“Sounds unbearably dull,” I say with deliberate derision. I’m relieved, and annoyingly pleased, when he laughs.
“What about you?”
“Oh, I’m not going to uni.”
“What?” His voice lifts, making a few heads in our vicinity turn.
“Academia is an elitist, racist, misogynistic and capitalist undertaking, and I want no part in it,” I say with my whole chest.
“Oh,” Ben says simply, and a few months ago I would have been glad to have silenced him with a truth bomb but now I feel strangely awkward.
“Also, I don’t want to move away from home.”
“You don’t? I’m surprised by that. I thought you’d be the first person to leave.”
It’s not the town I want to stay close to, I think, and I almost say but then I hear his comment in adifferent way.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just that you don’t seem, I don’t know, happy there. You’re one of the kids at school who looks like they can’t wait to get out at the first opportunity. And for good reason. You have so much…” he pauses and I wait, “talent. And confidence. And the way you see the world. I mean, that says it all. You actuallyseethe whole world. You see beyond the perimeters of our backward town. I would have thought you’d want to be out there as soon as possible, exploring, creating, being…” another pause, and this wait feels more charged, “you.”
“You make me sound like a snob,” I say, and I’m not lying. He does, although he also makes me sound like many other things too. Things that light up my brain and swell my heart.
“No, that’s not what I said,” he rushes to explain. “I just like the way you don’t give a shit. You just…are.”
That small comment hurts the most. Because am I being what I really, truly am?
“Forget I said anything,” he blurts when I don’t reply for a long moment.
“No, it’s okay. I’m just…I don’t hate our town and I’m not in a rush to leave.”
Maybe I could tell Ben why I don’t want to leave, why I don’t want to be far from my mum and dad while my siblings are still young and Dad needs so much help. Maybe he’d understand…
“I am,” he says. “I can’t wait to be away from…people.”
He frowns, and I sense he’s also debating what to say and what to hold back.
“The football boys,” he finally admits. “They’re…fucking idiots.”
I snort again. “Youdon’t say.”
“But I let them get away with it, you know.” He turns towards me. He’s not even pretending to look at the statues now, and I find myself doing the same, facing him. “Two years ago I asked them to call me Benji because that’s…that’s the name I prefer. But they laughed at me. Said it was a gay name.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” I roll my eyes.
“Exactly,” he says and then his eyes widen. “Wait. No. Not that I think gay is bad. That’s not what I…Fuck. Sorry. My point is that I can’t be myself with them. Just recently, I’ve started to see that they’re not real friends, to me, to anyone. And that makes me realise, I just want a fresh start. Somewhere where I can just be myself. Benji.”
As Ben, no, Benji speaks it feels like each word punches out a brick in a wall I’d long ago built up. Not for him specifically, but for…well, everyone. I start thinking a million new thoughts at once. CouldIhave a fresh start? Should I go to uni and just start over, be completely who I am? Is it too late to apply? What would it be like to have people call me a different name and see me as the man I think I am. No, the man IknowI am.
My stomach flips. My mind stays busy. My eyes glaze over and I’m no longer looking at Benji. I’m getting a glimpse at a very different future, and I feel something I haven’t felt in a long, long time. Hope.
“I can call you Benji,” I say when I start to return to my body and the Louvre and Paris.
Benji gives me a smile that is nothing but pure joy and I think to myself, somebody should do a marble sculpture of that. Of all his teeth, at the tip of his tongue poking through the middle of them, and of the way his blue eyes crinkle with laughter lines.
“That would be cool,” he says.
“Want to go see Mona Lisa?” I ask. “I read ages ago that apparently she may have been modelled on Da Vinci’s gay lover.” The words tumble out of me as I simultaneously want to forget and hold on tight to that moment we just shared.
