But, of course, they had. Because here I was, fifteen, almost sixteen. You don’t just get to be that age without going through everything that had come before. It was hard to believe I was almost at the end of my second year in high school. In some ways, it felt as if I had always been in exactly this same spot, been exactly this age, and always would be.
My life had fallen into a kind of pattern. Every day after school, except on days when I had play practice, Chipper would drop me off at the convalescent home, and I would read to Nana. I’d read Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, even The Catcher in the Rye, blushing as I’d utter the swear words in front of her. This semester it had been British lit, so Nana got to hear Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. I’d enjoyed them all, especially Jane Eyre, with that creepy lady running around in the walls. Nana always seemed so content when I read to her, the only time she wasn’t agitated, the nurses said. They called my father and told him I was such a good grandson to Nana. One night Dad came in and sat down on the edge of my bed and thanked me for spending so much time with his mother, since he rarely did. He was drunk, so his words were slurred, and he was a little more teary than usual. But still, I appreciated his effort.
I was doing so well in literature that Brother Pop thought I should become a teacher or a writer—but I had my heart set on something else. I wanted to be an actor. The dress rehearsal for Oliver! had only confirmed that ambition for me. It was so cool to act with upperclassmen: except for mine, all the parts were played by juniors and seniors, and I’d been accepted by them as if I were one of their own. No more spitballs tossed at the back of my head. Danny Fortunato finally had his clique. For the first time since leaving St. John’s, I was enjoying school. Rehearsing for the play filled me up with an energy I hadn’t known for more than two years. I loved being there in the auditorium: the smell of the wax and polish on the shiny wooden stage, the heaviness of the red velvet curtains, which creaked when they went up and down, the heat of the spotlights, the echo of our voices in the empty hall. I’m not sure I’d have described my life as happy, but it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.
“All right now, Danny!” Brother Connolly was clapping his hands. “Take your place onstage, next to Jane Marie.”
I hurried up to stand beside Jane Marie Schuster, who was playing the part of Nancy. Jane Marie was a senior and absolutely the coolest girl at St. Clare’s. “I got you the brochure,” she whispered. “I’ll give it to you later.”
“What brochure?”
“The UConn theater program brochure.” Jane Marie was planning to major in theater at the University of Connecticut next year. “If you want to study theater, Danny, you should really start planning now.”
“Oh, I do!” I replied. “Thank you so much!”
“No problem.” Jane Marie’s green eyes twinkled. “Maybe we’ll act in more plays together in college.”
“And then on Broadway!”
She laughed. “And then in movies!”
I let out a whoop.
“What was that?” Brother Connolly asked, spinning around.
“Sorry, Brother,” I told him. “I just burped.”
All my friends laughed.
My eyes caught those of Troy in the wings. Troy was in the chorus. He was in costume, too, that of a beggar boy. He gave me the thumbs-up sign, and I flashed it back to him. Then Brother Connolly called for Jane Marie and me to act out the scene.
If I’d thought play practice had been fun, dress rehearsal was amazing. The costumes, the lighting, the sound effects. This was how it was going to be on opening night—except that the auditorium would be filled with people. People who would applaud for us, for me. I’d look out into the empty seats and imagine the crowd that would come. They’d sit there, with their programs in their laps, their faces raised to the stage. I couldn’t wait. All my dreams were coming true. From the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to sleep at night, my heart was constantly racing in my chest in anticipation of opening night. I sensed nothing would be the same after that moment. Everything in my life would be different.
After Jane Marie and I had finished our scene, Brother called out, “Perfecto!” I raced off backstage, beaming. Troy caught up with me and slapped me five.
“You never mess up your lines, ever!” he exclaimed.
“Well, I’ve had them memorized for over a year.”
Troy drew close to me. “You know, you look kind of sexy with those whiskers.”
I laughed. “Oh, right.”
“You do.”
