“The classification of living things is called taxonomy,” Mr. Megars says, writing the word on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. He’s left-handed, so taxonomy gets smeary and blurred by the time he gets to the y.
I’m pretty sure generations of tenth graders have been fooled into thinking their eyesight is going as a result of sitting in this guy’s class.
“This system was developed in the 1700s by Carl Linnaeus in order to identify and classify every living thing,” he explains. “Because labels are important.”
I add two Xs for eyes on the sketch I’m making of a bored kid sitting at a lab table. It’s got a manga feel to it that I’m a little stoked by.
My stomach rumbles, and next to me Liz mimics the noise barely audibly. Is it my fault bio is just before lunch? I’m a big guy, I get hungry! Mentally, I’m already piling into Gordon Alexander’s Suburban with the other theater tech crew geeks and Liz, if she’s not off eating with other people. She’s one of those rare individuals who navigate the minefield of high school cliques without getting her legs blown off.
“Here, Chris,” she whispers, sliding me a bite-sized Mars bar under the table.
Megars glances back toward us. I palm the candy and sit up straight. My mom’s a teacher and her biggest complaint is students who sit in her class looking bored. I suspect her of grading those students harder. I try to at least give the appearance of looking alert because I’m screwed if I don’t bring home straight As.
He turns back to write something else.
Megars is dull, but his class does have a couple of saving graces. The first is that he doesn’t use a seating chart, which means I can sit next to Liz: provider of Mars bars when I’m hungry, next-door neighbor since kindergarten, best friend, and confidant. Up until recently, there was absolutely nothing one of us didn’t know about the other.
“Using man as an example, here’s how it goes,” Megars says, drawing a fuzzy pyramid. At the bottom he writes Kingdom, Animalia. On the next line up he writes Phylum, Chordata.
I look down at the handout, which has the same pyramid and says the same thing. I sketch the River Nile in the margin, add a boat, and then make the bored-looking kid the captain.
Megars continues up the pyramid through class, order, and family. When he gets to genus, the word is homo. Two tables over, Joe Trimble snickers. I look up just in time to see Tom Waters (saving grace number two) turn around and raise an eyebrow at Joe. The message is clear.
Not chill.
Joe looks down at his table and the tips of his ears redden.
That is one powerful eyebrow, I think.
There’s just something about Tom—a worldly air to everything he does. His mom’s a travel writer and his dad’s a photographer and they’re always taking Tom out of school to go with them to places like India and Japan. Sometimes for months at a time.
In fact, that happened so often in elementary and middle school, he’s actually a year older than anyone else in our class. But when being held back is the result of hiking in Cameroon from February to May … Well, let’s just say that Tom’s managed to even make repeating eighth grade seem like the sophisticated thing to do.
He’s on the student council, he’s the lead in every drama club musical (right now it’s Guys and Dolls), and he made varsity tennis his freshman year. He also started the Diversity Task Force, devoted to spreading the gospel of inclusiveness to our school.
The club is popular because Tom is popular.
He’s also gay.
“You’ll be working with your partner on making posters of three different phylogenetic trees and labeling them with the Linnaean classification system,” Megars says.
I continue to study Mr. Saving Grace Number Two. He’s got on a vintage white tux jacket. He wears it a lot, probably because it fits perfectly across his broad shoulders. Sandy blond curls just touch the collar, and from this angle I can see the slight scruff of facial hair along his square jaw. I think about its texture, about touching it, and how it would feel under my fingers … I shut my eyes for a second.
“The only requirement is that one of the trees must be that of humans. As for the others, whatever floats your boat.”
What floats my boat is Tom Waters.
At first I thought my attraction to other guys might be just a phase. You know, something some guys go through on their way to getting hot for girls. Last summer though, Liz and I took her mom’s Volvo to the basketball team car wash. Cheerleaders were out helping them, and Liz made some snarky observation about the bikini Daria Evans was wearing.
I didn’t see the bikini. I was too busy noticing the little river of water running down the sharply defined bicep crease on point guard Rob Kendal’s Michelangelo-worthy arm.
That’s when I realized that three years is a ridunkulous amount of time for a phase to last.
