Two Boys Kissing Page 13

  With a couple minutes left, Craig turns his thoughts back to Harry. Sweaty, sticky Harry. From the way he shifts and tenses, Craig knows he’s hurting. But he’s not going to back down, and Craig loves him for it. Genuinely loves him. At this point, he’s not even sure where Harry’s body ends and his own body begins. At this point, even their souls have become a Venn diagram, and the overlapping space grows and grows. Forget the togetherness of dating, the togetherness of sex. This is something higher. A piece of them has stopped being together and started to be the same.

  The countdown begins. Craig wants Harry to know what he’s feeling. Craig wants to kiss him and mean it. They may be weary, they may be broken up, but he wants them to always have this. No matter what happens after, he wants them to be at one for this. He kisses Harry as the numbers trickle down, as the second day begins. He feels so close to Harry, and then all of a sudden he can feel Harry slipping away. As the crowd goes crazy, Harry goes slack. Craig grabs him tighter, feels the edges of their lips separating, but keeps the middle there, keeps their lips together even as Harry isn’t responding. He squeezes harder, and Harry reacts. As a matter of instinct, Harry begins to turn his head, but Craig stays on top of him. Harry’s eyelids flutter open, and Craig, propping him up, makes the sign for water. Harry is burning up now. The crowd doesn’t understand; the crowd is still cheering. But Tariq knows. Smita knows. Harry’s parents know. Craig can see it in their eyes, in their rush to get Harry water.

  Harry is back on his feet now, wincing. He drinks some water through a straw, as Craig’s lips seal their mouths shut. But Harry’s still too hot. He needs air. He starts pulling up his shirt, exposing his skin. But it’s a T-shirt. Stupidly, he wore a T-shirt. So there’s no way to get it off.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez are at his side, asking questions.

  Is he all right?

  He signals yes. Because he knows what will happen if he signals no.

  Is he hot?

  Yes.

  Does he need his shirt off?

  Yes.

  Will he be okay without a shirt?

  Yes.

  Mrs. Ramirez heads off for a second. The crowd has now realized that something’s going on. The cheering has stopped, and the jeering can be heard behind it.

  Someone’s offering to get a fan, but Harry can’t wait. His mother comes back with a scissors and asks him if he’s sure.

  Yes.

  She hands over the scissors and he awkwardly starts cutting the back of his shirt. Right down the middle. And when it’s been bisected, the two boys choreograph its delicate removal. For the first time in twenty-four hours, Craig’s hands must sit lifeless at his side. Their lips are their only point of contact. It makes Craig feel distant, fragile.

  As soon as the shirt is off, Harry feels better. The fan, when it comes, brings more relief.

  Craig returns his hands to Harry’s shoulders, his back. The heat of his skin, the slick of his sweat. Harry moves his arm around Craig, too. He moves his hand under the back of Craig’s shirt. Skin on skin. Dizzying.

  For a moment there, Tariq thought it was over. Staring at the screen, he didn’t dare to breathe. As if holding his breath could prevent Harry’s lips from slipping from Craig’s. But we feel this connection all the time, don’t we? Our bodies don’t have to be touching to be connected to one another. Our heart races without contact. Our breath holds until the threat is gone.

  “What is it?”

  Neil walks into Peter’s bedroom and sees a deep look of concern on his face.

  Peter gestures to the screen. “It looked for a second like Harry was going to pass out. Now they’re cutting off his shirt.”

  “Who’s Harry?”

  “From the kiss.” Peter now points to one of the boys on the screen. “Harry. Haven’t you been watching?”

  “I’ve been doing other things.”

  “Well, it’s getting pretty intense.”

  Neil knows that this is the moment to tell Peter what happened with his family, how things feel a little different now. But Peter’s too focused on the boys on the screen, isn’t asking him how his morning was. And Neil is still piecing his reaction together—he doesn’t want Peter’s take on the situation until he has his own. Or at least that’s what he tells himself, to justify staying silent. The truth is, Peter will understand, but only up to a point. Peter has never had to have such a conversation with his parents. Peter has never felt like an outsider in his own house. He might claim there were moments he has. But he hasn’t really. Not from Neil’s point of view.

  “It looks like he’s rallying,” Peter says. “It’s been twenty-four hours. Only eight more to go.”

  Neil gets closer. He’s looking at the kiss, yes. But his eye naturally goes to Harry’s torso.

  In 1992, when over two hundred thousand of us were infected and over ten thousand had died, Calvin Klein launched a new ad campaign with a white rapper named Marky Mark. If you are young and you are male, most conceptions you have of your bodily ideal can be traced to those advertisements. Every Hollister model that calls out to you, every voice in your head that tells you that abs need “definition,” every ounce of the Abercrombie myth can be traced directly to Marky Mark. Whether you subscribe to these ideals or reject them, they are the unrealistic standard you must face. It’s what’s being sold to you.

