The Full Spectrum Page 14

  At the movie I was in the middle, Ryan to my left and Courtney to my right. Between jumping at the scary parts and whispering predicted endings with Courtney, I kept looking at Ryan's hand. It was just perched on the armrest, long fingers delicately planted like a bird on a telephone wire. I felt funny around him—that's the only way to say it. I'd never had a real guy crush before, or hadn't let myself—at least not with a real, live person who wasn't miles away because we'd met only on the Internet. I liked being around him, after just that short time. I liked his aura of coolness, felt I could bask in it and maybe soak it up, get a nice tan of confidence to block out my usual worried self.

  Wandering around at Barnes & Noble, waiting for our ride, Courtney said that Ryan had something to tell me. They were both laughing a lot and exchanging odd glances. My brain did that thing it always seems to do at crucial moments, completely checking out and leaving my body to stupidly perform on its own. I never had the conscious thought that Ryan was gay, but of course I wasn't surprised when he handed me the note, written with a pen borrowed from a bewildered cashier. Having someone else be gay made it suddenly acceptable. “Me, too,” I said, and we all kept laughing.

  That night I talked to Courtney online. My brain was doing that thing again. “So,” I IM'd her, “what's Ryan's screen name?” She asked if I liked him. I said of course not—he was just funny and stuff, another fun person to chat with.

  Naturally, I became completely infatuated. Ryan and I started e-mailing each other, gooey notes with awkward lines about how he wished I was there on the couch with him, or me pointing out that I'd never been kissed, just to get him to say “You could practice on me.” Checking my e-mail during second period, while I was supposed to be working on the school Web page, I was happy for the first time in ages, genuinely happy.

  That lasted about a week.

  God popped up. He has a habit of doing that, just when things are getting good. I heard the voice of Jesus himself, telling me how wrong this was. I shouldn't be having e-mails like this. I shouldn't be with a guy at all. If I didn't get right with God, I knew the horrible feeling in my stomach would never go away. I asked Ryan if he believed in God and he said, “Fuck God. Who would believe in someone so angry, someone who wants to send people to hell?” Words like that scared me even more than my burgeoning homosexuality. He dared to vocalize the doubts I squashed, and that made him dangerous. I had to break it off.

  One year later, all religion abandoned, outed to most of my friends and frustrated that the only gay guy in my grade was still so obnoxious, I looked up Ryan again. We'd talked some, in the intervening months, but only for a few brief phases, a couple of weeks here and there. This time I asked Ryan if he wanted to go see a movie.

  My parents didn't really understand. “Ryan who?” they asked when I begged them to drop me off at the theater. I tried to jog their memories: “You gave him a ride once, remember?” They gave the parental equivalent of a “whatever” and dropped me off, happy that I was at least getting out of the house. I waited awkwardly, leaning against a column, hands burrowed deep in my pockets. Then I looked over, and there he was—my Ryan, mostly the same after a year. I had picked out my clothes carefully, choosing streaked jeans and one of the tighter preppy shirts in my closet; Ryan never cared what he wore and stood in a bland jacket and wind pants. His gray T-shirt didn't even have a logo on it, much less some mildly subversive phrase thought up by the marketing wunderkinds at Abercrombie & Fitch.

  We said hey.

  The rest of it is all very disjointed. We ended up in the theater— we were supposed to be seeing some lame comedy. It started with hand-holding. Then him showing me the silver charm bracelet his friend Natalie had given him, which I grabbed and challenged him to get back. All innocent and flirty, until I slid the bracelet across my crotch, daring him with my eyes to grab for it now.

  Next thing I know we're on the floor in the unisex bathroom, door locked and lights out, fumbling all over each other. At one point on top of me, he began ramming his tongue in my mouth and swirling it around. When I started laughing, he admitted, in the same casual tone with which he'd later dump me, that he didn't know what the hell he was doing either. I didn't need the lights on to see his characteristic shoulder shrug.