I’m not one for big announcements, so even when I realized I was definitely gay, I just figured I’d wait until there was a reason to come out. In fact, it’s now been four months and I’ve told no one, even though I know my parents will be fine with it.
When I was eleven or so, my Aunt Jen made the mistake of telling me I was going to grow up to make some woman very happy. My mom jumped all over her, saying that I was going to make some person happy, and that she wasn’t going to stand for her kid’s indoctrination into heteronormativity. (A word I only recently looked up.)
“Neatness counts, as does obvious effort.” Megars could not sound more bored. “In the next couple of days, choose your partner and get with them to plan. Today is Monday, posters are due a week from Thursday; that gives you plenty of time. I’ll be able to tell if you waited until the last minute.”
Tom leans sideways to grab a book from his backpack on the floor, exposing a few inches of tanned wrist. I stare for a second, then snap my head toward Liz because I have this absurd notion that she, the person I’m closest to in the world, would have caught that one-second stare and realized what it meant.
Liz just looks at me like what?
Clearly telepathy is not one of my superpowers. I look back over at Tom, who may or may not know I’m even alive. I manage to keep a sigh from escaping my lips.
Of course Liz’ll be the first person I’ll come out to.
I think I finally have a reason to do it.
* * *
“I don’t believe you.”
Liz and I are sitting on beanbag chairs in her den, controllers in our hands, Converse shoes in a heap next to us. (Mine are a little bigger and a lot rattier than hers. She also claims mine smell, but it’s nothing I’ve ever noticed.) She unpauses the game (Mordock’s Giant) and goes back to blowing up gnomes, like it’s the end of the conversation.
I can only stare at her.
Of all the possible responses I’d imagined, this is one I never considered.
I’d prepared myself for “It’s probably a phase.” You know, because I actually thought that myself for the aforementioned three years. (Call me slow.) I’d prepared myself for “When did you decide you were gay?” To which I had my response ready: “When did you decide you were straight?” I even prepared myself for a squirmy made-for-TV-movie moment of a hug and a promise of support. But “I don’t believe you”?
I don’t know what to do with that except pause the game again, before any fireballs can come out of the trees and decimate me.
“What? It’s true!”
“Pretending to be gay isn’t funny.” Liz’s dark eyebrows are raised and wisps of hair are falling across her furrowed forehead. Her exasperation is as plain as the piercing in her nose.
“I’m not pretending!”
“You can’t be gay.” Again, like end of discussion.
She starts to unpause the game. I turn it off.
“Why would you say that?”
“Well.” She exhales dramatically and looks up at the ceiling like someone spray-painted a cheat sheet up there. “There was that time in seventh grade, when we…” She lets the sentence trail off.
An embarrassing memory zaps my neurons. It was at Sam Nesbaugh’s end-of-the-year party. I spent the day in the pool wrestling with the other guys and the occasional girl who’d gotten thrown in. When it got dark, the kids who were still there played spin the bottle. The fact that Liz and I kissed was eclipsed by the memory of how I’d spent the day in the water with a half husker, hoping no one else noticed.
The smug look on Liz’s face says she thinks she’s stumped me somehow. Then I remember what she’s talking about.
“For crying out loud! That was spin the bottle! What was I going to do? Refuse to play? And we both thought it was gross!” I remind her.
We’d walked home together and agreed that kissing each other was a never-to-be-repeated experiment.
Wait. Am I the only one who thought it was gross?
Liz must read my mind (this time) because she punches me. Hard.
“Don’t even think it,” she says. “I most certainly have not been sitting around for three years pining over you and that kiss. I just don’t think you’re gay.”
“I’m a guy. I like guys. How is that not gay?”
Liz brushes over this fact like it’s a glitch in the screen. “You play video games. Sometimes obsessively.”
“So do you!” Am I really arguing this with her?
“True. But in me it’s unexpected, maybe even charming,” she says.
“Don’t make me puke. Plus, there are Gay-mers.”
“You’re always on the tech crew, never the stage.”
“Now you’re just being stupid! Besides, there are gay techies; Emily Lupine stage-manages every show.”
