by L. A. Fields
Ray goes into full courtship mode, the same way he does when he wants to convince a girl to hold his arm at a party. There are stages in this art, and it requires time. Ray plans to devote all of June to the process.
First up, a single rose, or since Noah’s no usual conquest, a peacock feather that is also an inkwell pen. Noah likes birds, he wants to be a lawyer with fancy shit on his desk someday, that gift is literally two birds with one stone! Ray puts it in the Kaplan family mail box with a card that says, Saw this and thought of you, in his own handwriting, but without his name or signature. Noah will know who it’s from.
The second salvo begins thusly: Ray finds out by talking with Mr. Kaplan that Noah visits his mother’s grave with his aunt at least once a month (sometimes more often when he wants to go there alone). Mr. Kaplan is unaware of the boys’ falling out, an assumption that Ray gambles on and is correct about (there are some things that no one will voluntarily tell their father). Ray stakes out the house early when Mr. Kaplan is on his way to work to get this information, and he pretends he is out jogging even though Ray never does any such thing. He stops, panting as if he’s really out of breath after a slight run from the privacy wall, and he tells Mr. Kaplan, “I haven’t seen you since . . . I’m sorry about your wife’s passing. Faye was like a second mother to me.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Kaplan says, gazing wistfully up at his home in the early morning damp summer fog. “She was a wonderful mother.” This is what makes him divulge the information about how his son mourns said mom.
So Ray leaves flowers at Faye’s grave in front of the Kaplan family obelisk, this time with a signed note that says, I guess it isn’t true that a lady never leaves too soon. Faye liked to crack jokes starting with, “A lady never,” and then end them with something like, “forgets to brush her teeth for more than a week,” or “presents herself with only one food stain on her pajamas; it’s two at a minimum”—whatever it was that made her feel wretched that day. It always made Ray and Noah laugh, so Ray guesses that this reference will at least make Noah smile now that she’s gone.
The third contact is a return volley from Noah, a birthday card for Ray on the 11th. It’s signed formally (his full name and middle initial and everything), and it says, You are not acting your age. Ray is seventeen.
Touché, Ray thinks. That’s more cryptic than any message Ray would leave. Is it meant to discourage him, or congratulate him, or to just acknowledge his actions? Indecipherable. Ray moves on to his last shot.
The third and final step is an in-person meeting. He’s reminded Noah that no one knows him as well as Ray does and still likes him so much, and he’s also highlighted their shared history (Noah will never make another friend his mother approves of, he can’t), and now it’s time to just be friends again. For real this time, not like last time. Last time, Ray thought he could do a little better than Noah, and either Ray overestimated himself (no) or he underestimated Noah. That’s a compliment if he can just phrase it right, Ray knows it.
He executes an opposite approach on Noah than the one that worked on Mr. Kaplan. Noah is back at the University of Chicago, back in his old habits so deeply that he made himself the same schedule Ray once memorized to pursue him the first time, and Ray waits to catch Noah coming home from school. He sits on the splintery bus bench that Noah will disembark at, and lets Noah spot him. Noah freezes when he sees Ray sitting ankle-over-knee at the bench, and he’s jostled by the people trying to get off the bus behind him. They push Noah forward enough that the boy walks up and sits beside Ray. They wait for the other commuters to disperse before saying anything.
“I miss her,” Noah says, at the same moment Ray is volunteering, “I’ve missed you.”
They’re both hit a second late by the other one’s statement, and the awkwardness of it makes them both smile, and look away in embarrassment. A year apart and it already feels like old times to Ray.
“Do you wanna rob my frat house this fall?” Ray wants to do it himself, but he also wants to let Noah know that those people and that house mean nothing to him, comparatively.
Noah snorts. “Actually, I kind of do. I’ve always disliked that place.”
“It’ll be my last chance to do something drastic there and then watch the aftermath. Even though my grades sucked this year, I’ve still got enough credits to graduate at eighteen. The youngest grad in the school’s history.”
