Chapter 15: Families Suck Sometimes
Time went by quickly after Halloween. The parents of many students were outraged by the party, and school became sort of boring after that. People were around evaluating things all the time, and before Blue knew it it was Thanksgiving. She went home for Thanksgiving, as nearly everyone else did, and hung out with her family for the extended weekend. This proved challenging, because she honestly didn't understand her sister, and she thought she didn't understand her parents.
This left her talking on the phone to Malik, who was hanging out with Teddy. Blue didn't really think it was fair that the two of them were from the same place and got to hang out with each other when they went home. Teddy was “venting” about his very large extended family, while Malik tried to talk to Blue. Blue's boyfriend then described to her how to create a “Skype,” and soon she was in a video call with Malik and watching Teddy run around in the background, falling all over himself and snorting, with a steady stream of curses pervading Malik and Blue's conversation.
Despite Teddy's presence in the room and ability to block off everything Malik was trying to show Blue somehow, Malik showed the girl his room. His walls were stripes of various grays, and they were lined in posters of his favorite shows, actors, bands, and movies. Blue didn't really care as she asked, “WHERE IS ME IN YOUR ROOM?”
Malik laughed, “I don't have any good pictures of you. Do you remember how you have a lot of energy? You're blurry in all my pictures of you.”
“PUT THEM UP ANYWAY!” Blue demanded, then watched Teddy in the background carefully.
“And then Moneybags goes 'money!' and...!” at this point he fell over himself and declared a very loud swear which caused Blue to glare at the space that had been occupied by him.
“Hold on,” Malik told Blue, as he went to tend his friend. “You OK?” Malik asked, and though Blue couldn't see it, Teddy probably shook his head. Malik helped Teddy up to his bed, where he sat and coddled a bleeding knee. Malik went to get a band-aid, leaving Teddy to stare at his knee. Eventually, and apparently for the first time, he noticed Blue and waved.
“HI BLUE!” he shouted, and Blue as pretty sure it was because she was on Malik's desk in a computer, and Teddy was all the way over on his bed, where Blue wouldn't be able to hear him well. The thing is, Teddy was really good at projecting, and when he shouted it hurt Blue's ears.
A girl who couldn't possibly be related to Malik or Teddy showed up on Blue's screen then, giving Teddy a “look,” as Blue liked to call it. “Teddy, can you keep it down? We're playing Wii. Has that been you thudding around all over the place for like twenty minutes?”
“My family is so frustrating!” Teddy declared, as Blue realized this girl must have been kidnapped! Or she was there to kidnap Teddy and Malik? Oh no! Blue wasn't there to save them, so she tried to will Uni there to help them out, but Uni didn't show. Blue was disappointed in her.
“Teddy, everyone's family is frustrating,” the Asian girl insisted, but Teddy just looked bitter as Malik returned with band-aids and a washcloth to help with Teddy's scrape.
“Li-Mei,” Malik greeted, and Blue almost remembered that name but couldn't place it.
“Malik,” Li-Mei replied, “your gay boyfriend is loud. And bleeding on your carpet.”
Malik made no attempt at responding to Li-Mei's “gay boyfriend” comment, so Blue thought they might be cheating on her but she didn't say anything. Not yet. “Teddy,” Malik said with a less sympathetic voice, “try to contain your blood.” Teddy gave him the puppy eyes, which Blue knew well, and Malik sighed, “Here, take this washcloth and put some band-aids on your knee.” Teddy nodded with his sad eye mode still activated as Malik returned to Blue with a sigh.
“Sorry, but disasters of Teddy and his family are best averted early on or allowed to run their course and managed along the way,” he explained, and Blue nodded.
“Who was that girl?” Blue asked, and Malik seemed surprised Blue had forgotten his sister. “I knew it...She's your wife, right?”
Malik laughed at Blue's dismay then, and lied, “She's my sister. Adoptive sister. That means we're not related by blood, but we're still related. We're siblings. She's my parents' daughter as much as I'm parents' son.” Malik only felt the need to continue on for so long because Blue was shaking her head at him.
“Your parents have been lying to you,” she insisted, and Malik sighed.
“We've had this conversation,” he responded simply, and Blue didn't believe him.
“You crazy. I had no idea your parents were kidnappers,” Blue sighed, and Malik shook his head. Blues's mom called something to her then, and she asked Malik what she had said, since Malik seemed to understand her.
