by Jeffery Self
“Sorry!” he whispered in that way people whisper that isn’t actually a whisper at all. “Keep going. I got lost on the other end of the school.”
Mrs. Spitz rolled her eyes and let out a pathetic sigh. She continued going through the motions of her introduction, while the rest of the class continued going through the motions of pretending to listen. (Sometimes high school seemed a lot like the theater Audrey so dearly loved, each of us pretending to listen to the other for the sake of a story we were all stuck living in.)
“Okay. Page eight. ‘Is yeast alive and does it live inside me?’” Mrs. Spitz read aloud.
The televangelist spawn plopped down in a spare seat in the second row. Despite my creepy staring, he didn’t glance over, look up, or do anything close to noticing me at all.
Clearly, I was hideous, or my gaydar really needed to be replaced.
But I couldn’t stop stealing glances at him. It was like my mind was stuck in the present but my eyes were hell-bent on the future.
THE PUNGENT SMELL OF BOILING kale and tofu had overtaken the kitchen, where my mom was preparing dinner from a cookbook called The Psycho-Spiritual Diet and Lifestyle.
“But that’s the thing about lyrical dance, Marley—if we can’t debate it, then why does it exist at all?” she asked, not pausing for me to answer before launching into an exhausting lecture on the importance of freethinking and pirouettes. After a solid ten minutes, she finally paused, tossing a pinch of Himalayan pink salt crystals and rosemary grown in our backyard into the kale, then asked me about my first day of school.
I shrugged. “It was fine.”
“Marley, you know how Sharon and I feel about empty words like fine,” my father said, appearing in the doorway and scratching his long gray beard like a cartoon version of the novelist he actually was. My parents had strict disdain for words like fine or nice or okay. They also asked to be addressed by their first names.
In a nutshell, they were nuts.
“In that case, my day was overwhelming in its uneventful demeanor. Better?” I replied, to their delight. My parents could be a bit much when it came to their freethinking “intellectual” routine, but they meant well and loved me almost as much as they loved a well-rounded vocabulary.
“Your problem, Marley, is that you don’t have a force that drives you,” my mother said, launching into yet another dissection of my outlook on life. This was a common pastime of both my parents. “Sculpture, mixed media, advanced Pilates, anything. Every day, you need something to contribute to the world and be excited to wake up for.”
I didn’t have the heart or energy to explain to my mother that neither sculpture nor mixed media were high school activities (nor Pilates, for that matter), but I understood her point all too well. For my entire life I’d been the kid in class with no label. There was the football jock, the pretty cheerleader, the science weirdo, the cross-country star, the funny one, the bully, the smelly girl, the smelly boy, the band geek, the drama geek, the general all-around geek, and so on. In order to solidify your place in the community that is any form of school, you needed a label, and despite my best efforts, I’d never found one. Sure, there was the gay thing, but at this point being gay was like being a Pisces. By which I mean: common, and oftentimes emotionally unstable.
Why can’t sarcasm and global resentment be a passion? I asked myself inside my head.
I cut the conversation with my parents short and beelined for my bedroom … where I immediately googled Reverend Jim son. I don’t know what I was hoping to discover about this kid I had so quickly become obsessed with. It took a while before Google served any help, since the first few hundred results were from bloggers in rebel flag T-shirts celebrating Reverend Jim as the son of God.
Finally, I found a biography of Reverend Jim’s family, complete with a heavily staged family portrait in front of an enormous cross that had been painted red, white, and blue. Reverend Jim had a botoxed and chemically orange-colored face with a toupee so big it could’ve been considered its own species. His wife, Angela, had the biggest and fakest smile to ever be seen on a human being outside of paid amusement park performers.
Their only son, however, appeared normal.
And he had a name.
Christopher.
Even though he was stuck in a photo with the words Jesus Junkies written in calligraphy above his head, he looked just as cute as he had at school that morning. Unlike his parents’, his smile seemed genuine and kind.