  Afterward we slid against the wall of the theater's small arcade, looking at each other and vaguely smiling, miles apart, still processing. We ended the night simply saying goodbye. No one said we were going out; he didn't give me his letter jacket and ask to go steady. But all of a sudden we talked on the phone every day and he was at my house every weekend. Suddenly we were both Committed and Very Serious, always having chats about the state of our Relationship. Before this, my problem had been just allowing myself to have a boyfriend—I never realized how difficult it would be to maintain.

  Every few nights some new conflict arose. For a while he decided that he was bi and maybe liked girls. Another night he worried that he was in love with an online friend instead of me. Often he returned to the whole “I-can't-care-about-someone-because-I'll-just-end-up-moving-like-I-always-do” argument. I didn't help matters much, worrying each day that while he was at school, all the girls who constantly had crushes on him would finally win him over. Our online chats were tainted with my knowledge that while he talked to me, he could also be chatting with Zach, the classy New Yorker who shared Ryan's love affair with music like I never could. Just as one conflict subsided another one would pop up, rearing its ugly head like a nightmarish game of relationship whack-a-mole.

  Not to say there weren't sweet times: finding his violin performances on my voice mail, or rare blissful moments when we would both forget that we could fall apart at any second and actually enjoy each other, lounging around watching movies or playing on the computer. And we had our share of adventures. Once we skinnydipped in the neighborhood pool, ignoring the fact that it was the middle of the day and the windows of the surrounding houses were open. Another time we nearly gave an old security guard a heart attack when we emerged from a golf course bathroom together late one night as the guard was trying to lock everything up. We ran away, hearts pounding, checking over our shoulders for his golf cart. And, of course, there was the time my parents came home from work unexpectedly for lunch and Ryan had to hide under the bed. I smuggled him some food and a 7UP, then forgot it was lying there. When my mother asked about the errant can lying on the floor, I had to make up some ridiculous story explaining why I wanted to sit in the corner and drink a soda, squeezed between the bookcase and the bed. When she bent over out of habit to pick up a dirty sock lying dangerously near the gap below the bed, I leapt to the floor, shouting that I would get it, so she wouldn't see his silhouette among the old boxes and stray books.

  But the arguments never stopped. We were like a really boring soap opera—constant melodrama without any exciting twists; we had no evil twins or baby abductions to keep our relationship from cancellation. We were a bitter married couple with impending divorce overshadowing our every moment, and we didn't even have the legal process or custody battles to slow things down. So I guess it was easy for him, calling me that day, to break up.

  At first I couldn't believe him—we'd “broken up” several times before, so how was this different? And my brain did that thing again, deciding that it would be a good idea for us to do something as friends, right that second, instead of staying home and giving myself time to process.

  When I got to his house to pick him up, there he was, fresh out of the shower and wearing a towel, running late as usual. Empty house, semi-naked boyfriend—usually the towel would have gone flying. But this time he shut the door while he changed, and my defense mechanism began to crack. Once he emerged from his room, I kept hugging him, my words saying that I just wanted hugs to say goodbye, but I wasn't thinking or feeling a thing, just wrapping my arms around him with no plan to let go.

  On the car ride to the theater, we didn't hold hands. I didn't buy his ticket. And while standing in line in the wai
t to get seated, our casual conversation lacked any emotion. But it still wouldn't hit me. Letting myself even have this relationship, then all the stress of keeping it, had been a long process, and this sudden ending just would not compute.

  He sat to my left again, only this time I didn't have Courtney to turn to on my right. Staring firmly at the screen, I resolved that this wasn't over. I put my hand on Ryan's leg, testing. Held it there and waited. He didn't budge. We both just watched the movie. Earlier was just a misunderstanding, I told myself, and slowly I slid my hand into his.

