It’s funny, because I think about how Naomi must’ve known what this was like. Although she, at least, could hold her own. My version of flirting bears a striking resemblance to mime.
I want to pull Ely aside and ask Who are you? And Why haven’t we had sex yet? (Slept together? Yes. First, second, and third bases? Covered. All the way? Nope.) And Why are you with me? But I am so terrified of sounding needy. And I am so resentful that there is no want version of the word needy— And that was the point where he got all wanty on me. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you have some serious wantiness issues.” And maybe I do have wantiness issues. I want to go. I want to be alone with him. I want to be the kind of person who has a boyfriend who shows his dick to a stranger—once, in order to get them into a club. I want to be cool enough. I want to erase all these thoughts—all thoughts, period—and have a good time. But Ely can’t just show his dick to my wantiness and make it go away.
I feel like the mutant among the mutants. Like the boy who showed up at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and found out that, whoops, he didn’t have any superpowers at all.
I’m so tired of being uncool. You can dress me up, give me a cool boyfriend, even laugh at one of my jokes every now and then—but the anxiety always gives it away.
The techno Lilith ends and the floor show begins. The hostess is a drag queen calling herself Sarah McLocklips, and she starts by asking for some volunteers from the audience to be the impromptu opening act—apparently, Paula Cole-Minor’s-Slaughter retired and nobody bothered to tell the organizers. The music’s all cued—they just need a Paula.
Before you can say “Where have all the cowboys gone?” Ely’s onstage.
“Because my friend Naomi has all five seasons of Dawson’s Creek, I think I know this one cold,” he says. Then, warming into it, he adds, “This one is for Pacey, for being the Jughead. And Jen, who never got the respect she deserved. And Bruce.”
(“Was Bruce the gay one?” the girl next to me asks her staple-pierced boyfriend.
“No, that was Jack,” the punk replies. “Andie’s brother.”
“Oh! I loved Andie!” the girl screams.)
Ely doesn’t even try to sound like Paula Cole—instead he belts the song out like it’s graduation, telling everyone in teh room (if not the five boroughs beyond) that he doesn’t want to wait for our lives to be over. And since neither Pacey nor Jen is in the room, he’s looking at me as he sings it. So I smile and cheer and sing along when he asks everyone to join him. But what I’m thinking is: I don’t want to wait, either. And I don’t want you to have to wait.
Everyone adores him. What can I give him besides that, besides what everyone else does?
When the song ends, he’s more popular than ever. People buy him drinks. He puts his hand on their shoulders as he says thank you. It’s not an invitation; he’s just being nice. He’d hold my hand if I offered it. But I’m off offering. I don’t just feel like the third wheel—it’s more like the twenty-sixth.
I don’t blame him. I direct it all at myself. For not being able to go along.
I finally make my excuses and shove my way to the restroom. The person in front of me is clearly Natalie Merchant-of-Penis, since her T-shirt reads I BLEW 10,000 MANIACS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT. She takes so long inside that I’m worried she’s found her 10,001st maniac, but when she emerges, she’s all alone. When she passes me, she says, “I just want to thank you,” and I don’t know what to do but nod.
Once I’ve locked the door behind me, I do my business. And then I just sit there, because I realize I don’t want to face Ely yet. In fact, I realize that I’m actually going to leave. And I’m not even going to tell Ely I’m leaving, since I don’t want to ruin his night. I want him to stay and have fun. I’ll text him once I’m safely away. I don’t want to rain on his parade. Although, yeah, I wouldn’t mind if his parade decided to follow me out the door.
I look at all the graffiti in the stall. Some of it even has pictures. I don’t understand half of it. It’s only after I’ve been reading for two minutes or so and the person waiting outside has started to pound on the door that I know what I’ve been looking for—not words of wisdom, but a blank space.
There’s one available under an inscription that says:
The Cure. For the Ex’s? I’m sorry, Nick. You know. Will you kiss me again?
I take a pen out of my pocket and write:
Ely, I want. You, me, the rest of it. I want someone to make it work, and I don’t know if it can be me. Because I’m so uncool and so afraid.