I clicked on a clip of Reverend Jim speaking to thousands of rabid fans at one of his many conventions. In between plugging his countless books and DVDs, he tore into America’s “road to ruin paved in sin.” The camera panned around to the audience of devotees frothing at every judgmental word.
The entire time Christopher sat onstage with his mother, behind his dad. He didn’t respond to any of the theatrics, even though his mom kept jumping out of her chair and waving her arms around like she was afraid the air was attacking her.
I paused the clip at a moment where Christopher was close up in the frame, and stared into his eyes. He was a bit younger in the clip but he looked pretty much the same. I didn’t know what I was hoping to find, but I was definitely searching for something, as if staring hard enough would tell me whether or not he liked boys. Or, more accurately, if it was possible that I could convince him to like me. I don’t know what it was, but I could tell he wasn’t like his parents. And not just because I thought he was cute … although maybe that played a large part of it. But, regardless, I could feel it in my gut.
He was different. And I was determined to find out how.
I RUSHED TO MY LOCKER the minute I got to school, making it the first time I’d ever rushed to do anything at school. I would not have admitted it in the moment, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see Reverend Jim’s son again. Audrey was snaking her way through the crowd, wearing an unseasonably heavy coat, sunglasses, and clutching one of those enormous Starbucks cups that’s so big it might as well be a novelty bucket.
“Are we even allowed to bring lattes to school, Audrey?” I asked as she sucked the caramel-colored coffee through the green straw like some fabulous recovering alcoholic fashion designer making her post-rehab debut.
“Do I look like I care?” she said, her eyes rolling in a perfect circular motion. “Plus, it’s a flat white.”
The truth was, she looked like someone who didn’t care about anything, or rather, someone who worked really hard to look like she didn’t care about anything. I nodded, distracted, as I stared through the crowd.
“What am I missing?” she asked, attempting to join my gaze. I snapped back to reality long enough to start saying “Nothing,” when he appeared, a few feet away within the crowd. I froze, staring at him like an awestruck pioneer discovering the Grand Canyon. He was wearing a red hoodie that you could tell was brand-new, in that way brand-new clothes always look like costumes on a TV show. His hair was messy but in that way where you can tell someone used just the right products to make it look messy. He had this natural lightness, a glow or something, that seemed to radiate off the lockers and linoleum floors. In short, my feelings were so obvious and on the nose that even I resented me.
He passed, without a word. He smiled, but not the kind of smile that would’ve been too much for eight a.m. A light, warm, totally not obnoxious smile. And not a fake one like the ones his parents seemed to make in every photo I’d found in my all-night Google black hole of all things Reverend Jim and company. Then he was gone. It was quiet for a moment before Audrey tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hello? You in there, darling?” she called right into my eardrum.
“Sorry. Yes.” I could feel myself floating back down from the clouds.
“You can’t possibly be crushing over the son of the biggest and most conservative preacher superstar in the world, can you?” Audrey asked.
“Audrey, I don’t know what’s going on with me. I don’t even know this guy—there’s ju
st something about him that I can’t stop thinking about. I feel like he’s different from his family. Listen to me! I sound ridiculous.”
“You definitely do, darling.” Audrey nodded. “Who kidnapped Marley and replaced him with his optimistic evil twin? I don’t like this plot twist! If you start getting giddy, what the hell are we going to bond over?”
I’d made snarky my main defining feature, observing the world so sarcastically you would’ve thought I was a professional blogger. Audrey and I had always shared an overall mood of being over it. It had started when we were on the same team in fifth-grade dodgeball and I’d overheard Audrey mutter “Please just kill me” to herself—I knew instantaneously that we’d be fast friends.
“Whatever is happening,” she continued, placing her ring-clad fingers on my shoulder in a rare moment of warmth, the kind of moment she wouldn’t be able to pull off onstage, “it’s extremely entertaining to watch. So, when are you going to, oh, I don’t know, talk to him?”
