by Jason June
He couldn’t have said anything that rang more true in my soul if he tried. That must be how you know you’ve met your soul mate. When what they say or how they are just clicks somewhere inside you.
“Completely,” I said. His words broke down a wall and made me want to open up. “I’m just the new kid. Who likes math and stats. Everything else—where I want to go to college, what I want to do for a living, who I want to be for the rest of my life—is still kind of up in the air.”
“And can’t I try a few things out before I make a final decision?” Albert said. “There are so many things I haven’t been able to do yet that I don’t think I can truly make an educated decision on who I am. There’s a lot of firsts I still need to have. Do you know what I mean, or is that just me?”
Maybe the stars really did bring people together. All these years I’d been sitting on the sidelines worrying about being stuck in prepubescent purgatory, not having a kiss, a hand-hold, or a date, and still solidly having my V-card. But here was Albert, telling me that I didn’t have to rush things. That I was okay to be me. He was quickly adding to his list of swoon-worthy qualities.
ALBERT ADJECTIVES
1.Sexy (I mean, he is a V, V, V VSB.)
2.Sweet (Who else would help pick up all my crap even though I had gum on my face and my hand was soaked in blood?)
3.Adorable (I’m talking puppy-dog-eyes adorable.)
4.Smart (Where do you even get started on building a robot?)
5.Unabashedly Albert (As evidenced by the prevalence of Digihips with no mind for who’s watching.)
6.Accepting (Nobody else made me feel this safe to be me, exactly as I am.)
That last attribute was quickly becoming my favorite. He was so much more than just a hot guy. I didn’t have to have the answers around Albert, and if his very public flirting meant what I thought it did, he still liked me even if I was my own attribute list in progress. Or working my way out of that prepubescent purgatory. He even mentioned he had some firsts of his own to accomplish. Maybe we’d be each other’s firsts for a few things.
I considered telling Albert about the Gay Agenda right then and there. But sharing that I’d fantasized about us making out would be coming on too strong. I’d always imagined that the fun of my agenda would be crossing off items when they happened organically. I didn’t want to force it, and telling Albert about the list felt like doing just that. I didn’t want him to feel pressured to do these things just because I’d taken the time to write them down. It was different from telling Max, who just wanted to help set up situations that could lead to my great gay liberation.
“I totally get it,” I finally said. “Let’s just be ourselves and go where life takes us.”
Albert’s eyes met mine. He was still a step higher than me. His glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose, but he was too distracted to care. I swear he was thinking all the same things I was. That there was something between us that just clicked. That when the time felt right, a few firsts could be shared together. And maybe that time was now.
Albert leaned forward.
This was it. He was going to kiss me! My first kiss was finally going to happen after all this time.
Albert’s lips parted just slightly as he gently pulled me forward. He was going to put his mouth against mine and item number three—minus the dancing—would be—
PIIIIIIIIIING!
Albert’s text notification was outrageously loud. He snapped back, startled, when his lips were only centimeters away from mine.
Item three was still firmly a part of the Gay Agenda.
“It’s Reese.” Of course it was. “They’re wondering where we are.”
“PomPom waits for no one,” I panted. I was out of breath. My heart was pounding. PomPom, PomPom, PomPom, PomPom. It was like my aorta was rubbing it in that I’d just missed out on my first kiss thanks to a digital dog.
We left the market and walked the few blocks down to the pier. The Great Wheel, a massive Ferris wheel, loomed over the water and looked back on the city. In a perfect world, I’d be pulling Albert onto the ride and we’d make out as we were lifted into the air. But now I questioned everything after our kissing close call. Had he actually been going to kiss me? If he had, why would he pull away so quickly? Maybe I made up the tension between us. Albert could have just ignored the text. I must have been totally misreading his signals.
I could just see Reese, Regina, and Shruti fist-pumping in the distance. They’d probably caught a sparkly PomPom. At least the day was a success for someone.
Before I could go any farther and join the group, Albert caught my hand and pulled me to a stop. “Hey,” he breathed.
He looked so serious. No. That’s not right. He looked . . . smoldering.
“Hey,” I said.
“Can I tell you something?”
Oh gawd. He was close again. Really close. Close enough I bet he could feel my heart beating against his shirt. PomPom, PomPom, PomPom, PomPom.
“So, about back there,” Albert started.
The only way I could cool off now was to jump off the pier and into the Puget Sound.
“The Digigang can get pretty intense,” he continued. “Maybe we could do something just the two of us sometime?”
Yes, yes, yes! That was exactly what I wanted. Alone time, just him and me, and with as little clothes as he wanted.
“Like . . . a date?” It was the most forward I had ever been in my life. But I didn’t want any confusion this time. No more group hangouts where I went through an identity crisis again.
“Yeah, like a date,” Albert said.
Holy. Fracking. Shit.
Albert’s smile took over, and I wanted to kiss down his jaw all the way to that dimple. How would he react if I just seized the day and went for it?
I gasped. “That’s it!”
I looked down at my phone. The cursor was still blinking under What’s your name, Trainer?
I typed in my idea and showed the screen to Albert.
“SeizeTheJay,” he read.
