Tell Me It's Real by TJ Klune Read Free Book Online Page B

question by his lonely owner, a dog would most likely reach up and lick his master’s face in a way that let the master know that the world might be scary sometimes, but it would all be okay eventually. But my life is not a book or a movie and instead of licking my face, Wheels farted and then barfed up the section of carpet he’d been gnawing on when I’d gotten home last night.
    “Augh!” I cried, trying to roll away. Of course, Wheels thought we were playing a game and tried to crawl after me, running his cart through his own vomit, spreading it over my sheets as he rolled. “No, you gross two-legged monster!” I shouted at him, but he was already distracted by his own vomit and started to eat it and I gave serious thought to urking up a bit myself, but then I realized I would just be feeding him even more, and I had to turn away. As soon as I got myself under control, I heard my phone ring.
    “Hello,” I said, running to the bathroom to get a towel.
    “Hi, baby!” my mom said.
    “Hi, Mom,” I sighed. “Listen, now’s not the best—”
    “Your father is on the line as well,” she said, interrupting me.
    “Dad.”
    “Hello, son,” Dad said.
    Ah, Matilda (Matty) and Lawrence (Larry) Auster. My parents. You can’t say I haven’t warned you.
    “How did last night go?” Mom asked. “Did you get any play?”
    “It is way too fucking early for this,” I muttered, grabbing my bath towel and warming it under the water.
    “Language,” my father warned.
    “Sorry.”
    “Well?” my mother demanded.
    “Sandy called you, didn’t he?”
    “Oh yes,” she gushed. “He asked me how much I thought you would try to murder him if he pulled you down on stage with him.”
    “And what did you tell him?”
    “That you’d probably crap yourself on stage,” she said.
    “Language,” my father snapped.
    “It was fine,” I said through gritted teeth, walking back to the bedroom. Wheels had the decency to look at least a bit contrite as I walked over to him. He hung his head a little bit, and I started to feel bad for the way I had glared at him, but then he farted again and I didn’t feel so bad anymore.
    “It was fine,” I said. “Not that big of a deal.”
    “You did it?” my mother squealed. “I am so proud of you!” And she was, in her weird, weird way. Both of them were. I hear horror stories all the time of people coming out only to be rejected by their families and kicked out onto the streets and told never to return. I was scared, yes, when I was seventeen and trying to work up the courage to out myself to my family. Sandy had already come out to his family and received indifference, so we figured we could expect the same from mine. Boy, were we wrong. Being their only child, of course they were upset. For, like, two seconds. Once my mom got over her tears and my father stopped frowning, they went online to look up two things: where the closest chapter of PFLAG was, and the proper way to use a dental dam. “For all we know,” my mother had said, “you may be into rimming now. We just want to make sure you are safe.”
    I love them completely, don’t get me wrong. But they like to meddle just as much as Sandy does. They keep asking when I’m going to give them grandbabies. “We’re not getting any younger,” my father once growled at me.
    “Well, I’m not quite fertile enough yet,” I had growled right back.
    I don’t have the heart to tell them that I don’t have ovaries like they seem to think I do.
    “You got up on the stage?” Dad said now, sounding surprised. “Did you take off your shirt?”
    “It’s not that kind of a club,” my mother scolded him. “He wasn’t being auctioned off like some piece of meat. This isn’t Phoenix.”
    Apparently I went to the wrong kind of clubs. When you’re auctioned off, does that still make you a prostitute? Money is still exchanging hands, so it sounded kind of whorish to me. I decided right then and there that I would not want to