Farfa - A shortened form of the Norwegian farfar, meaning father’s father.

Collin came out of the shower, bringing a cloud of steam with him. He had changed into a clean T-shirt and dumped his sweaty clothing on the floor by the couch before going into the kitchenette.

Erik watched his brother out of the corner of one eye while simultaneously trying to avoid making eye contact with Ray. It was difficult. But more difficult would have been discussing the situation, especially with Collin there. He didn’t have the words to explain how uncomfortable the entire situation was. Ray, sitting there, watching and apparently waiting for an opportunity to do something stupid and ninja-like, made everything worse. Resolutely, he turned most of his attention back to Ultimate Legend VI and battle after unsatisfying battle.

“Man, how can you guys even move around in this place? I feel like I’m going to knock something over every time I turn around,” came Collin’s voice from the kitchenette.

“Usually we don’t,” Erik muttered. He gave up entirely on trying to watch Collin and fixed his eyes forward.

“Takeout is your friend,” Ray agreed. He ate another cookie.

Erik heard Collin make a gagging noise, and the sound of the refrigerator door being opened. “I can tell,” Collin muttered. “All you guys have is some really gross looking pizza and clumps of rice or something. You can’t expect me to eat this.”

“We don’t. You’re looking at our supper and breakfast, Collin. You can fend for yourself,” Erik said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

“I think the stuff in the rice is talking to me.”

Ray chuckled. Erik punched him in the arm. Collin did not need Ray’s encouragement. The kid had an overinflated ego that had been doubling in size since he was eight years old. Ray could be nothing but a bad influence on him “Shut up, Collin. I already said you don’t have to eat it. The contents of the fridge are not yours. Got it?”

Erik could almost hear the nonchalant shrug his brother was definitely executing. Then, Collin changed tracks. “Does Mom know you drink?”

Erik dropped the controller and was off the couch in a flash. Not even a brief encounter with Ray’s outstretched legs or the subsequent stubbing of his toe and smacking of his elbow on the end of the couch could stop him from speeding the short distance to the kitchenette and slamming the fridge door shut, nearly crushing Collin’s fingers. He loomed over his brother. “The contents of the fridge,” he enunciated with unusual clarity, “are not the business of you or Mom, understand?”

Collin shrugged, crossing his arms over the logo of his T-shirt. He leaned one shoulder casually on the fridge. His eyebrows rose. He was neither threatened nor impressed.

It hardly seemed fair to Erik. The entire point of being ridiculously tall was sibling intimidating. “I’ll throw you out the window.”

“You live on the third floor. It’s not exactly a killer drop.”

“He’s right,” Ray said from the couch.

“Shut up, Ray!” Erik lowered his voice. “Look, Collin, telling Mom would be pointless. I’m almost legal – ”

“If nine months is almost legal enough for you to get drunk and puke, then I may as well start driving now,” Collin interrupted.

Ray snorted and Erik felt his temples begin to throb. His hands could wrap easily around Collin’s thin neck, and while Ray would be harder . . . No. Overreacting. Probably. Breathe. “Could you please let me finish talking? Both of you?” When he heard Ray fill his mouth with another cookie and Collin didn’t verbally object, he continued. “Look, most people in University drink. It’s part of growing up, part of socializing with classmates – ”

Collin’s jaw cracked as he yawned.

Erik counted backwards from ten. Then fifty. “Telling Mom would be bad karma, okay? It’ll come back and bite you in the ass when you go away to school and just need a way to cut loose and have fun after an exam or something.”

The stare of cold adolescent contempt from Collin’s eyes could have instantly eradicated every forest fire the province had ever seen. “Alcohol pollutes the body,” he said evenly.

Erik goggled. “How do you not get beaten up at school every day?”

“I’m cool,” Collin said. He straightened and gave another of his careless, trademarked ‘I’m so much cooler than you’ shrugs.

Stupid smart, popular, athletic Collin.

“Look, I won’t rat on you to Mom, Sigurd. I wouldn’t do that to her.” Erik exhaled in relief. “It would just worry her. She’ll find out when you die from alcohol poisoning eventually.”

Erik rolled his eyes, but Collin was clearly too cool to acknowledge the gesture. “What about him?” he asked, pointing past Erik to Ray.

Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight . . . “Why do you care if he drinks? What could you possibly gain from telling his mom? When did you decide to finance your trip to the Olympics with blackmail?”

“My mother doesn’t speak English,” Ray said cheerfully, closing the subject.

Collin shrugged again. “Just curious. No blackmail. The big city has clearly made you suspicious and paranoid, Sigurd.”

Erik started counting again. He couldn’t remember why it was supposed to help control anger. Maybe the brilliant person who’d come up with the idea just hadn’t taken things like Collin, or Ray, or both into account. “Whatever,” he finally said, pushing away from the fridge.

