The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (3 page)

“Fuck off.”

I smoothed my tie and looked around. Tyson’s face was red and
Michael had glasses-magnified tears in his eyes. He rubbed his chin helplessly.
I spotted Jessica Parson dancing by herself, dancing like she had dodged a bullet.
I put my head down and walked out into the hall.

There was a bulletin board out there that usually showcased
school news and activities but tonight had been covered over with a giant sheet
of white paper, beckoning autographs and notes from our class of graduates. I stood
in front of it, hands in pockets, reading while I waited for my heartbeat to slow.
Dwight was drawing a Ninja Turtle in the bottom corner, had been for a while. He
hadn’t seen any of the fight. He hadn’t really been in the cafeteria since dinner.
Why was he excused from it and I wasn’t?

All around his drawing people had written things like
Best
night ever
and
Paul hearts Melissa
and
LMS Class of 93 4ever
.
Happy things, evidence of an ease I couldn’t imagine for myself. Out of all the
messages only one resonated with me:
I’m so sad I feel like crying
, a T.C.
had written. Beside it was a heart with a sad face. I closed my eyes. It’s your
fault, Taylor, I thought. You did this. I was minding my own business. I didn’t
want to hurt anybody.

I leaned against the board. A handful of other kids were hanging
out in the hall, bursts of elegance against the blue brick walls. Two girls examined
their makeup in a compact they were sharing.

“Last song is coming up, Ollie,” a voice bellowed. I turned and
saw Erika at the second set of doors farther down the hall. “Are you really not
going to dance with her?!”

I only shrugged, and hoped it carried across the distance.

“What is wrong with you, Oliver Wade?” she yelled. “Are you a
faggot or something?”

My vision blurred. Shadows of people around me raised their heads.
Dwight stopped doodling and looked up at me.

“No!” I said. To me I sounded precisely like what I was, though:
a person offended to be called out on a lie. “I just—don’t—like to
dance
.”

Erika let out a ragged sigh and disappeared back into the cafeteria.

***

Outside the night air was cold on my face. The parking lot
was amber-colored and silent; behind me music throbbed dully. I was shaking, my
heart was pounding. I lowered my bum to the curb. I opened and closed my fists—my
hands felt funny, twitchy, prickly; a numbness went up my arms, a numb buzzing.
I was afraid I was having a heart attack. I had seen old people in movies grabbing
their arms before keeling over. Superman’s father. A sure sign. I grabbed my forearm,
tried to squeeze away the buzzing.
Please
don’t die
, I whispered.
Please don’t
die.
Then it occurred to me that things might be easier if I did.

I rubbed tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand. I mocked
the little yelps I couldn’t contain. Stupid baby. Stupid fucking baby. I tried to
get a handle on my breathing. I counted to ten, then twenty.

Would it always be like this?

***

Cars started to arrive. Parents sat idling. Some smoked, some
got out and chatted among themselves. The music went silent. Behind me the school
doors sprang open, placing me at the bottom of a rectangle of light that stretched
a long shadow of me across the pavement. I was a dark form in a glowing box; silly,
I had always dared to imagine it was the opposite.

Around me suited legs dashed past, gowns brushed against my shoulders,
a river of eighth-graders high from dancing. Two legs stopped. I looked up. Boyd
sighed.

“They’re saying you don’t even like girls,” he said.

I didn’t want to know who was saying it. “I like girls,” I said.
My throat was sore from holding back. “I just don’t like to dance.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” He laughed, but it was a fake laugh. “Ollie,
next time? Just go stag, man.”

I looked up but didn’t say anything.

I wanted him to apologize for pushing me, but he didn’t. He smacked
the back of my head and ran to the red minivan that was pulling into the lot. A
moment later my mother arrived.

“Well?” she said cheerily as I slipped into the car and shut
the door. “How was it?”

I shrugged and she frowned and we were quiet for a while. I pressed
my mouth into a shape that might keep me from crying. My forehead bumped against
the cool window. We waited in the traffic of exiting families. Ahead of us a bright
red stoplight glowed.

“Did you not have fun?”

Again I only shrugged.

She sighed. It was an angry sigh. I could see in the reflection
that she was looking at me, but I didn’t look back.

