But the thing I haven’t thought about since freshman year, when I joined football and started hanging out with Xavier and the other guys on the team instead of Charlie, is how I felt when I was near him. How we’d sit, side by side, against the half wall separating the school from the service entrance off the street when it was warm, or against the lockers in the southeast corner of the third floor in winter, talking. How sometimes our shoulders would press together and neither of us would move away. How I was aware that Charlie always smelled like clean laundry, mint, and sweat. How I’d look forward to lunch because it meant seeing Charlie and hearing about whatever he’d been thinking about lately.
And how, sometimes, on really bad days after Mom died, I’d feel a strange compulsion to let my head drop down on Charlie’s shoulder, like maybe touching him could leach off some of the poison I felt snaking through my veins.
After Rafe and I, um… well, after Monday, I expected to feel some kind of seismic shift. But it didn’t happen. If anything, it’s more as if a mess that seemed really jumbled has shaken out into a pattern I can recognize.
“Hey,” I say to Rafe, ignoring the terrible movie we’ve been not really watching. “Did you—when did you realize you were…?”
“Gay? When I was ten or eleven, there was this group of guys in my neighborhood. They were—” He shakes his head. “—trouble. But there was something about them that appealed to me. The way they carried themselves. Their style. They looked tough. Like they could look out for themselves. They were probably only fourteen or fifteen, but I thought of them as being grown. I wanted to be like them. Look like them, dress like them, have a group of people to watch my back like them.
“My dad was a mean fucker. I think, partly, I had this idea that if I had friends like that, they could teach me how to be someone he wouldn’t mess with so much. So, I watched them. For years. And I really believed that’s what it was—that I wanted to be like them. It wasn’t until I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, that I realized I just wanted them. By that time, I did have people to watch my back. But it wasn’t anything like I imagined. And, well, you know how that turned out.”
I nod. The guys who pulled Rafe into their group were affiliated with a gang in his neighborhood. He told me about it haltingly on the phone last night. How he didn’t realize what their friendship meant until it was too late. Until he was so deep into taking and selling drugs with them that there was no way he could step away from it without a hell of a lot of fallout.
“They all talked a lot of shit about how many girls they’d been with, even at thirteen or fourteen. Some of it was true. I don’t know how much. But I went along with it. Until high school, when it was really clear who was… you know, screwing, because it’d happen at parties, in the backseats of cars, or in bathrooms.” He winces. “I kind of… had to.”
“With girls.”
He nods. “It was a shitty thing to do. Anyway, it’s not like it was terrible or anything. It just felt wrong. And then, when I first slept with a boy. Fuck. I knew for sure then. I mean, we were sixteen, so it was clumsy and fumbling, but, damn. It was like all the things I’d been feeling and questioning about myself finally made sense.”
“Who was he?”
“Mm, Benny. Benito. He went to a different school, but his cousin went to school with us, so he was always around. He had this really light coloring—almost blond, with grayish-bluish eyes—and everyone joked that he was secretly white. He was… sweet. Which didn’t really go over well in my neighborhood. But somehow, people left him alone. Like they could tell he was good.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what ever happened to him. But one night at some party, I was standing in a corner, watching everything. I was blitzed. Benny came over to me. He took my hand and led me to this tiny bedroom that had probably been a pantry originally.
“He was smaller than me, but he pushed me up against the door and looked right at me. Didn’t say anything. Finally, he leaned up really slow and kissed me. It was like he’d read my mind. I was so shocked that I pushed him away at first. But he kept standing there, looking at me. He knew. He was totally sure of me. And I was so relieved because he proved something to me that I probably would’ve sat with for a long time, never knowing.”
Rafe’s smiling. And I’m fucking jealous. Not of this kid Benny, but that Rafe got his questions answered at sixteen, by someone sweet. Rafe likes sweet.