I smiled. Troy had forgiven me. He always did. He blamed my cruel words on Chipper. He said he understood that I needed to act tough around Chipper so that he wouldn’t suspect what was going on between us. I felt like a schmuck. But at least it meant that Troy and I could continue our secret little trysts, which had become as much a part of my life as play practice and reading to Nana. But it was a fact that, when I kissed Troy, I would close my eyes and visualize Chipper. I knew Troy would feel bad if he knew this. But as much as I felt guilty about it, I couldn’t help it. Every time Troy touched me, I imagined it was Chipper’s hand. Every time he kissed me, I imagined it was Chipper’s lips. It just happened automatically. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried.
I’d somehow managed to keep Chipper in my life, too. What a balancing act. One couldn’t know about the other. But today Chipper was picking me up after dress rehearsal. I planned to sneak away at the last moment and meet him in the back parking lot. Part of me was torn: the cast had plans to go to Giovanni’s Pizza afterward, where we’d all hang out together for the last time before the show. I really wanted to hang out with Jane Marie and Paul, who played the Artful Dodger; and Lance, who played Bill Sikes; and Greg, who played the nasty old Fagin; and especially Eddie, who was our impish Oliver Twist. And, of course, with Troy, too, and all the chorus and crew members. We were like one big family. I’d never had so many friends at one time before.
But Chipper had been insistent. “I had a huge fight with my father last night,” he’d told me in the corridor earlier that day. “I need to go out tonight and just get totally wasted. And I need you to come with me. There’s nobody else I trust enough.”
Words like that always had the power to sway me. “Okay,” I’d replied.
I figured I’d just slip out when dress rehearsal was over, not saying anything to anybody. I’d meet Chipper at his car, and we’d take off. Nobody would know. I’d give explanations the next day.
But Troy seemed to suspect something. “You are coming out with us tonight, aren’t you?” he asked a couple of times.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
He just watched me with wary eyes.
Mr. Brownlow didn’t have another scene for a while. So I sat backstage, cross-legged, watching the action onstage through a space in the dusty red velvet curtains. Troy was sitting beside me. He kept nudging his knee into mine.
“Stop it,” I whispered. “You’re gonna distract Lance and Jane Marie.”
“I’d like to distract you,” he said in a low voice.
“Stop it.”
But my dick was getting hard nonetheless.
What was it with my dick? Sometimes all it took was a look, or a single word, to make it go all hard and raging. And at that moment, Troy’s word distract was enough to fire me up and completely take my mind off the play.
“We could go into the men’s room in the back,” Troy was whispering. “Nobody goes in there.”
“No,” I said, but my voice betrayed my ambivalence.
“I want to clamp my mouth around your cock,” Troy told me. “Suck it so hard for you. I’ll even swallow.”
I started breathing heavily. A minute and a half before, sex had been the furthest thing from my mind. Now I was panting for it, my cock threatening to pierce my underwear. “Okay,” I said, and we both stood.
Tiptoeing out the side door and into the corridor, we broke into a run, our footsteps echoing ag
ainst the brick walls.
Troy was right. The men’s room at the far end of the school was never used during play practice. We’d be safe there. “But we have to be fast,” I insisted as we came inside and Troy flipped on the fluorescent overhead lights. “I need to go back onstage in twenty minutes or less.”
Troy looked at his watch and nodded. “I promise we’ll be done by then.”
The janitor had already been through here today; the place smelled strongly of bleach and cleaning fluids. A line of five ceramic sinks sparkled against one wall; opposite stood five brown metal stalls, each with its door latched. Troy opened the last stall and practically pushed me inside. I closed the lid on the toilet and sat down. Dropping quickly to his knees, Troy began pulling down my pants—Mr. Brownlow’s felt trousers with the satin lining. His fingers slipped under the waistband of my Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear.
“Oh yeah,” I moaned, closing my eyes and leaning my head back.
Troy’s warm, wet lips slid over my erection. It felt good. Awesomely good.
For about thirty seconds.
