The Boy I Love, page 12
“You know the whole thing about this new Lutheran church?” Tim said. “And that website and everything? It’s saying there’s no such thing as being gay, that all you have to do is decide to like girls. They’ve got this quote on there, saying, ‘God loves gays but hates a perverted lifestyle.’ It’s not like I never tried—hell—I went out with Caroline Jones a whole year.”
I really wanted to ask how far it had gone but couldn’t quite figure out how to word it, never mind that it was none of my business. Tim said, “All the time I was going out with Caroline I tried my hardest to like her in the ways I was supposed to. But I couldn’t do it. Meanwhile she liked me just the way she should, and it just seemed so unfair. Wrong to me. Doesn’t it seem wrong to you?”
“It does,” I said, wishing he would stop asking me that. “You shouldn’t have to lie about how you feel or who you are.”
Tim speared a piece of the fried okra we’d ordered. “But I am lying about it,” he said. “I’m lying about it to everyone except you. And that’s how they want me to live my whole entire life. They want me to marry some unsuspecting Lutheran girl and sit across the table from her every day of my life, sleep with her every night of my life, pretending I like her instead of someone else. Do you think that’s right?”
“You know I don’t,” I said.
Tim smiled. But lately I had started to notice how his smiles were not so convincing anymore. The world had started to chip away at his natural cheerfulness. I wished there were something I could do besides listen. It was very weird to want two different things, but I had to admit I did. I wanted Tim not to be gay, so he could fall in love with me. And I also wanted the world to not mind that he was gay, so he could stop hurting so bad all the time. These two wishes sure seemed opposite from each other, and yet I went ahead and wished them both.
* * *
The next Monday I had another appointment with James to look at my hand. This time Mom came in with me. By now it had pretty much healed, though he said I would always have a big red scar in the middle of my palm. “I guess it’s not the worst place to have a scar,” I told him.
James, who saw all kinds of terrible scars and burns every day of his life, nodded. He said, “It may not seem like it, Wren, but you were lucky. Drinking and bonfires are a bad combination.”
I reminded James, “I wasn’t drinking.”
“But the girl who bumped into you was,” he said. He told us about a girl he’d treated last year who fell into a bonfire and had her hair catch on fire. It lit up and scarred both sides of her face. Hearing this, my mother put her hand over her heart and breathed in real hard. It seemed like she overreacted to everything these days. Poor Mom.
“Your fingers look good,” James said. “You can probably go back to playing guitar again.”
Mom perked up at this. “Oh, good,” she said. “I’ll call Ry.”
“Maybe I’ll just pick it up at home for a bit,” I said. “See how it feels.”
“Okay,” Mom said. I could tell she felt a little relieved at one less thing to pay for.
On the drive back to school, for no good reason, I thought about the conversation Tim and I had had at lunch on Saturday. And I couldn’t help but wonder, with a little ball of fear forming in my gut, that maybe it wasn’t just the church that had Tim thinking about being gay in practice versus gay in theory. Maybe he had started liking somebody. The idea made my heart do that inside-out thing again. At the same time I remembered his face in the library, and him saying he wanted to be dead and sounding like he meant it. I knew I couldn’t keep Tim all to myself forever. Not when I wasn’t enough to make him sure he wanted to keep on living.
* * *
“It wouldn’t matter if I did like somebody,” Tim said, because like the tactless idiot I am, I blurted out my whole thought process later that afternoon when we went for a horseback ride. It occurred to me in that moment that Tim and I talked about everything in the world except for how I felt about him. I wondered if he knew, if he could tell. The last thing in the world I wanted was him feeling like there was one more person in his life who expected him to be different than he was.
I’d put Tim on Sombero, who wasn’t the calmest horse in the world, but my mom had trained him so well I thought it would be okay. It was a teensy bit cold, particularly since neither of us had worn our coats, but I didn’t mind. The air felt crisp and clean, and Tim was real agreeable whenever I told him to hold his reins looser or put his heels down.
