Openly Straight

by Konigsberg, Bill

  We both stared at the broken bottle.

  “Did you just throw a bottle?” I said.

  “I think I did,” she said.

  “That’s, like, what you do when you’re unhappy now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m not happy either,” I said, and I tossed my half-full bottle at the bench too. It missed, thudded against the grass, and spun before settling and leaking onto the grass.

  “God, I’m gonna miss you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said back. “Me too. Miss you too.”

  “Is that how you talk now that you’re an East Coast prep student?”

  “Is yes,” I said.

  So I had hurt Claire Olivia by leaving. Now, as I scribbled words as fast as I could, trying to write something that was the complete truth while avoiding certain other truths, I realized something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before: I had been so focused on leaving that I had completely brushed her off when she wanted to talk about it. She must have felt totally abandoned. For all the grief I’d given her about how everything was always about her, at the most crucial time, it had been all about me.

  And now maybe we’d go to the same college — we’d try — but it was hardly a given that we’d get into the same places. A lump grew in my throat.

  The problem, as I was writing, was all that I had to leave out. Instead of going right into our strange but weird friendship (a guy has sleepovers with a girl, who happens to be his best friend?), I had to write less and hope that my words conveyed something.

  “Who will read?” Mr. Scarborough asked.

  A kid I hadn’t met yet, with a mouth full of braces, read. His piece was pretty good, about a time he’d been on a seesaw with his sister, and he was high in the air, and as a joke he’d jumped off, and she’d flown down and smacked her mouth against the metal bar. I could actually smell the blood and see the chipped tooth, which is one way I know something is well written.

  “Good, good,” Mr. Scarborough said. “What I’d like you to think about, Curtis, is culpability. You didn’t mean to hurt her; it was an accident, as you said. I’d like you to add to your homework a short piece like the one you wrote, but in this one I want you to reflect on a time when you purposefully hurt someone else. We can learn so much from seeing our own character flaws. I want to see that from you. Excellent work.”

  My gut churned. I knew that if he could find a flaw in that piece, mine would surely be flawed too, and I didn’t like the possibility. I hoped I wouldn’t have to read.

  “How about our new student?” Mr. Scarborough said, smiling at me. He looked down at his attendance sheet. “Rafe?”

  By sixth grade, I’d figured out that you have to get your parents to insist that your name is written as Rafe rather than Seamus Rafael on attendance sheets. Seamus Rafael isn’t the kind of name kids just let go by.

  So I read what I’d written.

  Claire Olivia was the kind of girl who could keep up with me on the slopes, even on the moguls. She laughed at all my jokes, even the unfunny ones. She coined the word craptacular. Her eyes smiled, even when she was crying. She was always beautiful, especially without makeup. When I told her I was coming to Natick, she looked up and to the left, like the answer was up there. I knew that it made her cry, but she never cried in front of me. I knew, because she always texted at night, and that night she didn’t. And the next morning she wouldn’t look me in the eye. When you hurt someone you care about, it’s like a part of you dies inside. If you can’t talk about it, the death goes unnoticed. I was never able to go there, and I’ll always regret that.

  “Wow. In-ter-est-ing,” Mr. Scarborough said, not taking his eyes off me. “Great details. Looking up and to the left — class, that’s the way you use singular detail, the way to show a lot with a little. But there was something else, a few other things, actually, that I noticed about that piece. Anyone?”

  “Sentence length,” said Bryce, not looking at me. “Scads of short sentences.”

  “Yes!” Mr. Scarborough cried. “Precisely. Did anyone else have a feeling as though it was hard to breathe, listening to that piece? Extremely tight, clipped, controlled. That can be fixed by varying sentence length. Anything else?”

  Some other kid said, “Why the hell would someone leave their hot girlfriend and move across the country to an all-boys school?”

  The room got really quiet, and it was like I could hear all my internal organs turning over inside me. I scanned what I’d written. Girlfriend? I hadn’t said “girlfriend.” And then I wondered if a part of me wanted them to think that.

