I make some ghoulish moan, wanting—basically—to die on this couch, but Auddy smacks my arm, jerking me upright.
“Knock it off.”
“I am Satan.”
“Stop it.” She looks pissed, for the first time. “We were sober. You were upset. I was at home, doing homework, reading. I wasn’t out of my mind. I wasn’t intoxicated. I knew what was happening. I wanted it.”
I close my eyes. Come back, Statue Tanner. Listen to what she’s saying and nothing else.
“Okay?” she says, shaking me. “Give me some credit, and give yourself some while you’re at it. You were so sweet to me, and we were safe. That’s what matters.”
I shake my head. I remember tiny flashes. Most of it is this weird, emotional blur.
“I wanted it to be you,” she says. “You’re my best friend, and in some twisted way, it made sense that it would be you. Even if you were doing it to get out of your own head for a half hour”—I actually snort at this; it was definitely not a half hour, and she smacks me again, but I can see she’s smiling—“I’m the one you make that kind of mistake with. That person is me.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she says. Her eyes turn into these shining beacons of vulnerability, and I want to punch my own face. “Please don’t say you regret it. That would feel terrible.”
“I mean,” I begin, wanting to be honest, “I don’t know what to say to that. Do I sort of like that I was your first? Yeah.” She grins. “But that’s shitty, Auddy. It should be with . . .”
She raises an eyebrow, waiting skeptically.
“Yeah, not Eric,” I admit. “I don’t know. Someone who loves you like that. Who takes their time and stuff.”
“ ‘Who takes their time and stuff,’ ” she repeats. “Honestly, you’re so smooth, I have no idea why Sebastian broke up with you.”
I bark out a laugh that seems to die out into silence almost immediately.
“So we’re okay?” I ask, after a minute or so of quiet.
“I am.” Auddy runs her fingers through my hair. “Have you talked to him?”
I groan again. It’s like a revolving door of suck. I pass through the lobby of Terrible Best Friend Behavior and into the room of Heartache and Religious Bigotry. “He came by today to apologize.”
“So you’re back together?” I love her for the seed of hope in her voice.
“No.”
She makes a small sound of sympathy that reminds me how easily everything happened yesterday.
I think we both realize it at the same time. Autumn pulls her arm away, tucking her hands between her knees. I shift so that I’m sitting up. “I think he just wanted to own the way that he was sort of shitty about it. As much as I want to hate him, I don’t think he set out to hurt me.”
“I don’t think he set out for a lot of this to happen,” she says.
I lift my chin to see her. “What do you mean?”
“I think he was intrigued at first. Sometimes you actually can be as charming as you think you are. I think he saw you as a way to rule something out, and then the opposite happened.”
“God, that’s depressing.”
“Is it terrible that I sort of feel sorry for him?” she asks. “I mean, I know it hurts and feels like it will never be okay again, but it will. Someday. You’ll wake up and it will hurt a little less and a little less, until some boy or girl is smiling at you and it makes you stupid all over again.”
It does sound impossible. “My whole book is about him,” I tell her. “He was going to help me edit it, to cut out himself in it, make it someone else. I never sent it to him. That’s out the window now, and I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I quickly learn that just because things feel fine after a conversation like the one Auddy and I have, it doesn’t mean things are normal.
Whatever the hell normal is anymore.
Autumn is back at school on Wednesday, but there’s a shorthand between us that seems to have been elongated. We climb out of my car, and she makes a joke when she points out that my zipper is down; we both turn into awkward robots as I reach for it, zipping it up. I throw my arm around her as we walk down the hall, and she stiffens before leaning into me, and it’s so forced I want to laugh. One look at her face—anxious, hopeful, eager to make everything okay—and I try to pull her into a bear hug, but we are crashed into by a couple of students running down the hall. It’s going to take some time to find our way back into an easy, physical space.
