Totally Joe

by James Howe

  Colin: I think you should be happy with Joe.

  Me: Really? You have such a cool name. Colin. It’s like a character in a novel. But Joe. Ugh.

  A loooooooong pause.

  Me: I’m sorry. I’m talking too much.

  Colin: It’s okay. And, anyway, you’re not talking too much. I was just thinking … Joe, I mean, JoDan …

  Me: You can call me Joe.

  Colin: Joe. I was thinking about Kevin and Jimmy at the dance last night. And the way my father was …

  Me: What?

  Colin: Looking at us during dinner. Do you think he knows?

  Me: I think he was mostly looking at me. I’ll bet your other friends don’t have streaked hair or painted pinky fingernails.

  Colin (laughing): You’re right about that. I just… I don’t think I’m ready for my parents to know about us. About me. I thought this was going to be easier. It took me a whole year to work up the nerve to tell you, and now that I have …

  Me: It’s okay. It can be our thing. Nobody else has to know.

  Colin: That would be okay with you?

  Me: Semi-okay.

  Colin: Oh.

  Me: No, I mean it’s okay. Honest. But what if somebody asks?

  Colin: I don’t know. Act like we don’t know what they’re talking about?

  Me: Great. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  Colin: It’s not anybody’s business, anyway. The important thing is, we can still do stuff together, hang out—even in school—just not like …

  Me: Just not like … boyfriends.

  Colin: Not like boyfriends out in the open for everybody to see. Okay?

  Me: It’s okay. Your dad seems nice, though. He’s not going to suddenly hate you if he does find out.

  Colin: I wouldn’t be so sure about that. What about your parents?

  Me: We’ve never talked about it, but I think they know. And I’m pretty sure they’re okay with letting me be whoever I am.

  Colin: You are so lucky.

  Me: That’s what my aunt Pam keeps telling me.

  Colin: She’s right.

  When my dad picked me up from Colin’s house Saturday, I was quiet the whole way home. Quiet is not exactly my thing, so my dad started asking all these questions. Was I okay? Did something happen at Colin’s? Did I need to talk about anything?

  I just kept shaking my head, but inside I was, like, screaming, Yes! I want to talk about everything! I want to tell you and the whole world that Colin is my boyfriend, and I want you and the whole world to say, “That’s great!” Or maybe I want you and the whole world to not even care because it’s no big deal Because it should be no big deal But it is, and that’s why Colin is afraid and why we’re going out but nobody knows.

  Finally, my dad said, “Whenever you want to talk, I’m here.”

  I almost blurted out everything then, but this big lump came into my throat and I knew if I tried to speak all I’d do is end up crying.

  LIFE LESSON: “Don’t ask, don’t tell” sucks!

  E is for

  E.T.

  OKAY, CONFESSION: MY FAVORITE MOVIE IS NOT THE WIZARD OF OZ (WHICH I READ SOMEWHERE IS supposed to be, like, the gay movie or something) (I have no idea why) or anything with Keanu Reeves or Leonardo DiCaprio (even if they do have fabulous names and are majorly cute). My fave movie is E.T.—the Extra-Terrestrial Unlike Keanu Reeves or Leonardo DiCaprio, E.T. does not have a fabulous name and is majorly ugly, but ever since the first time I saw him (I was six), I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I began thinking I was from some other planet and wishing I could go home, just like E.T. I would even look up at the sky at night and try to pick out which planet was mine. I had a name for it—Wisteria.

  I think that’s really the name of a flower or a perfume or something, but I liked the sound of it. I never told anybody, not Bobby or my aunt Pam or anybody. Wisteria was just for me.

  I never pictured Wisteria very clearly in my mind. I didn’t know what the houses looked like or the trees or people or anything. When I imagined myself living there, it wasn’t what I saw that mattered. It was what I felt. I felt at home.

  Is that totally weird or what?

  Because I love my family and they love me. And I have really good friends who would probably cry even harder than Elliott if I ever really went off to some other planet. But sometimes I get this feeling like I’m far from home. Like, I could be sitting with my family watching TV or hanging out with my friends at the Candy Kitchen, and this feeling will come over me, like: What am I doing here? I don’t belong.

