Craig is upset, but not surprised, that his mother hasn’t returned. That must have been his father’s order. To ignore. To deny.
He could text her. He could beg her to come back. He could ask her what’s going on.
But he stops himself. His parents have to figure it out themselves. Because he’s not the one with the problem—they are.
Harry senses him drifting. He pulls Craig closer. Kisses him like he means it. Kisses him to draw him back.
People cheer. But not everyone. At this point there are people in the crowd who aren’t smiling at all. Their disgust would be visible to anyone next to them, if the people next to them were watching. But for now they are invisible—except to us. We see them, and we have no doubt they will not stay invisible. Not for long.
The night pushes on.
“Don’t mind the mess,” Julian says as he turns the key in the door.
Cooper promises he won’t. He’d bet his room is messier, anyway.
Sure enough, when he gets in the apartment, he doesn’t know what Julian’s talking about. Everything seems to be in order. It’s not that big a place, but it’s not like there’s underwear everywhere, or pipes leaking through the ceiling. There are canvases in various states of completion all over the living room.
Julian sees Cooper looking, and feels the need to explain. “It’s just the way I work—I’ll spend an hour on one thing, then switch to something else, then switch again. I’m usually working on at least twenty paintings at the same time. Very ADD, I know. But I’ve tried doing it the other way, and the paintings get tired.”
Cooper gestures at the painting on the easel. “Is that your mom or something?”
Julian blushes. “No. It’s actually Joni Mitchell. I listen to her a lot when I paint, so I figured I’d return the favor. Although I’m not sure she’d appreciate the gesture. Did you know she’s a painter, too?”
Cooper clearly has no idea what Julian’s talking about, and when Julian realizes this, he blushes further.
“I’m being a bad host,” he says. “I haven’t even offered you a drink yet, Drake. What do you want?”
Cooper almost trips up on that Drake—he’s forgotten that’s his name right now. But he recovers quickly, and asks for a Jack and Coke. He’s never really had a drink with anyone else before, just in the company of his dad’s liquor cabinet when his parents have been away. Jack and Coke is the first thing that comes to his mind.
“It might have to be a Jack and Diet Coke,” Julian says. “Let me check.” He goes into the kitchen and yells out, “Yeah, Diet Coke.”
“That’s fine!” Cooper yells back.
Cooper can hear the ice maker doing its work, then the clink of ice cubes being dropped into glasses, and the release of the Diet Coke bottle when its cap is turned. He looks at some of the paintings and likes them more than he thought he would. Julian isn’t bad at all. And there’s something he likes about the way all of the paintings are unfinished. It seems more real that way. People are caught between being sketches and being complete. Cooper has no idea who any of them are. But he doesn’t expect to, so that’s okay. There’s one that looks like it could be his English teacher from eighth grade. But he’s sure it probably isn’t, and he barely remembers her, anyway.
Julian comes in with two glasses of the same drink. Cooper likes the taste of his—there’s just the right balance, the Jack tasting like alcoholic caramel at the core of the chemical Diet Coke fizz. Julian asks him who his favorite painter is, and Cooper says Picasso, because that’s the first painter he can think of. Then Julian asks him what his favorite period of Picasso’s is, and from the recesses of his mind, the phrase blue period rises, so that’s his answer, and from Julian’s pleased reaction, he can tell it’s a good one.
Julian goes off on a tangent about how the Impressionists are overappreciated by the general population, which leads to them being underappreciated by art snobs. Cooper polishes off his drink and wants Julian to stop talking about Monet, because it wasn’t an art appreciation app they met on, it was a sex app. Julian realizes he’s lost Cooper and ties off the sentence he’s speaking, then takes a sip of his own quarter-empty drink. “Let me put on some music,” he says, and asks if Cooper has any requests. Cooper says whatever is fine with him, then is impressed when Julian goes over to his computer and puts on some Arcade Fire.
“I like them,” Cooper says, and even though it’s just three words, he feels strange saying them, as if he’s just given something away.
“Me too,” Julian says, and takes another sip.