Finally, as if having mustered it, she said, “It’s your own fault,
Oliver. What did I tell you? You decided a long time ago not to have fun and guess
what? You have no one to blame now but yourself.”

I raised my eyes to hers in the reflection. She really didn’t
know? She really had no idea? No, she thought I was just being a grouch. A curmudgeon.
It seemed a good trade to be viewed that way. Better certainly than whatever she’d
think if she knew about Micah. But how long could it last? For my classmates
the events of tonight would blow over by Monday but they would never blow over
for me. There could not be many more reprieves, I knew that now. People, a whole
world of people, who used streamers and confetti to celebrate about themselves the
very thing that in myself I most wanted to hide—these people would never stop
pushing notes into my locker; they would never stop asking who I was taking to the
dance. I couldn’t keep closing my eyes to it. No. But when they asked, I could lie.
I had done it tonight. First to Erika, then to Boyd. If someday my mother asked,
I could lie to her too.

For a while we idled.

By the time the light turned green, I knew what the scariest
part of this new lying life would be: that it had a flip side. That if I could
lie, I could also someday tell the truth.

(Age
15)

RAINBOW SUBWAY

Somewhere down the line there was a disabled train.
That’s what the loudspeaker kept telling us. I didn’t know what it meant by “disabled,”
though—whether the train had just run out of gas or had jumped the tracks
and crashed through the front of a Dunkin’ Donuts. All I knew was that I was
going nowhere. Behind me the subway platform, empty when I’d arrived here a
half hour ago, was getting crowded as passengers built up, bulky and monochrome
in black and gray winter coats, hats, scarves. The city was weird.

Without
stepping forward—because there was nowhere to step but into the open air
in front of me—I craned my neck and looked over the edge of the platform,
down along the snow-dusted tracks. No sign of a train. The people around me in
their monochrome coats were mumbling to themselves, their gray breath like
speech bubbles puffing past my shoulders. More people than you’d come across in
a whole day in Lee. I felt pinched and all I could do was stand still.

Nervously I
reached down and picked up my backpack, its padded straps stiff from the cold.
I noticed my right foot was half on the bumpy caution strip that ran along the
edge of the platform, so I repositioned to keep the tip of my sneaker just
touching the strip. When I was younger I counted things, but these days I found
comfort in clean lines that avoided bisection.

This weekend
had made me want the comfort of clean lines. I had spent it with Dwight Macklin
at his parents’ condo here in Newton, a town right outside Boston, three hours
east of Lee. Last summer when we were on our way to being sophomores, Dwight’s
father got a job and they moved here. Soon after that, Dwight stopped talking. He
wouldn’t speak anywhere, or for any reason. His parents, his new teachers, his
doctor, everyone thought it must be because of the move, because he’d been
ripped away from his friends.

“Dwight needs
to see you, Ollie,” my parents told me after Dwight’s parents called them to
plead for a visit. They had asked Boyd Wren and Michael to come too. (Tyson by
that time was fully down the rabbit hole of St. Mark’s, a private all-boys high
school two towns over from Lee; we never even talked about him anymore.) Boyd
flat-out said no, and Michael was starting to get popular and couldn’t risk it.
But they both knew what I knew: that whatever the reason for Dwight’s
mysterious silence, it wasn’t because he missed us. We were his friends, so we
knew Dwight didn’t really have friends; Boyd, Michael, and me, we were just the
guys he sat with at lunch. They thought I was stupid for agreeing to go. I told
them my parents were making me, though they weren’t. I guess I was curious.

Dwight was
there at the train station when I arrived, standing gray and ghostlike beside
his father. He looked different from how I remembered him. Six months will do
that to a boy being pummeled by puberty, but this was more than that. He looked
blank.

“Hi Dwight,” I
said. He didn’t respond.

At his parents’
prompting I gave him a rundown of what was going on back in Lee, at school,
with the guys. It didn’t take long—I was finished by the time we got to
his condo—and the rest of the weekend I didn’t say much else. Most of the
time we sat at a drafting table in his bedroom and drew Ninja Turtles on big
pieces of white paper. I was more into drawing race cars now but I knew the
lines of the Turtles, the familiar curves of the head, the scars on the shell,
the way the loops of the eye mask curled. My poses were static and statuesque,
full of clean lines that helped me stay calm. Dwight drew them fluid and
leaping.

