You don’t need to feel bad,” he said.
Underneath his words, I could hear him think, I knew this was coming. I wanted to speak, wanted to take this all back, wanted not to hurt him, but at the same time I felt a terrible sense of freedom. I never had to see him again if I didn’t want to!
My mom wanted to know where I’d been, but when I said, “With Dave,” she left me alone, and I stalked past her and shut the door to my room. It was just past one a.m.
18
THE LOGICAL PEOPLE TO TEXT about my breakup were Avani and Jess, but I was worried about the consequences it’d have for our homecoming plans, so instead I sleepwalked through that Sunday, watching our group chat like a very pathetic hawk, hoping that Jess and Avani would want to hang out, yet not daring to ask them, and all the time seeing if, in the spacing and frequency of their texts, they might be getting together without me. I told myself they were an old friendship, and I was a new addition, and that if we ever got to be good friends, it’d happen slowly, over the course of weeks and months, but part of me felt small and abandoned.
I was relieved about the breakup, but that sense of wrongness—as if I were living the wrong life—hadn’t gone away. Through all this drama, it was hard to escape the logical conclusion: I wasn’t the least bit gay; I was a straight guy who’d been living a lie. And so long as I pretended to be queer, I’d never feel right in my skin.
But before I rescinded my coming-out, I needed a final confirmation.
It was Sunday, so not much was going on, but I sent a bunch of text messages, trying to dig up a party that was outside my usual friend group: I didn’t want any witnesses to what I was about to do.
A guy from Las Vacas High said, “Totally, my friend’s throwing a party,” and I got him to pick me up on his way there.
I was afraid the guy knew I was queer now, but we hadn’t spoken in almost a year, and maybe this sort of gossip doesn’t cross school districts very easily. I asked if there’d be any girls at this party, and he said, “Some.” The three guys in the car were pretty run-down, pretty scruffy, and a little on the nerdy side. If it wasn’t for me, I wasn’t sure any of them would’ve actually gone out that night.
The party was a small one, just twenty kids gathered in a basement, smoking weed. And because everything was so slow and so anemic, I was a huge hit.
I sat on a narrow couch next to some girls and worked my way into their conversation, cracking jokes, switching my attention from one to the other, and, right when a girl was deciding whether to move closer to me, I popped up, yelling across the room to my friend, and stormed over to make fun of him for something random.
By skipping around the entire room and being friendlier and more high-energy than the other guys, I ended up in a bedroom telling a girl about the problems with my “girlfriend” and how I wasn’t sure I wanted to be with “her.” The girl massaged my back and my arms and said, “If it isn’t right, don’t force it,” and finally we kissed. She was apologetic that she didn’t want to go further, but I was like, “That’s fine!” and got her number.
The walk back to Grenadine was incredibly long, and I had to take the back roads, because I was afraid the cops would pick me up for being drunk. I hopped into some bushes when I heard sirens, but I got unbalanced and tumbled down an embankment into a dry drainage ditch.
I had no clue where I was, and somehow I’d lost a shoe, but I still had my phone.
Mari answered after three rings.
“I kissed a girl,” I said.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m lost, and also I kissed a girl.”
“Okay. . . .”
“I’m lying in a ditch, and I kissed a girl.”
After five or six repetitions of this, she was like, “Hold on, I’m coming to get you,” and I lay there, talking to her on the phone, until a flashlight appeared at the top of the embankment.
When I’d struggled up the side, I said, “Where’s your car?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Okay . . .