Time Will Tell

by Barry Lyga

  Sweat collected on Dean’s upper lip. He was so hard. Unbearably hard. No photo spread had ever done this to him, made him so painfully erect and aware.

  “Do you…” He had to say something. His head swam in the humidity; naked body parts seemed to caper in the air. “Do you like Black girls better than white girls?” he asked Antoine, and felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  Antoine paused mid–page turn. The leaf fell over, revealing nothing more enticing or titillating than the second part of the interview with Billy Joel. Dean wished for something—anything—to happen, for some outside force, some external element, to interrupt and throw a scrim over the stupid, stupid question he’d just asked.

  But the universe chose not to intervene, and instead the only sound was the dry crinkle of the page turning. More Billy Joel. An ad.

  “I don’t like…” Antoine broke off, not lifting his eyes from the cramped columns of text before him, staring down as though all the answers in the universe were encoded in the words of the Piano Man.

  “Hey,” Dean said, trying to be comforting. Comfort seemed necessary in that moment. He put a hand on Antoine’s shoulder.

  Antoine wrenched his gaze away from the magazine in his lap, turning to look at Dean. Their eyes locked.

  A bead of sweat lingered in the divot of Antoine’s upper lip. The philtrum. That was what that little depression was called—the philtrum. The word raced around and around in Dean’s head. Philtrum. Philtrum. Philtrum philtrum philtrum philtrum.

  Not sure why, Dean reached out and wiped away the bead of sweat, blotting it with the pad of his thumb against Antoine’s upper lip. He felt moisture and the bristle of Antoine’s fuzzy, nascent mustache. Something like terror flared in Antoine’s eyes. Fire burned there.

  Dean leaned in to quench it. He shut off his thoughts and pressed his lips to Antoine’s.

  The first time Dean kissed Kim had actually been the opposite—she had kissed him, leaning in and up as they sat on her sofa together, the only light coming from the TV. She’d been snuggled up to him all night, stroking his arm, walking her fingers along his shoulder, playing with his hair. Something incipient burgeoned in each touch, and when she’d eventually kissed him, he hadn’t even been surprised.

  You weren’t getting any of the hints, she’d mock-complained later, so I had to make the first move.

  And here he was, in Jay’s garage, making the first move for the first time. The cushion of Antoine’s lips, and then the soft click of them parting. The next thing he knew, they’d touched the tips of their tongues, and Dean’s throat trembled with an involuntary groan. He was so hard. Harder than he’d ever been before. It was as though his cock had been cast in concrete.

  Bringing up his hands, he framed Antoine’s face and pulled him in closer, thrusting his tongue into Antoine’s mouth. Devouring him from within. Antoine grunted with pleasure and grabbed Dean’s wrists, holding his hands in place. The Playboy fell from Antoine’s lap and rustled to the floor in a heap.

  The kiss became more fervent. Antoine’s hands slid up Dean’s arms to his shoulders, then around to the back of his neck, gently holding him in place.

  Kim usually took charge. Kim usually pried open his mouth, launched her tongue inside, and played thirty-second notes as though he were a woodwind. Now he was the aggressor. He was attacking Antoine, unable to restrain himself, and Antoine wasn’t resisting in any event.

  Eventually, they separated, pulling apart by mere inches, inhaling each other, eyes drilled and fixed. Dean’s chest heaved. He was aware of Antoine’s fingers, still curled around his neck, cradling him. He’d never felt safer.

  “What did we do?” Antoine asked between gulps of air. “What did we just do?”

  Dean leaned in close and brushed his lips against Antoine’s. “This,” he said.

  Shortly thereafter, Antoine’s speaking tapered off. When he was alone with Dean, he spoke, but still not as much as before. Dean asked him about it only once, and Antoine’s response had been equal parts painful truth and severe reproach:

  “I just can’t talk when everything I say is a lie.”

  Dean had never thought of himself as a homosexual. He thought he knew what homosexuals were—men who thought they were women, who wanted to be women, so that they could be with other men.

