This Song Is (Not) for You (12 page)

“TOM!”

I slam my locker shut and turn around.

“Ally?” I say.

“Did you forget that today was the last day to sign up for the senior showcase?”

“I did not.”

“So you’re headed to Ms. Beasley’s before lunch?”

“I am not.”

“TOM!”

“Ally,” I say, “I would thank you for your concern, but you don’t want me to perform in the showcase for my sake. This is about your legacy, not mine.” I’m about to turn away from her toward the cafeteria when her shrill cry stops me again.

“TOM! That is true for most of the people I have been harassing the past few weeks. But in your case, I am sincere.”

I don’t answer her, and this seems to be all of the encouragement she needs.

“You have kept yourself apart from everybody, always. It’s probably been for the best, because you don’t fit in with most people and you know that.”

Again, I don’t answer her, and she continues.

“Tom, I’ve always admired you. Seriously. You’re different. Everybody knows it. And to most people that’s intimidating, but I’ve had two great dads telling me I’m amazing my whole life, so I’m down with it. Anyway, because most people are intimidated by you, most people haven’t really given you a chance. Now
is
your chance.”

“Bye, Ally,” I say. I start to turn, but she grabs my arm.

“TOM! This is about your legacy. You’re not coming back. You aren’t gonna be at the reunions. You know it; I know it. This is your only chance to say to everybody, ‘This is who I am!’ Who cares what they think?”

“I don’t.”

“Exactly.”

“Ally…”

“Finish high school by thumbing your nose at everybody who discounted you. Declare your identity as a weirdo and say sayonara. Just because you’re giving people something to look back on doesn’t mean that you’re the one looking back.”

“Ally…”

“Tom?”

There’s a park right across the street from the condo. That’s where I take Tom to have our conversation.

“I used to play here when I was little,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” he says. He knows I’m acting strange, and his face shows his worry. I keep talking.

“Suburban kids have backyards, and
maybe
they have a swing set,” I say. “But I had a whole playground and a lake with ducks.” I sit down on the bench facing the jungle gym. Tom slumps down next to me, his head hanging. He looks exactly like he did the day we met him, miserable and alone.

“Tom?” I say.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.” We’ve never said that to each other before, not explicitly. He’d been staring at his knees. Now he looks up and meets my eyes.

“I love you too,” he says, but he says it like he’s waiting for a trap to spring.

“But you don’t want me, do you?” I say. I keep my gaze steady and kind. Again, he slumps in his seat and stares at the ground.

“I should have told you,” he says, “but when I told Sara, she abandoned me. I don’t want to lose you, Ramona.”

“I’m not going to abandon you, Tom,” I say. “That’s not what love is.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and my heart breaks for him.

“It’s not that I don’t want you, Ramona. It’s that I don’t want anybody. I never have. I don’t think I ever will. Nothing happened to me. The doctor said there’s nothing wrong with my body. Please believe me. I know that I love you, and I really do think that I am in love with you. But sex isn’t something I can give you. It’s just not in me.”

I take a moment to think about this.

This seems like something that could happen in the course of nature.

He’s the same Tom; I just didn’t know this about him before.

I still want to be with him. I’m just going to have to adjust how I see him, what I expect from him.

“Okay.”

“What?”

I shrug. “I mean, sex isn’t something
I
wanna live without, and that’s related to the other thing we gotta talk about, but okay.”

He throws his arms around me with such force that I’m knocked backward, and we nearly fall off the bench. I can’t help it; I laugh.

And Tom says, “You don’t think I’m lying or in denial or a freak?”

And I can’t help but laugh again.

“No, I think you’re just Tom,” I say. He squeezes me tight and I return the hug, relishing how nice to is to be held by someone who loves you. “I have to tell you something now,” I finally say.

“Yeah?” He pulls back.

“Sam’s in love with me.”

His face falls. He sighs.

“I know,” he says.

“You do?”

“I’ve known that for a long time. When did you find out?”

“Today. Tom,” I say, and now I’m the one taking a deep breath. “I’m in love with him too.”

“Oh. You are?” His head is cocked to the side. He’s surprised. He isn’t angry. He looks worried, but he continues to hold my hand.

“Sam says that he doesn’t want to break us up,” I say quickly. “He said that he just wants to be with me too and stay friends with you.”