  Oh, and remember those scientists who practically kill E.T.? Well, there aren’t any scientists after me, but there is Kevin Hennessey. Sometimes I think Kevin would kill me if he could get away with it. Honestly. I don’t know why he hates me so much. Yesterday, he shoved me up against my locker and called me a totally disgusting name, which I so cannot write down here. I mean it. I was going to tell him, Takes one to know one,” but sanity kicked in and I kept my mouth shut. The way his face was all red and twisted, I swear he might have started punching me out any minute.

  On Wisteria there are no Kevin Hennesseys.

  I was so glad it was Friday. That meant two days without Kevin and at least one with Colin. Colin and I have spent time together every weekend for the past three weeks. I’ve even gone to his cross-country meets. And he’s come over to my house to watch movies. We haven’t talked any more about being boyfriends. We just kind of know it’s there.

  Anyway, we didn’t have any plans to hang out last night, but I was feeling so bad because of the whole Kevin thing that I called Colin and asked if he wanted to come over after dinner. He did, and the best thing happened! You’re never going to believe it, not in a million years!

  There he was, standing in the doorway with this DVD in his hand. He said, “I still don’t have a favorite movie star, but I do have a favorite movie.”

  He showed me, and I said, “Oh. My. God. It’s E.T.!”

  He said, “Oh. My. God. Yes, it is!” (That’s Colin trying to sound like me.) (Which was so funny.) (I guess you had to be there.)

  Well, anyway, we went down to the basement and watched the movie, just the two of us. Jeff was up in his bedroom glued to his computer. Dad started watching with us, but Mom and Aunt Pam got him to go upstairs. So it was just me and Colin, watching our favorite movie, saying our favorite lines together, cracking up when Drew Barrymore starts screaming her head off the first time she sees E.T. And at the end, when they’re saying goodbye and E.T. touches Elliott’s head with his finger, Colin reached over and touched my head and said right along with E.T. in this, like, perfect E.T. voice, “I’ll be right here.”

  I told him, “That was awesome,” meaning the voice. But all I could think about was his finger touching my head. I totally thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  No. It was better than that.

  I thought I’d gone to Wisteria.

  LIFE LESSON: You don’t have to travel to some other planet to find your way home.

  F is for

  FAMILY

  MY FRIENDS ALL THINK MY FAMILY IS SOOOO COOL. ESPECIALLY MY PARENTS and Aunt Pam. It’s not that they don’t think Jeff is cool. He’s just not on their radar screens. Okay, it’s true Addie had a crush on him once when she was younger, but then she decided that having the hots for your friend’s older brother (who also happens to be a jock and not exactly what you’d call politically enlightened) was too much for her feminist soul, so she went from giggling whenever he was around to making these huh noises to pretty much ignoring him.

  So, anyway, this is who is in my family:

  I’ll start with Jeff because I’ve already written about him and there’s not much else to say. He is:

  1. 15

  2. Growing what he calls a beard.

  3. Obsessed with a girl he met at camp last summer whose name is something that ends in na (Joanna, Sienna, Brianna, Banana, whatever). He mostly calls her Clark, which I believe is her last n
ame. She calls him “the J-man.” This is so not a healthy relationship.

  (Guy-guy Fact: Guy-guys love putting “the” in front of their names and adding “man,” “ski,” or “ster” after them, as in: “the J-man,” “the Jeffski,” “the Jeffster.”)

  4. An expert on all those guy-guy things I talked about back in B. (Except acting tough. As I said before, despite everything, he’s actually a fairly decent human being.)

  5. Possibly a computer genius (definitely a computer geek).

  6. The owner of a stunningly boring wardrobe, made up of two colors and the World’s Largest Collection of Identical Pairs of Athletic Shoes.

  7. The quietest member of our family.

  In some ways he and my dad are alike. They both love sports, they’re both into their computers, and they both have beards (except my dad’s actually is a beard). Oh, and they both love these meat-snacky things called Slim Jims. Do not ask. I am, like, this close to becoming a vegetarian.