Cooper wants something to start, and he wants it to start now. So he moves closer to Julian. Much closer. Undeniably closer. Julian is about to begin a sentence, but Cooper’s movement blocks it. Cooper thinks: This is what we’re after, isn’t it? He puts his glass down, careful not to put it too close to any of the paintings. It’s time to move in. He’s seen so many scenes of guys doing this—gotten hard to them doing this, jerked off to them doing this. Now here it is. Julian’s got a great body, a nice face. Cooper wants to see what will happen, wants to see if this changes anything. Julian’s putting down his own drink, running his hand down Cooper’s arm. Cooper knows he has him, knows he has it. He reaches out and puts his hand on the side of Julian’s neck. Leans in. And here it is, them pressing their mouths together, pressing their bodies together. Cooper wants it so badly, wants something, and he doesn’t want to stop for breath, he wants to keep going and going. It’s Julian who pulls away for a second, who actually asks if this is okay. And Cooper says yes, of course it’s okay, and then they’re pressing back in. It’s what he thought it would be and it’s not what he’d thought it would be, because Julian is gentler than he imagined a stranger would be, and when Cooper tries to push it harder, Julian slows it down. It’s a subtle disagreement, and they play it like the game it is. Cooper wants to pull him down to the couch, wants to get him horizontal, but the couch is covered in paintings, so he lets it go on for a little bit longer, then surfaces and asks, “The bedroom?” And when Julian gives him a surprised look, he says, “I don’t want to crush your paintings.” Julian smiles at that, takes him by the hand, and they’re in the tiny bedroom, still standing up and kissing, so Cooper topples them over onto the bed. Julian laughs, and Cooper kisses that laugh. It goes away, the laugh, and instead there are hands exploring—Cooper, not knowing any better, moves out of sequence, goes right for the groin, and Julian pulls away, directs him back above the waist, but Cooper’s not satisfied, Cooper’s not feeling what he wants to feel. He retreats for a few minutes, kissing with him on top, then rolling them over so they’re kissing with him on the bottom, groins touching now, him feeling what’s going on beneath Julian’s jeans, then rolling over again so he can take off his shirt and then take off Julian’s shirt. Now it’s skin on skin, sweat on sweat, and it’s hot, it’s really hot, but Cooper’s still not feeling what he wants to feel—it still feels empty to him—he’s still feeling empty—so he kisses Julian harder, moves his hands down there, and Julian whispers, “Not yet,” and Cooper feels he can’t wait much longer, it’s going too slow and he wants it to be fast enough that he doesn’t feel anything else, doesn’t think anything else, because isn’t that what sex is supposed to be like, isn’t it supposed to be a form of oblivion, and he’s not there yet—not there—and Julian is slowing things down again, easing things down, and Cooper doesn’t understand why they’re not naked yet, so he moves to Julian’s belt, but Julian moves them around so it’s impossible to undo the buckle. Cooper goes for the buttons on his own jeans, only Julian takes his hand, forces his hands up so they’re over his head, and Cooper likes the strong movement of that, likes the force, feels Julian’s chest hair against his bare chest, gasps involuntarily when Julian kisses his neck, then the intersection of his neck and his shoulder blade, a spot he didn’t even know he had. He wants more, even more, so he bends them so they’re side by side, moves his hands down, disengages them from Julian’s, starts innocentl
y enough at his shoulders, but then thrusts them down, down, and Julian’s hands are there again, blocking him. Julian says, “Let’s go a little slower. It’s just the first date.” And Cooper wants to tell him they’re only going to have a first date, so they might as well go all the way, might as well see what’s going on under those jeans. If this were porn, they’d be naked by now, they’d be blowing each other. But of course he doesn’t say that, doesn’t say this is the only date they’re going to have, doesn’t want to end things entirely, wants to deny that maybe somewhere in his mind he was hoping he would find a boyfriend tonight, because everybody knows you don’t go on a sex app to find a boyfriend, and Julian would never want to be with him, anyway, because Julian thinks that right now he’s tonguing the nipple of a nineteen-year-old college student with two roommates back home, a nineteen-year-old college student who has his shit together, and Cooper’s thinking, Where’s the oblivion? because now even his body is starting to fall out of it, and that’s ridiculous because he’s a seventeen-year-old boy and a breeze can make him hard, and while he’s still hard, he feels like it’s not going to go anywhere, and now Julian realizes they’ve fallen out of step, and he curls away, lies back on a pillow, leans on his side and strokes Cooper’s shoulder, touches Cooper’s cheek, says, “You’re so lovely,” and Cooper doesn’t want to be lovely, he doesn’t want to be a painting, he wants to be screwing himself into oblivion, and he knows, completely knows, that Julian is not the guy for the job. In fact, the only guy for the job would probably be someone who didn’t give a shit at all about him, and that would only be worse. So this is one path ended. This is one relief crossed out. Julian asks, “Are you okay?” And Cooper says he’s great, because what’s one more empty lie? Julian kisses him again, and then they exist like that, half entwined, Julian touching his hair, his chest. Breathing softly, trying to wrap them inside something softer than regular life. Cooper knows he should feel lovely, or at least relaxed. But lying there, he feels like he’s made of stone. Or no, not even stone. He feels like flesh. Not skin, not heartbeat. Just flesh. Julian is treating him like someone special, but Julian doesn’t know anything at all, because Cooper’s a piece of shit, and Julian’s lying there, admiring it.
