“How did I break it first?” Dylan yells. I can hear a fist hit something, but I can’t see over the people and I can’t get past the radiology guy, who is holding me back.
“Stop it, boys,” yells Mr. Key.
“By what? By being gay?” Dylan says. Then he makes an oophing noise that means Tom’s hit him back. Everything inside my body shakes, like the earth’s given way, like even my organs, my muscles, my bones have lost all stability.
Several people pull in their breath.
“I don’t give a shit about you being gay,” Tom says.
“Then what?”
Janine smashes by me and says, “I’m going to go get Tom’s dad. He’s in the gym. Don’t let them hurt each other.”
Like that’s possible. Still, I nod and manage to get past radiology man just as Tom says, “No, when you and Mimi hooked up sophomore year.”
I stagger and almost fall. My world spins. Mimi? Mr. Key grabs my arm and whispers my name but I shake him off and go to stand behind Tom. Dylan cheated on me. With Mimi. When we were sophomores? Was this before or after we were going out?
Tom looks like he wants to spit at Dylan and according to my reflection in the big mirror on the way, I look that way too.
Dylan’s eyes glance past Tom and at me. His anger crumples. His fists turn back into hands with fingers. He is not golden, but yellow. Tom shakes his head, “You always had to have it all, Dylan, but you can’t. You can’t have it all. No one can.”
Dylan looks up to the sky. His Adam’s apple moves along his throat like he’s gulping for air and my heart aches for him, despite everything. He murmurs to the ceiling, “I don’t want it all.”
I step in front of Tom and grab Dylan by the shoulders, forcing him to look at me. Tears rest in the corners of his eyes and my voice comes out soft, “Then what is it you want, Dylan?”
His lip trembles. His eyes look past mine, at Tom, at the crowd and he says in an almost whisper, “To be myself.”
“Oh, sweetie,” I say and hug him close. Over his shoulder Bob’s ears turn red, so I let Dylan go just as Tom storms away, out of the gym and into the hall. I turn and watch him go. My arms feel empty though. My arms still feel like they need to hug someone, maybe Tom, maybe Dylan.
Dylan wipes at his eyes and Bob drops his weight on the floor. Behind me Mr. Key says, “Okay, everybody. Nothing more to see.”
Tom and Dylan and I, though, we aren’t done yet. Tom’s not anyway. All his dad’s cop-authority training must have rubbed off on him somehow because he stomps back in, charging like a bull or something and he reaches out a hand, grabs Dylan’s upper arm and says like he means it, “But you can’t hurt other people. You can’t push them aside in your quest to be you.”
Dylan nods and something solids his eyes. “You either.”
Tom lets go and spreads out his own arms like they are wings. He agrees. “Me either.”
Tom’s dad comes in a second later. And even though he’s wearing basketball shorts and a sleeveless shirt instead of his uniform, he takes Dylan aside and starts lecturing him in that calm, stable way he has. He is, I am sure, telling him to be careful. He glares at Tom, points at him, and says in a total dad way, “I’ll talk to you at home.”
Tom and I go out to the hall and down a corner where no one can see us. I lean against the wall and Tom stands in front of me. My whole body shakes against the cold concrete blocks that somebody’s painted blue and white in an attempt to make the Y look nicer, I guess.
“Belle?” His voice is a question mixed with a want.
It is all I can do not to cry. The whole Dylan and Mimi thing is too much, after everything else. I wonder if everyone knew, or just Tom and why Tom never told me. Because of some stupid pact?
A gulp lodges in my throat and I push it back and say, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“You would have hated me. You would’ve thought I was just trying to break you guys up because I was jealous.”
I shake my head. My voice is angry. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. Belle . . .”
I press my lips tight and don’t bend. Tom’s eyes flash in anger. “You didn’t have to hug him in there.”
“He was hurt.” I glare at him and then realize he’s hurt too. There’s a cut on his forehead, near his temple that’s bleeding and the whole area is swelling.
“You’re hurt.” I reach up my hand and let it rest on Tom’s head, like I could magically take away the pain, just make the injury go away. My eyes stare into his and I can see the anger fade out, fade away like a plane moving past the horizon of the sky. “I don’t like him that way. I’m not sure how I ever liked him that way, but I don’t like him that way now.”
“And what about me?” His voice is mellow and harsh, rough and bumpy like a tree trunk, but whole somehow too, strong, holding up the weight of an entire tree.
I don’t move my hand away as I say, “I like you, Tom. I really like you, but it’s so quick and I’m so scared. That sounds wimpy. I know that sounds wimpy.”
I shake my head and drop my hand, start to turn away. “I was so wrong about Dylan. I don’t want to be wrong like that again.”
He leans toward me, puts his hands on either sides of my shoulders, and stares at me with serious tree-bark eyes. “I swear, I’ll never hurt you.”
I shake my head, breaking. “You can’t know that.”
He cups my hand in his chin. “Yes, yes I can.”
We sit in his truck, parked outside my house. Every once in a while my mom walks in front of the living room window and peeks out at us, thinking she’s all discreet.