That’s what our whole talk had been about. Waiting for our firsts to happen and figuring ourselves out in the process. The only way to get started on that was to seize the day, to actually do those firsts and discover the people we were meant to be.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Well . . . you’re actually really leaving me hanging on that date.”
It was a massive face-palm moment. “Yes!” I shouted, too loudly since Albert was so close. He winced, but his smile never wavered, and I lowered my voice to not-eardrum-destroying volume. “I’d like that. A date. I’d like that a lot.”
“In that case, here’s what I think about your username.”
Albert thrust his hips from side to side. The Digihips.
I think that meant he liked it.
12.
Find Yourself in a BFF (Best Friend Fiasco)
There was one downside to having such an epic weekend full of hot guys and electric tingles: I was going to have to tell Lu. Normally, I would have been ecstatic to tell her about Albert asking me on a date and Tony inviting me to his Lambda Chi party. But this time, I had a feeling Lu wasn’t going to like the end of that story. Because the next day, when Albert and I continued to communicate through elbow Morse code while selling dance tickets again, I realized that I didn’t want to give up on feeling this electricity at homecoming. Especially not after the way Albert looked at me when he solidified the time for our first date that upcoming Saturday, the day after the party where Tony might or might not want to hook up. I felt like I was just about to step into gay paradise, and heading back to Riverton during the middle of this would be taking a solid leap out of it. I knew Lu was depending on me since she and Chip were having a rough time, but what about me finding my Chip? Finding the guy who I wanted to spend as much time with as I could, like Lu did with Chip over the summer? After all, she was the one who said she didn’t want to continue our award-winning hoedown duo in
the first place. Maybe if I helped them get over their rockiness, Lu wouldn’t need me as a Spare Tire.
While I walked home after the QSA meeting that afternoon, I went through all the things I would tell Lu to explain why the hoedown just wouldn’t work this year.
HOMECOMING IS THE LEAD HO BECAUSE. . . .
1.I’d found a couple guys who made my whole body turn into an electric power plant. (Maybe this could take a global warming angle since this was sustainable energy. Too much?)
2.Lu was going to ditch me for Chip, and I went along with it. (By the laws of quid pro quo, she had to do the same for me.)
3.I had yet to dance with a boy, and this was my chance. (And if Albert happened to ask me, he’d want to go to homecoming, not to the hoedown with strangers hundreds of miles away.)
I knew she’d get it. She had to. Lu and I understood each other on everything, even if we didn’t always like what we had to be so understanding about.
My thumb was hovering over the Call button when a notification popped up on my phone. I’d set up a Google Alert freshman year when Lu started working for the school newspaper. I still got pinged whenever anything with her name on it was posted so I could read her articles right when they went up. Normally, her words filled me with a sense of pride that my bestie was pursuing her journalistic journey one piece at a time. But with this alert, there was no bursting pride. Just horrible pins of dread.
TOUGH AS NAILS NAILING SHUT DOORS
By Lu Fuhrman
Local nail salon Tough as Nails is closing its doors permanently after twenty-three years in business. Owner Leslie Lovett cited a lack of customers as the reason.
“With the opening of Nailed It in Deer Park, we’ve lost a lot of clients,” Lovett said. “It’s just too much for this old gal to keep up with.”
Nailed It opened last year. Its updated equipment and offerings of custom-made espresso drinks were noted as big draws to former Tough as Nails patrons.
“They’ve got, like, a thousand options for polish color, too,” Riverton High School senior Monica Delancey said. “It’s really the only place to go.”
Carol Fuhrman, the sole nail technician at Tough as Nails, is available for in-home nail service and can be contacted at [email protected].
Lu never tried to be funny in her articles. She always said journalistic integrity was everything. Avoiding “being cute” was rule number one, so with an article title like “Tough as Nails Nailing Shut Doors,” Lu was not feeling this assignment at all. Was not feeling her life at all.
I couldn’t blame her. I called her instantly.
“You read the article, didn’t you?” Straight to the point, as always.
“What are you going to do, Lu?”
“More shifts at the diner, what else? Eau de burger grease is my life now.”
There she was, trying to be funny again. Not good.
“And Aunt Carol? Maybe she could get a job at Nailed It?” I was grasping at straws, but it didn’t feel right not to offer some kind of solution.
“We don’t have a car, remember?”
Frack. This was bad. This was so, so bad.
“But who knows. Maybe I’ll be able to buy some beat-up junker with our hoedown prize winnings,” Lu continued.
Those pins of dread increased to knives. Lu was literally depending on us taking the costume contest prize money to get out of this mess. Hopefully Chip was doing his job as her boyfriend and making her feel better in all of this.
“How’s Chip been handling it?” I asked.
“He broke up with me. Over the weekend.”
“Oh gawd, Lu. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lu was silent, the only sounds coming through her phone the background noise of the diner: the milkshake mixer running on high, the cash register bumping open, Derrick yelling, “Order number eight, your Belly Buster is ready.” Life was so normal back in Riverton for everyone but Lu. She seemed to have the odds stacked against her even worse than I had as the only gay guy at our school. At least I’d had Lu all those years. Now Lu had to weather this shit storm alone. She didn’t have me; she didn’t have Chip. Maybe homecoming wasn’t the lead Ho after all.
