Ben drove to an entrance to the park I’d never gone in before, up off Skyline. There was a dirt pull-off where he parked the car, and a steepish path descending. He said, You wore good shoes, right? It’ll be a little muddy. There were leaves and trees all above us that filtered the sun and cut it in shadows like paper cutouts. We walked awhile on wet leaves without saying anything. It didn’t feel like we had to.
I said, You can smoke if you want to.
He said, Ha. I am an addict, but I’m not going to smoke in a forest. He said, So if those kids weren’t your crew, who were they?
It was easy to talk to Ben in the forest. I said, My best friend has a crush on one of them.
Ben said, Which one? The cute one?
I said, The one with glasses.
Ben said, The cute one. Water dripped from the leaves above us. Ben was a few steps ahead of me and he stopped and blew air out from his mouth. He turned around. He said, Julie, I don’t know if this matters, but I’m just going to tell you. Not because I think you have the wrong idea, but just to clear things up. We’re friends, right?
I said, Right.
He said, And you probably know already, anyway.
I said, Okay.
He said, Okay you know?
This was cagey, ruthless Ben, the one who would laugh his head off with someone else who was in on the joke. I’d meant it when I agreed that we were friends. Now he was veering. I said, Stop making me feel like an idiot.
I braced myself for the laugh again. We were standing even with each other. He looked at me and gave a little smile, a real one, and said, I’m sorry. He said, It’s weird to talk about at this point, but you’re just a kid. He had his hands in his pockets. He said, You know I’m gay, right?
It was warm enough out that I was wearing a sweater and no coat. I found a pilled ball of wool on my sweater to pull at. I said, Okay. Once I started picking at my sweater, it was hard to stop. I thought of the guy with the lined jean jacket. I said, Was one of those guys you were with your boyfriend?
He said, From the movie? No, those are my pals. They’re sweet.
I said, Are they gay? He said they were. We walked a little more. The air in Forest Park was extra sweet. The smell came from the trees, and it was fresh and clear, a smell that opened up the air. I said, Was my brother your boyfriend?
Ben said, No. Not really. We fooled around a little in high school, but no.
I said, So he’s gay.
It was weird that we were still walking. This seemed like the kind of conversation we should be having sitting still, at a long wood table, or on a log overlooking the river. It also seemed like a conversation we could only have if we were walking.
Ben said, I kind of hate that I’m the one to tell you this. No I don’t. Sure, yes. He is.
I said, He had a girlfriend in high school.
Ben said, So did we all.
I said, Why weren’t you and he — boyfriends?
Ben said, Oh I don’t know. Chemistry? He was into older guys.
I wanted to ask something else but I didn’t want Ben to think I thought all gay people had AIDS. There were so many layers of wet leaves and pine needles under my feet. It was possible that half the forest had sunk below me. Rotted leaves so soft and we weren’t sinking. I said, Older guys like his coach?
We had come to a log. We didn’t sit on it, Ben just rested his foot on it. I put my foot up, too. Ben said, Ech. Yeah, like him. What a sleaze.
I had only the faintest memory of the compact man with very blond hair and a moustache. He had taken my brother with him to San Diego, because he was my brother’s coach and he was moving there, and it made sense that my brother went with him to continue his training, but, if I can explain it, the feeling had always been there that the trip was more than an airplane ride. I said, So the coach was his boyfriend? It felt stupid, these minuscule, simple questions. For whatever reason I trusted Ben to answer them.
He said, I guess you could say that.
The sun was making so many good patterns. I loved how it hid us as much as how it shone on us. Ben sat on the log. He picked up a twig and rubbed it on a patch of moss on a knot of the log.
I said, Stop sawing.
Ben said, You stop sawing.
THE FIRST PHOTOS in the envelope were of my dad on the business trip he’d taken to Scotland, shots of sheep and men in kilts. My dad in a kilt, a glass in his hand of what was probably scotch. We weren’t Scottish. A man with a clipboard pointing to a poster of a scotch bottle. It made sense that my dad had forgotten these photos. The oldness of the film had done something to the color, a dusty reddening in the darker corners. I flipped through faster. Me reading an Archie comic on the beanbag chair. A fallen tree branch in the yard. A long shot of a pool taken from far up in the stands, and the next was of my brother: wet hair, on a podium, gold around his neck. We had an identical photo in a frame on the mantel downstairs. My mom must have brought another camera and developed her film sooner. My brother’s coach or a hired photographer must have taken it and sent us a copy. I went through the rest of the photos. There were no more shots of the meet, just the grainy dark shots I’d taken of the rubber bands on my dad’s desk, of my sneakers, untied. For a second I thought I remembered that when Alexis had mock-posed for her portrait in Yearbook, I’d actually lifted the camera and pressed the shutter. The last photo on the roll was of my painted pinecone. A bar of light struck through the frame like a ghost.
My brother on the podium, smiling, eyes to the crowd, didn’t look gay or not gay. I wanted a shot of his coach. I wanted to remember what he looked like. Was he cute, or hot? I wanted to know if, the first time, a guy came on to my brother or the other way around. Was it Ben? Was it an older guy? How would he define fooling around? Did having fooled around with Alexis make me gay and, if so, did it make her gay, even though she’d had boyfriends in high school? Maybe I should have fooled around with a guy first. Or I needed to try it with a guy in order to decide. The Berlin I imagined had narrow streets and alleys and bridges. Twice my brother had sent us postcards with a piece of the Berlin Wall inside a plastic bubble. Was he right there when the wall came down? Was it such a crazy party? Did he get drunk, and were there gay guys there? Was there AIDS in Germany? It wasn’t that late, or early, where he was but, I didn’t have his number. I knew where to find it, in the Rolodex by the phone downstairs, but I didn’t want to wake anyone up.
BEFORE WINTER BREAK the school went crazy with candygrams. Every morning a group of girls, cheerleaders, got on the intercom and sang a song about candygrams to the tune of Jingle Bells. Candygrams were a dollar. They were a construction paper candy cane or snowman attached to a real candy cane and they could be signed or anonymous. The candygrams song lodged and crackled in my head all day. Last year Erika had sent me a candygram and also a boy from math class who I’d never spoken to who wished me a Reeeeeally Happy Holiday and drew a ballpoint Christmas tree and a menorah and a question mark. At lunch I started humming and Erika said, Thanks a lot.
I said, Are you going to send PT a candygram?
Erika said, No way. Does he seem like someone who’d be into candygrams? Erika had been acting slightly pissed since the night of the movies, when I’d gone home instead of going over to striped shirt’s house. They’d all smoked pot, and Erika had gotten so stoned that she hadn’t said anything for the whole night except for one conversation with PT about swimming. He’d told her he found swimming kind of spiritual. Erika had said she almost didn’t want to tell me about their conversation because talking about it might make it less real.