“He didn’t care about that, Stick, you know that. He loved you.”
Stick shakes his head. “No.”
“Yes. He did. It doesn’t matter what you are, he loved you either way.” I say it with such certainty like I know it to be true and I think it is, or I want it to be. For me, too.
“So, are you? Gay?” He wipes his face and sweeps his hair and his pink lips are trembling. “I mean, you’re my friend no matter what, I just need to know.”
Stick blinks a bunch of times in a row but his eyes are clear when he stops. I reach for my leg and pinch at the skin. I want him to know. I want to tell him everything.
“A couple years ago, I was watching ESPN with my dad,” I say, “and you remember that college football player that came out—he was like the first pro athlete, or potential pro athlete to come out of the closet and it was such a big deal, like for weeks it was a thing, and all I can remember is when my dad saw the story he said out loud that he ‘talks like a faggot’.”
Stick nods but his face is clenched. I never told this to anyone before. I never thought I could.
“And my dad’s not religious like your father and I don’t think he would wish violence on gays or anything but he gets all old school Puerto Rican when it comes to stuff like that—like you got to be a man, a real man, you can’t be some gay lisping dude like on TV.”
I focus on his lips, not his eyes. They’re pink and broken.
“I don’t know how to tell him I’m gay.”
The colors on the screen spin across Stick’s face and he hesitates. I can’t gauge a reaction. My legs are shaking and my wrist is throbbing and I think this was a test and I failed, he’s sober now and he wanted to know for sure that I’m gay so he can stop hanging out with me. He blinks.
“Do you think he suspects?”
I shake my head. Sharp nails shoot up from my wrist.
“But maybe he does, you know. Maybe all that baseball stuff and making you go to camp is his way of turning you into a man or something. Like all the sports might keep you from being gay.”
“I’m not sure spending that much time in a locker room around sweaty boys is the best prevention,” I say with a half-hearted laugh.
Stick smiles, the tears now faded into brown smudges on his skin. His eyes are bright in the TV lights, and I reach for the bag for more glue.
“So, you’re gay?”
“Yeah.” I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t even hesitate.
“Okay.”
I squish the bag around my mouth to take another hit, long enough to ask him back.
“What about you?”
“I don’t know,” Stick says. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
I set down the glue and reach out with my wrist, the ripped bandage and the dried blood on my skin, bridging the gap between us. “Do you think about me?”
“Sometimes.”
“Really?”
He nods. It’s not a ‘no’ but it’s not quite a yes and I want a yes right now. I’m ripping out my guts and dropping them on the cushions and the glue is spinning webs through my head. I will be okay.
“Could we try again?” I say. “Kissing?”
Everything.
“Matt, I just—” Stick turns away at first, but he looks back. “How would that even work?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, after the kissing, how would that work?”
His legs are shaking, rattling the couch now, and his eyes are clear like he’s sober, but I don’t know how he’s sober. I just want to kiss him.
“Come on, Matt, think about it. We hang out all the time, right? Don’t you think it would be weird if we kept making out?”
I shake my head and I almost want to laugh but he’s not laughing, and I guess he’s right, it is weird. But we nearly got our heads chopped off by a machete-wielding maniac tonight, so I don’t know if it matters.
“I guess. But didn’t you like it?”
“Yeah, I mean … yeah,” he says.
I inch closer on the couch and push the bag to the floor.
“But what if something goes wrong—you know, like that—” MTV must have switched over to Teen Mom because there’s a pregnant teen yelling at her baby daddy on the screen. “People in relationships fight all the time. Like my parents. Or yours.”
“Yeah but they’re straight. It’s different in the gay world.”
“Oh yeah? You know about the gay world?”
I blush a bit but relax into a smile. “No.”
“I’m serious, Matt, if something went wrong and we got in a huge fight over something stupid and I lost you—our friendship.” He reaches out to touch my knee. “I can’t risk losing you right now. Not with what’s going on with my family.”