“Of course it would matter if you liked somebody,” I said.
“No,” Tim disagreed. “There’s no way in hell I’d do anything about liking another guy while I’m living in Williamsport, North Carolina.”
I reached down and petted Pandora. What Tim said made me feel relieved and worried all at the same time.
“Maybe I’ll just be a priest or something,” he added. “And just never have any kind of sex at all.”
“But then you’d have to be Catholic,” I said, as if that were the only problem with the priest plan.
“Can’t be any worse than being Lutheran,” Tim said. “As it turns out.”
Sombrero stopped walking for no good reason. Tim pressed his heels in real gentle, just like a natural. His posture looked so good, you’d think he’d ridden a horse every day of his life. I thought what a great athlete he was, and how he’d already decided not to play baseball in the spring. And I realized I almost never saw Tim happy anymore, except for when he was up on the stage.
All through Finian’s Rainbow, Og has this huge crush on Sharon, the main girl. But he also kind of likes Susan, coincidentally played by Caroline Jones. He sings this funny song called “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love.” In the end he sings this funny line, “For Sharon I’m carin’, but Susan I’m choosin’, I’m faithful to whos’n is here.”
It was a good solution for Og, but choosing between two girls in a musical comedy is just not the same as choosing between girls and guys in your real life. Seeing the expression on Tim’s face, I wondered how anyone in the world could think it was.
* * *
“You know,” I said to my parents at dinner that night. “I’ve been thinking about homosexuality.”
The three of us sat in the kitchen. Mom had heated up a Mrs. Budd’s chicken potpie and I’d made a tossed salad, making the dressing I’d invented, with soy sauce because vinegar upset Dad’s stomach. My parents looked at each other in a way I hadn’t seen in a good long while. Like they’d had the same reaction to something and wanted to check in with each other.
“Have you,” Dad said.
“I saw this website,” I said, “that said all this stuff about homosexuality being a sin. And how it was a choice. But you know, if you think about other sins, like drinking and premarital sex and all that. Well, those are things that are naturally tempting to everybody. So, if you think that homosexuality is so naturally tempting that it needs resisting, well, you must be a homosexual yourself. So probably all those people who think gays are bad are just really gay themselves.”
Mom laughed. “I’ve had that same thought, Wren.”
Dad put down his fork and said, “It’s just ignorant people looking for excuses to be hateful. That’s all.” He picked up his fork to start eating again, then paused. “Why were you looking at an antigay website, anyway?”
“Tim showed it to me,” I said. “His church sent it to him. They’re mad because gay people are allowed to be ministers.”
Dad pushed his plate away like something very serious had happened. He said, in his sternest voice, “So is Tim trying to tell you that it’s wrong to be gay?”
My father’s face looked electric and somber at the same time, like a serious line had just been crossed. And I felt a surge of love. At the same time it seemed unfair that my parents felt this way when I didn’t even need them to. It was hard to know what to say. In that moment I sure didn’t feel like lying.
Just like in the old days—with her horses, and with Daisy, and with a hundred other things too—it was my mom who saved the day. “Joe,” she said. “Tim doesn’t think it’s wrong to be gay. He doesn’t think that at all. Does he, Wren?” I could tell from her face, looking all calm and understanding. All this time I wondered why she didn’t know, she did know. She just knew better than to say anything.
“No, ma’am,” I said. Being from the North, my mother doesn’t usually expect me to call her ma’am. But in that moment I wanted to do some little thing that showed how much I respected her. “He sure doesn’t think it’s wrong to be gay.”
“We get it,” Mom said. “You don’t need to say another word.”
And everyone went back to eating.
* * *
Meanwhile, Allie wanted nothing to do with me. She started hanging out with a couple of kids who used to go to Cutty River, a girl named Ginny and also Jesse Gill. Part of me hoped Tim would notice that Allie was friends with Jesse, which would prove she was trustworthy and could be told the truth about us. Another, less generous part of me wanted things to continue exactly as they were, me with Tim—everyone including Allie thinking we were a couple—and Allie off with her new friends.