“My mom’s watching,” I laugh.
Tom looks at me, chews on his lip a bit, and then starts fiddling with his duct tape, twisting it fast and furious. “I never understood why you started playing guitar in grade school. Was it to make Dylan like you?”
“No.” I watch his fingers instead of his face, try to figure out what he’s making. “It’s because I like stories.”
His fingers stop for a second. “Stories?”
“Yeah, stories. I like songs that are stories and I like to tell them, I guess,” I pull up my shoe and start trying to unwedge a pebble that’s stuck in the tread.
Tom rips off a piece of duct tape, grabs my shoe, and sticks the tape on the bottom. He smiles at me, slow and long. “Watch.”
With one quick movement, he rips the tape off. Stuck to it is the pebble.
“Wow,” I say. I grab the duct tape and look at all the dirt and tiny rocks stuck on it now, lint that I’ve walked over, lint that’s stuck to me and I never noticed it the whole time it was tagging along.
“Why not write stories then?” he asks me, leaning back. The truck’s overhead light makes him glow a little, which reminds me of Dylan, which reminds me of Dylan and him fighting in the Y.
The cut on his face by his ear has stopped bleeding, but the swelling all around it hasn’t gone down. I reach out toward it but don’t touch. “Does that hurt?”
He shakes his head. “You’re avoiding the question.”
“I know, but I think I should get you some ice.”
“Only wimps need ice. Answer my question.”
“Okay, He-Man. I like words out loud better,” I say. “Sometimes stories seem pretentious and I’m not so good at getting to the music under the words when I just have a paper and a pen, or on the computer, you know . . . It’s different somehow.”
He shifts closer. “I’m listening.”
“The thing is, a songwriter is part of history. They are part of this tradition of singing other people’s stories, and their own stories, too, obviously. Like, if you look at old songs, they are tools for understanding history of people. Not just the presidents and the hoity-toity academics and stuff, but the
regular people.”
He nods and shuts off the overhead light. An owl hoots outside somewhere. A dog barks its response. The lights in Eddie Caron’s house flicker like the furnace has come on.
“And every time you sing a song, you change it a little, you leave your mark. Pete Seeger, this famous folk guy, he said that.” I shift on the seat. “That sounded pretentious before, didn’t it? Saying songs are ‘tools for understanding.’ That’s so pretentious.”
I shake my head because sometimes I am stupid.
“You worry too much about being pretentious,” Tom says. “You are the least pretentious person I know.”
“Really?”
“Really. Pretentious people do not wear Snoopy shoes.”
I admire them. “Do you think they’re stupid? They aren’t exactly the height of fashion.”
He smiles and tugs at one of my laces, untying it. “I think they’re you.”
“Dylan hated them. So I never wore them. I’ve had them forever.”
“They’re cute.” He closes his eyes for a second the way people do when their head hurts.
“You sure you don’t want some ice?” I ask.
“Nah, I have to go home soon.”
“Your dad going to kill you?”
He opens his eyes again and smiles like it doesn’t matter. “Probably.”
His eyes are so intense and deep and dangerous that I have to look away. Across the street, Eddie’s body is silhouetted in the light of his living room window. He’s moved the drapes and is staring out into the night, staring at Tom’s truck. “Eddie’s watching us.”
Tom shrugs.
I swallow. “No one’s ever asked me before, never asked me why I sing songs.”
He arches an eyebrow. “Not even Dylan?”
I shake my head.
“Not even Emily?”
“It’d be like asking her why she takes so many pictures. It’s just obvious I guess.”
“Why does she take so many pictures?” Tom asks. He picks up my hand and clips a duct tape bracelet over my fingers. It glides across my skin and settles on my arm. Tom moves it with his finger, slowly circling it around.
It is hard to keep my voice normal. “She’s afraid of losing people. She’s afraid she’ll forget things about them.”
My words come out slow and heavy maybe because my heart is fighting with two strange things. It’s tingling because Tom’s touching me and it’s aching sadness for Emmie and her sweetness.
Tom leans closer. “Some things you never forget though.”
“I know.” My voice becomes a whisper with a mind of its own.
“Some people either. Right, Commie?”
I don’t get a chance to answer because my voice has succumbed to flip flops of Heaven because Tom’s lips are pressing against mine. My voice is too close to the action to do anything but rejoice.
When we stop kissing I ask him, “Did you always know he was gay?”
Tom shrugs. “Not always.”
He turns his head away.
“He used to like me,” Tom says. “That’s how I figured it out. Then he pretended like he didn’t. That’s when the whole pact thing happened.”
I swallow hard. I take his hand in mine and ask him because I have to know. I hate to know now. “Did you ever like him back? That way?”
He turns back to me and squeezes my hand. “No.”
Then everything inside me melts because he kisses me and my stomach molds into his and my hands press into his chest and his hair.
“I don’t think I’m rebounding,” I say when we stop.
“Good.”
After Tom walks me to the door, I don’t go inside. Instead, I turn around to wave at him driving away. It feels like he’s going away forever, like I’ll never see him again. Eddie Caron’s standing at the end of his driveway.
