smackenzie

This time Laurie's alarm clock woke him up like it was supposed to, and he was momentarily confused as to why there was a strange arm flung over his shoulders. Then the body attached to the strange arm stirred, mumbled "Fuck," and he remembered. Danny sitting on his couch at two in the morning. Danny explaining he'd broken up with his girlfriend because he thought he might be gay.

Oh, joy.

Laurie was starting to think Danny was just confused. He'd never gotten a single whiff of queerness off his half brother, and as anyone could tell you, Laurie's gaydar was in full working order. Lea sometimes joked that he could smell the gay boys from across state lines. But he'd never even remotely thought Danny might be one of them.

But then, Danny was his half brother, and you didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about your younger sibling's sexual orientation, did you? So maybe he really did like boys better than girls. As Laurie had pointed out last night, there was just one way to make sure. Just not right now.

"Ok, kid," he said, literally rolling out of bed and landing on the floor with a thump, "you gotta go home, because I gotta go to work."

"Fuck," Danny mumbled again, pulling the blankets around himself. Kid was as much a not-morning person as Laurie was. He wondered where they'd gotten that from - their mom was always up and perky at six-thirty or seven, and Jeremy had been getting his ass out of bed early for so long that he couldn't sleep late even when he wanted to. It made for some very interesting mornings, sometimes.

"Come on." Laurie pulled at the blankets wrapped around his half brother. "Mom and Jeremy are gonna have a fit when you don't come down for breakfast."

"It's Saturday. And I said I might not come home."

"Whatever. I still have to go to work." Laurie stumbled into the bathroom to pee and check to see if he needed to shave or not. He had dark hair and relatively pale skin, so the stubble showed up alarmingly well, but he also had slow-growing relatively fine hair. He could get away with not shaving every morning. But he liked to make a good impression at work. They hadn't made him cut his hair but they didn't like their waiters to have beard stubble.

"I got a key," Danny called, and Laurie mentally slapped himself. Right. He went back out into the bedroom, having decided he needed coffee before he put a razor anywhere near his face.

"Ok, then stay here. I might come back after work - I should be out of there by four and practice isn't until eight. I guess you can stay if you still want to talk, but please call Mom or she'll pitch a fit, and she'll pitch it at me."

"Ok, ok." Danny's head disappeared under the blankets, and Laurie went to turn on the coffee machine, then came back to get dressed while it brewed. Danny hadn't moved.

"Hey, Danny, you ok?" Maybe that was a stupid question, considering. It looked like the mound under the blankets shrugged its shoulders. "If you really wanna know if you're queer you gotta put yourself in the path of another queer boy. He'll help you make the decision." The mound shrugged again. Laurie thought. He could smell the coffee and it was clearing his head. Excellent. "Ok, how about this - Book of Fish is playing the Pig on Tuesday. Yeah, I know it's a school night, we'll have to think of something to tell Mom and Jeremy. They always get a crowd of cute boys - Nico's got a worse reputation than me, and it's not quite all-ages but they'll let you in if you're eighteen. I know the guy at the door. I'll get you in." I know the guy at the door in this case did NOT mean I've fucked the guy at the door, but the much more prosaic The guy at the door and I were friends in college.

"I've got an ID," Danny said from under the covers. "Says I'm nineteen."

"Why didn't you go for twenty-one?"

"Do I look twenty-one to you?" He pushed the blankets off his head and sat up. His brown hair stuck out at all angles and he blinked at Laurie. He looked almost annoyed.

"Don't get pissed at me, Danny. I'm trying to help you. I'm not working lunch on Wednesday so we can stay out until either you kiss a boy and like it, or you kiss a girl and like it better. You're not gonna chicken out on me either. I'll bring Lea, she'll keep you focused."

"Ok, ok. Thanks," Danny said almost grudgingly.

"Least I can do. You got too much else to think about without having to worry about who you do or don't want to fuck. I suck with relationship advice but I think I can help with this. Ok?"

"I said thanks."

"Good boy. I'll leave you some coffee. You can pour it out if you don't want it - I can't drink stale coffee." Laurie stood up. "Danny?"

"Yeah."

"You'll work it out. Promise. Don't stress, it's not the worst thing that could happen to you."

"Well it pretty much sucks right now. I'm gonna make some unconscious move towards Marcus and he's gonna call me a fag and the team's gonna beat me to a pulp. Macho jocks."

"How long've you known those guys?"

"Some of 'em four years, since we were freshman."

"And you think they'll suddenly revise their opinion of you if they think you're gay?"

"Uh-huh."

Well, ok, Laurie had expected that answer. He hadn't exactly made a big deal of being gay when he was in high school, despite his stepdad finding him sucking face with one of his classmates. Some people knew because they just did, because he told them or they guessed, and some people were blissfully clueless. So he could understand Danny's hesitation.

He went into the kitchen to rescue his coffee and sucked it down as he paced the apartment making sure he wasn't forgetting anything (although his clothes were at work in a locker, so he didn't have to worry about that). He packed up his Les Paul so he wouldn't have to do it later, dropped the now-empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink, and stuck his head in the bedroom door. Danny seemed to be asleep. Maybe that was good.