  But in other ways my dad is like me. We’re both funny (well, I think I’m funny, thank you very much), we both like to talk (although we often talk about different things; my father has nothing to say about hair, clothes, or movie stars), and we both like to cook.

  My dad’s name is David, but everybody calls him Dave. He’s a social worker at this agency over in Saratoga that works with “troubled teens.” My dad loves kids, and it’s pretty obvious to anybody with eyes that he loves Jeff and me. He’s always outside with Jeff throwing a ball around or shooting baskets. When they’re inside, he gets Jeff to help him with computer stuff. With me, he plays games and watches movies (he gets a little squirmy during chick flicks like Steel Magnolias, but he hangs in there), and, as I said, we both like to cook, so sometimes it’ll just be the two of us out in the kitchen making dinner for the family.

  The best thing about my dad is that he’s not afraid of showing what he feels. He’s big on hugs (even with my friends, which is one reason they like him so much) and … Oh. My. God … he cries at the drop of a hat! True story: Last Christmas, Bobby and I were watching A Christmas Carol— the old one in black-and-white—and my dad happens to walk through the room right at the moment when Tiny Tim says, “God bless us, every one,” and he starts sniffling!

  “Dad,” I say, “are you crying?”

  And he’s all choking back these tears and he says, “Gets me every time.”

  Maybe you don’t think that’s a cool thing in a dad, but I do. Colin says my dad is THE BEST and that I shouldn’t worry about telling him I’m gay. He’s right. I don’t know why I do worry about it. Maybe it’s because when I see Dad and Jeff outside shooting baskets, there’s a way my dad laughs that makes me think he has a lot more fun with Jeff than with me. I listen very carefully for that laugh when we cook or play games together. When it comes, it’s almost the same as his Jeff laugh—but not quite.

  Here’s something else about my dad: He is much neater than my mom. He’s always picking stuff up and folding clothes and grumbling about the mess. If we were a sitcom family, it would be my mom carrying on like that, talking about having to live with a house full of men! But my mom can be the biggest slob. Honestly. I mean, she’s super nice, but she just doesn’t care about things like dirty dishes or papers piling up on the dining-room table. Her motto is “Life is short and there will always be dirty dishes, so let’s dance.”

  Did I mention my mother is funny, too? Her name is Penny. What’s weird is that she has this copper-colored hair, which she swears no one knew she would have when they named her (she’s the only one in her family with penny-colored hair). My dad says he fell in love with my mom because of her name and her hair, but I doubt he’s that shallow. (I pride myself on being the truly shallow member of the family. Remember, I fell in love with feathery blond hair and a head shaped like a melon.)

  My mom teaches second grade in a school a couple of towns away. I’ll bet she’s a really good teacher, even if she gets in trouble sometimes for having a messy room. (I hope she doesn’t tell her kids her motto.) Half the time our kitchen table is piled up with her classroom projects. And she’s always talking about her students like they’re part of the family.

  I never really thought about this before, but both my parents have jobs where they work with kids, and they’re both always talking about how terrific “their” kids are-even my dad’s “troubled teens,” who he says only need love and direction—and, well, the part I never thought about before is this: Why do I keep worrying that they won’t love me as much once they know “the truth” about me? They love everybody.

  Aunt Pam says that a kid like me couldn’t have better parents.

  Oh, I have to tell you about Aunt Pam. She’s my mom’s younger sister—a lot younger. When I tell people that my aunt lives with us, they probably picture this old lady with her hair up in a bun who sits around all day chain-smoking and knitting baby booties for the starving children of Armenia. But Aunt Pam is not like that at all. She is twenty-eight years old, and I think it is fair to say that if a vote were taken tomorrow, she would win the title of Most Beautiful Woman in All of Paintbrush Falls and Maybe Even All of Upstate New York. If Julia Roberts were her sister, Julia would be whining all the time, “Why can’t I look like Pam? It’s not fair!” I am so not kidding.