  Dean had no confusion about who or what he was. He was a man. He aspired to look like Sonny Crockett, not Marilyn Monroe. He liked the stubble that peppered his cheeks and chin after a day without shaving. He liked the square, straight lines of his body.

  In the days after his encounter with Antoine in the garage, his perceptions began to change.

  Antoine had spent winter break of junior year in New York City with a cousin attending NYU. He’d returned to Canterstown with a cheap faux leather jacket bought from a street vendor and a wealth of knowledge gleaned from magazines purloined from Manhattan’s sketchiest bodegas.

  “Don’t listen to the idiots around here,” Antoine told him. “Being gay doesn’t mean you want to be a girl. It just means you like guys.”

  That simple revelation had been a shift for Dean—a true realignment of his personal mental tectonic plates. He had been unable to let go of the notion that like guys and want to be a girl were synonymous, were like matched socks that just had to be worn together or not at all.

  His Sunday-night sessions with Dr. Ruth began to take on a new character. Whether by coincidence or message from the divine heart of the universe, her callers began to transition from girls moping over their boyfriends and guys trying to figure out what made women happy in bed to a steady march of gay men working through their own sexualities. For the first time, he heard discussion of “being gay” as a good thing, a positive thing, a normal thing. In those calls, Dean began to see the shape of a world that could be his. The ground quaked and the earth moved and the plates adjusted themselves; the idea took root, and suddenly he couldn’t not imagine the world and himself as they were. The idea of being gay transmogrified, melting from impossible and alien, and then reconstituting itself as not only normal, but also absolutely natural.

  One night he even stood in the family room, alone in the dark, hand hovering over the light blue phone extension on the side table. He would call Dr. Ruth. He would say:

  Hi, Dr. Ruth. I’m seventeen and I think I’m gay and I have a girlfriend, but I’m sort of cheating on her with a guy. And I’m probably too young to be in love, at least that’s what my dad says, but I feel so much and it’s so strong and I don’t know what to do or what I am or who I am.

  And he imagined Dr. Ruth purring back at him in that German accent that couldn’t possibly be soothing and yet somehow was:

  Zere is nossingk wrong vit you. Being gay is just how you vere born. Virst you must accept yourself, und zen you may ask ozzers to accept you.

  Then she would probably try to walk him through coming out, as she’d done with other gay callers. That, he knew, just would not happen. He couldn’t tell anyone. His father would have none of such talk. His mother would be devastated.

  Jenny…

  Maybe he could tell Jenny. Maybe. The Jenny of a year ago, definitely. She might not have understood, but she would have kept his secret unto death. Of that much he was certain. But this new Jenny, this Valley girl who’d inhabited the body of his big sister like an invasive spirit—he couldn’t be sure about her. She might tell the world in a burst of brainless euphoria, just to see what happened.

  Being gay felt like it could be natural. Coming out felt impossible.

  Antoine, similarly, had no one to turn to. His parents hewed strictly to the teachings of the ministers at their church, who infrequently but vociferously railed against the “plague of the homosexual, who seeks to turn our eyes away from God and God’s plan for us.”

  It sounded awful. Dean’s parents wouldn’t tolerate homosexuality, but at least they never talked about it, and they didn’t make him go to a church that fulminated against
it.

  And as for Marcus…

  “I can’t say anything to him,” Antoine lamented one night.

  They’d begun sneaking out a couple of nights a week, stealing time from the black blank in which the world slept, liberating them for precious hours at a time. Usually Antoine jogged to Dean’s house, and the two of them would make quiet circuits of the neighborhood, stealing down the half-paved road that led to a new development, where no one would see them holding hands or kissing.

  But as the weather turned and the dark morning hours chilled, they realized they needed shelter. And so they discovered an abandoned house in a development midway between their houses. A sign advertised it for sale, but the yard was thickly overgrown, marking it unoccupied, isolated, ignored. And a notice on the door declared it condemned, scheduled for demolition.

  They covered the basement windows with tar paper and brought flashlights and sleeping bags, then spent the drowsy time between one and three in the morning kissing and probing, desperate and eager and anxious to try more.

  “He won’t understand?” Dean admitted to a level of confusion. The twins were identical—if being gay was something genetic (and Dr. Ruth assured him it was), then didn’t that mean Marcus should be gay, too?