“And your plans after that?”
Ray shrugs. “Chicago again, probably grad school or something. What track is your future on now?”
“I’m in the law school here, taking extra classes this summer, and I’m applying to Harvard and Yale among many others over the next six months or so.”
Ray smiles and looks at Noah, and he crosses his arms over a strange sense of pride. Noah will get into one of those schools, he truly will, and he’ll be a big ol’ lawyer any minute after that. Ray really does like this kid.
“You think you’ll include the robbery in any of your application essays?”
Noah rolls his eyes. “Maybe I’ll talk about the contract I’d make you sign guaranteeing reciprocity before I’d ever agree to join you,” he says, standing up and looking down at Ray, considering him. He cocks his head, inviting Ray to walk with him before he goes on saying, “In fact, that wouldn’t be bad practice for me, mocking up a contract, regardless of whether its contents are legal or not.”
“I’d sign it either way,” Ray promises. “Although what I just said is a verbal contract, right? Does that count?”
“Oral contract, and actually that’s an interesting question.”
Noah launches into a lecture on the subject as Ray walks him home.
2
WRITING IN SANSKRIT THAT EVENING, with Ray waiting on the bed just two feet to Noah’s left for his friend to tie up some homework, Noah makes a personal note to himself: You take up with Ray Klein like he’s a bad habit. After that he stops writing, closes a few books, and pivots in his desk chair to get a full view of Ray.
Ray’s looking up at the ceiling like there’s something pleasant to see there, instead of a dusty ceiling fan and a slight superficial crack running away from it. His hair is shorter than when Noah last saw him, it’s more shorn on the sides, more military, more masculine. It’s not long enough to bend into that wave Noah likes to look at. That’s probably not the only thing that’s changed about him in the year or so they’ve been at different schools, having different lives.
“What are you so happy about?” Noah asks him. Noah probably feels happy too; he thinks that’s the emotion underneath a very wobbly apprehension. Part of him thinks this is all a trick, a bet Ray made with himself just for the sport of seeing if he could wile someone smart back to his own ruin, back into a cesspool he’s already crawled out of once before.
“Being back in your room is more of a homecoming than getting back in mine was; how fucked up is that?”
“You can thank yourself for that, you said you didn’t want that place to be your home when you left. It’s why you left.”
Ray’s smile deepens, and he cuts his eyes at Noah, and then he reaches out a hand and sets the palm of it on the inside of Noah’s left leg, just above the knee.
Noah stays silent as Ray’s thumb starts making small back-and-forth strokes. His face feels like it’s suffered a sunburn, when all that’s really happened is a ferocious blush. Once Ray notices that, and the hitch in Noah’s breath, he lifts up on his elbow and starts to reach further up Noah’s leg. That causes Noah to throw himself out of his chair. He stands in the middle of his room, his back to Ray, dizzy for a moment, but miraculously not embarrassed at long last. He collects himself enough to step up and lock his bedroom door.
He turns back around and looks Ray in the eyes, a pair of chameleon eyes, the sort of hazel that takes on the color of things around them. Ray is sitting up, shoving the sheets down, getting ready for Noah, and Noah is pulling his feet from his shoes and stripping off his summer blazer—basicall
y making himself comfortable, something that Ray did the second he walked into Noah’s house.
Noah crawls over the footboard as gracelessly as a flamingo once he’s untucked his shirt and gotten rid of his belt. Ray opens up his posture a little, presenting the front of his body, but Noah wants to try something different this time.
He shakes his head, and twirls a finger, indicating that he wants Ray to turn over. This Ray does, hanging his face and arm off the side of the bed while Noah lays himself closer, and touches the back of Ray’s head. Tragically short or not, his hair is still as soft as Noah remembers.
