Is there anything as fat with possibility as a crush? Before I knew that I was gay, before I knew that sexuality exists on a spectrum and attraction is no respecter of gender, before I knew what possibilities awaited me in the wide world of adult emotions and relationships, I had crushes. Crushes on celebrities, crushes on classmates of all genders, crushes on books. I had a lot of crushing to do. And sometimes it was disconcerting, like the moments in high school when I’d let myself wonder, Do I just think this guy is really cool or do I have a crush on him? I would never answer, though, because that seemed too frightening a prospect. I was resolutely good, very Christian, and deeply focused on excelling in school and extracurriculars so that my parents’ sacrifice would be worth it. Discovering a crush on a boy would have thrown all of that into disarray, I thought. Besides, this was the mid-nineties, so it was illegal to even say the word “gay” in a positive way in most municipalities. Plus, I also had crushes on girls, on friends, on life. Better not to look too hard.
My graduating class was small, ninety-two people, so by the time we entered high school we all knew each other backwards and forwards. Or as well as a group of people who are just starting to know themselves can know each other. I knew how my classmates ticked, I collected trivia and gossip like a magpie, and had considered having a crush on everyone. While there was uncertainty about what, exactly, the future held, there was a concomitant reliability in the patterns that we’d established and the lives that we were being set up to live. Most of us would end up going to college and after that, we presumed, get jobs, get married, have kids, donate a portion of our substantial earnings back to the school (they hoped!), and gracefully proceed to old age. While our individuality and creativity were encouraged, part of the promise of a school like Park was that it would help set you up for success in life. Of course, you had to get into college and do well on exams and decide if you were going to take AP History and all the other usual high school stuff. It wasn’t a leisurely idyll. But in retrospect the anxiety sheers off and most of what remains is the predictability and the possibility.
At the center of those two poles, in my memory, stands Electra. She was new to Park in high school, a year older than me, and a curious anomaly. While other new students seemed quick to try to find their footing, she was quiet, reticent. All I knew, to start with, was that she had moved from New York and she was black. Frankly, this was all I really needed to know to pique my interest in finding out what her deal was. I was obsessed with New York, so her mere presence suggested a cosmopolitan finesse and an understanding of the world that was more expansive and sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard of. Plus, her entrance raised the number of black students in the Upper School by like 25 percent. I was, at this time, trying to make sense of what it meant to be black in the larger world, having realized that the experience of being a minority in as progressive and unique an environment as Park was far from typical. I didn’t really know how to go about it. I read Roots. That seemed like a good idea. It was very long. Do I feel blacker? I wondered. I couldn’t say yes, but I couldn’t say no. I read it again.
I also joined the Black Awareness Club, an extracurricular in the Upper School that was part affinity group and part educational group. Once a year, we’d host a Black Awareness Day for the Upper School, which, from the title, sounds like someone marching up and down the halls banging together pots and pans and yelling, “Slavery! Have you heard of it?!” It wasn’t that, but I do suggest that for all your diversity needs. We’d put together workshops on various aspects of black life in America, invite speakers, and host discussions. The rest of the year, when we weren’t planning the event, we would meet in a French classroom to have discussions about our experiences and conceptions of ourselves. And sometimes have snacks.
Electra never came to the Black Awareness Club meetings. I found that fascinating. We would sometimes send various emissaries from the club to invite her. Perhaps she was not aware of the Awareness Club? She still never came. I found that even more fascinating.
I was not an emissary. I think by the time I met her we’d gotten the hint. We were introduced formally in the middle of her tenth-grade year. Up to that point, she’d been an enigma, the new black girl who kept to herself. Passing her in the hall or seeing her in the cafeteria, I’d sometimes stare, trying to intuit what her deal was. I ticked off the details in my mind with all the precision and remoteness of a police sketch artist. She had light skin and huge, alert eyes. Her voice was high-pitched but gravelly. When she spoke, it was a sort of chirp and a croak. She was tall and thin and moved spryly but perhaps cautiously. She never wore makeup, and though she relaxed her hair, she didn’t usually style it beyond brushing it back, away from her face. She wore black jeans seemingly every day, and they were always just a little short.
