“Hannah just went off on me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. You okay?”
“I have no idea. I just hurt a girl I really like because—”
He looked down at his lap. “Do you want to call her back and say you made a huge mistake? And have things go back to the way they were, like, a week ago? Because that’s fine with me.”
I looked over at him like he’d pulled a rug out from under my feet. “Are you serious?”
Rafe shook his head slightly. “I don’t want to be.”
“Good. Because I don’t want that. Okay?”
“Me neither,” he said. “And if you had said yes, things would have gotten even more real than they got with Hannah.”
I laughed a little and took a deep breath. “I just want to be happy.”
“Me too. I mean, I want you to be happy too. I wouldn’t mind being happy either.”
“Are you?” I asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, magenta is sitting on my bed with me, so, um. Yeah.”
“So here’s the question. Could you imagine us going out on a proper date?”
Rafe giggled. “You’re so twentieth-century.”
I ignored him. “Thursday night. Will you go on a boy-boy date with me?”
“Um,” Rafe said. “Nothing would make me happier in the world.”
During my free period the next day, I went over to the administration building to talk to Headmaster Taylor. I had to sit in the waiting room for about fifteen minutes, so I took out my calculus book and tried to get through a chapter about Heron’s area formula. I couldn’t wait for the day I could test out of math and focus my studies on things that made sense.
I also couldn’t wait for tomorrow. My first official date with Rafe. Was this really happening? What did it mean?
My thoughts were interrupted by Headmaster Taylor’s assistant, who told me I could see him now.
“What can I help you with?” Taylor asked when I entered his office. He was eating a tuna fish sandwich.
“I wanted to talk to you about my speech for the Pappas Award.”
“If you want some examples, you can check the library. I understand we have a folder of all the speeches printed out by year.”
I hadn’t known that, and I made a mental note to make sure my speech was proofread for grammar when I was done.
“Well, I’ve been doing some research on Peter Pappas.”
“Good,” he said. “We have an archive.”
I nodded, even though I knew that the so-called archive was basically two articles. “Yes, sir. I also did some research at the Bacon Free Library.”
He smiled. “Why does that not surprise me? Good man.”
I nodded again. “Thank you, sir. It’s just. I was just wondering whether anyone knew about Pappas’s conflicted feelings about the Vietnam War.”
He raised an eyebrow. “News to me.”
“He gave a Model Congress speech against it, and he went to an anti-war demonstration a year before he enlisted.” I didn’t mention talking to his sister. I wasn’t sure Headmaster Taylor would want to know that I bothered her.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it. The fact is that he’s a war hero, and he’s remembered that way. The award and scholarship are given by a foundation that wants him remembered that way. If I were you, I’d gloss over his objections. Just write about bravery, Ben. Surely a boy who volunteered to go to war and then died for the cause can be seen as brave, correct?”
“Well, yeah. I just thought—”
“Don’t overthink it. As a recipient of the award, your job is to pay homage. No more, no less. Whatever drama surrounded the facts would be inappropriate to bring up in a speech. You don’t want to give the foundation any reason to re-think their award choice.”
“Yes, sir.” I bowed my head.
“Is there anything else? I need to finish lunch before a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “One thing: Where am I, GPA-wise?”
He tapped the desk with his fist. “You’re fine, Ben. Ms. Dyson has told me you’ve improved on your C plus in calculus. So long as you keep at least a straight B in that class, you’ll be great. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Anything else?”
Our next calc test was a biggie. It was on Tuesday, or three days before my speech. To keep up a B average in the class, I’d probably have to get at least a B minus on the test, and that was going to mean a few all-nighters, and even then it wasn’t certain. But that wasn’t something you said to the headmaster.
“No, sir. Thank you.”
“Anytime,” he said. “And check out that folder. Just do like the other boys did, and you’ll be in great shape.”
Mendenhall was holding court in the locker room when I arrived for practice that afternoon. “How do you make a blond’s eyes twinkle?” he asked.
“How?” a guy yelled out.
“Shine a flashlight in her ear. What do blonds say after sex?”
“What?”
“Do you guys all play for the Patriots?”
I cringed, thinking about Hannah and what she’d said. What does it say about guys that they act like they hate the very thing to which they’re most attracted? A shiver went through me. I didn’t want to start thinking about the whole Hannah debacle.
Out in the gym, the jokes continued while Coach Donnelly hit grounders to the infield. Mendenhall, at shortstop, had an endless supply.
“What does a Lonna Dyke girl say when she wants to have sex with you?”
“What?” someone yelled.
“No,” he said.
Some kids started laughing, but I felt my face redden. And for once, I didn’t hide it.
“You do realize your mother is female, right?” I said to Mendenhall.
There was an “ooh” chorus that embarrassed me. I hadn’t said what I’d said to get attention, or show him up; I’d said it because of what I’d been thinking: Misogyny sucks.
Mendenhall stood there with his arms crossed, rigid. “Don’t you ever say another word about my mother,” he said.
“I said your mom is female,” I said. “She is, right?”
More oohs.
“I just told you. Not another word about my mom.”