  “Well, that’s a question for a different time, perhaps,” Mr. Scarborough said, clearing his throat. “But I think you make a valid point. Are we getting the full story? What’s missing here? Where is Rafe’s focus, emotionally?”

  No one had an answer for that one. Everyone just sort of stared, brain-dead-like, and I felt this sinking sensation in my chest and I wasn’t sure why.

  I thought about when I was training for Speaking Out, the gay advocacy group that Mom talked me into joining last year, which got me speaking engagements at high schools across the state. They taught us this game that we took to the schools. You ask everyone to write down three major facts about themselves. Then you put the kids in groups and ask them to introduce themselves without mentioning any of the three things. The exercise is supposed to help kids understand how hard it is for gay people when they are told, like, “It’s okay if you’re gay, just don’t talk about it.”

  That exercise sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, depending on the crowd. But sitting in Mr. Scarborough’s writing seminar, it occurred to me that this was that lesson in action.

  The bell rang, and we started packing up.

  Mr. Scarborough said, “Before you go, I wanted to announce that I’m the advisor for the school literary magazine, and we’re looking for new staff people, so let me know if you’re interested. As for this class, you’ll all keep journals. I’ll read them. I will not share them with other students, and I will not ask you to read from them. So you may feel free to write whatever you feel is important. But it must be about you. Your life. Tell me who you are.”

  Great, I thought. How the hell was I going to do that?

  At our first soccer practice, Mr. Donnelly lined us up against a wall in the gymnasium. He was our dorm adviser at East and a history teacher. Maybe thirty or thirty-five, he appeared to be going for older; he wore big wire-rimmed glasses that seemed like they were meant to look bookish. His black hair was parted on the side and combed over the top of his head.

  “The Romans dominated the world for hundreds of years. Does anyone care to guess why?” he asked as we sat in front of him on the gymnasium floor.

  I almost raised my hand. Legions, right? Military strategy and organization? I didn’t remember a ton from tenth-grade history, but I knew a few things still.

  “Leg strength,” he said. “No one had thighs like the Romans.”

  That was not what I’d expected to hear. It got me interested, at least.

  “The proof was in the famous marathons, discovered by the Romans, as you might recall. Did you know that the first Roman army ran all the way from Damascus to Constantinople? The French, and the Germans, and the … Danish … couldn’t keep up. Those Romans had stamina. Do you know what that means? Do you?”

  I looked around. Were there hidden cameras somewhere? Were we being punked? Even I knew the Greeks had invented the marathon. I looked over at Steve, but his expression was totally blank. I caught Ben’s eye, and he looked away, but not before a flicker of something crossed his face. I smirked. I wasn’t the only one thinking this guy had a few of his facts wrong.

  “All’s I know is the following: Stamina means never having to give up. Stamina means your body never builds up lactic acid. We’re going to get stamina this year, boys.”

  I made a mental note to look up the word stamina later.

  He had us lean up against the wall i
n a sitting position. I was fine for about thirty seconds, even when some of the other guys began to grunt. Then I felt it. The shaking, in my quads. I closed my eyes as Donnelly kept walking back and forth in front of us. He yelled, “Be like Mark Anthony and, uh …” Even with my quads throbbing, I almost laughed as he struggled to think of another name. “And all the other Roman leaders!” A few more painful seconds. “C’mon. Don’t you dare give up. First three to fail are doing laps the rest of practice. Hear me?”

  You can do anything for five minutes. This was something my dad used to say, and it was true. When I took swimming lessons as a kid, I hated the cold water of the lake we swam in. But if I didn’t pass, we wouldn’t be able to go Jet Skiing. Dad said: “Five minutes is nothing. You can do anything, anything, for five minutes.” So I did. I pretended I had a wet suit on, that the freezing water against my sides was a second skin, protecting me from the elements. And I started the crawl stroke and I didn’t stop until I heard the whistle.

  “And then there were four,” I heard Donnelly say, and I opened my eyes and realized I’d tuned things out so much that I didn’t know how long it had been. My legs shook something fierce, but I decided to keep going. I could win this. I could be the best. I could …

  “Nice try there, Goldberg. All’s I know is that’s a nice effort by the new guy. Way to show up on the first day.”

