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It's not an official rule, it's not on purpose, and honestly, it's not very convenient, but Flynn is the only person capable of calling the weekly Julie and the Phantoms band meetings to order. The others try, sometimes, but no one else's efforts to curb the giggles and social time and say, "hey, okay, we have work to do" ever seem to have much effect.
Today, Flynn kicks it off by bursting through the door, announcing, “I’m going to kill my mother,” and then plunking herself down on the couch next to Julie and reaching for the calendar on the table.
“You good?” Reggie asks. There’s a tiny hint of a smirk on her face, but it’s overshadowed by concern, like she can’t quite tell if Flynn’s going for laughter or sympathy and she’s trying to cover all her bases.
"I'm fine," Flynn says. "Can we get started?"
They do, but Flynn is completely off her game, and she's sure everyone can tell. They drop off sentences halfway through the point they were trying to make; they don't process a single word of Bobby's budget review; Julie has to wave them back from zoning out two separate times. She just can't get her brain to stick to anything with her blood boiling like this.
Luke is the one who breaks the tension, after Flynn forgets half of her own carefully crafted, years-old color coding system. “Okay, Flynn and I are taking a break,” he declares.
She eyes him skeptically, but Luke just says, “Come on, let’s go,” and pulls her up off the couch. “We’re gonna go for a quick drive,” he tells everyone else. “Don’t release any albums without us.”
“No promises!” Julie and Reggie chorus. Alex just gives them a thumbs-up, and Bobby tosses his keys over to Luke, who catches them and blows a kiss at him before he pushes Flynn out the door.
“We’re in the middle of a meeting,” Flynn says as she slides into the passenger’s seat.
“You’re in the middle of something more important,” Luke answers easily. “What’s up with your mom?”
“It’s not even like, a big thing,” Flynn says. “I just got stuck on something stupid she said.”
“You don’t get mad over nothing, though.”
“Ugh, I know. Like, I’m right, it’s just so annoying that I have to be the one affected by it. I just wanna know that she’s wrong and move on with my day, you know?”
“Yeah,” Luke says, and when Flynn lets the sound of the engine and the movement of the car fill the silence instead of her voice, he prompts, “So what was it that she said?”
“She’s mad that I think she’s homophobic? Which I didn’t even say to her face, she just assumes I’m saying it behind her back, which I am, but if she didn’t want me doing that she could have tried not being homophobic, right?”
“Definitely. Dude, didn’t she try to take your library card for reading too much queer stuff?”
“Yep!” Flynn confirms. “And for like, a year after I came out to her she made a point to let me know how uncomfortable every single rainbow accessory made her, and one of my dad’s brothers is gay too and she still doesn’t want us spending the night at his place and we never talk about that, and it’s just . . . okay, obviously I’m mad about those things, but it’s whatever, I just can’t stand that she gets to do all that and then turn around and tell me that the problem is me calling homophobia what it is.”
“Jesus.”
“Like, why the fuck does she get to make it my fault?”
"She doesn't," Luke says emphatically. He rolls to a stop at a light and turns to face her. "That's total bullshit and she has no right to make you feel bad for being right, you don't ever deserve that. Flynn, you're like, the coolest, most caring person I know, she's insane if she thinks you calling out her shit makes that less true."
The sheer earnestness is almost enough to make Flynn cry, and they should give him a real response, but . . . "The light's green."
"Shit, yeah," Luke says, eyes back on the road. "We're having a moment, okay?" he hollers at the cars honking behind them. "Assholes."
Flynn shakes their head. "It's like they don't know we're the main characters."
Luke grins, and they're quiet for a minute (or, Flynn is quiet; Luke is still muttering curses as he drives—less like he's mad and more like it's simply a requirement to keep the car moving). He pulls into a McDonald's parking lot and kills the engine, and Flynn says, "It is a little bit my fault, though."
Luke tenses, and before he can go on another trademarked validation rant, she adds, "I didn't do anything wrong. It's just . . . I can tell she's trying, right? Like, she has tried to have real conversations with me about queer stuff, and I don't think she can blame me for not being excited about that after she kept telling me how much she was 'really struggling with the whole rainbow thing,' but I also still get that it hurts when I brush her off. And it's not just with this; like, I know she's trying to be emotionally available in general, and I'm not engaging with that, and there's no way to not feel a little bit shitty about that."
"Yeah," Luke says. "Yeah, I definitely get that." He twists a ring around on his finger, slides it off and then right back on. “It's like . . . I'm glad I'm talking to my mom again, you know? I love her, and she knows I love her, and I can go and talk to her instead of hiding in the bushes, and I get to include her in the parts of my life I want her in, and, like, I actually feel like our relationship is good , and that's—I mean, I don't know if I ever thought we were gonna have that, especially after I left."
"Right," Flynn says. It's practically illegal for a friend to let Luke Patterson talk about his mom without offering some kind of physical comfort, but he won't want to keep his hands still long enough to hold hers, and hugging or leaning up against him are tricky in the car, so she settles for resting a hand on his knee.