“One. One gay techie. And she’s a girl,” Liz says. “Also, you slouch.” Then she points to the stains on the front of my plain white T-shirt. “And sorry, but you’re a slob.”
I look down at my dirty shirt. My stomach pooches a little over my jeans.
“This proves nothing except that my hot sauce packet exploded at lunch!”
“Pffftttt—and you didn’t rush home to change immediately.”
What am I doing here, trying to assert my … gaytivity? And who the hell does Liz think she is to question me? I wrap the cord around my controller and slam it down on the TV stand.
“I wanted you to know this thing.” I raise my voice. “This one really important thing about me. I didn’t realize I’d have to pass the gay SAT to get your tiny mind to accept it!”
Liz stands up and drops her controller to the ground. “I am not small-minded!” she snaps, and then, “Your mom’s calling you.” This is our code for “time for you to leave.” It’s usually only invoked in jest, but Liz’s face is flushed and I know she means it.
Which is more than fine by me.
I shove my binder into my backpack. We haven’t even discussed the bio assignment.
“Clearly leaving,” I say, grabbing my shoes and opening the sliding glass door that leads to her backyard. Barefoot, I get to the side gate that leads to mine.
“Thanks for the support,” I yell.
* * *
The next morning I leave for school early in order to avoid walking with Liz. In bio, when I see she’s claimed our usual table, I pass by her without a word. I’m suddenly conscious of the fact that my show shirt from last year (the front says tech crew, the back says techies do it in the dark) is a little tight, and I have to do that annoying tug-to-make-sure-it-stays-down-over-the-gut thing. I’m also suddenly conscious of the way I’m carrying myself. Liz accused me of being a sloucher, and it’s true, I slouch.
But that doesn’t make me straight.
I grab an open table near the front of the room, sit down, and keep my eyes straight ahead like I’m fascinated by the smeary whiteboard notes left over from Megars’s last class. I will not look back. I will not look back.
Someone slides onto the stool next to me and leans his arm on the table. I don’t need to turn my head to know who it is. No one else I know has that exact shade of blond down on his forearm, and even if he did, no one else’s blond forearm down could cause the reaction in my gut that this blond forearm down is causing.
“Okay if I sit here?” Tom asks.
“Positutely!” The second that word’s out of my mouth, I would give anything for a time machine. I would go back to the day of my birth and rip out my tongue in order to keep it from ever uttering something so asinine.
Tom doesn’t seem to notice though. He’s checking out my binder, the one with the sketch of the kid with x-ed out eyes on it.
“Hey, did you draw this?” he asks.
“Um yeah, it’s not…” He doesn’t wait for me to tell him it’s not my best work, it’s just a doodle.
“This is great!” he says. “You really captured something there.” He glances behind us. Before I can stop myself, I look back to see what he’s looking at.
Liz sees me and makes her what? face.
We both turn back around.
“Fight with the girlfriend?” Tom asks.
“She’s not, uh, we’re not…” I’m tongue-tied. I finally come up with, “Nah, I just needed to move closer to the board.”
I point to Megars’s blurry handwork. “I think I’m going blind. That look fuzzy to you?”
Tom laughs. “I thought my contacts were dirty.”
The bell rings. Megars takes roll and announces we’ll be watching something called The Private Life of Plants. He pulls down the screen and turns off the lights.
“Oh my God,” Tom whispers. “It’s happened! I can’t see!”
I laugh. And like him even more. Worldly, sophisticated, and a doofy sense of humor. An unlikely combo I’d never imagined until Tom.
For the next fifty minutes, I’m conscious of the heat of his arm, inches from mine on the table. Every once in a while one of us will make a stupid joke about the film. If possible, his jokes are even stupider than mine.
The bell rings just as the movie ends. Someone turns on the lights, and people start grabbing their stuff and shuffling out. Tom blinks, clearly coming out from the semistupor that educational films are designed to put their (helplessly captive) audience in.
I’m wide-awake.
“Hey,” he says, slowly hefting his backpack over one perfectly formed shoulder. “Want to do the classification poster together? I can’t draw, but I’m good at lettering and at looking things up.”