“There’s still the problem of food,” Collin called as Erik stepped over his brother’s smelly T-shirt.

“What problem? You said our leftovers were gross. You said you were going to make supper. You said Mom took you grocery shopping. What could possibly be the problem? I see no problem.”

“I was kinda operating on the apparently crazy assumption that you’d have food here. Real food. Not sentient rice.”

“Sushi,” Ray corrected. “Sentient sushi. I’m going to name it Santos.”

The brothers ignored Ray. “You know I don’t cook.”

“What about him?” Collin asked, jerking his chin towards Ray.

“He doesn’t cook either.”

“I made instant ramen, once,” Ray said defensively.

“He doesn’t cook,” Erik repeated, with forced calm. “He just memorizes the phone numbers of every place that delivers in the city.”

“Impressive. But gross,” said Collin succinctly. “We need to go back to the grocery store get the sort of things normal people have in their kitchens. Like salt.”

Erik gritted his teeth. “Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”

“You do have some money, don’t you, Sigurd? Or do you just mooch off the crazy sushi guy?”

“I don’t mooch!” Erik said hotly.

Ray snorted. Loudly.

“Then Mom or Grandfather or the bank or some benign force somewhere will have allocated you a certain percentage of money to help with the whole nourishment thing. And, since you’re clearly not making much use of it, I can only assume you have plenty of money at your disposal. Let’s get in the car and go already.” Collin punched Erik in the arm, causing Erik to wince and Collin to rub his knuckles. “Damn, Sigurd, can’t you put on any weight when you eat crap like this all the time?” He sat down and began pulling his boots back on with speedy efficiency, only pausing once or twice to blow on his knuckles.

“Kid has a point,” Ray said as he sealed the now half-empty bag of cookies and tossed it to the other end of the couch.

Erik wondered where he was supposed to start. Protests about his diet and weight seemed pointless. The lack of benevolence to be found in any of the three forces Collin had mentioned? The fact that he really wasn’t a mooch? How Collin was being stupid and they could just order a pizza and it wouldn’t upset Collin’s precious athlete’s diet that much? Finally, he settled on the easiest point. “I don’t have a car, Collin,” he said bluntly as his brother began to struggle into his jacket.

“But you steal Dustin’s car all the time. You drove up in it at Christmas. Just go steal it again.”

“I don’t steal his car, I borrow it.”

“I could steal it.”

“Shut up, Ray.”

“So call and ask to borrow it. It’s not that hard, Sigurd. I’m here to help you through these difficult and often complex social situations.”

“Dustin’s busy this week,” Erik said, not letting any of his own private disappointment seep through. If Dustin weren’t busy trying to cure cancer or build a flying robot monkey or whatever he was using the break for, Erik could seek refuge from this mess in his friend’s dorm. There was a couch, after all, and if he let his legs hang over the edge . . . He shook his head. Collin was watching him with raised eyebrows. Focus, Erik, focus. “He’s busy with important genius stuff, and I’m not going to bug him about the car just so you can go grocery shopping.”

“I’ll still steal the car, if you like.”

“Besides,” Erik continued, fingers trembling with the impulse to throttle Ray, “I haven’t agreed to go to the grocery store. I don’t want to go to the grocery store, especially since we’d have to walk. I have stuff to do.”

“Beer,” said Collin.

Erik sighed and went to get his jacket.

“Why did you come again?” Erik asked Ray as they trudged through the snow.

Ray shrugged. “Something to do, I guess.”

Erik rolled his eyes, despite the fact that he would be hard pressed to actually find a reason to complain about Ray tagging along. The nearest grocery store was only a ten minute walk away; going any further to stop Collin’s whining would be overkill and the store was the ordinary, boring kind of grocery store. There would be no repetition of the grass jelly incident today, no matter what Ray did.

It was dark, it was February, and even though Collin and Ray were bundled up as though they were going to face a blizzard, Erik didn’t think it was uncomfortably cold. His breath puffed out in a cloud of rapidly cooling condensation that he though looked rather cool when the dim street light hit it. Collin was walking ahead, pretending he wasn’t with them, but he wasn’t so far ahead that he’d actually lose them. And Ray.

Ray was kicking at lumps of frozen mud and ice, concentrating intently on where they went. Probably playing some weird made-up game in his head. With his toque pulled down low, his jacket collar turned up, and a heavy woolen scarf wound around his neck and over his mouth, Erik could just make out his roommate’s dark eyes and a fringe of black hair sticking out from beneath the toque. He was silent, his little game with the ice bits apparently taking up all his concentration. Sweet, beautiful silence.

“So, what’s the problem with you and the kid?”

Dammit!

