Absolutely Positively Not

by David LaRochelle

  I pressed and puckered and rubbed my lips against Bree’s. She must have used extra-glossy lipstick, because her mouth was wet and slippery. Her lips had the feel of canned peaches. I don’t like canned peaches. Not even a little.

  Eventually Bree pulled back.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was great.”

  Bree wrinkled her face. “Sure, Steven. If you say so.”

  “You bet,” I said. “Best kiss of my life.”

  The twins from next door came running up the sidewalk, banging each other with their violin cases. Bree followed them inside.

  “See you on the bus,” I called before she shut the door.

  When I returned to the car, Dr. Newel grinned at me slyly. I grinned back, one man to another.

  “Nice girl,” he said.

  “The best,” I replied.

  I began to whistle, just to show how happy I was.

  When we arrived at my house, Dr. Newel got into his Porsche and drove off with my lunch box. I waved good-bye and watched them both disappear. It was only after I went inside and discovered that our house was empty that I figured it was safe to stop whistling. Then, very discreetly, I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my jacket.

  It was a joyless night at our house.

  My mom, when she arrived home from Minneapolis, was furious because I did not get permission to go driving with our dentist. She grounded me for two weeks. My dad, when he arrived home from his overtime at the hockey stick plant, was furious because I had forgotten to put the tarp back on his pickup. He grounded me for an additional two weeks.

  And I was depressed to the bottom of my soul because my date with Bree had been such a complete and total disaster.

  What had I done wrong? Why hadn’t our kiss made me feel good?

  Had I pressed too hard?

  Had we stopped too soon?

  Was I turned off by the smell of buttered popcorn on her breath?

  I lay in bed and worried about the reasons for my failure. Finally, at two in the morning, it dawned on me. There was only one good reason why my date with Bree had left me so unfulfilled.

  She was too perfect.

  How could I expect to relax and enjoy myself around someone so stunningly perfect as Bree? What I needed was a girlfriend who was as ordinary as I was. A girlfriend who didn’t have a movie theater snack combination named after her.

  The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. Find a girl who was not a celebrity and the pleasures of dating were bound to reveal themselves.

  Relief, like a comfortable blanket, settled around me. Soon I was asleep, dreaming of attending a Superman film festival with Mr. Bowman.

  And so I entered a period of intensive dating, a quest for my ideal mate. At first, while I was still under house arrest, my dates were limited to inviting girls home after school. We’d study together, watch a video, and yes, sometimes even play Scrabble. Scrabble is a lot more romantic than you might think. With the right tiles, you can spell some pretty intimate words.

  My mother was thrilled with this arrangement. It allowed her to meet all of my dates. In the evening, as she described to my father the merits of my date-of-the-day, she always ended with this proclamation: “I have never in my life met a nicer young lady.” Until the next day, when she declared my new date to be even nicer.

  By the time I had served my four-week sentence, I had racked up a total of twenty-three dates with twenty-one different girls. What other guy at school could claim such an impressive record? In fact, I was developing such a strong reputation as a ladies’ man, girls were beginning to call me and ask for dates. Sometimes I went to their houses and helped them clean their basements, sometimes I helped them shovel their walks, and sometimes we just sat in the library after school while I listened to them confide their problems in me.

  This was all well and good, except …

  Except I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. The girls were nice enough, but I still hadn’t found one who triggered a single passionate emotion. Discouraged and increasingly worried, I wondered how much longer I would have to search.

  But perseverance pays off. The date that would alter my life eventually arrived, and it came from an unexpected direction.

  “Hello? Is this Steven? It is me, Solveig Amundson.”

  At first I thought our school’s foreign exchange student was calling to sell me tickets to the Norwegian Club’s lutefisk dinner and slide show.

  “I am calling to ask if you would go to a movie with me.”

  Solveig had completely slipped under my dating radar. I had assumed she was still preoccupied with members of the hockey team.

  “Sure, Solveig. A movie sounds great.”

  Maybe I was more compatible with Norwegians. According to our family tree, my great-grandmother’s second husband had been an officer in the Norwegian National Army.

  She picked me up on Sunday afternoon for an early matinee. I had spent the morning reading up on every movie currently showing in the state. There was no way I was going to be caught off-guard this time.

  “Hello to you, Steven,” she said as I opened the passenger door to her host family’s station wagon.

  A wave of dry heat rolled over me. I knew that Scandinavians were big on saunas, but I didn’t expect to find one in the car.

  Solveig wasn’t even wearing a coat, just a silky, short-sleeved blouse and a pair of white tennis shorts. Her hair, which was usually in long braids, fluttered loosely behind her, blown by the car’s heater. I unzipped my jacket and aimed the air vents away from my face, and the two of us were on our way.

  Solveig proved very easy to talk with. She told me about her school in Oslo, her overprotective parents, and her eccentric grandmother who raised guinea pigs in the family’s bathtub. I told her about my own family and revealed that I was a serious collector of Superman artifacts.

  “I like Superman very much,” said Solveig.

  This date was getting better by the minute.

  We were laughing and getting along so well that I didn’t realize we had passed the exit for the theater until it was several miles behind us.