I felt my face turn the color of his hoodie. Before I could find an answer, the homeroom bell rang.
MY MOM HAD A HABIT of forgetting something literally every time she went to the supermarket. She was never one for lists, choosing instead to “live in the moment of the shopping experience.” Which is all well and good, until you forget tampons and decide it’s a cool idea to send your seventeen-year-old son to pick them up for you after dinner.
“Make sure you get the heavy flow kind!” she screamed at me from the front door as I drove away from the house.
Once I got to the supermarket, I made my way over to the appropriate section, the aisle composed solely of tampons and adult diapers. The aisle that all but screams, “The human body is very messy!” Luckily, the coast was clear, not a soul in sight. I hastily examined all the options, searching for the words heavy flow, and eventually found what I was looking for. Just as I was reaching for the twelve-pack, a voice spoke up behind me.
“Can I help you find anything?”
It startled me so much that I dropped the pack of feminine hygiene products on the floor. “They’re for my mom,” I said loudly, turning around as if I had been caught shoplifting. That’s when my jaw dropped and the world came to a screeching halt.
Shut the front door, it was him!
Curly hair, freckles, jawline, crooked nose, two-toned-eyeballs, that smile, everything!
“Um. Okay,” Christopher said, stifling a hopefully non-patronizing laugh. “Don’t we go to school together?”
I was having a hard time forming the appropriate response; something as simple as “Yes, hi, I’m Marley” would have sufficed. But words weren’t forming, so after what felt like a five-hour-long awkward pause, I nodded.
“I’m Christopher.”
“Marley. I’ve seen you before,” I said flatly, sounding much more like a serial killer than I’d intended. “I mean, at school. Are you new?”
“Sure am. Just moved here from Branson, Missouri. Ever been?”
I shook my head to express my no, since I’d taken further use of words off the table for the time being.
“It’s basically Las Vegas for conservative Christians and the people who love them. So none of the casinos and hookers … but triple the buffets!” He grinned like someone up to something.
Just what he was up to was yet to be determined.
He beamed confidence and a surprising element of smoothness you usually don’t see from people outside the hip-hop community. I was like, What could you possibly have done to ooze such coolness?
It isn’t every day that you find yourself having a crush on a celebrity preacher’s son. And it’s even rarer that you find yourself talking to him while standing over a fallen box of tampons. So needless to say, I was having a very hard time reading the situation. His charming grin could mean one of two things: Either he was bragging about coming from said Las Vegas for conservative Christians, or he too was registering it as one of the most hilariously nightmarish places in the history of mankind. I was in no condition to tell the difference, so I changed the subject.
“And you work here?” I asked, which was a dumb question unless I thought he was wearing a name tag for fun.
“I do. I worked at a supermarket in Branson, so when we moved my parents made me get a job at the one here. My parents are obsessed with two things: responsibility and Jesus. But you might have already figured that?”
I didn’t know whether to pretend I hadn’t already figured out who his family was or to admit I knew he was one of the Andersons. If I did, that might indicate that I had stalked him. Which, clearly, I had. But I didn’t want to come across as creepy on the off chance that my oft-malfunctioning gaydar had been right.
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, blushing like a closeted gay teenager seeing Magic Mike XXL with his parents on summer break. (Not that I speak from experience.) My flustered skin made him giggle. Even his giggle was cool, calm, and collected.
“So, you’re gay, right?” he asked, flat out, like he was asking if I’d ever tried water.
This, obviously, caught me so off guard that I forgot my own name, birth date, and phone number. His confident grin awaited my answer. Was he gearing up to save me? Was he going to baptize me with the mouthwash an aisle over? He was so cute that, quite frankly, I wondered if I was going to let him.
His cool, calm collectedness fell into momentary confusion. “Sorry. Was that too forward? I can be blunt. I was just curious because you’ve been blushing and your voice has gone up, like, five octaves in the few minutes we’ve been talking to each other. Also you are, like, flaming.”