Noah can see enough to see that Ray’s eyes are closed, pretending to sleep. That works for him. He caresses from the side of Ray’s head down his neck and back, lifts up his shirt enough to get access to his skin, and then tugs at his jeans—just the outer pants—until Ray breaks the ruse of sleep enough to unbutton and start removing them. Noah finishes for him so Ray can go back to his slack position. It’s strange to Noah that he only feels like he can be with Ray when Ray pretends he isn’t there—eyes averted and mouth shut. The boy’s just too good a liar for Noah to really trust those ports of access to his personality, but this way he can be with Ray without the niggling suspicion that he’s being fooled. Why would Ray ever put up with this if he didn’t like Noah? This is no lie.
Noah leaves the underwear on both of them, but the skin above and below is exposed enough for real, warm contact, and the pressing and thrusting he does through the underwear, that doesn’t feel as hampered as it looks. The heat and the crevice and the squeeze of it all is enough to make Noah lose more head than one. And when he’s done, and the sweat is evaporating, and his breathing re-regulates into a normal rhythm against Ray’s neck, that is when Ray ‘wakes up’ and rolls over to face Noah again.
They both pull their shirts down because the air-conditioned room is starting to feel chilly, but they pull the covers over their legs and kick their pants fully off underneath.
“How weird do you feel?” Noah asks him.
“No weirder than I always feel. What about you?”
Noah just shakes his head. Not weird at all. He’s never felt this at peace with his own body, it’s like the perfection of Ray’s body can literally rub off on his. Or something like that, since Noah’s the one who . . . whatever. Noah laughs a little. For once he doesn’t care about the exact way to phrase it. That’s a new measure of peace as well.
Ray smiles to see his friend catch a fit of the giggles.
“You haven’t been laughing much since she died, have you?”
Noah’s smile shrinks a little, but stays on his face. “No, I haven’t. You remembered that tulips were her favorite flowers, that’s why you got them for her grave, isn’t it? And the note you left, that was really—” Ray pops a kiss onto Noah’s lips (they’ve never kissed on the lips before), probably because Noah’s voice is starting to tremble. He can’t talk about his mother without that crying tremor trying to burble out of him, that’s why he hasn’t said more than a word about her to anyone but Ray. Since Faye’s death, his father and brothers have grown into talking about her fondly, but Noah still can’t. He just listens to what they have to say, and that’s enough for him, usually.
The kiss from Ray is one long, one short, which Noah realizes is an N in Morse Code. He responds to Ray’s message with one of his own: short, long, short; an R. Then he’s smirking at his own secret joke—at last he’s the one thinking of something mysterious that Ray doesn’t understand! How rewarding.
“Now, what are you so happy about,” Ray states, repeating Noah’s question from before, but not really asking it himself because he sits up and pulls his pants back on and moves to the desk chair while Noah redresses himself.
They both seem to agree that what Ray doesn’t know can’t hurt him.
3
THE BOYS ARE BACK ON SUPERIOR terms, but Ray still has a lot of free time over this last summer of his legal youth. With Noah taking classes in law and teaching classes in birding, the kid stays ceaselessly busy all through the rest of June. They talk quite a bit, many late nights on the phone when Ray is up late staggering home from a campus party and Noah is staying up all night before an early morning birding expedition because he thinks he’s sharper when he’s not overly rested.
“No doctor would agree with you on that,” Ray tells him, chatting about Noah’s day before he wants to launch into a discussion of his own.
“You are mistaken. Studies of the napping habits of men like Edison and Churchill—”
“Are you trying to put me to sleep right now?”
Noah scoffs and Ray enters his house through the back door, the one closest to the stairs that are closest to his room, hoping not to get nagged about his exploits the next morning. The nerve his family has lecturing him on being immature for a college man when they’re the ones who engineered him to become a college man so young . . . astounding. Noah doesn’t have to put up with crap like that, but then Noah is also fast to remind Ray that he doesn’t drink or party like Ray does, so. That’s a firm point in a debate that they never declare won.
“So, do you want to hear about the bird I bagged tonight?”