“You need to go eat dinner with your family,” her boyfriend stated, and Blue nodded at him.
“OK,” she said, “I'll Skyperize you again sometime perhaps? Have fun with Teddy!”
“Yep,” Malik replied with a smile, “have fun with food.”
Malik disappeared from her screen then, and Blue sighed as she went to join her family for a meal. She had a fairly small family, so she was always a little jealous of people with big families, but Teddy made it seem like it was sort of awful. The only people joining her family unit for Thanksgiving were her uncle, aunt, and their three-year-old daughter. Meals and basic family interactions were a chore considering how little they all understood of each other, but it was extraordinarily boring. She wondered what her friends were doing with their families at that time.
Teddy was still sitting in Malik's room, staring at his knee with its new band-aid while Malik ate with his family. Pretty soon he received a phone call requesting his return to his house and begrudgingly drove home, where his large family was waiting for him. Though he tried to sneak by them, his family trapped him in a series of exchanges, relating but not limited to how big he'd gotten, what year of school he was in, why he thought wearing glitter on his pants was a good idea and whether all young men were doing that, whether they missed his birthday, calling him by his much larger brunet cousin's name and then asking his name when they were corrected and many other questions, eventually resulting in Teddy retreating to his room.
One of his cousins stood in the middle of his room, and he stared at her with giant eyes until she noticed him. “Oh, hey,” she said finally, but apparently couldn't see how flabbergasted Teddy was by her uninvited presence in his room.
“Hey,” Teddy replied, his voice dripping with animosity. His cousin missed it entirely as she sat on his bed and spoke to him.
“So what are you doing in here?” she asked, opening one of his nightstand drawers as she did so.
“This is my room,” Teddy replied. His cousin nodded as she picked out a notebook from his drawer and started flipping through it. Her blond cousin just stared at her, until he finally just walked out of his room and into his sister's room. It was on her bed that he flopped down, face first, and just lay there, totally still. It was in this position his sister found him later, and she patted his arm, as if sympathizing with a pain she didn't feel. While he stayed on the bed for the rest of the evening, Malik at the very least showed his family the courtesy of his presence.
Malik's family wasn't at all like Teddy's; they remembered everything about him. It was almost a little creepy, he thought, when they asked him, “You were in a reality show? What was that like?”
“Your class is doing the play As You Like It? How fun. You have to double up on parts though, right? That must be tough.”
“So how is your new girlfriend, Blue? I hear she's a little odd.”
Later in the evening, he and his two aunts, one uncle, twelve cousins, and two grandparents played Trivial Pursuit together, and every single time anyone got an answer right there was a chorus of, “Good job!” and “You're so smart!” coming from almost every adult in the room. After the adults were all tired and went to bed, the cousins who were older than twelve all gathered in Malik's basement, where they complained about how annoying their relatives could be. Malik entertained himself by counting the number of ethnicities shared by the seven of them. His mom's side of the family, which was the group gathered at his house, was all into adopting foreign children, so most of the occupants of the room came from different countries. There were seven ethnicities among the six of them, the only odd kids out being the two biological children in the room, one per aunt (though they were each half white half something else, so there were slight differences between them).
“And yes, I'm pretty smart,” Li-Mei was saying as Malik's phone started buzzing and he saw the words, “Teddy (home)” on the screen. He excused himself from the group as Li-Mei continued, “but I don't need to be called a genius all the time. How is that going to motivate me to become smarter?”
Malik answered his phone, expecting Teddy, but instead ended up talking to two of Teddy's prepubescent cousins. “Hey,” one of them greeted, and the two giggled as if they thought they were incredibly funny, “hey, um...hey,” the boy stopped and told the other he couldn't “do it” then. The speaker changed and Malik blinked in confusion.
“Hey have you and Teddy...kissed yet?” the second cousin said, as if it was a dirty word. Malik had forgotten that literally every member of Teddy's family thought he and Teddy were dating. “Because...Because that's gay!” A reinforcing voice came from the other boy, urging him to “ask about the butts and wieners,” at which point Malik hung up the phone.
When he returned to his own cousins he was rubbing his temples and trying to forget the phone call he'd just received. If his estimation of Teddy family meltdowns was correct, Teddy had given up for the night and didn't even know what his cousins were up to. Malik ignored the subsequent phone calls and eventually ended up in his bed, which was being occupied by one of his cousins as well.
