Openly Straight (3 page)

It’s
not exactly right to say I always wanted to sit at the jock lunch table back at Boulder. I mean, I’d enjoyed sitting with my best friend, Claire Olivia. We’d had a lot of laughs, and some of those laughs were at the expense of the jock kids. But I admit I had always wondered what it would be like to be at the top of the food chain.

On my first night at school, I got to experience the Natick version of exactly what I’d been missing.

“Your first day, huh? A hot one for ya,” Steve said. I was sitting at a table with eight guys, all of them from the football game earlier. My nose had stopped bleeding, and now the only thing bothering me was a serious case of jitters. What if I said the wrong thing?

“Yeah,” I said as I bit into an exceedingly adequate hamburger.

“Wicked hot,” said another guy with a very round face.

“Was it hot in Boulder?” asked Mr. Patriots Jersey.

“In the summer.”

“Bet you got a lot of snow.” This was from Zack.

“Yeah, in the winter. Lots.”

“It snows here too. But probably not like out there,” said another guy.

This conversation has been brought to you by the good folks at the Weather Channel
, I heard the Claire Olivia voice that lives in my brain say. I stifled the urge to ask if they were all studying to be meteorologists.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I skied out there with my family a couple years ago. Vail,” Steve said.

“Vail is excellent,” I said. “I’m kind of an Eldora guy.”

No one seemed to know what that was, because no one said anything.

“You traded up from the Rockies to the Red Sox,” a guy said, and I laughed, because while I don’t know a ton about baseball, I know enough to know that the Rockies are terrible, have always been terrible, and will always be terrible.

“You got that right,” I said, smiling, and a couple of the guys chuckled. Then they started razzing me about the Red Sox beating the Rockies in the World Series back in 2007, and I was happy to take it. I had never been razzed about sports stuff before. I liked it.

“So what do y’all do for fun?” I said, to change the subject, and then I noticed I had said “y’all,” which was weird, since I’d never said “y’all” before and Colorado isn’t the South. I felt sure they’d razz me for that.
Strike one, Rafe.

But Zack just said, “Homework. Flag football in the quad. In the fall, Sundays are all about the Pats. Saturday nights are all about hooking up with the girls from Joey Warren.”

They explained that Joseph Warren High School was the local public school, right across Dug Pond from us, and I nodded and said, “That’s cool.” I tried to imagine myself part of a pack of guys who picked up local public school girls on weekends. It was hard to envision, but I was definitely willing to try. Not the pickup part. Just the being in a posse part.

“Who are you rooming with?” Steve asked.

“Albie. Albie Harris.”

“Oh, man,” said Zack. “Tough draw.”

I nodded and took a sip of my soda. “Yeah, we already sort of clashed. But he seems okay. His friend Toby too.”

“They’re a little … different. All that survivalist stuff,” Steve said. I could tell he was being polite because I was new here. I appreciated that.

“Yeah. I was trying to figure out if they were serious or kidding,” I said.

The guys kept on eating; no one seemed to have much of an answer for that. They argued and joked around about someone named Jacoby Ellsbury, who was a Red Sock, apparently. I just listened, wondering if it was possible to be part of a posse when you don’t ever contribute anything. At the same time, I was enjoying it. It was totally new to me, and I felt like an anthropologist studying another culture.

As I started digging into my brownie, Steve asked me if I was going to play soccer this year. Natick was too small to have a football team — that much I knew from my research.

“Yup,” I said. “Midfielder.”

“Right on,” he said. “We could use your speed.”

I nodded.

“You in shape for it?” he asked.

“I dunno,” I said.

“Well, you better be. Soccer is a religion here,” Steve said, looking directly at me. “You play well, you’re set. You don’t play, you don’t matter. And losing, not an option. You gotta man up and give a hundred and twenty percent. Ten and three last year, lost in the playoffs to Belmont. Gotta do better this year.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to chime in, so I answered in the affirmative, trying to sound like a chorus of boys doing the same thing. “Yep ah mmm uh-huh uh-huh,” I said.

A little weird. I’d have to work on that.
Strike two.

