T.J. Klune - Bear, Otter, and the Kid 2 - Who We Are by TK Klune Read Free Book Online

house for the first time, the doorbell like my own, and I knew I’d made the right choices, even though it’d been in a crazy roundabout way. Even though so much was still uncertain and still is, I knew then I no longer had to do it alone.
    Do I still have doubts? I think I told you that I do. Of course I do. I’m human, after all. I’m the brother/parent of the smartest nine-year-old vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training (who just recently told me he would like to start tantric yoga—what the fuck?). I’m the son of a woman who left Ty and me more than three years ago to fend for ourselves just because her new man didn’t like having kids around. I fell into a routine then that bordered on paranoid obsession, making sure the Kid would never want for anything. My mother came back and tried to take all of that away from us, all that work we’d done to rebuild ourselves during her absence, making things infinitely worse for everyone before disappearing to wherever. Our attorney thinks I have an awesome chance of getting custody of Tyson. I try to believe her. I am the boyfriend (“ Partner ,” the Kid tells me. “Boyfriend makes it sound like you’re in middle school, and he asked you to circle ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”) of a man who thinks the Kid and me walk on water. We have a roof over our heads, a place to sleep at night, people that love us completely and fully. Everything is just going hunky-dory. How could I not have doubts?
    You know what, though? Before this goes any further, before we can see what kind of an ass I can make of myself this time around (because we both know that’s exactly what’s going to happen), there’s something you should know so there will never be any doubt about it: I love Otter. I love the crap out of him. Like, in a cheesy epic romantic comedy kind of way. If he was getting on a plane to take a job in China, I’d run to the airport after him and tell him I loved him right before he got on the plane. I’d stand outside his bedroom window with a boom box over my head and blast Celine Dion. If he was getting married to someone else and the priest said, “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” I’d be standing in the front row with a bullhorn screaming as loudly as I possibly could. Do you get it? The point I’m trying to make? I love him, yeah? Let’s never doubt that.
    “You can’t even tell you’re losing your hair,” Otter says to me as he wanders into the kitchen this bright, early morning, kissing my forehead before taking a seat beside me. “Except on the front part, where it’s way noticeable.” The Kid snorts in his cereal and laughs so hard the soy milk comes out his nose. This grosses me out and I start to gag. Otter just stares at us as the Kid drips his snotty soy milk into the bowl and as I make weird retching noises that I can’t stop because my little brother is so fucking disgusting. Otter shakes his head, pausing to sip his coffee before opening the newspaper, all the while grumbling that he never gets to have a civilized breakfast.
Love is so completely overrated.
    And finally, the last little piece of the puzzle, the last part that makes me whole: Tyson, the Kid, he of extraordinary intelligence and charm, he with milk dripping out his nose. He that can spout off some random eloquent quote one minute and then laugh hysterically in that high-pitched way he does so well the next. I told him once that he’d kept me alive after the events of three years ago, and that was not hyperbole, even though I sometimes bask in it. One could argue, I suppose, that if the Kid had never been born, life would have been significantly different. One could even go as far as to say that what happened with our mom might not have happened, at least in the way that it did. But, regardless of that fact, regardless of however hard it’d been, the Kid was and is the reason I am alive. While all the others had clustered around us to make sure we stayed afloat, it was him I