We knew my mom wouldn’t survive through the fall. I kept pushing off introducing her to Lloyd until it was too late. He hadn’t forgiven me, and I was beginning to think he never would.
“Babe,” I said, still shaking, and as soon as he said a word — his first to me in two weeks — I started to cry.
THE BEGINNING
In the beginning, a gay sixteen-year-old boy, desperate to convince himself of the falseness of that first adjective, tried to get a sixteen-year-old girl to show him her braces.
When Kate Schaffer used to laugh, she flashed her wild teeth like the triangles of a sliced orange. Now with her braces she giggled like an aristocrat, lips closed behind a chubby white hand. Obviously I used the word “love” without meaning it just yet, but I wanted to grow into that word with her, and the only way I figured I could was to make her laugh again the way she used to laugh. This — a straight boy might’ve concocted a more sexually explicit plan — should have been my first clue that the whole experiment was a waste of time.
However. On the day of the pep rally, Kate Schaffer and I ditched our history class to — to do what? I don’t remember. She was everyone’s crush in middle school, but now she’d put on some weight and had been relegated to kissing a boy she must have known was gay. She kissed shyly; my bottom lip, for the most part, rested gently between hers. I remember liking the fact that she was bigger than me, and remember uttering the phrase, “Kiss me, Kate”: if there had been any doubt to my sexuality, these should have been strikes two and three.
The gym’s back door opened from the inside, and we stopped kissing to duck behind an air-conditioning unit. I peeked over to see a janitor prop open the door with a large trash bin and walk off some fifty feet for a smoke. He kept his back to the open door, and I grabbed Kate’s hand and ran into the equipment room.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to kiss you in every room on campus,” I said, and kissed her on the mouth. I could feel the metal behind her lips. “This was a tough one, but, equipment room: check.”
“Let’s go to the next one before we get locked in here,” Kate said, happy to play along.
Plopped in the corner near the basketballs and volleyball nets was the cloth head of Rebby the Blue, his blank, meshed eyes staring blandly ahead. Above him, a dry-erase board, its black tray stocked with four fat markers of blue, black, green, and red.
“One minute,” I said. I grabbed the black marker, uncapped it, and aimed it at the mascot’s face.
At the rally, when the mascot came out onto the gym’s floor, and everyone around us jumped from the bleachers and hollered and laughed, I watched Kate Schaffer laughing wildly, and saw those braces. God, I was proud — I thought, stupidly, that being able to fix the way Kate Schaffer laughed meant I’d be able to fix myself.
“Was that the last girl you ever kissed?” Lloyd asked me once, years later. We were in bed in the Noe Valley apartment we shared with two other couples, alone for the first time in a long time on a lazy weekend afternoon. The sun through the windows turned the sheets on our stomachs an impossible white.
“The one and only,” I said.
“I know it’s ridiculous, but I hate to think of you kissing someone else, even if it’s a girl. Even if it’s ten years ago.”
Our faces were so close, it didn’t take much work for me to kiss him.
“There,” I said. “Now you’re the last person I’ve kissed, no question about it.”
“Take me home,” he said. “Let me meet your mom and dad.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise I will.”
THE END
The police arrested two nineteen-year-old boys (neither named Retivat) whose four homemade bombs — of which only two were set off — proved less effective than they’d planned. Now those boys were adults, forced to reconcile the perfection of what they’d imagined with the defectiveness of what they’d actually done. No one was killed, thankfully, though among the seventeen injured were Joshua Stilt and Jenna King. Both had checked out of the hospital with various degrees of burns and lacerations. I met with them at their apartment that night, just before heading back to BART.
“Well,” Jenna said. Her right arm was bandaged from the elbow to the wrist, and her nose ring had been — by choice or not, I didn’t ask — removed. To my surprise, she hugged me with her good arm. “At least this’ll give your article some pizazz. You might even win an award.”
The flowers Joshua had brought home from the man at the Mission Street BART station stood in a colorful Tiffany-style vase on the radiator. The day-old newspaper they’d come wrapped in had been thrown out, apparently, and now there was no way to tell the flowers apart from those purchased at an expensive boutique.
“I’m not sure I’m going to write the article after all,” I told them. Instead, my plan was to stop thinking so much about the past, to bring Lloyd home with me to the Antelope Valley. I wanted him to meet my father. I wanted to start our future. But that was another story.
If Joshua was disappointed by the news, he didn’t let on. He was sitting in the chair he’d been photographed in earlier that day, holding a plastic blue ice pack against his knee. He said, “What are you going to do with all your notes?”
“They’re yours,” I said, presenting my notebook. “If you want them.”
Joshua Stilt narrowed his eyes. He was in pain. “If I read them,” he asked, “will I find what I think I’ll find?”
I nodded.
Then he smiled — that smile — and told me exactly what I could do with these notes.
YOU’RE ALWAYS A CHILD WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT YOUR FUTURE
We didn’t love the circumstances, but for the first time in years, my sister and I were home at the same time. Dad took a nap on the brown leather couch in front of the TV, and Jean and I tiptoed past him on our way to the kitchen like kids. We weren’t kids. In a month, Jean would be twenty-nine. She was an attorney but worked, in addition, for free. Pro bono. My dad, if awake, would have made his favorite joke on the subject: He’d always been, himself, pro-Cher.
At twenty-five, I wasn’t a kid either, but compared to the Mother Teresa persona Jean had wrapped around herself, I didn’t feel much like a contributing adult. A day earlier I’d called her that — Mother Teresa — when she’d told me about a community center she was planning for low-income survivors of domestic abuse. I said, “Damn. Mother Teresa over here.” She told me never to call her by that charlatan’s name again, and recommended the book by Hitchens.
My mom was in the kitchen, making coffee the Armenian way. When I’d left home for college, I discovered most people knew it as “Turkish” coffee, but in my house we knew the truth. The Turks had taken enough from us already. We drew the line at espresso.
Jean and I took seats at the kitchen table, an oak-top rectangle with white, ornate legs like a piano’s. Jean saw me noticing the legs of the table and mentioned how Victorian they were. I corrected her. “Victorians would have sawed these off,” I said. “Too lurid. Too ribald.”
My mom rubbed her head and made a joke about herself being too bald. The treatment had taken her hair and weight, but not her jokes.