  “I don’t think he’ll deal well,” Antoine said. “He’ll think it means he’s gay, too.”

  Exactly. Dean frowned. This was one of those areas where he knew his curiosities needed to be tamped down, that his thirst for answers did not outweigh Antoine’s tolerance for emotional pain. Such territories—including the issue of race—were fenced off for now, NO TRESPASSING signs displayed conspicuously.

  Over the darkled, hijacked morning hours, he and Antoine explored both each other and what they had become. Or were becoming.

  They told no one. Of course not. And Dean was too close to Kim to break up with her. Break being such a brutally appropriate word. There was a bond between them, and he could not imagine the pain of severing it. They’d been friends since first grade, then more as time went on. They had planned to marry, which once seemed so far off, but now seemed imminent. After college, they’d said. A little more than four years from now. Back then, high school felt like it would take forever, but here they were, almost at the end of it. College would swim by like a dolphin, and then…

  And then what? Would he still have Antoine? Just as he couldn’t imagine leaving Kim, so, too, could he not conceive his life without Antoine. Antoine, who had opened him. Antoine, who had filled him.

  “I don’t know what to do.” It spilled from him, his voice a hoarse whisper, a broken bottle lost along the highway, dim and gray with road dust. His entire body felt old, racked. Shame, fear, and longing tickled along his spine and then stabbed forward, spearing his heart, choking it.

  Antoine wrapped his arms around him. They were entangled in a blanket Dean had brought from the linen closet, one no one ever used, one no one would ever miss. Until the presence and the pressure of Antoine’s body chilled it, Dean hadn’t realized that he’d been trembling, shaking and shivering as though flu-ish.

  “Be you,” Antoine whispered in Dean’s ear. “Just be true and be you.”

  The problem, Dean knew, was that he had no idea who he was.

  Kissing Antoine on the school roof now, his thoughts drifted to Kim again, and he suppressed them with savage deliberation. The days afforded precious few opportunities for Antoine and him to cleave to each other; he would not allow the exigencies of the daylight world to intrude on their night-swaddled second lives.

  They pulled out Jay’s hidden chairs and sat closer than Jay and Dean had, fingers lazily intertwined. Clouds warped the sunless sky overhead.

  “We should go away somewhere,” Antoine said out of nowhere.

  “What do you mean? On vacation?” How would that work? Dean wondered.

  A shrug. “Maybe. Or maybe for good.”

  For good. “What do you mean?”

  Antoine licked his lips. “What’s keeping us here? Think about it. School? Who cares about school? Plenty of people get by without school.”

  “Our families,” Dean said. And it was crazy that he even had to say it.

  “No. You think they would understand this?” He gestured back and forth between them. “How can you be loyal to them if they won’t be loyal to you? We’ve talked about that. Look, I’m closer to Marcus than… I mean, genetically. Biologically. I’m so close to him. But even he wouldn’t understand. He makes the jokes, too, you know.”

  Dean flushed. He, too, had made jokes about homosexuals. It was safer that way. It was armor.

  “Where would we go?” he asked. It couldn’t happen, but there was no harm in imagining it, right?

  Antoine stared up at the stars, thinking. “Just away. Somewhere where we can be us.”

  Dean had trouble imagining a world in which that could be possible. A world in which there were no stares or giggles or meaningful clearing of throats. When he watched Crockett and Tubbs on Miami Vice, those tight-as-brothers cop partners, one Black, one white, he thought that maybe that was the most he could hope for. Dr. Ruth could say that it was okay to be gay… and it could even actually be okay to be gay… but the world was the world.

  Somewhere where we can be us.

  Dean shook his head. “Right. Where’s that?”

  “New York. San Francisco. Big cities, Dean. It’s different in the cities. Trust me.”

  Dean wondered if that could possibly be true. And if so, what exactly did it mean?

  He had become, of necessity, two people. For sixteen hours on most days, he was Daylight Dean: Kim’s boyfriend, Jay’s best friend. Comic book reader and writer-in-training. He rarely spoke to Antoine because Antoine rarely spoke at all.

