by Hawke, Jessa
Anger snaps through him quick, and he thinks about answering back, but then she stomps a foot and the whole horde of chasers scatters. Shaking her head in their wake, the redheaded girl turns around and offers Sandrino a hand. “Those losers,” she fumes as he dusts off his pants. “I’m Amy.”
“Thank you, Amy,” he says, looking at her for the first time and being overwhelmed by the feeling that he will forever be safe in her presence. She is the kind of girl who always wants you to prove your friendship, he can tell, and he promises himself to continue doing so for the rest of his life. “I am Sandrino.”
She considers him for a moment. “Yeah, you’re the one who just moved here. Quite a welcome those little idiots gave you. Never mind them. Come have lunch with me and Paul,” she says, gesturing to the shady side of the metal fence where a different blond boy is sitting beside a spread of sandwiches and juice boxes.
“Paul and I,” Sandrino corrects, then wants to smack himself on the mouth because he has just offended his one friend in the entire school.
Amy considers him thoughtfully, and he is sure that this is the part where she turns on her heel and never speaks to him again. Instead, her face breaks out into a smile that cracks her face from ear to ear, a delightfully toothy grin that warms her entire face. “You’re going to be quite a project, aren’t you?” she says, grabs him by the hand, and runs over to introduce him to Paul.
And sometimes, friendships are made just like that.
* * *
Some days are harder than others. Some days you just have to ignore your internal buzzing in the vague hope that your brain will stop circulating thoughts through the posts of your mind like a conveyor belt. Paul has not slept in weeks.
It’s the images. Bronze skin, heated by the sun, deliciously warm to the touch. Long brown hair, knotted a little, but luscious and wavy, wrapped around his wrist like a handcuff, like a chain, like a promise, soft in its ironclad grasp. Paul dreams of his best friends now in a way that he never has before, and he could shoot himself for it.
He met Sandrino on the day that Amy schooled those bullies far into next week. Since he had been raised a good Christian, the mild envy that arose after he saw how close in cahoots Amy and Sandrino had become was brief. Sandrino was so smart-mouthed, so sassy, that he was like the male version of Amy, proud and brave and strong. And so it did not seem to matter that for ten years before that, he and Amy had switched off sleeping at each other’s houses, that they spent every recess discussing God and their parents, and how much they wanted to leave this small town behind. They had both read Gulliver’s Travels and become obsessed with the idea that they too could one day grow tall and strong, and use their own legs and arms to up and out of the town in which they lived. Sandrino fast became a part of these conversations, the three of them squirreling away wherever it happened to be coziest—under the bleachers at the local high school track or in Amy’s tree house that she built with her dad. Often, as the sun would set and the high from the grape soda would wear off, Sandrino would rest his head in Paul’s lap and his feet in Amy’s, comfortable as a kitten in the sun.
Paul could not pinpoint a specific day where this first started to affect him differently; all he knew was that one day, that little move of Sandrino’s was robbed a little of its innocence. He thinks of all the people he can never talk to about this, the way that he finds himself staring at Sandrino’s neck in the middle of class when he should be listening about electrons. He knows it’s wrong, but the thoughts pervade every aspect of his mind, especially when he should be thinking of other things.
An evening crisp has just dominated the air when Paul finally gets home from church. He has taken to spending his after school hours with Father Andrew, the local priest. His parents have always told him that Father Andrew has known him since he was just in diapers and has been there for every truly large moment in his life—the baptism, his first Communion, you name it. Lately, however, he has felt that Father Andrew is the one he can truly talk to. Paul has the big question inside of him, wanting confirmation but afraid to receive it because he believes he knows where the answer lies. He has come to Father Andrew about everything—the frustration he has often felt with his parents, how envious he used to feel about Sandrino and Amy being so close, and Father Andrew was the one person who never wrote it off to growing pains. But this thing he feels for Sandrino is so much bigger than all of that; tonight was the night he was gathering up all of his courage to come to Father Andrew about it, to ask him that one question raging a fever deep within him.