  Harry’s torso is not like this. It dares to be a regular body as it is broadcast out among all the ideals. He is neither fat nor thin. There is a line of hair from his chest to his jeans. His stomach is not taut. You cannot see his abs.

  In other words, he reminds us of the way we were as teenagers, the way we were before the world set in.

  Why is Marky Mark smiling in those ads? It’s not just that he has a perfect body. No, it’s as if he knows that soon enough, our bodies will be broadcast. Soon enough, our images will enter the ether. Everyone will want to look like him, because they will feel like they are being looked at all the time.

  Harry, of course, knows he is being looked at. But what he looks like is the farthest thing from his mind. When your body starts to turn against you—when the surface value of the skin is nothing compared to the fireworks of pain in your muscles and your bones—the supposed truth of beauty falls away, because there are more important concerns to attend to.

  Believe us. We know this.

  Avery wonders why Ryan is looking at him out of the corner of his eye, why Ryan would rather watch him than watch the road. Even when friends look at Avery, a small part of him still worries they are looking for flaws, irregularities. In this, Avery isn’t all that different from anyone else. We all worry that looking at is really looking for.

  Finally, Avery can’t stand it. The look. Then a knowing smile. Then another look.

  “What?” he asks.

  This only makes Ryan smile more. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t usually like people. So when I do, part of me is really amused and the other part refuses to believe it’s happening.”

  Maybe this is why we like watching you so much. Everything is still new to you. We are long past the experience, although we witness new things all the time. But you. New is not just a fact. New can be an emotion.

  “What are we doing?” Avery asks. It is not meant as an existential question. He just wants to know what they’re doing next.

  “I figured we’d start with pancakes. Do you want pancakes?”

  “It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone would say no to pancakes.”

  So they go to the pancake house. Because it’s a small town, Avery notices Ryan checking out who else is inside before committing to a table.

  “Looking for anyone in particular?”

  Ryan smiles again. “No. Just habit, I guess.”

  “How many people are in your high school?”

  “About two hundred. You?”

  “Eighty.”

  “You must stick out. I mean, with the pink hair and all.”

  “I bet you blend right in.”


  “Trying to blend in would be like being put through a blender. I abstain.”

  Avery finds this funny. “What did you just say?”

  “I said, ‘I abstain.’ ”

  “Is that what you say when the popular kids try to get you to hang out with them? ‘I’m sorry, but I abstain from blending in. There are just too many perks to being a wallflower.’ ”

  “Yup. That’s precisely what I say. But do they stop? No. The popular kids keep bugging me. Calling. Texting. Showing up on my doorstep. Begging like dogs. I’m embarrassed for them.”

  “I know precisely how you feel.”

  To emphasize his point, Avery squeezes Ryan’s hand. It’s such an openly lame excuse to touch him, and both of them smile in acknowledgment of this.

  “Part of you is amused,” Avery says. “And part of you doesn’t believe this is happening.”

  Ryan nods. “And in the Pancake Century Diner, of all places.”

  “Well,” Avery says, “it is the Pancake Century, after all.”

  The waitress comes to take their order. Each of them thinks about pulling his hand away, but neither of them does.

  Craig thinks of pancakes. He thinks of warm maple syrup and blueberries and butter melting. He thinks of the savory smoke of bacon on his tongue. A glass of cold orange juice. He tries to conjure their taste, but taste is elusive when it comes to memory. So instead he has to rely on his memory of how they look. How they smell. How happy they make him.

  He focuses back on Harry. Harry, who is fading. Craig feels awful for thinking it, but the thought is there: If they don’t make it now, it will probably be because of Harry. Craig’s texted over his shoulder, asked him if he’s okay, and Harry keeps saying he is, keeps saying now that he’s cooled down, he’s back on track. But Craig can feel the lie throughout Harry’s body, can touch the tight muscles, can notice all the small movements Harry is making to keep himself upright, to keep himself going.

  And I was never the stronger one. Craig allows himself to say it, if only to himself. All through their relationship, Harry was the one in charge, Harry was the one who gave them direction. This wasn’t because Harry was smarter or even better at it than Craig was; it just meant more to him, to be in control. And Craig didn’t really care, so he ceded it away. He liked not being responsible all the time.

  Complacency. Craig realizes now that this was complacency. One of the reasons he liked the sound of Harry’s voice was because it meant he didn’t have to use his own. But eventually this strategy backfired. Eventually Harry realized what was happening, and didn’t feel right about it. He wanted Craig to fight a little more, but by the time Craig started fighting for them to stay together, he had already lost.

  Now he’s fighting for something different, something that feels more elemental. He’s fighting to stay standing. He’s fighting to go without food, without a bathroom. He’s fighting to keep his lips on Harry’s for seven more hours. And he’s fighting to help Harry do all of these things as well.