I wonder if you’re supposed to sign something like this. But I figure if he ever sees it, he’ll know it’s from me. And if he doesn’t know it’s from me . . . well, then it wasn’t meant to happen anyway.
When I leave the bathroom, the person waiting says pretty much the opposite of “I just want to thank you.” But that’s the least of my cares. I search the club for Ely, thinking maybe I’ll say good-bye in person after all. But then I see him at the bar, drinking his bright green drink and chatting with the bouncer from before and two gay boys who almost look like they could be twins. They’re all laughing. Enjoying themselves.
I feel like an outsider to that. To Ely, and to that. So I head where the outsiders belong: outside.
I’m never going to fit in with him. Never.
I know this is the wrong choice. But it feels like the only choice. So I make it.
NAOMI
UP
Was that you I just heard snort from the other side of class?
I didn’t realize the sound of a snort could carry as far as where girl-Robin, sitting on the opposite end of the lecture hall, is IM’ing me during Introduction to Psychology class. At least I didn’t fart.
Yeah, I type back. Bruce the First’s new thing is to e-mail me daily inspirational quotes. I copy and paste today’s installment into the IM screen and send it over to Robin. It’s a Nicholas Sparks quote about flowers and talking to animals and refreshing breezes.
Robin’s hearty snort from the other side of the room is twice as loud as mine. Schenectady really knows how to raise ’em right.
Here’s the math on psych: Probably one hundred students in this class. Eighty percent type lecture notes into their laptops as the professor-drone pontificates about some sick experiment where people were told to perform a task completely unrelated to the behavior they were actually being observed for (shrinks are mean fucks but excellent liars—I respect that). The remaining 20 percent of students appear to be dozing, while easily half the laptop note takers are IM’ing or perusing online dating services instead of paying attention to professor-drone. The likelihood that I will fail this class is about 60/40 (professor-drone’s T.A. has a thing for me, but I can’t bother to fake a girl-crush on her, even for a passing grade). I’m here, though. The odds of me bothering to show at any class these days are nil.
But I had to escape Mom. She took another sick day off work. Since I wouldn’t have the apartment to myself, where I could spend the day not being in class, and I couldn’t bear a third consecutive day of hanging out in Mom’s giant bed reading fashion mags and watching DVDs while she naps, I opted to go to class. But I arrived too late to grab a seat by Robin, dutifully sitting in the front row.
She queries:
I thought Bruce the First was over you.
I respond:
I think he is. But he will never get over Nicholas Sparks.
This time our laughs are in sync. Only mine is louder, and the professor has to stop lecturing to point up at me. “You in the back? Do you have something you care to share with the class? Or are experiments in human reaction to animal torture really that funny?”
A hundred faces turn to me. “Sorry,” I mumble.
I lied. I’m not sorry.
I totally want to stand up and leave. Just like that. Leave this class and leave this university. For good.
Only I have nothing to go to. No one to help me along the way.
Ely.
It’s like I can smell him.
I did want to escape this lecture room, but then I see him through the glass windows in the door at the front of the room, walking through the hallway with a group of gay boys, easily identifiable as such by too much hair gel and clothing choices that are too carefully mismatched, and I’m fine to stay through the end of class. No Bruce the Second in sight. Must be Queer Boys With Assumed Musical Superiority Who Recycle For A Greener Rainbow Environment meeting day.
Then: Ouch.
I know Robin means the Ely sighting and not the professor’s interruption.
They travel in packs, you know, I answer.
Who?
Gay boys .
It’s true. I wasted my time creating rules for Ely and me to avoid each other in The Building when where I’ve really needed to avoid him is Everywhere Else. There he is, standing in line at the Mud-coffee truck in front of the Virgin store in Union Square, about to kiss Bruce the Second. Or I see him at six in the morning, sitting in the window seat at the twenty-four-hour Ukrainian restaurant across the street from the Star-bucks on Second Avenue and East Ninth, where I’ve taken up new residence solely to avoid Ely sightings; he’s dining with a posse of gay boys after what must be a late night out, wearing my pink shirt and compulsively glancing at his cell phone every two minutes even though he knows there’s no text message from me. It’s not The Building that’s too small for us anymore—it’s the whole damn city below Fourteenth Street.
