I choked out a laugh and glanced over at Riley. He looked completely serious. “No, not at all. She’s very nice, and I appreciate the way she thinks about preservation and landscape architecture. I like talking through design problems with her, and I’ve referred many clients to her, but . . . no.”
“Dude,” he sighed. “That was not what I saw.”
“What is it you think you saw?” I asked.
Riley shifted to face me but I kept my eyes on the road ahead. “First, she hugged the shit out of you.”
“That’s how she greets everyone,” I said.
“I didn’t get a hug,” he said. “Second, you two touch each other all the fucking time. Every time you opened your mouth, she was right there with her hand on your arm and all, ‘Oh yes, Sam, Ilovethat idea! Thatisbrilliant, Sam! Put your sperm inside me, Sam!’“
“That’s how she is.” He gave me an exaggerated look, and I said, “You can get out here. I’m sure you can walk home.”
“Let me remind you—she didn’t touch me once.” Riley plucked his water bottle from the cup holder. “I mean, she is hot in that ‘I’m the boss of your cock’ kind of way, and I can see how she’d find my dominant aura in conflict with that.”
I thought about Magnolia, and her bright smiles and shiny hair. She was one of my favorite thought partners, and could always be counted on for local industry gossip, but I wasn’t attracted to her.
Not at all.
These were the rare moments—the ones where I was forced to remind myself that not being attracted to one woman didn’t mean I wasn’t attracted to women in general—that resurrected my father’s words.
Abomination.
Filth.
Queer.
He started calling me gay before I finished kindergarten, and then I was too young to make sense of it. I only knew it was wrong in his eyes.
ThatIwas wrong.
Shannon always told me to ignore him, but it was more difficult when kids at school started saying the same things. I was eight when I comprehended what everyone was saying to me, and it was overwhelming.
I believed I was gay for years. It wasn’t until I stayed after school to watch Matt’s track and field practice one day—it was a thin excuse to avoid riding the bus alone, which always led to someone kicking the shit out of me—that I understood I wasn’t.
Instead of lurking near Matt, I watched the cheerleading squad and found myself in the uncomfortable position of concealing a short-lived erection and the messy aftermath.
I spent years trying to determine whether it was possible to be gay and find women attractive. This was a major point of confusion and stress, and though I’d always thought I kept it well hidden, Matt took up the topic the day he left for college.
He was two years older but I’d skipped a grade, and was starting my senior year of high school. I wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible, and I would have been able to finish high school in three years if I hadn’t caught pneumonia and spent four weeks in the hospital the previous winter.
I was young for college, and in plenty of ways, I was immature, too, but anything would have been better than living with Angus.
We never talked about the kids who tormented me or the names they called me, but Matt knew that year would be difficult. He was aware I’d get my ass handed to me more times than I could count when he wasn’t around to intervene.
“Here’s what you need to do. You need to put on about thirty pounds of muscle and you need to start running. I know it’s hard with your asthma, but you can start slow. Take Riley with you. He needs to stay out of trouble, and if you let him believe he’s training you for a half marathon, he won’t have nearly as much time to smoke weed in the attic.”
I had been readingThe Count of Monte Cristofor the ninth time—all twelve hundred pages of it—and set it on my bed. “Okay . . .”
“And then you need to get laid. In my opinion, you stare at tits too much to be gay, but I’m not about to tell you who you are. Fuck who you want to fuck—consenting adults only, please—and don’t apologize for it. Not to yourself, not to me, and definitely not to Angus.”
I did what he said, and though getting my ass into shape was one of the most physically grueling things I’d ever done, he was right. That wasn’t to say my graduating class suddenly became my best friends or stopped making jokes about me enjoying the boys’ locker room too much, but I found my confidence, and with it, I learned to stop giving a shit.
When I went to Cornell the following year, that confidence spawned a reinvention. I left all of the old Sam—the pale, skinny, sick kid who peed his pants during a fire drill in the first grade—behind, and tried on a new version of myself.
“Listen, maybe you aren’t into her,” Riley said as I pulled into the fire engine bay and came to a stop behind the old pickup I used for camping trips. “Whatever. But she’s into you, and she thinks it’s mutual.”
“Riley, you’re blowing this out of proportion,” I said. “She’s a friendly person. She’d invite you to her parents’ house for Sunday dinner if you asked. She’d offer you her extra ticket to next weekend’s Patriots game if she had one—she might, so speak up if you’re interested. She’s authentically nice, and it’s hard for us to recognize that because we’re a far cry from well-adjusted adults.”
