touched it in a week. He lunged for it, and this time Frank didn't try to stop him. Dwayne tore the sheet of paper into pieces with big, violent movements and then stuffed them all in the garbage.
"Better?" Frank asked.
"Not really."
"Do you miss doing push-ups?"
"No."
"Okay, so it is better. What do you want to do next?"
"Nothing."
Frank nodded. "Sounds good to me," he said. "Maybe it's time to live without goals for a little while. Or make your goal, I don't know, just living through the next three years. Or through the summer."
"Would you go in with me on that one?"
Frank blinked, then thought about that. "The summer's a little much," he said. "Why don't we start with this week?" he said.
Dwayne stood in the middle of the little room and held out his hand, a solemn look on his face. Frank hadn't been so aware of the scars on his wrists all week, but he stood up and he shook Dwayne's hand.
3: Any Start Is a Good Start
"Hey, Dwayne, do you have any more of those notebooks?" Frank asked a few days later.
Dwayne nodded, put down his book. He opened a cabinet and took out a cardboard box with a dozen of them inside. "You gonna take a vow of silence until…?"
"No, just felt like writing."
"Don't you have your computer?"
"Mm hm."
The nice thing about Dwayne was you knew he wasn't going to demand more of an answer than that. He tossed one of the blank notebooks on Frank's bed. Frank opened it to the first page, paused, and then wrote,
He looked at it, then turned the page. He wrote,
That took up several of the tiny pages. He looked at Dwayne, who was back to staring into space. Frank turned to another blank page and wrote,
Dwayne cleared his throat, and Frank wondered whether he'd waited for a pause in the movement of his pen to speak. "So," Dwayne said, "if you're not using your computer, do you…"
"You wanna use it? That's fine. I haven't tried to hook it up to the dial-up yet but –"
"I don't need it for that, just want to write something. Do you, um…" Frank waited. "I don't really want any of them to know what I'm doing."
"Okay. Yeah, the whole thing's password-protected, actually," which he'd done around the time he got fired, thinking there'd be more of a fight, legal challenges and investigations. Instead he'd given up and gone quietly, but he'd kept it locked. For that matter he hadn't even turned the thing on in three weeks, not since the night at the motel when he'd gone in to reread some old e-mails to and from Josh and ended up mixing vodka and half a bottle of Ativan. At the hospital they made him drink two extra-large charcoal shakes, but he kept them from calling Sheryl that time.
Since then he hadn't even had the will to open it up to look at some pictures and jerk off, let alone try to write something.
"But we can set up a separate account for you and lock that."
"It's no big deal," Dwayne said, "as long as the rest of them can't… I mean, I know you wouldn't look at my stuff if I told you not to."
That was true, and thinking about it Frank realized they didn't need separate accounts. Dwayne wasn't likely to go snooping around in his files. And even if he did, well, the kid had to have seen porn before. If he saw something new in Frank's porn it wouldn't be the death of either of them. And if he read Frank and Josh's correspondence and learned something new about love or something about betrayal, that wouldn't be the end of the world either.
Frank handed over the laptop, saying, "Just type Larry pound-sign one Suckerman, no space."
Dwayne opened it up and entered the password. "Okay," he said when it went through.
For the next ten minutes the two of them sat together, Dwayne typing, Frank writing notes he knew he would never give Josh to read. Then Dwayne said, "I hope they get divorced soon. I don't know what they're waiting for."
"Yeah," Frank agreed. It was a hell of a thing to wish on his sister, but then, so was an unhappy marriage. Besides that, once Richard left (because Richard would be the one to move out) Edwin's room would be free again and Frank and Dwayne could finally get some time to themselves.
"I told her not to marry him in the first place," said Dwayne.
"Seriously?"
"What, didn't you?"
"Yeah, but you were five."
"Yeah," Dwayne said with a sigh, as if remembering there was a time when he didn't hate the age he was stuck at. Or maybe not. Maybe when he was five he already wished his mom would take him more seriously. Maybe he was looking forward to being a teenager.
"Is that what you're writing about?"
"No."
Frank thought about the novel he tried to write when he was fifteen, and how he would have reacted if someone had asked to see his work of genius before it was finished. "Okay," he said.
4: Get a Little Help from Your Friends
When Frank had gone through six of Dwayne's miniature notebooks he stopped at Walgreen's and bought a regular-sized one, college ruled, but with a skateboarding-themed cover clearly designed to appeal to teenagers (if not the kind of teenager he was sharing a room with). He was used to buying Moleskines, but the price differential of little things like that actually mattered now.
Frank spent most of his time at the house, but Monday and Wednesday afternoons he took Olive on the bus to her dance class downtown, near the University. While she was there he'd walk past the Starbucks to Dunkin' Donuts, where he'd sit and scribble and drink black coffee instead of the lattes he was used to. The coffee wasn't half bad, as it turned out.
He'd stopped addressing his thoughts to Josh and was filling up the pages with memories, not worrying much about whether anyone else would ever see them. He'd sit at a plastic table and write for two hours without stopping, without going back to read it. Twice he'd cried while sitting at that table, but he pulled himself together by the time he go meet Olive. The teenagers who worked there looked at him a little funny after that, but in general they were too busy to pay much attention. He figured every coffee shop or restaurant must have a crazy regular or two. At least this one didn't shout profanities at the other customers, so they probably didn't mind him too much.
Since he couldn't spend all day drinking coffee and he felt guilty for not bringing any money into the house, he started picking up groceries and making dinner, timed to be ready when Sheryl came home from work. He did it mainly for his own sanity, because there were only so many meals of fried chicken a person could eat. That it made Sheryl smile at him was an added benefit. Even Richard thanked him once in a while, though it seemed to be more for the sake of demonstrating good manners to Olive than out of genuine appreciation. Olive herself seemed to miss the chicken, or maybe she just looked sad because she missed hearing her grandfather swear. Dwayne didn't react to the change in meals at all.
"Nice notebook," Dwayne said when they were alone in their room that night.
