When Nicole was done talking I packed my notebook into my backpack slowly, making every effort to be casual and suave. My post-class exit was no longer about trying to match Griffin’s speed to the door so maybe I could hold it for him or have it held by him, with the chance of our fingers brushing. This was about waiting for him so we could leave together.
Together. Imagine!
“I’m starving,” I said, trying to hide my giddiness.
“Me too,” said Griffin. “What were the pages for the homework?”
“I think it—”
“Never mind, I’ll get it from you later.” He closed his book onto a sheet of paper and stuffed it in his backpack. “After you,” he said, and held the door.
We walked up Beacon Street and through Boston Common. Spring had begun a few days ago, and while the trees were still winter-bare, the sun on the branches seemed to be selling the idea that it was time to start pushing out new buds.
“So you’re having trouble finding a roommate too, huh?” he said, backpack slung by one strap over his shoulder. He was taller than me by a couple inches, even in his thin-soled Converse, but skinnier.
“Most of my friends are seniors,” I said. “The guy I live with now is a musical theatre major. Let’s just say I’d prefer someone a little quieter.”
“Quiet would be a nice change,” he said. He hooked a thumb under his backpack strap. “I’m in a triple right now. It’s OK I guess but I’m kind of the third wheel. I’m pretty sure the other two guys are gay for each other, so, you know...”
“That’s funny,” I said, trying to decide whether he’d meant that the problem was the gay roommates or his third-wheel status. “Which dorm are you in?”
“Beacon-Storrow,” he said.
“...You are? What floor?”
“Ten.”
“I’m on Five. It’s weird that I’ve never seen you around there.” It seemed suddenly funny that while I was scanning through the student directory he was only five floors above me, sleeping, showering, practicing karate naked.
“I actually just transferred here this semester,” he said.
Ah, that explained why he wasn’t in the directory. “Where were you before?”
“Roger Williams. In Rhode Island.”
“No good?”
“I don’t know, it just wasn’t right for me somehow and I was shit-unhappy about it. I couldn’t get settled. I get kind of antsy sometimes.” He wiggled his hands as though they’d fallen asleep.
Two Shuster girls were playing tennis in the Common courts. Like window shoppers we stopped and watched them without saying anything, our fingers hooked through the green chain-link fence that surrounded the courts.
“The one on the left is gorgeous,” Griff said. “If I could draw people I’d draw her picture.”
“Didn’t you say you have a girlfriend?”
He looked at me with an embarrassed grin. “I didn’t say I wanted to sleep with her,” he said. “There are the girls you want to go to bed with, and then the girls you want to put a frame around and just gaze at, you know? Girls are art sometimes, I think. Don’t you?” He looked at me again, swinging himself playfully on the fence, but his feet were still touching the ground. “Sorry, I sound like a total homo.”
“No, yeah, I know what you mean. I like people-watching. Sometimes I crave beauty, too. Some people—some girls are just so beautiful.”
“That’s it exactly,” he said. “I’m a beauty-craver. I need to see it sometimes so I know the world’s going to be OK.”
It hurt when he said that because someone who would say something so personal to a stranger, if he loved me, would’ve already told me that too.
When the girls noticed us watching we got back on the brick sidewalk that led to Tremont Street and to the dining hall.
“So do you like Shuster so far?” I said.
“It’s better.”
“Even with Professor Nicole and your gay roommates?”
He smiled. “Yeah, even.”
We sat at a two-person table in the dining hall by the windows and had lunch; me a ham-and-cheese sub and he a grilled cheese with bacon. We talked about our Lit class (turned out we got a B on that group project) and his trip to Florida, and it was fun and easy. Even when the conversation drifted toward his girlfriend—whose name was Ashley, who he met at Roger Williams—it didn’t make me nervous. He still seemed like the guy I’d made up in my mind. Maybe it was because somehow, against all odds, he was exactly what I expected. Maybe it was because she was so far away.
“So do you want to do it?” he said, wiggling a fry through a puddle of ketchup, officially broaching the topic. “Room next year?”
“You mean you’ve felt me out enough already?”
“I figure you won’t stab me in my sleep or anything,” he said. A blob of ketchup dripped from his fry and plopped onto his sandwich. “Murder is really my main concern. I can put up with pretty much anything else.”
“Good. I promise not to bring any sharp objects. Although I do have a bat.”
He grinned and raised his plastic glass half-full of ginger ale. We toasted to our sophomore year.
Brian was standing on his bed when I got back to the room. His stereo was playing one of the numbers from the spring musical. I flung my backpack onto my bed and jumped onto his with him, my shoes still on. I grabbed his hands and forced him to dance. His lyrics fluttered to the floor.
“What’s up with you?” he said, eyes wide with bewilderment as I waltzed him across the bed. “Did you just get laid or something?”
“Does it look like I did?”
He looked at me closely and to break his stare I dipped him so low his head touched his pillow.
“Well, you haven’t had this glow since that night you sexiled me to hook up with that chick from Eight,” he said. He twirled on the end of my finger. I liked that he was playing along. He really wasn’t a bad guy.