"You awake?" Laurie said, just to make sure. No answer. "I'll come home after work, before practice. See, I'm even gonna leave my guitar here. You can hang out if you want, just give Mom a call if you decide to stay. Ok?"

"'Kay."

"Think of something to tell her that'll get you out late Tuesday."

"'Kay."

"See you later."

"'Kay."

And with that Laurie left the house.

Danny was gone when he got home after the lunch shift (which was busy but mostly straightforward). Laurie shrugged to himself, checked his phone messages, and made himself a peanutbutter sandwich with banana. He watched TV while he ate, thought about the song he was trying to write, wondered how Bran could write lyrics without ever having any idea what Laurie was trying to convey through the music, and decided he needed dessert to go with his sandwich. He wondered if Danny had come to a conclusion about yesterday, and then figured probably not. Once Laurie had worked out that he really was gay, which he'd done more or less by the time he was fourteen, he couldn't think of a time when he might've been straight. It had always been obvious to him that he liked boys.

Well, maybe it had always been obvious to Danny too, and he'd just been repressing it or something. Laurie might never know. There wasn't anything he could do about it now anyway - he figured they'd find out on Tuesday, and Danny would just have to keep his head on straight until then.

Straight. Heh. Sometimes Laurie cracked himself up.

At about seven he unpacked his guitar to make sure he had some extra strings just in case one broke, because their newest song, "Wide and Clever," always made him break a string. They were probably tuned too tight. He shouldn't still be letting Bran tune his guitar between songs. When he'd made sure he had everything, he pulled on his jacket, picked up his motorcycle helmet, and went back out.

The other side of the Story of Laurie Jude Dolan was the Story of Steerpike. It was more or less founded by Bran and Mission after the dissolution of a local little moody shoegazer outfit called the Pear and the Pomegranate, for which Bran sang lead and wrote inscrutable lyrics. Mission was their fill-in drummer and graphic designer - at the time he was roommates with the guitarist and kind of ended up designing their flyers and CD cover by default, because no one else in the band could or wanted to do it. The drummer turned out to have much bigger personal problems than anyone suspected, and when he showed up at their practice space one day and tried to strangle the bass player, they figured they should call it quits.

So Bran started Steerpike, which at first was just him and a drum machine and more of his now-famous obscure arty lyrics. He asked Mission to join as the drummer and they put an ad in one of the local alternative papers, calling for another guitarist and a bass player. Lea was the best bassist they auditioned (not to mention the cutest). The original lead guitarist was a law student named Nestor, but he ultimately didn't have the free time that Bran required from his band members, and he had to leave. Lea mentioned to Laurie, who'd been her friend since they were juniors in high school, that she was in this band that needed a guitar player and what did he think?

In the three and a half years they'd been together, Steerpike had recorded one EP, Peake, also known as The Stack EP, and one full-length CD, called simply Steerpike. They'd been on two compliations, Live at the Pig which was done by a club called the Blind Pig, and Girls Guys and Guitars, which was put together by a local radio station. They were getting fairly well-known in the local scene but had yet to play anywhere outside Eden.

Lea's boyfriend Marshall put together a web site and every so often a Mervyn Peake fan would stumble on it thinking it was a Gormenghast fan site. Bran always fielded the emails from confused Peake fans, explaining that yes, the band was named after the ambitious kitchen boy of the Gormenghast novels, and yes, he was a big fan of the trilogy, but no, the web site wasn't a Steerpike shrine. Mission had suggested they maybe put up a disclaimer to that effect, but Bran said no, he didn't mind confusing the occasional Gormenghast fanboy (or fangirl), and if they had any sense they'd realize right away the band's web site wasn't the Steerpike site they were probably looking for.

Laurie just figured that as long as they weren't intentionally trying to mislead people, there wasn't a problem. Besides, a girl had come up to him after a gig once and said she'd found the web site by mistake when she was looking for Steerpike/Jonathan Rhys Meyers fansites, but she really liked the music and was glad she'd been misled like that.

They practiced in Mission's house because he had the room and it was a pain in the ass for him to move his drums. They'd rented studio space to record the EP and the full-length CD, and sometimes when Mission's sister and her kids were staying with him they had to scramble to find someplace else, once ending up at Laurie's parents' house and once at Lea's parents' house. But Mission's sister and nephews were generally understanding - they tended to show up unannounced anyway, and couldn't really make demands. Besides, the nephews were six and nine, were fascinated that their uncle played in a band, and loved to sit in on rehearsals. They even managed to behave themselves.

Personally Laurie thought Mission's sister was taking advantage of him and she should leave her husband already, but he couldn't make judgements about someone else's family, because his wasn't exactly perfect. He was plotting to get his younger half brother laid, so the kid would know for sure if he was gay or not. Laurie didn't think that was the kind of thing that went on in nice suburban middle-class households.

words: 2139
total words: 7412