The tears start to seep back into his eyes and maybe he’s right, maybe I’m just being selfish about wanting to kiss him, with the way his hair sits lopsided across his face, so perfectly placed. Fuck. Teen Mom is yelling at Teen Dad and I can’t process this, any of this, we just came out to each other, fully out to one another, and we need to be kissing. I don’t know why we’re not kissing. I take his hand into mine. It feels warm against my skin.
“What about a trial?” I say. “A one-week trial.”
“A trial for what?”
“We try this for a week, like we really try dating for a single week and if anything happens, if either of us wants to stop or thinks it’s too weird then we call it quits, no harm no foul and we go back to being just friends.”
He looks at me like he’s considering. His hand is tucked into my skin.
“You could do that?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“No, I’m serious, Matt, if we went out for a week, and then I said let’s just be friends, you’d be okay with that?”
“Yeah.” I squeeze on his hand so hard that he looks. “I don’t want to lose our friendship either. No matter what.”
Stick finds my eyes and he sees I’m not lying, I’m way too high to even try and his skin is soft on my skin.
“You really want to do this?” he says.
I nod. And then the most awkward embrace that ever occurred between two people ends with us falling off the couch in a clumsy crash to the floor, wrestling on the ragged carpeting in front of the television.
We grapple for a bit and then we’re face to face beneath the screen and then we’re kissing, pent-up kissing, mashing lips against lips like deranged sex addicts, and it’s perfect. Everything is perfect. His tight smooth body is pressed against my body and it’s perfect.
I will be okay. EVERYTHING.
NINE
TONIGHT IS OUR FIRST DATE. Our first official date. I’m kind of excited.
I’M GOING ON A DATE WITH STICK TONIGHT HOLY SHIT.
Yeah, I’m a little excited.
Oh, and I have a broken wrist. The cast runs three-quarters of the way down my forearm to the elbow, extending to the knuckles, but my fingers dangle free.
We went to the doctor on Sunday, after the swelling had ballooned to twice its size overnight, and the official diagnosis is a Colles’ fracture of the left wrist. But the prognosis is good—the bone fractured without displacement and the doctor expected a full recovery without surgery. We needed to wait for the swelling to go down before the cast was applied. I’ll have it on at least six weeks.
But did I mention the date with Stick? Yeah, you know, no big deal, just a real-live boy-on-boy date, for the first time in my life, and I’ve only obsessed about Stick since the moment I met him. I can’t believe how much this is amazing.
The only person I’d ever dated was Monica Hopman in the eighth grade, after I found out from her brother in the most unromantic way that “she wanted my body,” which I didn’t quite get since we were friends and we used to watch Naruto in my living room and joke about how dumb it was that our classmates became obsessed with the opposite sex. Then all of a sudden her brother broke the news that she wanted me, as more th
an a friend. We went to the spring dance together and I liked having a girlfriend and I liked the way she’d stop by my locker every morning before classes and all her friends would giggle when they passed, I almost didn’t mind that she was a girl. But she kept trying to kiss me—this really aggressive kissing, and she always wanted more. She said I never did. We broke up before I moved to Woodbridge, and I haven’t heard from her since.
But tonight I have a date with Stick.
I’M GOING ON A DATE WITH STICK!
Did I mention I was excited?
Stick and I talked last night before I went to sleep, a couple hours of pressing conversation, joking and laughter and in-depth exchanges like we’re already dating and it’s weird—he’s right, it is weird, we’ve spent every day together for the past year but this was different. Better. I had the most amazing dreams.
“What did the doctor say?”
Dad changed into a T-shirt and shorts after work, like he’s planning to work on the new shed tonight, and I hope he isn’t going to ask me for help. I have a date. I HAVE A DATE WITH STICK! Oh, and a broken wrist.
“It’ll be on six to ten weeks, depending on how it heals.”
“Are you serious?” He looks to my mom across the kitchen table. “Is he serious?”
