How They Met (12 page)

As if this wasn’t hard enough, Seth was going to be in college by the time Bev and I got back from our respective camps. He looked sad when he told us this, but it was small consolation. That week was an extreme bittersweet.

The dreaded Wednesday, the day before I left, I spent the morning seeing Bev off to camp. There was a slight delay—the bus had a flat on its way to the parking-lot pickup. Bev leaned over to me and said, “Go. It’s okay. Just write and tell me what happens.” I hugged her tight and ran the thirty minutes to La Rota, stopping a little short to catch my breath.

Seth was there. I looked at him for a minute in the window, my reflection laid atop his body. I knew I would never forget him; I was recording it all now so I would remember him right. Then I walked in, bell ringing, Seth smiling. “The usual?” he asked, and we both laughed. It was a little before lunchtime—nobody else was around. Hal said hi to me and told Seth he’d cover the other tables. So for the first time, Seth and I sat at the table for a whole half hour, him asking about camp, me asking about his summer and college. He stole a slice from me. I didn’t care.

Too quickly, we were done. I knew my parents were waiting. I knew I still had packing to do. But I didn’t know how to say good-bye.

We just sat there. Then Seth laughed and said, “Look at us!” He said he was sure we’d meet again. He’d come back home and there I’d be, at table seven (I’d never known it was table seven), and we’d talk just like we’d always talked. I went to pay, but he said it was on the house. Then he said, “One sec” and ran back to the kitchen. When he returned, he was holding a neatly folded napkin. This time he had drawn something for me. It was a drawing of a pizza box. In the center he’d sketched a picture of me. And instead of
You’ve Tried the Rest, Now Try the Best,
he’d written something else. It said,
You’re Not Like the Rest—You’re the Best.

I knew I was going to cry. I thanked him and accepted his hug without once thinking it could be a kiss. He wished me luck at camp. I wished him luck at college. The bell rang again as I left. Our last words were
keep in touch.

I still have that drawing. Whenever I look at it, it makes me happy. That’s the moral of the story. That’s it.

LOST SOMETIMES

His name was Dutch. We weren’t boyfriends, but we screwed all over the place. I’m serious—you name the place, odds are we screwed there. The gym. Burger King. His grandmother’s house. We couldn’t stop. We decided to go to the prom together to make a statement, and also to see if we could screw there, too.

There were a couple of other gay kids in our school—it was a big school—but all of the rest of them were, like,
sensitive.
With Dutch, though, everything was exactly what it was. We first hooked up at this Christmas party, senior year. You know, the kind you have with your friends a few days before everyone has to go stick it out with their parents. Anyway, the eggnog was ass-knocking. I kinda knew Dutch, but I had no idea what his story was. Me, I was a big flamer. In middle school, they wanted to cast a girl as Peter Pan but decided to cast me instead. No real mystery there.

So it got to be about three in the morning and Dutch walked over and told me I was a little devil. I told him that he was a little devil, too. And sure enough, that’s all it took for us to start making out in Kylie Peterson’s little sister’s bedroom. I mean, her stuffed animals were on the bed, but we didn’t care. I’d kissed guys before, but it had never been so
voracious
. I loved it. We didn’t go all the way—we figured there weren’t any Trojans hidden in the My Little Ponies, if you know what I mean—but it was clear we were already on the way to all the way.

It was a game. I mean, don’t get me wrong—it was serious. But it was also a game. I’d say we screwed on our third date, but we didn’t go on
dates
.
Dates
makes it sound like dinner and candlelight were the point. But the point was sex. The usual ways and places first, then getting trickier. We didn’t want to get caught, but we wanted to come
this close
to getting caught. We wanted to see how far we could go before we got the shit kicked out of us. Sometimes we’d pass each other in the halls—arranging it so we’d walk by each other between every period, but not saying a word, just giving each other that
I’m going to have you soon
stare. And other times he would grab me right there by my locker and thrust his mouth onto mine, and we’d be tonguing it up for everyone to see. It was so screwed up, because the thing that made us the most powerless also gave us such power. We could make them turn away. We could bother them and challenge them and mess them up. You think people are afraid of two boys in love? To hell with that. What people are
really
afraid of is two boys screwing. And even though we weren’t about to drop trou in the halls, we were going to let them know we were doing it whenever we could. We always played it safe, condom-wise. But location-wise? Safety was not the first concern.