I wonder if it’s because, after the chaos of mutual apologies, the reality has settled in that we had sex. These are the kinds of things we would normally dissect together. If it were anyone else, I could complain to Auddy how it changed everything, but you see the obvious issue there.
I can’t talk to Mom or Dad about it either, because no matter how much they love me, knowing I did something like that would change the way they see me. I know it would. All they know is that Sebastian broke up with me and I’m a basket case.
Mom’s bumper sticker drive is out in full force. In the past three days, I’ve received deliveries in my pillowcase from, ostensibly, Morgan Freeman, Ellen DeGeneres, and Tennessee Williams. For as much as I tease her about it, I can’t deny it helps. I let out a long breath when I walk into the house. I’ll never shy away from her hugs. We don’t always need to speak out loud for them to know what I’m feeling.
The clock ticking down to graduation is both welcome and dreaded—I can’t wait to get out of here, but graduation signals the time when I’ll need to get this book in, and my only strategy right now is to offer Fujita the first twenty pages, tell him that the rest is too personal to share, and hope he understands.
Also contributing to the dreaded column: Auddy and I were stupid and didn’t apply to any of the same schools. So while I’ve been accepted to UCLA, University of Washington, Tufts, and Tulane, Autumn has been accepted at the U of U, Yale, Rice, Northwestern, and the University of Oregon. She’s going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
I say it over and over again.
Autumn is going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
We almost couldn’t be moving farther apart. It’s a few months away and I’m already dreading the pain of this good-bye. It carves out a hollow pit inside me, like I’m losing more than just a geographical anchor. I’m losing an era. Is that lame? Probably. Everyone seems to be getting deep about finishing high school. And then our parents listen to us and laugh, like we’re still so young and don’t know anything.
Which is probably true. Though, I do know some things.
I know that my feelings for Sebastian don’t seem to dim over the next two weeks. I know that the book I’m writing feels like an enemy, a chore. It has no heart, and no end. I realize now that what I thought was easy—writing a book—really was easy. Reasonably speaking. Anyone can start one. It’s finishing that’s impossible.
Autumn suggests changing the names and the places, but I assure her that didn’t work out so well before. Tanenr can attest to that. She’s quick to offer suggestions: I can rewrite it, she can, or we can work together. She thinks there are a million ways I can make it work without outing Sebastian. I’m not so sure.
Looking back, this book is so basic it’s almost embarrassing: It’s just one guy’s story, the lamest autobiography ever of falling in love. Love fails for a million reasons—distance, infidelity, pride, religion, money, illness. Why is this story any more worthy?
It felt like it was. It felt important. Living in this town is suffocating in so many ways.
But if a tree falls in the woods, maybe it makes no sound.
And if a boy falls for the bishop’s closeted son, maybe it makes no story.
• • •
Sebastian’s been in class only once in the past two weeks. Fujita informs us that he’s taking a break to finish up his own school year and will be back in time to see us turn in our papers.
The last day Sebas
tian was in class, he sat in the front, ducked low over a table with Sabine and Levi, going over their final chapters. His hair fell over his eyes, and he would flip it out unconsciously. His shirt stretched across his back, and I remembered seeing him shirtless, seeing the treasure map of muscle and bone. Being in the same room with him after the breakup was actually painful. I mean, I wonder about that, how I can be sitting there and no one is touching me and still, I hurt. My chest, my limbs, my throat—everything aches.
The whole time, Autumn sat beside me, her spine curled with guilt, and tried to listen to what Fujita was telling us about copyedits. Every time she looked at Sebastian, she’d glance at me, and I could see the question in her eyes: Did you tell him?
But she knows the answer. I’d have to talk to him to tell him anything. We haven’t texted, or e-mailed, or even passed notes in folders. I won’t lie; it’s killing me slowly.
I saw a movie when I was a kid, something that was probably way too mature for me at that age, but there’s one scene that stuck with me so intensely that sometimes it rushes into my thoughts and actually makes me shiver with dread. In it, a woman is walking across the street with her child, and the child runs ahead and gets hit by a car. I don’t even know the plot that comes after this, but the mother starts screaming, tries to walk backward, to undo what just happened. She’s so frantic, so tortured, that for a minute her mind splits and she thinks there’s a way she can take it all back.