Lu finally sighed and said, “I’ve just decided to stop focusing on the negative. So the first positive is that we get to go to the hoedown together again. Have you come up with any great ideas?”
I’d been thinking so much about boys that coming up with costumes for Lu and Chip slipped my mind. I knew I could come up with something good, though, while deciding what exactly I’d do about the dance dilemma.
“Absolutely,” I said vaguely. “We got this.” I’d think of something. I would.
“Okay, I’m heading into work. Talk to you later. Love you.”
“Love you too, Lu.”
It was the truth. Lu was the person I loved the most in the whole world. But when I hung up, I wasn’t sure that love was enough. Even though I wanted to figure out this whole mess, find the perfect hoedown costume to make Lu win the prize money, and have our relationship back to normal like it was before Chip, I wasn’t entirely certain that I could. Because while my heart was full of Lu in that moment, butting right up next to her were all my hopes and dreams in the Gay Agenda. I wasn’t sure I could give those up yet, even if Lu needed me right now. But if I chose the Gay Agenda over Lu, there was one thing I knew for sure:
It would break her heart.
I had to run to SIF to make it just in time for class the next day. I’d overslept after a night worrying about all the different ways the dance dilemma could play out, and I didn’t come up with any solid answers. I thought for a minute that I could just invite Lu to homecoming, but 1) where were we going to find the money to get her over to Seattle, and 2) an entire weekend away from the diner would mean at least two missed shifts. I eventually drifted off into a fitful sleep, but I woke up in a sweat after a nightmare where I told Lu I was ditching her. She scratched my eyes out with her perfectly manicured nails, screaming, “Headline news! You’re dead!” The only thing I could think to do was fill Max in on this conundrum and see if he had any good ideas about how to fix it.
I huffed and puffed down the horrifying SIF hall, through the chipped fashion lab door, and plopped myself on the stool next to Max. “I need to tell you som—”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Max interrupted, and he grabbed my hand like he needed me to keep him steady. His eyes were swimming with tears. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough night.
“What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Lord and Taylor, I am not going to cry.” Max quickly wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. “I was not going to do this, but there’s something I need to tell you. Can I vent?”
“I’m your man.” After how quickly he jumped on helping with the Gay Agenda, I owed him one.
Max opened his mouth to spill, but Mr. Bogosian walked into the room. “Okay, everyone,” he called. “Now that we’ve covered the basics of sewing machines that most of you seemed to grasp . . .” His eyes flashed to the back of the room, where Julian held a bandaged thumbs-up.
“It’s all good, teach,” Julian said. “I barely felt that needle.”
Mr. Bogosian cringed. “Good. Let’s tote-ally get started. This time accident-free, please. We do not need a lawsuit on our hands. Everyone grab your fabric while I pass out patterns.”
I focused all my attention on Max as the football players rushed to the back of the room. “What’s up?”
Max’s frown perfectly matched the basset hound’s on his forest-green sweater. “Dance drama. I’ll tell you after class.” He sulked behind the jocks and grabbed his pink tiger-stripe fabric.
Dance drama? It had only been a week, and I thought things were going smoothly when it came to homecoming. Tuna had signed on as DJ, and we’d already made enough money in ticket presales to cover her fee and pay for refreshments. What could be going wrong?
“Jay?” Mr. Bogosian said
. “You okay? Where’s your material?”
I jolted out of my seat way too fast, making my stool topple over with a clang. “Sorry, Professor. I mean”—awkward laugh—“Mr. Bogosian. I’ll just . . .” I bent down and picked my stool up, then ran to the back of the room.
“Come on, everybody, let’s pick it up!” Mr. Bogosian clapped his hands. “These totes won’t make themselves.”
I moved so fast to get back to my seat that I didn’t pay attention to where I was going and stubbed my toe on the leg of my worktable. “Shit!”
“Real smooth,” Reese fake-coughed into the sleeve of his baggy NYU sweatshirt. His insults were as unoriginal as his wardrobe. I’d hoped that we might slowly move toward becoming friends since we’d shared in the victory of catching a sparkly PomPom, but Reese was back to his spiteful self.
Mr. Bogosian glared at Reese instead of me for swearing, solidifying him as my favorite teacher. “Reese,” Mr. Bogosian said, “it sounds like you’re eager to share with the class. Why don’t you help me demonstrate how to cut the patterns we’ll need for this project?”
Max slumped in his seat. I couldn’t figure out what was up with him.
Mr. Bogosian walked to Reese’s worktable and demonstrated how to fold our fabrics in half, then lay the patterns for the tote bag and pin them into place before cutting.
“Does everyone see the placement of the main tote pattern on Reese’s fabric?” Mr. Bogosian asked.
Max sank even deeper on his stool. Maybe it was the way the light hit his sweater, but he looked like he was turning a little green.
“Placement is key so that we use our fabric as efficiently as possible. Okay, Reese, place the handle pattern as close to the main pattern as you can, again so we really utilize the fabric and don’t waste anything.” The class watched the pattern placement while I watched Max get greener and greener. This was definitely not a trick of the light.