“That’s real good,”
I’d told him as I leaned over the drafting table examining his tumbling
Donatellos
. I was examining him, too. Dwight was not cute,
had limp, pale hair and oddly-tinted glasses that made his eyes look small and
bruised. But Dwight was a boy. I wondered what it would feel like to kiss him,
if only because I thought I would get away with it. Dwight wouldn’t yell at me
or call me a faggot, because that would mean talking—and I knew that wasn’t
going to happen. So I had a small window of opportunity if I was going to try.
Two days. Maybe it’s why I had come. In Lee the boys wouldn’t stay silent.

***

Shivering
and jittery, I was carefully lining up the cuff of my coat sleeve with a
horizontal stripe on my glove when I heard the honk of a train. Approaching
headlights lit the polished tracks. Around me people started to chatter. “About
time.” “Not quite frozen to death yet.” “Probably be packed.” I looked behind
me and saw how many more passengers were there than when I’d arrived, how many
had accumulated. I started feeling more nervous. What if the people at the back
got restless before the train pulled into the station? What if they pushed the
whole mass forward and shoved me onto the tracks? I took a step backward and
felt someone’s elbow or bag or child push into my kidney.

I held my
breath as the train rolled past, a scrim of snow on its windshield, and when it
stopped and the doors folded open, I got on. There were a few open seats but I
didn’t sit down because I was afraid I’d never be able to fight my way off if I
did. Instead I stood facing a window looking out at the platform while people
poured in around me, like cereal pieces gathering around the prize. With half
of the people still on the platform waiting to board, the doors started dinging
and trying to close. I saw panic come into their eyes when they realized that
after waiting so long they were losing their chance.

***

I had
thought about kissing Dwight while we drew, while we watched TV, while we ate
pizza. I thought about it when his parents gave us ten dollars and directions
to an ice-cream place up the street. He wouldn’t order, of course, and while I
perused the menu for a sundae for him I wondered if I could mold him, this
silent outline of a person, into a boy-shaped receptacle for these things I
felt that no other boys felt. He had lips and a body and if I asked him to fall
in love with me he wouldn’t say no because he wouldn’t say anything at all. And
that, at least, would be something.

But through
the long night I kept myself cocooned in the beige sleeping bag on the floor
near Dwight’s bed. I knew I wasn’t about to steal a moment, even from a boy who
wouldn’t protest. A stolen moment, even if it was good, would hurt because it would
never be anything more. I doubted sometimes that I would even take one
willingly if it was ever offered.

“Do you think
you’ll ever have anyone, Dwight?” I had asked in the dark. I wasn’t expecting a
reply and didn’t get one, just the rustle of blankets when he moved his legs. “I
can’t imagine a single scenario where someone I wanted to be with would want to
be with me.”

***

Facing the
train window, I could see my reflection. The reflection was a boy who liked
boys, my only chance at seeing one who did. I looked to see what he looked
like, this boy who liked boys. I looked at his eyebrows and his nose, at his
wondering eyes that looked back at me, back and back to infinity.

Beyond my
reflection the scenery started to slide sideways. The train picked up speed and
rolled for a few minutes and then stopped at the next station, but only to
trade a few passengers on and off. Angry people waiting on the platform shouted
at us to move in, but we were already packed tight and there was nowhere for
anyone to go. The people on the platform looked in the windows at us,
inspecting for open space we might cavalierly be wasting. I wished for the
train to pull away so they’d stop looking. I moved my hand to keep it from
bisecting a streak of black-markered graffiti on the metal handrail. Then there
was an announcement that we were standing by until further notice.

***

I rolled up
the beige sleeping bag and put it on the bed beside Dwight, who was lying there
looking out the window at the street, his untied shoelaces dangling off the end
of the mattress. Watching him, I grew twitchy with an anger that came, I think,
from knowing that my window of opportunity for kissing a boy had closed.

“If you never
speak up you’re going to be alone your whole life, Dwight,” I spat, hating him
for the thing that was so familiar in me. There was a sinisterness in my voice
that made me feel bold. If I wouldn’t kiss him, there were other, more common
things you could do to someone who wouldn’t try to stop you. “At least I hope
you are, you fucking weirdo.”