"Thanks." Frank looked at the cover again. "I'm writing autobiography, so this is good for helping me remember junior high. You know, the kids my age who were so much cooler than me they couldn't even be bothered to beat me up."
"When you need your computer back just let me know. I should be done with this pretty soon anyway."
Frank took that as a signal Dwayne wanted another shot at the question he'd refused to answer so far, and he obliged: "So what's the top secret project that's nearing completion?"
Dwayne was silent for a few seconds, but Frank was used to that by now, knew he was just gathering his thoughts and didn't need more cajoling.
"Study abroad," Dwayne said.
"Now?" Junior year of college was what he was used to.
"Applying now so I can go next year," said Dwayne. "If I get into this one program I think they could afford it."
Frank thought briefly about how broken his sister would feel if this worked out, but asked only, "Where do you want to go?"
"Germany, I think. Austria could work."
"Do you speak German?"
"I've had a year."
"Okay, well, that's a start."
"But I wasn't talking that year, so."
"That's less of a start. I know some German though. I can help with that if you want."
"Yeah. Or, you know, Czech Republic or Holland or something. Japan, maybe. Mostly I just want to get out of here. Anyway, the application essays are in English."
"I'm okay at English too."
Dwayne stared at the screen for a while. He was punching a few buttons but he could have been deleting and replacing a word over and over. "Yeah. Did you ever read these? Applications and stuff?"
"Of course."
"So you know what they're looking for? 'Cause I could use some help with. Yeah, why don't you just read what I've got and tell me if you think it's ready."
"Sure." Dwayne handed over the laptop and, before starting to read, Frank looked at him and said. "Thanks. Thanks for trusting me with this."
Dwayne nodded but looked away.
Dwayne's first sentence was,
"Just to be clear," said Frank, "You're supposed to be talking about yourself?"
"Yeah."
"Okay."
Frank read another two pages of application essay boilerplate and then said, "So, just to be clear –"
"It's what they want. I read about it – you're supposed to be confident and friendly and flexible."
"You're supposed to be a real person, I think. I mean, if Germany wanted robots they could make their own robots."
Dwayne shrugged his shoulders as if to show he didn't care, but his voice was rising defensively as he said, "It's a means to an end."
Possibly Frank should back off if he wanted Dwayne to continue to trust him. Then again, if he agreed with everything he wouldn't be very helpful.
"What's the end then? You move in with some German family that's expecting Joe Shmoe and won't be prepared for the brilliance and complexity of Dwayne Hoover."
"They'll adjust," said Dwayne, "they'll be flexible. Look, I can't just write that I want to be an exchange student because I hate my real family, can I?"
"Is that the only reason you want to go?" On his first day here, when Dwayne had written in his notebook that he hated everyone, Frank had actually believed him. By the time he was shouting it out loud two days later Frank already knew it was a lie. But this wasn't the time to point that out.
"No."
"Okay, listen, when's this application due?"
"Six weeks."
"You've got plenty of time then. Let's try something different. Forget about the essay questions. Forget about a means to an end. Forget about words needing to be efficient. Try typing in this computer and writing whatever the hell you want."
Dwayne's mouth twisted. "My seventh-grade English teacher made us do that. It was a waste of time."
"Yeah, but you're a much more interesting person now than you were in seventh grade," said Frank, who was determined not to lose steam. "Here, if you need a theme, write about what annoys you so much about your family."
Dwayne nodded appreciatively.
"And meanwhile, you're gonna try reading something different. Not that there's anything wrong with Nietzsche –"
"You're not gonna give me Proust, are you?"
Determined. "It just so happens that I've got a copy of Swann's Way right here."
He dug deeper into his backpack than he had in a couple months. Even though he'd been lugging it around to the donut shop and the grocery store he hadn't gone to the trouble of emptying it out. He pulled out a very old and very battered paperback copy and handed it to Dwayne, who turned it over. A few pages fell out in his hand.
"Shouldn't you have a nice leather-bound complete edition or something?"
"Sure, I've got a couple of those too, but they're in storage. This is the one I keep with me in case of emergencies."
"I was hoping to send the application off early."
"Don't be such an overachiever, Dwayne. Remember –"
"Yeah, I know, Proust was a loser."
"You'll be in great company."
5: Be Honest with Yourself
They didn't tell Olive that Richard was moving out until he'd already packed his bags. Parents and child sat on the sofa in the living room and Frank did his absolute best to stay out of their way. He gathered the few things he had at the house and moved them into Edwin's old room. To his surprise, Dwayne knocked on the door less than fifteen minutes later.
"I thought you'd be reveling in the solitude," said Frank.
Dwayne shook his head. "If I'm by myself I'll just be listening to them talking and crying, and it'll make me want to scream."
There was only one bed and no chair in this room, so Dwayne sat on the floor and wrapped his arms around his knees.
"I don't really like Proust," he said.
Frank was used to hearing this from undergrads, though usually they were a little less blunt. It didn't faze him.
"Anything in particular about him?"
"I guess I just don't see the point."
Frank grinned. "Exactly."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, that's what great about it! There is no point! It's not about being efficient. It's not about...working your way through the nine steps to come out a winner on the other side. It's about this cup of tea I had once."
"I guess," Dwayne said doubtfully.
He arched his back and Frank could tell he was balancing, holding himself up with his abdominal muscles, like someone who wants to exercise but doesn't want people to notice. Frank noticed. Dwayne hadn't gone back to the push-ups and chin-ups but he was jogging most days. Frank hadn't had that kind of energy at fifteen or at any time since, but he thought he could understand. After all, everybody needed some excuse to get out of the house.
"Okay, so what about you? How's your writing coming along?"
"It isn't. I told you, that write-whatever-comes-into-your-head stuff is a waste of time. I'm just…I guess I'm not filling up pages. I'm filling up file space."
"Okay, but have you been doing it?"
"Yes."
"That's good enough then. You can figure out what's useful once you get closer to the deadline. Will you let me see?"
Dwayne leaned back on his hands. "If you really don't have anything better to do."
6: Put Yourself Out There!