One day, in the library, we said hello to each other like a couple of normal people and not one normal person and one dude who is constantly gaping and filling in the other person’s details from his imagination. I was using the microfiche catalog to do research on birth order, as was my ritual. I did this literally once a week, retrieving and printing the same articles that said maybe the reason I was the way I was came from my position as the oldest child or maybe it didn’t. Who can say? I was obsessed with finding a root cause for my being, and more broadly, I was obsessed with figuring out who I was.
I asked her the origin of her name, assuming that she had a connection to Greek mythology. No, she said, that would be weird. Her mother had heard the name on a New York City bus and liked it. She said it matter-of-factly and I nodded as if it wasn’t blowing my mind. To be fair, this is the least weird New York City transit story anyone has ever told. And the name does have a certain ring to it.
She’d grown up in New York City, I soon learned, raised by her mom. Then her mother had gotten sick and passed away the year before she came to Park, forcing her to move to Baltimore, with an uncle and an aunt and their new baby. Though we were essentially strangers, she spoke with an open wistfulness about her life in New York and her mother. And she spoke with a glum wariness about her new life now. I was surprised by how forthcoming she was. It didn’t feel like she was oversharing; instead, it seemed to me that she had a level of self-awareness and vulnerability that is rare for anyone, let alone a teenager. She knew that grief was the thing that had forced her out of her old life, waving from the train platform as she left. And it was the malevolent mystery sending her postcards from the past with the words “Wish you were here” scribbled across the back. Grief had been her first friend in this new world. It made itself known, an apparition, at points throughout her history and her present and, she presumed, her future, too.
Though she had mapped the path of the sadness that glowed within her, it was clear that grief wasn’t all there was to her story. She was funny, too, that day in the library and in the days and weeks following when we’d run into each other. Her sense of humor was dry and weird and casual, and just a hair shy of nerdy. Contrary to the early observations of the Black Awareness Club, she was social. She was trying to be, anyway; quietly sometimes, other times tinged with grief, but trying nonetheless. I asked her, finally, after months of after-school chats and run-ins in the hall, why she never joined the Black Awareness Club. It had become obvious that she wasn’t antagonistic toward the club, and I’d really started to like her, so I just needed an answer to make sense of this one thing. Maybe it was some deep personal grievance. Maybe she wasn’t black and this had all been a wild mix-up? Really, anything was possible. I was willing to suspend any and every belief. She answered with the same matter-of-factness that she used when telling me about her name. “I don’t go because I don’t want to,” she replied. I stared at her slack-jawed. It had never occurred to me that that was an option. She just wasn’t into it and it didn’t belie some sort of inner racial turmoil. A whole world of affable ambivalence opened up to me. It was possible to be authentic and black and aware and not part of a club, much like it was possible to be constantly hounded by grief, yet funny and charming.
We saw more and more of each other, working together in the after-school daycare program and congregating in the school library with a crew of erudite girls from both of our grades, the kind of slightly-too-smart group that talked about Rent and gossip and foreign languages with equal passion, that dated only occasionally—as teenage boys are, by and large, a disappointment—and earned kind but clear reprimands from librarians for laughing too loud on a regular basis. We spent so much time in the library that the summer between her junior and senior years, she was hired as a library assistant for a reshelving project. She encouraged me to snatch up the other position, which I did because I love libraries, and I love money, and I really liked her.
This job was the bee’s knees, the perfect summer activity for a couple of nonathletes who liked books more than sunshine. We spent eight hours a day on either side of a book cart, slowly making our way up and down each aisle, scanning the books for inventory and replacing misfiled items. We were supposed to work separately to maximize our time, but when we tried it on the first day, we found that it was too hard to shout things to each other through the stacks. We decided that the working-separately thing was just a suggestion. Did they really want us to be focused on the task at hand all summer? How boring! The library was the center of our social lives and we assumed that an unspoken but crucial part of the job description was “hang out in the air-conditioning with one of your favorite people.” Why else would anyone want to come to work?
Park’s school library, like many libraries, uses the Dewey decimal system for categorizing and filing books. As a lifelong library-goer, I’d always been captivated by the numbers on the spine of every book. I loved that every possible thing, every story, every fact, everything in the universe of knowledge, could be classified. I loved that by understanding the Dewey decimal system, even at a rudimentary level, I gained access to an ever-deepening world of information. Knowing what the ten divisions in the system were and what many of the divisions’ subcategories were made what was often overwhelming and mysterious suddenly comprehensible. A library looks like endless possibility in this way, rather than rows of closed covers. A library is a universe of smaller universes contained within pages, and to me the Dewey decimal system was the key.
