Authors: David Levithan
“I’m sorry,” Katie says.
“Not your fault.”
“Not your fault, either.”
“But it is, isn’t it?”
“And Ryan’s. Indirectly Ryan’s.”
“But he never asked me to do that, you know? I think he would have been happy if I’d gone out with Diego. He would’ve been thrilled. And it would have killed me, to see him that happy for that reason.”
Katie does some math in her head. “So the whole time you’ve been with Ryan, there hasn’t been anybody else?”
“There hasn’t been anybody else ever. He’s it. My only. How about you?”
“You know that stereotype that lesbians get married after the first date?”
“Is that a stereotype?”
“Committed to commitment—that’s us. Only I seem to be the control to that experiment with my placebo heart. I rarely make it through the first date. The first half hour, maybe. Then … I just don’t like them much. And I don’t like me very much when I’m trying to impress them. So I stop. Escape when I can. And, of course, long painfully for the one girl I can’t have.”
“Until, of course, she leaves the circus and comes to town.”
“Something like that.”
We sit there silent for a moment. I’m sure Katie’s thinking about the way the night ended, and I’m not sure I want to speculate about boys anymore. Because it raises the whole question of what I’d do if I actually found the right one.
“Look!” Katie says. “Here comes a very special guest! My ex!”
It’s Quinn Ross who’s walking over—Quinn Ross, Ryan’s big poetry rival and the editor of our school’s “underground” literary magazine.
“You dated Quinn Ross?”
“Yes. In third grade. For two weeks. It turned us both gay.”
“Hey, Katiegirl,” Quinn sings when he gets to us. “And hello, Markus-oh-really-us. School is wrapping up, and you two look like you’re laying it down. I’m sorry I didn’t make it to your gallery thing last night—I’ve been volunteering down at The Angel Project in the Castro. It’s a pretty big week for us, fundraising-wise. Let all the people come and party for Pride—when they leave, there will still be homeless teens, and they’ll still need help. Hey—you should come tonight. I’m hosting a poetry slam.”
“Maybe,” Katie hedges. “There are a few things we have to attend to first.”
I’m hoping this means she’s going to see Violet. But I don’t say anything with Quinn there. He is an ex, after all.
“Well, I hope to see you at the slam,” he tells Katie. Then he turns to me and says, “And I
really
hope to see you.”
“Um … sure?” I say.
Quinn laughs to himself and walks away.
“I’m not sure I like your exes,” I tell Katie.
“Quinn? He’s harmless. All snark and no bite.” She looks down at her phone. “I hate to say it, but we should probably head in. It would be lame to fail out in June because of attendance.”
“Are you going to call her?” I ask.
“Yes. No. One of the two.”
“Promise me. By the time we meet back here after school, you’ll have communicated with her in some way.”
“No. I can’t promise you. Because I don’t want to break any promise I make to you, and I’m not really sure that’s a promise I can keep.”
“You should call her. You should try to explain.”
“I know. I will. Unless she doesn’t want to talk. I wouldn’t blame her for that.”
“No, but you’ll blame yourself.”
She slides off the car. Gets her bag from the backseat. Says “I know” one more time, then heads off into school.
* * *
Ryan finds me right before lunch.
“This isn’t cool,” he says.
I’m at my locker. Caught.
“What isn’t cool?” I ask dumbly.
“The silent treatment. The look of terror on your face right now. The way you’re acting like this is all my fault.”
“I never said it was all your fault.”
“You might as well have.” He stops, stares down at the floor, then stares back up at me. “You disappeared last night.”
“I was right out back. If you’d looked for me, you would have found me.”
“But you didn’t want me to look for you, did you?”
Now it’s my turn to stare down at the floor, be honest. “No.”
“Exactly. Not cool.”
He stops, and I know it’s because people are passing us in the hall. People who could hear.
When it’s safe, he goes on. “I saw you talking to Quinn this morning. That was a bit of a surprise.”
“It was nothing. He’s Katie’s ex.”
“Well, I’m sure he told you about his poetry slam thing.” He pulls a flier out of his pocket and unfolds it.
