is . . . Okay . . . wait. . . . This is a real secret. Please do not tell anyone. Do I— Wait, you haven’t agreed yet.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“The real problem is I don’t think I even like guys! It’s just that sometimes I’m out with Pothan and Ken, and I’m like, This is boring. I am boring. And being gay seems like a big, shiny way of escaping it all. Isn’t that pathetic?”
“Not if that’s who you are.”
“But it’s not,” I said. “Guys used to risk death to have sex with each other. That’s not me. It’s fine, but whatever. Not unmissable. The role, the title—that’s what I want. But that’d be fake.”
“Nandan . . . ,” he said. “You should talk to someone.”
“What? A guidance counselor? Dude, this is such a common problem. Everybody wants to be queer these days. It’s almost a cliché. Like, that’s what stops me—it’d just be sad—can you imagine me standing up and being like, Oh, I like guys?—It’d be so pathetic—such attention whoring.”
“It wouldn’t be sad. It’d be honest.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I actually don’t. Your real friends would get it.”
Dave wouldn’t get off the subject. He kept saying if I wanted to talk, he’d listen, and after a while it made me angry. Dave knew the truth. He’d been a weirdo since day one of high school, and nobody had ever applauded his “courage.” With someone like Henry, it was different. He couldn’t help being who he was. But with me—everyone would know it was a ploy for attention.
Which, to be fair, was exactly what it was!
The only way to escape was to be like Carrie. Stay mostly on the DL about the whole thing until you popped up and were like, Hey, here’s my girlfriend. Then you weren’t coming out. You weren’t asking for anything. The whole queer thing was just a natural corollary of finding somebody you liked.
“Hey, and . . . if you ever want . . . ,” Dave said, “me to, uhh”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“come over . . . I still, uhh, I still owe you for the other night. And maybe you want to practice for Hen, or, uhh, just figure things out.”
“Dave,” I said. “Whoa, are you making a move?”
“I guess?”
“That’s so direct! I’m proud of you. I mean maybe a little more subtlety with Mari. Girls like that. But for someone like me, it’d be perfect.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“All right, I gotta go.”
A few minutes after I signed off, he texted me, asking if that was a no on his coming over and hanging out. And I suddenly had this vision of him sitting in his room, sweaty and anxious, tapping out a reply.
Me: No, man, I don’t think I want to hook up again. It’d just be weird. You’re a friend now!
I was gonna write more, about how anyway he wasn’t really gay, he was just horny and eager to please, but I deleted that part, because that wasn’t for me to judge. Still, I didn’t think Dave was serious about any of this. He just wanted to mess around. That was his first sexual experience ever! It must’ve been so confusing. If your first time ever getting a blow job was from a guy friend, it’d really have you wondering about yourself.
My conversation with Dave must’ve done some good, because a few days later I came into math, and Mari was literally bouncing up and down in her back-row seat.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s going—”
“Dave and I talked again last night.” Her eyes were aglow. “He called me!”
“Awesome,” I said. “That’s so cool.”
Now her hand touched my arm. “Did you have something to do with that?”
I looked down at her unpainted nails. “What do you mean?”
“Come on. You gave him a pep talk or something.”
“Nope. It’s all him. I realized my help wasn’t really helping. He needed to do things on his own.”
“Well, it was great. He was so different! But totally the same! Dave’s really amazing.”
Someone sat directly in front of us, and Mari’s voice quieted, but I could still feel the excitement. He had picked her up in his car, and they’d just driven up to Shoreline. I got the impression, though she didn’t say it, that they’d made out a bit, and maybe done a bit more. I followed her out of class afterward, wanting to know the details, and she just winked at me and said, “We’ll talk later, okay?”
I was about to be like,