“Oh no, the ex-gay pamphlets?”
“The ones I shredded.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him they were too pornographic for me so I threw them out.”
“You told him they were pornographic?” Jesse wails.
“They have a half-naked man on the cover! He’s hanging up there on that cross all muscular and cut with nothing but a little gym towel on—it’s pornographic!”
“He must have gone ballistic.”
“Worse, he was totally calm. He said, ‘Son, I’m asking you to please reckon with your choices. I don’t want you to spend eternity paying for your sins in hell.’ I said to him, ‘Howard, thank you so much for the advice, but I’ll take my chances.’”
“The point of these dates is to be nice to him so he’ll still pay for college, not to antagonize him and make him want to disown you forever.”
“I know, but I couldn’t help myself, he’s such an irrational idiot. And my comic sidekick wasn’t there to support me.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse repeats. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there next time, I swear.”
“Saturday the thirtieth, okay? Ten thirty a.m.” Wyatt steps in front of Jesse and puts his hands on her shoulders so he can stare deeply into her eyes. His dark, tendrilly curls are wild around his pale face. In his red-and-white-checked thrift-store Western shirt with the silver-buttoned pockets and the pointy collar embroidered with red, bucking horses, he looks a tiny bit like a chorus girl from Annie Get Your Gun. “Please be there. I don’t like to beg, but please, please, please.”
“Saturday the thirtieth, ten thirty. I will be there.”
“You’ll have to behave yourself in school. No more alternative suspensions. Can you keep your antisocial tendencies in check long enough to avoid Snediker for that one week?”
“Absolutely. I promise.”
Jesse breaks Wyatt’s gaze briefly to check her watch—3:24. T minus six minutes till Emily.
“Late for something?” Wyatt asks, mildly suspicious. No gesture of Jesse’s, not even the most discreet watch-check, escapes Wyatt’s attention.
“No, I just, I really have to get started on this homework. I’m sorry but I told you, I can’t actually hang out today.”
“Yes, I actually heard you the first six times you said that, and I have to work, too,” says Wyatt, just a bit testily. “I won’t bug you.”
“What are you working on, a historically accurate diorama of Ayn Rand’s first apartment?”
“Actually…” Wyatt lets his gaze drift vaguely up to the air above Jesse’s head. “I’m applying to do study abroad next semester, and I have to write an essay for it.”
Jesse stops walking.
“What do you mean, study abroad? Study abroad where?”
“I don’t know. Denmark, maybe. Somewhere where the boys are tall and dreamy.”
They’ve reached the library and Wyatt starts to head up the sidewalk to the front door, but Jesse grabs his arm to stop him.
“Excuse me, but what are you talking about? I mean, what are you talking about, Denmark? You can’t go to Denmark next semester, that’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous, it’s intercultural exchange. The American Field Service runs it. My mom thought it might be a good thing for me.” Wyatt’s trying to sound breezy, but he just sounds guilty and strained. He hasn’t made eye contact with Jesse since he dropped this bomb—he keeps looking over her head or just past her shoulder.
“But Denmark is, like, practically a socialist country! You’d hate it there!”
Despite the distance that has grown up between them, Jesse still can’t imagine making it through sophomore year without talking to Wyatt every night and seeing him at least a couple of times a week.
“Just because they have the wrong idea about how to run their government doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy their fjords and clean public transit and herring-based cuisine,” Wyatt says. “If they even have fjords. I believe they have fjords. Anyway, I probably won’t even get accepted. I have to write an essay for the application about what I personally am willing to do to promote equality between nations. Obviously, my real opinions on that topic are unlikely to impress anyone at the American Field Service. As you know, I believe that all countries are equal, but some countries are more equal than others. I may have to lie about my beliefs.”
Wyatt chunks open the heavy library door, and Jesse follows him inside.
The Minot Public Library is one of the places Jesse knows best in the world. Before they renovated it, it was just like a big, old, funky Victorian house overflowing with books from floor to ceiling, with worn, blood-red Oriental carpets on the floors and mismatched chairs and tables set out here and there for patrons to sit at. There were so many books that some of them were just laid out in stacks on side tables, or shelved in weird cabinets like where you’d keep dishes in your dining room. Some of the categories were strange, too—traces of the curious mind of some long-lost librarian who ignored the Library of Congress and organized the place according to her own interests and predilections: Cowboy Romances, Science FACTion, Travel Guides for the Elderly and Infirm, Intergalactic Adventure Stories. If you wanted to find anything, you had to already know where it was.