Boy Meets Boy (4 page)

I can sum it up in one word:

Joy.

Hallway
Traffic
(Complications
Ensue)

Self-esteem can be so exhausting. I want to cut my hair, change my clothes, erase the pimple from the near-tip of my nose, and strengthen my upper-arm definition, all in the next hour.

But I can't do that, because (a) it's impossible, and (b) if I make any of these changes, Noah will notice that I've changed, and I don't want him to know how into him I am.

I hope Mr. B can save me. I pray his physics class today will transfix me in such a way that I will forget about what awaits me at the other end. But as Mr. B bounds around the room with anti-gravitational enthusiasm, I just can't join his parade.
Two sixty-four
has become my new mantra. I roll the number over in my head, hoping it will reveal something to me (other than a locker number). I replay my conversation with Noah, trying to transcribe it into memory since I don't dare write it down in my notebook.

The hour passes. As soon as the bell rings, I bolt out of my seat. I don't know where locker 264 is, but I'm sure as hell going to find out.

I plunge into the congested hallway, weaving through the back-slap reunions and locker lunges. I spot locker 435 -- I'm in the wrong corridor entirely.

"Paul!" a voice yells. There aren't enough Pauls in my school that I can assume the yell is for someone else. Reluctantly I turn around and see Lyssa Ling about to pull my sleeve.

I already know what she wants. Lyssa Ling doesn't ever talk to me unless she wants me to be on a committee. She's the head of our school's committee on appointing committees, no doubt because she's so good at it.

"What do you want from me now, Lyssa?" I ask. (She's used to this.) - "The Dowager Dance," she says. "I want you to architect it."

I am more than a little surprised. The Dowager Dance is a big deal at our school, and architecting it would mean being in charge of all the decorations and music.

"I thought Dave Davison was architecting it," I say.

Lyssa sighs. "He was. But then he went all Goth on me."

"Cool."

"No. Not cool. We have to give people the freedom to wear something other than black. So are you in or are you out?"

"Can I have some time to think about it?"

"Sixteen seconds."

I count to seventeen and then say, "I'm in."

Lyssa nods, says something about slipping the budget into my locker tomorrow morning, and walks away.

I know it's going to be a rather elaborate budget. The dance was created thirty or so years ago after a local dowager left a stipulation in her will that every year the high school would throw a lavish dance in her honor. (Apparently she was quite a swinger in her day.) The only thing we have to do is feature her portrait prominently and (this is where it gets a little weird) have at least one senior boy dance with it.

At first I am distracted by theme ideas. Then I remember the reason for my after-school existence and continue heading to locker 264 . . . until I am stopped by my English teacher, who wants to compliment me on my reading of Oscar Wilde in yesterday's class. I can't exactly blow her off, nor can I blow off Infinite Darlene when she asks me how her double role at the Homecoming Pride Rally went.

The minutes are ticking away. I hope Noah is equally delayed, and that we'll arrive at his locker at the same time, one of those wonderful kismet connections that seem like signs of great things to come.

"Hey, Boy Romeo." Ted is now alongside me, luckily not stopping as he talks.

"Hey," I echo.

"Where you goin'?"

"Locker two sixty-four."

"Isn't that on the second floor?"

I groan. He's right.

We walk up the stairs together.

"Have you seen Joni?" he asks.

Sometimes I feel like fate is dictated by irony (or, at the very least, a rather dark sense of humor). For example, if I am standing next to Joni's on-and-off boyfriend and he says, "Have you seen Joni?" the obvious next step would be to reach the top of the stairway and see Joni in a full frontal embrace with Chuck, on the verge of a serious kiss.

Joni and Chuck don't see us. Their eyes are passionately, expectantly closed. Everybody pauses to look at them. They are a red light in the hallway traffic.

"Bitch,"
Ted whispers, upset. Then he charges back down the stairs.