I’m not comparing my breakup to the death of a child—I’m not that melodramatic—but that feeling of helplessness, of being totally unable to change your fate, is so dizzying, sometimes it makes me nauseous out of the blue. There’s nothing I can do to fix this.
There’s nothing I can do to get him back.
I’ve told my parents that we crashed and burned, and as much as they try to cheer me up, and as much as Auddy and I work on finding a way back to the easy comfort we had before, that rain cloud follows me everywhere. I’m not hungry. I sleep a ton. I don’t care about this stupid book.
• • •
Three weeks after we broke up and eight days before my novel is due, Sebastian is sitting on my front steps when I get home.
I’m not proud to admit it, but I immediately start crying. It’s not like I break down and crumple onto the sidewalk, but the back of my throat gets tight, and the sting spreads across the surface of my eyes. Maybe I’m crying because I’m terrified that he’s come here to do more damage, to reactivate what I feel only to let me down easy again, missionary style.
He stands, wiping his palms on his track pants. He must have come right after practice.
“I skipped soccer,” he says by way of greeting. He’s so nervous, his voice is shaking.
Mine shakes too: “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He smiles, and it’s the kind of smile that starts on one side, unsure, more like a question. Are we smiling? Is this cool?
It hits me like a slap across my cheek that I’m his safe space. I get his real smiles.
He’s never had an Autumn, or a Paul and Jenna Scott, a Manny, or even a Hailey, who hates him but accepts him.
I give up the battle and smile back; Sebastian has become quite the truant. God, it feels so good to see him. I missed him so much it’s like there’s an animal inside me, a beastly puppeteer, trying to direct my arms around his shoulders and my face into his neck.
The question hangs like a cloud over my head. “What are you doing here?”
He lets out a tight cough and looks down the street. His eyes are puffy and red, and I think this time he has been crying. “I’m not doing so great. I didn’t know where else to go.” He laughs now, squeezing his eyes closed. “That sounds so lame.”
He came to me.
“It doesn’t.” Reeling, I move closer to him, close enough to touch if I wanted, to check him everywhere and make sure he’s okay. “What happened?”
Sebastian stares down at our feet. He’s got on indoor cleats, and I love them on him. They’re black Adidas, with orange stripes. I’m wearing some scuffed-up Vans. While he figures out his answer, I imagine our feet moving at a dance, or our shoes side by side at the front door.
My brain is such a traitorous beast. It immediately goes from Ouch, Sebastian is sitting right there to happily married dudes.
“I talked to my parents,” he says, and the world comes to a screeching stop.
“What?”
“I didn’t come out,” he says quietly, and it’s such a revelation to even hear him say this much that my knees want to buckle. “But I gave a hypothetical.”
Gesturing that we walk around to the backyard for more privacy, I turn, and he follows.
I wish I could describe what happens inside my chest when I feel his hand slide into mine as we move past the trellis of ivy along the garage. There’s a party in my blood, riotous and electric; it vibrates my bones.
“This okay?” he asks.
I look down at our hands, so similar in size. “I don’t know, actually.”
Autumn’s voice pushes into my head: Be careful. I shift her voice to the front, but I don’t let go of his hand.
We find a spot under Mom’s favorite willow tree, and sit. The grass is still wet from the sprinklers, but I don’t think either of us cares. I stretch out my legs, and he follows, pressing the length of his thigh to mine.
“What should we do first?” he asks, staring at our legs. “My apology, or my story?”
His apology? “I don’t know if my brain has caught up yet.”
“Are you okay—have you been okay?”
I let out a single dry laugh. “About us? No. Not at all.”
“Me either.”
