Starry-Eyed

by Ted Michael

  Another text from Jesse: See you tomorrow?

  Landon typed, Yeah, see you then.

  Which was a whole lot less than he wanted to say. So much less than he felt.

  But all Landon could think was, Did I make that happen?

  . . . . .

  Jesse’s one study hall had turned out to be the same period as drama class, so ever since he’d been cast, he’d sat in with the rest of them, taking notes as Mrs. K talked about acting as a way of telling the truth, about how finding common feeling between you and your character was a way of being honest in any scene. Landon took these notes too, though lately he’d mostly been writing as though on autopilot while staring at Jesse the whole time.

  The morning after their private rehearsal, Jesse came in late—right at the bell. Landon’s heart turned over at the sight of him, especially when Jesse smiled at Landon before grabbing a seat in the back. Knowing he didn’t deserve that smile made him want to be sick.

  Of course, Mrs. K decided this was the perfect day for Landon to give the “Queen Mab” speech as an example of finding emotion in a monologue. Landon had worked hard on the “Queen Mab” speech, but today he hardly felt like he could face his classmates. When he got up to perform, he simply recited the speech, putting no feeling into it whatsoever. But he projected toward the class—even to Jesse, as unforgivable as it was to screw with his mind yet again—the sense that this was pure brilliance.

  “‘And in this state she gallops night by night.’” Thump. “‘Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.’”

  Faking it with his mysterious talent always made him feel like crap. Today, feeling like crap was exactly what he deserved.

  When everyone clapped at the end, Landon could only stare at the floor. He couldn’t bear to look at any of their faces, Jesse’s least of all.

  Landon didn’t see Jesse again until lunch. Claire was at the orthodontist, so he sat alone at a bench at the far end of the outdoor eating area. He could have texted her (he had thought about it approximately eight zillion times since last night), but he still hadn’t figured out what to say. The weather had turned cold enough that most people didn’t eat outside any longer. Landon huddled in his jacket and started on his sandwich, hoping to be alone—until Jesse sat down across from him.

  “Hey,” Jesse said, unpacking one sandwich, and another, and another, plus an apple and an entire quart of milk. “You okay?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Landon didn’t quite know what to say. “Wow. That’s a lot of lunch.”

  “Swimming makes me hungry.” Jesse took out a Kit Kat bar. “But I’ll split this with you.”

  Okay, when you went all gooey inside just from somebody offering to break their Kit Kat in half, you had it bad. Landon summoned his courage. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Landon made certain everybody else eating outside suddenly got really interested in the far side of the quad before he looked Jesse in the eye. “Are you gay?”

  Jesse didn’t immediately answer. Landon’s hopes rose. But Jesse said only, “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I’m not trying to make excuses, all right? Or push you away. It’s just—I didn’t expect this.” Jesse sighed and stared at the gray sky for a few moments. “Last year, you know, I was hanging out with this girl—”

  “Hannah Silverberg.”

  “I guess we were kind of obvious about it. Anyway. The thing is, I liked being with Hannah. But last night, with you—I liked that too.” Jesse’s shy expression felt like it might rip Landon open.

  “Yeah. I mean, so did I.” But Landon couldn’t smile back, knowing this wasn’t real.

  Jesse continued, “So I’m just not sure. It’s kind of scary, because maybe I’m not the person I thought I was. But when we were hanging out, I got less scared. So maybe we could, you know, see if we . . . fit.”

  Landon couldn’t speak. Couldn’t meet Jesse’s eyes any longer.

  More quietly, Jesse said, “I mean, if you want.”

  It should have been the most amazing moment of Landon’s whole life. This incredible guy said he wanted to be with him, the kind of guy Landon had only ever been able to dream about, somebody he’d never have thought would actually like him back. But knowing the real reason for Jesse’s feelings—it ruined everything.

  By now Jesse knew something was up. He just sat there, looking more and more awkward, until it became unbearable. Nothing was worse than Jesse thinking maybe Landon didn’t want him. It was so wrong, so crazy, that it made Landon do something he’d intended never to do in his entire life.

