by Annie Harper
Speaking of changes, you may be wondering how my summer love story ended? Well, it’s not over yet. Our story is just beginning. The slightly shy young man lurking by the door? That’s my guy, Alex.
As I sat in our apartment wondering what I should say today, a certain someone came up behind me, hugged me tightly and told me that I should just “go with my heart.” And so I have.
Something Like Freedom
Caroline Hanlin
Elias Meyer was absolutely, definitely, not checking out his best friend’s cousin. He wasn’t even sure how old Hannah’s cousin was, so checking him out would have been completely inappropriate. Never mind the fact that, after ten years of friendship, he was pretty sure that her family members were off limits.
No, Eli’s staring had nothing to do with how attractive—or not, he really hadn’t noticed—Gabe was. Some people might be attracted to redheads with freckles covering every inch of their bodies, but Eli definitely wasn’t. It was the mystery of it all that was getting to him. Gabe had appeared out of nowhere while Eli had been traveling in Europe with his parents. Eli had only been away a couple of weeks, but he’d returned home to a message from Hannah inviting him to spend his first day back in the States lounging by her pool. Then she’d casually mentioned that her cousin would be staying with her for a while. Eli hadn’t even known Hannah had cousins he hadn’t met.
Eli was lounging on a beach chair next to Hannah’s pool and pretending not to watch Gabe as he lay on the next chair. After a solid twenty minutes while Gabe did absolutely nothing but nod his head to whatever music was playing on his iPod, Eli officially gave up. If he wanted to know anything, he was going to have to ask.
Eli dragged himself out of his chair and walked around the pool to where Hannah sat with her legs dangling in the water. She didn’t look anything like Gabe; she had the same hazel eyes and thick, curly brown hair as her mother. Eli had always thought that she was pretty, but she tended to hide her curves under Mathletes team T-shirts, and she wore glasses because she didn’t like having to fuss with contacts in the morning.
“What are you reading?” Eli pulled Hannah’s book out of her hands as he sat down next to her. “The Signal and the Noise. Sounds thrilling. I can’t believe you’re reading about math on vacation.”
“Statistics, technically,” Hannah replied and tried to pull the book out of Eli’s hands.
“Watch out.” Eli held the book up out of her reach. “If you’re not careful, I might drop it in the water.”
Hannah crossed her arms and glared at him. “You’re terrible. Did you come over here just to bother me?”
“Of course not! I came over here to talk to my best friend, who I haven’t seen in weeks,” Eli said, leaning backward to put the book on the pool chair behind him. Hannah looked skeptical, but Eli wrapped an arm around her shoulders and said, “So what’s new with you, best friend?”
“You’re not subtle, you know,” Hannah said as she leaned into him.
“Whatever do you mean?” Eli asked. Hannah glared at him. “Okay, but seriously. What’s up with your cousin? In two hours, I’m pretty sure the only thing he’s said is ‘Hi.’”
“He just doesn’t need to fill every waking moment with chatter, unlike some people,” Hannah replied.
Eli ignored the sting of her words. “Come on, Hannah, seriously. Who is he?”
“He’s my father’s nephew,” Hannah said, then sighed and leaned back on her hands.
For a minute, Eli just gaped at her. Hannah and her parents weren’t in contact with her father’s family at all. The only time Hannah had met any of them was at her grandfather’s funeral. Other than that, none of them had spoken to Hannah’s father, Jeremiah, since he married her mother. Jeremiah’s family was incredibly religious—as in, no sex before marriage, being gay is an abomination, evolution is a lie conservative Christian—and Hannah’s mother, Rebecca, was Jewish.
“Holy shit,” Eli said. “What is he doing here?”
“He needed somewhere to go,” Hannah said quietly. “His parents found out that he’s gay.”
Eli closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He didn’t need Hannah to explain further. He felt Hannah lay a hand on his back, and he rested his head on her shoulder.
