“Sounds nice,” Holly said, glaring at Everett for demeaning my budding career move. “Is that your passion?” Holly asked.
I told them of my shared hobby of gardening with my mother, something I’d enjoyed even as a child. Around the time she started working, as her interest waned, mine had continued beyond our yard.
Perhaps the actual passion had been planted on a summer weekend my parents and I spent at Twin Lakes Park. Although tiny by comparison to my possible summer job, while only a few miles northwest of Greensburg, Twin Lakes was magical to my boyhood eyes.
Then ten years old, I’d become lost on some little adventure, and met a tall handsome park ranger. After calming me down by pointing out various wildflowers, he playfully scooped me up in his arms and carried me back to my parents, who hadn’t even noticed my absence. They never understood why I begged them to return.
As I decided to withhold that story, I glanced at Everett. “It’s funny, I think I started becoming fascinated by nature when I heard, you know, elsewhere, not from my parents, that homosexuality is unnatural. I remember asking my dad how something that existed on earth could be unnatural, when if it was a life form, didn’t that make it natural? I mean, unnatural is this table talking, or a cereal bowl turning into a cat.”
“Lots of animals have gay relationships,” Holly said. “It’s been documented.”
“Exactly.”
“So, you sure you can’t stay over for New Year’s?” Holly asked. “I’ve got at least three party invites. Those opera queens sure can drink!”
With the sudden rush of meeting Everett, the holiday had completely slipped my mind. For the past few years, my parents had attended an annual party given by my father’s company, leaving me contentedly alone to watch other people celebrate across the world on the television until my parents arrived home, slightly buzzed and, on a few occasions, somewhat amorous.
But now, being nearly old enough to drink legally, realizing the prospect of having the house to myself that night led me to consider inviting Everett to join me.
But before I even had a chance to ask him, he said to Holly, “Mother’s having her annual shindig, and I’m expected to help out.”
My sudden lurch of hopeful anticipation collapsed. Everett gave me a resigned look, as if he could sense my disappointment. I said nothing.
“Well,” Everett took his plate to the sink as he rose from the table, “Your other natural passion, or should I say, our flimsy ruse for this glorious visit, awaits at the museum. We should head out. I’ll have to get back home before too late, help Helen prepare the whore’s devores, and give my okay to what I’m sure will be another of her military-level packing efforts for school.”
While I assisted in clearing the table, maintaining a casual air, I felt anxious. We had less than a day left, the last day of the year, before Everett returned to his private school an hour north, and I to my last semester of high school. The wonderful gift had arrived suddenly, a few days late for Christmas, and would be taken away as swiftly.
“Wait! Wait!” Holly called out, chasing us as we headed towards the apartment door. In her hand she held a camera.
Everett knew there would be no turning her down, and tugged me back inside. Holly commanded us to take off our coats, settle on the sofa, then instead, the chair beside the front window, “for the light,” she said, pointing to a late morning sun glowing through her white window curtains.
The extent of my portrait-posing had previously been limited to holiday shots usually taken by my dad, a few team group photos and the obligatory yearbook pictures. Having Holly direct us to “act natural,” as I sat crunched into the large padded chair with Everett practically in my lap, was just odd at first. Then we settled, and she took a few pictures, Everett’s arm around me. At one point, I felt a light touch of moisture at my temple, and realized that Holly had caught Everett kissing me.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I shrugged my way up, embarrassed but quietly pleased.
Holly walked us downstairs, hugging us farewell before we left. On the porch, she still in her bathrobe, our breaths fogged in the chill as she shivered.
“Be good,” she called out as we trundled down the porch stairs. “And if you can’t be good…”
“Be perfectly wicked!” Everett shouted back with a farewell air-kiss. “It’s an old joke,” he confided as we settled into my mom’s dirt brown Plymouth. Although already slightly beat up, it usually started in even the coldest of winter days.
“Your sister’s great,” I said appreciatively.
“Isn’t she? It’s amazing my ice queen of a mother and jerk of a dad popped out such a marvel.”
“Two marvels,” I corrected.
Everett interrupted my attempts to start the car with a hasty peck on my cheek. “So; the muv zee vum?”
“Que?”
“Muv zee vum. You know how old museums always have V’s for U’s?”
“You’re no end of clever.”
“That’s why you like me.”
The giant Allosaurus greeted us in the lobby with a frozen brown snarl. Herds of babbling children, mistakenly calling it a Tyrannosaurus, were led by docents, teachers and parents. They flocked around it before being shooed off to various large doorways that led to the exhibits of the Carnegie Museum. Having been taken there twice before as a youngster on two family trips, I felt a bit of that remembered childlike excitement. Being there with Everett, however, made even the giant dinosaur skeleton inconsequential.