Mute, I nod, and then shrug both my less-than-perfectly-formed shoulders, like no big deal.
“I have tennis right after school and rehearsal at seven o’clock, but if you come over at four thirty, we can do it in between,” he says. He pulls out his phone and takes my digits so he can text me his address.
I leave bio feeling high.
Until Liz catches up with me on my way out of the building.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I say in a monotone that would make Megars proud.
She touches my arm. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“Mmmhhmmm,” I say, heading for the parking lot. Other people jostle around us in the mad rush to get to their cars. Lunch is only thirty-five minutes long.
Liz grabs me. “Really, I was just surprised!” She doesn’t bother to lower her voice. “It never in a million years would have occurred to me that you’re gay.”
“Oh, I totally knew Chris was gay,” Gordon says from behind us. We both whip around, Liz’s hand on her mouth about five seconds too late.
My instamortification that he overheard is weirdly enough replaced by (brief but insane) instagratitude that he recognizes I’m gay.
“Really?” I ask.
“Oh, totally!” He laughs.
“How?” Liz demands.
Gordon’s mouth shuts. His eyes do that shifty anime-ninja thing.
A car peels out of the lot.
“Um, you’re serious?” he asks. “I thought you were joking.”
The words “Yes, I’m serious” grind out through my clenched molars.
“Huh.” Gordon looks down at his keys like he’s never seen them before. He jangles them a little in his hand. “You just don’t…”
“What?” I demand, even though I think I know what.
“It’s cool.” He scratches the back of his neck, then tilts his head. “But you just don’t seem gay.”
“Exactly!” Liz says.
Without a word I turn around and head back toward school. Freshmen aren’t allowed off campus at lunch. I’ll eat crap food out of the vending machine behind the theater with them today.
* * *
At four fifteen I leave a note telling my mom where I’m going, then head over to Tom’s. He lives a good six blocks from me and it’s Indian summer. Between the heat, my angry imaginary conversation with Liz, and my flirty imaginary conversation with Tom, I’m pretty sweaty by the time I get there.
I walk through a courtyard to get to the huge front door. I’m doing a surreptitious little sniff of my pits before ringing the bell when the door swings open and Tom is standing there. Caught, I pretend to be looking down (sideways) at a cast-iron doorstop in the shape of a poodle.
“Cool house,” I say, stepping into the front room, which is cavernous. To my right, an indoor fountain trickles. One entire wall is covered in books, and a huge statue of Buddha dominates the space.
“Thanks.” Tom leads me through an arched doorway toward the back of the house. “We can snag supplies from my dad’s studio, he won’t care.”
“He’s not home?”
“Nah, he and my mom went out mushroom foraging. They won’t be back until tonight.”
“Mushroom foraging? Is that a thing?” I ask.
“It is for my parents,” Tom says, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Me neither,” I say. And then take a chance. “But your dad sounds like a fungi!”
Tom bursts out laughing. “That was the worst joke ever!”
“And yet, you laughed,” I say, shaking my finger at him in what I hope is a playful, maybe even flirtatious way.
We continue on through the kitchen (also huge) and out the back door to a little house behind the big one. Inside, prints and notes cover every available surface. Studio lights and tripods lean together in one corner. There’s a corkboard covered in newspaper clippings I’m too far away to read, and several crowded bookshelves line the back wall.
Tom opens the door to a closet and starts pawing through paper supplies while I check out some mounted photographs leaning against a wall. They’re of landmarks I recognize, despite never having been to any of them. There’s the Eiffel Tower, the Christ of the Andes, the Colosseum. I come across a picture of Tom himself, standing on a huge stone walkway. Jagged green hills loom in the background.
“Is this the Great Wall of China?”
Tom pulls out a poster-sized piece of thick white paper. He glances over at me and shrugs. “It’s the Pretty Okay Wall of China.”
I guess the very definition of worldly is someone who can be blasé about the Great Wall of China. I shake my head.
“Hey, I laughed at your worst joke, the least you could do is laugh at my best,” he complains in a mock-whiny voice.
It makes me smile, but I can’t think of a clever comeback, so instead I ask, “Don’t you like traveling?”
