Gone, Gone, Gone(15)

I knew it. I knew all along that I would keep

coming

back.

I’m that boy.

C—

Didn’t hear from you today, Cody. You doing okay? How’s school?

Things are okay here.

I pause and stare at what I’ve written. Well. I’m clearly the f*cking master of conversation. I should teach lessons or something. Lio could pay me a hundred f*cking dollars a week to learn to perform that kind of brilliant wordsmithing I demonstrated right there.

I keep typing. If I stop to think, that’s when I start crying or otherwise get f*cked.

My animals escaped. We’ve found some—remember Sandwich? and Kremlin? I sent you pictures, you remember—and it’s hard and kind of scary. No one is giving up, so pray for them, okay? Hey, I wanted to apologize for always making fun of you when you prayed. Really, I thought it was cute the whole time, I just thought you liked being teased, I don’t know. I’m stupid. But it helped me sleep when you wished that I would. I mean prayed that I would.

I hope school’s going okay. Did you get into that art class after all? I’ll come up there and bash some skulls together or something if you need. If that would help.

I ran into your mother at the grocery store the other day. She had a bag of avocados, said she’d tell you hi from me next time you called, but I said she didn’t need to because you were still emailing, but I kind of hope she said hi for me anyway. Also, are we still emailing?

Love,





C


I put my head down next to my keyboard. Kremlin wants to know what’s wrong.

“I have a broken heart,” I tell her.

She whines a little.

I say, “Yeah, I know. I don’t like it either.”

Cody . . .

I’ve known Cody since I was six. We used to play together because we lived next door as toddlers, and even though he moved away before we were really aware of each other, our moms stayed friends so we saw each other a lot for those forced play dates, and eventually we begged for play dates every day. We were the exact same height when I was in first grade—like, to the centimeter. We thought that was really cool. Of course, by the time we started hooking up, I was practically twice his size. But when I was six, we were perfectly matched and it was great.

I’m not huge, though I guess I must look really tall next to the boys I keep . . . doing things with. I’m tall enough that people always tell me I should play basketball (though when you’re black, you only have to be like five foot ten before people start asking) but not the kind of freaky tall where I have to worry about how high doorways are. It’s not really a big deal, so it’s weird that it keeps being this thing that I think about, although usually I think about it in terms of Lio’s smallness rather than my largeness, and maybe that means something, but probably not, because it has nothing to do with Cody.

Anyway, when Cody grew up, or I grew up and he stayed small, he turned into some kind of a big deal—a fantastic soccer player, a huge smile, a personality that seemed like it must have eaten bits of other people’s to get that big, like a very hungry caterpillar. He was so much more than alive. He always was.

Our first kiss was in fourth grade for me and fifth grade for him, when we were playing hide-and-seek. I said if I found him in less than two minutes, I got to kiss him. I don’t remember what happened if I didn’t. But I found him in a minute and forty-two seconds, roughly, and he was inside this old chest that holds all these old clothes that my grandmother draped all over herself before she died, and I pulled him out of the chest and he was shrouded in turquoise and gold and I kissed him.

We waited until I turned fifteen because even we thought it was a little weird to have sex at fourteen, and he was sixteen and really not okay with having sex with a middle schooler, so that was the summer before ninth grade for me, and the summer before tenth grade for him, and he was almost sixteen, and that was our summer.

It was so ours, that whole summer.

It was awkward and difficult and painful at first, but he loved me and we were really gentle, and then it got good. Really good. It got closer to the movies than antiseptic health class told me it ever could.

So f*ck health class and f*ck the preachy advice your parents give you, because sex didn’t ruin our relationship.

It’s not that.

Although I can see, from an objective standpoint, that maybe I was too young, but is that really the point at all? Why the hell should I see things from an objective standpoint? I’m not objective, I mean, this is my life.

And if we stop having sex, the terrorists win, right?

I guess Lio would say that, statistically speaking, I was too young, since he’s so crazy about numbers, and I’m sure that means that, from his perspective, I should have waited, because his whole f*cking life is about how many other people are doing things. I’m sure he’s a virgin. I’m sure he’s waiting until he’s exactly sixteen and seven months, which I think is the average age, but I think it’s a lot higher for gay boys, eighteen or so, because it takes us longer to realize and find each other and, I don’t know, wax off all our body hair or something.

But I didn’t have to go through any of that with Cody because I guess we were made for each other and too young to have a lot of body hair.

He’s a junior now. It’s crazy to think about that, to think that actually right now, maybe he’s thinking about college and SATs and stuff. Do they even talk about college at his school? Do kids from his school go to real college? Because it’s not exactly a real school. I mean, it’s called a school, a residential school, but it’s pretty much a mental hospital with classes.