“In the movie Clueless, the new kid was gay,” Albie said.
Toby said, “Gay tramp.”
“I assume that comment was vaguely aimed at me and that you were trying to make things awkward?” Rafe asked.
“It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that. Duh,” Toby said.
“Rocket surgeon?” I asked, and Rafe shook his head.
“Anyway, I’m giving up sex,” Toby said. “I’ve got other things on my brain.”
I thought back to when he’d come to my room to subliminalize me; he’d said he needed to talk. I wondered what was up.
“Isn’t it more like sex is giving you up?” Albie asked. “You don’t have a boyfriend, Toby. You haven’t abandoned sex; it’s abandoned you.”
“You should know,” Toby pouted, crossing his arms across his skinny chest.
“Ooh, good burn,” Albie said.
“Anyway, I would still be giving up sex if I had the choice. Because it’s not normal, you know? I mean, is it logical to want to stick your thing in—well, either the baby place or the sewer place or the food place? That’s all so weird.”
“I think Robinson hurt you,” Albie said. “I think sex is perfectly normal in a very—don’t think too much about it sort of way.”
Toby looked out the window and pouted some more. “I think sex is something that happens between two clowns in the privacy of their overcrowded car.”
It took us about forty-five minutes to get to Faneuil Hall, which is an old marketplace in front of a meeting hall in downtown Boston. It was an unseasonably warm night for January, and the area was inhabited by a truly diverse group of people. A vendor wearing African garb sold colorful handbags, a Japanese woman was doing an up close photo study of a statue, and a white homeless lady was feeding breadcrumbs to a large gaggle of ducks—which was odd given that it was winter, but then again the last week or so had been relatively mild. The trees throughout the square were still bright with Christmas lights, and old-fashioned lampposts surrounded the actual hall. I’d never been there before, so while Toby ran around showcasing what he called his Nice Tourette’s—“I love your hair,” he’d blurt out to a stranger; “You’re a beautiful flower”—I studied the Samuel Adams statue. Sam loomed high above us on a granite pedestal, his arms across his chest in a very self-satisfied pose. The inscription read, “Samuel Adams 1722–1803—A Patriot—He organized the Revolution, and signed the Declaration of Independence.”
As I looked at Sam Adams, Rafe came and stood next to me. I was thinking about how frightening it would be to start a revolution, without the hindsight that it would be a success. How much did you have to believe in something to heed that call to action? It was hard to fathom.
I glanced over at Rafe. He was staring at the inscription. For a long time.
“It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
He looked over at me. “What? Oh, yeah. No, I actually was thinking about something else.”
“Ah,” I said, crossing my arms like Sam.
“You actually were thinking about the Revolutionary War, weren’t you?” he asked.
I stifled a frown. “Well, yeah.”
“And that is why you are Ben, fascinating intellectual jock dude, and I am Rafe, who is none of those things.”
“Yeah, real fascinating,” I said as I walked over to the front of Faneuil Hall. Rafe followed.
“You kinda are,” he said. “Who’s this girl?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t we just say we weren’t going to do this?”
“I think you made her up to make me jealous.”
“I didn’t, Rafe. I wouldn’t. Fine. There is a girl.”
“Okay. Cool. I can handle that.”
“Sorry,” I said.
He rolled his eyes in a way that said, What can you do, and I laughed a little.
“Congrats on the award, by the way. And the captaincy.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I can’t believe it.”
“I can,” he said.
I said, “By the way: Is Toby wearing makeup now?”
Rafe nodded. “I noticed that too.”
“Huh. That’s—different.”
“Toby’s different.”
“He is that,” I said.
Toby ran over and saved us from the awkwardness of our conversation. “Okay, game time,” he said. “Best photobomb of the night wins a hot chocolate at Sparky’s. Losers team up to pay.”
I shook my head, hard. “Nope.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t be such a pooper of parties.”
I took a deep breath and bit the side of my lip. Killer of fun.
Rafe looked sideways at me as if to gauge my reaction. “I’m in,” he said.
I looked around the square. Indeed, photos were being taken all over the place. And this crazy thing happened. I thought, Maybe this is another apple orchard? A place where I could let loose for once? For one moment, I forgot my lifelong mantra: We’re Carver men. We work. We work hard.
I wasn’t quite sure how Faneuil Hall was like an apple orchard exactly, since forming an apple-related gang was surely not in the cards here. But I’d never have fun if I didn’t try.
“Fine. Whatever.”
Albie surprised me by yelling, “Me first, me first!” He skulked around the square for a few moments, then snuck in behind a couple posing about five feet in front of a statue of a chubby man in a suit. Albie leered at the camera like a serial killer from behind their backs. I had to laugh. It was going to be hard to top that one.
Rafe went next. He was less graceful, running through a shot with his arms up just as the flash went off.
Toby yelled, “Now me!” and ran off in search of a photo to bomb. He strutted around the perimeter of the square, looking so suspicious that people stepped away from him. Then he sprinted back toward us. Just to our left, by the benches, a group of tourists were posing for a picture. Toby ran behind them and tried to do the Karate Kid pose, his arms in the air, poised to attack, as he stood on one foot.