  It made him tell the truth.

  “You don’t really like me,” he blurted out. “Not really.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I made you like me. I didn’t mean to—I swear to God, I never meant to, I wouldn’t—but this isn’t something you feel. This is something I did.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  How could he prove it? Landon looked around at the dozen or so people who were also braving the chill outside. “Okay, watch. All these people are about to decide it’s way too cold out here. Maybe they’ll go in, maybe they won’t, but they’re all going to think it’s freezing. You’ll see.”

  “What are you—”

  “Just watch.” Landon went very still as he concentrated completely on his talent. Thump. Suddenly people sat up straighter, pulled the necks of their sweaters over their chins, yanked their sleeves down over their fingers. Most of them grabbed what was left of their lunches and headed for the cafeteria; a few simply started eating faster.

  Jesse’s eyes widened. “What just happened?”

  “I made them do that.” Landon felt almost dizzy with horror. He was revealing his strangest, most shameful secret, but what other choice did he have? It was one thing to let kids in class think he was a brilliant actor. Making somebody think they wanted to be with a person they didn’t want at all—that was evil, like slipping roofies into a girl’s drink or something. He wasn’t going there, not ever, particularly not with someone as good as Jesse. “I can make people feel what I need them to feel,” Landon said. “I always thought it was something I had to do on purpose, but apparently I can do it accidentally. Like I did with you.”

  “That can’t be real. It was just a breeze, or something.”

  Landon pointed at Coach Pang, who was walking along the sidewalk at the perimeter of the quad. “He’s going to decide he’s late. I don’t even know for what. But he’s going to think he needs to get where he’s going right away.” Almost immediately, Coach Pang jerked his head upright and started jogging toward the gym. Then Landon nodded toward a girl who was eating by herself, a lost expression on her face. “She’s going to be in a better mood. She’s going to stop letting it bother her, whatever ‘it’ is.” Slowly the girl began to grin as she tore open her bag of chips. “Do you see now?”

  “Oh, my God.” Jesse said. “Whoa. What did you—you did that. You did that.”

  “I only try to do good things with it, or at least things that don’t matter. Like, I made Mitch leave me alone, you know? Me and some of the other kids they used to push around. I didn’t let my parents hate me for being gay. Sometimes I try to cheer people up, stuff like that. And acting class. I can’t act. I just do my thing.”

  Jesse stared at him then. “We were acting last night. I don’t mean . . . not when we . . . but during the scene.”

  Landon breathed out in frustration. “Sometimes I try, yeah. Because I wish I could act for real. And with you, it seemed easy.” His throat was starting to tighten. “But I cheat. I make people think I’m awesome when I’m not. Like today? The ‘Queen Mab’ speech?”

  “That’s why everyone clapped?” Jesse looked confused. “I thought they were being polite.”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t acting at all! You just spoke the words. Totally flat. I thought maybe y
ou were distracted. Because of, you know, everything.” Jesse’s expression was changing to one of total astonishment. The truth was beginning to sink in. “But you did the—made the—you put the mind whammy on everybody. Holy crap.”

  “Wait. You didn’t think it was great?”

  “You were awful. But nobody else saw it, did they?”

  Landon didn’t understand. Apparently he had influenced everyone’s minds . . . except Jesse’s.

  If he hadn’t bent Jesse’s mind today, then maybe he hadn’t done it last night, either.

  Jesse began repacking his enormous lunch in a hurry. “Okay. Wow. All right. I have to think about this.”

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” Landon whispered.

  For a moment Jesse went still, his dark eyes meeting Landon’s. “I’d never do that to you. Not ever.”

  That was the moment Landon knew he hadn’t messed with Jesse’s head at all. Whatever Jesse felt for him was real.

  Except that now Jesse was walking away.

  Now Jesse knew he was a freak.

  . . . . .

  So then everything sucked.

