“Take some time for yourself, Cal,” my dad said when it happened. Well, one of my dads. I have two of them—and a biological mother I see a few times a year, who’s a college friend of my dads and was their surrogate seventeen years ago—but I call both of them Dad. Which is pretty straightforward—to me—but a certain subset of my classmates finds it endlessly confusing. Boney Mahoney, in particular, used to ask me all the time in elementary school, “But how do they know which one you’re talking to?”
It’s easy. I’ve always used a slightly different inflection on the word with each of my fathers, something that started so naturally when I was a little kid that I don’t even remember doing it. But that’s not the kind of thing you can explain to a guy like Boney, who has all the subtle communication skills of a brick. So I told him I call them by their first names, Wes and Henry. Even though I don’t, unless I’m talking about them to someone else.
Anyway, Wes is the dad I go to with personal stuff. “There’s more to life than romantic relationships,” he said when Noemi and I broke up. He’s the dean at Carlton College, and I’m pretty sure he spends half his life worrying that I’m going to have a marriage certificate before a bachelor’s degree. “Focus on your friends for a change.”
Yeah, right. Spoken like a man who’s never met my friends, which he hasn’t, because my Carlton High circle is one of convenience. We’re all people on the fringes of school who drop one another as soon as something better comes along, then go skulking back when it ends. The last time I had real friends was middle school. Wes, who knows way more about my social life than any self-respecting seventeen-year-old should allow, claims it’s because I’ve been a serial dater since ninth grade. And I maintain that it’s the other way around. It’s the ultimate chicken-egg conversation.
At least my new girlfriend likes the same things I do: art, comics, and calorically dense breakfast food with zero nutritional value. Well, girlfriend is probably a stretch. Lara and I haven’t defined things yet. It’s complicated, but I’m all-in enough that I drove forty minutes in rush hour traffic to eat weird doughnuts with her.
I hope I did, anyway.
Ten minutes later, my doughnut’s getting stale. My phone buzzes, and Lara’s name pops up with a string of sad-face emojis. So sorry, can’t be there after all! Something came up.
I tamp down disappointment, because that’s how it is with Lara. Something comes up a lot. I knew when I got into my car that there was a fifty-fifty chance I’d end up eating alone. I pull my plate toward me and take a huge bite of my Cheeto-dusted Bavarian cream and chew thoughtfully. Sweet, salty, with a strong hint of processed cheese. It’s magnificent.
I finish the rest in three bites, wipe my hands on a napkin, and glance at the clock on the wall. The drive back to Carlton against traffic will take less than half an hour, and it’s not even eight yet. I have time for one more thing. My messenger bag is on the floor beside me, and I reach into it to pull out my laptop. The browser is already open to my old WordPress site, and with a few clicks I open the first web comic I ever made.
The Greatest Day Ever
Written and illustrated by Calvin O’Shea-Wallace
I showed all my web comics to Lara a couple of weeks ago, and she immediately claimed that this was the best of the bunch. Which was a little insulting, since I was twelve when I drew it, but she said it had a “raw energy” my newer stuff lacks. And maybe she’s right. I started it after that day in sixth grade when I skipped a class trip with Ivy Sterling-Shepard and Mateo Wojcik to wander around Boston, and there’s a certain exhilaration in every panel that mirrors how I felt about getting away with something so outrageous.
Plus, if I do say so myself, the likenesses aren’t bad. There’s Ivy with her unusual brown eyes–blond hair combination, her ever-present ponytail blowing in the wind, and an expression that’s half-worried, half-thrilled. I might’ve drawn her with bigger boobs than she had then, or even now, but what do you expect? I was twelve.
Mateo, admittedly, I didn’t draw entirely true to life. I was supposed to be the hero of The Greatest Day Ever, and him the sidekick. That wouldn’t have worked if I’d given him that whole dark-and-brooding thing girls were already swooning over in sixth grade. So he was shorter in web comic form. And skinnier. Plus, he might’ve had a slight acne problem. But he still had the best one-liners that came out of nowhere.
“Hey! That’s you!” I jump at Viola’s voice as she reaches across my shoulder to grab my empty plate. I’ve paused on a panel that’s just me racing through Boston Common in all my red-haired, floral-shirted, twelve-year-old glory. “Who made that?”
“I did,” I say, scrolling to a new panel so my face isn’t quite so prominent. This one has Ivy and Mateo, too. “When I was twelve.”
“Well, isn’t that something.” Viola fingers the skull necklace that’s dangling halfway down her Ramones T-shirt. She was the drummer for a punk-rock band when she was my age, and I don’t think her style aesthetic has changed in thirty years. “You’ve got real talent, Cal. Who are the other two?”
“Just some friends.”
“I don’t recall ever seeing them here.”
“They’ve never been.”
I say it lightly with a shrug, but the words make me feel as flat as Noemi’s You’re not real speech. Ivy and Mateo were the best friends I ever had, but I’ve barely spoken to them since eighth grade. It’s normal for people to grow apart when they reach high school, I guess, and it’s not like our friend breakup was some big, dramatic thing. We didn’t fight, or turn on one another, or say the kind of things you can’t take back.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it was all my fault.
“You want another doughnut?” Viola asks. “There’s a new hazelnut bacon one I think you might like.”
“No thanks. I gotta haul ass if I’m gonna make it to school on time,” I say, shutting my laptop and slipping it back into my bag. I leave money on the table—enough for three doughnuts, to make up for the fact that I don’t have time to get the actual check—and sling my bag across my shoulders. “See you later.”
“I hope so,” Viola calls as I dart between a hipster couple sporting graphic T-shirts and the same haircut. “We’ve missed your face around here.”
* * *
—
I don’t believe in fate, as a general principle. But it feels like more than a coincidence when I step out of my car in the Carlton High parking lot and almost walk straight into Ivy Sterling-Shepard.
“Hey,” she says as her brother, Daniel, grunts a semigreeting and brushes past me. That kid’s gotten a lot taller since freshman year—some days I barely recognize him loping through school in his lacrosse gear. Nobody should be that good at so many different things. It doesn’t build character.