“I don’t really know much else, honestly,” she said. “He wasn’t very chatty at the funeral last year either, but I don’t know if he’s always this quiet or just when he’s upset.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Eli replied, dropping his legs in the water. His parents had been so supportive when he’d come out as bi a few years ago. He didn’t know what he would have done if they hadn’t been.
Eli heard a scream and then a splash as Gabe went flying into the pool. Hannah rolled her eyes at her boyfriend and wiped the water droplets from her face. “Really, Richie?”
Gabe surfaced a second later, and, once he’d pushed his hair out of his eyes, he crossed his arms and glared up at Richie. Richie was six foot two and solidly built—more like a football player than an engineering student—and Gabe was tiny. Gabe glaring at Richie was like a terrier trying to stare down a Saint Bernard.
“You looked like you needed waking up,” Richie said with a winning smile.
Gabe held his glare for a minute, then started giggling. Eli hadn’t seen Gabe laugh before, and there was something about it that made it impossible for him to look away. Gabe shook his head at Richie and then dived underwater to start swimming laps.
When Eli finally looked at Hannah, she was giving him a knowing look. “So, have you seen Melinda?” Hannah asked.
“No, I haven’t seen my ex-girlfriend in the day and a half I’ve been home,” Eli snapped. He knew exactly what she was trying to do, and it was a low blow. Melinda, Eli’s high school girlfriend, had waited until they were both home from their freshman year of college to break up with him over ice cream sundaes. After dating for nearly two years, Eli had thought he deserved more than that. He’d left for Europe only a week later, thrilled to have something to take his mind off her and her new boyfriend.
Hannah laced their fingers together and gave Eli’s hand a quick squeeze. “We’re going to have an amazing summer, okay?”
“We always have amazing summers,” Eli replied, squeezing back and smiling at her. Summers were their time. No matter who else might join them, the “Eli and Hannah show” was the center of the universe for those months. When they were kids, they’d played make-believe, crawling around Hannah’s back yard and Eli’s attic. Once Hannah got her driver’s license, they had taken advantage of the ability to go wherever they wanted.
* * *
The next night, they had their first sleepover of the summer. Sleepovers at Hannah’s always involved pitching her parents’ giant tent in the back yard, filling it with blankets and talking until they fell asleep.
Hannah and Eli always forgot how to set up the tent. Even though they’d been doing it for years, Eli ended up shouting that the stupid diagrams didn’t make any sense, and Hannah insisted that the problem was that they were missing a pole.
This year, Richie helped by flopping down across the tent where it was spread out on the ground. “Wake me when you guys stop arguing.”
Eli and Hannah were just starting to get into the swing of debating whether the stakes went in first or last when the directions were tugged out of Eli’s hands.
Gabe studied the diagrams. “Aren’t you supposed to be the engineer?” he asked Hannah, gesturing at her Rochester Institute of Technology T-shirt.
“Good point!” Eli said, shooting a quick smile at Gabe, who blushed and wandered in Richie’s direction. “What’s the point of those fancy degrees you guys are getting if you can’t even put up a tent?”
“I’m an electrical engineering major. It’s totally unrelated.” Richie got to his feet when Gabe tugged on his arm.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “Do you really think chemical engineering is more useful?”
“More useful than my m
usic ed major? Yeah, I think so,” Eli replied. That caught Gabe’s attention, and Eli wondered why.
After a minute, Gabe grabbed the longest poles and started showing Richie what to do with them. It only took a few minutes for them to set up the tent. “Now you stake it down.” Gabe handed the stakes to Eli and winked.
Eli stared after Gabe as he headed back to the house with Hannah. Apparently Gabe was capable of speaking in complete sentences if he wanted to, and he had a nice voice, even if it was quiet. He didn’t know what to think about being winked at by someone who’d barely spoken to him.
By the time Eli and Richie got back inside, Hannah and Gabe were engaged in a serious popcorn fight. When Hannah saw them, she grabbed Richie to use him as a human shield.
“What on earth are you two doing?” Eli asked, looking at the popcorn-littered kitchen.
Gabe shrugged and smiled. “She started it.”
