The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (4 page)

“I thought you
were gone,” I mouthed.

He grinned,
shook his head slowly. “Just fooling,” he mouthed. I wished I could know what
his voice sounded like. I knew it would be beautiful.

I stuck my
tongue out and he stuck his out and smiled. All of a sudden I knew I was going
to cry again today, though I wasn’t sure why, because now I felt happy.

The boy took
off his hat, surprising me with hair that was black as night. It stuck up in
tall staticky spikes for a second before the breeze smoothed it. He pulled his
hat on over his face like a feedbag and, holding the strings out at the sides
by his ears, rotated them like antennae. I looked down and wiped my eyes with
my sleeve.

Suddenly the
train started to make noise, as if coming to a horrible kind of life. The boy
yanked his hat off his face and stared at me. “Oh,” he whispered, and his pink
lips held the shape.

The snap on my
shivering coat sleeve was clicking against the metal rail like an alarm. The
doors dinged, opened and closed. The train lurched a few feet and the boy
walked to follow it.

I didn’t have
time to think, so I just mouthed it. He was looking at me and I was sure he was
seeing when I mouthed the three words I had come to feel for him in the small
eternity of these last few minutes. I didn’t think about what it would ruin for
me, for my imagination, if he recoiled.

But his
reaction was another smile, one maybe a little surprised and brighter than
before. He looked happy. I’d told a boy I loved him and he looked happy.

So this was
him.
So this is you.
A red hat,
lime-green gloves, green eyes, jet-black hair: this was what a boy who liked
boys looked like, too. He reached up and with two strokes of one finger in the
dirt and salt on the window he drew a plump heart. Near the bottom point, near
where the heart’s curves would’ve met, his finger started dragging a horizontal
line across the glass as the train started moving away from him. With his other
hand, the boy waved.

A moment later
I couldn’t see him anymore.

“I need to get
off,” I gasped, crying, pushing against people who weren’t moving, who wouldn’t
move for me, who had no space for me. “This is my stop. I need to— It’s
my only—”

“Kid, you
missed this one,” said the guy with the magazine, barely raising his eyes. “Next
one’s not far.”

Not far.
He had no idea what
far
was. This chance, this boy, I couldn’t,
I didn’t even know his
name
. He was
here, the other one like me, the one who wouldn’t merely not say no but who had
said
yes
. I discovered him only to lose
him? How could that be?

I tried taking
a deep breath. The landscape sped by, cars, trees, buildings, streetlights, all
of it filtered through the crosshatch of gray streaks on the window, jagged
like bolts of lightning. Lines were crossing everything everywhere. I was
afraid I might faint.

But the heart
was there, too. I focused on it. The smooth curves in the grit. He’d drawn it
smiling. He’d known I was leaving and still he’d drawn it smiling. How could
the boy like me afford to let the boy like him go, without tears or agony,
without an explosion of the loneliness I had long been sure would define my
whole life?

How? I was
suddenly sure it was because he’d already learned the thing that was dawning on
me now, that was coming to me like a sunrise: There were others. There were
others
. I was only one of them. He was
only one of them, too.

At the station
Dwight’s mother had told me to take a series of trains that would get me from
Newton to Worcester, where my mom would be waiting to drive me the two hours
back to Lee. I had thought that trip would be as bleak and gray as Dwight’s
bedroom, as the subway platform, as everything I knew. But what ended up
happening that day was that I rode the green train to the red train, to the
purple train, to the orange and silver city, where my mom was waiting in our
white car to drive me through all of the snow-blue hills, to the yellow house
in Lee, home
.

(Age
16–17)

DIAL UP

All I wanted was to get to Boyd Wren. And all I kept
hearing was “Goodbye!”

It was delivered in a robotic monotone that after all this
time sounded dickish to my reddening ears. Every time I heard it was a
surprise, too—and not a surprise. Because how many times had it been?

Entwined in a net of telephone cord and mouse cord and
laptop power cord, I slammed back against the living-room couch and raked my
hands through my hair. The shitty bastard of a service would not connect. Again
and again, over and over, I heard the dial tone, the chirpy grind of the modem,
the epic pause teasing the possibility that I might finally be allowed
online... then that too-cheery “Goodbye!”

Eighty-six times so far tonight.

Busy signals. Too much traffic. Fucking America Online. Why
did they mail out those trial CDs by the truckload when they couldn’t handle
the customers they already
had
? Didn’t
they know I depended on this, that this was my lifeline? No, of course they
didn’t, and I would’ve hated them—anyone—knowing.

“Ollie,” my mother called to me from the kitchen, where she
and my father were making popcorn or something, “why don’t you give it a rest
and go do something else for a while? You’re making us crazy.”

I ignored her. I was thinking of Boyd, not her. I sat up and
chose a new phone number from the list of local options (much more of this and
I’d start trying long distance). Again the dial tone, the chirpy grind—but
the pause that followed the grind this time seemed longer, long enough to give
me time to reposition the laptop perfectly along the edge of the coffee table,
for a little extra luck. Then I got smacked with another “Goodbye!”

