David and I flirted every time we hung out. (Certainly, the comment about his leather belt had intrigued me.) But he was dating a girl named Alex.
Anyway, I insisted to myself, David was all wrong for me. I couldn’t stay in one place; David had never applied for a passport. Even the small details didn’t align: I loved tofu; David had never tried it.
That night, as we all drank our beers, we launched into a conversation about past relationships. Everyone was twenty or twenty-one years old, so none of us had much experience, but we liked to think we did. At eighteen months, my relationship with John seemed long.
“Actually, my longest relationship was four years,” David said.
“Wow,” someone exclaimed. “That’s amazing! What’s the story there?”
David shrugged.
“It’s not amazing,” he said. “It was a weird situation. Her father was my high school principal. And after my mom died, he became—well, he became my foster guardian. Small towns, you know. So that relationship lasted a lot longer than it would have otherwise.”
My throat closed.
I remembered sitting on a stoop outside an apartment complex in Seville, waiting for John. I’d just left an Internet café, where I had read a story that I couldn’t forget. A boy in rural America was living in foster care with his high school principal, after his mother died of MS and his alcoholic father became violent. He worried about paying for college. I had imagined him with a baseball cap.
Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
The conversation had moved on.
“You wrote that thing,” I said to David, interrupting the others.
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, too loudly. “I’m tired. You all have to leave.”
It was rude and abrupt, but I didn’t care. Adrenaline was rushing through my veins. My heart pounded. I wanted to run, and I never run.
I stood up and opened my door.
“Bye,” I said. My friends looked confused.
“Bye,” I repeated, as they filed out. My hands shook.
I closed the door behind my friends and leaned against it. I didn’t understand the reaction that my body was having. David, my crush, that handsome guy in my Shakespeare club, was also the boy with the baseball cap I had imagined three years earlier, in Spain. So what? It wasn’t a big deal. It was a weird coincidence, nothing more.
If I didn’t do something to release the energy in my body, and soon, I’d throw up.
I really, really needed to move. I grabbed my iPod, pulled on a coat, and went downstairs.
There is a four-mile road at Stanford called Campus Drive Loop. That night, I walked the Loop, listening to the same song on repeat, over and over again, until dawn. And then I kept walking. I wasn’t tired at all.
Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
At 11:00 A.M., I slowed down. I had been walking nonstop for about twelve hours.
David’s dorm was to my left. That’s where I needed to go.
I knocked on his door. In the second before he opened it, it occurred to me that I should have gone back to my room first. I should’ve put on some makeup. Or at least brushed my hair. God knows how I looked after that night walking around campus.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” David replied, ushering me into his room. “Thanks for having me over last night.”
I nodded.
“That’s why I came by,” I told him. “I know the way I said good night was abrupt.”
David nodded.
“Was everything okay?” he asked.
I laughed to relax my nerves, and sat on the edge of his futon.
“The truth is, that was about you,” I told him. He sat next to me.
In the few weeks that we had known each other, I’d already come to understand that David was a closed-off guy. He didn’t talk about his past with anyone. David had told his story exactly once—anonymously, and online. On the other side of the world, I had read it. It was the kind of coincidence that is impossible to fake. I knew details about David’s life that no one else at Stanford (indeed, no one else in the state of California) could have told me. As I told David his own story from my point of view—how I had lived in Spain, read his words, and remembered them—a potent charge electrified the conversation. I mentioned that I had MS myself. I told him that I’d been rooting for him.
“I wondered a lot if you ever got that scholarship,” I said. “It’s so cool to see that you did.”
David looked stunned.
“Wow,” he said.
“It’s weird, huh?” I agreed.
David shook his head.
“It’s really something to think—” he broke off.
“What?” I asked. David looked at me.
“It’s just something to think that a person cared about me back then,” he said.
My heart lurched.
“I would have sent you a message in the forum,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “But I’m so bad with technology, I couldn’t figure out how to make an account.”
David was somewhere else.
“Do you think that sometimes people who are meant to meet just . . . do?” he asked. I shook my head.
“I don’t believe in things like that,” I admitted.
“Neither do I,” he quickly replied.
He pressed his lips together in thought. Then he smiled.
“This will be interesting, I think,” he said.
I laughed with relief.
“You don’t look the way I pictured you,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. “You didn’t expect me to be so damn handsome, right?”
I giggled. Giggled. And, let’s be honest, probably ran my fingers through my hair.
“I imagined that you were—smaller, I guess,” I said. “Although I did picture you with a baseball cap. I was right about that.”
David’s hat is legendary. It has the logo of his beloved football team, the Atlanta Falcons, and was such a regular presence on David’s head that people in the Shakespeare club pretended not to recognize him without it. When David had bought that hat five years earlier, back when he was sixteen, it was black. But by the time I met him, daily sun exposure had bleached it almost white. The brim was frayed.
My long night finally caught up with me. I was hit with a wave of exhaustion.
“I should go,” I told David. “I need to get some sleep.”