Frank really didn't have anything better to do, but he tried not to let that get to him. He liked what he was doing, or he liked it more than what he'd been doing before he moved in with Sheryl. He liked that he'd started using the computer again without really noticing, just in order to be nosy. He liked that Dwayne didn't seem to mind.
Most evenings after that Dwayne came to sit with Frank in Edwin's old room, even though there wasn't a lot of family drama to escape from, just Sheryl cheering on Olive's dance routine or watching a video with her.
Dwayne would sit or lie on the floor and read a book while Frank went over what he'd written.
"This is good," Frank said one night, two weeks after Richard had left. "This story about Olive and the teddy bear. That sounds like an absolutely horrific day. That sounds worse than our trip to Redondo Beach."
"Yeah," said Dwayne. "It was pretty bad. It just happened that way though. There wasn't anything special about the way I told it."
"That's what makes it work though, because you're not trying too hard to tell something perfectly constructed. It feels real."
"Because it is r –"
"Really, it's great. You could do more with this part. See if you can bring back any more details, like what you have here about the smell. How were people sitting? How were they looking at each other?"
Dwayne came and sat next to him on the bed and squinted at the screen. "You mean like here?"
"Yeah."
"This isn't gonna help me get to Germany," Dwayne mumbled, as he often did, but he took the computer back and started typing. Frank sat back and smiled.
He was teaching again, and it took that to make him realize that this was what he fucking missed. More than reading, more than writing, maybe even more than the shape of Josh's hips under his hands or the touch of those lips on his wrist. It was the look in Josh's eyes when he talked about Proust, but it was also the way that freshman, Steve Kim, frowned at his copy of Molloy while he tried to work through his thoughts. It was the day Jenna Miller showed up at his office hours to talk about switching her major from chem to comp lit, and the flush on Alicia Gimenez's cheeks when he asked her to read aloud in French, and then she did it perfectly.
After he'd been working for another half hour Dwayne said, "I suppose you're gonna tell me this story means I don't actually hate them."
"I wasn't going to say any such thing." But the truth was Dwayne had enough material now to show how open and loving he really was, despite his best intentions. It would mostly be a question of rearranging for the essay questions. It was nice, knowing they both knew this without having to argue about it, or even say it out loud.
Frank was feeling so good the next day that he actually went though the trouble and awkwardness of calling up Dianne Wursten at UMN and having her call up an old friend at NAU-Albuquerque and set up an interview for the following week. Okay, so the place didn't have an English department, let alone comp lit, but that was all right. This was what he was supposed to be doing. They'd work something out.
7: Don't Get Discouraged by Setbacks
After the interview he took the bus back to the house and started working on dinner, with Olive helping him out in the kitchen. He didn't realize until Sheryl got home and checked the answering machine that he'd already been rejected.
"Hi, I'm calling from Dean Alvarez's office to thank you for coming in today," said a woman's voice, sounding very young and very bored, "and to let you know the department has made the decision not to contract your services at this time. Thanks again."
"What does that mean?" Olive asked, wide-eyed, as if sensing from the way the others froze that this was something serious.
"It means I was looking for a job and they decided not to hire me," Frank answered.
"Frank," said Sheryl, "I didn't know you were –"
"I wasn't really," Frank said, smiling at both of them. "It was kind of a whim, just thought I'd give it a shot."
"Do you –" Sheryl started.
"It's no big deal," Frank said firmly.
"Okay. We'll, um, we'll talk about it later if you want."
Frank nodded and smiled again. "I made eggplant torte à la provençale," he said. "Who's hungry?"
Dwayne was leaning out of the doorway of his room. He said, "I could eat."
That might after Dwayne had gone back to his own room with the laptop and had shed tears of joy over the surprise ending of So You Think You Can Dance before going to bed, Frank sat down next to Sheryl on the couch. The local news lit up their faces without leaving any impression on them.
Frank said, "I need to thank you for helping me out, these last couple months."
"What?" Sheryl said. "Of course. We're family. I'm not gonna leave you out on the street. I hope you don't think that."
"No. I know that, but I still want to help out more, with the money. Didn't work out this time but –"
But the idea of going out there again was terrifying enough to keep him from finishing the thought. And never mind Proust, never mind being a respected scholar, if he couldn't teach at a community college, was there really any point in thinking of himself as a teacher anymore? And if there wasn't, what else was he going to do? Write technical manuals? Sell insurance? Fix cars?
"Hey," said Sheryl, her hand on his shoulder. "Hey, no. Remember when Tony left and I couldn't even afford to get food for Dwayne and me on my own?"
"But you had to take care of two people, and you managed it. I couldn't even –"
"I didn't mange it. I wouldn't have made it through without your help. Dwayne wouldn't have either."
Frank knew he'd been a lot less gracious at the time than Sheryl had been these last few months. But it was all right, it was like she said, they were family and they took care of each other. He hoped they were both a little more mature now than they had been thirteen years ago.
"He turned out great though. You know that, right?"
"Dwayne? Oh yeah. I mean, he's not really turned out yet, is he? He's not quite finished, but he's terrific. And he's…he hasn't wanted to talk to me that much lately, but I'm glad he's talking to somebody. I'm glad you're here with us, Frank."
"Well, I'm not really turned out yet either," said Frank. "I don't know if I'm the best influence…"
Sheryl just laughed and said, "None of us are," and went quiet again. "I miss Richard," she said after a minute. "I didn't think I would. I thought Olive would miss him and I'd just be relieved but I…but he…."
"Shhh," said Frank, "it's okay," and he hugged her.
"I'm sorry you didn't get the job."
"I probably would've hated it," he said truthfully.
"We'll figure out something."
Frank nodded and patted her back. "Sure we will," he said.
8: Are You Ready for Success?
Richard moved back in that weekend.
Olive hugged him and ran around the house some and hugged him some more and went around to everyone else in the family, asking how happy they were that Richard was back. Frank said he was happy for her. Dwayne didn't say anything.