“Some of it’s okay.” He closes the closet door. “But would you want to spend months at a time with just your parents and their friends?”
We go back into the main house and set up at the kitchen table. We decide to use the grizzly bear and the tulip for our phylogenetic tree, and Tom sits next to me. He opens a laptop so we can look up their classification and Latin names.
“Also, I’ve always wanted a dog,” he says, and it takes me a second to realize we’re continuing the conversation about travel. “But my parents say we’re never home enough.”
“A dog, huh.” I start to sketch. Tom’s so close I can smell him.
In a good way.
“You could get a poodle,” I say, thinking of the iron doorstop. “One of those little tiny ones that fits inside its own little purse so you could take it with you.”
There’s silence, and when I look up from my drawing Tom has a weird look on his face.
He gets up and goes to the refrigerator. He grabs a little bottle of Perrier but doesn’t offer me one.
“I was thinking more like a Rottweiler,” he says, pulling the laptop to the other end of the table and sitting down in front of it.
We don’t talk much after that, except about where to put different categories on the tree. When it’s time for Tom to get ready for rehearsal, we’re only two-thirds of the way through.
* * *
I get home to a note from my parents, reminding me that it’s their date night and that they won’t be back until later.
I grab a Coke, fill a bowl with Cheez-Its for dinner, and head upstairs, my mind on Tom. I think I’m alone in the house, so when I open my bedroom door, I’m incredibly startled to see Liz. I yelp, and the crackers go flying.
She jumps up. “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!”
Jesus! She should get a job as a hospital defibrillator; my heart is beating like crazy. “What are you doing here?”
“I grabbed the key from the flowerpot as soon as your parents left.” Her voice is a little choky and her nostrils are red. “I wanted to let you know how bad I feel about everything.”
She points to a banner I didn’t notice in the midst of my heart failure. It’s stretched across the window and spells out I’m SO Sorry in foot-high letters.
I don’t say anything. Instead I put the Coke on my dresser and start picking up the crackers that went skittering across the hardwood floor.
She kneels down to help. “I know I should have just shut up and listened when you came out to me, instead of criticizing you.” She pauses, one hand on the bowl, her eyes welling up. “I’m a shitty friend.”
God, I hate it when she cries. I scoop the last of the Cheez-Its into the bowl, walk over to my desk, and grab her a Kleenex.
She takes it and dabs under her eyes, smearing her mascara. I put the bowl on my dresser next to the Coke. Liz sits back down at my desk, and I’m about to sit on my bed, when she clears her throat and says, “But in my defense, Gordon didn’t believe it either.”
This is too much! “Gordon, who shouldn’t’ve known until I told him!” I explode.
She tears up again. “I know! I’m the worst friend ever.”
Ordinarily I’d hug her, but I’m not there yet. I do hand her another tissue and stand there awkwardly while she cries. I know that’s not helpful, but it’s what I can manage at the moment.
After a minute she blows her nose, and finally I sit.
She stares down at the Kleenex. “I have a plan to make it up to you,” she says quietly.
“Does this involve inducing amnesia in Gordon so I can tell him myself?”
She crumples a little next to me. “I wish I could, but since I can’t … you like Tom Waters, don’t you?”
I give her a sideways look. I will admit nothing.
She starts shredding one of the tissues. Not the snot-rag one.
“You don’t have to admit it, but I watched you in bio together today.”
I grunt. It’s not a commitment.
“So here’s the thing. You don’t seem gay. But if you are,” she says, and before I can react to the if she corrects herself. “Since you are, you’re eventually going to want to do something about it. If you want to make sure Tom knows you’re gay, you need to be more obvious about it, you know? Make your sexual orientation more apparent.”
“Really,” I say, in that tone that means this isn’t a question.
She looks at me, almost pityingly. “Chris, I’ve heard of gaydar, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’m pretty sure you don’t set that off in anyone.”
She gets up from my desk and sits next to me on the bed. “If we give you a makeover, it’ll be more obvious.” She punches me in the arm.
I guess this violence is meant to prove that she’s back to her usual self.
“And I have the most brilliant idea!” she says, bouncing a little. “We’ll unveil the Fabulous New You at Lillian’s party on Friday!”