The first-floor boys’ room. The showers of the locker room when everyone was in class and we were skipping. The couch in the faculty lounge. The boiler room. The second-floor boys’ room. The lighting room in the auditorium, against the movie projector. Room 216, second lunch block. The roof of the cafeteria when everyone else was under us, chattering. The art room, with paints. The third-floor girls’ room. The 400 aisle of the library.

We were only caught twice. Once I said I was helping to look for his contact lens, which must have fallen on his fly. The other time the art teacher found us. I thought he’d been watching for a while before letting us know he was there, but Dutch said his shock was real. He didn’t say a word to us. Just saw what was going on, turned red, and left.

We weren’t exactly the popular kids. But we were damn popular with the unpopular kids. The girls especially, this army of goth older sisters—they didn’t want to hear about us having sex, but they admired our spirit. We weren’t the prom types, but as the time approached, Dutch said to me, “Wouldn’t it be cool to screw at the prom?” and I said, “Yeah, I guess it would.” I kinda wanted to go anyway, but I wouldn’t’ve told him that. I didn’t want him to think I was taking anything too seriously. He’d already told me we were going to split up at the end of the year, because in college there would be new dicks to play with. He said it like he was joking, but you can’t tell a joke like that without meaning it at least a little.

We weren’t going to spend any money on the prom or anything cheesy like that. No limo, no tuxes, no tickets. We were just going to show up and do it our own way. While other couples were talking about flowers and cummerbunds, Dutch was telling me to not wear button-fly pants, “for easy access.” That night while biting his neck, I drew blood.

The prom was at some hotel, which made it very easy to crash. As everyone was pulling up to the front door in their gowns and their stretches, like it was the movie premiere of their new life, Dutch and I were smoking with some busboys by the service entrance. He was flirting, I was nervous, and when the pack was finished, the busboys pointed the way to the ballroom.

After we slipped in, I looked around the room and felt strange. It wasn’t that it was beautiful—it was just a hotel ballroom, with round tableclothed tables and white balloons with our class year printed in orange and blue, our school colors. But seeing it made me feel…sentimental, I guess. I had been to proms before, but this was the one that was supposed to be mine. This was a memory I was supposed to be having.

As I looked around at my classmates all dressed up, Dutch was scouting out a place to screw. He didn’t want to start in the men’s room, because that would be too obvious a choice. I insisted that going under one of the tables was a bad idea, since people would be sitting down soon, and then we’d be trapped. We walked back into the reception area. People didn’t seem surprised to see us, or to see that we hadn’t dressed up. They weren’t disappointed in us, because their expectations had never been that high to begin with. It bothered me.

Then Dutch pulled me into the coatroom and made me feel a little better. You know what it’s like to look at someone and realize they’re hungry for you? The thing I loved the most about Dutch was that he never stopped grinning—even if his mouth was serious, his eyes were in on the joke. He enjoyed me, and that’s what kept us going and going and going. He found the most expensive coat in that coatroom, then took a turn into the back, threw the coat on the floor, and led me on top of it. Button-fly access, yeah. Condom, nice to meet you. I could hear everyone outside not hearing us. I could hear the empty hangers ping against one another as my shoulder hit into the racks again and again. Dutch would stop and smile, and I would smile back and keep quieter than usual. I’d feel his breaths catching, measure the distance between them to know he was close.

After we were done, he squeezed me tight for a moment and then said, “All right—back to the prom!” I made the foolish mistake I’d made at least a few dozen times already—I thought, for that one millisecond of hope, that this might be the moment, the occasion that he would say “I love you, Erik.” Even if he didn’t really mean it. We’d been screwing around for long enough that I knew it was a conscious decision on his part to never use those words with me. And because he held them back, I restrained myself, too. The two times I’d slipped and said them, he’d just smiled and said, “No, you don’t.”

Dutch was hungry again, this time for food. So we put our clothes all back in place and returned to the ballroom. We found our goth girls and their punk boys, and we ate off their plates, which they let us do because they thought that was punk, too. We were crashing, which was nothing new. But this time I actually felt like I was interrupting, too. When the DJ started spinning hip-hop and pop tunes, Dutch made fun of everyone who went to dance to them. I could tell that some of our friends had intended to dance, but now felt awkward about it. I kinda wanted to dance. The best I could do was lure Dutch away, so the goth girls could get down and the punk boys could shimmy to their punk hearts’ content. I put my hand on Dutch’s ass and whispered, “We’re not done yet.”