I must have looked like I was going to faint because he quickly laughed reassuringly.
“I’m kidding! I’m just messing with you.” He slapped me on the shoulder, so hard that I almost went back to assuming he was straight. “I only asked if you’re gay because I’m gay and I’m new here and, well, I don’t have any friends. And you have been staring at me at school.”
There are those moments in life where you literally pinch yourself to make sure you aren’t dreaming and you feel ridiculous for pinching yourself because it’s clichéd. Also you usually pinch too hard and it kind of hurts. This was one of those moments. I had absolutely no idea what was happening, but in retrospect I guess it’s safe to say this was the moment where Christopher and I began.
“I AM GAY!” I said, eagerly and loudly, like I was coming out before Congress or the Thanksgiving dinner table. I was getting this entire situation so wrong that a more self-aware part of me wanted to laugh. “Sorry. I am not handling this well, am I?”
“I mean …”
Christopher winked, leaning down to pick up the package of tampons sitting on the tile floor between us. He handed them to me with a grin I could only imagine Reverend Jim would’ve deemed sinful.
“Let’s start over,” he said. Then he took my hand and shook it, with a firm, gentlemanly grip. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”
I shook back. “I believe that is absolutely true.”
He smiled. “Good.” Our hands went back to being hands, and not a frankly romantic bridge between us. “Now, I’m afraid there are some soup cans in aisle eight that need my attention.”
“And I better get these to my mom before … oh God … never mind.”
Smiling, he walked away, head held high, like he did this all the time. Like stealing hearts was just another hobby. Like he was some sort of retail Casanova. Like his father wasn’t a famously antigay TV preacher and like we weren’t in the middle of a grocery store on a weeknight in North Carolina. Something special had just occurred, I could feel it, the way dogs can sense storms. I watched him go, in utter awe of the entire encounter, then paid for the tampons and took them home to my mom.
And that, my friends, is what I call romance.
IT’S WEIRD TO THINK BACK on those first few days of seeing Christopher. How it felt as if with each moment I was around him, he chipped away at my snarky armor just a little bit more. Ho
w unattainable he seemed. How high a pedestal I put him on. I guess that’s something a lot of us do when we meet people we like: We make them into these supreme beings. Everything they do seems like it’s the first time in history anyone has ever done it—because the only history that really matters is your own history. People’s faces change, from the time you meet them to when you actually get to know them. I don’t know if it’s that their image settles into your brain, making it less foreign, less brand-new or whatever. It’s like when you go somewhere you’ve never been before, like when we first went to Vermont. You see everything for the first time, you get lost, you wonder what’s inside certain buildings, down certain roads, what certain signs mean. Then, by the end of your trip, everything seems normal, everything seems everyday, like it’s yours. Not in a bad way either, just comfortingly familiar, and when you think back on what seemed so mysterious about it all, you can’t remember what it was because now it’s just a part of you.
That’s what getting to know someone feels like. One day you see them; they intrigue you; you have so many questions and you wonder if you’ll ever have a chance to ask them all. Then, a few weeks in, you know them so well you can’t imagine a day without them. You know the indention in their chest, the birthmark on their armpit, the way they absolutely detest jalapeños. They have become a part of your routine. Or at least that’s how it felt with Christopher.
It happened absurdly fast, our falling for each other. But sometimes things click—and also, it’s not like two gay teenagers in some small North Carolina town have that much else going on. By the end of those few weeks, I felt like I could’ve drawn his face from memory, every freckle and crease (and I am truly terrible at drawing). I couldn’t imagine a night without texting him good night. I couldn’t imagine a morning without kissing him by my locker. I couldn’t imagine him being a stranger ever again.
Even now, when I see his picture—when they show it in one of my interviews, or when I stumble upon it on Instagram—it feels like he’s still here. Like nothing ever happened. Like our routines are still routine. Like, when I get under the covers, he’ll text me good night with some stupid emoji that I hate. (Christopher loved emojis, but hey—we all have our faults.)
