“Yeah,” Freck agreed. Then cocking his head to the side, he asked, “Hey, you wanna go swim until the guests arrive?”
Shaking my head, I replied, “There’ll be plenty of time to swim later. I think I’ll just chill out and watch TV. But don’t let me keep you from swimming! Why don’t you go ahead?”
“Oh, Okay,” he replied. “Just come get me when the first guests arrive. If the party’s supposed to start at noon, you know no one’ll show up before 12:30, and things won’t get underway until 1:00.”
“For sure,” I agreed, and then Freck headed down the stairs to the lower level and the pool. Before I even had a chance to grab the remote control, however, I heard him shout, “Oh wow! There are already a lot of presents here!”
Running to the railing overlooking the foyer, I looked down and saw that, indeed, there were a ton of gift-wrapped boxes under the tree. “I think those are all yours, bud,” I called out over the railing. The Hanukkah gift-giving wouldn’t be for another three days yet, on the final night, just after we light eight candles.
“There are gifts from all your relatives,” Freck exclaimed. “Even from people I’ve never met.”
“You probably met them at the wedding,” I responded, “but some of them even I don’t remember,” I added with a laugh.
“I guess I’d better leave these for later,” Freck stated with a sigh.
“If you don’t want someone to throw you in the pool,” I agreed.
“Someone will probably throw me in the pool anyway,” Freck noted and I had to agree.
After Freck disappeared from my sight, I headed back to the great room and plopped myself down on the sofa next to my brother, where Roger was already mindlessly flipping through channels. After watching him fail to land on anything for more than a second or two, I suggested, “Either watch something like CNN, or pull up a short movie or episode of something you actually like on Netflix or Amazon Prime, why don’t you?”
“Because annoying you is so much more fun,” he replied.
“Likewise,” I agreed, and then I attacked him with a vengeance. The tickling soon turned into an all-out wrestling match as we fell off the sofa to the floor and rolled around, taking care not to knock anything over. It didn’t take long for Roger to have me pinned, but even still, he held my shoulders down with his extended arms, failing to let me up.
“You may be two years ahead of me in school, brother, but I’m still nearly five years older,” he exclaimed. “By the way, how long did it take you to shave today? Oh, that’s right. You’re still hairless… everywhere except for your head, where you wear your hair longer than most girls I know.”
That much was true. I hadn’t cut my hair in nearly a year now, and it was already halfway down my back. I liked my hair long and more importantly, Freck absolutely loved it that way. “Like Sampson, my hair makes me strong,” I told my brother. “Let me up now, or you’ll see what I do to you.”
Of course, taunting him only strengthened his resolve to keep me down, but with his hands holding my shoulders down and his body holding my legs down, that left my hands and arms totally free, and so I resumed tickling his arm pits with furor. That was all it took and we soon ended up sitting on the floor, laughing with each other as only brothers can.
“Boy, the food smells amazing,” Dad said as he entered the great room, with Ken close behind him. They were both barefoot and wearing swim trunks, but also polo shirts. I guess that was so they’d appear parental to any parents dropping off their kids. And maybe to the kids too. As far as I knew, no one we invited was a smoker or used drugs, but one doesn’t always know what their friends from school do in private or when they party, so I could understand the need for the appearance of authority.
“I didn’t know you hired a sushi chef,” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could hire Japanese caterers at all, but that was naïve of me. I love sushi. I love anything Japanese, except maybe the Americanized stuff like Benihana.”
“The sushi chef was part of a package deal,” Dad explained, “and the caterers are actually Korean.”
“Korean!” I responded in surprise.
“A lot of Japanese restaurants are owned by Koreans, and a lot of trained sushi chefs are Korean… even the ones working in some of the Japanese-owned restaurants,” Dad went on to explain. “Of course, the Japanese-owned restaurants claim they’re more authentic and generally charge more, but the Koreans, by increasing the supply to meet the demand, have reduced the prices the market will bear. The fact is that during World War II, Japan invaded the Korean peninsula and they trained Korean chefs to prepare food for them. Thus the Japanese trained a generation of Koreans to prepare Japanese food identical to that served in Japan, and now there are Koreans training other Koreans, serving a growing demand all over the world.”
“That’s really cool,” I replied, “at least until the fish run out.”
“That’s a bit pessimistic, don’t you think?” Ken asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “Yesterday’s worst-case scenario is today’s best-case scenario. Scientists have consistently underestimated the speed of climate change. We’re already in the midst of global ecosystem collapse.”
“It’s a shame… they were talking about the greenhouse effect back when I was your age, Kyle,” Dad added.
