Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (2 page)

“Good,” Dylan starts whimpering. He sits down and I stop standing. Caught half up and half down, I wrap my arms around him. The dog barks again. Dylan’s body shakes against mine. “Good.”

I hug him tighter. He sniffs into my hair. His hands move across my back and I tingle, even though, even with what he just told me, I still tingle.

His tears turn to sobs. “I couldn’t handle it if you hated me, Belle. I couldn’t handle it.”

“I know,” I say. “I know. I don’t hate you.”

My words are dark breath clouds in the cold air. My hands pat his back, his hair. I hold on and hold on because I’m scared I’ll never hug him again. I hold on and hold on but my heart is empty like the night sky. The plane is gone. It’s flown away. Even the dog is quiet.

“We’re always supposed to be in love,” he says. “We’re always supposed to be there for each other.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We are.”

Car headlights swing into the road and I can tell that it’s a Chevy pickup truck, which is pathetic, but that’s what it’s like in a small Maine town. I even can tell by the hitch in the engine that it’s Eddie Caron, so I guess that’s even more pathetic, but I’m glad he wasn’t stuck home watching porn on a Saturday night.

He stops the truck near us and opens the door, but doesn’t get out, just sticks his head and part of his body out. It’s all black shadow and I can’t make out the features that go with his bulk because the headlights are so bright.

“You guys okay?” he yells.

“Yeah,” I yell back, which is a total lie.

“You aren’t getting funky on the side of the road are you?”

I stand up. “No! Jesus, Eddie.”

He laughs. “Just wanted to make sure you’re okay, Belle.”

“Thanks,” I yell back.

Eddie shuts the door and drives to his house. I reach down to Dylan and help him up off the ground.

“We have to get inside,” I say. “It’s too cold out here.”

Dylan doesn’t use my hand. He pushes himself up, wipes dead leaf crumbs off his butt. “I hate Eddie Caron.”

“It was nice. He just wanted to make sure we’re okay,” I say.

“Well, we’re not. We’re not okay, are we?”

He starts walking to my house, not waiting for my answer. It’s an answer that would have to be, totally be, a no.

It’s the chorus in a song that he says over and over again. He wants to know why it happens. Why, he asks. Why?

I shake my head.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

He leans back on my mother’s stupid corduroy couch, looks away. With his index finger, he flicks a leaf from her tropical plant. He waits for me to talk.

What am I supposed to say?

I can’t. I can’t say anything.

We sit on the couch for hours. My mom pokes her head in. She’s wearing her turquoise bathrobe, with the little pink roses on it. Dylan is the only person other than me who has seen her in it. She pads over to the couch, yawning. “I’ve got to hit the sack,” she says.

She kisses me on the top of my head, then she kisses Dylan. She squints her eyes at both of us like she maybe knows that something’s going on.

“Don’t stay up too late, you two,” she says and waddles out of the room, heading up the stairs.

“Your mom is so cute,” Dylan says, leaning forward. He puts his head in his hands. His voice cracks. “I’m going to miss your mom.”

I reach out my hand and touch him on the back. “We’ll still be friends. You’ll still see my mom.”

He shrugs, but doesn’t take his face out of his hands. I am stuck staring at the muscles of his back. “It’s won’t be the same.”

“No,” I say, wanting to take my hand away but too afraid that it would be insulting somehow, if I moved it. “No, it won’t.”

We sit like that for a long time. Minutes click away and still I am numb. With each second that passes, Dylan-and-Belle becomes a lost fairy tale, an old story, and I don’t know where this new story is going.

Finally, Dylan sits up. His green eyes look like leaves blending all together. “We’ll still sing together, right?” he asks me. “You’ll still play Gabriel and we’ll hang out. Right?”

I nod, but I know it isn’t probably true so I say, “I don’t know, Dylan. I don’t know. It’s like the songs we had, they’re gone now. You know?”

He closes his eyes because this is the hardest truth of all.

Dylan and I would come home after all our extracurriculars were done at school, and we’d always hang out in my bedroom. I’d strum Gabriel and we’d fool around, singing songs, making up chord progressions, fooling around with corny lyrics. Then we’d throw on some old-time crooner music that Dylan liked and we’d sing it.