One of the most fascinating things about the Dewey decimal system is that while there are distinct categories for every subject imaginable, it also allows for internal referencing, acknowledging that while a book may be about one subject and exist in one place, it also has a corollary placement elsewhere. At the same time. And that’s okay. I understood that a book could be many things at once, without conflict or contradiction, long before I realized it about people. Or, at least, long before I admitted it.
Another thing I liked about the Dewey decimal system was that it could sometimes function as a secret code. Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gay” into a search bar in a card catalog. Just “gay,” as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question—which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation. And where if not a library could I go to understand the unknown, to expand my world, to make sense out of gibberish? I would type “gay” and then survey the titles that came up and then click the window closed without ever doing any further exploring. I didn’t know what I thought I might find if I actually went to the aisle where the books were. A very quiet gay bar, perhaps? I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. But as I closed the screen, I memorized the Dewey decimal number of the section where, I presumed, a mirror ball sprinkled stardust across the aging carpet and the rows of books waiting to be opened.
Years later, I would learn about the work of Dorothy Porter, the Howard University librarian who devised her own classification system for library materials. In the 1930s she began building a collection of books by black writers and volumes on black and African history that would eventually become Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. At its inception, it was an anomaly. In 1995 she told The Washington Post, “When I started building the collection nobody was writing about blacks in history. You couldn’t find any books.”
As her collection grew, it became apparent that Dewey reified the same sort of structural inequities that kept black history out of books and black books off of shelves. In Dewey, she said, “they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had another number—325, as I recall it—that mean colonization.” The result, she explained, was that many libraries were reaffirming a Eurocentric mindset by filing any- and everything about black life under these two categories. Porter’s system, like the Dewey, classified work by genre and subject but included black authors and black history in every area. When I first learned about the Dewey decimal system, I assumed it was an impartial way of defining and filing the breadth of knowable information. I came to understand that the intention of the filer and the perspective that they carry play a huge role in how Dewey, and any other system, is employed.
There are probably few more interesting date options than lazily wandering the aisles of a library or a bookstore. Better if you’re getting paid for it. Not that we were on dates or that we were dating. That would be untrue. But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.
In retrospect, we probably weren’t supposed to take the entire summer to scan the library. But work is slow-going when you scan a book, show the person on the other side of the cart the cover, laugh at a joke she makes, pause for a second to discuss the O. J. Simpson trial—an obsession you both share—and then break for lunch. We were at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Every new book, every new aisle, promised different avenues of conversation and ways of seeing each other. We talked a lot that summer, we laughed a lot, but I mostly listened. I was enthralled. I stood with a book in one hand and a dormant barcode scanner in the other, taking it all in.
Electra also talked a lot about her mother. She missed her every day, in new ways and old ways, at surprising times and every moment. She talked about New York a little, but with less openness than she talked about her mother. She talked about the strangeness of her new situation. How she felt, sometimes, that she was in the way in this new life, an imposition in a house dominated by a new baby and her young uncle and aunt. She spoke about her feelings with a sort of strangeness; she was a mystery to herself then, like so much of the world. So much of what we thought about was still waiting to be filed away in its proper place: the vagaries of emotion, the substance of blackness, the weight of grief. What we didn’t know was that for some things, there is no permanent place.
Our conversations weren’t only heavy things, though. We laughed a lot. She seemed to grow funnier and funnier all the time. Perhaps I was a more willing audience. She made ridiculous puns shamelessly, in English and in French. The previous year we’d both been scheduled to go on the French exchange trip, but issues with terrorism forced the school to postpone to the next year. We were eager to go, but the specter of violence and, possibly, death hung over the idea in a new way. I was nervous; she was excited. Neither of us knew what to expect.