“Some of us,” he said to the kid to my left, “need to step it up this year. Because, I gotta be honest …”

“Uh-oh,” I said, without thinking.

The conversation ceased. So did my heart, momentarily.

“What do you mean,
uh-oh
?” Steve asked, his eyebrow raised. Everyone was looking at me. I realized Steve was the leader. Maybe he wasn’t to be questioned?

I tried not to stammer. “Uh, back where I’m from, my, uh, best friend,” I said, not specifying that this best friend was a girl, since I had a feeling that wouldn’t play so well with this group, “we had this thing. It was like, anytime someone says, ‘I gotta be honest,’ it’s like, get the hell out of there. Because nothing in the history of the world has ever been said after those words that was nice. It’s never like, ‘I gotta be honest, what you just said was really smart,’ or ‘I gotta be honest with you: Your breath smells like fresh mint.’ It’s like a polite way to say, ‘Do you mind if I insult you now?’”

It was silent at our table. The guys looked at one another. This was the kind of stuff Claire Olivia and I riffed on all the time, and now I was realizing why we didn’t sit at the jocks’ table. Not that they were better than us, just that they didn’t quite laugh at the same things. And I was like,
Strike three, you’re out. I’ll head off now and find the weird kids’ table. Where are Toby and Albie?

And then Zack cracked up. “I gotta be honest,” he said to the kid on my left. “You probably shouldn’t play soccer.”

“I gotta be honest,” the kid said back. “Your mother needs to stop calling me.”

“I gotta be honest,” said another guy. “Have you considered acne medication?”

“I gotta be honest. You might want to look into buying a blow-up girlfriend.”

Soon we were all laughing, and even Steve was smiling as everyone got real honest with one another. A wave of relief passed through me, and I realized I truly liked these guys. I hadn’t laughed this much with a group of guys since, well, ever.

My cell phone buzzed. I looked at it and saw it was Claire Olivia. We hadn’t talked since I’d arrived on campus, and I knew I should pick up.

I quietly declined the call.

“Who’s calling you?” Steve asked.

“No one important,” I said, smiling. “I gotta be honest.”

Big-ass wrench number two appeared that night after dinner, when I went down the hallway to pee. I ran into Ben, the big guy from foot
ball who had rolled his eyes to his friend Bryce about me. They hadn’t sat with us at dinner.

I know about urinal etiquette. For one thing, you don’t say anything beyond “What’s up” to another guy while peeing. It’s common courtesy. But I’d never had so much fun in one day, and here we were, two jocks, peeing next to each other. All I wanted to do was keep things going. So I broke the cardinal urinal rule.

“How’s life?” I asked.

Through my peripheral vision I could see him look up at the ceiling. “Fine,” he said.

Silence.

“That was a good game today,” I said.

“Yup.”

Again. Silence.

“You’re not really supposed to talk at a urinal,” I said, like a crazy person. “I actually know that. I’m breaking the rules.”

He laughed. “You’re a rebel.”

I was so grateful that he’d said something back that I turned toward him. Maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea.

“Dude,” he said, recoiling slightly. “Really?”

I flinched back to the forward position as my entire face turned red. “Sorry.”

He took a deep breath. “You missed, but should that even be an issue?”

“Really, really sorry,” I said. “Very not cool. I can’t believe I just did that.”

We went back to peeing next to each other in silence. There’s not
a color for what I imagined my face looked like. Time for damage control. Major damage control.

“I have a peeing problem,” I said. I meant it like a joke, like, “I have a drinking problem,” but as soon as the words left my mouth, I could see how it might not make sense.

“Ah,” he said.

“I meant it like a drinking problem. Not that I drink pee or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Of course,” Ben said very quietly.

It was so awful that I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing.

“This is the worst pee ever!” I said.

This cracked him up too, and that made me feel a bit better.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said so many wrong things at one time. Wow.” Tears were running down my cheeks now. I’d tucked myself away and was just standing there. Ben tucked himself in and flushed his urinal.

“Wow. Well, I guess I’d say it was really nice, but, maybe just it was really weird meeting you? I’d shake your hand, but …”

“Right,” I said. We both went to the sink to wash our hands.