On his way back from the bathroom, Eli caught sight of the clock on the microwave; it was past four o’clock in the morning. He was almost back to the tent when a shadow moved by the fire pit. He spun around, one hand pressed to his chest. “Jesus Christ!”
“Gabriel, actually,” Gabe said, with a hint of a smile illuminated by the dying embers.
“Did you just make a Bible joke?” Eli wandered over to stand next to where Gabe was sitting in a folding chair. Gabe just grinned.
Eli deliberated about whether or not he should sit down. If he’d found Hannah or Richie sitting up this late at night, he’d have known that they would want to talk, but he didn’t know anything about Gabe. Nevertheless, he dropped himself into the chair next to Gabe’s.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Eli said.
“It’s difficult,” Gabe replied, leaving Eli totally flummoxed. He couldn’t figure out what was difficult. Waking Gabe up? Or something else?
The two of them sat in silence while Eli tried to control his need to say something, anything at all. Gabe picked up a stick lying by the fire and started to move the coals around. Eli watched his hand; the steady motion was soothing, and it relaxed him until he could have fallen back to sleep in the chair.
“So, music ed?” Gabe asked, startling Eli from his reverie.
“Yep,” Eli said and sat up straight in his chair. “At the University of Connecticut, but it’s really just the backup plan.” Gabe raised an eyebrow. “My band is working on recording an EP.”
Gabe leaned toward him. “What do you play?”
“Guitar usually, and I sing lead,” Eli replied. If Gabe was interested in music, Eli would happily talk about it forever. “I started on the piano when I was a kid, but I’m a much better guitar player.”
“Must be nice,” Gabe said and sighed.
“What must be nice?”
“Having a plan. I keep trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life now. I haven’t been able to think about much else since I left.”
“Can I ask you something?” Gabe shrugged, so Eli said, “How did you end up here?”
Gabe nodded and pulled his feet up onto the chair so that he could wrap his arms around his legs. He looked so small and scared that Eli wished he knew Gabe well enough to hug him.
When Gabe finally spoke, Eli had to lean over to hear him. “There was this guy,” Gabe explained. “He was in my church youth group and a lot of my classes, so I’d known him forever, and I didn’t even know he wasn’t straight. I usually miss these things.”
Eli gave Gabe what he hoped was an encouraging nod. “He came over to study for our last final—history—and, right in the middle of the French Revolution, he kissed me.” Gabe blushed and stared at his knees. “I don’t think he knew my father was home.”
“Oh, shit,” Eli said, closing his eyes.
“Yep, and then my parents spent the next few days arguing about what to do with me and saying terrible things…” Gabe trailed off into a sniffle and used the sleeve of his oversized hoodie to wipe his eyes.
The tears broke what little restraint Eli had left; he knew he often annoyed people with his questions, but he didn’t usually make them cry. He pulled his chair next to Gabe’s. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to keep telling me.” Eli said, tentatively resting a hand on Gabe’s back. Gabe relaxed a little under his touch, so Eli figured he’d gotten it right.
“I want you to know,” Gabe said. “I’m just not very good at this.”
Eli nodded and rubbed slow circles over Gabe’s back while he pulled himself together. As the silence dragged on, he started to worry about what he was doing. Should he stop touching Gabe? Move farther away?
Just when Eli was starting to wonder if Gabe had changed his mind about telling the story, he started to speak again. “My parents eventually decided that I should go to one of those places that are supposed to cure you. I don’t really want to be cured, so after graduation, I got on a bus. Everyone I was close to went to the same church as my family. Hannah was the only person I could think of to ask for help.”
Eli could picture the whole thing, and the images made his heart hurt. He shifted to wrap his arm around Gabe, and Gabe rested his head on Eli’s shoulder. For once, Eli was comfortable with the silence. He wanted to ask Gabe when he’d realized he was gay, whether he’d known his parents were going to react the way they did, if he’d talked to his parents at all, if they even knew where he was. Probably a bit selfishly, he also wanted to ask if that had been Gabe’s first kiss or just the first time he’d been caught. But he was content just to sit and stare at the trees.