That was when the chaos began. I heard a shout: “What the fuck?” I felt Troy’s lips leave my cock. I heard the bang of the stall door opening and closing, and the thud of a body being thrown against the sinks. Above the stall, I caught a glimpse of an enraged face.
It was Chipper.
“What the fuck? What the fuck?” he kept repeating “What the fuuuuuck?”
I yanked up my pants and burst out of the stall. Chipper had pulled Troy off me and tossed him against the sinks. Troy had come down hard on his butt. He was struggling to stand up.
“Faggots!” Chipper was screaming now. “I should’ve known! You really are a couple of faggots!”
“Shut up,” I said to Chipper. “Please, shut up! They’ll hear you!”
Chipper’s hands were in his hair. His face was scrunched up, and his mouth was opening and closing, sometime spewing forth a word, sometimes just silent. It looked almost as if he were having a heart attack.
“Faggots!” he shouted again. “You’re both a couple of dirty faggots!”
“Chipper, please be quiet! Let’s just get out of here!”
He turned his crazy black eyes on me. “He told me to meet you guys in here! He told me to be here on time, and so I was! He told me we’d smoke a joint together, that he had some good pot! And this is what I find! Faggots!”
I spun on Troy. “You…set this up?”
There was no time for Troy to respond. Chipper screamed at the top of his lungs like an Indian warrior going into battle and lunged at Troy again.
“Help me, Danny!” Troy screamed.
“Shut up,” I told him now. “They’ll hear!”
And they did hear. Brother Connolly came bursting through the door then, just in time to grab Chipper by the shoulders and throw him off of Troy. Chipper staggered backward, catching himself on a sink.
“What the hell is going on here?” Brother demanded.
“They’re faggots!” Chipper bellowed. “I caught them in the stall—doing it!”
Brother’s eyes widened as he looked from Troy over to me.
“It’s not true,” I said, my voice shaking terribly. “We were just in there talking…I wanted to go over my lines. Troy was just listening to me go over my lines!”
“Troy was sucking his faggot dick!” Chipper screamed, his black eyes accusing me of everything—of lying, of depravity, of loving Troy more than I loved him.
“No, no.” I still tried to bluff my way out of this. “He thinks he saw that because I was taking a piss. I mean, I was urinating, Brother. I was going over my lines while I was—”
“Chipper’s right,” Troy interrupted, his voice as calm and reasonable as could be. “I was sucking Danny’s dick.” He smiled at me, then over at Brother. “And enjoying every moment of it, I might add.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Brother managed to say.
“Sorry, Danny,” Troy said, looking back at me. “Really I am. But when I saw Chipper’s car in the parking lot and realized you were planning to cut out on me again, I decided to take matters into my own hands for a change. I thought Chipper would come in here and see us and just storm off.” He threw a disdainful glance in Chipper’s direction. “I didn’t realize what a hissy fit the stupid closet case would throw.”
“You fucking little—,” Chipper roared, but Brother held him off with one hand and a look that told him his entire graduation was on the line.
“And this is what lured him in,” Troy said, producing from his pocket a Baggie filled with pot. “I know he’s got more in his car. I was out there only a few minutes ago. I told him that I had better stuff than he had, and he should really come in and smoke with me and Danny here in the bathroom. If I were you, Brother, I’d go out there and search his car before he has a chance to clean it up.”
Brother snatched the pot from Troy and turned to face Chipper. “Is this true, Chipper? Have you been smoking pot with these boys?”
“These faggots, you mean,” Chipper sputtered.
“Please, Brother,” I cut in. My hand was caressing the whiskers that were glued to my face. “This doesn’t mean I can’t be in the play, does it?”
Brother turned his eyes on me. “Oh, it does indeed mean that, Danny. I’m afraid it’s going to mean a great many things.” He looked around at the three of us. “For all of you.”
A small smile ghosted across Troy’s face. He could have cared less what was in store for him. He seemed pleased, in fact, by the way the whole thing had turned out.
“Okay, move your asses,” Brother commanded. “You first, Chipper. Straight to the principal’s suite. Danny, you go to my office. Troy, you go to Brother Finnerty’s.”