Lillian Bruner, president of the drama club, has a get-together once a semester. In theory it’s a meeting to talk about drama club business, but really it’s a parent-sanctioned excuse to have people over. It’s one of the few times the techies and the actors really mingle. Tom is sure to be there.
“Once we’ve made you over, he’ll be dazzled, and the rest will be history.”
“That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” I tell her.
And I mean it.
* * *
The next day, though, I walk into bio to see that Tom has claimed a seat next to Alex Lee. Alex may or may not be gay, but he wears collared shirts and penny loafers, and he has a killer smile.
I sit down next to Liz at our old lab table.
“Okay.” I give in. “Transform me to fabulous.”
* * *
By late Thursday afternoon, I have had just about enough. We’re headed toward our third vintage clothing store of the day. After what feels like a gazillion hours spent shopping, I am now the owner of three button-down shirts and a pair of skinny (well, skinny for me) jeans. For the last two hours Liz has jabbered my ears off about Real Housewives and designer sunglasses. These topics have never before interested either of us, but Liz thinks I should know about them now in order to better convey my gayness.
“Did you listen to the playlist I made you?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I tell her, even though I only listened to half of it. It’s not that I’m not into music, but I just can’t seem to get into Lady Gaga or the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge!
“Good. Tonight I’ll send you the list of witty things you can say tomorrow to show off your snarky sense of humor.”
“Your snarky sense of humor,” I grumble.
But Tom sat next to Alex in bio again today, and he blew me off when I asked if we could finish the poster this weekend. I’m committed to Liz’s plan.
A bell on the door tinkles when we walk into The Happy Dragon Consignment Store. A musty odor is the first thing I notice.
“Vintage stores cost more than Goodwill, but don’t smell that much better,” I complain. “And the Goodwill smells like poverty.”
Liz laughs and says, “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”
This store has rows of clothing on old-fashioned wooden bars, and mirrors at the end of the aisles that are pitted and speckled with age. There’s a bored-looking clerk behind the counter, and a stuffed owl sitting on what looks like an old dresser. I step closer to take a look (at the owl, not the clerk) but Liz grabs my arm.
“That is perfect!” she squeals, pointing toward the back of the store. She drags me toward a white tuxedo jacket that’s hanging face-out on the wall next to the dressing room. It’s an exact replica of the one Tom wears, except that it’s several sizes bigger than his.
Liz grabs it off the hook and hands it to me.
“Try it on,” she orders.
“I’m going to look like the iceberg that sank the Titanic!” I protest. “Or like I’m trying to be his twin.”
“Great line, but one, direct comments about the Titanic at other people, never at yourself, and two, his subconscious will know you’re interested because you’re dressed similarly.”
Of the two of us, she is the successful dater—or at least the only one who’s ever had a date—so I check out the price tag (twenty bucks) and stick my arms into the sleeves.
I have to admit it looks mostly okay on me. Not as iceberg-y as I thought.
“Voilà!” Liz says, straightening the collar. “Chris the Fabulous!”
* * *
It feels different on Friday night though, when we’re walking to Lillian’s. Trying something new when it’s just me and Liz is one thing. People are going to notice I’m dressed up and think it’s weird. Even my parents asked if I was going somewhere special when I left the house in this getup.
“Remind me again why I let you talk me into this?” I ask on the way up the steps. My penny loafers are a little loose (at Goodwill, you take what you can get size-wise) and a blister is already starting.
“Because you luuurrvvee Tom Waters, and now he’s going to notice you! You know I’m right.”
She rings the doorbell, and Lillian’s mom ushers us inside and points down a staircase.
“They’re in the rumpus room,” she says.
“The rumpus room,” I whisper, following Liz down. “If I was a housewife serial killer in the fifties, that’s where I’d keep my victims.”
“Your snark is showing,” Liz whispers back. “And I love it!”
Downstairs, all the theater nerds seem present and accounted for. Tom is standing in a corner talking to the actor types. He’s wearing his white tux jacket and a skinny tie. He must have had a haircut after school, because it’s shorter than it was in bio today, but he’s got the usual facial-hair-scruff thing going on. My fingers itch to feel it.