I faced him. “Then stop with the rape jokes. Are you that stupid, that you think rape is funny?”
Mendenhall took a step toward me, and instinctively I took a step toward him. I was done with being his little lapdog and playing along with his stilted view of the world. Even if a lot of the guys thought that way, I was done being part of that.
“Boys,” Coach Donnelly said. “Enough. Minds on the drills, please.”
I got back into fielding position, and Coach hit one my way. I could hear the sizzle of the ball off the bat. It was a hard grounder, two bounces, just to my left. I got in front of it, but somehow I misjudged the hop off the gym floor. It got me right in the shin, and I muttered, “Damn,” and hopped around.
“More concentration, less mouth,” Mendenhall yelled over from short.
“You too,” I said back.
Then it was batting practice. Clement, who was probably going to wind up on the freshman team even though he was pretty good, was up and struggling. He was a lefty, and he was hitting every ball down the third-base line. I knew that meant he was swinging late. Donnelly was tossing batting practice, and I put my hand up to ask him to hold up a moment.
“Clement,” I said, approaching him. “Your step is too long, I think. You’re having trouble catching up with the ball. Do this.” I took the bat from him, and even though I’m normally a righty, I stood in from the left side and spread my legs wide. “Until your bat speed picks up, why don’t you forget the leg kick and just swing? That leg kick isn’t doing you any favors.”
I handed the bat back to him, and he took a wide stance and pulled the bat back. The pitch came in, and while it was a bit awkward for h
im to swing without stepping, he hit the ball back to the pitcher. He did it again, this time a bit harder, and he looped one into shallow right field.
“There ya go,” I said. “Get your timing down, and little by little, you can see about shortening your stance and adding some leg to it.”
Coach gave me a thumbs-up, and when I ran back out to third, Mendenhall gave me a thumbs-up too.
I nodded to him, and he nodded back, and I realized that I might not fully understand the rules of team camaraderie. Just a moment earlier I thought we were going to fight, and now here we were, on the same side again.
The next batter smashed a ball down the third-base line. I didn’t have time to think; I dove sideways, my outstretched glove leading the way and my body fully airborne. It was all instinct, the kind of thing that happens when you play a lot. You do what you have to do to stop the ball. I felt the ball pull my glove upward just as I was sinking to the hard gym floor. Oof. The landing jarred my rib cage, but somehow I closed my glove around the ball. I leapt up and fired a bullet to the first baseman, and then, as the guys started to whoop and holler, I put my head down, afraid I’d been showing off a little.
“There he is,” Mendenhall said. “Dude’s an asshole, but he can pick ’em.”
“Screw you,” I said, stretching out my bruised ribs but unable to hold in a little laugh. He laughed too, and I thought, Yeah. No idea how this works.
That night, the night before my first real date with Rafe, I barely slept. So many thoughts ricocheted through my addled brain.
I pictured a Play-Doh man, his arms being pulled until they snapped off.
I thought of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I liked. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
That quote had always resonated with me, ever since we read it freshman year. But now it was different somehow, like Emerson had reached inside my brain and knew exactly what it felt like to be me.
Was I becoming more me, or less? Was I someone who went on dates with a boy and it was no big deal? When it came to the baseball stuff, the whole “having words with Mendenhall but everything was fine” thing had felt good but foreign. Would the new me constantly fight with people and then shake it off like it hadn’t even happened?
And then there was the whole thing with my family. A chill ran through me as I imagined my dad’s face if he heard about the date tomorrow. He wouldn’t be okay with me dating Rafe, not at all. Was there something wrong with me, that I was doing this? Had there been something wrong with Uncle Max, when he’d done things like this? Would my mom be okay? The chill seeped into my bones as I imagined my mom’s face, and I wondered whether she’d turn her back on me if she knew. Because that wasn’t something I’d be able to handle. What about Luke? He thought I was a good older brother. Would he still respect me if he knew I was dating another boy?
A thought came to me. What do I think about the date with Rafe? Here I am thinking about what everyone else would think, and I haven’t taken even a second to have my own reaction. Weird.
If I put all that stuff away, I was looking forward to it. Rafe and me, hanging out together. I grinned. Yeah. That could work.
Rafe chose the spot for our Thursday night date. He picked a coffeehouse in Lowell, and while I wasn’t thrilled about the traffic or that I needed to spend gas money on a sixty-mile round-trip, I wasn’t about to say that to Rafe.
“I love the trees here,” Rafe said as we sped up 95 toward northern Massachusetts. I nodded, aware that he was as nervous as I was. And that was very. I was having a lot of trouble looking to my right. How was this happening? What if it went well? Would we go on more dates? Was there any way to just hang out and not call it a date? Because it was the word that I was uncomfortable with, mostly. It was so hard to get my head around this. I had always thought of dates as something that boys and girls did together. Boys and boys hung out as buddies, and that had been the case for me always, and now I was broken open and all this new stuff was seeping in, and my head was so noisy.
What if I was gay? What if I’d only been interested in Hannah and other girls as a defense against the truth? In psychology class we talked about the ego and defense mechanisms, like denial. Was I in denial? How did you know when you were denying something? I wasn’t gay. I couldn’t be. Hannah had definitely not felt like a defense mechanism.