“Well, that’s perfect then,” Tom says.

“What?” I say. Apparently it’s my turn.

“That’s perfect. We can all just be together then.”

“You don’t think it’s a weird idea?”

“It is a weird idea. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.”

I laugh and bump my head against his shoulder one last time, at least for a while.

“I’m gonna have to take some time to adjust how I see you,” I tell him. “We should probably not be affectionate with each other for a little while. I need to be able to put our physical relationship in context.”

Tom squeezes my hand. Then he lets it go.

“I do really love holding your hand, holding you,” he says. “And I like kissing you.” We talk about what he likes and what he feels less enthusiastic about. He asks me about my conversation with Sam. Then he asks me where Sam is.

“At home I guess,” I say. “I told him I needed to talk to you.”

“Could we go see him?” Tom asks. “We need to have a band meeting. There’s a favor I need to ask you guys. About the senior showcase at my school.”

“You signed us up to participate in a school activity?” I asked. We were all sitting on the floor of the garage in a circle. Ramona had her hand in mine, which added to the dreamlike quality of the conversation. We were all sitting together, and everything was different, and everything was the same. “You want Vandalized by Glitter to perform at your school’s ‘senior showcase’?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s not like me to leave without making a mark. I want to show our music to my classmates.”

“I suppose Vandalized by Glitter needs to have a practice show,” Ramona said. She wasn’t holding hands with Tom right then, but someday, she’s gonna be holding his hand too, and I won’t mind that ’cause she’ll still be holding mine.

“Yeah, I mean, we don’t need to make a big deal out of this or anything,” Tom said. I laughed, given the context of our situation.

“So!” Ramona jumped up, still holding my hand, dragging my arm up with her. How I love her. “We need to finish mixing the album. That way we can have it up for download on the website, in case a few of your classmates do actually like our music. And then we need to pick—how long did you say our set could be? Fifteen minutes? So we need to pick probably two of our songs and practice them a ton, so that maybe a few of your classmates actually like our music!”

Tom had already stood up. I pushed myself up with one hand, still reluctant to let go of Ramona. (I hadn’t kissed her yet, but I realized that I would soon. That I would drive her home that night—)

“All right, we better get to work,” I said. “It’s a school night, and I can’t be up that late.”

“There’s something I want to talk to you guys about,” I say to Mom and Dad. It’s dinnertime. I’m supposed to be talking to my parents about my life, sharing my feelings and such. My parents and I have spent most of my adolescent years in a battle over my reluctance to tell them anything about myself. I expect them to be overjoyed at my words. I thought that this conversation would start with their pleasure at my involving them in my life.

Instead they look startled. And suspicious. There’s nothing for me to do but plow ahead.

“This is one of those things where I’m gonna ask that you don’t say anything until I finish. Okay?” This doesn’t improve their demeanor, but again, all I can do is continue. “I don’t want to go to Artibus. I know that it was a great place for Jack. But I don’t think it’s right for me. I know that you guys just want what’s best for me, so I want to tell you what I think that is.

“Teddy says that he wants to hire me for real at Grift Craft, on the books and everything. I like working there. I’m good at talking to people about art supplies. Teddy is planning on opening this other business with a friend of his. He’ll be getting pretty busy this summer, and he says he’ll bump me up to full time by autumn.

“I don’t want a career in retail, but I’d like to work there for a few years. I’ll pay rent if you want. I’m also going to still be reading books, trying to work my way through the classics and the important works of nonfiction, and I’ll be studying music. I’ll still be educating myself, I swear.

“I’m gonna live by a budget and save as much money as I can. When I feel like I have enough money in the bank, I want to buy a car—the most environmentally friendly one that I’d still be able to live out of sometimes—and I’d like to travel the continent, see as much as I can. I can live very cheaply, and stay at hostels and communes—Let me finish, Mom—even stay in some places doing temporary work. Manual labor will be fine.

“I could stretch my money and be able to travel for a few years, really get to see the world. And I’ll still be reading and watching documentaries. What I’m trying to say, guys, is that I want to pursue my own path of education. I’m not sure where I’m going to end up ultimately, but most college students don’t know either—and the ones who are certain about what they’re going to do might be wrong anyway.

