How They Met, and Other Stories(29)
Author: David Levithan

Too quickly, we were done. I knew my parents were waiting. I knew I still had packing to do. But I didn’t know how to say good-bye.

We just sat there. Then Seth laughed and said, “Look at us!” He said he was sure we’d meet again. He’d come back home and there I’d be, at table seven (I’d never known it was table seven), and we’d talk just like we’d always talked. I went to pay, but he said it was on the house. Then he said, “One sec” and ran back to the kitchen. When he returned, he was holding a neatly folded napkin. This time he had drawn something for me. It was a drawing of a pizza box. In the center he’d sketched a picture of me. And instead of You’ve Tried the Rest, Now Try the Best, he’d written something else. It said, You’re Not Like the Rest—You’re the Best.

I knew I was going to cry. I thanked him and accepted his hug without once thinking it could be a kiss. He wished me luck at camp. I wished him luck at college. The bell rang again as I left. Our last words were keep in touch.

I still have that drawing. Whenever I look at it, it makes me happy. That’s the moral of the story. That’s it.

LOST SOMETIMES

His name was Dutch. We weren’t boyfriends, but we screwed all over the place. I’m serious—you name the place, odds are we screwed there. The gym. Burger King. His grandmother’s house. We couldn’t stop. We decided to go to the prom together to make a statement, and also to see if we could screw there, too.

There were a couple of other g*y kids in our school—it was a big school—but all of the rest of them were, like, sensitive. With Dutch, though, everything was exactly what it was. We first hooked up at this Christmas party, senior year. You know, the kind you have with your friends a few days before everyone has to go stick it out with their parents. Anyway, the eggnog was ass-knocking. I kinda knew Dutch, but I had no idea what his story was. Me, I was a big flamer. In middle school, they wanted to cast a girl as Peter Pan but decided to cast me instead. No real mystery there.

So it got to be about three in the morning and Dutch walked over and told me I was a little devil. I told him that he was a little devil, too. And sure enough, that’s all it took for us to start making out in Kylie Peterson’s little sister’s bedroom. I mean, her stuffed animals were on the bed, but we didn’t care. I’d kissed guys before, but it had never been so voracious. I loved it. We didn’t go all the way—we figured there weren’t any Trojans hidden in the My Little Ponies, if you know what I mean—but it was clear we were already on the way to all the way.

It was a game. I mean, don’t get me wrong—it was serious. But it was also a game. I’d say we screwed on our third date, but we didn’t go on dates. Dates makes it sound like dinner and candlelight were the point. But the point was sex. The usual ways and places first, then getting trickier. We didn’t want to get caught, but we wanted to come this close to getting caught. We wanted to see how far we could go before we got the shit kicked out of us. Sometimes we’d pass each other in the halls—arranging it so we’d walk by each other between every period, but not saying a word, just giving each other that I’m going to have you soon stare. And other times he would grab me right there by my locker and thrust his mouth onto mine, and we’d be tonguing it up for everyone to see. It was so screwed up, because the thing that made us the most powerless also gave us such power. We could make them turn away. We could bother them and challenge them and mess them up. You think people are afraid of two boys in love? To hell with that. What people are really afraid of is two boys screwing. And even though we weren’t about to drop trou in the halls, we were going to let them know we were doing it whenever we could. We always played it safe, condom-wise. But location-wise? Safety was not the first concern.

The first-floor boys’ room. The showers of the locker room when everyone was in class and we were skipping. The couch in the faculty lounge. The boiler room. The second-floor boys’ room. The lighting room in the auditorium, against the movie projector. Room 216, second lunch block. The roof of the cafeteria when everyone else was under us, chattering. The art room, with paints. The third-floor girls’ room. The 400 aisle of the library.

We were only caught twice. Once I said I was helping to look for his contact lens, which must have fallen on his fly. The other time the art teacher found us. I thought he’d been watching for a while before letting us know he was there, but Dutch said his shock was real. He didn’t say a word to us. Just saw what was going on, turned red, and left.

We weren’t exactly the popular kids. But we were damn popular with the unpopular kids. The girls especially, this army of goth older sisters—they didn’t want to hear about us having sex, but they admired our spirit. We weren’t the prom types, but as the time approached, Dutch said to me, “Wouldn’t it be cool to screw at the prom?” and I said, “Yeah, I guess it would.” I kinda wanted to go anyway, but I wouldn’t’ve told him that. I didn’t want him to think I was taking anything too seriously. He’d already told me we were going to split up at the end of the year, because in college there would be new dicks to play with. He said it like he was joking, but you can’t tell a joke like that without meaning it at least a little.

We weren’t going to spend any money on the prom or anything cheesy like that. No limo, no tuxes, no tickets. We were just going to show up and do it our own way. While other couples were talking about flowers and cummerbunds, Dutch was telling me to not wear button-fly pants, “for easy access.” That night while biting his neck, I drew blood.

The prom was at some hotel, which made it very easy to crash. As everyone was pulling up to the front door in their gowns and their stretches, like it was the movie premiere of their new life, Dutch and I were smoking with some busboys by the service entrance. He was flirting, I was nervous, and when the pack was finished, the busboys pointed the way to the ballroom.

After we slipped in, I looked around the room and felt strange. It wasn’t that it was beautiful—it was just a hotel ballroom, with round tableclothed tables and white balloons with our class year printed in orange and blue, our school colors. But seeing it made me feel…sentimental, I guess. I had been to proms before, but this was the one that was supposed to be mine. This was a memory I was supposed to be having.

As I looked around at my classmates all dressed up, Dutch was scouting out a place to screw. He didn’t want to start in the men’s room, because that would be too obvious a choice. I insisted that going under one of the tables was a bad idea, since people would be sitting down soon, and then we’d be trapped. We walked back into the reception area. People didn’t seem surprised to see us, or to see that we hadn’t dressed up. They weren’t disappointed in us, because their expectations had never been that high to begin with. It bothered me.