It was one of the last Fridays of the school year, and Spencer offered to throw a party at his house.
“There’s so many crazy things happening to you guys, huh?” Zoe was drunk, one of her eyes half closed. She rested her bare feet in her hands as she spoke.
I smiled, letting my knee rest against hers.
“Our mom says we can’t sign the record contract until September. She wants us to be eighteen.”
“I’m jealous. You’ll probably get out of Calgary before I do,” she said.
“What do you want to do next year?”
“I’m going to go to Los Angeles and be a backup dancer for Janet Jackson.”
I wanted to tell her how everything I knew about L.A. made me think of her—vast, permanent things, like the sun. How I’d imagined myself a thousand times living with her in the shabby apartment from the photograph she’d taped to her bedroom wall—surrounded by the pyramid of beautiful girls she’d lived and danced with the previous summer.
“I’d trade all of it for you,” I blurted out.
She laughed.
“I mean it. You’re the only thing I think about.”
And then she wasn’t smiling anymore.
She turned to the door as if her boyfriend might be waiting right outside. “Dustin,” she said. “I should go.”
I sat on the floor with my head in my hands after she’d shut the door behind her. Panic and curiosity gnawed at my guts. I rejoined my friends in the living room, pulling my toque a little lower over my eyes. A few minutes later I watched Zoe taking wobbly steps over everyone’s legs and the backpacks littering the carpet. Her boyfriend, Dustin, was doing the same, their hands interlocked. They found a spot near the wall and sat down together. In his tracksuit, he looked like the coach of a sports team, or a youth minister. He was a born-again Christian and didn’t swear or drink alcohol. He’d started showing up at raves with Diego the previous summer. When he and Zoe started dating, I took solace in the fact that his religious beliefs prevented him from having sex with her. Over the summer we’d gone to see All Over Me in the theater. It had a gay story line, and during the scenes where the two leads were having sex, Dustin kept his head bowed, refusing to watch. Afterward we’d laughed behind his back. But it made me furious.
When Spencer finally cleared us out of his parents’ house after midnight, I watched Zoe climb into Dustin’s yellow sports car, her face streaked with tears.
On Sunday morning I woke with a fireball in my guts worse than any hangover. I was acidic with regret. I called Dad and asked if it would be okay for me to stay with him that night. When I couldn’t stand to be at home or I was feeling guilty about something I’d done, the sterility of our bedroom at his house—the bunk beds we’d had since we were five years old, the comforters from before that—was a place to reset, to disappear.
After dinner I worked a little on my homework, but my thoughts raced back to my confession to Zoe again and again. At bedtime I was crawling out of my skin. It was unbearable to imagine showing up to school without talking to her first. There was a single phone in the house, and it sat next to Dad’s bed. I asked his permission to use it, then snooped in his closet, holding his clothes up to myself in the mirror while I worked up the courage to call her. Finally, I lifted the phone and dialed, pacing in time with the ringing.
I felt so startled when she answered that I almost hung up.
We made small talk. I could hear her mother’s voice and the television in the background. When she moved to the bedroom and the line grew quiet, I gritted my teeth and said what I’d spent all day rehearsing.
“I thought we should talk about last night.” I buried my face in my shirt. Years of drunken hookups and flashes of undefined moments between us clouded my vision. Why had I waited so long to talk about it with her?
“Dustin asked if there was something going on between us.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that we were just talking, and that you told me . . .” She stopped.
I pressed my face to the metallic screen of the open window. I shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “That I like you,” I said. My jaw was as tight as a fist. I waited for her to respond, a hundred steps ahead, imagining with her a future that I’d never quite allowed myself to see before with a girl.
“I don’t feel that way about you,” she said softly. “I don’t like girls.”
It was as if I were sucked into a void alone, the finality of her words as permanent as death.
After we’d hung up, I sat for a long time in the bathroom, crying into one of Dad’s threadbare towels.
Shutting off the lights later, I lay down on the bottom bunk. I slept in fits. My mind touched down on her words again and again. I don’t feel that way about you. In the morning, my body felt numb.
I arrived late for first period, and quickly walked between classes, avoiding the student center and hallways. Steeling myself at lunchtime, I met Tegan outside the school and we walked to the lawn where our friends were sitting together on the grass. Zoe was there, of course, distressingly cute in striped overalls.
Stephanie bounded toward me, her cheeks pink. “Hi!” She rested a consoling hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
I was afraid I might cry.
“I gotta meet Diego.” She hugged me goodbye.
Zoe’s face softened as I joined her at the outer edge of the group. Here was the cause of my suffering, but also the cure. Was it possible I felt more in love now that I knew she didn’t like me? Or was it the intimacy of my confession that bound her closer?
“How was your sleep?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said, grabbing fistfuls of grass between my fingers. “Did you tell Stephanie?”
She went pale.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I could tell that she knew.”
“I only told her because, well, I guess I just tell her everything.”
I changed the subject, and at the afternoon bell, we went our separate ways back to school. For the rest of the day I thought of all the boys who’d asked me out, who I’d laughed about with friends, or had broken up with and never spoken to again. Had I hurt any of them like this? It was impossible to imagine ever having that kind of power.
I went home that day with pages of new lyrics furiously etched with thick pencil in my notebook. Words that screamed back at me from the page. In my bedroom I sat cross-legged on the carpet with my guitar and began to work on a new song. It was the only thing I knew how to do to make myself feel better.
“This is the last song that I’ll write for you. This is the last song that I’ll sing for you. This is your last song.” Singing those words, I felt tears roll off my chin.
That night I woke up anguished, replaying the conversation with Zoe again in my head until I thought I might be sick. I crept to the bathroom and once again sat sobbing into a towel. When I’d exhausted myself, I stood looking out the window at the moon. I’m gay. It was the very first time I had allowed myself to say the words I had been desperately afraid of. From that night forward, I carried the words in my mouth, tempted to tell everyone and no one.