A grin broke across his face, and he squinted at me. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll kiss you, just this once. If you want.”
He snorted. “Right. Sure.”
“I will. People do that. They kiss their friends. It happens.”
“Dude, no. I didn’t mean … look, I don’t want pity or whatever.” But he wasn’t shoving me off or wriggling away. He stayed put, beneath me, on my bed.
“It’s not pity.” My arms, locked straight, were getting tired, so I sank onto my elbows. Our chests touched. “It’s generosity.”
He laughed, then studied me. Flecks in his green eyes matched the golden tan of his skin. He had tiny, dark freckles across the bridge of his nose. I hadn’t noticed any of that before either. He was breathing fast; I felt his ribs expand against mine with each inhalation.
The weirdest thing about it, honestly, was that this position was kind of turning me on. I was still a virgin, but I knew what being turned on felt like and that it could happen in unexpected situations, so I didn’t let it bother me. I just made sure not to let my groin touch him.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“Why not?”
Enough conversation. I leaned down and kissed him.
Party games and dares were the only times I’d kissed anyone so far, and only girls. Same with him, as far as I knew. I thus belatedly realized, as I pressed my lips to my best friend’s, that this was my first real kiss, and likely his too.
It started out clumsy, an awkward squishing together. We hardly moved, and his lips felt dry against mine. Then I tilted my face to improve the angle, a breath slipped from his mouth and warmed our lips, and he started kissing me back. My eyes closed. His hand slid onto my back, and—
“Joel Sinter Blackwell!”
“What in the—”
My mom. My dad. Oh dear God, my parents had walked in.
I whipped up and sprang to my feet—yeah, that move didn’t look guilty or anything. Andy sat up, clutching the edge of the mattress, mouth shut tight and eyes wide.
No one said anything for a few seconds. My parents were both dressed for work in gray suits, Mom with her tastefully curled blonde do and pink lipstick, Dad with his receding, silver-streaked hair, crisply shaven jaw, and furious blue eyes.
“It was nothing,” I said through a larynx that felt like it was being squeezed shut. “We were just goofing around.”
They didn’t answer, only stared at me from my doorway. They moved so silently sometimes it was creepy. I hadn’t even heard them enter the house, and our TV show hadn’t been turned up that loud.
Andy got off the bed. “It’s late. I should go.”
“Yeah. Okay. See you tomorrow.” I tried to sound normal, like everything was cool.
He grabbed his backpack from the floor, slung it onto his shoulder, and hesitated in front of my parents, who still blocked the door.
Ordinarily, my parents liked Andy well enough. He was short and slim and non-threatening, and Mom had remarked in the past that she appreciated his polite manners.
That day, her gaze raked over him in disgust, then she stepped aside to let him pass.
He shot out. I heard his footsteps patter down the stairs. A moment later, the front door opened and shut, echoing in the silence.
“Seriously, it was nothing.” I couldn’t think what else to say. I hadn’t figured out yet what it was, other than me trying to do my gay best friend a favor, and I couldn’t say that. Even with my mind in complete panic mode, I knew I couldn’t reveal Andy had come out to me. I had to take the fall for this one. So if I could just convince them we were only … um, wrestling or something …
“I think you better sit down.” Dad’s tone was glacial.
I sat down.
My parents hadn’t hit me since some vaguely recalled instances of being spanked when I was a little kid, but for a frightening moment, I really thought they were going to.
They didn’t. Instead, they slapped me with words for the next two hours—immoral, harmful, dangerous, unnatural, sick. And I slapped back—I’d had enough, and it all came out, all the things I despised about their beliefs. Yes, I kissed him, but this was the first time. Yes, it actually was; fine, don’t believe me then, but it was, and no, I’m not gay, but there isn’t anything wrong with it, by the way. And no, it wasn’t his idea so don’t you dare call his parents, just punish me, I mean, I guess you get to do that, but in actual truth, I did not do anything wrong. I don’t care what you believe …
Everything said by the three of us would fill an entire book, a repetitive and seriously unpleasant book.