I punched my
sweatpants into my backpack and zipped it shut. “I’m never coming back, just so
you know,” I said. “You lost your chance.”

If he had
looked at me with any regret or hurt or anything even human I may have put on
my backpack and walked quietly out of the room. But when he didn’t, I threw it
down and jumped onto his bed, my sneakers sinking into the mattress on either
side of his thin torso. I dropped to my knees and pushed one knee into his gut.
His eyes bugged darkly behind his glasses and he gasped but still didn’t speak.
I grabbed his sweatshirt in my fists and knocked him against the mattress until
his glasses fell off. I wanted to hear him hate me. I wanted to hear him
acknowledge that he was lonelier than I was.

***

Motion on
the platform outside made me lift my heavy eyes. I expected it to be another
irate would-be passenger, but they were all looking at newspapers or pacing or
gazing longingly down the tracks the way we had come. Instead it was a boy on
the platform—my age, a little older, probably fifteen or sixteen—swinging
the braided strings that dangled from the ear flaps on his cherry-red hat. He
looked taller than me and had big green eyes. He was wearing a blue Patriots
jacket and lime-green gloves, a burst of rainbow brightness against all the
bleak black and gray. He was already looking at me when I noticed him. He
turned his head away, then looked back at me again and smiled with chapped lips.
He raised his eyebrows and they went up under his hat—it was a
conspiratorial look, as if our eye contact were a joke shared between us. Or
something more?

I checked the
people on either side of me (though I knew it was me he was looking at), then
pointed to myself and raised my own eyebrows questioningly. He laughed. I
couldn’t hear anything through the barrier of window glass but a burst of
breath bloomed around his face and his lips parted to show teeth that were
railroaded with blue braces. He nodded.
Yes,
you. Hi.

My heart
started pounding inside all my layers and I felt fully awake for the first time
all day. The glass between us made me feel bold. I wiggled my nose like a
rabbit. The green-eyed boy wiggled his. Then he tugged on the strings of his
red hat, bobbing his head side to side and making a sound I could tell from his
lips was
boop
boop
boop
.

Was he making
fun of me? It was easy to think he was, maybe even comforting to think that,
because that was familiar territory. But people don’t usually smile and turn
pink-cheeked when they’re making fun of you, the way they do when they’re
flirting. I looked around again, afraid of who might be seeing us two boys
blushing. The man on my left was reading a
People
magazine. The woman on my right was examining her fingernails. This might be a
trick or a setup, but the boy’s face was so friendly.

Now he stuck
out his tongue, just the little red tip of it, like the end of a strawberry.
When he pulled his hat down over his eyes, I did the same. In our shared
darkness I smiled my biggest cheesy smile and bobbed my head side to side, not
even sure he could see me. When I pushed my hat back up to check, he was gone.

***

“I really
hoped you’d be able to get through to him, Ollie,” Dwight’s mother had said when
she was driving me to the subway at the end of my visit. “But I guess it was
too much to expect.”

“I’m really
sorry,” I told her softly—it was almost a whisper. She didn’t know it but
I had made her son cry that morning—and myself too, while I had fixed his
sweatshirt and his hair and put his glasses back on his face.

“Well Ollie,
it’s not your fault, you’re not a therapist. We just thought....” She watched
the road for a minute and then looked at me again, a kind of searching in her
eyes. “He really didn’t say
anything
?
That whole time?”

I shook my
head. “Maybe I’m just not the person he needs?”

***

As I leaned
forward to try to see more of the platform outside, my glove slipped off the
handrail and I almost knocked my face against the window. The woman with the
fingernails looked at me and smirked but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see
the green-eyed boy anywhere. How could he have just disappeared? I saw that the
people on the platform were almost a mirror image of the passengers on the
train. Same black and gray coats, same eyes gazing down. But it wasn’t exactly
a mirror image. There was only one me.

When I was
starting to fear I’d imagined the boy, a lime-green-gloved fist rose up in
front of the scratched glass. He must’ve been crouched against the side the
train. One finger went up. Then two. A countdown. As the third was going up the
rest of the boy bounced up too. The liftoff, like a spaceman. Smiling, as if
this had been a great surprise (and it had been), he hopped on his sneakers a
few times and then stepped closer to the glass.