“Do you mean like a girl, and do you mean you managed to touch a base or score a basket or whatever the sports metaphor is for that stuff?”
Ray yelps a laugh that nearly becomes a hiccup and certainly ruins all his care in trying to use the quiet entrance in returning home so late. He promised himself that tonight he would actually bathe before he passed out, but since he can’t take the phone into the shower, Ray lets go of that fantasy and settles for just getting his pants off. They’d been half off once before, earlier in the night, that was the news he had for Noah.
“She actually believed me when I told her I sold drugs, just mother’s prescription meds and ADHD pills to other students, but still. She seemed to think I was some kind of master criminal, and I guess she had a thing for that. She actually tried to blow me.”
“What do you mean, ‘tried’? What stopped such a thing from being successfully accomplished?”
“Man, if you have to ask, you might never know.” Truly, and this truth is already in a locked place in his mind where Ray sticks his most uncomfortable nightmares and disheartening failures, he couldn’t seem to enjoy himself. He started off so excited when she leaned in and went for his zipper with this knowing look in her eye, like she had some skill, some secret, something real behind the crumby black mascara that didn’t work on her blonde eyelashes. But Ray’s excitement hadn’t been the right kind, and it didn’t translate to a rush of blood to the right place, and the whole experience felt gluey and embarrassing, and the way she let it fall out of her mouth after a minute like a tasteless wad of gum . . . well, Ray won’t tell that story to anyone, not even himself. He’s already modifying it so that if he ever remembers this night far in the future, he won’t really remember which details are true and which are fabricated. And since there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so, someday the truth will be what Ray wants it to be.
“Do you think a man or a woman would be inherently better at doing that? Obviously practice goes into the ability at a certain point, and probably women get more practice in general, but there’s also the consideration that it takes one to know one, like a man would know better what a man wants.”
“Maybe you should go out and collect some data on that,” Ray says.
“Hmm. A scientist shouldn’t be his own test subject. Maybe you’ll find out and lend me some anecdotal evidence.”
“Maybe,” Ray says. He can admit to being that curious about himself, and what could letting a man give it a try do, be worse? More humiliating? At least when another fellow says, Don’t worry, it happens to all guys sometimes, it would be easier for Ray to believe the lie. How can a girl say that with any authority? Maybe she’s the common denominator that skews the stats!
“What are your plans this weekend?” Ray is debating even getting up
to turn off his light before he conks out, but since he never bothers redecorating when he comes ‘home’ from school, the walls are hopelessly sad and bare and bright.
“Birding class with that Girl Scout troop, and my aunt’s coming over for dinner with her new beau, she’s ready to introduce him to the family. What about you?”
“Nothing, I guess. Want to set another fire on the fourth of July?”
“You know the answer to that. Besides, I’m going to some company guy’s barbecue with my dad.”
“And the week after that you’re headed back to Michigan for that bird thing, and that’s going to be like a week of camping, right?”
“At least, but Professor Woodrow thinks we’re close to finding the bird’s nesting ground. Last season we saw where they’d been, and—”
“We’ll have to meet up after that some time.”
“Yeah. Definitely,” Noah says so firmly that Ray knows he means it.
4
“YOU WOULD HAVE HATED THIS trip,” Noah tells Ray on the other side of a supremely successful expedition to find the nesting grounds of Kirtland’s warbler. “I loved it, I got so close to the nest I was feeding the parents. The male bird actually hopped on me a few times he was so comfortable. The other guys didn’t have the nerve to approach, they were afraid of getting pecked at.”
“Were you pecked at?” Ray asks, and Noah raises his sleeve like he has a badge of honor to show off. There are little dotted scars from the female’s beak—she was not as comfortable with a human interloper as her colorful counterpart was. The male specimen seemed to like the convenience of having Noah hunt bugs and grubs for his nest, rather than having to do all the work himself. Noah was training the bird into a bad dependent habit, but they only spent three days observing and filming the nest, then they took only pictures and left only footprints.