Queer Youth Speak Out,
it says at the top. “Not very subtle. They even printed it out on pink paper, just in case you didn’t pick up on the fact that it was gay.” He holds it to his nose and inhales. “Mmm … smells like Whitman.”
“Are you going?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Are you going to read?” I ask, even though I know the answer’s going to be no. Ryan’s gay poems live in a very private place.
“Maybe.”
Oh. “Maybe?”
“What may be, may be.” He smiles. “You’ll just have to show up and see.”
What is he telling me? I don’t know what he’s telling me.
“Taylor will be there, and I think some of his friends are going to be there. You should join us. If I go through with it, I want my cheering section to be bigger than Quinn’s.”
I want to be in control. I don’t want him to see what I’m really feeling. But my walls aren’t that high when it comes to him. The truth flies right over.
“Well, if Taylor’s going to be there, you don’t really need me, do you?” I spit out.
And Ryan’s walls must be low, too, because he grabs my arm, right there in the hall, right where anyone could turn the corner and see.
“I’m only going to say this to you once, okay? I like Taylor. I’m excited about Taylor. I may want to date Taylor, if everything goes well. But I have known Taylor for a total of about five seconds, while I have known you since the mountains were made and the rivers were formed. I know we’re in a weird place right now, but I want you to step out of it and be there for me. Taylor is a boy, and you are my best friend. Taylor is a date, and you are my calendar. Understood?”
I know I should say I understand. I know I should understand. But there’s still a part of me that hates how easy it is for him to say these things. He wants to put it in perspective, but it’s all his perspective.
Also, I don’t want to be a best friend if I can’t also be a boy in his eyes. I don’t want to be a calendar if I’ll never get a date.
“Are you really going to read?” I ask him. “In public?”
He smiles. “You can be such an Oblivious Oliver. Like I said, you’ll just have to
show up and see
. Maybe you’re not the only one who can dance on the bar—so to speak.”
He’s got me, and he knows enough to leave before he loses me. The result is a locker-side muddle. I don’t have any desire to follow him into lunch, so I detour to the library again. I see Dave Hughes sitting at his table by himself. He spots me coming and clears a space.
“Are you always here at lunch?” I ask after I sit down.
“Nah. This is actually my study hall. I have third lunch.”
“Got it.”
I see he’s got the sports section on the table, and he nods that I can take it. Then he goes back to whatever he’s doing on his laptop.
About five minutes later, I hear something that sounds like a
Pssst
. I ignore it, but it happens again. I look up.
“Pssst.”
Dave’s eyes don’t leave his laptop, but he tells me, “It’s coming from a girl in the shelves over there.”
All I can see is a hand, its index finger indexing me to come over.
I don’t recognize the hand, but when I step into the shelf area, I recognize the face of Katie’s friend June.
“We never talked, we never saw each other, this never happened, okay?” she starts.
“Sure.”
“If Lehna catches me, it’ll be bad. She’s like that. But I’m not taking sides. I’m really not. I don’t want there to be sides, you know? It’s not like anyone asked me—it’s not like anyone said, ‘Hey, do you mind if we divide into sides?’ Because you know what sucks? Having friends who aren’t being good friends to each other. That really sucks. And I know I should be talking to Kate, but if I talk to Kate, that will be taking sides, so I’m going to talk to you instead, and if you end up talking to Kate, that’s not really my fault, is it?”
“No,” I say. “Not at all.”
“Good. Because Kate needs to be careful. Very careful. Lehna’s really mad. And at first it was just Lehna being dramatic, but now the reason is serious, because Lehna thinks that Kate’s playing with Violet. Like,
really
playing with her. We all saw Violet at the art thing last night, and Violet was like, ‘What’s Kate’s deal?’ And Lehna was like, ‘What did she do to you?’ Violet said Kate stood her up and was being deluded—no, it wasn’t that. Not deluded. The word that means hard to get. She said Kate was being that, and while she understood everything was like, wow, sudden, she’s not going to wait around forever for Kate to focus. And Lehna—ohmygod, Lehna. Lehna was like, ‘She’s not worth it if she’s going to do that to you.’ And she’s right, right, because no one should treat you like that. But she’s also wrong, because it’s Kate we’re talking about, and we all know Kate’s only acting like this because she’s afraid. Or at least I think we all know that. It just stops being a good excuse after a while. And what I’m trying to say is, the time it stops being a good excuse? Well, that’s now. Lehna’s already sure of it. And Violet’s getting there. So you have to tell Kate to do something. Really do something.”