In the morning he received a call from “Teddy (mobile)” and answered it, hearing Teddy sob from the other end, “I'm so sorry, Malik. They're so stupidddddd.”
“Haha,” Malik laughed, “I don't mind it. How was Thanksgiving for you?”
“OH MYYYY GODDDDD THEY'RE NEVER GOING TO LEAVE!” Teddy whined, and Malik laughed again.
“Power through it,” he said, as one of his aunts greeted him with an overly cheery, “Good morning!”
“I want to go back to school! ...That's the worst thing I've ever saiddddd,” Teddy maundered, before someone stole his phone from him and Teddy squeaked something along the lines of “How did you find me?”
“IS THIS MALIK?” a thirteen-year-old girl screeched. From her voice, Malik knew who she was. He was speaking to none other than Teddy's second cousin, Hillary, who had a crush on him. She firmly believed she could “awaken” his “love for the female form,” even though she hardly had a female form herself.
“Hi Hillary,” Malik replied, and the girl literally screamed.
“He recognized my voice!” she declared. “It's true love I know it!” From the sound of things, Teddy then described Blue to her, and the line went dead very suddenly. Malik shrugged as his family got ready to leave his house, and called Teddy back when they were all gone.
“Hi Malik,” Teddy greeted cryptically, “I'm thinking I might just hit my head against the wall until I give myself a concussion...or die.”
“Would you like to tell me about it?” Malik asked. Teddy then started the tale of his Thursday, before he showed up at Malik's house in the middle of the day, through when he passed out late at night to the sound of raucous laughter from his great uncle that haunted his dreams. Unfortunately for Teddy, his family was still at his house, and before he finished telling Malik of his woes his phone was taken from him.
“Who are you talking to? Your family is visiting! You spend time with them!” one of his aunts ordered him, as Teddy wrestled the phone away from her.
“Malik I have to go I love you bye!” he shouted into the phone, before it was removed from his possession again. His best friend laughed, then found Teddy's behavior made him miss Blue, so he called her up again.
Blue was finished with her Thanksgiving celebrations as well, and she was delighted to receive a call from Malik, “Hey Babyface,” she greeted with.
“...I don't have a baby face,” Malik replied, sounding completely confused.
“I thought it was, like...a pet name?” Blue responded, jumping onto her bed as she did so, and making an “Oomph” noise that confused Malik further.
“Oh. No, I don't think so,” he mumbled, glad to be talking with her again, even if the conversation started out in confusion. They'd only been apart for a couple days; this missing her already thing was not good for his sense of independence.
“Sorry. I'll try again...Hey Dollface,” Blue corrected, and Malik grinned.
“Hey Dollface,” he simply laughed. They spoke for a while, and eventually their conversation turned to how everyone else from school was spending their Thanksgiving...
Gerda and Alec spent Thanksgiving in the dorms, trying to comprehend why exactly it was celebrated, and dissecting what turkeys had to do with it.
“Perhaps the color of the turkeys,” Gerda suggested, and Alec nodded at her to continue, “reminds them of the Native Americans they exploited?”
“Well, that could be,” Alec replied, scowling. “Yes, I imagine it has something to do with Native Americans...”
“Maybe Hakan knows...”
Kip spent Thanksgiving at his home, apparently having a staring contest with a large ham that was sitting on his table while his parents took notes about his reactions. He hadn't moved since he'd gotten home and gotten led into the kitchen, where his parent sat him. Even they seemed surprised when he was still sitting there after they'd gone to bed for the night. Eventually they moved the ham, and he immediately fell asleep at the table. In some attempt to not be the worst parents ever, they moved him to his bed, where he spent the rest of the extended weekend.
Rashida spent Thanksgiving in her grandparents' house, doing generally regular Thanksgiving sorts of things. Hammy, Reg, and Miss Allberry had a slightly more "exciting" Thanksgiving.
“No, seriously,” Hammy insisted to Today's parents, where they went by default at Thanksgiving time. Hammy's family was a no-go, and Reg's didn't celebrate the holiday, so Today's hippie style parental home was the destination of choice. The meal was completely vegetarian. Since Hammy was already a vegetarian, Reg pledged to become one too after they got engaged. Today didn't often cook for herself, so she'd become a vegetarian by default after moving in with Hammy.