The thing about my guitar, Gabriel, is that she’s how I express myself. I’m not a brilliant writer, or an actress, and I don’t spew out heartrending confessional poems. I just play my guitar and that’s where all my emotions go.

I bring her to school every day, play her during the second part of lunch, because that’s how you get good, you do things all the time, you keep on playing and working at it. I thought that was how relationships were too, but obviously I thought wrong. I didn’t factor in the whole gay thing.

I’m not wrong about what playing Gabriel means though.

And when I played for Dylan, all those songs were about fun and silliness and love and that’s gone now. It’s all gone.

Hours later, my mom snores in her bedroom. The clock tells me it’s too late to call Emily, my other best friend. Dylan? Well, I can’t exactly call him. He kissed me on the cheek before he drove off. My lips felt neglected, but they didn’t pout. They trembled instead.

I pull his last note out of my pocket, read another line.

I wish that people would just leave us alone. Leave everyone alone so they can all be themselves. But, of course, there’s always a restraint on like a leash.

I read another line.

I just want to be free with you.

Standing in my bedroom, with my flannel pajamas on, it hits me: I will always be lonely.

This stupid note isn’t going to help me. I throw it on my dresser and it flutters down on top of my lip gloss, dead.

The stupid clock keeps making it later, too late to call anyone, or even text message.

Gabriel leans up against the wall by the window. She belonged to my dad. I named her Gabriel, which is a man’s name, I know, but she’s still a girl guitar. She’s too pretty to be a boy, and Gabriel was an angel, right? And to me, angels are sort of sexless; they aren’t about gender, they’re just about soaring and flight, like music. So no matter how much Dylan used to tease me about it, I think it’s a perfectly appropriate name for a guitar. I’d play her and Dylan would sing with me, old folk songs mostly. Bob Dylan. Greg Brown. John Gorka. I pick her up, but even arching my fingers over a simple G7-chord doesn’t feel right, so I put her back down.

There’s a big empty hole in the middle of an acoustic guitar. The sound echoes in there, but right now, that circle looks like an eye staring at me, waiting for me to make some noise, to fill up the empty, but I can’t. I’m too empty myself.

Usually, when I’m not at school, or doing homework, or eating, I’m playing Gabriel. The tips of my fingers are hard because of all the strumming I do. Dylan used to call me Guitar Girl. Some people at school still do when we’re just hanging out and fooling around. What are people at school going to think? About me and about Dylan?

I touch Gabriel’s neck with one of those hardened fingertips, but I can’t pick her up. I can’t play her.

I turn off my bedroom lamp. Through the window, past the mostly leafless trees and a good mile away on flat land, cars move on the Bayside Road. Their headlights make little lights, like tiny stars. I probably know everyone in those cars and they probably know me. It’s probably Dr. Mahoney going in to Maine Coast Memorial Hospital to deliver a baby. It’s probably Cindy Cote, Mimi Cote’s mother, going in to work her shift at Denny’s, our town’s only restaurant that serves after 8:30. She works there and at the Riverside on Sundays.

And all those people know me too.
That’s Little Belle Philbrick
, they’ll say,
whose dad died in the first Gulf War when she was a baby. She dates that cute Dylan boy. What a good couple they are. They’ll get married after college. You just can tell.

In my town, everyone repeats your past and predicts your future every single time they see you, even though the people they tell it to already know. I wonder what they’ll say about me now, what they’ll say about Dylan.

I turn away from my window and tiptoe through the house without flicking on any lights. It doesn’t take much to lose my way, even though I’ve lived here all my life. Everything is different in the dark. I bump into the coffee table. My shin bruises. My hip launches into the corner of the kitchen counter. The pain is sweet, like water after a long bike ride uphill.

Night sounds skim against me. My mother’s snore-breaths bound down the hall. Cars on faraway roads rev their engines. Mice rustle in the walls. Cats’ paws pad along crackling leaves.

I lean against the counter.

“I’m lonely,” I say to the sounds, the house, to nothing.

In the dark, dark kitchen my body slumps onto the counter, leaning, but my soul, it floats up by the ceiling, watching it all, wondering about this lonely girl with her feet planted on the wood floor, this girl who is me.

My mother snores in her bedroom. The clock tells me it’s too late to call.