I jumped off his bed, making a rockstar splits.
“That was almost as good,” I said. I handed him his lyrics.
“But not quite?”
“We’ll see.”
*
“In the movie version of our lives,” Griff said, jabbing the poker into the coals and sending a flurry of sparks up the chimney, “this would be the perfect place for a montage. We start hanging out, we become fast friends. We go to movies, we crash the dining hall together, we sit on benches in the Common and watch hot girls play tennis. We talk so much in class that we’re told repeatedly by Nicole to be quiet and have some respect for the people who actually want to learn something, boys. We’re only roomies-to-be, but already after two weeks I consider you my best friend.” He said it matter-of-factly but I looked up in surprise; I hadn’t known he felt that way about me, at least not so soon. “And then one night...”
I took a deep breath. It was 4:18 in the morning and we’d arrived at the hard part.
***
“So what do you want to do Friday night?” Griff said. “Movies?” He was lying on my bed with the soles of his feet pressed against the wall, bouncing a red super ball in the rectangle of eggshell paint between two posters, catching it in my baseball mitt. It was evening.
“Sure,” I said from my desk, and clicked send on a response to one of my father’s emails.
“Actually, before you log off—” He caught the red ball a final time and swung his legs away from the wall. “Can I check my email real quick?”
“Your— um...” His email? But there were secrets on my computer; I never liked anyone to use it. I knew that if he sat at my desk and used this, of all programs, my act was done. My heart seized. I was afraid to say yes, but how could I say anything else? To him it was a harmless request.
He stood up, dropped the mitt on the bed. “Ashley was supposed to let me know if she’s coming up.”
“OK.”
“Cool.”
I got up from my desk and he sat down in my place. I walked over to my bed, sat
down hard, put my elbows on my knees, leaned forward waiting for everything to unravel. He would click the little dropdown button on the screen name menu. He would see the other screen name in the user history. Truman08. He would see it and know. And then what? Would he punch me? Break my jaw, my nose—blind me? Would he not want to room together next year? Would he stop being my friend? It wasn’t that I was bi, but that I had hit on him, that I had initiated our friendship based on a lie.
A lie I could’ve kept up. Options popped into my head. I could tell him some guy from our class had come to my room for homework purposes, had checked his email. Truman08 was not me at all, but that guy.
My stomach churned with all the fear of discovery I’d ever felt, all the close calls combined. My hands were shaking. I wanted to run to the computer and yank out the power cord before he could click that little button—the one that would unroll the secret I’d kept so carefully for so long.
I closed my eyes.
“Who is this?” Griff said. I opened my eyes and found his looking at me, the dark eyebrows above them scrunched.
I could lie, I could lie. It was that kid from class, the one who is maybe a little gay. It wasn’t me at all, it was that kid.
I could lie.
“It’s me,” I said.
My vision blurred and I felt dizzy, nauseous. I got up from the bed and walked over to the desk, steadying myself on the way with a hand on my roommate’s bureau. I leaned close to the laptop screen, as though to make sure, like a witness picking a criminal out of a line-up, and I said again, “It’s me.”
For a long time I could hear every atom shivering in the room. Griff’s brain must’ve been churning as hard as mine. It’s him, it’s him, it’s him, I was sure he must be thinking. But when he finally looked up at me there was no hate in his eyes, no shock or even confusion. Instead he asked if I wanted to go play pool.
“OK,” I said.
The T we took to the pool place in the Fenway was crowded; it was especially awkward now being pressed against him, both our hands fighting for space on the railing. I tried to act as straight as possible, with an extra-steady voice and slow, confident movements, in hopes that I could make him doubt what he’d learned.
We played pool for two hours without saying anything more than which ball was going into which pocket. It was both reassuring and agony. Maybe rage was bubbling inside him and would soon burst forth, Hulk-like, and blow me across the place. The silence allowed for too much information to be sketched in with guesses and assumptions. He knew I was Truman08, but how much else did he suspect? And how much did he suspect incorrectly?
“I’m about done,” he said finally, dropping his cue into a metal barrel. He offered to cover our game because my wallet was empty. “You can pay me back later,” he said and pushed a few bills across the counter.
Later was a comforting word. There would be a later.
Close to midnight now, we were walking back to the dorm from the Arlington Street T station. It was the end of March, and while the temperature had been close to fifty during the day, the night was bitter cold.
I watched my breath, watched Griff walking a half step ahead of me, his arms stiff, his hands in his pockets—and I wondered, after all the silence, whether he’d really made the connection at all. Maybe he had never even gotten the Truman email. Maybe he had deleted it without reading it, thinking it was spam. Maybe he—
“Vince,” he said, turning to me, spinning from his hips without taking his hands out of his pockets, “I think it’s best if we get everything out in the open.”
I stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk. He continued several steps before stopping and turning around. A woman passed by with a dog.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. I didn’t know what else to say. My voice felt heavy with the weight of the whole thing and with the years leading up to it. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“It’s OK,” he said, not in a tone of forgiveness, but in one that meant he didn’t think there was anything to forgive. “I didn’t know you were gay. I mean, it’s totally fine, I have no problem with that. I just wish you’d told me.”