By the end of it, my cheeks stung with angry tears, I’d been grounded, they’d taken my phone away for the month (thank God I had deleted those texts from Andy), and I had run out of words and just nodded to indicate I was never, ever going to do anything like that again.
And it was almost four years, in fact, before I kissed another guy.
CHAPTER 4: (EVERY DAY IS) HALLOWEEN
I attended the screen test. They had me take off my shirt for the camera and hold a glittery blue electric guitar. They let me put my shirt back on. I read through scenes from New Romantic (“Working title, ignore that,” Fiona said), first alone and then with Ariel Salisbury, the actor signed on to play Jackie, the posh girl. I vaguely recognized Ariel from a British TV show, though I couldn’t remember which one. She looked like an underwear model (in fact, I was pretty sure she’d been that too), smelled like cigarettes and vanilla perfume, and had greeted me with, “Hi. God, I’m so hungover.”
All the same, by the end of the screen test, I craved this role with every fiber of my being.
My agent called the next day while I was in the cereal aisle in Tesco. I fumbled the buzzing phone out of the pocket of my motorcycle jacket. “Hi, this is Sinter.”
“Sinter, it’s Jerry.” He sounded excited. “So listen, Fiona Wyndham just called. How would you like the part of Taylor? Because they loved you in the screen test and she’s really hoping you’ll say yes.”
Giddy delight swarmed through me, the feeling another actor had once called “the casting dazzles.” It was a rare feeling, only experienced when you got the news of winning the part, so I let myself enjoy it, grinning at boxes of Weetabix. “Yes. Of course. Wow, this is great.”
“Fantastic! I’m thrilled, honestly. This part is quite a catch. Can you meet me at the studio today so we can get the paperwork in order?”
“Yeah, I’m free this afternoon. Maybe around one?”
“Perfect. I’ll let them know. See you then. Cheers.”
“Cheers.” I hung up, beamed at cereal until an old lady gave me an alarmed look on her way past, then finished my shopping and pelted back to my flat.
After my punishment for kissing Andy expired and I was free to do what I liked again after school (within limits), I found I had little taste anymore for hanging out at my house. It had become a prison to me during that month, owned by a pair of wardens hopelessly behind the times. (I’d never say my parents were evil. They weren’t. They were just about salvageable, in fact. But they were also out of touch with nearly everything I enjoyed in the world.)
I’d been fanatical about TV shows, movies, and music ever since I was a little kid. Enthralled by some show or performance on TV, I studied details, imitated lines, and did my terrible best to sing until my parents requested I shut up. I hadn’t chosen theater or music as electives so far, but whenever I was required to perform as part of a class project, my educational ennui vanished and I lit up like a floodlight. Sitting in the high-school auditorium to watch my classmates in concerts or plays during assemblies also enchanted me, and not just because I got to miss part of math class for it.
I liked the auditorium itself: how it could be made into anything, bright or dark, cheerful or spooky, no matter the season or time of day. It had comfy cloth-covered seats that folded down like in a cinema. When you got close to the stage, it smelled like paint, wood, cosmet
ics, old dusty fabrics, and the resins and oils the orchestra students used on their instruments.
But not until I became officially sick of my own house did I slow to a stop in the school halls one day to read a flyer on blue paper, pinned to a bulletin board.
Auditions for MURDER AT WILDWOOD
3:00 Thursday
Auditorium
Cast and crew needed. All welcome!
Beside me, Andy stopped too.
“I might go,” I said.
“To try out?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see what they need.”
“Do you think they’d want people to work the light boards?” he asked. “I’ve always wanted to go up there.”
“Come ask ’em.”
We showed up and got assigned our requested jobs: Andy with the sound-and-lighting crew, me building sets and assisting the stage manager during productions. The play was a murder mystery, not particularly well-written or memorable. But I fell in love with the whole experience.