“I guess it’s been a weird day,” I said. “This is my first day ever at boarding school and —”

“You don’t know how to pee in public. I get it,” Ben said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said as he punched down on the paper towel dispenser a few times and tore off some sheets.

“I feel a little out of place, I guess. It’s hard.”

“We’re all out of place in our own way,” he said.

I tore my own paper towel off the dispenser. “Deep,” I said.

He smiled ruefully. “Yeah, real deep.”

“No, I mean it,” I said, continuing to wipe my hands even though they were now dry. “I like stuff like that.”

He averted his eyes, and I averted mine. We were back to weird, and I’d taken us there.

“So, anyway,” I said, well aware that our conversation was basically over, but somehow, not wanting it to be. “I also have the weirdest possible roommate. Albie?”

“Ah,” Ben said.

“He has a police scanner and this apocalyptic poster thing. It’s freaking me out. Is he, like, a survivalist?”

“I think he’s an ironic survivalist.”

I laughed. Ben looked pleased.

“Anyway, I’m not so thrilled about the whole ‘My roommate is a dork’ angle. Won’t exactly help my standing here.”

Ben half grimaced, baring his lower teeth like he’d just eaten something that didn’t taste too good. “Well, good luck with that,” he said, tossing his paper towel out. “Bye.”

“I didn’t mean …” I said, but he was already out the door.

And I was like,
Can I get a urinary do-over?

“Now,
I’m familiar with nearly all of you, and I’ve read some terrific essays on
Hamlet
and
A Separate Peace
,” Mr. Scarborough said, prompting a few mutters from some of my classmates, who clearly didn’t enjoy the flashback. “But in this elective writing seminar, we’re going to embark on an entirely different journey. We’re going to write about ourselves. I am well aware that some of you seniors think this is the English equivalent of Rocks for Jocks.” Several of the kids laughed. “I assure you, that’s not at all the case. You will be challenged in here, challenged in unforeseen ways. And I want you to know right now, if you’re unwilling to be introspective, drop this class now. Today. No questions asked. I know there’s still room in Mr. Stinson’s Dramatic Literature class.

“Steve Nickelson. Can we know others if we don’t know ourselves?”

“No?” Steve said, half question and half answer.

“Correct you are. Bryce Hixon. What do you think we gain by writing about ourselves?”

I looked around. In a room of white faces, Bryce was the only dark-skinned person. He was dressed better than most of the other kids; whereas most of us (myself included) were wearing jeans and a polo shirt, he wore black slacks and a blue blazer over a tan, pin-striped button-down shirt. He stood out.

“I guess we can learn about who we are,” Bryce said in a monotone.

I noticed no Ben in the class. I felt relieved.

“Precisely,” Mr. Scarborough said, pumping his fist to accentuate the word. “Writing, you see, is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. That’s a quote from the writer E. L. Doctorow, who wrote …?”

No one spoke for a while, until a kid in the back said, “Books?”

Mr. Scarborough laughed, and then we did. It was my first class on the first day, and I got the sense that students here took their cues for how much they could get away with from their teachers. Mr. Scarborough was tall and thin and young-looking, maybe just a bit out of college, though he wore a beige blazer that made him look old. Still, he was cute — for a teacher, anyway.

“Fair enough. That’s a little much to expect. E. L. Doctorow wrote
Ragtime
, which became a movie, and
The Book of Daniel
, among others. He’s one of our finest American authors. He said, and I repeat: ‘Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.’”

I wrote that sentence down on the page, which was blank other than the date and the title

I had always loved writing. It was my favorite subject. Not to brag, but at Rangeview I was considered one of the best writers in the school. I hoped that would be the case here.

“I want to start with an exercise here in class,” Mr. Scarborough said, prompting a few groans. “I know, I know. You’ve hardly shaken off the rust of the summer, and here you are, eight-thirty on the first Monday of school, and you have to work. Just humor me. This won’t be that challenging.