“Oh,” he replied. “Yeah, of course.”
I said good-bye and stood up to leave. As I walked toward his door, I looked over my shoulder to smile at him—and plowed directly into the doorframe.
David laughed.
“You weren’t kidding,” he said. “You do need to sleep!”
I blushed with embarrassment, waved good-bye, and fled.
I ran downstairs and left his dorm. The door swung closed behind me, and I stopped in the courtyard.
Something big had just happened.
For only the second time in my life, I was filled with uncharacteristic confidence. Something very important would happen between this man and me. I was certain.
It didn’t take long.
“IAMBIC PENTAMETER IS fun,” I explained as David and I picked through a salad bar a few days later. “When you understand it, you can hunt for clues in the rhythm. It’s like a puzzle.”
“Uh-huh,” David murmured, skeptically, as he reached for the cherry tomatoes.
“Like trochees,” I said. “Trochees are my favorite. You know how regular iambic pentameter is a bunch of feet that make a heartbeat? Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump? If mu, sic be, the food, of love, play on?”
“Sure,” David replied.
“Well, a trochee is an inverted foot,” I said. “Like, ba-bump instead of ba-bump.”
“Oh my goodness,” David teased. “How have I lived for twenty-one years without inverted feet?”
I made a face.
“It’s fun, David
,” I insisted. “Trochees are Shakespeare’s way of letting us know when a character’s heart skips a beat.”
“Well, that explains it,” David joked. “My heart is a metronome. It doesn’t skip anymore. I have no use for trochees.”
I used the salad tongs to grab a bunch of radicchio leaves and dumped them on his plate.
“There you go,” I teased. “Some bitter leaves to match your bitter mood.”
David smiled.
“Can you blame me?” he asked. “Who isn’t bitter on Valentine’s Day?”
I blinked.
“Is it Valentine’s Day?” I asked.
David nodded.
“It’s February fourteenth,” he said. “How come you never know the date?”
I sprinkled croutons on my salad.
“Don’t you have plans with Alex?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
David shook his head.
“I broke up with her last week,” he said. “I’m interested in someone else, actually.”
After lunch, I ran back to my dorm, unscrewed a lightbulb from a lamp in my room, and tied a small note to it.
“Here’s something to make this Valentine’s Day brighter than the rest,” I wrote. I congratulated myself on the joke and, a few hours later, left it outside David’s door.
That night, on the balcony of the Italian-language dorm, he wrapped his hands around my neck, leaned forward, and kissed me.
“I mean, you gave me a literal lightbulb,” David said.
I laughed.
So David and I started to date: burritos at Taqueria Cancún in San Francisco’s Mission District; midnight movies in Santa Clara; brunches in Palo Alto. While John had intoxicated me with giddy physicality, and Dylan had excited me with intellectual theories, David just made me laugh. He made me laugh more than anyone ever had.
A few weeks after our first kiss, David announced that we were going on a “fancy” date.
“Didn’t you call Red Lobster ‘fancy’ the other day, farm boy?” I teased.
“Compared to Tater Tot hot dish, Red Lobster is damn fancy,” he insisted.
I frowned.
“Do I want to know what Tater Tot hot dish is?” I asked.
David considered the question.
“No, you don’t,” he concluded. “But I’m serious. This date will blow your mind. I can out-fancy any of these big-city folk.”
And he did. That weekend, he picked me up wearing a suit and, for the first time, no hat. My boy with the baseball cap was a man, too.
“Who are you?” I joked. “The guy I’m waiting for doesn’t have a cranium. A hat grows out of his face.”
“Get in the car, woman,” he said. “We’re being fancy now.”
I had teased him, but in truth it was just a cover for my nerves. I’d changed my dress some fifteen times that afternoon, agonized over every detail of my hair and makeup, and even made the risky choice to switch out the studs in my newly pierced ears for pretty earrings.
“Actually, it’s good you didn’t wear your hat,” I said, deadpan. “We need to find out whether I like you, or if I just like the fantasy of some dude I read about one time.” (I didn’t say it, but I also needed to find out whether David liked me, or was just on some quest to “save” a woman with the same disease that killed his mother.)
“That’s it,” David said, as if he’d read my mind. “Fancy Night, like Fight Club, has some rules. The first rule of Fancy Night is: No psychology on Fancy Night.”
“Psychology is not fancy?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Psychology is not fancy,” he agreed.
I smiled.
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Any other rules?”
David looked at me.
“We’ll start with that one,” he said.
All night, throughout the restaurant and post-dinner jazz club (which were, as promised, fancy), David’s last remark gnawed at my mind. He must be kinky. He had to be, didn’t he? Who jokes about “rules” and hints that there are more to come? Who makes a point to tell someone that he has a leather belt?
Maybe I was a magnet for kinky men. Maybe my compatibility with John wasn’t the coincidental rarity I’d thought it was.
“Before you picked me up tonight, I was nervous,” I told David, as we drove back to Palo Alto at the end of our date. “I had a mental list of things that could go wrong.”