The way the lights looked, spilling onto the stage while the rest of the house was in darkness. The glow-tape arrows and soft blue bulbs illuminating the backstage area during performances so actors and crew wouldn’t crash into stuff. The palpable thrill of excitement running through us all before the curtain rose on opening night. The vulnerability and courage of the actors, those people in my classes whom I’d never paid any attention to before, who got to wear outlandish clothes and makeup, and yell and sob and kiss in front of a live audience.
I had to try it. I auditioned for the next play.
It was Romeo and Juliet, so my first audition ever, through which I sweated and trembled, involved mouthfuls of Shakespearean English, practically a foreign language from a fifteen-year-old’s perspective. But I’d read through the play beforehand, grasped the gist of things, and managed my “canst thous” coherently enough. Besides, theater always needed more guys, so if you were male and showed up and could read any lines at all, you’d probably get a part.
I was cast as Mercutio. Even my parents were impressed. They could appreciate Shakespeare. That is, while they didn’t like his “crass jokes” or his frequent theme of cross-dressing, they liked his poetry and his classiclit pedigree. They attended one of the performances, dutifully watched me get killed by a sword, and told me it was nice I’d found some extracurricular activities.
It wasn’t long before they started to see the downside.
For the play, our drama teacher wanted us Montagues to have black hair, to contrast with the blonder Capulets, so she handed out boxes of dye to those of us with light coloring. With the help of Andy and the girl playing Lady Montague, I dyed my hair in a makeup-room sink after rehearsal one day without telling my parents I was going to do it.
They blew a gasket when I came home. They threatened to force me to visit a hairdresser and get it put back to its natural color, because imagine the disgrace of showing up in public—in church—like that. When I challenged them to show me where in the Bible it said God cared what color our hair was, they spluttered and eventually shut up, then said fine, I could stay home from church and read their assigned Bible passages every Sunday from now on instead. I said fine, works for me. I hadn’t attended since.
If that was the outcome, then yeah, I was going to goth it up forever.
But I wasn’t just doing it to get out of church. I honestly became fascinated with how different it made me look to wear cosmetics or costumes or a wild hairdo, especially when I added a new posture or voice on top of those, how it all turned me into a new person, someone deeper and more mysterious than just another suburban kid.
My first attempts at doing my own makeup took place backstage at school, using the theater’s drawers of cosmetics. While I sneezed from an overdose of face powder and poked myself in the eye with the eyeliner pencil (“Ow, fuck fuck fuck, ow”), Andy doubled over with laughter and told me, “You look … like … a panda!” But once I learned how to wield makeup appropriately, he nodded in approval and declared that the emo style suited me.
I started wearing black more often, got my ears and eyebrow and lip pierced (more conniptions from my parents), attended class with eyeliner on. Popular kids occasionally called me a weirdo or a freak, but that was to be expected. Theater or stoner kids, on the other hand, sometimes told me I looked like Gerard Way—nice of them, but let’s be honest, Gerard was cuter than me.
I turned my bedroom into a batcave of band posters, dark curtains, and the occasional skull. I think by then my distraught parents were seeking advice from their pastor. Andy, meanwhile, calmly remarked, “I like how you’ve found a way to use Halloween decorations year-round.”
Andy never auditioned for a play, but he stayed on the tech crew for the remainder of high school, keeping me company through several productions. He and two other techies ended up founding the school’s Anime Club, and frequently got into passionate, you’re-dead-to-me debates over fandom. (One evening we had to pause dress rehearsal because they were arguing too loudly in the light booth about whether Joel or Mike was the better host of Mystery Science Theater 3000.)
In college, I signed on as a theater arts major. Loneliness swamped me the first time I walked into that auditorium, a new place with no faces I recognized, no Andy hanging offstage with the techies. But I stuck with it because there was nothing else I wanted to do, and soon I made friends there and began enjoying it again. My parents were perplexed by my choice of major, and irritated when I compounded the folly with a minor in English. They never came to my plays anymore, though my acting had vastly improved since my rookie turn as Mercutio. It was too far to drive from our Portland suburb down to Eugene, they claimed.
