“What?” I asked.
“You. You sound . . .” She waved her hands like she was trying to snatch the right word out of the air. “Confident. Yes, that’s it. It’s cracking me up.”
“Thanks? Hey, so I promise I’ll tell you all about my crazy summer. But right now I’m going to tell you about something else. Remember when my brother threw that huge party a few months ago?”
“Yeah?”
“I slept with Connor that night.”
She stared at me for a second and then laughed into the floor, her hair spilling across the tile like a mop. When she looked up and opened her mouth, I thought she was going to tell me how stupid I’d been. Instead, she retched again and spewed into the john.
“Unacceptable,” I shrieked as I scooped The Hummingbird out of a pile of padlocks and handcuffs. “Are you high? These are not toys.” The Hummingbird let out an ear-piercing wail, as if I’d just snatched a fresh cone of fudge-ripple ice cream—her favorite—out of her hot little hand.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Miyake,” au pair number seven groveled. “She begged me all morning. I thought a few minutes would be okay. I was watching her carefully.”
“No excuses,” I squawked. “You’re fired.”
“Please don’t do this, Ms. Miyake. I love little Miyu.”
“Oh, shut it, Esther. You love your work visa, not my kid.”
My brutal honesty must’ve been the final straw for the moon-faced girl. She pursed her thin lips and glared at me from behind a monstrous pair of glasses that made her look like a pale frog. “Before I go, I just want to say you’re not at all how I thought you’d be.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” I shot back. I’d become impervious to the ineffectual whining of these naïve, European post-adolescents. “Did you think I’d be all smiles as we jet-setted around the country? Did you think you’d be rubbing elbows with stars and sipping champagne?”
The Hummingbird howled and beat her little fists against my chest. I pretended she was mad at Esther instead of at me.
– Akiko Miyake, Orlando, July 4, 1987
Will With Two Ls Meets
Francisco of the Sacred Sword
If there’s anything to be gained from frequenting intolerably-loud-vomit-parties, it’s the ability to wrangle a drunk person.
Once it became abundantly clear that Stella was three sheets to the wind and then some while we were at Salone Postale, I pulled her onto a hug. “Hey, buddy.”
“Will! Will, you’re the best. Isn’t this place the best? I’m having the best time.”
“I can see that, Stell. You know what? The fun doesn’t have to end. We’re going to have a slumber party at my house.”
“A slumber party,” she slurred. “Heck yeah! I haven’t had one-a those in . . . Your parents won’t mind?”
“They’re away for the weekend. Thank god.”
“Yay! Your parents are the best.”
I guided Stella into the backseat of her little jalopy and tried to keep a lid on her while Mattie drove to my house. Frankie called his mom from Mattie’s cell and rattled off something in Portuguese.
“Isn’t Frankie the best, Will?” Stella asked. “He’s bilingual!”
And now she was lying on the tile floor, trying to get Mattie’s attention.
“Ginge, I have something to confess.”
I snagged Frankie’s arm and pulled him into the hall. “I think that’s our cue, kid.”
Unfortunately, the two of us didn’t move fast enough to avoid overhearing Stella tell Mattie that she’d fooled around with some guy at St. Joe’s.
“Don’t ever repeat what you just heard,” I told Frankie.
He yawned and shook his head. “Stella’s personal life is old news. Currently, all I care about is finding a semi-comfortable place to collapse.”
Frankie followed me up the stairs, and I dug out a t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants for him. He changed in the master bathroom and came out looking like a little squirt who’d raided his dad’s closet. I saw him eyeing my parents’ king-sized bed.
“Have at it. I’ll wash the sheets tomorrow. They’ll never even know you were in there.”
He flung himself onto the down comforter and flailed his skinny arms and legs. “Are your parents obese? Because this bed is huge.”
I laughed through a yawn. “We had a pretty good night. It’s been a while since I’ve had that much fun.”
Frankie sighed one of those melodramatic sighs that early-adolescents pull off so well. I’d like to think I’d grown out of that, but my parents would probably say otherwise.
“What’s up, kid?”
“Nothing. It was a fun night. I had a really fun summer, actually. But all that just reminds me I have one more year of high school looming ahead, like a giant cloud of suck.”
I should’ve laughed, because almost everything that popped out of that kid’s mouth was a hoot and a half. Instead, I recognized him for the first time as a fellow in-betweener. A guy who belonged neither here nor there. A wanderer without a tribe. Frankie was too smart and too wonderfully weird to appeal to any of the freshman pipsqueaks his own age, but it’s not like any of the seniors wanted to hang out with him. Well, except Stella. And me. And Mattie, who’d done her best to resist a new pal and been won over anyway by clever Star Trek references.
I nodded, and he must’ve taken it as a sign to keep talking, which I guess it was. He told me about how anxious he sometimes got in his own neighborhood—a neighborhood that I’d occasionally ventured into to track down a taco truck that Betsy loved, knowing that she and I could leave anytime we wanted and go home to our safe little suburban capes in Grayton.