He closes his eyes, feels the touch, but not any sensation from it. Time expands, and then he opens his eyes and looks at the clock and it contracts. Cooper must have slept for a little bit. Julian must have joined him. Now Cooper startles awake, and Julian shifts beside him. “What time is it?” Julian mumbles, and then they see what time it is, which is later than either of them want it to be. “We must have drifted off,” Julian says with a smile. He stands up, puts his shirt on, then warns Cooper before he turns on the light. “I think we need to call it a night,” Julian tells him. “I have first shift tomorrow morning—I have to get up at five-thirty. So I should probably get to sleep. Or get back to sleep, as the case may be. Let me drive you back to your car. Or walk you back.”
The thought of his car depresses him. But even so, Cooper cannot believe what he says next. Even as the words are leaving his lips, he cannot believe he is saying them. He hates himself deeply for saying them. They make him feel like he’s nine.
“Could I maybe stay here tonight?” he asks.
Julian is not expecting this. He looks at Cooper’s shirt, tangled on the floor.
“Not this time, okay?” he says. “I know it sounds silly, but that’s a big step for me. Plus, I have to get up so damn early. Another time.”
The next words that want to emerge from Cooper’s mouth are I can sleep on the couch. But this time he manages to trap them, swallow them back down. Were he a better liar, he could probably craft a story to justify the statement (a wild party in the dorm, a roommate’s boyfriend or girlfriend over, a feeling the Jack and Coke is hitting him too hard to drive). But the lies are as inaccessible to him as the truth is to Julian.
Cooper reaches down for his shirt and puts it on, then replaces the change that fell out of his pocket as he and Julian were rolling around. He tells Julian he doesn’t need to drive him or walk him to his car. He says he could use the walk, and that he doesn’t have nearly as early a start as Julian does. Julian hasn’t put on his shoes yet, and because of this, and because Cooper doesn’t really look like he wants the company, he backs down. Together they walk out of the bedroom, to the front door. Julian kisses him again, but Cooper barely feels it at this point. Before Julian opens the door, he asks Cooper for his phone number. Cooper gives him a fake.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” Julian says in parting.
“Yeah, thanks,” Cooper replies. Then he’s out the door.
For a moment when he gets outside, the air feels good. But that’s only because he isn’t thinking about anything else.
Then he starts to think about other things, and he doesn’t feel good. The noise has come to claim him again. The flat, dead noise.
We watch as Julian takes the two glasses into the kitchen, the ice cubes melted now. We watch as he puts them in the sink, then stands over the sink, both hands on the counter, wondering what just happened.
Miles away, Peter and Neil are feeling much more certainty. After dinner, they hid in the basement and made out for a while—an intense interlude that came to a mutually pleasing conclusion. Then they went online and chatted with friends, many of whom were also watching the Big Kiss. Finally, it was time for Neil to head home, so now they are saying their usual goodnights: Peter in his boxers, Neil in his pajamas.
