Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (21 page)

I take a peek at him. That muscle in his cheek twitches and his face is definitely a deeper color like maybe he’s blushing. He looks scared. I’ve never seen him look this scared, not when taking a penalty kick, not even when giving those German oral reports.

“I mean,” I rush out and grab his hand. “I really liked it. I like it a lot. I liked it way too much.”

I am an idiot.

He smiles at me and his scared eyes turn happy again. “I liked it too, Commie.”

I pull my hand out of his and cross my arms in front of my chest. “I am not a commie.”

He starts to say something back, but Em and Shawn tromp back down the stairs, Em grabs me by the hand, all panicky looking. “We have to go, now. I completely forgot I have a dentist’s appointment.”

“But?” I say, yanked up off my happy couch place with Tom, a delicious-looking happy couch boy. No, he isn’t. Yes, he is. “But . . .”

I know Em just had her dentist’s appointment last Thursday and I know she had no cavities. She is always proud about the fact she’s never had a cavity.

She glares at me and I get it. She’s lying.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I forgot too,” I say and we wave bye and scramble up the stairs, still holding hands, Em still pulling me along.

She slams into her car and says, “I got my thing.”

“Oh!” I say and start laughing.

“It. Is. Not. Funny,” she accentuates every word. She hates her thing, she hates buying tampons. She’d like to pretend she’s still ten, I guess. “I have no tampons.”

“Oh,” I say, straightening up, but the horrified look on her face just makes me laugh more.

“You have to come with me to buy some,” she says, turning on the car, shifting into reverse, and hightailing it out of Shawn’s driveway. The car squeals.

I shake my head. “Emily, you are a big girl. I think it’s time you faced your fears.”

She shifts into forward and heads down the road. “You have to come with me.”

“Dolly is not going to think any less of you if you buy tampons. People buy condoms there, remember?” I try not to laugh and put my Snoopy shoes up on the dashboard.

“Dolly thinks I’m eight.”

“You act like you’re eight,” I laugh and smile.

Dolly runs the local Rite Aid. She’s only about 115 years old, with no teeth, sweet eyes, and smoker’s voice. She knows everybody and everything in town, and she tells you all about it.

“You don’t have any at home?” I ask Em as she whizzes the car past the Y and Harmon’s Auto Tire. She cuts off Ray Davis’s black pickup truck and speeds through a yellow light, one of our town’s four stoplights.

“I’m sure! Would I have ditched Shawn if I didn’t have to?” she yells, slamming into a stop at our town’s second of four stoplights.

I put my hands up in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I will go in with you and I will buy them for you but you have to stand with me when I buy them.”

She smiles and relaxes, she turns on WERV, the alternative community radio station I love but she hates. “Deal.”

I wait until the light turns green and then I say it, “Tom kissed me.”

“What!” She swerves, hits the divider, and bounces back into the lane again. “He did what?”

I shrug and smile and Em shakes her head and laughs, and laughs. Then she says all triumphantly, “Well, I guess we are definitely going to that dance and you are definitely no Mallory.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re obviously not sulking anymore, moaning, whining, crying, sobbing, gesticulating, grousing, complaining, brooding, acting all morose . . .”

I make a pout face and she laughs harder. “Shut up. I think I’m rebounding.”

“So?”

“Well, that’s no good,” I pull up my Snoopy sneaker and start fiddling with the laces.

“Why not?”

“Then it’s not real,” I say. Anna drives by and waves. We wave back.

Em gives a happy little toot and says, “I love Anna.” Then she turns back to the conversation, “Nothing is ever real, Belle.”

She keeps driving with one hand and swerving and taking pictures out the window and I think about all the ways I felt with Dylan. I think about the me I was with Dylan, singing show tunes instead of folk, never using parmesan cheese on my spaghetti because he hated the way it smelled, watching old sci-fi movies even when I hated them, making myself like them anyway because that’s what Dylan wanted me to be.

My heart hits my throat. I am lost without Dylan but I lost myself with Dylan. I am a cliché. “Nothing’s ever real really,” I say. “Nobody’s ever who we think they are.”

“Emotions are real,” Em says, turning on her blinker at the light. I give her the thumbs-up sign for remembering. “Emotions are real just not the reasons behind them. Feelings are real, you just never really know that what you’re basing them on is real.”

The light turns green. Em takes a wickedly wide left turn. I mock her. “Happy advice, oh sage one.”

She bops me in the arm. “Shut up.”

I do. I wait until she’s turned into Rite Aid and pulled into a spot, but still I don’t speak. She puts the car in park, turns to me, and says, “What do you feel when you’re with Tom?”

I grimace at the stupid touchy-feely aspect of this question but answer anyways. “Lots of stuff. Confused. Scared. Happy. Safe.”

Em smiles. “See? That’s too complicated to be fake.”

“Yeah.”

“And when he kissed you, how did you feel?”

I close my eyes, but I don’t have to do that to remember it. Just thinking about that kiss makes my heart a happy thump-thump song. “Giddy. I felt giddy. Shut up.”

She laughs and then panic hits me and I grab Em’s arm. “What if he’s gay, too? What if only gay men like me because I’m not threatening or something?”

“That’s stupid,” Em pulls her keys out of the ignition and pockets them.

“No, it’s not.”

“Belle, I don’t think Tom Tanner is gay.”

“But what if he is? What if every man is? What if no one is ever who we think they are?