And then Father Andrew pulled out Leviticus 18:22, just like that, with no warning. He said he had been thinking about it recently, and he was not sure why; sometimes, said Father Andrew, the subconscious works its way up to the surface and we may never figure out what it is that fueled certain actions, perhaps our environment, maybe the people who surround us, but there it is. Father Andrew was truly a worldly minister, in so many ways.
A worldly minister who firmly believes that a man shall not lie with a male as he lies with a female. It is an abomination.
When he heard that, Paul knew. He knew the burning question would have to remain buried for the rest of time, deep within himself. It was, in a word, his cross to bear. He is home now, entering the bedroom that contains him and all of his vivid fantasies and dreams. How odd it seems, that this plaid bedspread is his, that those are the rumpled pillows his thoughts rest on at night. Only he knows that there are certain magazines beneath his mattress that nobody, not his mother or Father Andrew would deem heaven-worthy, and it fills him with shame. He has read enough books to know that this is natural, this drive towards sinful thoughts, that it is not sinful at all because human beings are capable of control, and that is what matters.
Laying on that bedspread, Paul wonders if he has any self-control at all.
An hour passes, maybe two, and there is moonlight streaming into his room. Watching the pale light glide like a piece of silk over his legs, Paul feels suddenly and incredibly alive. It is during moments like these when he feels the need to be with others the most, and when the urge comes upon him, he likes to imagine the people there, rather than call them. People are so unpredictable; if you imagine them, they can do anything you want them to do rather than what they would actually do if they were there.
Sandrino sits at the edge of his bed, bared to the waist, gleaming in the moonlight like a mythical creature. The dark locks of his childhood have lengthened and softly graze the nape of his neck, giving him that air of the naughty gardener that cougars so much seem to favor. Paul shakes off the duality of the two images, one of purity and the other of sin until he can see only his friend, utterly desirable, the brown tips of his nipples pointing straight up into the light as Sandrino pushes his weight back on the palms of his hands, the long tapered ends of his fingers completely delectable, his head tilted back, leaving his throat vulnerable. Paul wants to touch him, and so he scoots over to the edge of the bed and gently, almost gingerly, runs his hands over the slopes of Sandrino’s shoulders. His skin is both cool and warm, a perfect piece of living marble, and when Paul presses his lips against it, Sandrino closes his eyes and turns his head towards him, his eyes hot and dark.
Their lips press together, and as they turn to each other, perfectly attuned, their motions are fluid. It happens like this, as if in a dream because it is, that Paul and Sandrino sit with their legs wrapped around each other, pressing their mouths on bare parts of their anatomy. Sandrino watches as Paul lifts his hand to his mouth and purposefully licks the long fingers, closing his eyes as Paul wraps his tongue around them, sucking and looking straight into Sandrino’s eyes. If only, if only he could do this to the real Sandrino, in real life, but he pushes the inestimably sad thought far out of his mind as the dream Sandrino crawls on his hands and knees across the bed, forcing Paul to lie on his back against the pillows and slides his pants off.
Sandrino’s mouth and Paul’s hand are one, sliding up and do
wn Paul’s penis like water, like burning hot water that pleasures as it scalds. There is a pressure building up, and Paul imagines that at that moment, that last, final moment, Sandrino fixes his eyes squarely on his, because he wants Paul to know that he is going to accept all that Paul gives him directly into his mouth and throat and that he wants to see Paul become undone directly into him, he wants to receive, and so Paul bursts forth, sticky and hot, and infinitely unsatisfyingly into dream Sandrino’s mouth, only to come away with a hand that is a mess of the same elements.
As he lays there with sticky hands and a heavy soul, Paul is overwhelmed by a rush of feelings that are as dense as clouds, and he tries to run, but finds he is unable to escape from the guilt. It washes over him, an inescapable storm, and Paul knows that tomorrow, he will not go to confession. He will sit at Mass and pray for his eternal soul, pray that God still loves him although he sins. He is sorry, he is truly sorry, but he cannot change.