“But I
have
told her to do something. Just this morning.”
June locks me into a look there, and it’s like finding out that Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because
she can beam words directly into your mind.
“Well, try harder,” she says. “We’re all going to the Exploratorium this afternoon—if you and Kate come, I can make sure Lehna’s distracted so Kate and Violet can talk alone. This is it—her last last chance. Give me your number.”
I tell June my number and she enters it into her phone. Then she calls me so I can have hers.
“There,” she says. “Remember: We never had this conversation.”
“You’re not taking sides.”
“Right. I just want all my friends to be happy. And sometimes you have to do that one friend at a time.”
* * *
I’m aware that I should contrive a reason for me and Katie to go to the Exploratorium—it’s a fun place, so it wouldn’t be too hard to say I need the pick-me-up that playing around at an interactive science museum can bring. And then, surprise!, we’ll bump into Violet there.
A trick. I could easily trick her into going.
But I don’t want our friendship to be like that.
So instead I sit down next to her at the start of math class and say, “I know where Violet’s going to be this afternoon, and I think we should go there.”
Kate sighs. “How do you know this information?”
“A little bird told me. And I’m not going to tell you anything more than that. I promised.”
Katie nods.
I go on. “Also, I found out Ryan’s going to be at Quinn’s poetry thing.” I tell her about the conversation Ryan and I had, and how weird it made me feel.
“So do you want to go?” Katie asks after I’m done. “Do you think he’ll read?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know. What about you? Do you want to go to the Exploratorium?”
Our teacher is clearing his throat, waiting for us to settle down so he can start.
“Let me get back to you on that,” Katie says.
We make it through class. It’s the end of the year; there’s no real reason to pay attention except to be polite to the teacher as he goes through the motions.
As soon as the end bell rings, I turn to Katie for an answer.
“Yes,” she says. “But only because it’s the Exploratorium.”
* * *
I went to the Exploratorium so many times with my parents and on field trips as a kid, but the last time I went was with Ryan.
It was one of our first city excursions alone, and for two hours I wasn’t worrying if we were boyfriends or best friends, or if someone was going to see us, or if this was the moment it would all click into place. No—for two hours, we got to be kids, running around and playing. We got to fool around with sound waves and pulleys. We got to pixelate ourselves and dance as a projector turned us into shadows on a kaleidoscope-colored screen. At the end of an exhibit about artwork created in a nineteenth-century mental asylum, we waded through the comment box and found a comment card written by a young kid:
I have lost my turtle. His name is Charles.
For weeks after, we pretended to be looking for Charles.
“He couldn’t have gotten that far,” I’d say.
“Maybe we should try the Shell station,” Ryan would say back.
Eventually we forgot about Charles and moved on to other inside jokes, other references to what we’d shared and continued to share.
Charles is still out there,
I’m thinking now.
He must be entering his awkward teenage mutant ninja years by now.
I don’t turn to Ryan and say this, because it’s not Ryan who’s with me. It’s Katie, and she’d have no idea what I was talking about. I could explain it to her, but it wouldn’t be the same.
I feel like I’ve lost half of all the stories I know.
I hear Katie take a deep breath; we’re about to reach the door. I’m not going to ask her if she’s sure she wants to do this, because I don’t want to give her a chance to say no.
I text June to let her know we’re here.
I get a text back almost instantly.
Meet Violet by the mirrors.
Kate
I can’t find the mirrors.
I’ve checked the little paper map, but there’s so much to discover in here that it’s practically useless. Mark told me he’d wait for me in the shadow room. He said he’d be in there for a while, in case I needed him, and if I didn’t come back for him that would be a fine thing. A
good
thing.