Rather than move back to Dwayne's room, Frank took the opportunity to establish himself a little better in Edwin's. He figured if Richard wanted to come back then he was responsible for keeping Sheryl happy enough to sleep in the same room with him. Frank was digging through the closet when Dwayne came in and locked the door to shut out his sister's screaming, as if just closing it wasn't enough.
"You'll see though," Frank said, without turning around, "someday your lover will leave you and you'll lose your job and your house and your will to live, and then you'll be glad you have a sister." He paused, "Or maybe not exactly glad…"
"Yeah, I get it." When Frank came back was relieved to see that Dwayne did, that he was smiling. "It's just loud, that's all. I don't think she's been this excited since she found out she was going to California."
"She was pretty worked up on Wednesday," said Frank, "but in a quieter kind of way. I think she was nervous to let me know how excited she was."
"What's Wednesday, dance class?"
"Yeah, and this particular Wednesday was the day she figured out that her dance teacher and I need to get together."
Dwayne burst out laughing.
"What? Just because he's probably the only other gay person she knows?"
"Have you met her dance teacher?"
"No, we always split up outside the building. She wants me to come in to class next week so she can introduce us.
"And do you have anything in common with this guy besides… And how does she even know he's gay, anyway?"
Frank shrugged. "Maybe your mom figured it out. Also, it seems he speaks French."
"Oh well, there you go, you're made for each other."
Frank just smiled. It was funny how he'd gotten past whatever fear of humiliation he'd had in the past. Dwayne started giggling again, this time staring at the small pile of Edwin's porn mags that Frank was getting ready to throw out.
"What is it?" said Frank. "What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking. The last advice he gave me before he died."
Frank tried to remember, but he'd done his best to block out most of that trip. He hadn't even read through the little notebook Dwayne had written in that weekend.
"Fuck a lot of women," Dwayne reminded him. He sat down on the bed and typed the password for the computer.
"Ah. So… Is that your new goal?"
Dwayne smiled and shook his head. "I don't know if I want to…women, I mean."
Frank just nodded. It was a conversation he'd had with several undergrads. He knew not to try to make it go too fast.
"Did you always know?" Dwayne asked.
"That I was gay? Pretty much, yeah. Once I figured out that was an option."
Dwayne laughed, more softly now, eyes on the blank screen.
"But it's different for everybody. That's okay too. Keep your options open."
"Right."
"Can I tell you something, Dwayne?"
Dwayne turned to look at him, his expression clear and open.
"You wouldn't have liked the Air Force anyway."
9: You Are a Winner!
The two of them walked to the post office together, even though it would have been fine to leave the envelope in the mailbox to be picked up.
"If this doesn't work out," Frank said, "it's not the end of the world."
"I know."
"In fact if it does work out, your life will actually get more complicated. You'll have to tell everyone. Your mom and Olive will probably cry, and there'll be money issues. You'll have to ask Richard for help, whether or not he's still in the house at that point."
"I know."
"And then you'll have to leave them and go live with another family that you might hate even more. And, you know, learn German. Or Czech or something."
"Yeah. And if it doesn't work out I'll have to start over."
"Figure out something else to try for."
"Would you go in with me on that one?"
"Yeah," said Frank, "I will."
They shook hands and then turned around and walked back.
Fandom: Little Miss Sunshine
Characters: Frank and Dwayne (gen)
Rating: PG/PG-13
Words: 5713
Summary: Frank and Dwayne try to figure out what comes next
Notes: Written for
speccygeekgrrl for Yuletide 2008, first posted here. Thanks to claudia603 for beta and cheerleading.1: Take Stock of Your Situation
"No! Just, fuck!" Dwayne yelled, slamming the bedroom door. Frank tried to stay very still, but he'd probably jumped a little and he dropped his book. "Sorry," Dwayne said to him and, sitting down on his bed and pushing his hands back through his hair, added, "Fuck!"
"Would you like me to go somewhere else?" Frank asked.
"No."
Dwayne lay down and stared at the ceiling. Frank tried to relax in his own bed, but trying not to make noise was making him uncomfortable, which caused him to keep fidgeting and so draw more attention to himself. After a few minutes he gave up trying to disappear and said, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Dwayne shook his head. "Same shit," he said. "Talking won't help."
"All right," said Frank. He picked up his Blanchot and pretended to read.
2: Decide on a Goal
He found out what the shouting was about a few hours later, as they settled around the table for dinner.
"So, Dwayne," said Richard, reaching for a chicken wing, "have you given any more thought to what you want to accomplish, now that flying's out of the picture?"
Dwayne remashed his mashed potatoes and gravy with the back of his plastic fork, saying nothing.
"There are a lot of different jobs in the Air Force, you know. Just because you're not gonna be a pilot doesn't mean –"
"I'm not going to the Air Force Academy."
"It's a fine education, you know."
"Yeah, I know."
"I just don't want to see you…drifting." He glanced uneasily at Frank and then back at Dwayne. "You're smart, you're talented, you're strong, and most important of all you know how to go after what you want. You're capable of great things, and I don't want to see you throw that away just because –"
Dwayne stood up abruptly, pushing his chair back from the table. He put a piece of chicken on his plate and took it with him to the bedroom. His room, where Frank wouldn't try to follow him, at least not until the meal was over.
Frank cleared his throat and said, "Maybe he could use a little time to get used to all this. You know, before you push him ahead to the next thing."
"I'm not pushing him into anything," Richard said with a shrug. "I just want him to push himself. A kid's gotta have goals."
"But maybe your goal is just to have fun, right, Olive?" said Sheryl.
Olive grinned and nodded as she picked some dark meat off the bone of a drumstick with her teeth.
"Somehow I don't think having fun is a very realistic goal for Dwayne," said Richard.
After dinner Frank spent a couple hours watching TV with Richard, Sheryl, and Olive. This was something they managed to do as a family without much arguing, since Olive insisted on silence during her reality shows.
After Olive had gone to bed to dream of manufactured drama and ecstatic contestants, Frank knocked on Dwayne's door. When there was no answer he let himself in and settled quietly on the bed.