Late into the night, Paul cries.
* * *
“Out of town, I’ve got to leave town,” says Amy.
“Slow down there, Gulliver,” Paul tells her, stirring his milkshake with a pink straw.
“Says the man with the fruitiest of all straws,” jokes Sandrino, not noticing the small look of discomfort that passes over Paul’s face as he does.
Senior year finds the gang holed up in Dosey’s Diner, knocking back burgers and sugared drinks at the rate only teenagers can ingest them. Amy, long, leggy, and beautiful, headstrong and wild, has no idea how beautiful she has become. She knows only that she needs, nay wants, to get out of the town so bad and so fast that she can taste it in every waking hour. Pre-med is no joke, and she has no intention of become a small-town doctor where every single little old lady with blue hair is going to come to her every time she gets a bunion. She has dreamed of New York ever since freshman year, and nothing is going to stop her, a fact that she has made repeatedly and abundantly clear to both of the boys many times over.
She looks up now from her fries at Paul and wonders at the change she has seen in him in the past year. Paul, always so gentle, always so morally sound that she felt like he was his namesake, the apostle Paul who served as the rock of the church. He kept to himself over the summer, which bothered Amy more than she ever wanted to let on; Sandrino has helped fill the void left by her oldest childhood friend, but nothing is quite the same in the tree house without gentle Paul and his calming presence. There are far too many moments where there is a new tension between her and Sandrino, a tension she has no time for and does not want to give a name because giving it a name would make it become real.
Paul came back from his seclusion that summer, roaring into the school parking lot on a brand-new bicycle Amy was certain gave both his mother and Father Andrew, the town’s minister, a hefty heart attack. A cool September was upon them then, and Paul sported a leather jacket, so rebel without a cause-esque that Amy could not seem to find a hint of her old friend within the new Paul. Small changes seemed to be happening with increasing frequency, a new earring, a pack of cigarettes tucked into his jacket pocket, and Paul had become so brooding and morose that Amy barely recognizes him. She does not know how to talk to him in the least. He’s still Paul, still serenely beautiful with heavy-lidded brown eyes and soft-blonde hair, but now the hair is slicked back with enough product to make him look like a 50s throwback. From the diner’s window, Amy can see his shiny black motorcycle parked outside.
“So dear,” she says teasingly, “You want to explain to me again this drive towards self-flagellation? I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with Father Andrew, but this seems extreme, even for you.”
So concerned is she with the dangers of riding a motorcycle—they are the number one cause of death and traumatic brain injuries, facts she has come across in every medical textbook she has ever opened—that she misses it. The quick glance that says it all. The quick glance Paul throws Sandrino, who has his nose thrust into yet another book, so oblivious to the outside world that he rarely even glances into a mirror, let alone socializes.
The changes in Sandrino of late have also been great, although they have not come as a huge surprise. The insinuations that an immigrant can never learn proper language did not stop at the playground when Amy saved him, all those years ago, and so Sandrino tasked himself with becoming a writer. It was all he ever talked about, writing deep and angry poems that Amy knew had only to do with the negativity he drew from being in a small Jesuit town that still used derogatory terms for immigrants that had died out in most other progressive places decades ago. Sandrino understood well Amy’s drive to leave the busybodies behind and consumed books as if the more words he contained inside himself, the easier it would be to create a whole new world. It was a trait he shared with Paul, although he did not know it; Paul truly never had relinquished his world of dreams, and Sandrino wanted to control his characters with as much ease. The crossover here was that neither boy could make the figments of their imaginations do anything they did not in truth wish to do, could not coerce their dream-things to go against their wills. So while Paul dreamt of Sandrino with a frequency that he would never become comfortable with, Sandrino threw himself into the literary world and ordered book after book on psychology, trying to understand why unconscious drives exist the way they do.