  I picked myself up off the gym floor, my quads still throbbing. I watched Steve, Ben, and Robinson, the final three. Robinson crashed soon after I did, and then there were two. Ben’s eyes were closed, and I saw a bead of sweat travel down the side of his face. His legs were like horse legs. His calves, grapefruit sized and finely matted with light hair, bulged and trembled. I wasn’t surprised when Steve fell first.

  “Ben Carver. He outplayed, outwitted, outlasted you all,” Donnelly said.

  Wasn’t that the Survivor TV show motto? I’d have to ask Albie and Toby later. Nah, probably not the right kind of survivor show.

  We went out to the soccer field. Natick has some of the best athletic facilities around, and that includes a gorgeously manicured soccer field surrounded by a track. I worked out with the midfielders. I’d always liked to run, and they did the most running.

  We scrimmaged. The ball came my way, and I dribbled up the sideline. Steve came over to defend. I knew I couldn’t get around him, so I faked as if I were going to try, and when he bit, I kicked the ball across the field. I had no idea whom I was passing to, but at least it seemed like the right thing.

  As luck would have it, Bryce was there. He stopped the pass by catching it with his chest, dribbled around a defender, and hit the top of the net, easily past the diving goalie.

  “Beautiful, Bryce. Great, great pass, Rafe. That’s the way,” shouted Donnelly.

  I was glad I’d made a positive impression, even if it was dumb luck. I was clearly not the best player, but I tried hard, and I wasn’t the worst either.

  I found Ben as we walked back to the locker room. “I think some long-passed Natick history teachers are turning over in their graves right about now,” I said.

  He smirked. “Wait until he starts using World War II analogies. He gets the Axis and the axis of evil confused.”

  “Sounds excellent,” I said as I held the door for him.

  “Some of the more disgruntled upperclassmen made a big stink about it last year. Natick is famous for pushing these sorts of things under the table. We win games, so why worry about the miseducation of the soccer team?”

  “Were you one of the disgruntled?” I asked.

  “Nah. I was gruntled.”

  That cracked me up. I liked Ben. He was smart. So was Bryce, who had used the word scads in our writing class. I hoped I could make them see that we should be friends. And just as I was thinking up a good comeback, he was gone, hustling down the aisle to his locker.

  As I started to get undressed, I saw the first few guys head into the shower area. I felt my heart beat faster as I glimpsed my teammates walking by, some wrapped in towels, some with towels draped over their shoulders. In Boulder, as the gay guy, it was an unspoken rule that I wouldn’t gawk at my fellow athletes. That would be considered rude, you know? And, basically, I just figured it was a tradeoff: They accepted me, I didn’t stare at them naked. It worked.

  Here, no such unspoken pact had been made; why would there be? And I felt a little guilty and a bit tingly, entering the sacred shower room with my fellow straight teammates.

  The thing about Natick guys was this: They really were genuinely nice. I had never been in a shower room that wasn’t filled with name-calling and insults. Once faggot had been taken away from my Boulder teammates, they’d found other ones — dumbass, shit breath, dick face — that they used with abandon. Here, the guys were mostly talking about, of all things, soccer.

  “We gotta be better this year,” Steve said. “Schroeder’s gone, but Bryce is our boy.”

  I looked over at Bryce. It was almost like he wasn’t there; Steve had spoken about him in the third person rather than the second. It was weird.

  “Add Rafe and his speed and we got a serious shot to win it all, right?”

  Steve turned to me and smiled, which made my heart spin even more, since he was just about perfect, physically. It gave me a chance to look at him, since he was looking at me. He had a six-pack, the kind I was not quite muscular enough to have.

  I looked over at Ben. He was silently soaping and rinsing. His torso was thick — not fat, just bigger — and well sculpted. The curve of his back was graceful, his neck strong. Teen People would probably choose Steve, but something about Ben made me think he was even more attractive.