  “Do not worry,” said Solveig. “I have been shown a special way to go.”

  Solveig’s special way was mighty long. It snaked down a single-lane road through a forest of birch and pine. It might not have been faster, but at least it was scenic.

  Suddenly the station wagon stopped. The road had ended and we were sitting at the edge of a small clearing.

  Solveig turned off the engine and gave me a shy look. “Here is the special way,” she said.

  No theater. No highway. Nobody else for miles.

  She unbuckled her seat belt. A fistful of melting snow from an overhead branch landed with a plop on the hood of her car and scared me half to death.

  “If you don’t want to go to a movie, we could always go bowling,” I suggested. “Bowling is very American.”

  Solveig’s hand began inching across the seat. Even without the heater, the car was stifling. I tried to get some fresh air, but with the engine off, the power windows wouldn’t work.

  “I do not want to go bowling,” said Solveig.

  “Or else we could go back to my house and I could set up our foosball table. Do you have foosball in Norway?”

  Solveig laughed. “You are a funny boy.”

  Her hand was now only a finger’s length away from my leg. “I think you are a nice boy too,” she added.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice of you to say I’m nice.”

  “And I think you are …” She bit her lip as she tried to recall the right word. Her fingertips were now resting on the edge of my pants.

  “Cheerful?” I offered. “A good listener? Far too polite to ever take advantage of a girl on our first date?”

  She shook her head no. And then the word came to her.

  “Sexy!”

  I shifted my weight and accidentally hit the buckle of my seat belt. It retracted into the wall with a sn
ap.

  “And if you want,” she continued, “maybe we could, how you say …”

  She tilted her head and waited for me to fill in the blank.

  Boy. Wasn’t I the lucky guy. Here I was, a young man in a secluded wood with a pretty girl who obviously wanted to know me better. I should be thrilled. Ecstatic. Leaping about the car with joy.

  Solveig patiently waited for my answer. I knew what that answer should be. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”

  She was on my lap in an instant. Her warm, moist kisses covered my face. Her long, blond hair engulfed me like a soft curtain. And her hands, they were everywhere, from the back of my head to the tops of my thighs, and every place else in between.

  I swear I did my best to respond. I rubbed my hands up and down Solveig’s silky blouse. I squeezed her close to my chest. I opened my mouth and allowed our tongues to tickle each other.

  Solveig hummed in pleasure as her mouth moved from my lips to my ear to my neck. I echoed her hum and moved my hands to all the places they belonged. I moaned and whispered and concentrated as hard as I could. Then I fought my way through her tangled hair, gasped for breath, and shouted, “No! I don’t want to do this!”

  Solveig brushed the hair away from her face. “What is wrong?”

  “I can’t!” I said. “I absolutely, positively can’t.”

  Solveig looked puzzled. “Why not?”

  It was an excellent question. I just needed an excellent answer.

  “I can’t because I’m coming down with the flu.”

  Solveig’s smile returned. “That is not a reason to worry. My doctor gave me a flu shot before I came to America!” She snuggled up close again and began nibbling my ear.

  I backed into the corner by the door.

  “I also think I’m getting strep throat. And a cold. And maybe even mono. It’s called the kissing disease, you know.”

  “We do not have to kiss,” said Solveig. “We could just sit and hold hands for a while. I like to hold hands.” She picked up my hand and gently stroked my fingers with her thumb.

  At that moment, even holding hands seemed wrong.

  “Did I mention I sprained my fingers on the computer? It hurts to touch just about anything. Ouch.”

  Solveig looked at my fingers, then looked at my face. And then she dropped her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

  But I knew she didn’t see at all.

  She set my hand down and slid back to her side of the car. “Maybe you do not want to do anything?” she asked. “Maybe I should take you home now?”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  I made a pathetic attempt at sneezing, but it sounded so phony, I gave up after two kachoos. Neither of us said a word the entire drive back. Despite what she had told me earlier, I didn’t feel funny or sexy or nice.

  When she dropped me off, Solveig stared at her lap.

  “Good-bye, Steven,” she said. “I am sorry if what I did was bad.”

  No one deserved to look that sad.

  Not Solveig. Not me.

  I tried to think of something clever to say that would make us both feel better, but before I could think of what that might be, Solveig was gone.

  “Back so soon?” asked my mom. “Where’s Solveig? I wanted to tell her god dag. That’s Norwegian for ‘good afternoon.’”

  “Our date was canceled,” I said. “Because of the flu.”

  My mother set down the cup of yogurt she was eating and placed her hand on my forehead. “Then you’d better drink an extra glass of orange juice before going to bed. I don’t want you getting sick too.”

  I climbed the stairs to my room and shut the door. Surrounding me were the hundreds of women I had carefully cut out from newspapers and magazines. They seemed to be watching, wondering what I’d do next.

  I located the Victoria’s Secret ad that had started my gallery. I carefully pulled it free from the wall and ripped it in two. I then did the same thing with each of the remaining photos. When the last had been removed, I carried the pieces to the garbage and returned with the phone. Then I hit the speed-dial button. “Rachel? It’s Steven. Could I please come over and talk?”