“And nothing did go wrong,” he cheered. “I nailed it! I’m fancy!”
I giggled.
“Well, one of the things I was afraid of did happen,” I admitted. “Have you not noticed me dabbing at my ear all night?”
“What?” David said, craning his neck to look. “What are you talking about?”
“I got my ears pierced for the first time last week,” I told him. “I wasn’t supposed to take the studs out until next Thursday. But I wanted to wear cool earrings tonight, so—”
“Wait,” David interrupted. “Are you about to tell me that you’ve besmirched my fancy date with earlobe blood ?”
I laughed again.
“I had to confess,” I replied, with a shrug. “You deserve to be forewarned if you’re getting involved with the kind of girl who takes her studs out too early.”
David clicked the turn signal and pulled onto the exit ramp. It wasn’t our exit.
“This is how the story ends? You’re kicking me out of the car?” I joked. “We can work through this! It’s just one lobe!”
David pulled into an empty suburban parking lot, turned off the ignition, and turned to face me.
“There’s a word for girls like you, Jillian,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Is it bootylicious?”
David smiled.
“No,” he said, suddenly serious. “It’s keeper.”
I blinked. I hadn’t expected that.
“Because . . . my ear is bleeding?” I said.
David laughed again. “No,” he replied. “I just like you a lot. I want you to know that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was so disarmed by his candor. David was unlike anyone I’d ever met.
And the truth was that I liked him a lot, too.
“But I’m also bootylicious, right?” I finally joked.
He laughed.
“Sure,” he said. “You’re bootylicious, too. Just my type.”
My stomach tightened. I looked out the window.
“You don’t really know what type of girl I am yet,” I admitted.
“I want to find out,” David muttered, his lips inches from my own. We kissed.
I was falling for this boy too fast. Although I had a few reasons to hope that David might be kinky, I still hadn’t smoked out his sexuality for sure. And if David was vanilla, I needed to know as soon as possible so I could nip things in the bud. I was not going to let myself get involved with another vanilla guy. That was a recipe for disaster. A relationship with someone who didn’t share my sexuality seemed just as unappetizing as a relationship with someone who did not share my species.
There’s a scene in Love’s Labor’s Lost when the Princess of France and her ladies hear that the men are coming, in disguise, to see them. They decide to turn the tables. They put on masks and swap the tokens of love that the men had previously given them. If the men used the tokens to identify them, each man would flirt with the wrong woman.
“Hold, Rosaline, this favor thou shalt wear, and then the king will court thee for his dear,” the Princess says, handing her own token to Rosaline. “Change your favors too,” she encourages the others, “so shall your loves woo contrary, deceiv’d by these removes.” Katharine asks the Princess to explain the purpose of this gambit, and the Princess replies: “The effect of my intent is to cross theirs: they do it but in mocking merriment, and mock for mock is only my intent.”
It works. The men identify their loves with physical tokens and woo the wrong ones.
It’s a silly idea—in real life, of course, any true lo
ver could recognize the object of his affection with or without a mask. But I saw a serious message in the silliness. Masks turn love into a farce. My first relationship, with John, had been marred by the mask he had worn for nearly a year. And when I tried to mask my sexuality and elevate myself to Dylan’s seemingly unblemished level, it hid our mutual incompatibility.
“We, following the signs, woo’d but the sign of she,” says Berowne, after the men realize they had each pursued the wrong woman in disguise. I refused to make the same mistake with David. He was falling for me, that much was clear. But I wanted him to fall for more than just the sign of me.
Not that my tactic was much more mature than that of the Princess and her friends. I went to a dorm party, pretended to be drunk, and sloshed up to David’s roommate, Kyle.
“Hi, Skyle,” I slurred.
“Hi, Jillian,” he said, smiling. “It looks like you’re having fun.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, nodding into my cup. “I like David.”
Kyle laughed.
“That’s good, because David likes you,” he said.
“I’m also kind of into S&M,” I blurted. “So I hope David is into it, too.”
Kyle blinked.
“Whoa,” he said. “For real?”
I made my eyes as wide as possible and nodded.
“Yeah,” I drawled.
“Interesting,” Kyle replied. (Kyle was the first of many, many, many people who would use the word interesting—always followed by a literal or vocal period, never an exclamation point—to respond to my sexuality in the years to come.)
A few nights later, as David and I sat in a bar near University Avenue, I learned that my efforts had paid off.
David swirled the scotch around in his glass.
“So, Jillian,” he asked. “Are you, like, into pain?”
I blushed.
“Um,” I replied. “Yes?”
It wasn’t quite true. But it seemed close enough—and definitely less embarrassing than the whole story.
“Interesting,” David said.
“Kyle told you, right?” I asked.
“He said you mentioned it at the party,” David confirmed.
I smiled with an embarrassed cringe.
“I told him that for your benefit,” I admitted. “I wanted it to get back to you.”
David picked up his scotch and took a sip. Then he leaned back in his chair and eyed me.
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