“I ran into Allie’s mother today,” Mom said to me one afternoon. We were in the barn, forking fresh hay into the stalls. Mom had adopted out two more horses, and I almost hated being in the barn as it emptied out one by one. At the same time I made myself go out there at least once a day, to make sure Pandora was still right where she belonged. I shoveled the last forkful of straw into her stall, then climbed in with her. I wrapped my arms around her neck and buried my face in her mane. Obviously Mom wanted to talk about Allie. If she’d wanted to talk about her mother, she would have just called her Julia.
Mom stuck her head into the stall and said, “She says Allie’s been having a really hard time at Williamsport.”
“Well,” I said, “I haven’t been seeing much of her these days.”
“She said that, too.”
“Mom,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve deserted her or anything.” Then I felt super guilty saying that, because I guess I had deserted her.
“I know that, honey. It’s just, things have been going well for you. Have you thought about that? You’ve made new friends, you’ve got Tim. You’ve got a part in the play. And for Allie, nothing has gone the way she imagined it. She feels lost.”
I told Mom how Allie had acted when she found out about the farm.
“Maybe you just took her by surprise,” Mom said. “People don’t always say exactly the right thing when they hear bad news, you know. Especially fifteen-year-old people.”
Pandora let out a soft nicker, like she agreed with Mom. I lifted up my face. “So what do you think I should do?”
“You should give her another chance,” Mom said. “Obvi.”
I rolled my eyes at Mom’s attempt to be one of the girls, and she laughed. As if I would ever take her advice on how to handle my friends.
* * *
“Mom says I should give you another chance.”
This might not have been the most tactful lead-in. Allie looked up from where she sat on the curb waiting for her bus—the early bus, since she didn’t have an after-school activity. I figured I could get to rehearsal a little late. Our performance was coming up in just one week, so we’d been running straight through the play, and my song didn’t come on till toward the end of Act 1.
“Funny,” Allie said. She had a book open in her lap and looked back down at it instead of at me. “My mom says the same thing about you.”
I sighed and sat next to her. She tapped her pencil on her book, like she felt impatient for me to leave. “Well,” I said, “maybe we should both listen. We’ve been friends a long time, you know. And I’m really sorry you’re having such a hard time.”
At this her head shot up. She had her hair in a ponytail and had wiped the makeup off her face, so she looked more like the old Allie than I’d seen her in a long time. Not to sound like my dad, but she looked so much better this way. I wished she’d stop messing herself up with all that extra effort.
“Who says I’m having a hard time?” she said. “I’m not having a hard time at all. Things are great. Really great. I’m so glad to be rid of Devon. And Ginny is a much cooler girl than I ever realized. She cracks me up every day. Jesse, too. And . . .” She started tapping her pencil again, and I could tell she was racking her brain for something else that was great.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m glad you’re not having a hard time.”
“Thanks,” she said. “So. Have you figured out where you’re going to move?”
I stared at her for a minute. Her face looked tense and empty. If she cared about me at all, if she had any idea of what my family was going through, you sure couldn’t see it from the way she acted.
“No,” I said. “We haven’t figured out where we’re going to move. But thanks so much for asking.” The bus pulled up with a great wheezing and hissing of brakes. Allie snapped her book shut and shoved it into her book bag.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks so much for forgiving me. I really feel better now.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
We both stood up, and Allie marched past me. I watched her get onto the bus and thought about standing there until it pulled away, but what was the point? The only thing I could do to make Allie like me again was prove that Tim was not my boyfriend, and at this point that might not even do any good. And honestly, I couldn’t think what she could do to make me feel better about her and the fact that she would dump me forever over a boy she’d barely ever spoken to. Which as far as I was concerned was just the beginning of things she’d done wrong. I decided then and there I was going to stop trying.