That’s when I heard the crunch. It sounded like a combination flutter-scrunch-quack, real quick like. The tourists jumped away, and the woman taking the picture snapped it. I will never see that picture, but I imagine it was a perfect shot of Toby standing on one leg, his arms high and wide, looking down at the duck whose foot he’d just stepped on.
The woman yelled, “What the?”
Toby picked up his foot, and the duck fluttered away a few feet.
“S-s-orry,” he stuttered.
“What the hell? Who does that?” she continued, her hands on her hips.
“Seriously,” one of the posing guys said.
“I’m … in a contest,” Toby managed.
Meanwhile, several other members of the duck gaggle had amassed next to their injured comrade. More ducks flew in to join them.
“Asshole,” the photographer said, and the three of them hurried away.
“Watch out!” Albie yelled.
The gaggle of ducks had formed something of a circle around Toby, and they were pecking the ground.
“Yikes,” Toby said, just as the first duck quacked out a frantic war cry and charged. It pecked at his leg, and Toby flinched. As he stumbled back, we heard another squeak. He’d stepped on another one.
Now they came at Toby from all sides, squawking and quacking wildly as their beaks pecked at his legs. He stood there, clearly confused about how to respond to a public duck pecking. When a duck rose up to his crotch level, he backed up but stumbled and lost his footing.
The fall was painfully slow: a hand to brace his fall, then butt, then arm. Once Toby was on the ground, the ducks surrounded him, pecking at his face, his Adam’s apple, arms, crotch. He didn’t have enough hands to cover all the places they could peck, and when he did manage to guard something, they went for his hands.
“Ow ow ow,” he yelled.
I stomped hard on the ground, hoping to disperse the ducks. A couple did fly off, but most stayed
. I wasn’t about to let my friend get beat up by a bunch of ducks. I waded into the circle and reached down for Toby’s hand, but as I grasped it, a duck stabbed me in the wrist with his bill. “Damn it,” I said, and I did something I never thought I’d do.
I punched a duck.
I didn’t mean to punch it. I was just frustrated, and the duck was there, and I punched.
It felt … small. Like something that shouldn’t be punched by a human. It looked at me like he was thinking: No, you didn’t just do that. Somewhere far away, I could imagine the ASPCA folks mobilizing against me. It made several of the ducks hurry away, but some others—perhaps the protective mothers?—squawked and attacked me. I got pecked in the shins, the hands, the biceps. But I managed to lift Toby up, and we four ran the hell out of there, not needing to remain at Faneuil Hall as the guys who got their asses kicked by a gaggle of waterfowl.
We only stopped running when we got to Tremont Street. I looked back, wondering if the ducks had followed us. They hadn’t run a quarter of a mile, no, and as I watched Albie, bent over and breathing hard from running maybe two minutes, I started to laugh. Really hard. Like years—or at least weeks—of pent-up energy. Thank God laughter is contagious, because soon they were all laughing with me. Even Toby, who had visual proof of duck-related injury in the form of several welts on his face, which looked especially freaky in combination with his eyeliner.
“C’mon, Ben, your turn,” Toby said, and I walked over and gave him a hug.
“I think you win,” I said.
The ride back was much less weird than the ride there, with lots of laughter about stupid stuff. I looked down at the few sore spots on my wrists and realized that in this case, they were totally worth it.
On Tuesday night, I was busy learning about transference and denial for psych class when there was a knock at my door. Somehow I knew who it was.
“Duck!” Rafe yelled when I opened it.
“Har har.” I stepped aside and let him in.
I was mostly over the embarrassment of being taken down by a dozen angry ducks in front of a bunch of strangers this past weekend. I still had a couple of bruises on my wrists; they looked like purple semicolons. But I was otherwise fine, so long as the baseball guys never, ever heard about what happened.
“Talk about fowl play,” Rafe said.
“I said: har har.”
His face was all scrunched up like he was thinking really hard. I said, “I know you think besmirching me is hilarious, but can we move on, please?”
I saw the moment it came to him, and he turned to me with this inimitable Rafe expression of wonder, the one he gets when he surprises himself with what he thinks is a funny idea.
“That must have been very … unpheasant?”
That one cracked me up, it was so stupid. “Okay, a point for that one. And no more, please.”
He sat down on the bed that he’d adopted last term after Bryce left, and I sat down on mine, facing him. A pang of something came over me. Memories? Not specific, exactly. Just of how it felt to have Bryce or Rafe close by all the time.
We didn’t say anything for quite a while. I watched him look around the room, and then, when he looked at me and smiled, I grabbed my psychology textbook and placed it on my lap as if it were a shield.
“What’cha studying?” he asked.
“AP psych.”
“Ah. You like it?”
“Meh.”
“Why’d you take that?”
“AP credit,” I said. “But also—I don’t know.”
“What?”
I scratched my left eyebrow. “I guess it’s kind of like philosophy. It’s a study of the brain. Or I thought it would be. Instead, it’s a lot of stupid stuff I don’t care about.”
“Welcome to high school.”
