A Very Large Expanse of Sea(53)

But Ocean wanted more.

He didn’t like hiding. He said it made it seem like we were doing something wrong, and he hated it. He insisted, over and over again, that he didn’t care what other people thought. He didn’t care, he said, and he didn’t want a bunch of idiots to have this much control over his life.

Honestly, I couldn’t disagree with him.

I was tired of hiding, too; I was tired of ignoring him at school, tired of always giving in to my cynicism. But Ocean was a lot more visible than even he knew or understood. Once I started paying closer attention to him—and to his world—the subtle gradations of his life began to come into focus. Ocean had ex-girlfriends at this school. Old teammates. Rivalries. There were guys who were openly jealous of his success, and girls who hated him for being uninterested. More important: there were people who’d built their careers on the back of the high school basketball team.

I knew by now that Ocean was really good at basketball, but I didn’t know just how good until I started listening. He was only a junior, but he was outperforming his teammates by a wide margin, and he was, as a result, attracting a lot of attention; people were talking about how he might be good enough to win all kinds of state and national Player of the Year awards—and not just him, but his coach, too.

It made me nervous.

Ocean had this quintessential all-American look, the kind of look that made it easy for girls to fall in love with him, for scouts to know where to place him, for the community to think of him, always and forever, as a good boy with great potential and a bright future. I tried to explain why my presence in his life would be both complicated and controversial, but Ocean couldn’t understand. He just didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

But it wasn’t something I wanted to fight over. So we compromised.

I agreed to let Ocean drive me to school one morning. I thought it would be a small, carefully measured step. Totally innocent. What I kept forgetting, of course, was that high school was home to infinite clichés for a reason, and that Ocean was, in some ways, still inextricable from his own stereotype. Even where he parked his car in the school parking lot seemed to matter. I’d never had a reason to know or care about this, because I was the weirdo who walked to school every day. I’d never interacted with this side of campus in the morning, never saw these kids or spoke to them. But when Ocean opened my door that day, I stepped out into a different world. Everyone was here. Here—in this school parking lot—this was where he and his friends hung out every morning.

“Oh, wow, this was a bad idea,” I said to him, even as he took my hand. “Ocean,” I said, “this was a bad idea.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” he said, and squeezed my fingers. “We’re just two people holding hands. It’s not the end of the world.”

I wondered, then, what it would be like to live in his brain. I wondered how safe and normal a life he must’ve lived in order to say something like that, so casually, and really, truly, believe it.

Sometimes, I wanted to say to him, for some people, it really was the end of the world.

But I didn’t. I didn’t say it because I was suddenly distracted. An unnerving quiet had just infected the groups of kids standing nearest to us, and I felt my body tense even as I looked forward and stared at nothing. I waited for something—some kind of hostility—but it never came. We managed to weave our way through the parking lot, eyes following our bodies as we went, without incident. No one spoke to me. Their silence seemed to be infused with surprise, and it felt, to me, like they were deciding what to think. How to respond.

Ocean and I had very different reactions to this experience.

I told him we should go back to arriving separately at school, that it was a nice try, but, ultimately, a bad idea.

He did not agree, not even a little bit.

He kept pointing out to me that it had been fine, that it was weird but it wasn’t bad, and he insisted, most of all, that he didn’t want their opinions to control his life.

“I want to be with you,” he said. “I want to hold your hand and eat lunch with you and I don’t want to have to pretend that I’m not, like”—he sighed, hard—“I just don’t want to pretend not to notice you, okay? I don’t care if other people don’t like it. I don’t want to worry all the time. Who gives a shit about these people?”

“Aren’t they your friends?” I said.

“If they were my friends,” he said, “they’d be happy for me.”

The second day was worse.

On the second day, when I stepped out of Ocean’s car, no one was surprised. They were just assholes.

Someone actually said, “Why’re you fucking around with Aladdin over here, bro?”

This was not a new insult, not to me. For some reason people loved using Aladdin to put me down, which made me sad, because I really liked Aladdin. I loved watching that movie as a kid. But I’d always wanted to tell people that they were insulting me incorrectly. I wanted them to understand that Aladdin was, first of all, a guy, and that, second of all, he wasn’t even the one who covered his hair. This wasn’t even an accurate insult, and it bothered me that it was so lazy. There were so many better, meaner alternatives from the movie to choose from—like, maybe, I don’t know, compare me to Jafar—but there was never a good time, during these types of situations, to bring it up.