We walked into the men’s room just as half the football team was peeing out the beers they’d tailgated before heading over to the dance. I thought,
We really shouldn’t be doing this.
But Dutch’s boldness carried me on. He held my hand and opened the stall door as if it was the door to Cinderella’s carriage. When he closed it and locked it behind us, I could hear the jeers. One of the guys pounded on the door, and I jumped. Dutch looked ready to start fighting…but soon the jeers faded. The football players left. Other people came in, but they had no idea what we were up to—not unless they looked down and saw the two pairs of legs.

This time we didn’t go all the way. We just kissed and groped, and it was almost like the beginning. Only it didn’t feel like the beginning, because I knew the beginning had passed a long time ago. Dutch was murmuring how hot I was, how great I was, how cool this was. Usually I could lose myself in that for hours. Usually that was how I knew I was okay. That being me, that doing this, was okay. I loved that he said these things, and I loved that when I was with him I could believe they were true. Which is different from loving him. But in some ways more powerful.

There was a spot on his back that caused him to shiver whenever I touched it a certain way. I loved that, too. I loved knowing his body that well. But it only worked when we were lying down, relaxed, quiet. When we were pressing against each other in a bathroom stall, there wasn’t that kind of vulnerability, that kind of control. It was like we were now one thing, and everything outside the stall was another. As opposed to when we were truly alone together—then we were each one thing, and the charge came from combining the two.

After a while our mouths and hands took their usual course. When we emerged from the stall, this kid I’d been friends with in seventh grade—Hector—was at the sink, washing his hands. He looked in the mirror and saw us emerge. And then he shook his head, as if to say,
What a waste.
And I thought,
You asshole.
I turned back to Dutch and gave him a long, hard kiss, right in that mirror. Us against the world.

Here’s the thing—even if it was just sex, even if he didn’t say “I love you,” even if I knew it wouldn’t last, you have to understand that I would have been alone without him. I would have been so alone.

I held his hand as we went back into the ballroom. I couldn’t get him as far as the dance floor, but we found friends to talk to, joke with, tease and be teased by. I could see a few teachers and administrators wanting to say something to us about our clothing choice, but as long as we held hands, it was like we were invincible. When the prom queen and prom king were announced, I half expected it to be us. I was a little disappointed when it wasn’t, because I would’ve liked nothing more than to have walked on stage with Dutch, to give him that royal kiss in front of the whole school, to prove that we’d been here, unafraid.

The DJ announced that there was only one more song until the prom song, and that couples should reunite and head for the dance floor. Dutch looked over at the DJ on the stage, then grinned and sparkled even wider. He held me by the hand and led me in the dance floor’s direction. Then, just as we were about to get there, he pulled me to the side, into the shadows. He pointed, and I saw what he’d seen—a small crawl space under the stage, beneath the music. “Come on,” he said, hunching down, heading inside. I followed.

It was a maze of dust and wires and reverb. There was barely enough room to sit upright, so Dutch lay down on the floor, staring up as if the bottom of the stage was full of stars. I crawled next to him, and he immediately rolled to his side and kissed me. His hand ran over my back, then down below my waistband.

The first sounds of “In Your Eyes” came through—the drum and the bell, the steady heartbeat. And then Peter Gabriel’s first words—
Love, I get so lost sometimes.
I heard them so deeply at that moment. Even though Dutch was pressing into me. Even though I was turned on and warm and with him…I thought to myself,
I’m missing something.
I stopped kissing Dutch back, and the minute I stopped kissing him back, he knew it and he stopped kissing me. But he didn’t pull away. He didn’t let go. Instead he pulled back enough to see me. To read me. And I stared back at him, daring him not to move. I thought it again—
I’m missing something.
A few feet away, couples were dancing to their prom song, holding each other tight. I was missing that. And at the same time, I was here, under the stage, being held in this different way. Looking into his eyes. Having him look into my eyes. Staying quiet. Just watching. Feeling our breath, his hand still on the small of my back, on the skin. I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn’t miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting.

I had no idea whether Dutch noticed any of this, or what he was thinking. When the song was over, we made sure we’d been hanging in the moment before a kiss, not in the moment after one. Then we crawled back out from under the stage and walked back to our friends. I forgot to hold his hand.

Later that night when we were naked in my basement, naked afterward, he said it to me. And even though it was too late, I didn’t say, “No, you don’t.” Instead I kissed him once, quickly. Then we lay there, and I let time pass.