Chipper and Troy walked out ahead of me. I stopped in the doorway and turned back to look into Brother’s face.
“Please,” I said, tears now rolling down my cheeks and into my fake whiskers. “Please don’t kick me out of the play, Brother.”
“I’m afraid you kicked yourself out, Danny,” he said coldly.
On my way to Brother’s office, I walked past the door to the auditorium. The whole cast and crew had gathered there to see what all the commotion was about. I couldn’t bear to lift my eyes from the floor to look at them, to see the way they must have been looking at me. Jane Marie and Lance and Greg and Eddie and Katie.
I never saw any of them again.
PALM SPRINGS
“Danny, this is crazy.”
I sat there, facing him, my eyes bleary from lack of sleep and too many hours spent staring at my computer screen. We were out by the pool. The sun was directly overhead, a white fluorescent ball. The reflections of palm trees wavered across the azure surface of the pool.
“Danny,” Randall said, “there must be millions of people on the planet with similar birthmarks. And you don’t even know for sure that your sister had a child.”
“But it all makes sense finally.” My head throbbed, and I massaged it with my fingers. A headache had blossomed behind my eyes a day ago and had yet to release its grip, no matter how much Motrin I swallowed. “Everything makes sense. My feelings for Kelly. Why I was so drawn to him. And why Becky disappeared. Finally I know the answer. Becky left home because she was pregnant.”
Randall shook his head. “But how did she get to San Francisco? More importantly, why? Why would she go there if she had no connections there?”
“Why did I go to Los Angeles when I had no connections there?” I sat back in my chair, still rubbing my head. “Maybe Becky just wanted to get far away from the scene of all her problems—just as I would want to do a few years later. So she hopped on a bus and went to San Francisco and gave birth to her baby far away from any condemnation from my mother or the church.”
“And then got addicted to drugs.” Randall shook his head. “From what you’ve told me, that doesn’t sound like your sister.”
“Randall, nobody could have predicted that little Danny Fort
unato of St. John’s School would become a pothead at St. Francis Xavier or a coke fiend in West Hollywood.”
“Still, I think the odds are so unlikely—”
“The dates match up exactly! If Becky left home when she found out she was pregnant, she would probably have been about a month or two along. So she would have given birth the following April or May.” I leaned across the table to make my points, ticking them off on my fingers. “Kelly was born in April of that same year. He’s Italian. His mother was from somewhere ‘back East.’ She wasn’t married to Kelly’s father. Her name was Ann—Becky’s middle name. And, to cap it off, Kelly has a birthmark very much like the one both my sister and my mother had, and in exactly the same place.” I glared at Randall. “And he has Chipper’s eyes.”
“I still think you’re seeing what you want to see.” He folded his arms across his chest. “The only way you could prove it is through a DNA test.”
“I’m aware of that.” I leaned back in my chair and looked across the deck. A hummingbird was flitting around the red bougainvillea that climbed over the fence. “And I can’t go that route. Not yet. I can’t let Kelly know what I think.”
“Why not?”
I stood and watched the hummingbird, the way its tiny wings beat so fast. I’d read where a hummingbird beats its wings fifty times a second. That was three thousand times a minute. Once, a hummingbird had gotten into the house. Try as we might, neither Frank nor I could guide it out. The poor thing flew against windows and darted in and out of rooms for an entire day. Exhausted, it finally perched on our ceiling fan. It was the first time I’d ever seen a hummingbird sit still. I stared at its long, slender beak, at the frenetic wings that were finally stilled, folded back against its body just like those of any other bird. But a hummingbird is not like any other bird. I felt terribly sad seeing it sit there on the ceiling fan. It was almost as if a hummingbird at rest was not something we were meant to see. Finally, Frank managed to swing a paper bag and catch the tired little creature inside. Outside, in the garden, we released it—and I cheered as the hummingbird flew out of the bag, landed once on a rosebush, then buzzed off into the night.
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