“I want you to fastwrite on the following subject: someone you’ve hurt in your life. I’ll repeat. Someone you’ve hurt. When I ask you to fastwrite, I want you to simply put words on paper. Don’t worry about editing, or how it’s going to read to someone else. This is about getting your feelings down and not allowing form or the editing part of our brains to get in the way.”

One of my favorite parts of writing is that
aha
moment you get when you know what you’re going to write, and it propels you to start writing. I got mine right away: Claire Olivia. That would be an easy one, since I had, actually, hurt her.

Claire Olivia and I had been best friends forever. Our families were friends, and my first memory of her was my parents talking about her name. Her parents were typical Boulder loonies, sort of like my folks. My parents had met at Oberlin College, which is this liberal paradise in the middle of Ohio, and Claire Olivia’s had met at Reed College, Oregon’s Oberlin. The name they chose for their first daughter, Claire Olivia, sounded perfectly nice. But here was the deal: Her last name was Casey. Her mother spoke fluent Spanish for her job. They named her Claire Olivia so they could call her Claire O. Casey.

Which was supposed to sound like
“Claro que sí.”
Which means,
But of course
.

Claire Olivia rebelled —
but of course
— once she was old enough to realize her name was also a joke, and she insisted on being called Claire Olivia ever since. We now referred to the incident as an NWI: Naming While Intoxicated. Which should obviously be a crime.

I would know, since I, Seamus Rafael Goldberg, was another victim of an NWI. I always got a lot of “Oh, is your mother Irish?” on the first day of school each year from my new teachers.

“Nope,” I’d say.

“Your … father?” they’d ask as a hopeful follow-up. I could see the combinations and permutations flutter through their minds. This was Boulder. It could easily be two moms. Two dads. A dad, a mom, and an orangutan. Three Amish hipsters and a transgendered Aboriginal mermaid.

“Nope,” I’d answer. “My parents went to Oberlin.”

And the teachers would nod, usually. Sometimes they’d creep backward, slowly. Often they wouldn’t respond at all, just go on to the next name. Everyone knew about Oberlin.

So Claire Olivia and I bonded over horrible names as kids. We were inseparable through elementary school, junior high, and the first two years of high school. The spring of eighth grade, she was the first person I told about being gay. She was like,
Wow, shocker
.

When I decided I wanted to go to Natick, she was in denial, while I just wanted to leave. So we never really talked it out until the good-bye party my parents threw for me at Barker Reservoir. We had
snuck a couple bottles of Corona and sat on one of the concrete benches that faced the water.

“You psyched?” Claire Olivia asked. She was wearing all black — mourning, she explained.

I took a swig, swished the beer around in my mouth, and swallowed. “I dunno,” I said, rubbing my knees together. “Kind of psyched.”

She snorted and gulped down more beer. “You’re abandoning me for
kind of
?”

“I’m psyched,” I said.

“You don’t sound psyched at all.”

“Well, it’s just weird, you know? I’ll be, like, the one new junior, and the rest of the kids …”

“Guys,” she corrected, looking at me through narrowed eyes. To Claire Olivia, even the idea of an all-boys boarding school was misogynistic.

“Guys,” I repeated. “The rest of them will already know each other, and I’ll be this outsider freak.”

I hadn’t told her about the main reason I was going to Natick. I knew she wouldn’t understand.

Claire Olivia put the beer bottle against her forehead. I wondered if it was still cold, so I did the same. Lukewarm. We were silent for a bit. I listened to the way the water lapped against the concrete barrier, the faint sounds of the party my parents were throwing.

“Well, aside from the fact that I will be totally alone for the next two years,” she muttered, rolling the bottle back and forth, “I guess I’m glad for you.”

“It’s only two years. I’ll see you in college. I promise.”

“You suck,” she mumbled.

We made brief eye contact and she quickly looked away. My gut churned. I put my hand on Claire Olivia’s shoulder, even though we were not touchy people. She looked over at it as if it were an exotic parrot. I took it off, and we sat silently, looking out at the reservoir. She sighed.

“I’m just not happy,” she said, and she picked up her beer bottle and threw it at the concrete bench about ten feet away. It nicked the edge and shattered. Beer gushed into the grass.

