Bagel, because we can call him Mini Bagel when he’s being cute, and because it’s one of the coolest words I know.
Bilbo, because my story with Caio was built on The Lord of the Rings.
Catsby, which would be the feline version of Gatsby (can’t stand the book; love the movie, though).
Cheese, because I think it would be funny to have a cat named Cheese.
Slinky, in case we adopt a fat cat. Everyone loves animals with ironic names.
Of course, creating this elaborate list didn’t take my mind away from my conversation with Becky. I suddenly have all these responsibilities that I didn’t have when I woke up this morning. I have a responsibility to be a good friend to Caio, to make a move if I want this story to go beyond pure friendship, and an even greater responsibility to the cats we will adopt in the future.
As anyone who has ever seen a Spider-Man movie knows, “With great power comes great responsibility” (it was actually Spider-Man’s uncle who said that), but right now all I have is great responsibility and no power.
The hours drag by, and when my mom and Caio finally get home, I’m almost done watching a YouTube video where a girl throws a bunch of stuff into a giant shredder. It’s mesmerizing, I swear. She throws a fridge into the shredder, and it turns to dust in five seconds.
“Hi, son. I missed you.” My mom walks into the living room and kisses my forehead.
“Me too,” Caio says, and my face goes red immediately.
I want to hurl myself into a giant shredder.
“How was it?” I ask.
My mom answers, but I’m not paying attention. I’m more focused on Caio as he rummages through his backpack, searching for something.
He produces a piece of paper and hands it to me.
“This is for you.”
I unfold the paper, and a smile blooms on my face. It’s another drawing by Eddie. This time, it’s a self-portrait. He’s wearing a Robin suit. On his costume, the R is inverted, and on the bottom of the page he wrote Me.
“Eddie missed you. He was sad when he saw you weren’t with us. But I told him a new drawing would make you really happy, and he spent the whole day on that work of art,” Caio says as I take in every detail of the drawing.
“It really did.”
I get up and go to my room to hang the new drawing on the wall, next to the one I got last week. My bedroom is starting to look like a prekindergarten classroom, but I don’t mind.
“Why did you want to stay home? If I knew, I’d have stayed, too.” Caio is right behind me, and his voice is lower than usual.
“I was sleepy. No big deal. I’m sorry I aborted the mission without saying anything,” I answer, also in a low voice, as if we are sharing a secret.
“But everything’s okay, right? With you, I mean. And me. We’re … cool. Yeah?”
I have no idea what to say, so I wriggle out of it. “You left your phone behind. Becky called. Then she called two more times, and I thought it could be serious, so I picked it up.”
“And was it?”
“What?”
“Serious?”
“No,” I say. “And yes,” I add.
“What do you mean?”
“She just wanted to say hello. But it was an important hello. She said she’ll call you later.”
Caio starts looking at his phone, somewhat suspicious.
“Felipe, you were on the phone for twelve minutes. No one takes twelve minutes to say hello, no matter how important it is.”
“She asked me for comic book recommendations,” I lie.
“Oh, yeah.” Caio seems to believe my lie, and then my mom calls us to dinner.
Monday is Takeout Night, and we vote to decide what we’ll eat just for the simple pleasure of turning anything about our routine into a TV game show.
I vote for Chinese because I urgently need some advice from Grandma Thereza. But Caio and my mom prefer Mexican, and I have to accept that tonight I won’t get any supernatural help from a fortune cookie.
As we eat our sophisticated Mexican dinner, sharing the tight couch and watching an episode of Hoarders (a really gross show to watch during a meal), Caio’s phone starts ringing. He rolls his eyes and lets out an impatient sigh, but when he looks at the screen and finds out it’s not his mom trying to call, his face lights up.
“It’s Becky. I’ll take it in the bedroom.”
And off he goes, leaving half a meat burrito on a plate balancing on the couch’s arm.
My mom and I continue eating in silence, completely focused on the TV. In today’s episode, we’re following a hoarder addicted to wedding artifacts and cats. She’s never been married but has hundreds of white dresses. When the show crew finds a dead cat under a pile of bridal magazines, my mom and I exchange a look of disgust and decide it’s time to watch something else.
It’s been half an hour and Caio still isn’t back. I can hear his voice from the bedroom but can’t understand what he’s saying. Sometimes he laughs out loud, but mostly it sounds like it’s a serious conversation.
My mom is exhausted. She kisses me good night and goes to bed. Then it’s just me, the TV, and Caio’s burrito. I feel tempted to finish it, but I put it in the fridge because that seems like the right thing to do.
I go into the bedroom quietly, and Caio keeps talking to Rebeca. I try to gesture the question “Can I come in?”
“What’s that?” Caio asks, taking his attention away from the phone.
Apparently, I suck at sign language.
“Can I come in?”
He smiles at me, nods, and goes back to his conversation.
“So, yeah,” he says. “I’m going to hang up now. But thank you for the talk. You know exactly how to pat my head and slap me in the face at the same time.”
I laugh, trying to imagine what that must feel like.
Caio hangs up and hands me a piece of paper. “I circled my favorites.”
It’s the list of cat names that I left on my desk.
I let out a sigh of relief, because on the top of the list I wrote only Possible Cat Names and not Possible Cat Names for the Cat Caio and I Will Adopt in Our First Year of Marriage.
I scan the list and see the names Caio circled: Nesquik, Jonas, Nugget, Beyoncé, and Bagel. The last one is the common denominator, so it’s official. Our adopted cat will be named Bagel.
It’s not even ten o’clock yet, but Caio is already turning off the light and getting ready for bed.
“It was exhausting today. Those kids drained all of my energy,” he explains. “They won’t stop for a second.”
“You weren’t very different,” I say, remembering the afternoons I spent playing with Caio at the pool. He could run and dive for hours, never stopping to rest. But if I got tired (which happened very often), he would calm down and swim slowly with me.
Caio goes quiet for a moment and I’m starting to think he fell asleep when I hear him say in a whisper, “It was cool, wasn’t it? When we were kids. At the pool and everything. Too bad it didn’t last.”
“It was. I don’t even remember why I stopped going,” I lie for the second time in the last couple of hours.
“We can go back there one of these days. I never say no to pool time. Just let me know!” he says, and I can feel a drop of sweat running down my forehead, nervous just to imagine going to the pool with Caio. “If you want to, that is,” he adds, when he notices I got a little awkward.