How They Met, and Other Stories(15)
Author: David Levithan

I wish I could say that I hurled a response right back at him. But mostly, I was stunned. To have such a blast directed at me. To be yelled at.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t figure out what to do.

Then the door opened, and Thom said, “Stop it. Stop it right now.”

Now Mr. Wright and I had something in common—disbelief. But even though I had disbelief, I also had faith. In Thom.

“If you say one more word, I’m going to scream,” he said to his father. “I don’t give a shit what you say to me, but you leave Ian out of it, okay? You’re being a total ass**le, and that’s not okay.”

Mr. Wright started to yell. But it was empty yelling. Desperate yelling, mostly focusing on Thom’s foul language. While he yelled, Thom came over to me and took my hand. I stood up and together we faced his father. And his father fell silent. And his father began to cry.

As if the world had ended.

And it had, in a way.

I could feel Thom shaking, the tremors of that world exploding. As we stood there. As we watched. As we broke free from limbo.

And I wanted to say, All you really need to get to know me is to know that I love your son. And if you get to know your son, you will know what that means.

But the words were no longer mine to say.

Except here. I am writing this to let you know why it is likely that you received a very harsh alumni interview report about me. I’m hoping my campus interview will provide a contrast. (Thom and I will be heading up there next week.) I do not hold it against your university that a person like Mr. Wright should have received such a poor education. I understand those were different times then, and I am glad these are different times now.

It is never easy to have a college interview with your closeted boyfriend’s father. It is never easy, I’m sure, to conduct a college interview with your closeted son’s boyfriend. And, I am positive, it is least easy of all to be the boy in the hallway, listening in.

But if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this:

It’s not the easy things that let you get to know a person.

Know, and love.

THE GOOD WITCH

It was a mistake from the start. I see that now, and the really twisted thing is that I saw it then. But once you utter the words “Will you go to the prom with me?” there’s no way back. The wheels have left the ground and you’re officially over the cliff.

I asked Sally Huston to go to the prom because I was bored in bio class. There’s no other way to explain it. I was bored…she was sitting next to me…I got to thinking…and that was that. I wasn’t dating anyone—I’d already gone out with this girl Nina for like two years, and once that was over I thought I could coast until college. I didn’t realize I was g*y yet, so it wasn’t like I was taking a boy to the prom. I had all these friends-who-were-girls, but I knew that if I asked one of them to the prom, the other six would be bitter. So that left me looking for someone fringe, someone safe, someone who wouldn’t make a big deal about it. Sally and I passed notes all the time, mostly because the alternative was paying attention in class. I knew she wasn’t dating anyone, since she’d broken up with this guy Mark at about the same time I’d broken up with Nina. So I just put it in a note—Hey, wanna go to prom? I don’t even think I bothered to fold it. But the way she reacted, you would’ve thought I’d sent it over on a velvet pillow. Her eyes lit up the moment she saw the sentence. I mean, I wasn’t actually watching as she read the note. But the next time I looked over, her eyes were still lit. She wrote back—Are you sure? And this time I didn’t even bother writing it down. I just said, “Of course I am,” real low so the teacher wouldn’t hear. I was relieved to have the whole thing over with.

By the time lunch hit, everyone knew. I could tell because now I had seven friends-who-were-girls pissed at me, each in her own special way.

“It’s no big deal,” I said.

“You better shut up, because you’re only going to make it worse,” my friend Theresa warned me.

“But I thought you guys liked Sally,” I said.

“That is so not the point,” Theresa replied—I think she actually sighed when she said it.

There were only about three weeks to go before prom, which meant the seven of them had to grab any available guy to be their dates. Most of them ended up with juniors—and not the kind of juniors who act like they’re already seniors, more the kind that you can never remember whether they’re a sophomore or a junior or even a freshman. It was clear that the girls would be the ones to buy the corsages and the boutonnieres. And they were not going to ask me to come along when they did.

Sally was cool about the whole thing, at least at first. Most of our conversations about it happened in written form, while the respiratory system was being explained. The limo logistics, the cummerbund/gown coordination—we figured everything out. If asked, we said we were going as friends.

The girls in my group circled their limos and made their plans without me. I didn’t have any real guy friends to speak of—or, at least, to speak to—so Sally and I ended up getting a limo by ourselves. The price of everything blew my mind, but Sally was good about splitting it. She said she knew it was stupid to get a limo when both of us had cars, but she thought it wouldn’t be prom without one.

The day of the prom, the limo picked me up first. I was wearing my dad’s tux, feeling massively uncomfortable but ready to hang out and have a good time. I rode over to her house with her corsage next to me in its plastic deli container, the big-ass ninja pins stuck through the stems. As I was walking up Sally’s front steps, I felt like something out of a syndicated sitcom, stuck in a lost episode of The Brady Bunch. Sure enough, her dad opened the door and gave me a dad handshake. Her mom fluttered around like she was the one going to the prom. Sally was nowhere in sight. I waited in the front hall, mustering charm for the gushing parents. Then I heard the creak of floorboards. I looked up, and Sally’s dress appeared at the top of the stairs, with her body somewhere in it.

She looked like Glinda the Good Witch. There’s no other way to describe it. The description hit immediately—I mean, I explicitly thought, Holy shit, she looks like Glinda the Good Witch. And there was no letting go of it. I have never in my life seen so much pink. It was poofing everywhere. She had to turn slightly to the side to get down the stairs.

This was a girl I’d only seen in jeans before. A girl who used words like f**kbucket in her notes to me. A girl who I knew listened to Led Zeppelin.