Knowing this about her two friends as only an outside observer can, Amy considered the two boys in front of her with equal amounts of affection and worry. They seemed to be drifting away from her lately, not by any conscious choice, but rather to troubles of their own. This motorcycle of Paul’s was truly a cause for concern, in her excellent medically-oriented opinion, and was totally out of character for him. “Paul, tell me honestly, tell me truly,” she says to him now.
“Tell you what?” Paul says, tearing his gaze away from the long-haired Sandrino, who is slouched over at the table, one perfect hand squashing an olive-toned cheek into non-existence.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Amy squints at him, playing cop at an interrogation.
Paul sighs deeply. “I’m finding myself, Amy.”
“You’re Paul Saunka, that’s who you are, that’s who you’ll always be.”
“Maybe Father Paul one day,” Sandrino says out of nowhere, dreamily, as if it is an afterthought.
Amy and Paul look at him in shock. Sandrino is a dreamer, he always has been, and no doubt in this moment, he is simply thinking of a character he wishes to create, but what he has just said has hit the mark so accurately and fairly that the other two are left fairly breathless. It is perfect, it is so perfect that the blood is rushing to Paul’s ears and staining him a deep crimson color. Amy looks at Paul wordlessly and knows that he is thinking just what she is thinking, and she knows in that moment that Paul’s life has been changed forever.
* * *
“Eighty hours a week, eighty hours a week they worked until some med intern passed out and they had to file a lawsuit. God damn, is that what it’s going to be like?” Amy sighs deeply and tosses her book bag on the softly carpeted ground. She plops herself down on the couch and kicks off her shoes, groaning in equal parts pain and relief, since she has been on her feet for six straight hours.
“Doctor Charles didn’t give you a break today, huh?” Sandrino asks sympathetically. He had arrived at her house at least an hour before and was perusing her family’s well-stocked library when Amy burst in like a summer storm.
“No,” hisses Amy, pseudo-evilly, and leans her head back against the couch; with closed eyes, she continues. “The Hendersons like to take their schnauzer on walks not on grass and ground like normal people, but while they’re running errands on Maine Street, so the poor guy’s nails got all worn down and super-sensitive. Those idiots! We spent a good forty minutes just trying to calm him down enough to allow us to get near him with the clippers.”
“It’s all going to be worth it, relax.”
“I know, I know,” Amy says, turning her head to get a l
ook at her friend. He has grown tall, taller than he ever has been, and his brown body has angled out in a way that makes her think of Family Guy’s Meg’s boyfriend, the one Francine is so jealous of that a poltergeist is created. From the deep vee of his faded maroon T-shirt, Amy can see the slight curl of chest hair, and tangled in it is the family crest Sandrino wears on a gold chain. When he leans forward to get off the couch and kneel by her feet, she allows herself one clandestine glance at the way the dark denim of his jeans encase his thighs. Does he have any idea how beautiful he is? And if he does, does that make her like him any less? Amy shakes her head, trying to rid her mind of the inappropriate thoughts.
Sandrino leans back until he is resting on his elbows and looking up at Amy. Lately, he has begun to notice the dark circles under her eyes, making her look bruised, but still like Amy. He knows she wants to be a doctor, but is all this effort worth it? He picks himself up and grabs one of her feet, hearing her squeal in delighted protest. If anyone can do it, he thinks as he slides a rainbow-colored sock off her foot, it’s Amy; she’s strong enough to do anything in the world and then some.
“I just wish it would all happen sooner. I know I have to pay my dues, but for how lo—ohhhh,” she moans, just as Sandrino begins to rub the soles of her feet, to bend and need her tired, tired, overworked adolescent toes. She is filled with bliss, but just as she is tilting her head back to enjoy the massage, Sandrino lifts her leg up high and places it on one of his shoulders to work on her calves. What attracts her attention to his face in that moment, she is not able to say, but the look Sandrino wears suddenly spells everything out for her in huge letters, and in that moment, Amy realizes how blind she has been. It is as if someone has deluged her with cold water, and she tries not to freeze as she realizes for the first time, just how much Sandrino desires her.