You'd Be Home Now (18)

I’d known Gage my whole life. Our parents lumped us together to play when we were little, there were neighborhood barbecues, elementary school with soggy snow boots and runny noses, and through most of it, Gage was just a blur, really. Always with a glove in hand, the thwack of the baseball on his side of our backyard wall as he practiced. If the ball landed in the pool and I was outside, I fished it out with the skimmer and tossed it back over the wall and waited for the thwacking to resume.

You can be around people every day of your life and not really see them, you know? They’re just a collection of things, like baseball gloves and tousled hair and wide grins, and you don’t paw around any deeper because you think you have them all figured out already, just by what you can see on the outside.

But something in Gage’s eyes was different.


How can you remember a line from a poem I read years ago?

I don’t know, I just do. Stuck with me. How can we live next door to each other and we never talk, you know?



I glanced at him again. He didn’t have the half smile anymore. His face was softer. Sadder, somehow.

He looked back down at his phone.


Give me some words I have to go to sleep Something interesting, like the stars thing



I looked down at my phone, thinking.

Then I typed: If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.

Isabel Archer. From The Portrait of a Lady. I was reading it right then, for my class. I liked that line, too, because it’s kind of how I felt when I thought about my mother.

It took a long time for Gage to answer.


…

I’m not sure it’s possible for you to be disappointing, Emory

Tell that to my mom, ha

Funny. You can never win with parents, tho Def not

Night, Emory

Night



He pulled his blind down. I didn’t know what to think, really. I thought he was just being weird, texting me out of the blue. Gage had his own crowd, and baseball, and we didn’t intersect all that much. But then, after the texting, he’d sort of lift his chin at me in the cafeteria during lunch, or glance at me in the hallway, maybe a beat too long, and every once in a while after that night he’d text again, after everyone had gone to bed. About baseball. Or his homework, or nothing at all really. A smiley face. A frown. The tiny-person-sleeping-in-bed emoji.

    I guess I thought, for all his popularity, that maybe he was kind of lonely, too.

It’s nice talking like this, he texted once. Easy.

Yes, I answered.

And then, Want to hang out? I could come over.


It’s late.

Just for a bit. I can come over the wall.

We could hang out in your yard. It’s nice tonight.

My parents are asleep.

We’ll be quiet. You have that pool house.



It was late. It was Friday night and I was tired. I’d waited for Joey to come home for hours and when he did, my mother intercepted him in the hallway on the way to his attic room and there was a fight, and I was exhausted from all that. I was tired and lonely. And if I’m being honest, I wanted to be kissed. Because I knew the moment he said “pool house” that he was going to kiss me, because no one asks to go into a pool house late at night just to recite poetry from memory or discuss the plays of Arthur Miller, and I’d been thinking about Gage and his mouth for a very long time.

Ok, I finally typed back.



* * *



—

    That’s how it started.

And after that night, I felt alive in a way I never had before.



* * *



—

Gage and I do everything but have sex-sex. He doesn’t want to mess anything up, he told me. He doesn’t want to get somebody pregnant. “Condoms break,” he said. He doesn’t want to date anyone. “Too complicated,” he said. “People would get up in our business. It would be a thing. I need to concentrate on my game.” I don’t know if what he does to me is spectacular or anything, because how would I know? He’s the only person I’ve ever done these things with. But it makes me feel better.

“We’ve known each other forever,” he said once, kissing my neck. “It could be destiny, but it has to be secret. My mother would freak out.” I didn’t mind that secret, like I don’t mind the secrets in my box of stolen things. Something that’s mine. Like I’ve stolen him from all the girls who sidle up to him in the hallways of Heywood High, who text him photos of their bodies in bras and bikinis and who can’t figure out why he doesn’t pick one of them. Because he could pick one of them. He could pick any one of them to do the things he does with me, in secret. They could be his secret, but instead it’s me. And when you live in a house where all the energy is directed toward one person, and that person is your troubled brother, well, you get kind of hungry to be seen.

I think about this in bed, after Gage has gone and I’m upstairs, still warm and electric, my hand on my stomach, the whole house quiet. Maddie is the pretty one, Joey is the bad one, and I’m the good one, and that’s where I have to stay.

    Last spring Gage said, “I don’t want to fall in love with anyone and I don’t want anyone to fall in love with me, not right now.”