  Aunt Pam is an artist. When she moved in with us a couple of years ago, my dad helped her turn the upstairs room over our garage into a studio. She makes these really big paintings that she says are abstract and all about feelings. I don’t know about that. I know I like them, but maybe that’s because I totally love Aunt Pam.

  It’s hard not to love somebody who is always on your side. When I was going through such a tough time in fifth grade, it was Aunt Pam who helped me know I’d be okay. I told her everything—even more than I told Bobby. And do you know what she would do? She’d sit there and nod her head and say, “That’s cool.” Like nothing I told her was a big deal! Then when I would finish, she would say, “You’re good just the way you are, Joe. Life isn’t always going to be easy—it isn’t for anybody—but you’ve got the stuff and you’re going to be so fine you’ll shine.” We’d laugh when she’d say that. It was so corny, that “so fine you’ll shine” thing. But it really helped. It still does.

  I guess I could believe anything Aunt Pam told me, because I knew she’d been through tough times herself. She moved in with us after living in New York City for a few years. It wasn’t that she wanted to move to a small town, she just needed somebody to take care of her for a while and help her get back on her feet—“love and direction,” as my dad says. She had a boyfriend in New York who wasn’t good for her. I think there might have been drugs involved, and I hate to say it because it makes me so mad, but I’m pretty sure her boyfriend hit her sometimes and that’s the main reason she had to get away. When she came to live with us, she looked a lot older than twenty-six, but the longer she stayed the younger she got.

  Bobby has this major crush on Aunt Pam—or did until Kelsey came along and he got a girlfriend of his own. (And one his own age. Hello.) When he found out that Aunt Pam was going to move back to New York (which she’s going to do after Christmas), he could hardly talk about it. I’m kind of glad he feels that way, because to be honest, I can hardly talk about it myself. I’m going to miss her soooo much. She says we’ll IM and talk on the phone, but it won’t be the same. She’s my aunt, but in some ways she’s my very best friend. She’s the keeper of my secrets. She makes me feel so fine I shine.

  She says I’ll shine just as bright without her. We’ll see.

  I just reread everything I wrote about my family. I pretended I didn’t know me or Jeff or my mom or dad or Aunt Pam, and I thought, Wow, this is a pretty nice family. Then I got thinking about Colin’s family and how I’ll bet he could write really nice things about them, too—but there’s something, I don’t know, different about them. I’ve been over to his house a few times now, and his mom and dad are very polite and try hard to make me feel welcome
, and his little sister, whose name is Claire, is really cute (although weirdly well-behaved for a six-year-old), but I never feel entirely comfortable there. Everything matches. It’s all so perfect—from the American flag flying out front to the cabinet in the family room full of trophies and awards (a lot of them Colin’s). The magazines on the coffee table in the living room are fanned out like they belong in a doctor’s office, and there isn’t one picture on the walls that’s even, like, a millimeter crooked.

  Then there’s Colin’s room. It’s nice and all, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect a seventh-grade boy’s room to look like. Neither is mine, of course, but it definitely looks like me. Colin’s room looks like it belongs in one of the magazines on the coffee table downstairs. I asked him once if he’d picked out the furniture and pictures on the walls, and he just laughed and said, “As if.” He told me his mom uses this decorator named Paul, who comes up from Albany and he makes all the decisions in their house. He said his mom thinks Paul is “brilliant,” but his dad doesn’t want to be there when Paul is around because “people like that” make him “uptight.” When I asked Colin what his father meant by “people like that,” Colin said, “You know,” and changed the subject.

  My other friends’ families are nothing like Colin’s. They’re more like mine, but funkier. Addie’s family is the funkiest of the funky, even after her mom started shaving her armpits a few years ago (thank you, Lord). They all wear these really ugly sandals that should be totally banned—Birkensomethings—and the way they eat tofu 24/7 you’d think it actually tasted good, when in fact it has no taste at all! And they’re always carrying on about the latest political outrage and the starving children of Armenia and animal rights and women’s rights and Native American rights … and, well, their car has so many bumper stickers I swear it’s a miracle they haven’t caused, like, a zillion accidents. I mean, how are you supposed to read those things when you’re zooming down the highway at a hundred miles an hour?