like this, going around and around, and my heart swelled. The pressure inside my body was intense, and I had a physical yearning to be there for him, to kiss him, to hold him, to make him feel better, but instead all I got was his hollow voice, ringing out, quiet and unsure, into the silence of my ear.
Eventually he yawned and said he needed to work. I promised we’d see each other the next day, and he said, “It’s okay. You’ve done enough. I know you’re not my, umm—” His voice clamped down on the last word, but I understood it.
“I’m— I—” The words I love you were the only ones I had, but they didn’t come out. “You mean a lot to me. You’re so brave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
When I came out, Mari’s face changed from happy and joking to concerned. She shrank back into the couch. “What happened?”
“It was okay. Everything’s fine.”
I couldn’t describe the unsureness and the sorrow I’d heard in Dave’s voice, so I didn’t. Instead, I smiled at her and joked about his parents, saying they’d given him a talk about AIDS. She gasped, saying, “Oh my God, really?” And she was horrified, but her horror was tinged with laughter, and Dave’s hadn’t been. There’d been nothing funny about that phone call.
I felt the narrowness of my escape. I’d almost let Dave go through that alone. I’d almost stayed away. And for no reason, just because I hadn’t thought to do it. My hands gripped the plush sides of the chair, and I took a deep breath, holding it for fifteen seconds, before letting the air out in a thin hiss.
The next morning, some part of me thought the whole school would already know about Dave and me, but even Carrie, when I ran into her, seemed to suspect nothing.
Dave and I met for lunch, sitting maybe two inches closer than would two guys who had never kissed, at the same table, far out by the lemon trees, where I’d gone and talked to him a few weeks ago, and, to my surprise, my whole body tingled from his nearness. Maybe I actually was queer. Maybe I really did like him. This was exhausting; I was so tired of questioning myself.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, totally,” he said. “I was just being stupid. Everything was fine.”
“Your parents act weird again?”
He shrugged. “They’re okay. What about your mom?”
Ants swarmed over a lemon that’d fallen onto the edge of the table. With a backhand motion, I smacked it onto the field.
“I think this news made my mom really happy. I guess she thinks gay guys get into less trouble,” I said.
“Umm, but . . . are you gay? What exactly did you tell her?”
“I told her I was seeing you!” I said. “That’s the beauty of us”—I waved my hands between us—“of this thing. No explanations needed.”
“Are we an ‘us’?”
“Well, that’s what we should discuss. To be honest I’ve been considering the benefits of being ‘out.’”
The word felt artificial to me, and I made a face.
But he picked up on a different word: “You’re so weird. The ‘benefits.’ I know you’re not really that unemotional about it.”
Now I looked into Dave’s brown eyes. We were two people who were bound together for eternity. Just like a first crush or a first kiss, a first gay hookup is a milestone that sticks with you forever. But were we anything more than that? Could I love him? Could I love anybody? I’d loved Avani, I thought, but probably that had been something else: a combination of envy, gratitude, and disbelief.
“I don’t want to be myself anymore,” I said. “I want to be different. And this coming-out thing is a way to do it.”
“See, most people would say: ‘I want to be my real self.’”
“But that’s not how I feel—that’s how other people feel, but not me. To me, it’s like—it’s like—it’s like I am the thing people see. When Pothan chose me, when Avani hooked up with me, I became something different. Before them, I was a nobody. Afterward, I had a role.”
“You were always golden.”
“Not really. I was pretty shy.”
He shook his head. “No, trust me. You were always something different. I used to watch you, moving through the parties, and everybody knew you, everybody was friends with you, everybody trusted you. I’d try to remember what exactly you said or did to win everybody over, but the words would go blurry in my mind. I don’t