I wish my vision lied, but what I see is that Ely looks happier with him, with them, than he ever did with me. He’s more comfortable, relaxed—like he’s sacrificed a crucial element in his life but won back the elemental right not to have to worry about a bomb randomly and unexpectedly going off in his midst. He probably prefers being surrounded by his own kind. Not every gay boy needs to accessorize with a straight-girl best friend. That is the lie.
Robin asks, What about Gabriel?
He asked me to Starbucks.
That’s big. Did you go?
Not yet. But I’m thinking ’bout it.
Good. If Bruce the First can move on, so can you.
I’m a little awed that Robin can IM so rapidly when I know she is also typing lecture notes. I admire multi-taskers. I decide to follow her lead. I open a new document on my laptop.
THINGS BETTER EXPERIENCED WITHOUT ELY
1. Bingo.
Ely totally messed with my juju. I never won when I played with him sitting at my side, but since we’ve worked out an alternating-Tuesdays schedule for bingo playing, I’ve discovered a lucky winning streak. Who knew? The old people in The Building touch me for luck when I pass by them now, I swear.
2. Frappuccinos.
The tasty treats Ely hates. Yummmmmmmmmm.
3. Dawson’s Creek.
Ely’s a Dawson-Joey ’shipper (and I don’t think that’s because Dawson was so clearly gay; I think Ely really believed that girl-next-door Joey was Dawson’s true love), whereas I am all about the Pacey-Joey true love, and debating the issue with Ely is useless when the final episode proves me so clearly right.
4. Love Thyself.
Okay, I’ve given up on Seventeen entirely (some things are sacred), but even reading Cosmo without Ely is not the same fun, and defacing the models with our crayon collection is rather pointless without him (Ely draws a dick much better than I). But Cosmo does have a point: Thinking about someone you’re really really attracted to while touching yourself can yield satisfactory—very satisfactory—results. And when I think about Gabriel touching me here-there-everywhere while I’m doing just that, I seem to reach a place I never found when fantasizing about doing it with Ely. It makes me want to find that place for real with a real person—a person named Gabriel and not named Ely.
Oh. My. God. No wonder I don’t go to class. The professor has decided to run a slide show sponsored by PETA, apparently. I can’t look. I don’t want Robin to look. So I distract her with a new IM:
What does sex feel like?
She turns around so I can see her face looking up at me. Her jaw drops. Then she types back:
Are you serious? You’ve never done it?!?!? YOU?!?!?
I shrug, then send: I almost did it with Bruce the Second. But I knew we were both going through motions to express a feeling we didn’t actually feel for one another, and he seemed to know the same, and he never pushed it like most guys. And I don’t think that’s because Bruce the Second is so clearly probably gay. I think maybe it’s because he’s just a good guy.
I hate that.
I guess I hope he finds what he’s looking for. Bruce the Second, that is.
Robin responds:
People say you should wait to be with someone you love, but I think it’s more important to be with someone you like. I mean, that person is going to see you naked, you know? Be inside you. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it, but don’t wait for a fantasy, either.
Friends? I type back.
She turns around again, smiles up at me.
Yeah.
And suddenly I want to fall out of my chair with laughter Because I am imagining Ely on top of me, naked, penetrating me, and the mental image is so clearly wrong. The intimacy may be loving, the intentions are good, he’s up and in me, but it’s awkward and forced—worse than the deadening image of watching porn, because the feeling part of the chemical components between us just could not be right. Naomi + Ely should not = sex.
Ely likes boys. I like boys. Ely is a boy. I am a girl.
Ringring, Naomi. How can you even be in college when you’re so dumb as to take this long to make the connection? To truly believe it?
It’s not funny, so I don’t know why I am laughing so hard. But my dream vision, which won’t lie to me even as fantasy, is just that ridiculous.