“I don't think that's possible,” Today's mother, May Allberry, replied.
Reg chimed in then, “Yeah, actually it's pretty much everywhere.”
“I still don't think toilets flush normally,” Today's father, Birch Allberry, replied after a pause.
“They do,” Today deadpanned, and her sister, Tomorrow, and brother, Yesterday, nodded to enforce her words.
May and Birch shook their heads, “Nahh.”
Austin spent the majority of her break in her room, only coming out to eat and tell her brothers, Evan and Ewan, to be quiet. Kendall spent time with her family as well, awkwardly staring at her younger brother Kendrick as he spoke to their extended family. Pablo, Hakan, Estela, and even Kakahi also had fairly "regular" Thanksgivings, too, in their own rights.
By Sunday they were all back in their dorm rooms, and while Blue and Malik discussed how much they missed each other, Teddy sobbed into Pablo's shoulders about how annoyed with his family he still was.
“And then I didn't have any time without them until I left earlier today and...and they were still there! It was so awful,” he whimpered, as Pablo held him consolingly.
“I'm sorry. If it makes you feel any better, my family sounds a lot like yours, but they all speak in Spanish,” Pablo consoled, and Teddy stopped sobbing to blink at him in confusion.
“Do you speak Spanish, Pablo?” he asked, and Pablo smiled.
“Claro que sí,” he said, “pero no hablo ningún idioma asiático. Me siento como un fracaso.”
“De repente, tú te has convertido más atractivo para mí,” Teddy said, leaning in toward Pablo, all but forgetting his familial woes.
“Dame un beso,” Pablo replied, seeming to be equally as turned on by Teddy speaking his mother tongue. As they started kissing, Kip walked into the room, gave them a look only to be described as “Oh. Ehh...I'll deal with the awkward to stay in my own room” before flopping down onto his bed and sighing loudly. The other four occupants of the room ignored him.
“What else about me did you missssss?” Blue asked, and Malik frowned. Kip sighed again.
“Seriously, though, Blue...I just listed every one of your personality traits. I missed everything about you...I can't...I can't move on from there,” he replied, and Blue grinned. Kip sighed even louder.
“Well I missed your abs and your pretty green eyes,” Blue said. “Oh, and your smile. Mmm. Love me some Malik smiles.” Blue stopped, and Malik looked a little disappointed. Another sigh from Kip floated toward them, but no one noticed.
“Nothing else?” he asked, and Blue shrugged.
“Sometimes you do silly things with me,” she suggested, “but you're pretty much perfect, aren't you? I missed your awesomeness.” A great big sigh came from Kip's direction.
“Perfect?” Malik mumbled, not taking it as a compliment as Blue hoped he would have. “I'm not—,” he tried to say, but Kip interrupted him.
“NOTICE ME,” Kip ordered, and both couples abruptly pulled away from each other and gave him curious glances.
“Is there a problem, Space Invader?” Teddy asked, and Kip sighed again.
“Rashida...Rashida...broke...up...with...me,” he said sadly, and the couples each glanced at each other.
“Why?” Malik asked, voicing the rest of the room's feelings.
“Higlork,” he mumbled. “She thinks I don't take things seriously or something. Like...religion is somehow something serious now. Who knew?”
“It usually is,” Teddy replied.
“Radish broke up with you?” Blue mumbled, with her mind starting to spiral out of control. If Kip and Rashida broke up, then anyone could break up! Plus, Teddy and Malik were quite possibly cheating on her with each other.
“Yeah,” Kip sighed, “I just said that. Anyway, I know I'm a dude and for some reason dudes aren't supposed to express their feelings, but do you all want to watch a sad movie with me? Preferably we would invite someone who is single as well so I don't feel terrible about it. You guys cool with that?”
The four of them nodded, and spent the evening with Alec and Kendall for very strange company. In the middle of the movie, Teddy left to answer a phone call. Even with the volume turned up almost as high as it could go, they could hear him shriek, “NO! Diaries from sixth grade are still very personal! Just because they happened a long time ago doesn't mean they become public domain!!! Hillary...Put it down or so help me I will call the police! How did you get it, anyway? ...Hillary, stealing is wrong! ...Hillary! Why did you call to ask if you were just going to read it anyway?”
I wrote a new chapter! It was more Teddy focused than I actually intended. Writing about his family was a lot of fun though. Yayyy! :D