  Landon basically hid in his room all weekend. Occasionally his phone would chime with a text and his heart would turn over, but it was usually Claire asking him how he was feeling. (He’d pretended to be sick, the only way to tactfully ditch their Saturday plans, a twisted Netflix double feature of Little Shop of Horrors and Sweeney Todd.) Once it was this girl from his psychology class asking for last week’s notes.

  It was never Jesse.

  At least half a dozen times, Landon nearly broke down and called Claire. It would have felt so good to talk to someone about this—but what could he have said? He’d never told Claire about his talent. He’d been too scared to, and seeing Jesse’s reaction to the news wasn’t encouraging. No way he could stand losing Jesse and Claire both.

  He could just have said that he liked someone but it wasn’t working out. But Claire had already noticed his crush, so she would know he meant Jesse. If she realized something had happened between them, then Landon would basically have outed Jesse without his permission. That was incredibly not okay.

  So Landon had to lie there alone and try to figure it out for himself.

  Was Jesse actually immune to Landon’s talent? It was almost a relief to think that his power wasn’t, well, all-powerful. If only he could have figured out Jesse wasn’t affected in some other way besides revealing his secret: Hi, I’m a total weirdo out of a science fiction movie, so maybe you should run really fast in the other direction right now.

  Sunday morning was the worst. Landon had never used his talent in church; it felt sacrilegious, the kind of thing that would get you struck by lightning. This meant a lot of people there felt about him the way his parents would’ve felt if he hadn’t given them what Jesse had called the “mind whammy.” Every single Sunday, he could feel the rest of the congregation staring at him, their eyes boring through his back. Not everybody there knew he was gay—but enough of them did, and most of the ones who knew weren’t okay with it, not by a long shot. Landon was able to keep persuading his parents, but he couldn’t keep going around town convincing everyone all the time that his sexuality was just awesome. It was a bleak reminder of the limits of his talent.

  But seeing what he couldn’t do wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when his mother smiled at him, or his dad put his arm around Landon’s shoulders. It was when he saw exactly what he could do.

  That was when he had to remember they only loved him because he’d made them do it.

  . . . . .

  Monday’s rehearsal included his death scene. Which meant he’d be staring Jesse in the face all day. Great.

  By coming in late and spending plenty of time talking to Mrs. K, Landon managed to avoid Jesse until the rehearsal itself. He’d never felt more exposed than he did standing in the auditorium in front of hundreds of empty seats, on a bare stage, waiting for Tybalt’s entrance.

  And he’d thought he felt as bad as he could feel until the moment Jesse walked out, so handsome and yet so remote, and Landon couldn’t even believe he’d been able to touch him, or that he’d never get the chance again.

  But Jesse looked right into Landon’s eyes as he spoke: “‘A word with one of you.’”

  Is he playing it the way we practiced it? Like he knows I want him and doesn’t know what to do? He is.

  So Landon put all his longing and shattered hopes into his next line: “‘And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow.’”

  When the fight began, their wooden swords smashed against each other with real force. Landon stumbled back, genuinely startled, and Jesse seemed to be equally surprised . . . even as Sean Pryor moved between them as Romeo, and Jesse stabbed his sword beneath Sean’s arm, against Landon’s side.

  The force wasn’t any harder than it should have been; their stage-fighting workshops had paid off. But Landon crumpled immediately, like there were no bones left in his legs. It was as if he let his despair drag him down.

  Then it was his death scene, his biggest moment in the play, and for once, Landon knew he didn’t have to project anything for anyone else to feel. He didn’t even have to act.

  “‘A plague on both your houses!’” he said, his voice weak with strain. Though the stage directions called for Tybalt to go offstage, Mrs. K had blocked it out so that instead Jesse stood at the far corner of the fray, as if being held back by his friends. Landon forced himself to focus on Sean-as-Romeo instead. “‘They have made worms’ meat of me. I have it, and soundly too. Your houses!’”