“This is really what I want, guys. I don’t want to pursue making as much money as possible. I want to pursue seeing and experiencing as much as possible.”

My parents stare at me from across the table.

“You. Are planning. On being. Homeless,” my mother says.

It doesn’t really get better from there.

• • •

At one point I shout at my father, “They don’t use heroin in communes, Dad!”

Mom screeches back, “You can’t possibly know that, Tommy!”

• • •

It only ends hours later by us all admitting that we’re getting nowhere. The only thing to do is to not talk about it for at least a week and then try to sit down and calmly discuss this at a later time.

I can’t believe I’d actually thought this conversation might go okay.

Today, we are flyering St. Louis. This is a message for every neighborhood, so it’s gonna take all day.

Tom made the flyer. It’s his art project, obviously. It’s simple, thin white paper with cheap black ink; he emphasized the thrift. Across the top it says:

LOST CHILD

Under that, there’s a picture of a baby. I hope it survived. Then,

HAVE YOU EVER
THOUGHT ABOUT
WORLD HUNGER?

and the URL for a website he made that has statistics about regions with chronic undernourishment and directs visitors to charities that provide food and to nonprofits that provide paths to sustainability.

It’s not much, but like Tom said, maybe it will get a few people interested, maybe a couple of donations will be made. It’s something.

I’m carrying the flyers. Sam has the staple gun for telephone poles, and Tom has the clear packaging tape for light posts. We’ve posted twenty-three flyers so far. Twenty-seven to go.

Sam keeps looking over at me with this soft, stunned look on his face. It like he’s suddenly remembering that we’re together. I didn’t know that I was capable of being this happy. I wish everyone could feel this way. I wish everyone could be as loved as me.

“Here,” Tom says. “Right next to this Lost Dog poster. We want it to almost blend in, so that when people see it, they’re startled. We want people to react emotionally to the image before their brain can tell them that it’s not their problem.”

Tom is the same as ever but perhaps more at ease, more like the earlier days of our friendship. It does make me sad that I won’t have those things I’d imagined having with him, but I fell in love with him because he was such a fey character, and I can’t fault him for it now. I’ll adjust to this, and when he touches me, my body will understand his attentions. He’ll still hold me and kiss me and call me his “kiddo.” As soon as I say I’m ready.

If he’d demanded monogamy of me,

I couldn’t have stayed though.

Though if you’d asked me before,

I would have demanded monogamy.

But now here we are.

I have Sam, my Sam, who was always my Sam.

And Tom. I have Tom.

Strange, beautiful Tom.

We’re hanging flyers together;

the guys look at each other and laugh.

We’re hanging flyers because we have hope.

We have hope for the world’s future, hope for our own.

What’s wrong with Hope? What’s wrong with Love?

My girlfriend is drumming.

My girlfriend? She’s a great drummer. The greatest drummer, really. She drums like a demon, like a maniac on time. She bangs like a typhoon. She taps like a queen.

I’m damn proud of her, proud to be her boyfriend. Yup, I’m her boyfriend. That’s a fact. I’ve kissed her and smelled her behind her ear. Her. Ramona. My girlfriend.

I strum my sitar and watch her keep our pace. Tom’s running effects on the board. Out of the kaosolator comes the sound of a dance-party elven forest gong.

We’re playing at Tom’s senior showcase in two weeks. This will be Vandalized by Glitter’s first public performance, our last one as high school students. A few venues in St. Louis allow musicians under twenty-one to perform. Tom’s gonna talk to Teddy about making local booking connections. By July everyone will be eighteen, and we can get at least one show in before Ramona moves into the dorms at Artibus. After that, she’ll come back to St. Louis some weekends for shows, and she’ll find a place near her school where we can perform, for when we visit her there.

Tom says he’s leaving in a few years’ time. His parents have realized that they can’t legally force him into school, and it’s not like they can kick him out to punish him for planning to be homeless. Negotiations are in process.

His plans are something I would never choose, but I’m happy for him, that he knows what he wants. I look forward to reading his emails with Ramona. We’ll phone, chat online, and visit.

My girlfriend stops drumming. She wipes her sweaty brow.

I love watching her drum. She’s a talented musician, and her boobs do amazing things while she’s playing.

“We’re amazing,” she says. “We’ve gotta run through it again.”