"It was so much easier when I could just ignore him," Dwayne said to the ceiling. "I made it into this big thing, like I was making a sacrifice, but it really just started with me not wanting to talk to them."
"I wish I could give you some privacy, kid. But your mom still thinks she shouldn't leave me alone –"
"And they're sleeping in separate rooms now so there's no room anyway. Don't worry about it though. I don't really mind having you here."
Frank thought of himself at fifteen and wondered how he would have felt about having a strange suicidal gay man sleeping three feet away from him. "I'd mind," he said.
"You're not trying to push me," said Dwayne.
"I'm not exactly in a position to."
Dwayne didn't say anything for a while, and Frank had the urge to get up and pace, or pick up another book, but he resisted. If not being pushy was the one thing he had going for him at the moment he wasn't going to ruin that too.
"I'm just…I'm wondering what I did with the last nine months, but I also kinda wish I could go back to that," Dwayne said.
"Why is that?"
"Because…you can say now, it was all for nothing, I was wasting my time. But at least then I didn't know it was all pointless. I've got these notebooks." He sat up and took one off the night table, held it up to Frank's face. "I went through a lot of these fucking notebooks, but it was…efficient. I only used words when I really needed them, and the rest of the time I could just keep to myself."
"Is that really what you want?"
"Yeah."
Dwayne tossed the notebook in the waste basket.
"Oh, come on." Frank said quickly, tired of talking like a useless psychologist. He grabbed the discarded notebook. "This is our reunion, right here. This is our weekend from hell. This is your life. You really want to throw this away?"
Dwayne's stare communicated effectively that the answer was yes, but that grabbing it out of Frank's hand would be too much ridiculous effort and drama.
"All right then. I'll just hold on to it for you for a while."
Dwayne shrugged, then directed his disdainful gaze toward the wall, the chart full of sets and reps that he'd been marking every day for months before Frank arrived, keeping track of his conditioning, his progress. He hadn't touched it in a week. He lunged for it, and this time Frank didn't try to stop him. Dwayne tore the sheet of paper into pieces with big, violent movements and then stuffed them all in the garbage.
"Better?" Frank asked.
"Not really."
"Do you miss doing push-ups?"
"No."
"Okay, so it is better. What do you want to do next?"
"Nothing."
Frank nodded. "Sounds good to me," he said. "Maybe it's time to live without goals for a little while. Or make your goal, I don't know, just living through the next three years. Or through the summer."
"Would you go in with me on that one?"
Frank blinked, then thought about that. "The summer's a little much," he said. "Why don't we start with this week?" he said.
Dwayne stood in the middle of the little room and held out his hand, a solemn look on his face. Frank hadn't been so aware of the scars on his wrists all week, but he stood up and he shook Dwayne's hand.
3: Any Start Is a Good Start
"Hey, Dwayne, do you have any more of those notebooks?" Frank asked a few days later.
Dwayne nodded, put down his book. He opened a cabinet and took out a cardboard box with a dozen of them inside. "You gonna take a vow of silence until…?"
"No, just felt like writing."
"Don't you have your computer?"
"Mm hm."
The nice thing about Dwayne was you knew he wasn't going to demand more of an answer than that. He tossed one of the blank notebooks on Frank's bed. Frank opened it to the first page, paused, and then wrote,
This is stupid. I'm not fifteen. I don't need a fucking notebook. I don't know why I even
He looked at it, then turned the page. He wrote,
Dear Josh, great running into you last week. Hope you and Larry had a good trip. I hope you're really enjoying getting fucked by that fucker. Don't be surprised if he steals all your ideas for his next book – I think that's his regular modus operandi, but then you probably knew that going into this. Hell, maybe that's what you're planning to do too.
That took up several of the tiny pages. He looked at Dwayne, who was back to staring into space. Frank turned to another blank page and wrote,
When I was fifteen I was sure I was going to write the novel that everybody talked about for the next hundred years. By the time I graduated from college I was more realistic – I just thought I'd make a decent living as a novelist. It wasn't until grad school that I really gave up and settled for writing about someone else's novels. I loved Marcel so much and I loved my professor so much that I barely even realized at the time I was giving up on myself. I wonder if it was like that for you. We never talked about what you'd be doing with your life if you weren't following Proust specialists around like a puppy dog.
Dwayne cleared his throat, and Frank wondered whether he'd waited for a pause in the movement of his pen to speak. "So," Dwayne said, "if you're not using your computer, do you…"
"You wanna use it? That's fine. I haven't tried to hook it up to the dial-up yet but –"
"I don't need it for that, just want to write something. Do you, um…" Frank waited. "I don't really want any of them to know what I'm doing."
"Okay. Yeah, the whole thing's password-protected, actually," which he'd done around the time he got fired, thinking there'd be more of a fight, legal challenges and investigations. Instead he'd given up and gone quietly, but he'd kept it locked. For that matter he hadn't even turned the thing on in three weeks, not since the night at the motel when he'd gone in to reread some old e-mails to and from Josh and ended up mixing vodka and half a bottle of Ativan. At the hospital they made him drink two extra-large charcoal shakes, but he kept them from calling Sheryl that time.
Since then he hadn't even had the will to open it up to look at some pictures and jerk off, let alone try to write something.
"But we can set up a separate account for you and lock that."
"It's no big deal," Dwayne said, "as long as the rest of them can't… I mean, I know you wouldn't look at my stuff if I told you not to."
That was true, and thinking about it Frank realized they didn't need separate accounts. Dwayne wasn't likely to go snooping around in his files. And even if he did, well, the kid had to have seen porn before. If he saw something new in Frank's porn it wouldn't be the death of either of them. And if he read Frank and Josh's correspondence and learned something new about love or something about betrayal, that wouldn't be the end of the world either.
Frank handed over the laptop, saying, "Just type Larry pound-sign one Suckerman, no space."
Dwayne opened it up and entered the password. "Okay," he said when it went through.