  Rachel met me at the front door with her hands on her hips. Her hair today was a stark India ink black. “It’s been a while,” she said.

  She was right. The two of us usually spent every weekend together, listening to music, discussing our classes, writing protest letters to multinational conglomerates, but ever since dating had taken over my life, I hadn’t had time for anything else. Even my lunch periods had been consumed with arranging future dates.

  “I’ve been kind of busy,” I said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Rachel moved aside so I could enter. I carefully stepped over the golden retriever with a tail splint sleeping in the front hallway. Rachel’s parents ran a veterinary clinic and their house was always filled with stray and recuperating animals.

  “Could we talk in your bedroom?” I asked. This wasn’t going to be a conversation I wanted her family to hear. I didn’t even want the dog eavesdropping.

  “Whatever,” she said, and led me down the hall.

  When we reached her room she scooped up a pair of gray kittens from the floor.

  “Strays?” I asked.

  “They were abandoned,” she told me. “Someone found them in a dumpster at the laundromat. We named them Downy and Bounce.”

  She handed me the smaller one.

  “Being abandoned really stinks,” she added.

  Maybe this conversation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  She flopped onto her bed and put Downy on her stomach. I lowered myself onto a lime-green beanbag chair and let Bounce crawl onto my lap.

  “So?” Rachel asked. “What’s the emergency?”

  This was it. The moment of truth.

  “Rachel, I want to talk about …”

  Bounce began to nibble on my pinkie with its tiny sharp teeth.

  “The reason I’ve been dating so much is because …”

  The kitten began climbing up my arm.

  “You see, I’ve been thinking that there’s a remote chance that I might be …”

  A little sandpapery tongue began to wash the inside of my ear.

  I pulled the kitten off my shoulder and set it on the floor.

  “Rachel, I’m …”

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say the words. They clung to my vocal cords, refusing to leave the safety of my throat. Once I said them, I knew I could never again pretend that they weren’t true.

  Rachel was sitting up now. She scooted to the edge of her bed and picked up Bounce so that both kittens were on her lap. All three of them looked at me expectantly.

  I closed my eyes and booted the words out of my mouth.

  “I’m gay.”

  When I opened my eyes again, Rachel was diving toward me, arms outspread. The kittens leaped to the floor as Rachel wrapped me in a hug. “Steven! It’s about time!”

  She must have misheard what I said.

  I tried to wriggle out from beneath her, but only slipped deeper into the beanbag. It was then, while the two of us were still tangled in a knot, that Rachel’s mother walked into the room, carrying an armload of folded laundry.

  “And what do we have here?” she asked.

  Rachel scrambled to her feet. “Guess what? Steven finally told me that he’s gay!”

  “That’s nice,” her mother said, setting the clothes on Rachel’s dresser. “Are you staying for dinner, Steven? Fred made manicotti.”

  Maybe I was the one with the faulty hearing.

  While Rachel did a happy dance around her mother, her father appeared in the door. “Where have you been hiding, Steven? We’ve missed you around here. Win any more ice houses?”

  Rachel’s mother slipped her arm around his waist. “Steven was just telling us about being gay, Fred.”

  Rachel’s father smiled and reached down to shake my hand. “Way to go, Steven. Just remember: safe
sex, safe sex, safe sex.”

  The room was spinning so fast, I thought I was going to be hurled into outer space.

  To complete the family picture, Rachel’s ten-year-old sister, Tracy, pushed her way through the door. “Samson was on the table again, licking the silverware.” Samson was the fat iguana she clutched in her arms. “Hey, why is everyone in Rachel’s room?”

  I finally managed to speak. “DON’T SAY IT!” I cried. “Don’t you dare tell her anything!”

  Immediate and total silence. Even the iguana looked surprised. Rachel and her family waited for me to say more, but that brief vocal outburst seemed to have drained me of my vocabulary.

  At last Rachel’s little sister spoke. “Did Steven finally tell Rachel he was gay?”

  I was going to pass out. I was sure of it.

  Rachel’s mother put her hands on Tracy’s shoulders. “Maybe we should give Steven and Rachel some private time. Let’s help your father wipe off the silverware.”

  She steered Tracy into the hall, and the two of us were alone again.

  Rachel climbed back onto her bed and hugged her knees close to her chest. She hadn’t looked this happy since her parents had installed solar panels on their roof.

  I wanted to strangle her.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I said.

  “Did what?” asked Rachel.

  “Told your parents I was …”

  I had said the word once today. Once was all I could handle.

  “I didn’t tell them anything, Steven. They both already knew.”

  This was like a very bad episode of The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling must be standing behind me.

  “About a year ago my parents asked if I thought you were gay, and I said yes.”

  A year ago? Impossible! How could Rachel’s family know I was gay even before I did?

  I summoned the little strength I had left. “How could they tell? How could you tell? How could Tracy tell?”

  Rachel sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  She twisted the friendship ring I had given her last year for Christmas. “For one thing, you’ve never been very interested in girls, if you know what I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “The only thing I’ve been doing for the past month is date girls!”