“That’s what he told us,” she says. Mom took me to the doctor while Dad was at work and the casting was pretty painful, this whole week has been an incessant ball of ache since the slide on Saturday but it’s not as bad now that the bone is set, and the thirty-eight Motrins I swallowed after the doctor’s visit are still in effect.
“And when can you play again?”
He doesn’t care about the pain. Or the heavy-ass cast I’ll need to drag around the next six weeks. But God forbid I miss any baseball.
“I think he said I could do some exercises like one or two months after the cast is removed.”
“You ‘think’?” He glares at me, his default setting for his home-from-work state. “What did he say?” he asks my mom.
“That’s what he said.” Mom’s stationed at the stove pan-frying chicken in butter and olive oil, thin-sliced and overcooked. “He might be able to play sports three months from now, I think.”
“You ‘think’ too? Lot of thinking going on at that doctor’s office.” Dad stands up from the table and moves over to the bar in the corner of the kitchen. “Well there goes the fall season.”
I glance at the phone to see if Stick texted. The plan is for his sister Janice to drive us to Menlo Park Mall like she’s done before so it won’t be strange, it’ll be so normal it’s boring, just two straight friends seeing the latest Marvel movie and only Stick and I will know we’re actually on a date. My dad fills his glass with a long pull from the vodka bottle then a couple cubes of ice, which he lets melt at the table before taking a drink.
“This was already discussed,” Mom says, stacking the chicken on paper-towel plates. “We knew it would be a long recovery.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dad says, returning to his seat across from me. “Did you look for work today?”
“No.” Umm, I was at the doctor’s office all day and I don’t know where I could work with this cast on my arm anyway and it’s not exactly the look I intended for my first date with Stick but okay, be a dick about it. I’m going on a date with Stick. Dad being an asshole isn’t going to ruin my mood.
“What are you smiling about?” Dad sets down his drink. I didn’t realize I was smiling. “If you’re not playing baseball, you’re getting a job.”
“Fine,” I say. I don’t have the energy to fight.
“Nico, dinner’s ready!” Mom shouts across the house, through the ceiling to his bedroom.
“There’s no way you’re spending the rest of this summer watching those dumb cartoons in the basement,” Dad says. “You’ll build that shed yourself if you can’t find a job.”
“Okay.” The summer’s only got one month left and he’s just being an asshole because I’m happy. I’ve been texting Stick one-handed all day as we planned out our evening.
“Can you get your brother?” Mom says as she sets a bowl of salad at the center of the table.
“Sure.” I’ve already perfected one-handed texting.
“Who the hell breaks their wrist sliding into second?” Dad says, up and out of his seat to fill his glass again. “The other parents must think you’re retarded.”
“Jay stop,” Mom says, sharp and harsh but it won’t stop. It never stops. She does her best when he gets crazy like this, but he hates that she sticks up for us and he hates that we love her more than him. I really do hate him sometimes.
“Why do you always coddle them?” Dad says but Mom doesn’t respond, she’s back at the stove preparing our plates as Nico tumbles down the stairs to join us.
Mom feeds Dad first, a plate of the chicken with a sweet potato on the side, then Nico and me, fries as a substitute and not as much chicken, I’m too nervous to eat and Nico is twelve, wolfing down the food to get back to his video games.
“So, we have good news for you guys,” Mom says, taking a seat at the end of the table while my father jumps up to refill his glass.
“You know how we have to skip vacation this year because of the new house and the move and your braces”—she nods at Nico, still eating at top speed—“and I just got my paycheck for the summer and it wasn’t what we were expecting.”
We heard this all before, last week at dinner, and I’m still annoyed that Nico’s mouth is fucked-up enough to get braces but mine was fine, perfectly fine, even as the tooth to the right of the center pushes on top of its neighbor each day.
“So we’re going to pool all our money from this year and save up for the next year and take you guys back to Disney World.”
“No way!” Nico shouts.
“Yeah. Way,” Mom says and she laughs, that loud cackling cough you can hear down the block. “I think you’ll like it even more now that you’re older.”
