Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (12 page)

“When I’m with you,” I leaned in and kissed him. He sighed and gently pushed me away.

“Other than that.”

I pouted and then decided to answer. “When I play Gabriel.”

He nodded, excitement flushing his face. A squirrel twittered at us from a nearby tree. “Right. But you don’t play it all the time. You don’t even expect to do it for a living, do you? You’re going to be a lawyer, right? Why’s that?”

I grabbed the grass blades off my leg and scattered them. I didn’t answer. I hated it when Dylan did this psychobabble stuff. I loved that he was smart and philosophical, but I hated when he used it on me.

Up in the sky another osprey joined the first one. I wondered what we looked like to them, two tiny specks on the ground, too big to eat, but small, small, small in the scheme of things.

Dylan answered his own question. “You don’t think of being a guitarist because that’s not what’s expected of you. You don’t sit around playing guitar all day because that’s not what other people want you to do. You change your own wants to fulfill other people’s expectations.”

I stood up. “Like you don’t.”

He kept sitting there, sad taking over his face. All my anger melted away. “No, believe me, I do.”

Sometimes we would try to memorize the names of the people in the cemetery, the names of the people whose stories are long gone, who are invisible now, the unremembered. We would chant them like a mantra, with our eyes closed. Our voices overlapping each other.

Larry Rohan

Charlotte Block

Frances Block

Ebenezer Block

Cpt. John Mortan

Horatio Alley

Elizabeth Alley

“We should make up songs about all of them,” I told Dylan, propping myself up on my elbow so I could see his face.

He kept his eyes closed. “Why?”

“So people will remember them.”

“Who’ll make up songs about us?” He opened his eyes. They were grainy green, like they had texture and depth.

“We’ll make up our own songs,” I said, kissing him lightly on his lower lip. “Deal?”

He nodded and closed his eyes again. “Deal.”

When we were walking home, I stopped and wrapped my hands around him.

“You should be who you want to be,” I whispered.

His hands tightened on my back.

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can,” I said and then to lighten the mood I licked his ear.

He hollered and chased me the entire way home.

At the Key Club meeting, it is decided that we will sell bracelets at the YMCA’s Middle School dance to try to raise money for a gym at the Hancock Consolidated School. This girl named Gillian was killed in Hancock last summer by a car. She’d been riding her bike. There aren’t any shoulders on the roads in Hancock. It’s a dangerous place to ride a bike. Gillian was big into sports and she would have come in to our high school this year, because Hancock, like lots of towns around here, don’t have their own high schools. Anyway, her parents thought that building the Hancock School a big gym in Gillian’s honor would be a good way to make sure that no one will forget her.

It’s a good idea. Still, Hancock County’s a small place. Nobody will ever forget about Gillian. Her big sister, Anna, is in Key Club, she starts crying when everyone agrees to sell the bracelets.

“Thanks,” she sniffs and wipes her big, beautiful brown eyes with her sleeve. “It means a lot.”

I tiptoe over and sit next to her and hug her, while everybody else finishes up and Rachel adjourns the meeting. Em clicks a picture of us hugging and Anna gives her the finger.

Em lifts her hands up. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know when to quit.”

Anna groans, smiles, and waves her finger a little bit more, before tucking it into a fist. Em’s so cute, everyone forgives her everything. Except for Mimi Cote, who could not get over the time Em took a picture of her leaving the girls’ bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into her thong. You can’t really blame Mimi for that. Em says it’s all in the name of art. I don’t know what kind of art you call it to see Mimi’s butt hanging out of a thong, but whatever.

Anna leans over and whispers to me, “I’m sorry about Dylan.”

“Yeah,” I nod.

She sniffs in again, pushing her long black hair over her shoulder and says, “Is he really gay?”

“Yeah.”

Right then, Em’s eyes meet mine. I move my hair in front of my face in case she’s thinking about taking another picture. My eyes start to tear up. Anna pulls me into the side of her fluffy sweater, her hugging me this time.

“You poor baby,” she says. “It sucks to be you.”

“It sucks to be a lot of people,” I say.

“Yeah,” Anna says, letting go of me. Our sad eyes meet. “Yeah.”

Monday night

I try not to call. I want to call. The phone waits and waits for me to cradle it against my face like a long-lost baby, like a lover, like a teddy bear. Gabriel leans against the wall and waits and waits for me to wrap my arms around her and make her sing.

I pick up Muffin instead. She mews but decides it’s more comfortable to sit on my shoulder than my arm. Dylan would flip her upside down and hold her like a baby and even though that’s got to be an uncomfortable position for a cat she always purred and purred anyway.

She trusted him.

I wait and wait and wait but he does not call me.

He always calls me every night.

It was hard coming home today without him. My bed looked angry at me. It wanted him there. I plopped myself on it, but it wasn’t the same. The bed knows that the weight of one is not the weight of two.

In my room, I pull out last year’s yearbook from its place on my bookcase.