Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (16 page)

I blush scarlet. I wish Em were here. God, I am so stupid.

I understand him
, I wrote.
He loves me
, I wrote.

I can’t believe I was so stupid.

I can’t believe I spent two years of my life loving a guy who is gay.

“I’m done whining,” I announce to Emily as I stir my Postum.

The stupid red coffee stirrer keeps bending. It’s not tough enough to slosh around the thicker stuff, the Postum stuff, the hearty stuff.

Emily raises her eyebrows. She sips her Coke.

“I mean it. I’m officially done whining,” I repeat. I pull out the stirrer and suck the end.

“Uh-huh,” she says.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You’re allowed to whine a little,” she says. She twists the pop top on her Coke. Twisting. Twisting. She yanks it off. She takes a picture of the Coke can, pop topless.

“I’m done whining,” I tell her.

My head spins. She flicks the little metal pop top at me. It skitters across the table. I slap it down with my hand, keep it from sliding off the table top and into the abyss of the cafeteria floor.

“I mean it,” I say again. “I’m done.”

All during lunch people come up and ask me if I’m okay. Callie Clark gives me a supportive hug. Amiee Ciciotte tells me that I’m better off without Dylan. Shawn comes over 800 times and asks Emily and me if we need anything. She makes googly eyes at him.

My eyes keep glancing over at Tom’s table. His eyes glance over at mine and when our eyes meet, lock, and hold it’s like electric shocks bounce up and down my skin. It’s crazy, uncontrolled electricity and it makes me scared a bit and my breath hitches and I turn away. And there’s this other thing stuck in there too, this thing that gnaws at me. His dad told him to look after me. That’s it. That’s all. Why does this matter? I have no idea.

When Emily’s Coke is gone and my Postum has sunk to the bottom of my stomach, she says, “You know, I’m not sure if liking other guys yet is a good idea.”

I lift up my eyebrows at her.

She fiddles with the buttons on her camera. Her unoccupied hands flits through the air with her rapid-pace words. “I mean, it’s good in the way that it means you’re moving on, right? You’re moving past this, which is healthy, but maybe it’s not, because it’s like a rebound thing, you know? It’s like maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough time to recover from the trauma of your relationship.”

“The trauma of my relationship?”

“Yeah,” she nods, sighs, and puts the lens cap on. “You know. It’s a big deal, what’s happening to you and Dylan and everything. That’s hard to adjust to. You loved him for, like, forever and then—boom—that love’s gone.”

I stare into Emily’s blue eyes. She stares back with sympathy. I say as undramatically as possible, “It was a lie, Em. It was just a fairy tale. You don’t have to recover from a fairy tale.”

She exhales, plucks off the lens cap again, and twirls it between her fingers. “Yes, you do.”

Emily and I head off to science. Just outside the cafeteria door, Shawn stands in front of me, totally blocking the way. His too-big eyes are sad, sad, sad and he stares down at me so intently that I’m worried that there’s dandruff on the top of my head or something.

“Belle,” he says.

I wait.

He doesn’t say anything. Emily fluffs her hair and flutters her eyelashes, totally subconsciously. She’s had the hots for Shawn forever.

He stares at me.

I wait.

He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about Dylan.”

“Oh,” I say and suddenly find my shoes incredibly interesting. They are canvas Snoopy sneakers with clouds on them, arty but cool. Snoopy holds the balloons floating up above his red doghouse, heading up, up, up into a blue sky.

Shawn clears his throat again. “It sucks that he’s gay.”

I nod because what else am I supposed to do?

Emily coughs and shifts her weight in her bright yellow clogs. Shawn’s sneaker taps the floor. Footwear is very interesting these days.

“I didn’t know,” he says.

“Yeah,” I shrug. “Me either.”

“Really? You couldn’t tell?”

People push by us. Rachel, Mimi, Anna. Mimi glares at me. It’s getting late.

“Nobody could tell,” Emily says. “I mean, how can you tell if someone’s gay or not?”

Shawn shrugs. “I heard they smell different.”

Emily rolls her eyes. She grabs his arm and steers him down the hall. I follow them, watching their feet and how they move forward one step at a time. Em snaps a picture of Shawn. He starts walking in such a happy way that it’s almost like skipping. They are too cute.

Behind me someone hisses, “Fag hag.”

I whirl around, but it’s just blank faces, none of them stick in my head, they are all unfocused, except for their eyes. Their eyes stare.

But the truth is, I know all these eyes. There’s Andrew. There’s Mimi again. There’s Aimee Ciciotte and Anna.

“Did you say something?” I ask Mimi. She shakes her head, but her mouth makes a tiny little smirk.

I do not give her the finger the way I want to, because I have class, damn it. Instead, I whirl back around and head into science.

“We are going to the dance Friday,” Emily announces as we examine our fetal pig’s urinary system.

The pig’s bladder looks suddenly, impossibly full. Oh, maybe that’s my own.

“What?” I sit back in my chair, pull off my latex glove. My hand smells like a condom. I contemplate telling Emily about what someone, possibly Mimi, called me in the hall, but she looks so focused, it’s not worth it.

“The dance. We’re going,” she says, not even looking at me, poking through the pig’s innards.

I shake my head. “No way.”

“Yep.”

Emily invades the pig, works her way around like a pro, now that we’ve found its spleen. “This baby is ours,” she said when we sat down. She took a picture of it. “No more girlie queasy crap. This baby is ours.”

She pokes and prods. She careens through its insides. She explores and takes notes. I follow her lead, but wrongness fills my bones. We are invaders. We are defilers, slicing through muscles, moving protective sheaths to see what we will see.

“You have to get back out there,” she says.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” she slices something. “Damn. Hold this up.”

Using this thin metal stick thing, I hold up a piece of abdominal muscle. She takes a picture of me and then goes back to work.

“Didn’t you just say it was too soon for me to like somebody else?”

She slices deeper. “I changed my mind.”

“I don’t want to go,” I tell her.

“You sound like a baby. ‘I don’t want to go.’” She peers into the pig’s pelvic area. “No choice. Shawn and I will kidnap you.”

“You’re going with Shawn?”

She flashes smile glorious. “Mm-hhm.”

“That’s great!” I say and think, third wheel, third wheel.

Emily, the telepath, hears me somehow. “Like I’ve never been the third wheel.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it,” she sighs. “Do you think this is the ureter or the vagina?”

She giggles.

I shrug.

“We don’t know the difference between a ureter and a vagina.” She’s dying now, laughing hysterically. She raises her hand and calls out, “Oh, Mr. Zeki! We can’t tell the difference between the ureter and the vagina!”

Mr. Zeki struts over, hands on the hips of his too-tight chinos. “What are you? Junior girls or sophomore boys?”

Everybody cracks up. I drop the muscle. Emily snorts out her nose.

Mr. Zeki moves the muscle, uses the pointer, aims it at a tiny tube. “That, girls, is the ureter.”

He winks. “You’ll have to find your vagina on your own.”

Red flames both our faces, but it’s funny too. I hide my face in my hands and laugh and laugh until there is nothing left, until tears break through the surface of my eyes, until everything inside of me is gone, a dehydrated fetal pig without a soul.