“It’s home, but smart and scrawny doesn’t get you very far there, you know? Sometimes the guys in my building look at me like I’m from another planet.”
He told me about how his dad was still back in the Azores, and he hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He told me about how he missed him but worried that he didn’t miss him enough, and it made me think about how often I took my own parents for granted.
And he told me how excited he wants to be for college but how he can’t quite get there and how scared he is of living on his own at fifteen.
I was standing at the edge of eighteen and terrified of the same thing.
At some point, he turned to me and said, “Sorry. I ramble when I get tired, and I’m probably raining on your parade. You’re one of those people who likes high school, right?”
This time, I did laugh. Hard. I felt that little tickle in my chest again, even more insistent than when I’d come out to Mattie. Maybe telling her had torn off some kind of floodgate. It’d certainly felt that way as I tossed and turned in my bed the night before we met up at Trés Amigos and she dubbed me Will With Two Ls. And this might’ve been the gin and tonic still buzzing in my head, but I wondered if colliding with Mattie, in Salone Postale of all places, had sent up some kind of magical, invisible beacon, drawing fellow in-betweeners and strange cats toward us the way speakeasies used to.
“It probably looks like I’m one of those people, right?” I said to Frankie as I plopped down on the bed. “Because I play basketball and have a cool girlfriend and go to parties and yadda-yadda-yadda. But here’s the thing—my cool girlfriend and all those supposedly cool people at those parties? None of them know I’m gay.”
For a second, I couldn’t believe I’d said it. But there it was, hanging in the air between me and a sleepy, brilliant kid who didn’t fit in anywhere and whose dad was literally an ocean away.
He blinked at me. “Wow. I guess that kinda makes things more complicated for you then.”
“You could say that.”
“Wait, am I the first person you told?”
“No, the second. I told Mattie first.”
He nodded. “Good, good. I don’t think I could han
dle that kind of pressure. Mattie’s really neat. Do you think she’d hang out with me again?”
“Abso-tive-ly.”
“Great. Hey, Will?”
“Yeah?”
“This was a really good talk. But my brain registered what you just said as some bastardized combo of absolutely and positively. I think that means I’m going to start hallucinating pretty soon if I don’t get some sleep.”
“Goodnight, Frankie.”
“Goodnight.”
I padded down the stairs and opened the fridge. Mattie wandered in as I was unwrapping a cheese stick.
“String cheese?” I asked.
“I just watched Stella toss her cookies. I don’t think I can handle food.”
“She’s pretty zozzled, eh?”
“Two months at a prep school can do strange things to a person. Where’s Frankie?”
“Asleep on my parents’ bed.”
“Aww. Did you read him a bedtime story and tuck him in?”
I laughed. “We kind of bonded, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“I just came out to him.”
Her eyes bugged out. “Really?”
I relayed my heart-to-heart with Frankie while Mattie stared at my string cheese.
“Admit that you’re hungry even though you just watched Stella spew.”
“Fine.” She stole a piece of my cheese, and we chewed in silence for a few beats. “Can I ask you a really personal question?”
“Shoot.”
“Do you and Betsy have sex?”
I can only imagine the look that crossed my face. “Uh . . .”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“No, it’s a fair question.” Betsy and I had had the sex conversation at least a dozen times over the course of our relationship. In junior high, we were still too young and she was too Catholic. Like, confirmation-in-a-white-dress kind of Catholic. She told me she was saving herself for marriage, which sounded pretty damn fantastic to me, assuming I grew the cojones to come out before the two of us ended up walking down the aisle.
The day her mom moved out, she declared herself officially non-Catholic. But when you grow up with something like that, you don’t just throw it off in one fell swoop. Over the years, we’d added more and more to our repertoire, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she’d want to start shopping for condoms and take the plunge.
“What does she think you’re doing tonight?” Mattie asked.
“I told her I was going with my parents to Martha’s Vineyard. She texted me a few times to check in, but she won’t call me until Monday because she doesn’t want to interrupt the family time I’m not actually having. It kills me that she’s such a perfect girlfriend. Like, she’s dedicated but never clingy. What about you? Do you have a secret guy I don’t know about?”
She chuckled. “No, but my whole family thinks so because I’ve hardly been home all summer. Wait, how do you know I’m not gay? Is gay-dar a real thing?”
I laughed. “You could be attracted to all sorts of people for all I know. But I’ve seen you stare at Naveen on occasion.”
“Ugh. Great.” She stole another piece of my string cheese.
“Have you ever been with a guy?”
She stopped chewing and stared across the kitchen, like she couldn’t decide how much she wanted to tell me. “Yeah. One of my brother’s friends. It wasn’t serious, though.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Not-serious sounds good in theory but is kinda messy in real life.”
“Like you and the guy at basketball camp?”
I nodded and swallowed a little lump in my throat and tried to push him out of my noggin.