In my sophomore year, they told me they’d still pay my tuition, but not my lodging and food. Those would be up to me. And, they added, I ought to consider a field of study I could actually find work in, such as finance or business. Being bankers, they’d long had funds prepared for my future, but the college fund was being rapidly depleted by rising tuition costs, and the other was untouchable until I was thirty (“For buying a house,” they said). They hadn’t grown up rich; their money had accumulated through investment over time. They bought dependable cars and clothes, never luxury goods. And they had insisted I work for my money from as far back as I was able to hold a job. Given the last thing I wanted to do was borrow money from them, I acknowledged they probably had a good point about the career prospects.
Still. I stuck with theater and English. I took side jobs and scraped together the money for rent and food. I graduated cum laude. After graduating, I sought out acting work relentlessly, and because I showed up on time, gave each role my best, and didn’t act like a diva, people hired me. And why would I act like a diva? I loved theater. It was worth enduring miniscule paychecks, my parents’ dismay, nerve-wracking auditions, exhausting nights-and-weekends working hours, and the devastating times someone else got cast for a part I wanted.
When I was acting I got to be an array of different people, an ever-changing spectrum of roles, and audiences applauded me for it.
Which, most days, was far better than being just me.
CHAPTER 5: BEST FRIEND
TO CELEBRATE THE CONTRACT SIGNING, JERRY AND I SHARED CHAMPAGNE WITH FIONA AT A ROOFTOP BAR, huddling near the patio heaters in the October chill. After saying goodbye with hugs all around, I staggered alone into a park and sat on a bench. The realization that I was actually going to do this had slammed into me. A TV movie. With a sex scene.
I got the script out of my backpack and found the notorious page. Beginning with He pulls up her shirt and She shoves down his jeans, it moved on to Gasp, clutch, shudder; finish the job, followed by hauling clothes back into place and some tense postcoital conversation. No easy fade-to-black or anything.
I laid my knuckles on my cheek, feeling the burn of the blush.
But, okay. I could handle this.
Like any normal person, I started by sending a message to my best friend.<
br />
Sinter: Umm so I got the part. Thus I’ll be doing a sex scene with Ariel Salisbury for a TV movie. There’s a nudity clause in my contract. Holy crap, help
I’d always figured I would have to perform a scene like this eventually, but suddenly there we were, and it wasn’t a theater production, where all the viewers were at least twenty feet away from me, no, but a camera taking close-up footage that people could replay over and over, and capture in screenshots and GIFs and put all over the internet, and, and …
I calmed down by watching people in the park, all leading their own lives, which helped put my internal freakout in perspective. One pair of kids amused me in particular: a boy and girl, both about ten years old, were flinging a Frisbee back and forth. It kept flying off course and smacking into trees or making pedestrians dodge out of its way, and the kids were busting their guts laughing.
Andy and I had been the two worst players on our middle-school Ultimate Frisbee team. It was how we’d met, one of the first things we’d bonded over. Something good had come out of that awkward phase of my life, so surely something good would come from this one too.
It was only eight a.m. in Seattle. Andy was probably just getting to work. I rose from the bench and headed for the nearest tube station.
On the way, he answered at last.
Andy: Wow, congrats! Sex scene and everything, haha
I lingered by the top of the tube stairs to reply, off to the side to keep out of everyone’s way.
Sinter: My parents will be so proud
Andy: Lol! What’s in this nudity clause anyway?
Sinter: It actually says it WON’T show anything below the waist. All filmed in shadow. But still “simulated sex acts”
Andy: Whoa take it easy there, it’s too early in the morning for porn
Sinter: Haha
Andy: Well I am going to brag all over the place that my bff is a movie star
Andy: That’ll show mitchell
Sinter: Sure, milk it for what it’s worth
All the Better Part of Me Page 3