I’d brought a small notebook and focused on a few historic floral references in the Cenozoic exhibit. The dioramas included models of various smaller creatures. The wooly mammoth skeleton that centered the exhibit interested most visitors. I focused on the obscure, how earlier variants of the angiosperms led to modern-day wildflowers, how common ferns had their own giant ancestors.
Having scanned the room and its displays while I scribbled notes, Everett returned, giving me another one of his chummy half-hugs that were proper in a public setting, but which secretly meant more.
“Giant bones all around, and you’re honing in on shrubs,” he chided.
“Actually, it’s quite fascinating,” I argued, half-seriously. “The pluvials and interpluvials, rainfall shifts, are related to glacial melt, and all those thousands and thousands of years led to what we see in any common field.”
“It’s hard to believe that Heidelberg Man survived while the utterly fabulous sabre-tooth tiger never made it.” I forgot that Everett’s private school education surpassed mine.
“We still have horses and rhinos.”
“And reindeer. Come on, let’s watch the kids freak out when they see Santa’s sleigh-pullers as just a bunch of bones.”
Sauntering in between herds of children and a few adults, the exhibits had lost some of their fascination. It was Everett’s proximity, of course.
As he gazed at a diorama of a Megatherium (basically a giant sloth) and its accompanying explanatory text, I kept sneaking glances at Everett’s strong profile, the pinkness of his lips when his mouth was open, a stray eyebrow hair, marveling at the memory of his face having only hours before burrowed its way between my legs. The glow of the exhibit lights reflected through the side of his dark eyes. I realized they were not at all black, but brown with slivers of green and yellow.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just admiring the miracle of evolution.”
We sauntered by a doorway that was blocked off with a wall panel and a ‘Temporarily Closed’ sign. We’d almost passed it, when I felt Everett’s hand grab my elbow.
“Come on.”
I immediately knew what he was up to. I hesitated, for a moment.
Sub-Saharan murals surrounded a smaller darkened exhibit room. A few unopened crates sat next to empty plastic display shelves. Even in the dim light, the room felt somehow comforting.
Everett led me to a far corner and expectedly pulled me into a hasty embrace. Despite my initial misgivings, I drop
ped my notepad and returned his kiss. We hastily shoved hands inside our clothes, not daring to unbutton anything, at first.
After a few open-mouthed sloppy kisses and some whispered gasps, I felt his hand atop my head give a gentle push.
“Here?” Another dare; if that was what it took to keep up with him, I was determined to try.
“Sure. Nobody’s coming in here.”
“Except you, maybe.”
I knelt, fumbled for his zipper, fished out his erection and struggled to find a proper angle to take him in. He thrust toward me, his zipper scraping my cheek. I was somewhat annoyed by his forceful hand.
“Dude, you’re making me pluvial,” he joked.
And, in the moment between my full-mouth chuckle and his near-orgasm, the quite expected occurred.
“Is someone in here?” An elderly guard, probably used to lesser indiscretions, appeared, annoyed but not surprised. Perhaps he couldn’t see clearly.
“Oh, uh, sorry,” I stuttered, jumping to my feet.
Everett swiftly turned around, having flopped his coat hem over his fly before zipping up. As we rushed toward, then past, the guard, Everett blathered some insistent excuse about his friend, in spite of the room’s closure, having to document the variegation of African flora for a very important thesis paper.
After a few more effusive apologies, we fast-walked ourselves back to the main lobby and outside into the bright chilly day.
Should I have scolded him, played the role of the easily shocked apprentice in comically licentious dares? Perhaps, but I didn’t. We were having too much fun.
“Now, that,” he declared, “was very educational. I love the Life Sciences!”
Chapter 10
“So, school.”
“Yeah, school.”
The spiked skyline disappeared behind us as we drove back east. Looming ahead of us, our imminent separation matched the grey skies hovering over the pine forests beside us along the highway. A real snowstorm was expected later that night, but we were driving though somewhat clear skies.
“Tell me more about Pinecrest. What’s it like there?” I asked, fighting our mutual exhaustion from the two days of strange adventures, dares, a bumpy makeshift bed, and what would have been a wall of awkward silence, were it not for Everett’s casual warmth. He seemed determined not to allow gloom into his life.
“It’s great,” he said. “I guess I can’t really compare it to yours, since I never went to a public school.”
He reached his hand over and rested it on my thigh. While it was not flirtatious and more of an appreciative gesture, I playfully gunned the gas pedal.
“Those legs!” Everett rubbed my thigh.
My legs are rather lanky. As a kid, I had once gone to the Carmike Cinema for a matinee of some Disney cartoons, including their version of the Ichabod Crane story. One of my childhood acquaintances, Billy Sanders, who was just part of a cluster of neighborhood kids who played together by convenient proximity, definitely lost any friend potential when after the movie he decided to nickname me Ichabod.