Eli was wondering why he could see everything so well when Gabe spoke again. “I was supposed to go to this evangelist college about an hour from home. Obviously I’m not doing that anymore. But I didn’t really know what I was going to do there, either.”
“There’s nothing wrong with not knowing yet. You’re only, what? Eighteen?”
“Seventeen,” Gabe replied. “Until August. I’d just like to have a plan for September.”
“That makes sense. It sucks not knowing where you’re going next.” Eli winced at how idiotic he must sound. He was distracted from contemplating why he always said stupidly obvious things when he looked down at Gabe and realized that he could make out the plaid pattern on Gabe’s navy blue pajamas. “I think if we stay out here any longer we’re going to catch the sunrise.”
Gabe nodded and pulled away from Eli. “Guess we should sleep,” he said and smiled.
Just as Eli turned to head back into the tent, Gabe grabbed his hand and pulled him into a tight hug. “Thank you,” Gabe whispered.
Eli slipped back into his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, but he couldn’t stop replaying his conversation with Gabe in his mind. Every time he did, the knot in his stomach grew. He kept picturing Gabe curled up in his folding chair crying and, even though he didn’t know Gabe’s parents, he was furious at them.
Every time Eli learned something about Gabe, he wanted to know more. Gabe was a puzzle, and Eli desperately wanted to understand him.
* * *
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’m going on that roller coaster, Hannah Collins, and you know it,” Eli said, crossing his arms and glaring at her. For some reason, every time he and Hannah went to Six Flags, she tried to convince him to get on one of the theme park’s several giant roller coasters. This year, her target was a ride that went upside down not once, but twice. Eli didn’t like heights very much, but going upside down was even worse.
“Be adventurous for once! I hate abandoning you while we go stand in an hour-long line,” Hannah replied, returning his glare.
“But you don’t mind badgering me into doing something that I’ll hate?” They were starting to make a scene, but Eli was too hot to care. Normally, he was willing to go a few rounds with Hannah, but it was already three o’clock and he’d been baking in the hot sun since nine in the morning. His shirt was sticking to him with sweat, and he was pretty sure the back of his neck was starting to burn
Ha
nnah rolled her eyes. “How do you know you’ll hate it? You’ve never been on it.”
Gabe rested a hand on Eli’s shoulder. “He won’t be alone. I don’t want to go, either.”
“Fine!” Hannah said, throwing her hands in the air. “You two be lame together. Come on, Richie.”
As soon as she was out of sight, Eli shot Gabe a grateful smile. “Thanks. It usually takes Hannah much longer to give up. Are you afraid of heights?”
“Something like that,” Gabe replied. “What now?”
“Usually, I just get some ice cream and hang out. Where do you want to go?”
“How do you feel about getting wet?” Gabe grinned. The two of them headed to the line for one of the water rides, although they stopped to grab ice cream on the way.
“You know, you never told me what kind of music your band plays,” Gabe said, after a few minutes of waiting in line.
“Oh, it’s sort of folk rock inspired.” It occurred to Eli that he should probably stop being so surprised every time Gabe started a conversation. Over the last couple of weeks, the two of them had begun to figure out how to talk to each other.
“Folk rock is still a thing?” Gabe asked innocently.
“Oh my God.” Eli blinked at him. “I can’t believe I just got burned by a guy who barely even talks.”
“It’s about quality, not quantity,” Gabe replied, seeming incredibly pleased with himself for a moment before he burst into giggles.
Once they regained their composure, Eli said, “Seriously though, we’re playing a gig next week in Hartford. I know Hannah’s going to be out of town, but I’d love it if you came to see us.”
Gabe’s smile dimmed, and Eli couldn’t figure out why. “So you’ll still hang out with me while she’s not here?” he asked and then bit his lip.
“Of course I will,” Eli said, surprised that Gabe had to ask. Hannah and her parents were going to Costa Rica for a week. He knew they’d tried to include Gabe in the trip, but Gabe had convinced them that he’d be fine alone.