He catches their eye for half a second before continuing, "But I think she thinks it's gonna keep getting better? Like, she's happy that we're talking again because she thinks it means we're on a path to getting closer, and I don't know if I can do that. I don't . . . I don't think I want to do that. Which I guess means I'm gonna be disappointing her for the whole rest of our lives." Luke ducks his head and pushes a hand back through his hair, a little self-conscious. "Was that . . . did I get it right, is that what you're feeling? Or did I go on the wrong kind of tangent?"
"No, you pretty much nailed it." Flynn sighs. “I love my mom, and I know I came into this with ‘I’m gonna kill her,’ but I really do think things are mostly good, and there are a lot of things she does right, it’s just that every time we try to actually talk, it ends up like this. So then I feel like we have too many fundamental differences for things to ever be better, and she feels like I’m not trying, and we never get anywhere, and it sucks .”
“Yeah,” Luke says.
Flynn pulls his hand over to her lap and fidgets with his bracelets as they speak. “I get why she’s hurt, and I get that some of the choices I’ve made have been hard for her, but I don’t know what to do, because like . . . I don’t know, it’s easy to be in favor of the idea of having hard conversations with the people you love, but then all the actual conversations we have are this bullshit” —Flynn waves their free hand meaninglessly; Luke seems to get the idea anyway— “so either I talk to her, and we both get upset about it, or I don’t, and she’s still upset, and there aren’t any better options when just existing as ourselves around each other hurts, so I just . . . exist a little less around her. And that hurts too.”
“Fuck,” Luke breathes. “Dude, come here.” They’ve given up on respecting the limitations the car puts on cuddling, then. Flynn isn't complaining. She clambers over to sit in Luke's lap, back against his window, side wedged against the steering wheel.
“I don’t think she gets that she pushed me away in the first place," she tells Luke. "She either doesn’t know what she did, or she doesn’t think my reaction is fair, and either way, neither of us think we’ve done anything wrong, so all she’s ever gonna see is how I keep rejecting her. That’s always what her story’s gonna be.”
“I know,” Luke says. “It sucks, and she’s wrong, and you deserve better than that, okay?”
“Okay,” Flynn echoes, noncommittal. They usually don’t have any trouble knowing their worth and knowing how they deserve to be treated, but mom stuff has a way of getting to them, of dragging every insecurity up with claws. Luke gets that better than anyone, though.
“I’m serious, she’s so lucky to have you. You know that, right? God, I never tried this hard to understand my mom’s side of things back when I lived with her.”
“Eh, mine doesn’t scream at me,” Flynn shrugs. “I think it balances out.”
“That’s fair,” Luke says. He sort of half lifts her up for a second so he can shift his legs, then adds, “They’re about even as far as having no way to win with them, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, like, all of our fights about music were like that; she’d get mad that I was doing too much band stuff and then she’d get mad that I didn’t want to tell her anything, and I think I always thought that if the band got far enough, she’d see it was all worth it? But every time we got closer to that it just freaked her out more.”
This isn’t new information to Flynn, she had the gist of that conflict already, but it’s nice to hear it again in a context that lets them know that Luke gets what they’re dealing with, and anyway, sometimes listening is less about learning anything new and more about just letting your friend say what they need to say.
“And I just spent a lot of time swinging back and forth between trying to hide everything from my parents and trying to throw it all in their faces,” Luke says, “because if they were going to be like that anyway, like, what was the point? Why not blow everything up? Maybe it would at least make them see how much it mattered to me, you know?”
“Yeah,” Flynn says, because that’s really the only thing to say. Like, yeah. Yeah . Exactly. Fuck.
"I dunno," Luke says, "we're better about the music thing than we used to be; I think she knows she can't push it too hard, but now she keeps getting on me to bring Bobby over for dinner like I don't know how that's gonna go."
Flynn raises their eyebrows. "Yikes."
"I know," Luke groans. "But I don't really have better options here, either, because if they don't see me, like, bring him to family stuff and go on real dates and gush about him all the time, both of my parents are gonna think that it's not serious, or that I'm wrong about my feelings, or that I'm not doing this relationship the right way, but then if they do see any of that, they're just gonna be weird and tense and judgey and I hate it."
"It's so stupid," Flynn says.
"So stupid," Luke agrees. "You ever think about how many problems we just wouldn't have if our parents knew how to chill out?"
"Alllll the time," Flynn sighs. "But hey, gotta give them props for keeping all those therapists in business."
Luke snorts, and Flynn decides they're officially out of serious mode now, so she says, "Okay, I love you, but I am not loving this steering wheel right now, I'm gonna—" She pushes off of Luke and does a little half-tumble, half-crawl back over to the passenger seat. "There."
Luke reaches for the keys, but he pauses, checks, "Did you get everything you needed? I didn't mean to take over or anything."
Flynn grins. "I was asking for it, we all know you win at mommy issues."
Luke sticks his tongue out at her. "Shut up."
"Seriously, you're good," Flynn assures him. They don't know how to say everything they mean to—that Luke putting words to his feelings was a gift to them, saved them the time and frustration of having to sort through everything on their own. That he's really good at this, at handing people pieces of his heart that reflect things in themselves that were hard to nail down. He can get avoidant about his feelings, and Flynn can't blame him, but when he makes the space to stumble through them honestly, he always hits something real.
Flynn tells him, "I feel better," and gives his hand a squeeze, and hopes that says enough.