“That’s so cool,” Nico says. He’s beaming.
Last time we went Nico was little and no one would ride on the big rides with Dad except me so we spent the day on the toughest roller coasters and the Tower of Terror and avoided the lame rides for the women and children, Dad said, like he was proud of me.
“I knew you’d be excited. How about you, Matt?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Awesome.” And it will be awesome, although I don’t really want to spend a week away from Stick.
“Don’t sound so excited,” Mom says.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She reaches over and rubs Nico’s head and Dad finds the remote for the television.
“When would we go?” Nico asks, half-eaten fries sticking out of his braces. I love the little dude, I really do, but he’s so gross it’s disgusting.
“Next August, when I’m off school again.”
“Can I go on all the rides now?”
“Yeah, you’re old enough,” Dad says. “You’ve been old enough. Don’t you go on all the rides at Great Adventure?”
We’re not too far from Six Flags and we used to go all the time but it’s less often now because of baseball and Mom working every summer. She said we could go this month, now that she’s done with school and I’m finished with baseball—at least into the fall and maybe longer, the doctor wouldn’t even guess when I could grip a bat again. Mom said we should keep that from Dad for now.
The phone rings and Mom gets up to answer. Stick’s supposed to text when they’re coming over and I’m already ready, or mostly ready, I have my outfit picked out and laid out on my bed I just need to change—I didn’t want to get dressed for dinner and arouse suspicion, but I don’t want to wear a T-shirt and shorts like every other day because this isn’t every day, this is special. This is everything.
“Nico, come here,” Mom calls from across the kitchen. “It’s your coach.”
Dad perks up from his plate, but Nico just stares, like why the hell is the coach calling
him?
“Go answer the phone,” Dad says, and Nico jumps out of his seat. Mom and Dad listen intently but it’s a lot of “yeah”s and “okays”s and I rip through several fries on my plate.
“What did he say? Is it about the travel team?” Dad asks, standing up now.
“Yeah. He says I made it.”
“That’s my boy,” Dad practically screams. “Finally some good news in this house.”
He doesn’t look at me, he’s not that obvious, but I know what he means. Mom gets the rest of the details from the coach and gives Nico a hug and the three of them gather in a semi-circle in the kitchen, away from me.
“When did he say it starts?” Dad asks and my phone buzzes, it’s Stick texting so I stop paying attention.
I’m getting ready now. Be over in twenty?
“That’s really great, Nico, I’m proud of you,” Mom says. OK. I’ll get ready, too.
I’m already showered—which was a bit of an ordeal with the whole wrapping my wrist in a garbage bag to keep the cast from getting wet, but it’s been several days and I needed it bad, even Nico was shooting me looks like I stink. But I’m showered and I spent thirty minutes on my hair, testing different looks with different gels and washing them out and combing again which is tough with one hand but I finally settled on parting it to the left, like it always is.
“See what bearing down at practices does,” Dad says and I didn’t quite catch the rest of the conversation but I’m sure it’s an attack on me. Asshole. I made the same travel team in South Brunswick when I was Nico’s age.
Awesome, Stick says.
I ignore my dad and his stupid smirking face. I have a date with Stick, and he said it was ‘awesome’. I step away from the table and move to the edge of the room.
“Where are you going?” Dad asks, but I don’t answer. I just walk away.
TEN
JANICE KNEW SOMETHING was up, either from the way we were dressed or the way we were acting, not casual like usual, but this isn’t usual. Stick’s dressed in pressed jeans and a button-down shirt and the sweeping poof of his hair is tamped into place by some kind of spray so he looks perfect, better than his usual perfect—is it possible to be better than perfect?—maybe this is a math experiment on the limits of absolutes like something in Calculus but I know nothing about Calculus—you know nothing, Jon Snow!—I just know I’m not making sense, I can’t get my mind to focus on anything for more than a second, not with Stick beside me in the movie theater, freshly pressed jeans touching my legs.
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