Page 3 of Isn't It Obvious?
“What?”
“Nothing. How about I take Mia to the zoo?”
“On your own? What if she has a meltdown when she can’t have a second elephant ear again?”
“Then I’ll buy her the second elephant ear,” Ravi says, pulling the phone away from his ear long enough to take a picture of the flyer. It’s a good thing, because he can hear shouts of protest and his phone isn’t on speaker. “I’m joking, Suresh.”
“Good.”
“If she ate two elephant ears, she wouldn’t have enough room for gift shop fudge.”
“Yuh ass too happy.” Suresh sucks his teeth.
“Just let me help! We will have an appropriate amount of sugar, I promise. And then you can do laundry and cook and also take a nap.” Ravi starts toward Burnside. Now that he knows exactly where he is, it’s even more ridiculous that he let Charles order the Lyft.
“Ohhhh, so this is just so I’ll do all the housework myself,” Suresh says.
“Okay, I take it back. You go to the zoo, and I’ll do the rest.”
“No, wait—”
“I’m still taking her, I know. I’ll be home in forty-five minutes,” he says before hanging up.
It’s so easy to rile Suresh. Especially now, when he’s in a constant state of worry and pretending not to be. Ravi doesn’t really have a better way of cutting through it.
On the bus, he pulls up the photo of the flyer. The QR code takes him to a sign-up sheet on a Portland Public Schools webpage:VOLUNTEER NEEDED FOR KENNEDY HIGH SCHOOL QUEERBOOK CLUB. Wild that there’s just… a school-sanctioned club like that. At his Catholic secondary school in Trinidad, Ravi never could’ve imagined it. The club seems new, though. Maybe it’s as much a difference of time as it is place.
He scrolls further. It meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:40 to 5:25. A weird and specific window, which is probably why they’re still looking for a volunteer when the school year must have started already. But with his freelance schedule being flexible by design, Ravi can probably make it work. And Suresh has been worriedly reminding him he needs to get out of the house,withoutMia, more.
By the time the bus gets across the river, he’s put in all his information and consented to a background check.
He almost wishes it was a good idea to see Charles again. Maybe he could tell the roommate about the club. An asshole wouldn’t take a twice-a-week volunteer job, would he?
Fuck, he thinks, scrubbing his hand down his face,maybe fantasizing about using a book club for queer kids to prove I’m not an asshole is whatmakesme an asshole.
God, Charles’s roommate had really gotten under his skin. So incisive. There had been rosy pillow creases cutting across one of her cheeks, and she’d been blinking at the sunlight that streamed through her window like she didn’t even know what planet she was on, and yet she seemed completely sure about him.
AFTER SOMESTEADYgulps of water and many solid minutes of staring at the wall, Yael drags herself out of bed and pokes only her head out of her bedroom (her suspicions were right—she did not manage pajama bottoms). Charlie is curved overthe stove, lifting what looks to be the last of a batch of French toast out of a cast-iron skillet. “Hey, handsome,” Yael says.
Charlie turns toward her, that dopey smile of his a little sad, his eyes rimmed red. “I knew he was leaving when he asked for the bathroom.”
“What a dick,” Yael says.
“I don’t know.… I think he was trying to tell me he wasn’t looking for something serious, and I sort of thought if he just spent some more time with me, he’d change his mind.”
Honestly, she’s pretty lucky that she realized she was headed for a bout of hypomania yesterday. Otherwise, there’s no way she’d be able to keep her facial reactions inoffensive. “Charlie,” she says carefully, “was hetryingto tell you, or did he literally tell you?”
His cheeks flush, which is all the answer she needs. “He’s not a dick,” he says, ducking his head away.
“No, he definitely is. Or at least a coward, which isn’t all that much better.” Charlie doesn’t say anything. “That looks delicious. Let me get myself together, and I’ll join you?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
In the shower, Yael scrubs herself clean, and it’s bathing-after-a-ten-mile-hike heavenly. By the end of it, she’s almost human again. She moisturizes, pulls on a loose cotton dress, slides into her fuzzy pink slippers, and emerges from her cave feeling positively weightless.
There are two plates on the coffee table, alongside mugs of Charlie’s notoriously caffeinated cardamom oat milk lattes.I mean, really, she thinks,that guy was an assandan idiot.Yael settles into her spot on the couch, tossing her phone aside and sighing as she brings a mug to her lips.
“How are you feeling?” Charlie asks.