“I could kiss you for hours and still be on my feet,” Peter says.
“Likewise,” Neil says.
Then they wave, and sign off into slumber.
Ryan texts Avery to say goodnight, and asks him what he’s doing tomorrow. Would he be up for another drive?
Avery has about a million other things to do, but of course he says he’s free. Completely free.
He should be floating from the day, but a look in the mirror drags him down. He has a full-length mirror in his bedroom, and it is often his enemy. Tonight he looks into it and tries to see what Ryan sees, and all he gets in return is disappointment. He’s worked so hard to change his body, to make it the right body, but he can’t come close to loving it. He thinks it’s because he was born in the wrong body, but we want to whisper in his ears that many of us were born in the right bodies and still felt foreign inside them, felt betrayed. We completely misunderstood our bodies. We punished them, berated them, held them to an Olympian ideal that was deeply unfair to them. We loathed the hair in some places and the lack of hair in others. We wanted everything to be tighter, stronger, harder, faster. We rarely recognized our own beauty unless someone else was recognizing it for us. We starved or we pushed or we hid or we paraded, and there was always another body we thought was better than ours. There was always something wrong, most of the time numerous things wrong. When we were healthy, we were ignorant. We could never be content within our own skin.
Breathe, we want to tell Avery. Feel yourself breathe. Because that is as much a part of your body as anything else.
Avery, we whisper, you are a marvel.
And he is. He may never believe it, but he is.
It’s eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. Since there is rarely anything to do on a Saturday night in Harry and Craig’s town, a lot of people are dropping by the lawn of the high school to see the two boys kissing. A multitude of cell phone pictures is being taken—the disposable commemoration of this day and age. Sometimes girls have to shush their drunken boyfriends, who want to say something inappropriate. Or maybe the boyfriends say it quietly, and the girlfriends laugh. Not everybody is here to show support. Some are just here because they think it’s a freak show.
“I bet if we wanted to break the world record with a straight kiss, they’d never give us the high school,” one guy complains, as if this is a particular aspiration that’s been robbed from him.
“Totally,” his girlfriend agrees.
“This is bullshit,” an
other guy loudly declares, his voice and confidence amplified by the Budweiser he’s consumed.
You’re bullshit, the drama club girl next to him wants to say.
Eventually the crowd thins out—there’s not much to see after a while. It’s getting late, a little chilly. People get back into their cars—some to go to late-night parties, but most to go home.
Even within Harry and Craig’s team—that’s what they think of themselves now, over eleven hours into it—there’s a shift change. Harry’s mom blows a kiss to both Harry and Craig, then goes home to get some rest. She’ll see them in the morning. Rachel also heads home, so she can relieve Tariq later on, even though he’s pledged to stay up the whole time. Smita promised her mother she’d be home by one. Mykal has a schedule of a few friends who are sleeping now but who will come in the middle of the night, bearing glow sticks and caffeine.
It’s also the end of Mr. Nichol’s shift. As his replacement comes closer, we can’t believe our eyes.
Look, look, we tell each other. It’s Tom!
He’s Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he’s Tom to us. Tom! It’s so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent’s, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters—anyone who had a hand to be held. He had to watch so many of us die, had to say goodbye so many times. Outside of our rooms he would get angry, upset, despairing. But when he was with us, it was like he was powered solely by an engine of grace. Even the people who loved us would hesitate at first to touch us—more from the shock of our diminishment, from the strangeness of how we were both gone and present, not who we were but still who we were. Tom became used to this. First because of Dennis, the way he stayed with Dennis until the very end. He could have left after that, after Dennis was gone. We wouldn’t have blamed him. But he stayed. When his friends got sick, he was there. And for those of us he’d never known before—he was always a smile in the room, always a touch on the shoulder, a light flirtation that we needed. They should have made him a nurse. They should have made him mayor. He lost years of his life to us, although that’s not the story he’d tell. He would say he gained. And he’d say he was lucky, because when he came down with it, when his blood turned against him, it was a little later on and the cocktail was starting to work. So he lived. He made it to a different kind of after from the rest of us. It is still an after. Every day it feels to him like an after. But he is here. He is living.
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