  He pulled back and said, “Josh …”

  It was our first movie alone together, all over again, only in reverse: my hand reaching out, not his, followed not by happy images but shards of painful memory. I know at one point that I took his keys, the only sharp thing I could find, and tried to cut myself— driven by instinct, a trapped animal trying to bite off its own leg in a struggle to escape. He didn't even stay, not wanting to deal with me any longer. He went to the bathroom. I found myself alone in this crowded theater, halfheartedly attempting suicide, when I suddenly decided I would not let Ryan's slinking away be the end of the only first love I would ever get.

  So I followed him to the bathroom, finding him at a urinal, and closed myself in a stall. We peed awkwardly among the unaware men around us, so much unsaid. At the sink, trying to ignore others' curious glances, I convinced him that we just needed to go back to the movie, that I'd be fine.

  Naturally, I ended up on the floor, just inside the screening room in the little hallway leading up to the seats, crying and kicking like I was auditioning for The Exorcist. “Get hold of yourself,” Ryan said, sounding angrier than I had ever heard him. I rattled off a list of apologies but none of it made any difference. Ryan asked me then, as he would again and again, what had he done? How did he do anything to cause this break-up? I tried to explain that I cared about him more than he ever cared about me, but he didn't understand. He just sat there, aloof as always, as much a stranger to me as when we first met, sitting in the pickup more than a year earlier.

  I asked him if there was someone else, and he admitted that he did like another guy. Later, I found out that my replacement was Stuart, a kid I'd gone to elementary school with. Stuart had thick glasses and a nasal voice, and his mom wouldn't let him go to camp with the rest of the fifth graders. “He's gentle and sweet,” Ryan answered each time I would ask what Stuart had that I lacked. I tried to tell myself that what Ryan really wanted was just someone passive who wouldn't expect anything from him, but this was too hard to believe. Ryan had chosen someone else over me, so of course I had to have done something wrong.

  Crying is hardly ever the beautiful single-tear-falling as movies would lead you to believe—it's messy and noisy. Still at the theater, coughing and wiping snot from my nose, I called Ryan's mom, Maggie, who I'd actually been pretty close to. She answered and from the voices in the background I could tell she was at a party somewhere. “Hi,” I forced out, in between chokes and gasps. “Just wanted to say bye, and thanks for being so supportive of us, and … say bye to Billy for me, because he was always so nice to me.” Ryan's younger brother had always made me fit in, and the thought of losing him along with Ryan sent more shock waves of grief through my body. Maggie said that she was sorry and asked if I was going to be okay, and told me to not do anything drastic, knowing how dramatic I could get. I understood what she was saying: Don't kill yourself over my son. Don't kill yourself over him, even though he meant more to you than any other human ever has, even though you fought past a rocky beginning and all sorts of fights and you tried so hard to make it work, so sure that you'd be together forever, soul mates who met as teenagers like your parents did. Don't kill yourself, because I don't want that on my conscience, and neither does he.

  Ryan didn't say anything throughout my brief conversation with her. I called my mom next, just asking if she could come, unable to explain why. Confused and sounding slightly irritated, she said that she was on her way. I told Ryan that I would never see him again, and walked off. Of course, we saw each other seconds later, outside the theater, standing on opposite ends as we waited, people streaming in and out, oblivious.

  Both my parents were in the car to get me, which only happened when they were worried. I climbed into the back, still crying, barely able to explain. “I don't understand,” my mother said. “If he was going to break up with you, why did he make us drive you to the movies first?”

  I couldn't explain my stupidity, my insane thought that somehow, if we were together, Ryan would change his mind. That my brain had done that thing again.

  Ryan was my first boyfriend. Although I managed, for better or for worse, to fast-forward through the early stages, nothing could make the ending unfold in anything other than wrenching slow motion. While he went on to date Stuart, I staggered through a series of unsuccessful flirtations and months of misery, often regretting Ryan as much as longing for him. Maybe Jesus had been right all along.

  A Story Called “Her”

  by Alison Young

  It is warm. Her hands are everywhere on me, on my thighs, breasts, shoulders. She laughs softly, and it echoes through the room. I'm not sure where we are, but it's a bed, and the sheets smell like lavender. She leans closer and kisses me, fingers and palm slipping between my legs.