Tom’s truck’s headlights flash him into light. He scowls. His eyes glint yellow from the light’s reflection.
“Hey, Eddie!” I yell.
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even lift up his hand to wave.
“Goodnight, Eddie!” I try again.
He still doesn’t move. I shiver and open up the door, stepping into the warm light of my house and my mother’s million trillion questions about Tom and if I’m moving too fast and if I’m happy.
“I want you to be happy, baby, just be careful. You don’t want to jump into a new relationship too soon,” she says, leaning against the kitchen counter.
“You don’t like Tom?” I bristle.
“I like Tom very much. He’s always been a special boy. Do you remember how he used to write you love notes in kindergarten?”
“No.” I try to remember. I don’t. “I thought that was Dylan.”
“It was Tom.” She smiles and opens up her arms for a hug. I step into them and all is good in the world, again, for both of us.
I call Em on her cell phone, which I know she keeps beside her bed for late-night friendship needs.
“I’m completely in lust with Tom,” I whisper so my mom won’t hear.
“I know.”
“It’s too soon,” I say and slip my feet out of my bed. I pad over to the window, move the curtain to look down on the street where Dylan told me he was gay, to look down at the night sky.
“It’s pretty soon,” Em whispers back. She yawns.
“I woke you up.”
“It’s okay.”
“He and Dylan got in a fight at the Y tonight.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was freaky,” I said. “Like some sort of weird Neanderthal-caveman thing.”
“They were fighting over you?”
I grab onto the curtain of the window a little tighter, and look toward Eddie’s house. “Yes. No. I don’t know. It was weird. I really like Tom though.”
A large shadow walks down Eddie Caron’s driveway and then stands on the road, outside my house staring up at it. I can only make out the shadows of him. I don’t move.
Em starts whispering again, “Sometimes things aren’t logical. Sometimes things don’t follow timetables, you know? If you like Tom, you like him. If he’s a rebound, he’s a rebound. At least you’re not being a Mallory and wallowing in self-pity and playing the whole ‘poor me I’ve got a gay ex-boyfriend’ thing.”
“Yeah.” I lift my hand to wave to Eddie, because that’s who it has to be out there.
He doesn’t wave back. Maybe he can’t see me. Instead, he lifts his head toward the sky. A plane’s lights blink far above us. Its cabin is probably full of sleeping passengers ready to land in new places, start new adventures, maybe even new lives.
“Do you think he’s a rebound?” I ask Em.
“No.”
“Why not?” I ask her as Eddie turns and walks back to his house, a slow shuffle toward home in the night.
“Because I think you guys are meant to be. You’ve been lusting after each other since middle school, you’ve just been suppressing it.”
I let that thought drift into me and lean my head against the cold window. “I just saw Eddie Caron outside, staring up at my house.”
“Oh my God. That’s freaky,” Em forgets to whisper and it takes a second before I hear her mom’s voice yell for her to get off the phone.
“Crap,” Em says. “Gotta go. Sorry. Bye.”
I hold my phone and watch Eddie enter his house. He goes through the door, doesn’t turn a light on, and just steps inside. He must know his way through his house in the dark. Above us in the sky, the plane is gone. It’s moved on.
Because my mind keeps flashing on images of Dylan’s fist hitting Tom’s face and because I am resisting the urge to not stare out the window at Eddie or to obsess about the fact that Dyla
n cheated on me with Mimi, the stupid stereotyped arch villainess of my life, I start another list on my computer.
Reasons Not to Have a Crush on Tom Tanner
It’s a rebound thing and he is far too cute to be a rebound thing with those big soccer legs of his. Don’t obsess about that!
Because he makes things out of duct tape and that’s a little weird, although in a sort of kinky way it could be . . . Don’t obsess about that either!
Because he obviously is a corruptive force on your morality because he makes you obsess about things that you shouldn’t be obsessing about.
Because he makes you wonder why you shouldn’t be thinking those obsessing thoughts about those things.
Because it is too soon. It is too soon and it would sully your post relationship with Dylan who was perfect, even if he was gay. Okay, that’s not true, since he had a thing with Mimi Cote, which is too disgusting for words. This is turning out to not be a good reason. I should cross it out.
Because he makes you wonder if having sex with a straight guy is different than having sex with a gay guy. DO NOT THINK ABOUT THAT EITHER.
Because he knew Dylan had a fling with Mimi and didn’t tell you.
Because he keeps eighth-grade promises even if no one else does.
“I think I have a crush on Tom Tanner,” I tell Emily the moment we’re out of my driveway.
“Damn. That was fast,” she says in a completely ironic way. “It’s not like you told me that last night or anything.”
“Shut up.”
She whoops and slaps me on the leg. Then she starts grinning from ear to ear and I am too.
“I’m sure it’s just a rebound thing,” I say, still smiling.
“Of course. Is he a good kisser?”
She bites the end of her fingers.
I hit her hand away from her mouth. “No biting!”
She shakes her head at me.
“And he does make all those things with duct tape,” I say and let my sentence dangle there.