Was I bi? Hi, I’m Ben Carver, I’m bisexual. It just sounded so … foreign. Yes, my uncle was bi, and obviously a lot of people were. But to me, bi meant equally attracted to boys and girls. I wasn’t that. I was basically attracted to girls and one specific guy.
There had to be a term for that.
“You probably ought to go back and get that,” Rafe said, and stunned out of my thinking fit, I glanced over at him.
“What?”
“I think I just saw a bit of your gray matter on the side of the road. The explosion was nasty.”
I laughed tentatively.
“Earth to Ben, earth to Ben,” he said, and as an answer, I cracked a smile. The tall trees whizzed by as we roared down the highway. The sun was setting to my left, sending quick blips of brightness through the foliage.
“Did you know that the original word for the National Socialist Party was Nasos?” I asked. “It was an abbreviation. The word ‘Nazi’ was first used as a term of derision by a journalist, and it caught on. It was derived from a Bavarian word that meant ‘simpleminded.’ ”
“Good date talk,” Rafe said.
“You never know when you’ll be involved in a little drive-by Jeopardy-ing.”
We were quiet for a bit. “Why did you bring that up? That was really weird,” he said.
I thought for a moment. “I was thinking about how this was complicated. I don’t think I’m gay, but I’m on a date with my best friend, who is male. But on the other hand, complicated is often good. It’s when things get narrowed to the lowest common denominator—hate, fear—that society gets into trouble. The Nazis were the opposite of complicated.”
“You are so going to a better college than me,” Rafe said.
“But don’t you think that labels are exceedingly narrow? Not complicated enough?”
Rafe looked out the window. “That’s where I was last semester. I was, like, labels can’t describe a person. I still think they can’t, but also, it’s complicated. Because as crappy as labels are, I think we get lost pretty quick if we try to do away with them.
“How do you point someone out in a restaurant without labeling them? Like, tall, or male, or even, like, black or Latino. Those are just descriptions. They don’t embody a person, I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.”
I’d have to think about that one for a while, I realized.
The venue, it turned out, was a coffeehouse called Brewed Awakenings. I thought a coffee shop was actually a really nice place to go on a date, and I was looking forward to a good talk. But when we got there, I realized that there might be some good talk, but it would be by slam poets, not me.
“What the heck is this?” I muttered when we brought our coffees to a free table. College guys with beards and girls with multicolored hair milled around us.
“Are you kidding me? You never watched slam poetry?” I shook my head. “It’s a real mix. Some of it is amazing, and some of it is, like, hipster hell.”
Could we go somewhere else? Anywhere else? I almost said. I didn’t give a crap about slam poetry, and this wasn’t even Boston, where I felt like we could be on a date without any trouble. I didn’t know much about Lowell, and these people looked perfectly nice, but this was on the route to my parents’ farm. A little uncomfortable. Instead I smiled and said, “Yay, slam poetry.”
Rafe smirked, rolled his eyes, and said, “Open mind.”
That became difficult immediately. The first act was a bearded, bespectacled guy who looked like a college student or maybe a little older. He had set up a boom box, a mic, and
a couple small speakers on the makeshift stage. The fifteen or so people watching waited in anticipation and, in my case, a small amount of fear. Especially when the guy turned toward the audience and I saw he had a beard on one half of his face only.
And then the music started, and even I recognized it as an old song, the one where the guy is bringing sexy back. Then Half-Bearded Guy approached the mic and opened his mouth and we learned of his plan.
“I’m bringing Chaucer back. Yeah! Those other poets don’t know how to write. Yeah!” he sang.
Rafe and I looked at each other with wide eyes as the performer scurried back and turned off his boom box and then rushed back to the mic.
“Yo yo yo yo! Geoffrey Chaucer was off the hook, yo!” He punched the air in front of him. “Homeboy forgotten these days, yo. But Chaucer—dude brought it!” His mouth was too close to the microphone, and feedback ruffled my ears. He scanned us in a way that made it clear he’d practiced having an intimate moment with his audience.
“Rap gets a bad rap, right? But you know what? And this isn’t said enough. Rap is poetry! No, I’m serious. Rap is poetry. It’s flow. It’s words, flowing together, meaning tripping over meaning. It’s stories, told by the teller. That’s what rap is.
“So I want to share with you today some slam poetry I wrote that is heavily influenced by The Canterbury Tales, which to me is the first-ever rap, which to me is the story of people, and people are the thing, yo, that I write about, that I live for.”
I leaned over and surreptitiously poked Rafe in the side, not once taking my eyes off the performer, whose eyes were now closed as he swayed back and forth, mentally preparing his slam poem.
“What did you do to me?” I whispered.
“Beautiful train wreck,” Rafe whispered back. “I think I’m in love with another man, Ben.”
This earned him a harder poke in the ribs, and I realized that I was actually having fun. Out of my comfort zone.
The man began to rap his slam poem with what sounded like a Scottish accent.
E sleh-pen al the nicht with open ay-yuh