I will never understand why gender is so important to mating rituals—it doesn’t make sense; love is love, attraction is what it is, and why should the arbitrary assignment of genital parts determine whether or not you want to be with a person?— but the fact is, it matters.
I hate that, too.
But it’s true.
And if I’m going to face the cold, hard truth, someone else should, too.
I’m out of here, I type to Robin.
Are you leaving in the middle of the class? Where are you going?
Home.
Mourning has to end. For both of us.
Time to get Mom up and out of bed.
ELY
EASY
After a few days of awkwardness and avoidance with Bruce, I call an emergency meeting of the Dairy Queens. With Naomi and Bruce out of range, I need to call in the backup support system. I figure if you’re facing big dilemmas or difficult personal problems, it always helps to get the perspective of a few gay boys who grew up in farm country. The shit they had to deal with makes mine look puny. And to survive in style . . . well, we could all learn a lot from that.
We meet right after class. Shaun (linebacker from Nebraska) is wearing his usual rugby shirt and jeans; I used to dismiss him as “straight-acting” until I realized that he was just acting like himself, and that playing the “straight-acting” card was just a weird way for gay boys to hate themselves and each other. Art (from Idaho) is wearing an XXS T-shirt that’s embroidered with the phrase I AIN’T YOUR BITCH. Neal (our F2M transitioning pal from southern Illinois) is sexy as hell in a British-schoolboy-with-his-striped-tie-all-askew ensemble, and Ink (who had such a miserable time in Missouri that his first tattoo said GET ME OUT OF HERE across the inside of his arm) is his usual mess of plaids and blacks. It’s been a while since I’ve needed them like this, and they’re good enough to me not to mention that.
As we’re heading out, we pass Naomi’s psych class. I always learned her schedules before I learned my own, and I feel nostalgic for that now. But I can’t invite her along, not right now—I have to deal with my life one failure at a time, because if I consider them all at once, I might fall
into a bucketless well.
I’m not the only one with problems. As we walk past Washington Square Park (too many people we know, too much social noise) and down to the Hudson, Ink talks about how he tried to call his mother for her birthday only to have her refuse to come to the phone, no matter how hard his sisters tried to persuade her. Art then recounts a sadistic night out—“sadistic in the bad way”—with a Facebook date who ended up being forty pounds heavier, six years older, and five blank hours duller than he’d been when they were e-mailing. And Neal says his ex has started calling again, making booty overtures and nearly wrecking his latest like.
Shaun stays silent about himself, and I wonder if it’s because I’m there. Even though I dated Ink for a week during freshman orientation and once made out with Neal at a party, Shaun’s the one who didn’t appear on the No Kiss List until it was too late. I flirted recklessly and it nearly wrecked everything.
We walk ’til we get to Rockefeller Park, right on the river. As soon as we hit the grass, Neal asks me what’s going on, and if I’ve heard from Bruce yet.
It’s a simple question, and my answer takes about twenty minutes. I start with the night Bruce disappeared, because even though Neal and Art were there, Shaun and Ink weren’t. I talk about how confused I was, and how I’m still just as confused, if not more so. I admit: I should have clued in earlier that Bruce had disappeared. At first I thought there was just a really long line for the boys’ room, because a lot of the time, there is. Then I figured he’d found other friends to talk to or something. It was only after he’d been gone for about an hour that I noticed, wow, it had been an hour. I confess I even thought, Oh shit, now I’m going to get in trouble for leaving him alone for an hour. It never occurred to me that he might have left without saying good-bye. I looked everywhere for him and enlisted Neal and Art to look, too. I asked the people on the bathroom line if they’d seen someone fitting Bruce’s description, but they assured me the only person in the bathroom at that moment was a Jewel-inspired drag queen (Family Jewel). Finally I bumped into the Missy Elliot bouncer, who told me my fly guy had flown. I checked my voice mail and texts: nothing. I even had Neal text me and Art call me, just to make sure the phone was working. I tried calling Bruce. No answer. I texted him: Where are you? Are you okay?