Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (4 page)

“Live like Yoda’s crying,” my mom sing-yells.

Em starts laughing. “Oh my God, is she screwing up the words to ‘
Live Like You Were Dying’
?”

“Yep,” I say.

“That’s so funny,” Em snorts. “Does she really think those are the words?”

“She’s always stunned when I tell her she’s singing things wrong,” I say and fortunately for all of us my mom turns on the vacuum and we can’t hear her singing anymore. I try to relax onto my bed. “I feel selfish for thinking about myself. I should be worrying about him, you know, all he has to deal with.”

“No way. That’s his job. You worry about you. That’s okay. As long as you only do it for a week.”

Muffin pounces on my stomach and knocks the air out of me. “A week?”

“Yeah, any longer and you become annoying, self-obsessed, like a Mallory.”

A Mallory is a girl who only thinks about, talks about, knows about herself and how herself reacts/responds/is involved with boys, makeup, clothes, parents, herself.

“I will never be a Mallory!” I yell and sit up straight again, holding Muffin against my belly so she won’t run off. She squirms.

“That’s right. You are a good Maine girl who gets on with her life,” Emily says, raising her hand and putting her fingers in the form of the Boy Scout pledge. “Swear it with me. On my honor, I swear, under God, blah, blah, blah to never be a Mallory.”

I raise my hand. I swear. I raise Muffin’s paw, make her swear too. Emily grimaces, checks her nails, shakes her head, and says, “You’re losing it. That poor cat.”

She grabs Muffin, who climbs onto her shoulder and settles there. They both seem to purr. She pulls out her digital camera and snaps a picture of me, even though my nose is red from crying and my hair is a mess. She’s always taking pictures ever since her dad died. She’s afraid of losing people, afraid she’ll forget things about them, if she doesn’t snap what they look like happy, sad, angry, bloated from eating too many buffalo wings. She says she can’t remember how her dad looked except for how he looked smiling. So, I let her take her pictures and think of how brave she is, how brave I should be.

“A week?” I ask Emily.

She nods, checks out the photo but doesn’t show me. She snaps another one of my lonely Gabriel guitar, leaning against the wall. Em throws her sexy brown supermodel hair behind her cat-free shoulder. “A week.”

After Em leaves, I yell to my mom that I’m going out on my bike.

She looks up from her computer. She’s paying bills and her hair’s flopped out of her weekend ponytail, looking all scraggly in her face. “It’s cold out.”

“Yeah.”

She has worry stuck behind her eyes the way she always does when I go out alone, but she’s a good mom, she knows that I hardly have seizures, that they don’t run my life and she wants me to have a life. “You have your cell phone?”

“Yep.”

I kiss her on the top of her head and she wraps her arms around my trunk. “You bundle up, okay?”

I pull away. “I promise.”

She smiles and something shifts behind her eyes. It turns out it’s a memory. “Do you remember when you were little and you and Mimi Cote rode bikes all the way out to the Washington Junction Road and you both got flats and that guy, Pete, from R.F. Jordan picked you up and put your bikes in the back of the dump truck?”

I clench my teeth. I hate thinking about Mimi Cote. We used to be good friends when we were little and then kind of friends in middle school, but then she went out with Tom Tanner and everything changed. “Yeah.”

“You ever talk to Mimi?” my mom asks, but she’s already turning back to her computer screen filled with check numbers and deposit statements.

I don’t even think she hears me when I say, “No.”

I take my bike out and ride until my mind is like the blueberry barrens—this nothing field full of rocks, scrappy bushes, and dried-out fruit. Old footprints in the sand. Abandoned blue jay feathers. A worker’s gray t-shirt soaked with sweat.

I know that beyond the barrens is a world of forest with sloping trees, limbs reaching toward the sky, birds flittering from nest to home, to nest. I know that beyond the barrens is a world with nice subdivision houses full of wagging-tail dogs and happy kids, comfy beds, family photos on walls featuring smiles and laughs and hugs, magical stories of love and hope, and refrigerators full of chocolate milk and good leftovers waiting to be rewarmed.

I know, I know that it is all out there, beyond the barrens, beyond my mind and when I ride my bike up and down the Maine hills and around the potholes, over the frost heaves, all I can do is think about wanting, wanting, wanting.

Each want puffs out with my cold breath, making a cloud in the frigid air. Each want stomps itself into my heart as I pedal harder and faster.

I want a life that I can trust. I want a life where there are four stable walls and the people I love are who I expect them to be. Is that too much to ask? I want no one to know about Dylan and me. I want it not to be true.

Before Emily or Dylan could drive, we all used to walk home from school to Dylan’s house, because he lived the closest, only a mile or so away. Dylan would laugh at Emily and how girlie she could be sometimes, quoting from
Cosmopolitan
or
Vogue
. We would all crash in Dylan’s kitchen and scarf up all the food in the house, usually bagels. We always ate bagels and tea.

Dylan always made my tea perfect, the way I can never make it. It would come out tasting like apples and cinnamon, not too strong, not too wussy weak like I make it. He’d put the perfect amount of honey in it, stirring the spoon around and around in the mug, without ever clanging the edges. Now, there’s no one to make me tea anymore.

Now, he’ll be making some handsome boy tea, and they’ll kiss each other the way we used to kiss each other, soft and then hard, aching and then fulfilled.

My heart throbs and my feet stop pedaling, because my lips will no longer be the kissed lips. My feet stop pedaling because really where do I have to go? I am in the middle of a road that winds through a blueberry barren.

I was wrong. It is my heart that is the barren, not my head. My head is a river rushing, rushing, rushing and not knowing where it’s going. My head is a river rushing, rushing, rushing and looking for the home, looking for the ocean.

There is nothing to do except go home and hide in my room, stare at Gabriel the guitar leaning against the wall, try not to think about music, try not to think about him.

My mom knocks on my door.

My arms hug my yearbook to my chest and I close my eyes, hoping she won’t come in. Hoping never works. The door squeaks open and her voice squeaks after it.

“Honey?” she asks. “You okay?”

I nod, but do not open my eyes.

She says again, “You okay?”

I nod but the nod is a lie and I do not want to be one of the liars so I make my tongue put air out of my mouth. The air forms a word. The word is no.

She rushes in, because that is the kind of mom she wants to be. She rushes in and launches herself onto my bed. Her arms wrap up me and the yearbook in a hug.

“Oh, honey? What is it? Do you want to tell me?”

I shake my head.

She smoothes down my hair with gentle hands. “You sure?”

The volume of Barbra Streisand’s voice gets lower. My mom must have turned it down. Dylan’s song voice slips further and further away.

I shrug. The thing is, I am really mad at Dylan. I am really mad at him but it’s not because he’s gay, it’s because he pretended not to be. How can I tell my mom that? How can I tell her that the boy she thought I’d marry never liked me that way at all?

She hugs me and rocks me back and forth. “I’m here for you, you know. I’m right here.”

“Yep,” I say. “Thanks.”

I lean away from her. She moves the hair out of my face. It’s wet from my tears. Her voice comes out a murmur, “Oh, baby. I am so sorry you are so sad.”

I sniff in. “Yeah, me too.”

“Okay. I’ll give you some space, but you know if you need me . . .”

“You’ll be right here,” I finish for her.

“I haven’t heard you play today,” she motions toward Gabriel. “Maybe that would make you feel better.”

I shake my head.

I don’t think so.

“My fingers are too cold,” I tell her. “Maine is too cold.”