Every day on our lunch break, Electra would drive us to the mall in her car, blasting Madonna the entire way. She loved Madonna. Deeply, passionately, wildly. She listened, it seemed, to nothing but Madonna. In retrospect, it’s a period-appropriate choice but also a bold statement at odds with the rest of her personality, which while funny was resolutely subdued. Madonna was cone bras and getting censored on TV and a book about ::whispers:: sex. It wasn’t an easy match. I, too, liked Madonna, but my knowledge of her work extended only to the tracks on The Immaculate Collection and the soundtrack to Dick Tracy. This felt like quite a lot to me, but Electra was outraged. I was not a true fan. She was obsessed. She bought every new Madonna CD the week it came out and could list all the tracks in order. She had extensive thoughts on Madge’s recent work in Evita, as well as past work in A League of Their Own and Who’s That Girl? But her main focus was on the music. She lectured me with a professorial intensity on Madonna’s most recent album, Something to Remember, and what it meant for her image and her career. “I’m lobbying for ‘This Used to Be My Playground’ to be our class song at graduation,” she said to me one afternoon as we raced back to campus late and covered in Auntie Anne’s pretzel butter. “It’s the only choice, don’t you think?” Prior to the roughly thirty times she’d played the track for me in the car, I’d never heard it, but I was immediately on board. I vowed to vote for the song even though I was not in her class and there was no voting process that either of us was aware of.
Most days at the mall, we’d quickly grab something to eat and then push the technical boundaries of an hour-long break by spending an eternity at Sam Goody, the tape and CD store. Electra would marvel at the poster for Madonna’s forthcoming album, Ray of Light. “Sandra Bernhard got her into Kabbalah,” she told me reverentially. “This album is going to be like nothing we’ve ever heard before. It’s going to change everything.” I stared at her with the same awe with which she stared at the poster.
By the time September came, we had restored the library to a state of order and everything had changed about our friendship. We were inseparable. I wonder sometimes how she would tell this story. I wonder whether the force that felt to me simultaneously matter-of-fact and otherworldly struck her as odd and wonderful, too. I wonder, also, knowing who I was then and what was happening beneath the surface, what was happening beneath the surface for her.
In February, Madonna at last released Ray of Light and Electra copped it immediately, cranking up the stereo in her car for the title song. “And I feel like I just got home,” Madonna cries, the synthesizer shrieking in the background. “And I feel like I just got home.” I bought myself a copy and I played it over and over, too, each time finding a new way to understand it and love it. And in March, with the same nonchalance that had become a touchstone, Electra asked me if I wanted to go to senior prom with her. Or rather, I think, we just decided to go. There wasn’t any big to-do, no prom-posal or whatever the kids are doing these days. It just seemed like the thing we most wanted to do. “And I feel like I just got home and I feel…”
She wore a dark blue strappy evening gown and I rented a tuxedo. She’d hot-combed her hair and a few strands of it fell insistently across one eye to glamorous effect. I brought her an enormous wrist corsage that I’d gotten from the market my father managed. It was truly gargantuan. My father had told the florist that his oldest son was going to prom and he needed the best corsage they’d ever made. The florist delivered a creation that was essentially a bouquet attached to an elastic band. Electra had trouble lifting her arm. The corsage had its own gravitational pull. I think of that corsage a lot when I think about how well my dad loves me, that enormous wrist garden a physical manifestation of joy and pride and care.
Electra and I laughed at the size of the corsage. It seemed a bit ridiculous. Then again, everything about prom seemed a bit ridiculous: the awkwardness of taking photos in the vestibule of her house, the fact that my parents had followed the limo I rented in their own car with my ambivalent younger brothers and no less than three cameras, like paparazzi. We were embarrassed and happy and eager to get out of there and loving every minute.
The American Visionary Art Museum is a mosaic-covered building on Baltimore’s harbor. The works inside are all by untrained artists, often dubbed outsider artists. Some of them struggle with mental illness or have experienced homelessness or been in jail. Some don’t know their work is in a museum at all. It’s an institution dedicated to making space for those who’ve been left out of the traditional art world. The exterior walls are covered by glass and metal and mirrors and found objects that gleam intensely in the sunlight. Inside, the walls are covered with art that is wild and furious and quaint and beautiful and everything in between. Each piece is a portal into an untold story. Behind the museum, in a courtyard, is a tall sculpture barn that used to be a whiskey warehouse. This is where Electra’s class chose to hold their prom.