I know Noah is waiting for me. I know Joni should know what I've seen. I know I don't really like Ted all that much. But more than I know all those things, I know I have to run after Ted to see if he's okay.

He stays a good few paces ahead of me, pushing through hallway after hallway, turn after turn, hitting backpacks off people's shoulders and avoiding the glances of gum-chewing locker waifs. I can't figure out where he's going. Then I realize he doesn't have any particular destination in mind. He's just walking. Walking away.

"Hey, Ted," I call out. We're in a particularly empty corridor, right outside the wood shop.

He turns to me, and there's this conflicted flash in his eyes. The anger wants to drown the shock and the depression.

"Did you know about this?" he asks me.

I shake my head.

"So you don't know how long?"

"No. It's news to me."

"Whatever. I really don't care. She can hook up with whoever she wants. It's not like I was interested. We broke up, you know."

I nod. I wonder if he can actually believe what he's saying. He betrays himself with what he says next.

"I didn't think football players were her type."

I agree, but Ted's not listening to me anymore.

"I gotta go," he says. I want there to be something else for me to say, something to make him feel even marginally better.

I look at my watch. It's been seventeen minutes since the end of school. I use a different stairway to reach the second floor. The locker numbers descend for me: 310 . . . 299 . . .

275 . . .

264.

Nobody home.

I look around for Noah. The halls are nearly deserted now-- everyone's either gone home or gone to their activities. The track team races past me on their hallway practice run. I wait another five minutes. A girl I've never seen before, her hair the color of honey-dew, walks by and says, "He left about ten minutes ago. He looked disappointed."

I feel like a total loser. I rip a page out of my physics book and write an apology. I go through about five drafts before I'm satisfied that I've managed to sound interested and interesting without seeming entirely daft. All the while, I'm still hoping he'll show up. I slip the note into locker 264.

I head back down to my own locker. Joni is nowhere in sight, which is a good thing. I can't even begin to know what to say to her. I can see why she would have kept the news about Chuck from Ted. But I can't figure out why she never told me. It hurts.

As I slam my locker shut, Kyle walks by me.

He nods and says hi. He even almost smiles.

I am floored.

He keeps walking, not turning back.

My life is crazy, and there's not a single thing I can do about it.

Finding Lost Languages

"Maybe he was saying hi to someone else," I say.

It's a couple of hours later and I'm talking to Tony, recounting the drama to the one person who wasn't there.

"And the smile--well, maybe it was just gas," I add.

Tony nods noncommittally.

"I don't know why Kyle would start talking to me again. It's not like I've done anything differently. And it's not like he's the kind of guy who changes his mind about this kind of thing."

Tony sort of shrugs.

"I wish I could call Noah, but I don't feel like we're close enough for that. I mean, would he even know who I was if I called? Would he recognize my name or my voice? It can wait until tomorrow, right? I don't want to seem too neurotic."

Tony nods again.

"And Joni. What was she thinking, snogging up to Chuck in the middle of the hall like that?

Do I let her know that I know, or do I pretend I don't know and secretly count the number of times she talks to me before she lets me know, resenting each and every minute that goes by without her telling me the truth?"

Tony sort of shrugs again.

"Feel free to chime in at any time," I tell him.

"Don't have much to say," he answers with another slight shrug, this one slightly apologetic.

We are at my house, doing each other's homework. We try to do this as often as possible. In much the same way that it's more fun to clean up someone else's room than it is to clean up your own, doing each other's homework is a way to make the homework go faster. Early in our friendship, Tony and I discovered we had similar handwriting. The rest came naturally.

Of course, we go to different schools and have different assignments. That's the challenge.

And the challenge is what it's all about.

"What book is this paper supposed to be on, anyway?" I ask him.

"Of Mice and. Men."

"You mean, 'Please, George, can I pet the bunnies?' "

"Yup."

"Cool, I've read that one."

I start scribbling a topic sentence, while Tony flips through a French-English dictionary to finish my French homework. He takes Spanish.