“I guess. Oh, wait. This part cracked me up.” I flipped through the textbook to the graph I’d just been studying. “They have an actual graph where, like, they explain the unhealthy ways people deal with anger. Check this out.” I read: “You are mad at your mother. Possible reactions: Displacement. ‘I’m not angry at my mother; I’m mad at my dog. Bad dog.’ ”
Rafe laughed.
I continued reading. “Projection: ‘I am not angry at my mother; she is angry at me.’ Sublimation: ‘I am not angry at my mother; I just need to arrange these pennies in perfect stacks of twenty.’ ” I looked up. “I just think that’s all a little too neat, you know?”
Rafe kinked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Like, you put everything into this little box. If I’m pissed off and I don’t act it, it’s not like I’m doing one thing. I’m probably, you know, doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”
“That makes sense,” he said. “What did you do when you were angry at me?”
I clutched my book tight. “Eh,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Rafe said, jumping up and pulling the burgundy chair into the middle of the room. Then he sat down, crossed his legs, and rested his chin in his hands like a shrink might.
I rolled my eyes. “You are really not going to analyze me.”
He affected a weird German accent. “It sounds as if vat you’re saying ees that you have fear of being analyzed, ya?”
I laughed despite myself. “You could say that.”
“Tell Dr. Freudberg. Vat ver you theenking ven you ver mad at that Rafe fella?” By the end of the sentence, he’d morphed into Irish.
I laughed again, crossed my legs and then uncrossed them. I looked at him and said, “You really want to go there?”
The nod started as if he was in character as Dr. Freudberg, but I could see also that he was serious, that he wanted to know, and that it was okay; I could tell him.
And I could. That was the surprising thing. All these months of staying away from the deep stuff, and here I was, about to dive in. I’d been so sure I’d never have this conversation with Rafe, ever. But it was okay. It just was.
“I was—pissed,” I said.
“Okay. That much I knew.”
I sighed. “I was pissed because of, yes, the lying or whatever you’d call it. Withholding. But it was more than that too. It was like, suddenly I had a boyfriend, who was gay, and I was WAY not ready for that.”
Rafe nodded, and he didn’t say anything.
“I guess I made more of it about the lying. Not that it didn’t bug me, because it did. But a lot of it was that I was freaked out. Do you get that I have totally, honestly NEVER had a serious thought about a guy before? And then you. You just came into my life, and I don’t know what happened. Something. But. It was real, you know?”
A tear fell from his right eye and trailed down his cheek.
I looked down at my mattress and continued. “It was real. So. I thought we were both in this place together, this new place, and that was a beautiful thing. But you weren’t really there—”
“I was, though,” he said, interrupting me. I looked up, and he wiped a tear away.
I raised an eyebrow and waited.
He wiped his eyes again. “I was there. You don’t get that it was new for me too. Yeah, I’ve always known I liked guys, and that part is different. But you don’t get that you were my first too.”
“What about that other guy?”
“Clay? Are you serious? I barely knew him. I could hardly have a conversation with him. I fooled around with him because he wanted to, and he was there. I tricked myself into thinking it was more, but it was basically—he was there.”
“Huh,” I said. “That kind of makes you a slut, doesn’t it?”
He jutted his neck out like he couldn’t believe what I’d said, and he exhaled when I smirked.
“Until you, Ben, I’d never had any feeling that felt like, you know.”
My windpipe shut down, and I closed my eyes.
“You okay?”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to open my eyes and look at Rafe. “Sorry, the boy said. I’m not freaked out abou
t this. I’m freaked out about my dog. Bad dog.”
Rafe laughed and flexed his feet like he was about to stand up, and I realized he was going to come over to me. I crossed my arms. Nope. You have Jeff. And not ready for that, even if you didn’t. He seemed to get the message; he un-flexed.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Are you really straight? Or bi, or whatever? Is there really a girl?”
“Yeah. Straight.”
“It’s not, like, denial? In the GSA we joke that bi guys are just gay guys who aren’t ready to admit it yet.”
I tightened my arms around my chest. “Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t, I guess.”
“The girl’s name is Hannah. She is a real person. I like her, okay?”
He clasped his arms around his legs. “Okay.”
“And. Is it okay to talk about this? I mean. Jeff and all.”
“It’s fine,” he half whispered.
“Here’s the thing. I’m glad we’re talking again. But you really can’t ever, ever lie to me, or withhold any information. Never. Seriously.”
“I promise. I will never.”
His face was so earnest, and I noticed that my arms had uncrossed and there was this feeling in my chest like I was breathing for the first time in a long time. Part of me wondered again if this was a type of intoxication, if Rafe really was like my alcohol, because this feeling of peace came over me, and it reminded me of the first taste of a plastic screwdriver, how it enters the bloodstream and you just go, Ahh.
I’d have to watch out for any sign I was becoming addicted.
Rafe smiled at me, and for the first time since maybe Thanksgiving, I smiled back.
“So let’s play a game,” he said.
“Scrabble?”
“What? No. The game is called Let’s Clear the Air. If we’re gonna be honest with each other from here on out, let’s get every little thing out from last semester.”
“I don’t have any little things,” I said, but I felt my jaw tighten and realized that wasn’t true.
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “I’ll start. You, sir, are a terrible dancer.”