“Yeah,” Mattie sighed. “I don’t even know how to feel about it.” She laughed. “I was just about to ask you not to say anything to Stella, but I realized I just told her. You think she’s so drunk she won’t remember?”
“Either way, you know your secret’s safe with me, Mattie-O.”
I put my arm around her and handed over the last of my cheese stick.
***
Stella woke up the next morning with her first hangover, and if the perma-grimace on her face was any indication, it was a doozy. But I could treat a hangover almost as well as I could wrangle a drunk person, so I took her to breakfast at the greasiest spoon I knew—a little railcar diner in Warwick.
Mattie and Frankie came with us, of course, but the of two of them got sidetracked by an antique store on the way there.
“Oh my god, is that Bill Shatner’s first spoken word album on vinyl?” Mattie squealed as she pressed her hands to the glass of the front window.
“Where?” Frankie asked.
“Over there, by that kitschy nightstand with the nobs that look like dice.”
Frankie crossed his arms. “It’s probably a reissue.”
“It looks vintage from here,” Mattie said. “Should we bet on it? Loser buys breakfast?”
“We’ll meet you guys there,” Frankie said.
Stella grimaced at me. “Why is the sun so bright?”
I pulled her toward the diner and the two of us slid into a booth near the back, in the dimmest spot I could find.
She scanned the menu for a bit and then dropped her head down to the table. “Everything sounds disgusting.”
The waitress cocked an eyebrow at the two of us when she came over. “Rough night?”
I smiled and ordered two coffees, two large orange juices, and breakfast sandwiches with double bacon.
“Yep. Sounds about right,” she said before she ducked back into the kitchen.
“Ever been as zozzled as you were last night?” I asked Stella.
She lifted her head up off the table and shot me a look that was almost-but-not-quite a glare.
“What?” I asked.
“I appreciate you taking care of me last night and making sure I didn’t drunkenly stumble home to my own house. But I still don’t trust you, and I have no idea what your intentions with my best friend are, but they can’t possibly be good.”
“Stella, I swear I—”
“Will, cut the crap. My head feels like it’s being continually run over by a truck, and I simply do not have the patience to deal with you acting like you’re all innocent.” She huffed and started shredding a sugar packet. “I know I smile and nod like I don’t care that you and your friends either ignore me or make snide comments behind my back. But sometimes, like right now, I really do mind.”
And there it was again. That tickle crept into my chest as I stared at a stripped-down no-bullshit version of a girl I’d been in honors classes with for three years and, obviously, hardly knew.
“Stella I promise I’m not trying to get in Mattie’s pants.”
She rolled her eyes.
“No really. Because . . .”
She glared at me again. “You think she’s not good enough for you?”
“No!” I shut my eyes and clenched my fists under the table. “Look, I’m sorry my friends are assholes. Will you just listen for a sec?”
“I’m listening,” the said icily.
“Stella, I’m gay.”
I’d expected her to react like Mattie did, except maybe with repressed giggles instead of hysterical laughter. But she just stared at me, and then shifted her gaze to the window. I could’ve been wrong, but I thought her eyes got a little misty.
“Oh.”
“Say something other than ‘oh,’” I begged.
“How many people know?”
“Three. Including you.”
She nodded and we were both quiet for a bit before she spoke again. “It’s funny how sometimes everything starts to change all at once. First Mattie. Now you’ve just torn my stereotypical basketball-guy sc
hema for you to pieces. And this time next year we’ll all be at college orientations.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And I always thought I’d be ready for it. More than ready—excited even, after three years at a school where I’m just ‘that brainy girl who drives a Bug.’ And it’s amazing. Beautiful, really. But it’s also . . . a lot.”
I grinned at her. It’s true that Stella and I had never exchanged more than a few pleasantries in any of our classes together, but I wasn’t at a total loss. “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
She smiled back. “Lewis Carroll. Well played, Will Kane. I guess you’ve been paying more attention than I thought.”
When the waitress brought our food, Stella scowled down at her double-bacon sandwich, oozing with processed cheese.
“Can you trust me on this one?”
“I suppose,” she sighed. “But just this once, and only because you quoted my favorite author.” She took a hesitant little bird bite. “Oh my. Why is this disgusting grease-fest so scrumptious?”
A poem:
“Hachidori, you need to finish your math homework.”
“Hachidori, please make your bed.”
“Hachidori, turn that music down so I can get some sleep.”
“Not until you start training me” is always the response.
God help me, I’ve created a monster in my own image.
– Akiko Miyake, Grayton, March 4, 1991
Mattie as Moral Support
The night before the first day of our senior year at Cianci Regional, Will picked me up at my last gelato-scooping shift at Café Italiano.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked as I slid into the passenger seat.
He rubbed his palms against his jeans. “I guess so. You know my mom.”
“Not really. But you told me once that gay men are like pets to her or something. And your dad has a tell when seething on inside, right?”
“Yeah. Rubs his nose like he’s about to sneeze.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for that,” I promised.
The Art of Escaping Page 14