Openly Straight (16 page)

As
the trees went from fiery yellow and orange to bare, Bryce’s desk became my desk, Bryce’s bed my bed. Ben and I joked, we talked out the serious stuff, and sometimes we even cried, like when he told me about his uncle’s death the year before. Often we’d just sit up at night and talk until three or four in the morning. These were my favorite nights ever, even better than when I’d done the same thing on weekends with Claire Olivia.

“What do you want?” Ben asked me one night, as we lay across the room from each other in our beds.

I cracked up. “General much?” I asked.

He didn’t laugh back. “I mean, like, in the future. If you could come up with a perfect scenario for what your life would be, what would it be?”

The question stole my breath. The answer was obvious to me.
You. You and me. Us.

“You first,” I said.

He exhaled. “Maybe a house out in the woods somewhere in Vermont or Maine. You know. Somewhere with fewer people because
people aren’t my favorite, present company excluded. A black lab who likes to take long walks. A wife — probably not Cindy — who likes to cook lots of unusual meals, someone funny and interesting but also serious, you know? With dark hair and pretty eyes and … you know … the other stuff too … goin’ on or whatever.”

I laughed. “You’re so hip-hop.”

“I know,” Ben said. “Anyway, probably a couple kids. And at night we don’t watch TV, but we sit in the wood-paneled living room as a family and there’s a fire in the fireplace, and we read books and we share about what we’re reading. Of course, you live nearby with your family.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“What about you?” Ben asked.

I paused to think. I’d had so many fantasies about us together in the future, just about every night, and it was hard to pick just one. Would we go to college together and then settle down in the country, somewhere out here in Massachusetts? Or after our college years, would I take him back to Boulder and we’d live in the mountains together? Whatever fantasy I chose, it was off-limits to Ben.

“Pretty much the same.”

“It’s nice, dreaming about stuff like that, isn’t it?” Ben said. “Makes me feel so peaceful.”

“Mm-hmm,” I replied, feeling a lot less peaceful inside.

“So can I tell you something weird?” he asked, after a long silence.

“Always,” I said. I turned and faced him in the darkness. Even with the moonlight I could barely make him out across the room.

“The first time I had sex with Cindy, I cried,” Ben said.

“Yeah?” I said.

“It was, like, I don’t know, there’s naked and then there’s naked, you know?”

“Not sure I follow?” I said, feeling British as I said it. Sometimes when I say a sentence I feel like I’m trying to be a different person entirely, and this was one of those times.

“I mean, I’d been naked with her before. But this was us totally without any barriers at all. And then to actually be … you know … in her? That was like … You know how the guys talk about sex like it’s this game? It wasn’t a game to me, Rafe. It was, like, this melding. And I felt responsible for her at that moment, you know? Maybe that’s not the right word. But I just felt very open in this incredible way, and I think for me that’s the part I liked the most about it. And I would never tell her this, but in the darkness I cried a bit. Or I teared up.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said.
You’re beautiful
, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

“I’m guessing that didn’t happen for you, right?”

“Well,” I said, trying to think of what to say. I’d done my best not to lie to Ben, but this didn’t feel like a time to be evasive, especially since I’d just evaded his last question. “I guess for me it felt, when it was over, like I was this different person. And I wasn’t sure I was ready to be that person? Like something huge had happened and it changed everything, and there was no announcement you could make to the whole world that wouldn’t be superweird.”

That was all true enough, I realized, after saying it.

“Yeah, but what about the act itself? That’s all after stuff. I felt that way too. But, like, when it happened. What did you feel?”

Nothing
, I realized, and a lump grew in my throat, thinking about my experience with Clay. By most definitions I was still a virgin, since we’d only fooled around, but still it made me sad to think of how little my first experience had meant to me. But I had to say something, and saying “nothing” was going to lead to a conversation that was going to be really hard for us to have, so I said something else instead. For the first time with Ben, I willingly went deeper into the lie.

“I felt close to her, I guess? Like connected? Spiritually connected. I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to get all high-fiveish about having sex with a girl for the first time, so I guess mostly what I felt was connected on a deeper level with her.”

“Sure,” Ben said.

And then mostly what I felt was dirty. Lying to a friend sucked. But what choice did I have? Our friendship was amazing and getting better, and that made an occasional small white lie acceptable, right? Not great, but acceptable.