  It’s one of the secrets of strength: We’re so much more likely to find it in the service of others than we are to find it in service to ourselves. We have no idea why this is. It’s not just the mother who lifts the car to free her child, or the guy who shields his girlfriend when the gunman starts to fire. Those are extremes, brave extremes, which life rarely calls on us to offer. No, it is the less extreme strength—a strength that is not so much situational as it is constitutional—that we will find in order to give. How often did we see this, as we were dying? How many soft-spoken lovers turned into fierce watchdogs over our care? How many reticent parents shed that reticence to be there with us? Not all. Certainly, not everyone showed strength. Some supposedly strong people in our lives showed that their strength was actually made of straw. But so many held us up in ways they would not have held themselves. They saw us through, even as their worlds crumbled through their fingers. They kept fighting, even after we were gone. Or especially because we were gone. They kept fighting for us.

  We are gone, and maybe our spirits are gone, too, as the ones who knew us stop remembering us so often, or come to join us. But the spirit of that strength—it carries through. It is there for the taking. You just have to reach for it and find it, as Craig is doing now. He would never grasp at it for himself, not in this way. But for Harry, he will.

  Cooper, meanwhile, refuses to grasp. He refuses to hold. He refuses to feel.

  We watch him letting go, but we will not let go of him.

  He is driving without realizing he is driving. He knows there is a destination out there for him, and he is working his way toward it. In the meantime, he is taking the empty census of people who love him. He is not afraid of hurting anyone, because he doesn’t think anyone cares about him enough to be hurt. Surely, they will go through the motions. They will have their tears once he’s left. But underneath that performance of sadness, he feels their relief. They don’t want him to come back, so he won’t.

  Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He’s not even worth a lie.

  We want him to take a census of the future. We want him to consider that love does make the world bearable, but that does not make it a lie. We want him to see the time when he will feel it, truly feel it, for the first time. But the future is something he is no longer considering.

  In his mind, the future is a theory that has already been proven false.

  What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that’s never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.

  Sing us that old refrain.

  Where do you want to go?

  I don’t know—where do you want to go?

  What do you want to do?

  I don’t know—what do you want to do?

  The feed of the two boys kissing stays on in the background as Neil and Peter play video games in Neil’s room. Peter senses something is not quite right with Neil—his heart doesn’t seem into the game, and it’s the game he brought over a few days ago, desperate to make it to level thirty-two by the end of the week. Peter is afraid it’s still about the stupid text he got from Simon, or about something else that’s them-related. So he doesn’t say anything, because he knows Neil will bring it up when he’s ready to bring it up. Maybe it isn’t anything at all.

  For his part, Neil doesn’t understand why he isn’t talking to Peter, why he’s killing Russian assassins instead of telling Peter that his world has shifted. He’s waiting for Peter to ask him what’s happened, because he thinks it’s clear something’s happened, and why should he always have to be the one to point it out?

  Peter pauses the game.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  “Not really” is Neil’s reply.

  “Thirsty?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to do something else?”

  “Do you want to do something else?”

  “Are you in the throes of constipation?”

  Neil is not in the mood for this. “No.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “Sick of this game?”

  “Which game?”

  “The one you’re playing.”

  “Which one am I playing?”

  “The one on the screen right now. Balkan Bloodbath 12.”

  “Oh. No. I’m fine.”

  Here’s where Peter should say it. What’s going on?

  But instead he unpauses the game.

  “If you’re fine,” he says, “I’m fine.”

  They continue to play.

  Ryan hasn’t had t
o spend much time thinking about where to take Avery next, because already they are running out of cool places in Kindling. If they’re not on the river or at Aunt Caitlin’s or in the Pancake Century Diner, there are very few places worth exploring. The Kindling Café is the one that’s left, but that’s where everyone is. He wants Avery to meet his friends, but not yet. He still wants them to be alone together, with no one watching, no one even noticing. This is Ryan’s relationship to this town: He doesn’t really want to leave any marks, and he wants Kindling to leave as few marks as possible on him. He knows he’s been defined by this town. And, of course, the more he’s tried to resist definition, the more they’ve defined him. But this—this time with Avery—needs to exist outside definition. Or, at the very least, he and Avery need to get a chance to define it themselves.

  So he directs Avery to Mr. Footer’s, the old relic of a miniature golf course. It’s been closed for years now, but no one’s bought the land, so it sits in its abandoned state, nearly post-apocalyptic in its decay. There’s a lock on the gates, but the gates themselves have worn away in places, making it easy to come and go. At night it’s a breeding ground for stoners and crankheads, but during the day it’s graveyard quiet.

  “Where exactly are you taking me?” Avery asks. Ryan has a flash of seeing the site through his eyes, and realizes this might be a mistake. But he doesn’t want to turn back now.

  He tells Avery to park in front. “When I was a kid,” he explains, “this place was the best place around. Like, if you were really good and did all your chores, Mom and Dad would take you here. You’d play all the mini golf you could, and then there’d be ice cream and video games in the hut over there after.”

  Avery takes it all in. “So what happened?”