For the next ten minutes the two of them sat together, Dwayne typing, Frank writing notes he knew he would never give Josh to read. Then Dwayne said, "I hope they get divorced soon. I don't know what they're waiting for."
"Yeah," Frank agreed. It was a hell of a thing to wish on his sister, but then, so was an unhappy marriage. Besides that, once Richard left (because Richard would be the one to move out) Edwin's room would be free again and Frank and Dwayne could finally get some time to themselves.
"I told her not to marry him in the first place," said Dwayne.
"Seriously?"
"What, didn't you?"
"Yeah, but you were five."
"Yeah," Dwayne said with a sigh, as if remembering there was a time when he didn't hate the age he was stuck at. Or maybe not. Maybe when he was five he already wished his mom would take him more seriously. Maybe he was looking forward to being a teenager.
"Is that what you're writing about?"
"No."
Frank thought about the novel he tried to write when he was fifteen, and how he would have reacted if someone had asked to see his work of genius before it was finished. "Okay," he said.
4: Get a Little Help from Your Friends
When Frank had gone through six of Dwayne's miniature notebooks he stopped at Walgreen's and bought a regular-sized one, college ruled, but with a skateboarding-themed cover clearly designed to appeal to teenagers (if not the kind of teenager he was sharing a room with). He was used to buying Moleskines, but the price differential of little things like that actually mattered now.
Frank spent most of his time at the house, but Monday and Wednesday afternoons he took Olive on the bus to her dance class downtown, near the University. While she was there he'd walk past the Starbucks to Dunkin' Donuts, where he'd sit and scribble and drink black coffee instead of the lattes he was used to. The coffee wasn't half bad, as it turned out.
He'd stopped addressing his thoughts to Josh and was filling up the pages with memories, not worrying much about whether anyone else would ever see them. He'd sit at a plastic table and write for two hours without stopping, without going back to read it. Twice he'd cried while sitting at that table, but he pulled himself together by the time he go meet Olive. The teenagers who worked there looked at him a little funny after that, but in general they were too busy to pay much attention. He figured every coffee shop or restaurant must have a crazy regular or two. At least this one didn't shout profanities at the other customers, so they probably didn't mind him too much.
Since he couldn't spend all day drinking coffee and he felt guilty for not bringing any money into the house, he started picking up groceries and making dinner, timed to be ready when Sheryl came home from work. He did it mainly for his own sanity, because there were only so many meals of fried chicken a person could eat. That it made Sheryl smile at him was an added benefit. Even Richard thanked him once in a while, though it seemed to be more for the sake of demonstrating good manners to Olive than out of genuine appreciation. Olive herself seemed to miss the chicken, or maybe she just looked sad because she missed hearing her grandfather swear. Dwayne didn't react to the change in meals at all.
"Nice notebook," Dwayne said when they were alone in their room that night.
"Thanks." Frank looked at the cover again. "I'm writing autobiography, so this is good for helping me remember junior high. You know, the kids my age who were so much cooler than me they couldn't even be bothered to beat me up."
"When you need your computer back just let me know. I should be done with this pretty soon anyway."
Frank took that as a signal Dwayne wanted another shot at the question he'd refused to answer so far, and he obliged: "So what's the top secret project that's nearing completion?"
Dwayne was silent for a few seconds, but Frank was used to that by now, knew he was just gathering his thoughts and didn't need more cajoling.
"Study abroad," Dwayne said.
"Now?" Junior year of college was what he was used to.
"Applying now so I can go next year," said Dwayne. "If I get into this one program I think they could afford it."
Frank thought briefly about how broken his sister would feel if this worked out, but asked only, "Where do you want to go?"
"Germany, I think. Austria could work."
"Do you speak German?"
"I've had a year."
"Okay, well, that's a start."
"But I wasn't talking that year, so."
"That's less of a start. I know some German though. I can help with that if you want."
"Yeah. Or, you know, Czech Republic or Holland or something. Japan, maybe. Mostly I just want to get out of here. Anyway, the application essays are in English."
"I'm okay at English too."
Dwayne stared at the screen for a while. He was punching a few buttons but he could have been deleting and replacing a word over and over. "Yeah. Did you ever read these? Applications and stuff?"
"Of course."
"So you know what they're looking for? 'Cause I could use some help with. Yeah, why don't you just read what I've got and tell me if you think it's ready."
"Sure." Dwayne handed over the laptop and, before starting to read, Frank looked at him and said. "Thanks. Thanks for trusting me with this."
Dwayne nodded but looked away.
Dwayne's first sentence was,
All my life, I've been fascinated by other cultures and loved meeting new people.
"Just to be clear," said Frank, "You're supposed to be talking about yourself?"
"Yeah."
"Okay."
Frank read another two pages of application essay boilerplate and then said, "So, just to be clear –"
"It's what they want. I read about it – you're supposed to be confident and friendly and flexible."
"You're supposed to be a real person, I think. I mean, if Germany wanted robots they could make their own robots."
Dwayne shrugged his shoulders as if to show he didn't care, but his voice was rising defensively as he said, "It's a means to an end."
Possibly Frank should back off if he wanted Dwayne to continue to trust him. Then again, if he agreed with everything he wouldn't be very helpful.
"What's the end then? You move in with some German family that's expecting Joe Shmoe and won't be prepared for the brilliance and complexity of Dwayne Hoover."
"They'll adjust," said Dwayne, "they'll be flexible. Look, I can't just write that I want to be an exchange student because I hate my real family, can I?"
"Is that the only reason you want to go?" On his first day here, when Dwayne had written in his notebook that he hated everyone, Frank had actually believed him. By the time he was shouting it out loud two days later Frank already knew it was a lie. But this wasn't the time to point that out.
"No."
"Okay, listen, when's this application due?"
"Six weeks."
"You've got plenty of time then. Let's try something different. Forget about the essay questions. Forget about a means to an end. Forget about words needing to be efficient. Try typing in this computer and writing whatever the hell you want."
Dwayne's mouth twisted. "My seventh-grade English teacher made us do that. It was a waste of time."