For years after that, I felt self-conscious about being taller than most kids my age. My ears and nose are a bit large, too. But the night before, with Everett having caressed my legs and other parts, like some kind of living statue worthy of such appreciation, I felt stronger, more self-assured.
“You’re blushing.”
“No, it’s the heater.” I reached over his arm to the dashboard, adjusted the temperature.
“So, Daddy Long-Legs, is that why you do cross country?”
“I guess. I tried basketball, some other sports in grade school. I just couldn’t care, you know? Where the ball goes, who wins. It really clears my mind, the repetition, the feeling of just running. Ever since I was little, I was already running around in the woods anyway.”
“Thank you for that!” Everett offered a hokey blessing to some god that resided above and beyond the car roof.
What would have happened if I had grown up with Everett? I would probably have known of him, but only seen him from a distance. The various cliques and social substrata of our school would have kept us separated anyway. He might have been just another more popular cute guy I knew more about than I should have. Gossip and stories about the smallest of events spread through my school like bee swarms.
“Are they strict?”
“No, it’s really the opposite,” Everett said. “I think, well, most of my schoolmates, the boarders, have to grow up faster. The day kids, they live nearby and sometimes come and go, and pay less tuition. Of course my parents…”
I understood. Money was not a problem.
“Dad went there, and I tested smart since, I dunno, kindergarten.” He told of a day, not in his memory, but bragged about often by his mother, when a teacher made some request of a five-year-old Everett, who replied at length in French. He denied any sense of talent, claiming to have probably been mimicking his sister’s taped lessons, which had fascinated him.
“She’s really the best. But I don’t–” he halted. “The way you’re so relaxed with your parents; I never had that. There’s a distance, and I just feel more comfortable at school. It’s not like the uniforms and ties make us little zombies. There’s only about a hundred-fifty guys. Everybody knows each other. We get along, but, you know, there’s a kind of hierarchy; the jocks, the science brains, the equestrian boys. We call them the cowboys, even though they ride English.”
“How is that different?”
He explained the more austere style in comical terms with a British accent and gestures.
“Anyway, from what I can get, the teaching is different, more close. We’re asked to understand, not just memorize. Being smart is considered cool, and actually competitive, and it makes me want to study. It’s good.”
“You know, I don’t think I ever would have met you if you’d gone to my school.”
“What do you mean?” Everett asked, a bit surprised.
“It’s… I’m thinking the guys you’d hang out with wouldn’t be my friends.”
“Well, you don’t have a lacrosse team, and I can’t run worth shit.”
I smiled, surrendering any further explanation.
“But we did meet,” he insisted.
“Collided, more like it.”
“And? Aren’t you happy?”
I blushed again, tried to focus on my driving despite the flood of emotion. “Yes,” I muttered.
“Well, say it, my man. Say it!”
“I’m so fuckin’ happy I met you!”
“Now, that’s my Starsky.”
I smiled, then turned back to the road ahead. “Actually, I think I’m more of a Hutch.”
We drove a while, sang along to some rock songs on the radio as Everett drummed on the dashboard. I asked him if he was hungry. He suggested we just get home, warning that his mother was already ‘not amused’ by his little trip. “She demands her quality time, which includes giving me a nice big send-off dinner, where we actually sit down and eat together with Helen. It’s kind of a tradition.”
I nodded; more miles, road signs, clouds.
Asked when he might return to Greensburg, he contemplated that and what it really meant. “I don’t usually come home for weekends or anything, just, you know, no car.”
“Oh, right.”
“What? Don’t mope. Maybe you can be nice to your parents and ask to borrow this fine chariot again.” He patted the dashboard, rubbing it like a pet.
“Yes, I could, although I never have for anything or anyone before you came along.”
“First time’s a charm.”
“Or third.” That time, I had to explain my meaning. “We’ve had sex three times.”
He hadn’t kept count, I thought. Perhaps this was all just a blur to him. Perhaps I was just a new wingman for his life where such adventures were normal.
“Actually, three and a half, if you count the museum,” he quipped. “Anyway, we can write to each other. We can talk on the phon
e, whisper sweet nothings,” he tickled me in the side, or tried to from outside my coat.
Would that be it? Pen pals and road trips? It was better than nothing, the space between us at least a point between one soul and another. Everett had cracked me open with those few days of joy and affection. What would I do with such feelings in his absence?
“Do you think they know?” I asked.
“Who?”
“My parents, your mom, and–”
“Well, my sister definitely knows, obviously. She’s probably already dumped the sheets in a bucket of bleach. Bad joke. Anyway, probably, but they’re totally in denial. But who cares? They’re not gonna stop us.”
“Mmm. For the time– Pro tempore.”
“Excellent!”
We drove in silence for a while, each of us considering our future paths.
“So, I’d invite you to my house tonight, but it’s really dreary; just a bunch of old Republicans getting quietly soused.”
“Right.”
Every Time I Think of You Page 6