Дэвид Левитан - Boy Meets Boy

For Infinite Darlene, things are always such a mess; if they weren't, she wouldn't have nearly enough to talk about.

This time, though, it's a real dilemma.

"Coach Ginsburg is going to have my hat," she declares. "It's the frickin' Homecoming Pride rally this afternoon. He wants me to march with the rest of the team. But as homecoming queen, I'm also supposed to be introducingthe team. If I don't do the proper introductions, my tiara might be in doubt. Trilby Pope would take my place, which would be ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Her boobs are faker than mine."

"You think Trilby Pope would stoop that low?" I ask.

"Is the Pope shrewish? Of courseshe would stoop that low. And she'd have gravity problems getting back up."

Usually Infinite Darlene acts like she's in a perpetual congeniality contest. But Trilby Pope is her weak spot. They used to be good friends, able to recount an hour's worth of activity with three hours' worth of conversation. Then Trilby fell into the field hockey crowd. She tried to convince Infinite Darlene to join her, but football was the same season. They drifted into different practices and different groups of friends. Trilby started to wear a lot of plaid, which Infinite Darlene despised. She started to hang with rugby boys. It all became very fraught.

Finally, they had a friendship break-up — an exchange of heated classroom notes, folded in the shape of artillery. They averted their glances dramatically when they passed in the halls.

Trilby still has some of Infinite Darlene's accessories, from when they used to swap. Infinite Darlene tells everybody (except Trilby) that she wants them back.

My attention is beginning to wander from the conversation. I am still scanning the hallways for Noah, knowing full well that if I see him, I will most probably duck into the nearest doorway, blushing furiously.

"I do declare," Infinite Darlene does declare, "what has gotten you so distracted?"

It is here that I feel the limit of our friendship. Because while Infinite Darlene feels comfortable telling me everything, I am afraid that if I tell her something, it will no longer be mine. It will belong to the whole school.

"I'm just looking for someone," I hedge.

"Aren't we all?" Infinite Darlene vamps ruefully. I think I'm off the hook, but then she adds, "Is it someone special?"

"It's nothing," I say, crossing my fingers. I pray that it's not nothing. Yes, I pray to my Big Lesbian God Who Doesn't Really Exist. I say to her: I don't ask for much. I swear. But I be. Please let him be someone I can groove with, and who wants to groove with me.

My denial has sent Infinite Darlene back to her own dilemma. I tell her she should march with the football team while wearing her homecoming queen regalia. It seems like a good compromise to me.

Infinite Darlene starts to nod. Then her eyes see something over my shoulder and flash anger.

"Don't look now," she whispers.

Of course, I turn and look. And there's Kyle Kimball walking by.

Turning away from me like he might catch plague from a single bubonic glance.

Kyle is the only straight boy I've ever kissed. (He didn't realize he was straight at the time.)

We went out for a few weeks last year, in ninth grade. He is the only ex I'm not on speaking terms with. Sometimes I even feel like he hates me. It's a very strange feeling. I'm not used to being hated.

"He'll learn," Infinite Darlene says as Kyle recedes into a classroom. She's been saying that for a year now, without ever telling me who Kyle's going to learn from. I still wonder if it's supposed to be me.

With some break-ups, all you can think about afterwards is how badly it ended and how much the other person hurt you. With others, you become sentimental for the good times and lose track of what went wrong. When I think of Kyle, the beginnings and the endings are all mixed up. I see his enraptured face reflected in the light of a flickering movie screen; passing him a note and having him rip it into confetti-sized pieces without reading it; his hand taking mine for the first time, on the way to math class; him calling me a liar and a loser; the first time I knew he liked me, when I caught him hovering around my locker before I actually got there; the first time I knew he didn't like me anymore, when I went to give him back a book I'd borrowed and he pulled away instinctively.

He said I'd tricked him. He said it to everyone.

Only a few people believed him. But it wasn't what they thought that mattered to me. It was what he thought. And if he really believed it.

"He's the worst," Infinite Darlene says. But even she knows this isn't true. He is far from the worst.

Seeing Kyle always takes some of the volume out of my soundtrack. Now I'm no longer floating on a Noah high.

Infinite Darlene tries to cheer me up.

"I have chocolate," she says, reaching a big hand into her purse for a Milky Way mini.

I am sucking at the caramel and nougat when Joni comes up to us with her latest Noah Report.

Sadly, it's the same as the last five.

"I haven't been able to find him," she says. "I've found people who know who he is, but nobody seems to know where he is. Chuck was helping me before, and Chuck said that he's one of those arty types. Now, from Chuck that wasn't an ultimate compliment, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. I looked at the wall outside the art room and found a photo he did. Chuck helped me get it."

I am not really alarmed by Joni's thievery—we take things off walls and put them back all the time. But my inner security device does take notice of the number of times that Joni's name-

checked Chuck. In the past, I've been able to tell that things with Ted were getting better when Joni began to name-check him again. The fact that it's now Chuck has looped me for a throw.

Joni takes a small, framed photograph out of her bag. The frame is the color of Buddy Holly's glasses, and has largely the same effect.

"You have to look at it closely," Joni tells me.

I hold the photo up to my face, ignoring my own reflection to see what lies beneath. At first I see the man in the chair, toward the back of the photo. He's the age of my grandfather and is sitting in an old wooden rocker, laughing his head off. Then I realize he's sitting in a room covered by snow globes. There must be hundreds — maybe thousands—of the small plastic shakers, each with its own blurry locale. Snow globes cover the floor, the counters, the shelves, the table at the man's arm.

It's a very cool photograph.

"You can't keep it," Joni says.

"I know, I know." I look at it for a minute more, then hand it back.

Infinite Darlene has kept quiet through this whole exchange. But she's about to burst with curiosity.

"He's just some guy," I say.

"Do tell," she insists.

So I do. Tell.

And I know as I do that he isn't "just some guy." There was something in our two minutes together that felt like it could last for years. Telling Infinite Darlene this doesn't just feel like I'm setting myself up for gossip.

No, it feels like I'm putting my whole heart on the line.

Pride and Joy

Joni, Ted, and I sit together for the Homecoming Pride Rally that afternoon. It's the first rally that I've ever been in the stands for. This is due to a fluke of scheduling. Our school has too many activities and teams to be represented in each and every cheering session, so whenever we have a rally, only a dozen groups are spotlighted. They'd asked me to bring my acting troupe this time around, but I felt such recognition might damage our art—putting the personality before the performance, as it were. So as a result I am sitting in the bleachers of our gymnasium, trying to gauge the Joni-and-Ted barometer. Right now, it looks like the pressure is high. Ted keeps looking over at Joni, but Joni isn't looking as much at Ted.