"You don't seem very surprised about Joni," I say.

"Saw it coming," he replies, not raising his eyes from the dictionary.

"Really? You pictured Ted and me catching them in the hallway?"

"Well, not that part."

"But Chuck?"

"Well, not that part, either. But face it. Joni likes having a boyfriend. And if it's not going to be Ted, it's going to be someone else. If this guy Chuck likes her, odds are she's going to like him back."

"And you approve of this?"

This time he looks right at me. "Who am I to approve or disapprove? If she's happy, then good for her."

There is an unhappy edge in Tony's voice, and it doesn't take leaps to get to the source of it.

Tony's never really had a boyfriend. He's never been in love. I don't exactly know why this is.

He's cute, funny, smart, a little gloomy--all attractive qualities. But he still hasn't found what he's looking for. I'm not even sure he knows what that is. Most of the time, he just freezes.

He'll have a quiet crush, or even groove with someone who has boyfriend potential . . . and then, before it's even started, it will be over. "It wasn't right," he'll tell us, and that will be that.

This is one of the reasons I don't want to dwell on Noah with him. Although I'm sure he's happy for me, I don't think his happiness for me translates into happiness for himself. I need another way to buoy him. I resort to speaking in a nonexistent language.

"Hewipso faqua deef?"
I ask him.

"Tinsin rabblemonk titchticker,"
he replies.

Our record for doing this is six hours, including a lengthy trip to the mall. I don't know how it started--one day we were walking along and I just got tired of speaking English. So I started throwing consonants and vowels together in random arrangements. Without missing a beat, Tony started to speak back to me in the same way. The weird thing is, we've always understood each other. The tone and the gestures say it all.

I first met Tony two years ago, at the Strand in the city. It's one of the best bookstores in the world. We were both looking for a used copy of
The Lost Language of Cranes.
The shelf was eight feet up, so we had to take turns on the ladder. He went first and when he came down with a copy, I asked him if there was another up there. Startled, he told me there was a second copy and even went back up the ladder to get it for me. After he came back down, we hung together for a minute -- I asked him if he'd read
Equal Affections
or
A Place I've Never Been,
and he said no,
Lost Language of Cranes
was his first. Then he drifted off to the oversized photography books, while I got lost in fiction.

That would have been it. We would have never known each other, would have never been friends. But that night as I boarded the train home, I saw him sitting alone on a three-seater, already halfway done with the book we'd both bought.

"Book any good?", I asked as I hit the space in the aisle next to him.

At first he didn't realize I was speaking to him. Then he looked up, recognized me, and half smiled.

"It's very good," he answered.

I sat down and we talked some more. I discovered he lived in the next town over from mine.

We introduced ourselves. We settled in. I could tell he was nervous, but didn't know why.

A cute guy, a few years older than us, passed through our car. Both of our gazes followed him.

"Damn, he was cute," I said once he'd left.

Tony hesitated for a moment, unsure. Then he smiled.

"Yeah, he was cute." As if he was revealing his deepest secret.

Which, in many ways, he was.

We kept talking. And maybe it was because we were strangers, or maybe it was because we had bought the same book and had thought the same boy was cute. But it was very easy to talk. Riding the train is all about moving forward; our conversation moved like it was on tracks, with no worry of traffic or direction. He told me about his school, which was not like my school, and his parents, who were not like my parents. He didn't use the word
gay
and I didn't need him to. It was understood. This clandestine trip was secret and special to him. He had told his parents he was going on a church retreat. Then he'd hopped on a train to visit the open doors of the open city.

Now the city lights ebbed in their grip over the landscape. The meadowlands waved in the darkness until the smaller cities appeared, then the houses with yards and plastic pools. We had talked our way home, one town apart.

I asked him for his phone number, but he gave me an e-mail address instead. It was safer that way for him. I told him to call me anytime, and we made our next set of plans. In other circumstances, this would have been the start of a romance. But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had Was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.