“I thought I made it clear that this was not a topic open for discussion, Ray.”

“I thought the prospect of food might have improved your mood. You were looking pretty relaxed, so I figured you’d had a change of heart.”

Erik’s eyebrows snapped upwards in disbelief, almost vanishing beneath his toque.

“A ninja sees all, Thor. And when a guy’s making goofy faces at the street lights, it’s only logical to assume that’s he’s maybe in a slightly better mood than he was ten minutes ago.”

Erik flushed. To cover his embarrassment, he gave a derisive snort. Collin wasn’t paying them any attention, just tossing a snowball from hand to hand over his head. “Like you’re even on speaking terms with logic.”

Ray laughed. “I took an entire class about it back at St. Faustus, man.” He punched Erik in the arm and laughed again, the sound partially muffled by his scarf.

“Idiot,” Erik said, and grinned.

Ray looked up, making what was visible of his brown eyes bright and hopeful.

Erik thumped him in the back of the head. “It’s still none of your damn business. I don’t go asking you about your family.”

“That’s because the odds of my family just dropping by the apartment and sleeping on the couch aren’t very good.”

“Half the time I answer the phone I find myself talking to someone who doesn’t speak English!”

“Someone who doesn’t speak English who isn’t sleeping on the couch,” Ray persisted. “Besides, if you ever did have questions, I wouldn’t be able to answer them due to ninja vows of secrecy.”

Erik didn’t know whether to explode because of the stupidity or laugh. “You’re half Italian!”

Ray gave an unapologetic shrug, mittened palms facing upward. “Catholic vows of secrecy.”

“Ray!” Erik laughed.

“I won’t lie to you, Thor, but that’s all I can tell you. For your own safety.” Ray gave Erik a friendly pat on the back.

Erik shoved the arm away. “Get lost, moron.”

With his mitten, Ray touched the side of his nose, and part of one eye, in a conspiratorial gesture. Erik guessed that beneath the scarf, Ray was grinning like a demented lunatic, partially because Ray’s eyes were crinkling in the way most people’s did when they were on the verge of laughter, but mostly because ‘demented lunatic grin’ was always a safe bet with Ray. “Good thinking, Thor, good thinking. Someone needs to keep an eye on Mini-Thor. If he gets to the store before us, who knows what kind of horrible things he might do. He seems desperate, though, and that’s never a good sign.” He bowed mockingly, saluted, and skidded across the frozen sidewalk to catch up with Collin, nearly knocking them both into a snowdrift and laughing his quiet, wool-and-snow-muffled laugh the entire time.

“That,” Ray announced from where he lay on the floor, “was worth it.”

Erik stared at his chipped plate, pushing the remnants of practically fresh salmon and rice around in some kind of butter-based lemon sauce with his fork. “You got us banned from the grocery store. I didn’t think anything could get you banned from grocery stores beyond actually breaking the law.”

Collin rolled his eyes and picked up the dirty plates, stepping carefully over Ray’s sprawled figure. “You said you never went there anyway.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Erik said, scowling at Collin’s back as he went into the kitchenette. “What if we need more pain killers or bandaids or something?”

“If?” Ray and Collin said in disbelieving unison.

“You cut yourself on something every three days, man.”

“I can remember at least seven times when you got yourself concussed back home.”

Red-faced, Erik pushed away from the tiny, cluttered table and went to lie on the couch, gritting his teeth. The food had been good, and Collin was doing the dishes without even being asked, but the shopping. He had let the uneventful walk lull him into a false sense of security and hope that maybe, maybe this entire Mom and Collin mess could become something beyond a total humiliating, painful, stressful disaster. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. Stupid snow and stupid goofy Ray and stupid Collin’s incredible cooking. He groaned and flung out one arm to turn on the console and reluctantly rolled into a sitting position to continue the game Collin’s arrival had interrupted.

“Thanks for the food, kid,” Ray said, smothering an overfed yawn.

“Not a problem,” said Collin, filling the sink with hot water and newly purchased dish soap.

“How’s a fourteen-year-old learn to cook like that?” Ray asked.

Erik looked at Ray out of the corner of his eye. The question would have been innocuous coming from anyone else, and Ray looked harmless, lying on the floor by the table with his eyes half-shut, but Erik couldn’t help but feel slightly paranoid when his roommate began paying attention to anything outside of his own tiny ninja-filled bubble of reality. A nosey Ray was a dangerous Ray.

“Dad,” Collin answered simply.

“No way, really?”

Erik tried to focus on the game.

“Sure,” Collin said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I mean, the old man does have his own restaurant and all that stuff. It’s kinda hard not to pick up on something like that, when he has you scraping dishes and stuff from the time you’re big enough to stand on a stool and reach the sink.”

“Ah,” said Ray.