  I push her on her back, and now I can see that the sheets are pale blue, reflecting the lightest shade in her eyes. She's laughing again, and her eyes twinkle when she does that. I smile sheepishly, and my heart flips when she smiles back.

  “I love you, Kitty,” I whisper and kiss her again.

  I wake up sweaty, my thighs sticky. The room is too warm—my fan had cut off sometime during the night, but I hadn't kicked off my blankets.

  I dreamed again.

  I dreamed about her again.

  Frustrated with myself, I slide out of bed before the alarm goes off. The floor is relievingly cool against my feet, tendrils of cold air and sanity creeping up my legs like vines, finally reaching my brain. Clothes are more of a bother than they are worth, but I have to be dressed to go to class, so I pull on jeans and a T-shirt. As I brush my hair—tangled from tossing and turning—I hope that class will help drown out her face smiling up at me and the sounds of her groaning my name. I know, though, that it won't.

  When the professor lets us out early, I am not sure if I'm angry or pleased. Being let out early means permission for my mind to wander, permission to daydream about her.

  Lunch is quiet, with Dylan and Lysi.

  “You know Kitty? My best friend in Australia? I'm in love with her.”

  They look at me, more surprised that I've suddenly started spilling out my innermost secrets over cheeseburgers from the dining hall than the actual contents. Dylan hugs me—his solution to many situations is a hug—and Lysi watches me for a moment, silent.

  Then she smiles gently. “We know.” Left unspoken is that they've been waiting for me to figure it out. I smile helplessly back. “You should tell her.” The smile falters.

  It's late that evening, and I am furiously typing at the computer. I don't realize until halfway through writing the piece I'm so fervently working on that I'm crying harsh, angry tears. Why did I have to fall in love with her? Why does it have to be so hopeless? Why does she have to live on the other side of the damn globe?

  More importantly, why can't I work up the courage to tell her in person?

  I think it's the last part that's making me cry, but I'm writing anyway, typing without planning or outlining or anything good writers do, just an outpouring of feelings in little black and white pixels on the screen. Even if I finish the piece, I don't know if I have the courage to put it online where she could see it, read it, and know. I am far too paranoid to open myself up like this, but the pressure of holding in these feelings every time we speak is driving me insane. For once, I'm glad we are separated by a computer screen, or I would have pushed her against a wall and kissed her a long time ago. I'
m sure it would have been disastrous.

  I see Sarah get online, and rush to instant-message her. I need confidence. We talk for a while, and then …

  me (9:10:18 PM): Him: “Marry me, Sarah. Make me the happiest man on earth!” You: “Llama.”

  me (9:10:31 PM): You: “Erm … I mean, yes. Sorry.”

  Sarah (9:11:49 PM): ∗giggles!∗

  Sarah (9:11:54 PM): Should I send out the invitations already?

  Sarah (9:11:55 PM): hehe

  me (9:12:02 PM): Sure

  me (9:12:10 PM): And you should name your kids Llama and Monkey

  me (9:13:22 PM): ∗swallows∗ Asenath Caitlìn Ryan-Young, Celia Alison Ryan-Young, and Mathin [still debating a middle name but I want Kavanagh] Ryan-Young.

  Sarah (9:13:49 PM): Aw, how adorable

  me (9:13:52 PM): I'm not sure how we will afford 3 rounds of in vitro, but we'll make do.

  Sarah (9:14:05 PM): ∗grin∗

  me (9:16:56 PM): I don't think you realize that I'm dead serious.

  Sarah (9:17:26 PM): and what does Kitty say?

  me (9:18:17 PM): For now? Yes. But that could be us just joking. I don't know. ∗sigh∗ We don't talk about it, or who it involves. It's just acknowledged.

  Sarah (9:19:58 PM): ∗hug∗ I still think you should just give it time, since those dreams could mean any a number of things.

  me (9:20:48 PM): I love her. I know it and it's really brought a new level of serenity and peacefulness to my over-fraught brain.