A small flock of Canada geese who couldn’t be bothered migrating squawked as I walked past the retention pond. I thought of the old Allie, and all the fun times we’d had, and how we used to be able to talk about anything. It was hard not to wish for that girl back, because I had so much to tell her.
Twelve
My parents got an offer on the house. It came out of the blue because they hadn’t officially been trying to sell it yet, but the lady from Knockton Farms told some rich friends how we were having trouble, and it turned out they’d been looking for a piece of property to buy for their son, who was a chef. He wanted a place near town with a big old house and a lot of land where he could cater weddings and such. There was all kinds of complicated information that I knew mostly from hearing my parents fight about it. Nobody told me anything directly, but what I gathered was that the offer was for way less than we owed on the house, so the bank had to approve it. It seemed to me that if the bank was willing to take less money than we owed, why not just reduce the amount we owed and let us keep it? But as I found out on a more and more regular basis, life just didn’t work that way. Meanwhile Mom had brought our barn cats over to Knockton, but we still had ten horses and possibly a whole lot less time than we thought to figure out where we were going to flee to when all this finally ended.
Mom and Dad fought pretty much round the clock. Mom’s face had turned this constant shade of red, and anytime I woke up during the night I could hear her rattling around the house—she’d pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. She’d also lost a whole lot of weight, while my dad—who had a tendency to eat under stress—put on about fifteen pounds. It was like the weight moved off her body and onto his.
To drown out the sound of their fighting, and because Finian’s Rainbow was mere days away, I sang my “Necessity” song all the time. I couldn’t wait to perform it onstage. In the play, Annie Leonard started out singing, “What is the curse that makes the universe so all bewilderin’?” Then I came in and sang, “What is the hoax that just provokes the folks they call God’s children?” After that Elizabeth Claire Zimmerman sang, “What is the jinx that gives a body and his brother and everyone around the runaround?” And then we all sang “Necessity.” I had one verse that I sang all on my own, my solo, and it went like this:
My feet want to dance in the sun
My head wants to rest in the shade
The Lord says go out and have fun
But the landlord says, “Your rent ain’t paid!”
So you can see how in addition to being something I had to practice, the song felt relevant to our home life, to the point where one morning at breakfast Mom came right out and asked me to stop singing it. “At least all the time,” she said, kind of apologetic, when she saw the hurt feelings on my face.
I felt like saying I’d stop singing when she and Dad stopped hollering at each other, but she looked so fragile that I bit my tongue. Mom was spending hours and hours on the telephone, trying to find other rescue groups to take her horses. But they all had the same problem: When people needed to start economizing, the first place they started was charitable donations. Especially charitable donations to animals. That morning Mom picked up the phone to start making her calls before I even left for school, and I’m sorry to say that she forgot to say good-bye to me.
Daisy walked me down to the end of the driveway and waited with me until the bus came. She was the only member of our family who didn’t know what was going on, and I envied her.
* * *
We were going to have four performances of the play: Thursday night, Friday night, a Saturday matinee, and Saturday night. Each performance would be packed, because as I have said, people from all over the area came to Williamsport High productions.
As the week began I made a decision that nothing—not Allie scowling at me in American history, not my parents fighting, not even the fate of all our horses—would let me feel anything except excited about this being the week I performed in my first Williamsport High School play. Do you know how many other sophomores were singing solos? None, that’s how many. And do you think my parents stopped for a single second to feel proud about this? No, they did not.
On Monday, after school but before rehearsal, I hung out for a bit on the stone wall by the football field with Tim, Caroline Jones, Tyler, Devon, Rachel, and Jay. Us girls and Tim sat on the wall, while Jay and Devon stood there wearing their football gear for practice. Rachel chatted away with Devon, looking like she couldn’t believe her good fortune. I almost had a flash of sympathy for him when I thought how Allie had always saved her adoring glances for Tim. It was hard to blame him for dropping her for someone who actually liked him. Anyway, in the midst of our various conversations, Caroline happened to mention the cast party, which was going to be at her house.