"Yeah, but you're a much more interesting person now than you were in seventh grade," said Frank, who was determined not to lose steam. "Here, if you need a theme, write about what annoys you so much about your family."
Dwayne nodded appreciatively.
"And meanwhile, you're gonna try reading something different. Not that there's anything wrong with Nietzsche –"
"You're not gonna give me Proust, are you?"
Determined. "It just so happens that I've got a copy of Swann's Way right here."
He dug deeper into his backpack than he had in a couple months. Even though he'd been lugging it around to the donut shop and the grocery store he hadn't gone to the trouble of emptying it out. He pulled out a very old and very battered paperback copy and handed it to Dwayne, who turned it over. A few pages fell out in his hand.
"Shouldn't you have a nice leather-bound complete edition or something?"
"Sure, I've got a couple of those too, but they're in storage. This is the one I keep with me in case of emergencies."
"I was hoping to send the application off early."
"Don't be such an overachiever, Dwayne. Remember –"
"Yeah, I know, Proust was a loser."
"You'll be in great company."
5: Be Honest with Yourself
They didn't tell Olive that Richard was moving out until he'd already packed his bags. Parents and child sat on the sofa in the living room and Frank did his absolute best to stay out of their way. He gathered the few things he had at the house and moved them into Edwin's old room. To his surprise, Dwayne knocked on the door less than fifteen minutes later.
"I thought you'd be reveling in the solitude," said Frank.
Dwayne shook his head. "If I'm by myself I'll just be listening to them talking and crying, and it'll make me want to scream."
There was only one bed and no chair in this room, so Dwayne sat on the floor and wrapped his arms around his knees.
"I don't really like Proust," he said.
Frank was used to hearing this from undergrads, though usually they were a little less blunt. It didn't faze him.
"Anything in particular about him?"
"I guess I just don't see the point."
Frank grinned. "Exactly."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, that's what great about it! There is no point! It's not about being efficient. It's not about...working your way through the nine steps to come out a winner on the other side. It's about this cup of tea I had once."
"I guess," Dwayne said doubtfully.
He arched his back and Frank could tell he was balancing, holding himself up with his abdominal muscles, like someone who wants to exercise but doesn't want people to notice. Frank noticed. Dwayne hadn't gone back to the push-ups and chin-ups but he was jogging most days. Frank hadn't had that kind of energy at fifteen or at any time since, but he thought he could understand. After all, everybody needed some excuse to get out of the house.
"Okay, so what about you? How's your writing coming along?"
"It isn't. I told you, that write-whatever-comes-into-your-head stuff is a waste of time. I'm just…I guess I'm not filling up pages. I'm filling up file space."
"Okay, but have you been doing it?"
"Yes."
"That's good enough then. You can figure out what's useful once you get closer to the deadline. Will you let me see?"
Dwayne leaned back on his hands. "If you really don't have anything better to do."
6: Put Yourself Out There!
Frank really didn't have anything better to do, but he tried not to let that get to him. He liked what he was doing, or he liked it more than what he'd been doing before he moved in with Sheryl. He liked that he'd started using the computer again without really noticing, just in order to be nosy. He liked that Dwayne didn't seem to mind.
Most evenings after that Dwayne came to sit with Frank in Edwin's old room, even though there wasn't a lot of family drama to escape from, just Sheryl cheering on Olive's dance routine or watching a video with her.
Dwayne would sit or lie on the floor and read a book while Frank went over what he'd written.
"This is good," Frank said one night, two weeks after Richard had left. "This story about Olive and the teddy bear. That sounds like an absolutely horrific day. That sounds worse than our trip to Redondo Beach."
"Yeah," said Dwayne. "It was pretty bad. It just happened that way though. There wasn't anything special about the way I told it."
"That's what makes it work though, because you're not trying too hard to tell something perfectly constructed. It feels real."
"Because it is r –"
"Really, it's great. You could do more with this part. See if you can bring back any more details, like what you have here about the smell. How were people sitting? How were they looking at each other?"
Dwayne came and sat next to him on the bed and squinted at the screen. "You mean like here?"
"Yeah."
"This isn't gonna help me get to Germany," Dwayne mumbled, as he often did, but he took the computer back and started typing. Frank sat back and smiled.
He was teaching again, and it took that to make him realize that this was what he fucking missed. More than reading, more than writing, maybe even more than the shape of Josh's hips under his hands or the touch of those lips on his wrist. It was the look in Josh's eyes when he talked about Proust, but it was also the way that freshman, Steve Kim, frowned at his copy of Molloy while he tried to work through his thoughts. It was the day Jenna Miller showed up at his office hours to talk about switching her major from chem to comp lit, and the flush on Alicia Gimenez's cheeks when he asked her to read aloud in French, and then she did it perfectly.
After he'd been working for another half hour Dwayne said, "I suppose you're gonna tell me this story means I don't actually hate them."
"I wasn't going to say any such thing." But the truth was Dwayne had enough material now to show how open and loving he really was, despite his best intentions. It would mostly be a question of rearranging for the essay questions. It was nice, knowing they both knew this without having to argue about it, or even say it out loud.
Frank was feeling so good the next day that he actually went though the trouble and awkwardness of calling up Dianne Wursten at UMN and having her call up an old friend at NAU-Albuquerque and set up an interview for the following week. Okay, so the place didn't have an English department, let alone comp lit, but that was all right. This was what he was supposed to be doing. They'd work something out.
7: Don't Get Discouraged by Setbacks
After the interview he took the bus back to the house and started working on dinner, with Olive helping him out in the kitchen. He didn't realize until Sheryl got home and checked the answering machine that he'd already been rejected.
"Hi, I'm calling from Dean Alvarez's office to thank you for coming in today," said a woman's voice, sounding very young and very bored, "and to let you know the department has made the decision not to contract your services at this time. Thanks again."
"What does that mean?" Olive asked, wide-eyed, as if sensing from the way the others froze that this was something serious.
"It means I was looking for a job and they decided not to hire me," Frank answered.