Still, I automatically migrate over to the techie corner, where a game of air hockey is going on. Gordon’s leaning against the wall, waiting for a turn. “Dude, you’re a Dapper Dan,” he exclaims.
“Totally!” Emily Lupine agrees.
I knew this was a mistake. They’re all wearing black and I feel like a great white walrus next to them.
Tom breaks away from his group to grab a drink from the ice chest and Liz pokes me. “Go!” she hisses. “Make your move.”
My kneecaps are tingling as I walk over. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Tom’s fishing around in the ice. “Any Perrier?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” he says, grabbing a Coke and straightening up to look at me. He takes in my jacket. If I felt stupid a minute ago, hanging with the tech crew, I feel ten times that now, because the look in his eye is not one of oh-you’re-dressed-like-me-now-I-know-you’re-interested-let’s-go-make-out. It’s more of a what-the-hell-am-I-seeing? look.
In the uncomfortable silence, I decide the tingling in my kneecaps is a bad thing.
“Sure we can’t get together this weekend to finish the tree? If not, early in the week is good, too. I mean, anytime that’s good for you is good for me. I don’t have much going on,” I babble because he’s not saying anything. He’s just … looking at me.
Liz comes over, thank God. This is not going well.
“Hey, Tom,” she says, and then, “Chris, what’s up with her?” she asks, pointing to Terilyn Coats, who is wearing her usual mismatched outfit. This time it’s a leopard top and a plaid miniskirt over hot-pink leggings.
“She looks like a fabric store threw up on her,” I recite as instructed.
“God, Chris, you’re such a bitch!” Liz says, playfully slapping my arm. She turns to Tom. “Would you say fabric-store vomit? Or massacre at the Scottish zoo?”
Tom arches an eyebrow. He looks me up and down, then deliberately unbuttons his own jacket, takes it off, and folds it over one arm.
“I like her style,” he says, walking away.
* * *
Saturday and Sunday are miserable. I spend them both playing Mordock’s Giant by myself. I text Tom four times about the assignment.
I don’t hear back from him.
On Monday I talk to him just before the bell rings.
“The poster’s due in three days. We have to finish,” I tell him.
“It’ll get done,” he says, and turns to talk to Alex before I can ask him when.
* * *
He brushes me off again on Tuesday.
* * *
On Wednesday, I grab him in the hall after bio, even though I feel like an idiot creeper for doing it.
“It’s almost done, I’ll handle it,” he says.
He can’t draw, and it will definitely look like we waited until the last minute to do it. Which now we have, I guess.
“I am not getting a bad grade on this project because of you,” I say, my voice louder than I meant it to be.
“I said I’d handle it.” His voice is just as loud. He looks over his shoulder at the people flooding out of classrooms on their way to lunch. “Besides, you might catch gay from me,” he says, then stalks away.
I stand there for a second, stunned.
Liz comes up behind me and touches my arm. “C’mon, let’s go.”
I ignore her and run after Tom.
“Wait! Why would you say that?”
He stops to face me. People bump around us.
“It’s not cool to make fun of gay people. Especially when you do it to their faces!”
“I wasn’t!”
“Yeah, right,” he says. “First you say I should carry a little yappy dog in a purse and then you show up at Lillian’s dressed like me and acting all … whatever! It’s like you and your girlfriend went to the stereotype store and cleaned out the merchandise.” His voice rises. “And. I. Don’t. Appreciate. It.”
My first thought is, Damn! And then, Damn Liz’s Chris-the-Fabulous idea.
Tom turns to walk away.
“I swear that’s not what I was doing!”
He keeps walking. “It sure seemed like it.”
I catch up again. “Really! The truth is…”
Oh my God, I can’t tell him the truth. Maybe just part of it?
“Liz decided I needed a makeover. She took me shopping and we saw a jacket like yours.”
Tom still looks suspicious. “Why would Liz give you a makeover to dress like me?”
Lillian and Alex are heading toward us, and I know we can’t have this conversation right now. “Please. Just let me come over after school. We’ll finish the poster and I’ll explain.”