  Steve continued to work the room, and I realized it was basically his space. Whatever Steve said or did, people listened. I’d never been part of a group like that, so it was interesting, like a National Geographic special on wolves that I might watch with my dad.

  And I was part of the pack.

  Albie and Toby came into our room while I was reading A Separate Peace for lit class that night.

  “Hey,” I said, pretending to be engrossed in my book, even though my interest in Gene and Finny was pretty low. I had gotten along with Albie and Toby over the weekend when we’d been in the room together. They were weird but harmless. Albie said strange things and never laughed, which made me a little uncomfortable. Toby said even stranger things and laughed a lot. I hadn’t seen either of them much out of the room, and when I did, a nod was all I’d give them. I liked them fine, but clearly if I had to choose between my jock friends and these two, it wasn’t going to be a tough choice.

  “Greetings and salutations,” said Albie.

  I saw he was wearing huge camouflage shorts, and what happened next was not exactly expected. He dug four Styrofoam bowls out of his desk drawer and put them on the desk. He then stood on his toes and proceeded to turn his pockets inside out. Lucky Charms poured into the bowls. Each pocket seemed to fill two bowls to the rim. There was some overflow that landed on the floor, and without thinking, I stood up to go over and clean up the spill, but Albie put out his hand to stop me. He then bent down and picked up the cereal bits that had landed on the floor and placed them in the garbage.

  “Progress!” I said, smiling, and he bowed at me.

  “Here goes nothing,” Toby said, and he walked over to the windowsill, where a single, wilted rose drooped in a clear glass vase. Toby picked up the vase and poured the clear liquid — water, I supposed — into the Styrofoam bowls. The cereal pile got higher.

  “Ew,” I said, unable to suppress my disgust. As if Lucky Charms weren’t disgusting enough, adding flower water?

  “Puts hair on your chest,” Toby said, grinning. “Want some?”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said.

  “Vodka?”

  Toby nodded bravely. “They kick you out for this,” he said. “Hence the vase.”

  “Lucky Charms with vodka?”<
br />
  “Frosted Russkie Charms. They’re Bolshevik delicious!” Toby sang. “Think of it like an after-dinner drink, a dessert wine.”

  “Actually, it’s more like an alcoholic dessert,” Albie said. “It’s not a drink.”

  “It’s more like an alcoholic’s dessert,” I said, and Toby giggled.

  I passed on a bowl. Albie shrugged and said, “More for us,” and we three sat there, a strange trio.

  “So what’s your thing, Rafe?” Toby said, rolling marshmallows around in his mouth before crunching on them.

  “My thing?” I asked.

  “Tweaker, womanizer, historical reenactments, poetry slams, model airplanes, VH1.” Toby listed these choices as if they were the only possibilities.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Weed whacking, porcelain doll collecting, Ferris wheels,” added Albie.

  I just stared at the guys, totally speechless.

  Albie looked at Toby, and for the first time since I’d met him, he dropped the aloof act, smiling.

  “He doesn’t know what to make of us,” he said.

  “Good,” Toby said, smirking. “I like to be a mystery.”

  In Boulder, I’d be friends with these guys, I realized. Maybe not the Survival Planet stuff, but they were funny. They said things that surprised me constantly. I decided to play along. What Steve and Zack didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Plus, it would be fun to go against the label they’d given me. Blow their minds a little.

  “I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and taking photographs of nuns on Segways,” I said.

  I was thinking back to the time this summer when Claire Olivia and I had seen these three nuns riding on Segways in the Pearl Street Mall. The rest of the crowd was being very Boulder, very “nothing to see here” laid-back, so Claire Olivia and I followed the nuns and waited until they parked their Segways and sat down on a bench. Then we went and talked with them and found out they were an honest-to-God (no pun intended) group of local nuns who traveled on Segways. For fun. They liked us, and, of course, I got to snap several pictures of Claire Olivia riding on a Segway amidst a group of nuns. (A cloister of nuns, we later decided, when we got to talking about words meaning groups of things, like a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows.)