OOM: the anti-Thanksgiving

[isaysimplewords]

Cal holds the door open for Chandler, saying,

"My dog'll probably jump on you, but don't worry, she's friendly. We're, uh, working on that." The jumping thing, that is, not the being friendly thing.

And Chandler is almost immediately, as promised, investigated by a very curious (and not very big) puggle. It's far from the first time Cal's had

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[pickyourmoments]

Chandler jumps away sharply.

"Aah! It can smell my fear!" he cries, honestly frightened by the animal. It takes him a few moments to cast a nervous glance in Cal's direction.

The mun would not be surprised if Cal had forgotten this particular quirk of Chandler's, as the writers treated it very inconsistently.

[isaysimplewords]

Cal stifles a laugh.

"She's just friendly," he assures Chandler, "she doesn't bite. Her name's Penny."

Penny, for her part, is entirely unconcerned by Chandler's reaction. He is, like most of Cal's visitors, interesting and smells of strange things and places! She follows to keep sniffing at him.

[pickyourmoments]

He looks down at the dog. And then up at Cal. And back at the dog. He takes a wide step sideways, away from little Penny. She is, like all dogs, absolutely terrifying.

"They let you keep pets in the building?" Chandler asks. "Man, they don't let any animals in mine."

[isaysimplewords]

Cal relents and tells Penny, with appropriate stern Owner And Master Voice,

"Penny, no. Knock it off. Go lay down."

Penny takes another sniff or two - because she knows exactly how far she can push Cal - then slinks away with the proper canine penitence.

"We buy the apartments," he says. "There are some limits, I think, but a dog's okay."

And if Chandler is thinking that Cal's apartment looks like it wasn't cheap, especially in Manhattan, he's right.

(Then again, given the apartments that he and his friends can apparently afford to rent, he may not be.)

[pickyourmoments]

Hey, it ain't called Friends Rent Control for nothing.

"Ah, right. I inherited mine from my old room mate," Chandler explains, able to breathe easy now the the dog is gone. "I'm still paying the rent from the original lease, from before I even moved in."

[isaysimplewords]

"Good deal," says Cal, who has never in his life had to worry about paying rent, and just assumes that it's a good one from what secondhand information he has on the subject.

"You want anything to drink?" he asks, going over to dig a takeout menu out of the drawer of the phone stand. "Uh, I don't have any alcohol, but I have some soda and stuff."

[pickyourmoments]

"Soda's fine, thanks," Chandler says.

Cal's place is certainly a hell of a lot nicer than his little two-bedroom apartment (it's probably never had hammers or flaming tennis balls flung across the room, by any means). Chandler knows that he could do much better than the space he shares with Joey, but it's his way of proving that he doesn't need his mom's money.

"I almost moved back in with my mom after college," he explains. "Now, I'm kinda glad I didn't."

[isaysimplewords]

Cal locates a Chinese menu and hands it to Chandler.

"Pick whatever you want, I'll be right back with that soda."

He comes out of the kitchen a few seconds later with a couple cans of Coke, one of which he passes to Chandler.

"Yeah, I've, uh - my family was a little different," he says. "This is the first time I've lived on my own. We all lived in the same house."

By house he means mansion. Potayto potahto.

[pickyourmoments]

Chandler came from the prep schools and house staff background, too.

"You should have seen the look on my mom's face when I went to NYU instead of Princeton," he says with a small laugh as he flips through the menu. "I thought she was gonna have a stroke right there."

"Ooh, Dim Sum."

[isaysimplewords]

Cal laughs. It's a familiar enough story, from the upper class - well, not friends exactly, but people he knew, who rebelled at that age.

None of them made it on their own, but that's just the kind of world Cal originally came from. Nice things don't happen very often there.

"Jesus, I'll bet."

[pickyourmoments]

Hell, he's still rebelling in his own way. "God, I don't know what the hell I was thinking in college. I was the biggest dork ever."

But it was the 80s. Everyone was a dork.

[isaysimplewords]

"Maybe the Medieval Studies rubbed off?" Cal guesses. That conversation wasn't too long ago, for him.

[pickyourmoments]

"No, I think it was more Mike Score doing the rubbing off."

Really, Chandler, what the hell were you thinking with that haircut?

[isaysimplewords]

Cal looks blank.

. . . music, where he comes from, has a very different function than it does on the majority of worlds.

[pickyourmoments]

Maybe that's all for the better. Because he really could not rock that Flock of Seagulls haircut AT ALL.

"If you missed it, that's probably a good thing," Chandler says honestly. "Trust me. I wish I had."

[isaysimplewords]

"I'll take your word for it," Cal says.

It's probably from an episode he missed or doesn't remember or something, he figures.