I count out my heartbeats. One, two, three, four. A bird shrieks overhead, and wind moves through the leaves. This tree always reminded me of Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street. Lumbering and unobtrusive and gentle.
“I didn’t end things because I was over you,” he says.
“I know. That made it worse, I think.”
He turns, cupping my neck in both palms so I look him in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
His hands are so warm, and they’re shaking. I bite my lip so I don’t lose it. Sebastian moves closer, ponderously, never closing his eyes even when his mouth touches mine. I don’t even think I kiss him back. I just sort of sit there, mouth hanging open in shock.
“I love you too.” He kisses me again, this time longer. This time I kiss him back.
I pull away because maybe I need to lose it a little, bending and pressing my hands to my face. Of course, this moment is playing out almost exactly like I wanted it to in every iteration of the fantasy. But there’s a lot of scar tissue there, and I’m not sure how or whether I can cleanly remove it with him sitting there watching. I need about a half hour to figure out how to react to what he’s said that’s slightly more measured than pulling him on top of me on the lawn.
“I need a minute to process this,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”
He nods, cheeks hot. “Okay, so, remember that guy Brett my parents mentioned?” he says. “When we overheard them?”
The guy who married his boyfriend, and Sebastian’s mom worried for the well-being of the parents. “Yeah. I remember.”
“He and his husband moved from California to Salt Lake. I guess there’s some drama in the ward about it.” Sebastian turns our hands over, tracing the tendons under my skin with his index finger. “Is this okay?”
“I think so.” I laugh, because the tone of my voice is the acoustic equivalent of a tail wagging, but I can’t even bother being embarrassed about it.
“So, he moved back, and my parents were talking about it at dinner. My grandparents were there.” He laughs, and looks over at me. “I chose a bad time to do this, I know, but it just sort of . . . came out.”
“So to speak.”
He laughs again. “So at dinner, they’re talking about Brett and Joshi, and I just put my silverware down and asked them point-blank what w
ould happen if one of us was gay.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.” He nods, and keeps nodding like he almost can’t believe it. “I haven’t been okay the past few weeks. I don’t know that I can go back to thinking that it will go away. I tried out all these hypotheticals with myself, like what if you moved on from this, would I stop being attracted to guys? Would I be able to marry someone like Manda one day? But the truth is, I wouldn’t. I felt right with you. In part because you’re you, but in part because . . .”
I point to my chest. “Guy.”
Sebastian smiles his real smile. “Yeah.” He pauses, and I know what’s coming before he even says it, and it’s like the sun chose this moment to press through the dense branches of the tree. “I’m totally gay.”
A gleeful laugh rips out of me.
I throw my arms around his neck, tackling him.
Beneath me, he laughs, letting me kiss all over his neck and face.
“I mean this in the least patronizing way possible: It makes me so proud to hear you say that.”
“I’ve been practicing,” he admits. “I said it into my pillow. Then I’d whisper it while I rode my bike. I’ve been saying it every day since we broke up. It doesn’t feel weird anymore.”
“Because it isn’t.” I let him up, and remember that he was in the middle of a story. “Okay, so you asked them the hypothetical . . .”
“Mom got really quiet,” he says, and both of our smiles fade because no, this isn’t silly, wrestling fun anymore. “Dad and Grandpa looked at each other, like ‘Oh, here we go.’ Grandma focused on cutting her steak into tiny, tiny pieces. Lizzy stood up and gathered Faith and Aaron and walked them out of the room.” He looks at me, pained. “Lizzy, my closest friend, wanted to remove them from the conversation. Like, I don’t think anyone was surprised by this.”
This, I think, is what it feels to have a heart broken. I let out some garbled sound of sympathy.
“Finally, Dad said, ‘Do you mean attraction or behavior, Sebastian?’ And he never uses my full name.” He swallows, with effort. “I told him, ‘Either. Both.’ And he went on essentially to say that our family believes that the sacred acts of procreation are to be shared only between a man and his wife, and anything else undermines the foundation of our faith.”
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