I’ve always found it funny that though we went to an elite, expensive private school, the prom was held in an artfully and authentically distressed old warehouse with Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling. Twenty years later, that sort of homespun reclaimed style would be all the rage; my own wedding would be overrun with mason jars holding votives in a huge room with broken stained glass and paint peeling off the walls. But in 1997 a dance in a barn seemed positively anti-establishment. These people were swimming in money, and yet when it came time for the biggest formal dance of their high school career, they went for Charlotte’s Web chic? Some jig.
We giggled our way through a couple of dances, which were just as delightfully awkward as we thought they’d be, and then went inside to explore the artwork. She dazzled me, strolling past outsider art in formal wear, stopping and staring at a canvas, attempting to divine its truth.
Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.
The month before prom Electra had gone to France. After a semester of hemming and hawing, I decided I was too nervous to go on the exchange trip. And I wasn’t certain that I actually knew how to speak French. So I opted out. She was excited about it, though. We talked frequently about what a good time she was going to have; she’d never been and she had high hopes.
On the afternoon she left, just before she was due to join the group and get on the bus to the airport, she poked her head into the library, where I was working. I stepped outside to chat. Was I on a break? Unclear. I was under the impression that talking to Electra was part of my job description.
“Are you excited?” I asked.
She looked away glumly. “I guess,” she said.
“Are you nervous?”
“I’ve been thinking about my mom. I’ve been thinking about how happy she would be for me. I’ve been thinking about how I don’t want to do this great thing without her being able to see it.”
She started to cry. I embraced her. We stayed like that for a while, in the hall outside the library, while a bus idled somewhere nearby, waiting to take her away.
Finally, we separated. We agreed that she should probably get going. We hugged again and I squeezed her and whispered in her ear, “Please have the best time.” And then she walked off down the hall to something new and unknown.
I really loved her. Isn’t that something? Before I knew myself, before I knew that sexuality was a spectrum, before the difficulties of college and becoming and stepping out into the world, I fell in love with a young woman in high school. We had a friendship that bloomed into a prom date like the culmination of a teen romcom. It’s a simple story. And one that could end right there. Except it doesn’t. Or rather it won’t.
Whenever I talk about Electra, the ending of the story rises up almost of its own volition and then dissolves into questions. And when faced with the end, I can’t help but rethink everything we shared before it. Had I really felt what I remember feeling? Or was it just a crush? Did it matter to her like it mattered to me? What was it about that summer in the dusty stacks that changed me so? What was her experience of this period? Who had she been before we met? And what happened after she went away, going to college in Pennsylvania, responding to all of our friends less and less often on Instant Messenger, until she became a question that we asked each other from our far-flung destinations: Have you heard from Electra? Do you know if she’s having a good time? Is she doing okay?
And then, the end. The question that lingers to this moment, unanswerable: In April of 2002, I got a call at my parents’ house from a high school friend. She wanted to know if I’d heard the terrible news. Earlier that month, the world had lost Electra. My friend on the phone didn’t know why, only that Electra had taken her life. No one knew why. And I sank to the floor of my parents’ laundry room and stared into the darkness, trying to picture her face, her huge smile, the way she bounced when she walked, even when she was experiencing a mixed emotion, even as she composed herself while leaving the library that afternoon three Aprils prior.
When I was a strange, uncomfortable boy, I met a melancholy, cerebral girl. And none of that exists anymore. But for me it’s not locked away in the past. It’s unresolved, as if there is still a glimmer of possibility somehow. It’s Christmas lights strung across a barn ceiling in anticipation of a magical night, or the release of an album that will change Madonna’s life and ours; it’s dusty books waiting to be put back in order.
I tell this story to get back there, to unwind the ending, despite the realities of life. And of death. When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.
And so one time our story ends in the car racing toward the mall with Madonna blasting from the stereo, and another under the night sky in the barn’s courtyard, and another while she and three others sing “This Used to Be My Playground” at graduation, just like she said she would. And yet another ends the first time she told me her name and I felt bright lights sizzle to life inside me.
I tell this story because of what knowledge it began in me—the complexity of love, the shape-shifting heaviness of grief, and the possibility of tragedy. I tell this story because she left before the end and I’m trying to find her in the darkness. And with her, a piece of myself. I tell this story because I believe that somewhere, still, two teenagers are standing outside a library, and their eyes are ringed with tears. And in this place, she hugs me, and I whisper in her ear, and anything is possible, for anyone. Forever.