“Actually, they taught about it in school when your parents were my age,” I responded. “We’ve known about it all this time yet done nothing. We’ve destroyed the Amazon rainforest… the most important carbon sink on the planet. We’ve only accelerated the pace of deforestation as we over-fish, over-graze and over-plant. The pace of species extension is quickening and we’re losing the very buffering systems that have absorbed atmospheric carbon throughout our planet’s history. Not only are we releasing vast stores of fossilized hydrocarbons into the air, but as the tundra thaws, we’re releasing vast amounts of methane. People don’t realize that the ice caps that are melting are themselves an important buffer that regulates temperature. Once the ice is gone, the only remaining buffer will be the boiling point of water. How will life survive when the oceans start to boil?”
“You’re assuming a runaway greenhouse effect,” Freck said as he padded his way up the stairs, his hair still wet from swimming. “We’re a long way from becoming another Venus, mind you. Not that it couldn’t happen,” Freck continued, “and James Hansen would back you up on that, but the earth doesn’t receive nearly as much sunlight, nor does it have an atmosphere that’s entirely carbon dioxide. Yes, the sun’s output will eventually increase enough to boil the oceans, but not for another billion years or so.”
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” I replied. “All we have to do is keep burning fossil fuels and destroying earth’s ecosystem, and we’ll get our answer.”
“The good news, if it can be called that, is that China stands to lose the most from climate change,” Freck countered. “They have a lot of issues with corruption, but when they flood the market with cheap solar panels and wind turbines, not even the protectionist policies of the U.S. will be able to stop the adoption of renewable energy. The biggest problem is that carbon neutrality won’t come nearly fast enough to mitigate against sea level rise, starvation and mass migration. And that’s where I’ll come in, building new cities to absorb the migrants, and vast high-rise urban farms to feed them.”
“And who’s gonna pay for all that?” I asked.
Shrugging his shoulders, Freck answered, “It could just as easily be us as them who are the migrants. It’s cheaper to house and feed climate refugees than to go to war with them, particularly when there are more of them than us.”
Ken chimed in. “Let’s hope we all come to our senses before things get that much worse.”
“Amen to that,” Dad agreed.
“Man, the smell of all that food’s makin’ me starved,” Freck announced, as if we didn’t already know that. Being the most brazen among us, I stepped up to the kitchen island, where a batch of spring rolls was cooling, and grabbed one, popping it into my mouth. I’d figured it would be hot, but not quite so hot. With nothing cold to drink within my reach, I put my hand in front of my mouth and blew repeatedly on the morsel in my mouth until it was cool enough to bite into. Finally, I could tell that it was stuffed with shrimp, and it was delicious.
Being far more sensible, Freck stepped up to a plate of fresh chicken yakitori and grabbed a stick, blowing on it and then sliding it into his mouth, biting down and pulling back. The smile on his face as he chewed showed how much he was enjoying it. Roger grabbed a stuffed mushroom cap and popped it into his mouth, obviously enjoying it as well.
“Boys, you can each have one more appetizer before the guests arrive,” Dad admonished us. This time I grabbed a mushroom cap, Roger ate a stick of beef yakitori and Freck, the devil, took a shrimp spring roll, dipped it into spicy mustard and popped it in his mouth. Perhaps it had already cooled down since my misadventure, as he had no trouble at all.
It was just as I attempted to take another appetizer without being noticed, the doorbell rang. Of course, it rang just as I was trying to get away with sneaking a third appetizer, and so I was caught with chicken yakitori in my mouth.
“What the fuck is someone doing, arriving early,” Freck asked. Actually, it was ten of twelve, which could only mean one thing, and so Freck and I rushed upstairs, just as Dad was opening the door. Sure enough, it was Asher and Seth on the other side. Only our very best friends would be brazen enough to come early.
“You’re early,” I said as they waltzed in.
“No, we’re not,” Asher countered. “It’s rude to be late and given the vagaries of public transportation, you should have expected us any time after 11:30. Everyone else is just late.”
“You just wanted to get here before the best of the food was gone,” Freck countered.
“Damn right, we did,” Seth replied.
“Same place for changing?” Asher asked.
Nodding my head, I replied, “Freck’s and Roger’s rooms for boys, mine and the guest room for girls.”
“Swimsuits optional?” Seth asked with a teasing voice as he unzipped his coat to reveal he was already bare-chested.
“You know better,” I answered. “For one thing, Jessie may have the same equipment, but she’s trans and would be offended to be treated like a boy. Secondly, Freck invited quite a few girls who are friends from school. Thirdly, the caterers aren’t all men and for all we know, some of the men might like boys too. And finally, we don’t need any rumors getting started about an orgy or anything.”
“We aren’t having an orgy?” Asher asked. “What kind of party is this, anyway.” He was having trouble saying it with a straight face however, and then he lost it entirely as he broke out in his trademark Tiger Woods smile.
“Come on in guys,” Freck admonished our guests. “There’s a ton of food and we’re all starving. You’re our best excuse to start eating.”
“In that case, we’ll be right back,” Seth replied as he grabbed his boyfriend’s hand and pulled him in the direction of Freck’s bedroom, which was on the opposite side of the vestibule from mine.
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