Even if I’m going to feel like the biggest dork in the world doing it.
He doesn’t look happy, but he nods and says, “Be there at four thirty.”
* * *
Four hours and a bag of Doritos later, I walk up the hill to Tom’s. When he answers the door, he doesn’t look any happier than he did the last time I saw him. Without a word, he leads me through the house into the kitchen. The poster’s laid out flat on the table, a couple of pens and drafting pencils are scattered next to it. His white jacket hangs over the back of a chair, and for some reason, this makes me conscious of the orange Doritos residue on my fingers.
I spent the last couple of hours rehearsing what I was going to say. Now that I’m here all I can come up with is, “Can I have a napkin?”
Instead of answering, he grabs a paper towel from above the sink and hands it to me.
Have you ever noticed how gritty that orange shit is?
“So. Homework first?” I ask.
I get the eyebrow.
Which I take as a no.
I’m pretty sure the term dead silence was invented for this exact minute.
I rub away at my fingers until the paper towel finally disintegrates. I honestly can’t remember exactly what I was going to say, and Tom clearly isn’t going to help me out.
He leans against the wall, arms folded across his chest.
I feel stupid just standing there, so I ball up what’s left of the orangish fibers in my hand, throw them away, and sit down next to the poster.
“Okay. First of all, I only thought of a little poodle when you said you wanted a dog because of the one on your porch. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I pick up a pen and play with it. “And Lillian’s party … shit.” My voice is shakier than I would like it to be. “Look, I know you won’t believe me. Liz didn’t, at first, and neither did Gordon, but…” I take a deep breath and blow it out.
“I’m gay.”
Tom just stares at me for a minute. Like he doesn’t believe me.
Here we go again, I think.
“Let me get this right,” he says slowly. There’s an expression on his face I can’t quite read. “You’re gay, so you asked for Perrier at Lil’s house?” The left corner of his mouth quirks up. “And you’re gay, so you said that mean thing about the way Terilyn dresses?”
I press my lips together. Of course it was stupid.
The right corner of his mouth quirks up to match the left. He closes his eyes for a second. Then he laughs, but it’s not a mean laugh. “And you’re gay, so you need a white tuxedo jacket?” He pulls his off the chair by its lapels. “Do you think there’s a gay handbook or something?”
Laughing again, he makes a big show of shrugging into his coat, smoothing it down, and brushing imaginary dust off the sleeves.
“No,” I mumble. “The jacket was because…”
He’s still laughing when he sits next to me.
“It’s a great look,” I say. “I mean, you look really … amazing in yours.”
Tom goes quiet when I say that. He studies me for a minute. I study him right back. There are a few deep gray flecks in his eyes that, for all my previous scrutiny, I somehow never noticed before. The grandfather clock chimes once.
My kneecaps tingle. In a good way, this time.
Tom’s the first to move. He grabs a drafting pencil and pulls the poster toward himself.
I shift closer and watch while he sketches a figure at the top of the tree. It has hair that looks remarkably like mine.
“I thought you couldn’t draw!” I say.
“I lied.” He shrugs his shoulders and adds a dimple to the chin that matches mine. Still focused on the drawing, he says, “I wanted us to do this together.”
He keeps sketching. “Something I like about you is that you make dumb jokes in biology. And, I like that you make dumb jokes everywhere else, too.” He adds little high-top tennis shoes to my feet. “I like that you dress like you don’t care what people think.” He draws a hole in one of the shoes. “In fact, I can tell you don’t care, and I really like that.” He tags the figure Chris and puts down the pencil. “And now you’re telling me you’re gay.”
“Yes, I’m gay,” I say. It feels good to say it. It feels right.
“I don’t know if I believe Megars about labels being important,” he says, facing me.
I look down at the drawing. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and Chris. I trace the mini me with my finger, then look back at Tom.
It flashes through my mind that I’m actually glad Liz is such an idiot about stereotypes. And I’m glad I’m stupid enough to have gone along with her disastrous idea because it ended with me sitting next to Tom Waters, in this room, and at this moment.
I reach out and touch the scruff growing along his perfectly shaped jaw.
And it feels exactly the way I knew it would.