Openly Straight

by Bill Konigsberg

  Reverse coming out to Claire Olivia was the obvious next step. I didn’t anticipate it going real well. I was right.

  “So I have something to tell you,” I said, as casually as possible, a few days after my parents’ visit.

  “Is it something scandalous, Shay Shay?” she asked. “I love scandals, especially at all-boys schools!”

  “Well, actually, it is a little scandalous,” I said.

  “Ooh,” she said. “Saucy.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I’m not gay here, Claire Olivia.”

  She was silent. Then: “Say again?”

  “Not gay. Here. At Natick.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I decided to not be gay. I just wanted to, like, be a normal kid for once. Not the gay kid.”

  “You went back in the closet?” I could hear the prickliness in her voice, and my heartbeat accelerated.

  “No. Not in the closet. To me, the closet is when someone won’t admit they’re gay at all. I already have. I’m sort of … taking a break.”

  She snorted. “Taking a break?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not getting this. How do you take a break from who you are, Shay Shay?”

  I was quiet for a while. I didn’t want to get into a fight with her, but something about her tone really pissed me off, like she was so smart that in three seconds she got something that I, having lived with it for months, didn’t get.

  “You can take a break from a part of yourself,” I said. “I mean, you could take a break from being a brunette by, I don’t know, dyeing your hair. Right?”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “That’s completely different than denying part of who you are. This sounds SO crazy, Rafe. Why would you do something like this? You’re happy with who you are.”

  “I am. And I’m happy with who I am here too. Even my mom got it. She saw me, like, playing football….”

  She snorted even louder this time. “You? Playing football?”

  “Yeah, touch football, Claire Olivia,” I said, my voice sharp. “I liked it. I like it.”

  “I’m sorry, but is this Rafe? Like, my friend Rafe, who is my best friend, whom I’ve known since I was six? My friend whom I adore, who is GAY, by the way? Not straight, because that would be INSANELY weird?”

  “Yeah, this is him,” I said, and my voice was shaking. “This is Rafe, and I’m telling you something about me, and you’re being mean. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Rafe. Maybe the same way I feel when I find out that my BEST FRIEND in the world has been lying to me for two months and is now, apparently, a straight guy. Are you, like, a Republican now too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I said.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “Go enjoy a football game, drink a beer. Hang with your buddies. Scratch your balls. This one’s not interested.”

  And she hung up on me.

  My gut twisted in knots. I had known it wouldn’t be good, but I hadn’t imagined it would be that bad. My mood dark and my nerves rattled, I went down the hall to Ben’s room. He opened the door, glasses on, philosophy book in hand, reading up on Immanuel Kant.

  “What happened to you?” he said. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”

  I walked in and collapsed in the burgundy chair. “Claire Olivia and I just had this huge fight. I think we’re … done.”

  “Oh, man,” he said, grabbing me an orange drink from the mini-fridge and going for the vodka. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It sucks.”

  He handed me the Gatorade and I chugged a third of it down, closing my eyes when brain freeze momentarily attacked me behind the eyes. Then he filled the bottle with vodka, shook, and handed me back the plastic screwdriver.

  “It’ll cure what ails you,” he said, and I laughed, but only a little.

  “What happened?” He lay down on his bed.

  So I told him an extremely edited version that involved her not getting who I am. The football part I told him verbatim, and he nodded like he understood.

  “Cindy used to do that all the time, decide that I had to be exactly the same as I’d always been. It drove me nuts. We’re not supposed to ever change, and if we do, and they aren’t there to witness it, it’s this major affront.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I mean.”

  “So is it really over?”

  I shrugged and took a deep swig. “She hung up on me, so probably.” I kicked off my shoes and put my feet up on his desk.

  “Well, you know, the way your parents described her, she really didn’t sound like someone I could see you dating.”

  That made me think about what kind of girl I would date if I really did date girls, and I enjoyed the silence. That was the thing with me and Ben; we shared the best silences.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “It still sucks.”

  “I know. That connection. It’s hard to replace. I can’t tell you how many times last spring I’d hang out all night with Bryce, talking about Cindy. It was like, that friendship, that closeness with Bryce. That was my replacement.”

  I looked him straight in the eye, not feeling at all ashamed. “Yeah, I feel in a lot of ways closer to you than I ever did to Claire Olivia.”

  He smiled and his face reddened a little. “Yeah. That’s not the kind of thing that people talk about too much, but I get it. It’s, like, a bromance.”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “That’s it. A bromance. I love that. I love you, man!”

  “I love you too, man,” he said, and I went over to the bed and collapsed down next to him as a joke.

  Ben laughed, and put his arm around me, also as a joke, and it felt so, so right. I felt like I could almost lose my mind in happiness, being there with his arm around me. I didn’t move, and soon he just kept it there, and we lay there, not saying anything.

  “Men in India hold hands walking down the street,” Ben said, his voice right up against my ear.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s just part of their culture. They don’t, you know, do things sexually. They just hold hands. Here, that would be, like, weird.”

  “Yeah. We Americans are so uptight,” I said. “Why does everyone have to make everything into such a huge deal? Why do we have to label everything?”