"Frank," said Sheryl, "I didn't know you were –"
"I wasn't really," Frank said, smiling at both of them. "It was kind of a whim, just thought I'd give it a shot."
"Do you –" Sheryl started.
"It's no big deal," Frank said firmly.
"Okay. We'll, um, we'll talk about it later if you want."
Frank nodded and smiled again. "I made eggplant torte à la provençale," he said. "Who's hungry?"
Dwayne was leaning out of the doorway of his room. He said, "I could eat."
That might after Dwayne had gone back to his own room with the laptop and had shed tears of joy over the surprise ending of So You Think You Can Dance before going to bed, Frank sat down next to Sheryl on the couch. The local news lit up their faces without leaving any impression on them.
Frank said, "I need to thank you for helping me out, these last couple months."
"What?" Sheryl said. "Of course. We're family. I'm not gonna leave you out on the street. I hope you don't think that."
"No. I know that, but I still want to help out more, with the money. Didn't work out this time but –"
But the idea of going out there again was terrifying enough to keep him from finishing the thought. And never mind Proust, never mind being a respected scholar, if he couldn't teach at a community college, was there really any point in thinking of himself as a teacher anymore? And if there wasn't, what else was he going to do? Write technical manuals? Sell insurance? Fix cars?
"Hey," said Sheryl, her hand on his shoulder. "Hey, no. Remember when Tony left and I couldn't even afford to get food for Dwayne and me on my own?"
"But you had to take care of two people, and you managed it. I couldn't even –"
"I didn't mange it. I wouldn't have made it through without your help. Dwayne wouldn't have either."
Frank knew he'd been a lot less gracious at the time than Sheryl had been these last few months. But it was all right, it was like she said, they were family and they took care of each other. He hoped they were both a little more mature now than they had been thirteen years ago.
"He turned out great though. You know that, right?"
"Dwayne? Oh yeah. I mean, he's not really turned out yet, is he? He's not quite finished, but he's terrific. And he's…he hasn't wanted to talk to me that much lately, but I'm glad he's talking to somebody. I'm glad you're here with us, Frank."
"Well, I'm not really turned out yet either," said Frank. "I don't know if I'm the best influence…"
Sheryl just laughed and said, "None of us are," and went quiet again. "I miss Richard," she said after a minute. "I didn't think I would. I thought Olive would miss him and I'd just be relieved but I…but he…."
"Shhh," said Frank, "it's okay," and he hugged her.
"I'm sorry you didn't get the job."
"I probably would've hated it," he said truthfully.
"We'll figure out something."
Frank nodded and patted her back. "Sure we will," he said.
8: Are You Ready for Success?
Richard moved back in that weekend.
Olive hugged him and ran around the house some and hugged him some more and went around to everyone else in the family, asking how happy they were that Richard was back. Frank said he was happy for her. Dwayne didn't say anything.
Rather than move back to Dwayne's room, Frank took the opportunity to establish himself a little better in Edwin's. He figured if Richard wanted to come back then he was responsible for keeping Sheryl happy enough to sleep in the same room with him. Frank was digging through the closet when Dwayne came in and locked the door to shut out his sister's screaming, as if just closing it wasn't enough.
"You'll see though," Frank said, without turning around, "someday your lover will leave you and you'll lose your job and your house and your will to live, and then you'll be glad you have a sister." He paused, "Or maybe not exactly glad…"
"Yeah, I get it." When Frank came back was relieved to see that Dwayne did, that he was smiling. "It's just loud, that's all. I don't think she's been this excited since she found out she was going to California."
"She was pretty worked up on Wednesday," said Frank, "but in a quieter kind of way. I think she was nervous to let me know how excited she was."
"What's Wednesday, dance class?"
"Yeah, and this particular Wednesday was the day she figured out that her dance teacher and I need to get together."
Dwayne burst out laughing.
"What? Just because he's probably the only other gay person she knows?"
"Have you met her dance teacher?"
"No, we always split up outside the building. She wants me to come in to class next week so she can introduce us.
"And do you have anything in common with this guy besides… And how does she even know he's gay, anyway?"
Frank shrugged. "Maybe your mom figured it out. Also, it seems he speaks French."
"Oh well, there you go, you're made for each other."
Frank just smiled. It was funny how he'd gotten past whatever fear of humiliation he'd had in the past. Dwayne started giggling again, this time staring at the small pile of Edwin's porn mags that Frank was getting ready to throw out.
"What is it?" said Frank. "What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking. The last advice he gave me before he died."
Frank tried to remember, but he'd done his best to block out most of that trip. He hadn't even read through the little notebook Dwayne had written in that weekend.
"Fuck a lot of women," Dwayne reminded him. He sat down on the bed and typed the password for the computer.
"Ah. So… Is that your new goal?"
Dwayne smiled and shook his head. "I don't know if I want to…women, I mean."
Frank just nodded. It was a conversation he'd had with several undergrads. He knew not to try to make it go too fast.
"Did you always know?" Dwayne asked.
"That I was gay? Pretty much, yeah. Once I figured out that was an option."
Dwayne laughed, more softly now, eyes on the blank screen.
"But it's different for everybody. That's okay too. Keep your options open."
"Right."
"Can I tell you something, Dwayne?"
Dwayne turned to look at him, his expression clear and open.
"You wouldn't have liked the Air Force anyway."
9: You Are a Winner!
The two of them walked to the post office together, even though it would have been fine to leave the envelope in the mailbox to be picked up.
"If this doesn't work out," Frank said, "it's not the end of the world."
"I know."
"In fact if it does work out, your life will actually get more complicated. You'll have to tell everyone. Your mom and Olive will probably cry, and there'll be money issues. You'll have to ask Richard for help, whether or not he's still in the house at that point."
"I know."
"And then you'll have to leave them and go live with another family that you might hate even more. And, you know, learn German. Or Czech or something."
"Yeah. And if it doesn't work out I'll have to start over."
"Figure out something else to try for."
"Would you go in with me on that one?"
"Yeah," said Frank, "I will."
They shook hands and then turned around and walked back.