And Erik knew that was it. Ray was still lying on the floor, his voice was still lazy and slightly inaudible due to the fact that Ray may have been talking into the carpet, but there was a tiny note of self-satisfaction in the single syllable that said that somehow, Ray had just gotten something he wanted. It was the same note that was audible in his voice when he was completely hammered but still playing poker anyway and had gotten a really good hand. It was just as revealing then as it was during poker; Erik knew that Ray had gotten something good, but he was damned if he knew what.

“I wouldn’t think there would be much call for that sort of thing up in the middle of nowhere, though. I mean, you guys are from somewhere that’s practically the Arctic, aren’t you?”

“Not that far up North,” Erik said irritably.

“But still nowhere,” said Collin easily. “Definitely nowhere. But when Oldefar immigrated to Saskatchewan from, uh . . .”

“Hasvik,” Erik said, cycling irritably from one menu option to the other.

“Yeah, Hasvik. In Norway. When he immigrated here from Hasvik, and Farfa was just a little kid, he tried farming for, like, three months before he gave up on it and went further north, where there were just trappers and loggers and shit and hardly anyone, and sort of got himself installed in around one of those camps taking care of the food and stuff or something. When things became a bit more civilized it had just become a habit, I guess.”

“It became one of those damn annoying family traditions, which I kind of thought Oldefar left Norway to avoid,” Erik said dryly, staring at the TV screen.

“Only if you have the misfortune to be the oldest son.”

“So why didn’t dear Sigurd pick up on any of this stuff if you did?” Ray asked, still playing at innocence.

Collin wiped his nose with the back of a sudsy wrist. “Dunno. Just a genetic fluke, I guess, or something. He’s okay at, like, the dishwashing and the table waiting and stuff, but anything else, man . . .” He shook his head ruefully. “He’s not much good at anything, really. Don’t see why cooking would be any different.”

“I’m sitting right here, you know,” Erik said through clenched teeth.

“Some people just need more help than others, I guess,” Ray said, and lifted his head slightly to make eye contact with Erik.

“Fuck you,” Erik said, dropping the controller on the floor. Sitting quietly and just listening to his brother and Ray, fucking Ray, casually dish out personal abuse was just too much. He got off the couch and went into the bathroom to shower, slamming the door loudly, and leaving the TV on the opening movie of Ultimate Legend VI.

“So, still think I’m being unreasonably cold to Collin?” Erik asked, lying on his back in bed. A bed that had been deprived of two blankets and a pillow because, as Ray had pointed out, Erik had a faster metabolism, better circulation, and was altogether more accustomed to dealing with cold weather, and they weren’t for one of Ray’s brothers, anyway. His hair was slowly soaking the thin pillow under his head, and the lamp on the table between his bed and Ray’s was on. A T-shirt had been draped over the alarm clock next to it, so neither of them had to look at the bright green numerals.

“Yeah,” Ray said calmly, sitting on his bed and writing in the frost that had gathered on the window. He was writing in Japanese, but Erik was certain that, whatever was being written, it was rude. “Fourteen-year-olds aren’t responsible for anything they say. They’re stupid.”

“He’s a straight-A student.”

“Those ones are especially stupid.”

“And eighteen-year-olds?”

“I was just trying to make conversation with the kid, Thor. You weren’t.”

“That wasn’t conversation, that was insulting me.”

“For kids his age, that’s what conversation is. If someone isn’t being taken down a notch, then it’s not a real conversation.”

“You had the most messed up childhood ever, didn’t you?”

Ray sighed. “Look, Thor, I don’t give a damn about what you can do and probably neither does Mini-Thor. I think all anyone cares about at this point is that you get the fucking stick out of your ass before it ruptures your brain. You’re being stupid about this.”

“And now that we’ve been banished from the only room in the apartment that has a TV? And videogames? And a computer? Before midnight?” Erik asked sarcastically, trying to see patterns in the bumps of the ceiling.

“It just proves that your little brother, while a perfectly decent human being in his own right, is fucked up. Your entire family is,” Ray said frankly. “Any teenager who goes to bed on time when he’s without adult supervision is definitely a bit weird.”

“There you are, then,” Erik said, and reluctantly opened his Canadian history textbook.

“On the other hand, any eighteen-year-old University student who doesn’t even make a peep when his kid brother demands to be left alone to get some sleep is even weirder than the kid. Wait to be whipped until you’ve had sex with someone, for Christ’s sake,” Ray continued, standing up to expand his frost graffiti.

Erik hurled his textbook at the back of Ray’s head.

One gloved hand shot out and caught the book while the other continued scraping away. “And there goes your entertainment for the evening. You really need to think before you act, Thor.”

Erik swore loudly and let his head fall back on the wet pillow. Monday could not come soon enough.