“Well, what do you think? That it’s all polarities? Like all gay or all straight all the time?” Em unbuckles her seat belt, shifts forward in the seat, grabs the steering wheel like she’s still driving. “Maybe it’s all shades and everybody is a little bit gay or a lot bit gay or no gay or they shift around. I don’t know.”

I point at her. “You have been watching too many self-help shows again.”

“Shut up. I don’t know. It’s just a theory.”

“So according to your theory, you are a little bit gay,” I wiggle my eyebrows at her to show her how ridiculous this is.

“Well, I mean, you’re looking kind of cute with those bacon lips,” she laughs.

I stick my tongue out at her. “You are so not gay.”

She crosses her arms in front of her chest. “It doesn’t make my theory wrong.”

“This isn’t about your theory. It’s about me. It’s about whether or not I’m some sort of fag hag.”

“That’s a stupid name. Hanging around with gay men is not a big deal,” she sighs and shifts her weight in the seat again, looking uncomfortable. “You seriously think Tom is gay?”

“No, but I didn’t think Dylan was gay either.” I shove my hair into a ponytail, which is what I sometimes do when I’m serious about things. “I feel like I don’t know who anyone is.”

Em’s eyes grip mine. I stop fidgeting with my hair. “You know who you are, right?”

Everything in me heavies. I unbuckle my seatbelt, like I’m going to free myself from the truth somehow, but the truth tumbles out my mouth anyways.

“No,” I shake my head. “I don’t.”

Em grabs her camera, fiddles with a button, and shows me an old picture of me. Freshman year. Singing in the talent show with Gabriel against my chest. My eyes smile. My fingers strum an old John Gorka tune, a silly one about Saint Caffeine.

Her eyes glint with something fierce and determined and she flicks off the monitor. “You are Belle Philbrick. You are a fantastic folk singer, a good student, my best friend, a sweet political activist who can’t drink coffee, and you are my best friend. Did I already say that?”

I nod, bite my lip, and she grabs me by the shoulders and says, “And you are also going to buy me some freaking tampons before things get really ugly.”

I jump back and the urge for crying passes. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.”

She puts her camera in her pocket and opens the door. “Yeah. But I didn’t.”

We sneak through the front door of Rite Aid like cat burglars. We walk in sideways, looking over our shoulders.

“Doorway clear,” I say to Em in my best military voice, which even I have to admit, isn’t all that good.

She pulls her hair over her face to hide it. She makes her fingers like a pretend gun, unholstered and ready at her side. “Check. I’ll survey the perimeter.”

She sashays away before I can yell at her, the sneak. She’s just checking out the perimeter so that she doesn’t have to go down the tampon aisle. Wimp. She didn’t even bring her camera in here. Double wimp.

I shake my head, pull my hair out of my coat collar, and walk past Dolly, who flips through a tabloid at the register wearing her cute little blue apron.

“Why Belle Philbrick!” she says with a big smile. “Isn’t it good to see you here, little missy. How’s the singing?”

“Good,” I say, smiling back at Dolly and her gums.

She leans her tiny, old body across the counter. “Any record deals, yet?”

I laugh. “Hardly.”

She slaps the counter with her hand, which has only 800,000 rings on it. “You be patient. You’ll be a superstar, mark my words.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Dolly that I don’t want to be a superstar so I just smile and nod, which is my good-girl reaction to situations of this sort. Dolly stands back up straight. “How’s your mumma? Still singing the wrong words?”

Everyone in town knows about my mother’s wrong-words syndrome. According to Dolly, my mom was kicked out of the high school’s show choir because of it. I’m not supposed to ask about that though because Dolly said it might “hit too close to the bone.”

“She’s good,” I say and cast a glance over my shoulder for Em. She’s obviously still scoping out the perimeter. She will probably scope out the perimeter until I’ve completed the transaction, she’s such a wimp.

Dolly makes her voice one decibel quieter than a jet landing in Bangor. “What’cha here for, honey?”

I step up to the counter and make my voice a whisper. “Girl things.”

Dolly leans forward so I can smell the cigarettes on her clothes. Her eyes twinkle behind her glasses. “You stuck buying tampons for Emily again?”

I straighten up, shocked. My hand zips over my mouth.

Dolly slaps her hip with her hand and hee-haws. “Like she thinks I don’t know. That’s one uptight chicken.”

I giggle. Dolly winks and I walk down the feminine-products aisle. She calls after me and I turn around and she mouths a word, but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe “Dylan?” I wish I could read lips. I give her a little wave and turn away. My Snoopy shoes slide on the smooth linoleum and take me past the douches and sanitary pads, the weird medicine stuff for yeast infections to the nice blue and white boxes of the tampon section.

I look for slender regular. How ridiculous it is that I know what kind of tampon Emily uses. I decide I deserve the BEST FRIEND OF THE YEAR AWARD.

“That girl owes me,” I say.

That’s when I hear it, the low, deep laugh of Dylan when he’s trying not to laugh. It’s a snort really. That always happens when he’s trying really hard not to guffaw, like the time one of Em’s tampons fell out of her locker and she had to stomp on it with her foot to hide it.

Dylan’s here. My breath catches in my chest. I should try to warn him again, about what Tom’s dad said, I think, or tell him that I’m so sorry he had to lie to be with me. I grab a tampon box and walk around to his aisle.

It takes me a second to figure out what it is I’m seeing under Rite Aid’s fluorescent lights. It’s Dylan and he’s struggling so hard not to laugh that he’s leaning into the guy next to him. The guy next to him has his arm around Dylan’s shoulders and it looks as if he’s smelling Dylan’s hair. It’s Bob. Of course, it’s Bob.