  We were silent again, except for my pounding heart, and the jitter in my throat, the feeling of waves crashing over my head — waves of some alien feeling that felt ridiculously good. Was this love? Was I in love with Ben? Because whatever I felt was everywhere in my body and it was something I wanted more of, immediately. I so wanted to tell Ben everything about everything, and how I once had an almost boyfriend, but that I would have traded that entire experience for two seconds of this.

  But of course I couldn’t tell him that. Which sucked. It was hard not to be able to share the entire truth about my past with Ben. Maybe someday I’d be able to.

  “Thanks, Ben,” I said finally, when I was sure my voice wouldn’t crack. “You may be the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  After a few unbearable moments, Ben replied: “You too.”

  THE THIRD, FOURTH, and fifth times Clay came over, we started with chemistry, and after a while, there was his touch, never going past where it had the time before. And then talking. I learned that Clay was one-eighth Native American and mostly French Canadian, that he had gone to science camp the previous summer, that he liked to play Ping-Pong, and that his favorite food was Brie cheese. Every fact led to follow-up questions, like they were these tender morsels of truth that needed further dissection, and a couple of times, I told him things about me. He didn’t ask questions back, and I wasn’t sure if he was even listening until the fifth visit, when he referenced the fact that I had gone to Jarrow Montessori School for elementary school. I had mentioned that the previous time.

  He’s just weird, I realized. It’s not that he doesn’t listen, or he doesn’t care. He just has his own way of e
xpressing himself.

  The sixth time, though, things went a little differently.

  It started out the same: hovering over my book, me talking about oxidation and reduction, and then isotopes and ions, his finger straying to my thigh, his breath in my ear. Then I asked him a question about the extra outer electron that sodium has, which chlorine could use, and when he didn’t answer, I looked up at him.

  He was staring into my eyes, and I felt that shivery thing that happens when you look in someone’s eyes and you get goose bumps because you’re gaining access.

  I stopped talking, and I stared back. I wanted to tell him how perfectly eager and scared his eyes were, but I didn’t get a chance, because in barely a second his face was mashed into mine.

  I couldn’t even breathe. His lips pressed into my lips, and even though it was awkward and I didn’t want my first kiss to be like that, I let it go because I didn’t want to embarrass him, and I knew how hard it must have been to get up the nerve to kiss me. His mouth tasted like stale mint and peanuts.

  So I kissed him back, and I grabbed the back of his neck. When I did that, he grabbed the back of mine. We stood at the same time, our faces still mashed together, and the room seemed to spin as we made our way to the bed.

  There was a knock on the door. The unlocked door.

  “Don’t come in!” I yelled, before I could think. Clay looked at me, horrified, and then looked at the door. He started to jump up.

  My mother sounded amused when she said, “Sorry to interrupt.”

  And she walked away. We could hear her steps as she went down the hall, and both of us stood very still. When there was no more sound, I collapsed onto my back on the bed and sighed.

  “That was close,” Clay said.

  I said back, “She probably would have told us we were doing it wrong.”

  Clay didn’t laugh. That line would have killed with Claire Olivia, but he just looked at me like I was some unusual coral formation at the bottom of the ocean, something mildly interesting but beyond his understanding. I realized he really didn’t know that much about me, and my family, and my sense of humor.

  Still, I jumped up and locked the door.

  We went back to kissing, and though my head wasn’t in it at first, soon I relaxed and began to enjoy the feel of his mouth against mine. Then we went further.

  It was not all I expected it to be.

  After, we lay there on my bed, shirtless, side by side, not touching. A bubble of some unpleasant feeling pressed on my rib cage.

  “It’s my mother’s twenty-fifth anniversary of teaching Jazzercise tomorrow,” he said, as if that was a normal thing to say after fooling around.

  And the thing is, there was no tone at all, nothing sarcastic or ironic or anything in his voice, just a flat statement, and I thought, What am I doing?

  Here was this guy who had wormed his way into my life, and at first, his non sequitur stories had been cute. But minutes after the first time I had ever kissed a guy, not to mention gone beyond kissing, they were annoying. I mean, he talked and talked about nothing, and he rarely asked me a question, and what kind of guy doesn’t ask you about you, ever? Why was I making excuses for bad behavior? I wondered if I should start talking about myself like he had, if I could ever do that to a person: just enter their life and start talking about myself and never ask any questions. I didn’t think so.

  I didn’t respond to his Jazzercise comment, and eventually we dressed and packed up his books and I walked him downstairs. No kiss, but as we got to the door, he reached back and touched my hand, and then grasped it. It caught me off guard, as usual with Clay.

  “You’re great,” he said, and at first I thought maybe he said, “You were great,” but when I played it back through my mind, I was pretty sure he was making a comment about how he felt about me. Pretty certain, at least.

  I lingered in the foyer for a bit after he left, feeling totally different in my skin. I hoped my mom would come down, because I needed to talk to her. I was about to give up when I heard her on the stairs.

  “There you are,” she said, all smiles. And then she did the most amazing thing. She came over and hugged me, which was exactly what I needed her to do.