“I know. I never told you because I’ve never told anyone.” I was standing directly under a streetlamp and felt exposed. We started walking again. “So you’re the first to know.”
“Wow.” He seemed honestly surprised, maybe even intimidated by the weight of being the first. “How long have you known?”
“I don’t know, since middle school.” I kept my eyes straight ahead but in my periphery I could see he was still looking at me. “It was never a surprise. When I started to like girls I was starting to feel different about the boys, too.”
“Girls? So...?”
“Yeah. I like girls and I like guys too. I guess I’m— I mean I am— I am bi.” I watched the word flow as white breath into the air in front of me. I half expected it to crystallize and drop like a brick onto my toe, but it just became part of the air, released.
“I was just thinking that you were pretty into girls for a gay guy,” Griff said and he laughed. “Or else you were a really good actor. So we can still go babe watching?”
“I just like watching the guys too,” I said. I inhaled, deep and staccato like a person finishing a good cry. I was beginning to realize that I would come through this OK.
“Whatever floats your boat,” he said. “So you never told anyone? How do you hold in something like that?”
I laughed. “Fear.”
“Of what? Getting beat up?”
“Of saying, I’m different. And, I’m not who you think I am. And that feels worse, I think.”
He took that in, cleared his voice. “Well you don’t have to be afraid anymore. Not with me. And I don’t know other little details about you—I don’t even know your favorite color!—but that doesn’t mean I don’t know you.”
“It’s blue,” I said. He smiled. “Thanks Griff.”
“Thank you for being honest,” he said.
“I wasn’t honest though.”
“You wanted to be, you just needed a little help.” He put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a playful shove. When we had come to the tall iron gate of the dorm, he asked if I wanted to walk a little more.
“OK,” I said.
I was glad because I wasn’t ready to leave him yet. It was beginning to dawn on me, the idea that the guy I’d picked out of a crowded classroom and labeled perfection based on his smile, the way his jeans fit his ass, and fifteen minutes of group work was the same guy who was right now changing my life. Had I somehow known he was special? Was it fate? It seemed sillier to think it was only chance.
“It’s weird that I never seem to have straight roommates...,” he mused.
I felt a rush of relief. “So you still want to room next year?”
“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I thought surely he was the only person in the world who could be this accepting, this cool. I felt so lucky. He’d known me ten days and knew more of me than people who’d known me nineteen years. And I was OK with that. I’d always been afraid of people knowing too much, but now Griffin shared my biggest secret, my only secret—because if I’d had any others they were all rolled up in that one. It felt funny that now there was nothing I had to be afraid of him knowing. There was nothing I couldn’t say. I felt completely free and completely myself, and the more that what had happened began to register, the more I wanted to run and stretch out my arms and leap up into the sky. Surely this exhilaration was enough to let me zoom across the face of the moon.
“Sorry if this sounds lame,” he said. “But doesn’t it feel weird to have the potential to fall in love with every person you meet? All your friends?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s weirder to only be able to fall in love with half of the people you meet.”
“Hmm.” He looked a little taken aback. “Maybe. I guess it is. Like, as much as I care about my guy friends, I know
there’s always going to be that distance between us.”
“I don’t have a distance,” I said—and then I was afraid he would think I couldn’t separate friendship and sex. “I mean I do. But it’s not automatic. It’s about individual relationships, not just gender.” It began to sound confusing even to me. “This is the first time I’ve ever talked about this with anyone. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve never had to describe it. I have no automatic boundaries.”
“Nah dude, I get it,” he said. “You can love everyone. Everyone could be your soulmate. I think, if anything, you’re a few steps ahead of the rest of us.”
*
He was leaning back deep in the chair; he’d pulled his hood up a few minutes ago and now it framed his grin when he looked at me. “I can’t believe I really said Let’s go play some pool,” he said.
“So many possible responses went through my head...”
“I told you it didn’t matter, Vin.”
“I didn’t think about it at the time because I didn’t have any experience with coming out, you know? But there are so many ways you could’ve handled that situation. You could’ve said any of the fifty things I was afraid you might say. You were a borderline saint and I didn’t realize it until too late. And I don’t know— How do I ever forgive myself for that?”
“I was no saint,” he said. “Not even a borderline one. All I was was your friend. You should’ve trusted me more.”
He went back to bed a little while later. I stayed up until I was sure he was asleep, then joined him.
S A T U R D A Y
The phone ringing woke me up. I couldn’t move. I was pinned. Griff was lying on my arm. I yanked myself free and fumbled with numb fingers for the receiver.
“Hello?” I croaked.
“Sorry if I woke you. It’s me.”
“...Mm?”
“Zane.”
“Oh, Zane.”
“Zane who?” Griff mumbled.
“I nee—” Zane began. “Not your boy, huh?”
“No, he’s not.” I looked over at Griff. His shoulder was stamped with the pale imprint of my right hand. “We aren’t together, Zane.”
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 7