  With that, Landon let his head drop back onto the floor. For the rest of the scene, he’d just lie here and try to look dead. Should be easy. He felt dead.

  Tybalt challenged Romeo. Romeo, maddened with grief for his friend, struck back. Within moments, Jesse fell to the ground by Landon’s side. He was so close—but Landon didn’t dare open his eyes to see.

  “‘O! I am Fortune’s fool!’” Sean shouted.

  “And scene!” Mrs. K started the applause, but then the whole class went nuts from the wings. Landon sat up, Jesse beside him, neither of them looking at one another. “Guys, that was fantastic! Landon, with you, I expect the best. But Jesse—who knew?”

  “Landon’s helped me,” Jesse said quietly. “We’ve been practicing.”

  “It shows.” Mrs. K patted Landon’s shoulder. “That fight isn’t just two guys acting out. It’s personal. It’s powerful. And frankly, it raises the bar for all the rest of you. Tybalt’s reaction when Mercutio dies—you feel real pain there, real horror at the consequences of his actions.”

  Landon couldn’t help imagining what Jesse’s face must have looked like, or wondering what emotions had been behind it.

  Mrs. K finished, “Romeo, Juliet, if you don’t want to get outshone, you’d better get cracking.”

  Sean glared, but Claire grinned at Landon; she mouthed the word Yay! His heart ached to see her so guilelessly happy to see him praised in front of the class, so completely unaware of his secret misery about Jesse. She was his one true friend, the one person he never had to doubt. Landon had come out to her before anyone else, and months before he’d discovered his talent. He’d kept his talent a secret from her, but he’d always believed it was absolutely the only thing he couldn’t tell Claire. Apparently he’d been wrong, because now he couldn’t tell her about Jesse either—it wasn’t his secret alone to share.

  Jesse still sat next to him, breathing hard from the fight, not looking in Landon’s direction.

  But as the bell rang, Jesse said, “Want to cut?”

  “Sure.”

  They hung around backstage as everyone else filtered out, Mrs. K included. Finally they were alone, sitting behind the old red velvet drapes—so old the color was starting to change, worn pink in some places, stained dark in others. Landon kept rubbing a fold of the curtains with his finger, still unwilling to meet Jesse’s eyes.

/>   Landon managed to ask, “You get sad when Mercutio dies?”

  “Yeah. Right then, I realize that I hurt you. That I really hurt you. None of it was real before that.” They finally looked at each other then, and Landon knew even if he’d lost Jesse as a potential—whatever he might have been—Jesse at least didn’t hate him. “You were great, by the way. You really went for it. None of the—you know.”

  “I didn’t do it that time.”

  “I was thinking about that all weekend. The thing you do. Your—”

  “Talent.” That was the least scary word for it Landon had ever been able to come up with.

  “Okay. Your talent. I kept thinking about how you used it to be an actor.”

  “You mean, how I cheated.”

  But Jesse shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. You have this talent, and you could mess with people’s heads all the time. Most people’s anyway, apparently not mine.”

  “No. Not that I ever tried to mess with your head,” Landon hastily added. “Except with acting. Not ever besides that, I swear.”

  “I know. Because, Landon—do you realize how the average person would behave if they figured out they had that talent? They’d manipulate everyone. They’d screw with everybody’s head to get whatever they wanted. But not you.” Slowly, Jesse started to smile. “You only got people off your back, when they shouldn’t have been giving you a hard time to start with. And you made things easier for other people who were getting picked on too. You wanted to act, to make people enjoy themselves. You were so scared you might have made me like you that you told me the biggest secret you had. The biggest secret anyone ever had, probably. Just to protect me.”

  Landon had never looked at it this way. Like he shouldn’t feel ashamed—like instead he had something to be proud of. “I never wanted to hurt anybody. Least of all you.”

  Jesse didn’t acknowledge that, but he stretched out his legs so that once again their feet brushed against each other. For a little while they were quiet together, and something painfully tight around Landon’s chest began to loosen so he could again breathe free.