  “Thanks,” I said into her shoulder. I was glad I didn’t have to tell her what had just happened. There are some perks to having a mom like mine.

  She took me by the hand and led me to the couch, and then we sat there and didn’t say much for a while.

  “We didn’t do that much.”

  She didn’t react. I realized that she hadn’t asked.

  “It was weird,” I said, staring off into space.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I thought I’d feel, like, very adult after. I don’t.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. Let down.”

  She gave me her sympathetic look, and I felt tears welling in my eyes. I didn’t want to cry but part of me needed to, and I wasn’t exactly sure why.

  “His mom teaches Jazzercise.”

  She looked at me and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, What am I supposed to do with this information?

  “Thank you!” I said. “Exactly. He tells me random, weird things. We haven’t ever had a normal conversation. He never asks me anything.”

  “Perhaps he’s autistic?”

  I shrugged.

  “It doesn’t sound like you have such a great connection.”

  I knew that she was right, obviously. But part of me didn’t want to. I wanted to have someone to call my own so badly that I just couldn’t let it go. Clay was a riddle wrapped in another less impressive riddle. Maybe he was a fixer-upper. Maybe with a little work?

  “He has his good qualities. He’s really sweet. He’s just … in the closet.”

  “Well, perhaps you can help him come out.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s not ready. And I don’t think he’s my boyfriend. I thought he was, but now I don’t even know. Why does this all have to be so hard?”

  She laughed, not in a mean way. “Experimentation is the way we learn about who we are and who we want to be with. Before your dad, I tried on quite a few boys in high school and my first year in college.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, trying to head off a conversation about my mother’s swinging days.

  She sighed. “I’m sorry, Rafe. I know you’re not comfortable yet with sexuality. Someday you will be. Someday, you’ll be glad that your parents are an open book.”

  “Someday I’ll move far, far away,” I replied, and she laughed.

  Rafe,

  I found it interesting that you made the choice to go out of scene and into exposition when the scene got intimate. Good instinct, I think. But why did you decide to leave scene again after the Jazzercize comment? Such a crucial moment, and you chose to stay in your head through it just about until Clay left. What do you gain as a writer by doing that? What do you stand to lose by showing the scene and letting the reader come to his or her own conclusion rather than telling us what to think about Clay and Rafe?

  — Mr. Scarborough

  As the trees went from fiery yellow and orange to bare, Bryce’s desk became my desk, Bryce’s bed my bed. Ben and I joked, we talked out the serious stuff, and sometimes we even cried, like when he told me about his uncle’s death the year before. Often we’d just sit up at night and talk until three or four in the morning. These were my favorite nights ever, even better than when I’d done the same thing on weekends with Claire Olivia.

  “What do you want?” Ben asked me one night, as we lay across the room from each other in our beds.

  I cracked up. “General much?” I asked.

  He didn’t laugh back. “I mean, like, in the future. If you could come up with a perfect scenario for what your life would be, what would it be?”

  The question stole my breath. The answer was obvious to me. You. You and me. Us.

  “You first,” I said.

  He exhaled. “Maybe a house
out in the woods somewhere in Vermont or Maine. You know. Somewhere with fewer people because people aren’t my favorite, present company excluded. A black lab who likes to take long walks. A wife — probably not Cindy — who likes to cook lots of unusual meals, someone funny and interesting but also serious, you know? With dark hair and pretty eyes and … you know … the other stuff too … goin’ on or whatever.”

  I laughed. “You’re so hip-hop.”

  “I know,” Ben said. “Anyway, probably a couple kids. And at night we don’t watch TV, but we sit in the wood-paneled living room as a family and there’s a fire in the fireplace, and we read books and we share about what we’re reading. Of course, you live nearby with your family.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “What about you?” Ben asked.

  I paused to think. I’d had so many fantasies about us together in the future, just about every night, and it was hard to pick just one. Would we go to college together and then settle down in the country, somewhere out here in Massachusetts? Or after our college years, would I take him back to Boulder and we’d live in the mountains together? Whatever fantasy I chose, it was off-limits to Ben.

  “Pretty much the same.”

  “It’s nice, dreaming about stuff like that, isn’t it?” Ben said. “Makes me feel so peaceful.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I replied, feeling a lot less peaceful inside.

  “So can I tell you something weird?” he asked, after a long silence.

  “Always,” I said. I turned and faced him in the darkness. Even with the moonlight I could barely make him out across the room.

  “The first time I had sex with Cindy, I cried,” Ben said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “It was, like, I don’t know, there’s naked and then there’s naked, you know?”

  “Not sure I follow?” I said, feeling British as I said it. Sometimes when I say a sentence I feel like I’m trying to be a different person entirely, and this was one of those times.

  “I mean, I’d been naked with her before. But this was us totally without any barriers at all. And then to actually be … you know … in her? That was like … You know how the guys talk about sex like it’s this game? It wasn’t a game to me, Rafe. It was, like, this melding. And I felt responsible for her at that moment, you know? Maybe that’s not the right word. But I just felt very open in this incredible way, and I think for me that’s the part I liked the most about it. And I would never tell her this, but in the darkness I cried a bit. Or I teared up.”