  Then, for eight hours or so on some days, he became Nighttime Dean: Antoine’s… what? What exactly was he to Antoine? What was Antoine to him? Boyfriend sounded wrong. Boyfriend was what he was to Kim. Boyfriend implied girlfriend.

  He didn’t know. There were a great many things he didn’t know. Sometimes Dean felt as though his life had become a space shuttle, soaring into the upper atmosphere, and he could only cling to it from the outside, holding on for dear life against the g-forces and the wind shear, praying to God that it wouldn’t blow up and send him spiraling down to his death like Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnik and the others.

  “I do trust you,” he told Antoine, tightening his fingers on Antoine’s in solidarity. “Absolutely. But we can’t just go to a big city.”

  Antoine laughed. He laughed infrequently these days, never in the daylight with the others. Dean surmised that he might be the only one to hear Antoine’s laughter, it plausibly being denied even to Marcus.

  “Why can’t we?” Antoine asked. “The world is bigger than this town and the factory. You want to be a writer, right? You think you can be rich and famous writing about Canterstown?”

  For the first time since their first kiss, Dean experienced a frisson of anger toward Antoine. His writing was sacred and holy and his alone. It was not to be questioned.

  “We’ve got time to think about this,” he told Antoine. “I don’t want to worry about it right now.”

  Antoine absorbed that. “Okay. So after graduation, then. But that’s not as far away as you think. It’s October. It’ll be Thanksgiving and then Christmas. And then second semester will race by. We’ll be done and even before then, we have to make big decisions. Life decisions.”

  Dean knew. He had the Princeton application on his desk at home, along with a stack of three more: Rutgers, Boston University, and Western Maryland College as his safety school. With Jay planning on bumping all their grades, he wasn’t worried about his GPA, but he was worried about his essays, which confounded and bemused him. How could he sum up who he was and what he wanted when he had no idea who he was? And when what he wanted was both within his reach and also impossible?

  “We’ve made the decisions,” Dean pointed out. All of them knew one another’s
plans: Jay would head to College Park just to get through college as quickly as possible on his way to being a police officer. Brian was bound for either College Park or the University of Connecticut, depending on financial aid. Kim was going to Western Maryland. And Black Lightning were already being courted by a dozen schools, though they’d planned for two years to go to the University of Houston, like their heroes Kirk Baptiste and Carl Lewis.

  “I’m not gonna go to Houston with Marcus,” Antoine said, as though he’d tuned in to the radio frequency of Dean’s thoughts and picked up Dean’s most immediate transmission.

  “What?” Dean gaped at the announcement. Perhaps even more than their first kiss, it disrupted every notion of Antoine he’d constructed in his imagination.

  Antoine sucked at his lower lip for a moment, thinking. “I need to be somewhere where I can be me. I’m thinking Howard.”

  Dean had never heard of Howard University. Antoine explained that it was a Black college in Washington, DC, originally chartered by Congress after the Civil War. It had provided an education to thousands of freed slaves in its earliest days and had grown to become an important and respected institution for Black students.

  “You could go, too,” Antoine said excitedly, as though just realizing something important. “They actually have special minority scholarships for white kids. Isn’t that wild? And we could be ourselves. We could be real.”

  “I don’t want a minority scholarship,” Dean said. “You want me to be, what, one of maybe a hundred white people in the whole place?”

  Antoine laughed mirthlessly. “Dean. Come on, man. Right now I’m one of maybe ten Black kids at our school. You can handle it. Trust me.”

  Groping for words, Dean could not meet Antoine’s eyes as he spoke. “I’m not even sure I want to go to college.” He was admitting it out loud for the first time ever. “It’s what my parents want. And my grandparents. But I sort of want to take a year off and work on my writing. But I don’t know what my dad will say.”

  “Screw your dad,” Antoine said with bright urgency. “You want to work on your writing? Come to Howard with me. We’ll get an apartment off campus. I’ll go to school and you’ll write. It’ll be great. We’ll be free. We’ll be out of this crappy town and away from everyone. We can do it, Dean. You and me. Together.”