We both stared at the broken bottle.

“Did you just throw a bottle?” I said.

“I think I did,” she said.

“That’s, like, what you do when you’re unhappy now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m not happy either,” I said, and I tossed my half-f bottle at the bench too. It missed, thudded against the grass, and spun before settling and leaking onto the grass.

“God, I’m gonna miss you,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said back. “Me too. Miss you too.”

“Is that how you talk now that you’re an East Coast prep student?”

“Is yes,” I said.

So I had hurt Claire Olivia by leaving. Now, as I scribbled words as fast as I could, trying to write something that was the complete truth while avoiding certain other truths, I realized something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before: I had been so focused on leaving that I
had completely brushed her off when she wanted to talk about it. She must have felt totally abandoned. For all the grief I’d given her about how everything was always about her, at the most crucial time, it had been all about me.

And now maybe we’d go to the same college — we’d try — but it was hardly a given that we’d get into the same places. A lump grew in my throat.

The problem, as I was writing, was all that I had to leave out. Instead of going right into our strange but weird friendship (a guy has sleepovers with a girl, who happens to be his best friend?), I had to write less and hope that my words conveyed something.

“Who will read?” Mr. Scarborough asked.

A kid I hadn’t met yet, with a mouth full of braces, read. His piece was pretty good, about a time he’d been on a seesaw with his sister, and he was high in the air, and as a joke he’d jumped off, and she’d flown down and smacked her mouth against the metal bar. I could actually smell the blood and see the chipped tooth, which is one way I know something is well written.

“Good, good,” Mr. Scarborough said. “What I’d like you to think about, Curtis, is culpability. You didn’t mean to hurt her; it was an accident, as you said. I’d like you to add to your homework a short piece like the one you wrote, but in this one I want you to reflect on a time when you purposefully hurt someone else. We can learn so much from seeing our own character flaws. I want to see that from you. Excellent work.”

My gut churned. I knew that if he could find a flaw in that piece, mine would surely be flawed too, and I didn’t like the possibility. I hoped I wouldn’t have to read.

“How about our new student?” Mr. Scarborough said, smiling at me. He looked down at his attendance sheet. “Rafe?”

By sixth grade, I’d figured out that you have to get your parents to insist that your name is written as
Rafe
rather than
Seamus Rafael
on attendance sheets.
Seamus Rafael
isn’t the kind of name kids just let go by.

So I read what I’d written.

“Wow. In-ter-est-ing,” Mr. Scarborough said, not taking his eyes off me. “Great details. Looking up and to the left — class, that’s the way you use singular detail, the way to show a lot with a little. But
there was something else, a few other things, actually, that I noticed about that piece. Anyone?”

“Sentence length,” said Bryce, not looking at me. “Scads of short sentences.”

“Yes!” Mr. Scarborough cried. “Precisely. Did anyone else have a feeling as though it was hard to breathe, listening to that piece? Extremely tight, clipped, controlled. That can be fixed by varying sentence length. Anything else?”

Some other kid said, “Why the hell would someone leave their hot girlfriend and move across the country to an all-boys school?”

The room got really quiet, and it was like I could hear all my internal organs turning over inside me. I scanned what I’d written.
Girlfriend?
I hadn’t said “girlfriend.” And then I wondered if a part of me wanted them to think that.

“Well, that’s a question for a different time, perhaps,” Mr. Scarborough said, clearing his throat. “But I think you make a valid point. Are we getting the full story? What’s missing here? Where is Rafe’s focus, emotionally?”

No one had an answer for that one. Everyone just sort of stared, brain-dead-like, and I felt this sinking sensation in my chest and I wasn’t sure why.

I thought about when I was training for Speaking Out, the gay advocacy group that Mom talked me into joining last year, which got me speaking engagements at high schools across the state. They taught us this game that we took to the schools. You ask everyone to write down three major facts about themselves. Then you put the kids in groups and ask them to introduce themselves without mentioning
any of the three things. The exercise is supposed to help kids understand how hard it is for gay people when they are told, like, “It’s okay if you’re gay, just don’t talk about it.”