Two Boys Kissing(10)
How did they spot me? How did they know?
What did I do wrong?
People like to say being gay isn’t like skin color, isn’t anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding.
But if that’s true, why do they always find us?
Cooper’s loathing of everyone else—his parents, the people in his town, the men he chats with—is surpassed only by his loathing of himself. There is nothing that will add depth to despair like the feeling of deserving it. Cooper drives around, not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go. He barely notices that he’s running low on gas. Then the warning light pops on, and he’s almost grateful for it, because now at least there’s a next thing to be done.
He wasn’t always like this. Nobody is ever always like this. There was a time he was happy, a time that the world engaged him. Catching inchworms and naming each one. Blowing out candles on a cake his mother had made, with twenty of his fifth-grade friends around him. A home run in a pivotal Little League game that made him feel like a champion for weeks. A desire to draw, to paint. Shooting baskets at lunchtime with the other guys.
But high school confused things. He didn’t want to do sports anymore. Friends moved away—if not from town, then from his lunch table. The dullness started to pervade the outside of his life, and the noise started to grow on the inside. He spent more and more time on the computer. This wasn’t really a choice; it was simply the one thing that was always there.
Now his laptop is dead in the backseat. It doesn’t really bother him.
In another car, Avery drives to Kindling. The land around him is flat, the horizon long. He tries not to rehearse what he’s going to say to Ryan, because he doesn’t want it to sound like a performance. All of the dates he’s been on before have been half-hearted attempts with a boy in town who’s known him way too long. Neither one of them was sure what he wanted, so they tried to put one another into that void. It never held, and Avery just happened to realize it five minutes before Jason did. “No harm, no foul,” Jason had said, and this phrase in itself pointed to why Avery wasn’t interested. He wants to be with someone who knows that a harm is much worse than a foul.
A boy with blue hair would have to know this, Avery thinks. Or at least there’s a chance he knows this.
Avery is about to find out.
After a year, Peter and Neil feel they are beyond the discovery phase. But we’re sure that they will continually discover this not to be the case. There’s always something new to learn about the person you love.
Neil is not surprised to get to Peter’s house and to find him still in his boxers, sitting on the floor of his rec room, navigating a fantasy world on his game console.
“I’m sorry,” Peter says. “I’ve almost gotten the Guild of Wizards to sign my treaty. Twenty minutes, I swear.”
Neil foolishly forgot his own homework, so he goes to Peter’s room and fetches Peter’s homework to do instead. It would be one thing if Peter’s game involved massive amounts of battle and swordfightery. But from what Neil can tell, it’s more about making and breaking alliances. In other words, politics, with beards and robes. Not his thing. Balkan Bloodbath 12, the game he brought over yesterday, sits on the ground.
Peter knows Neil’s not into it, but can’t help but play anyway. Because once this treaty is signed, he is going to be able to travel to the water nymphs’ world for the first time.
He doesn’t even notice what Neil’s doing until he’s through. Treaty accomplished, he finds that Neil is halfway through his English assignment.
“I can do that,” Peter says. He knows he should like it when Neil does his homework for him, but he doesn’t. He knows Neil does it because it’s easier for him … and that’s precisely why Peter doesn’t like it.
“You have more important things to do,” Neil says. “I mean, what’s John Steinbeck compared to the fate of the Guild of Wizards?”
“I like Steinbeck.”
“You know what would be cool?”
“What?”
“If your game took place underwater.”
Peter knows Neil is going somewhere with this. Some joke. But he can’t figure out the punch line.
He gives in and asks why.
“Because then the wizards could be fish, and it would be the Guild of Gilled Wizards.”
Peter smirks. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“More like you swam into it.”
Peter likes these jokes, these jibes. Really, he does. It’s just that he’s not always in the mood for them. Sometimes he wishes he were dating someone a little stupider, or at least someone who doesn’t think about each word in every sentence he utters.
Neil doesn’t realize he’s gone one step too smart. He doesn’t change the subject because he senses something (slightly) wrong. Instead his innate gauging of the rhythm of the conversation knows it’s time to move on.
“Pancakes,” he says. “I think we need pancakes.”
This time, Peter knows what’s coming, and joins in. They both start jumping up and down on one leg, yelling, “I-hop! I-hop!”
We are such wonderful idiots, Peter thinks.
We often believe the truest measure of a relationship is the ability to lay ourselves bare. But there’s something to be said for parading your plumage as well, finding truth as much in the silly as the severe.