In public, we toned the intensity of our friendship down, knowing that Steve and his posse would not quite get our strange and unusual bond. But in private, we threw away most of our barriers, and that was more than fine with me.

Sex was not on the menu. I hadn’t found the line yet where things would be “too much” for Ben, but I had a feeling we were pretty close to it. For all my fantasies about Ben — and I’d had a lot of them — I couldn’t really picture any of them coming true. So many nights, after lights out, I snuck off to the bathroom and “took care of business,” hoping to God no one would come in and utilize the bathroom in a way that would ruin the mood.

Toby thought it was cute, our bromance. More than once when the four of us were hanging out, he talked about how much he wished he could find what we had, which was funny, since I knew he and Robinson had something going.

One afternoon before dinner, as we did homework in his/our room, Ben got an e-mail from his mom. He groaned, and then read it out loud.

“Dear Benny,”
he said.

“Oh, I’m definitely calling you that!”

“You are definitely not.
Dear Benny
,” he continued.
“Do you mind if we invite the Tollesons over for Thanksgiving this year? I know Mitch is not your favorite, but it’s been five years since we’ve had them over and I hate to be rude.”

He pantomimed putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

“Mitch Tolleson is not exactly your favorite?”

“He’s this kid I hung out with when I was six. We parted ways when he shaved his head and got big into hunting. Now he dresses in army fatigues and has a Confederate flag sticker on his pickup truck.”

“Delightful. And your parents like him?”

Ben flopped onto his bed and crossed his arms against his chest.

“My parents believe in civility at all costs. Even if your neighbors raise a skinhead, it’s better not to make a fuss.”

I shook my head. “Our families are not so similar, huh?”

He pursed his lips, like he was already imagining Thanksgiving dinner. Ben was obviously the oddball of the family, into books and ideas. I remembered how uncomfortable his dad looked at Natick, and now it began to make more sense to me. I’d been so caught up in
my own stuff that I hadn’t even realized that this person, who was superclose to me, felt so alienated from his own family. Suddenly I recognized what I had to do.

“You obviously can’t dine with Mitch Tolleson,” I said. “He sounds like a Nazi.”

He shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said.

“Well, you won’t be dining with him. What with you being in Boulder and all.”

This caught Ben off guard, but then he looked like a kid who had just gotten the best Christmas present ever. He got this goofy smile on his face, like all his cares had lifted. That I could have such an impact on someone as awesome as Ben made me feel amazing.

And then I remembered the obvious: Bringing Ben to Colorado could be total suicide for our relationship. I was going to have to figure out how to “reconcile” with Claire Olivia, for starters, since there was no way I was going to go home and not see her. How the hell was I going to be the same person in Boulder as I was here at Natick?

“You serious?”

“Of course,” I said, willing those thoughts away. “It’s all done. You’re coming with me.”

He lowered his head again. I’d forgotten Ben was on scholarship at Natick. My family was well-off enough, but a ticket to Denver wasn’t exactly something Ben could call home for.

“My parents bought you a ticket. It was supposed to be a surprise,” I said. It wasn’t a total lie, because I knew that even if they wouldn’t do it, I could. I had a few hundred dollars saved from my summer job at Ripple, this frozen-yogurt place back home. Ben was worth it.

“I can’t accept that,” he said.

“Yeah, you can,” I said. “You’re my friend. They want you there. I want you there. Benny.”

It took a second, but soon that goofy, slightly uneven smile of his came back, and I knew for sure that I loved Ben. Any fears I had melted away. Ben. In my house. In my room. Yeah, I could make that work.

MAYBE IT WAS having a closeted semiboyfriend who wouldn’t be seen with me in public, but the little things that used to bug me about being out were making me more and more annoyed.

It was right after Thanksgiving break, and I was in the cafeteria with Claire Olivia, eating Rangeview’s version of tacos — reduced-calorie tortillas and ground turkey that tasted like sadness — when the Kaitlins attacked.

Every girl in Boulder who isn’t named after a color or a month or a city or a state is named Kaitlin, Brittany, or Ashley, according to Claire Olivia. All the Brittanys wear cool hair bands. The Ashleys are smiley and apolitical and tend to be cheerleaders. The Kaitlins are blond, inquisitive, and prone to be on the yearbook staff or reporters for the
Boulder Tattler
.

Kaitlin One in this case was petite and wearing a peach sweater and dangling turquoise earrings. Kaitlin Two was tall. A volleyball player, I think.

“Hey, Rafe, Claire,” Two said. I felt Claire Olivia tense next to me. Call her Claire and you leave yourself open to lotsa bad possibilities,
most of them violent. Two didn’t wait for any response beyond a nod. “That was so mean, what they did with the church.”

I knew she was referring to our history class. Ms. Peavy had taken the subject of church burnings in the South during the civil rights movement and likened it to what had happened locally, four years earlier, at the church where PFLAG met. Someone had spray painted “Die Fagot” on the side of the church, and there was this huge outcry. And of course there should have been. It wasn’t a church burning, but it was terrible that someone would vandalize a church, not to mention the spelling issue.

But this being Boulder, the
powers that be
had to organize a vigil. (This was before my mom was involved with PFLAG.) At the vigil, apparently, everyone got to express how they felt, and there was lots of hugging. Then they formed a committee to figure out how to respond to the event. After three months of meetings, the committee started a hotline, which people could use to call in and express their feelings about the hatred shown in the spray-painting act.

Ah, Boulder.

This time, Ms. Peavy hadn’t asked me for the official gay opinion on the vandalization. Progress. But now the Kaitlins were. I shrugged.

“It was bad,” I said.

“Totally,” Kaitlin One said, nodding. “But also too, Mayor Barkley’s wife was, like, African-American, so it was like, you know, he understood oppression and he should have organized the vigil.”

I nodded, unsure of what she had said, or what that had to do with anything. “Right,” I said. “The personal is political, and all of that.”

Two nodded this time. “You’re so smart. You’re going to go to, like, Harvard.”

“For spring break,” I said, for no apparent reason. I was getting bored with the Kaitlins, and I was afraid that for every minute they stayed there, the likelihood of Claire Olivia starting an international incident was increasing.

Both Kaitlins laughed, and one of them, One or Two, said, “Oh, my God! You’re smart like Will and funny like Jack. From
Will & Grace
? Which one are you?”

They didn’t wait for a response. “You’re Will. Will is so funny.”

I stared out the window at some guys playing hacky sack, and sighed. “If that’s what makes you comfortable, I guess I can be that,” I said.

They walked away. Not two minutes later, Jasmin Price, who is pretty much an Ashley, came up to us.

“Did I see you at Eldora this past weekend?”

I said I was there. She looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know gay guys liked skiing.”

Claire Olivia looked up from her incessant texting and gave me a moon-eyed look. I ignored it and nodded at Jasmin.

“We really do,” I said. “It’s a little-known fact. You can tell who is gay by who skis and who snowboards.”

And I could actually see the wheels turning. She was thinking,
Wait, doesn’t so-and-so ski?
I was about to say,
Just kidding
, but then I got fed up and went to get rid of my tray.

There was Clay, across the room, sitting with his friends. I caught his eye and smiled, and he barely nodded. I envied him then. He could have lunch in peace. Why couldn’t I?

And there was Caleb, holding court at another table, surrounded by girls. Everyone was laughing and having a good time. No doubt it was at someone else’s expense, but still, they were laughing. That wasn’t the kind of guy I was. I mean, I loved the time Claire Olivia and I spent together, but I wasn’t flamboyant and always surrounded by girls who wanted to be entertained.

When I got back to Claire Olivia, Jasmin was gone. I rolled my eyes and Claire Olivia rolled hers.

“Hey, did you know I was gay?” I asked.

“Shut up!” she said. “Really? I had no idea, since it’s not like the only thing people talk to you about.”

“I know, right?” I said. “I am so fucking tired of being seen as ‘the gay kid.’”

“Well …” She made a face and ran her hand through her hair.

I tensed up. “Well what?”

“I mean, no offense, Shay Shay. But it’s not exactly a cosmic mystery how that happened. I mean, it’s not like you told the world, and visited other schools to talk about it. It’s not like your mom is president of PFLAG Boulder. How rude of people to make a big deal out of you being gay.”

I curled my lower lip down to show her my feelings were hurt. Making the face was a joke between us; it was supposed to mean our feelings weren’t
really
hurt, but that they would be if we were more sensitive. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that almost every time I did it, my feelings were actually a little hurt. I wonder if that was true for Claire Olivia too.

“Aw,” she said, teasing. “Poor Rafe.”

“You’re always yelling,” I said, putting my fingers in my ears.