I punched the couch cushion and screamed.

“Ollie, language,” my father shouted.

My mother added, “You could try
calling
your friends if you’re so anxious to chit-chat with them.”

“They’re already
online!
”
I screamed. I was losing it. “That means you
can’t
call them. And it’s not
chit-chat
,
it’s
chat
. Why won’t this fucking
thing
connect?!
”

“Ollie, Jesus,
language
,”
my father yelled amid bursts of popping corn.

The screen in front of me blurred as tears pooled in my
eyes. Quickly I slapped them away with my sweatshirt sleeve. I took a breath. I
needed to remember: I couldn’t let my parents see how this was killing me.
There was no acceptable reason why I should be this desperate to chit-chat, as
my mother called it.

Again I clicked
Sign
On
. I’d been doing this for forty-five minutes now. Dial tone. Modem
grinding.

“
Oll-
ieee
,”
my father groaned.

The pause was long. I held my breath. This time the yellow
cartoon man lit up, started jogging, told me “Welcome!,” ushered me through the
sign-on screen to the home screen.

“Thank god,” I heard my mother whisper from the dwindling
edge of my consciousness.

Onscreen my buddy list drew itself alive and overwrote all
other things. The only name on it—the only name
ever
on it—was the only name I cared to see:
BoydyBoy
. Leaning forward, I clicked him. And connected.

OwOw0:
Yo
yo
yo
yo
yo

BoydyBoy
:
hey

OwOw0:
It took me 88 tries. Almost 45
mins
.
I was going
fcukin
insane in the membrane

BoydyBoy
:
AOL blows donkey dick. but here you are.

OwOw0:
Here I am....

BoydyBoy
:
I hope its worth it,
haha

OwOw0:
Hahaha
. you better make it worth
it.

Boydyboy:
so much
pressuuure
.

My cheeks were flushing; they always did. It
was
worth it—the waiting, the
agony—just knowing Boyd Wren was there on the other side of that screen,
at the end of a short trip through some wires. Even if he had no idea why. It
was enough just to see his name: Boydyboy. The letters were blue and seemed to
bounce.

OwOw0:
I kinda thought you
wouldve
logged
off by now though.

I’d been terrified of it. Sometimes the busy signals only
delayed me getting to him; other times they made me miss him completely.

Boydyboy:
Nah
i’ve
been poking around

OwOw0:
Cool
cool

I dared to wonder, like always, if he’d been waiting for me.
Every night, in my deepest, secret, closeted hopes I imagined him watching his
buddy list the way I watched mine whenever his name was missing from it. It was
intoxicating to imagine. And scary.

Boydyboy:
how goes your science fair project *cough
cough
* bullshit?

OwOw0:
It’s driving me to Nervous-breakdown City, Boydyboy.

Boydyboy:
mine is not too shabby if I do say so...

OwOw0:
fuck you and your liquid nitrogen demo.
haha
.
has anyone ever used liquid nitro in
thier
project
and not won their science fair?

Boydyboy:
it’s
comin
out good. after
i’m
done using it to freeze everything in site
i’ll
use some to heat up your cold
cold
heart.

Without thinking I flopped over on the couch and looked
dreamily at the laptop screen from the cushion where my cheek rested. I pulled
the laptop onto my chest.

OwOw0:
you know nothing could warm my lump of
pulminary
coal.

Boydyboy:
Hahahaaah

OwOw0:
Meanwhile
i’ll
be there with my
friggin
zoetrope project!!

Boydyboy:
Hahaha
. yes. so what did you build
exactly?

OwOw0:
Well I built the zoetrope, which is a ring of
posterboard
(like imagine a lampshade) with a little window
cut in it. inside the ring is another ring with a series of
pics
drawn around it..... The inner ring spins, and you see the
pics
through the window. and the movement makes them animate, like a flip-book. IN
THEORY! However, I made the inner ring too big, so it’s too tight. and the
bastard does not SPIN.

Boydyboy:
so what!
Mr
gruber
is a lightweight... as long as you made the effort he’ll grade you OK. it
sounds somewhat cool.

OwOw0:
HAHA! “Somewhat.” Eat a dick, Boyd.

Boydyboy:
haahahaha

OwOw0:
everyone is gonna look at it and say “What’s a zoo-trophy?”
It’s pitiful, you’ll see. However: the way I wrote “Zoetrope” on it is fucking
awesome!

Boydyboy:
That should get you a B+ right there.

OwOw0:
I don’t even care. I’ve got other more important things to
worry about in life than zoo-
trophys
.

Boydyboy:
seriously. fucking
sci
fairs.
we’ll be out soon though.
i
can’t wait till college,
Ollie
bolly
bo
bolly
.

Yeah, everything Boydyboy said made me happy. The way he
gave me shit about stuff, the way he bounced my name across the screen like a
rubber ball:
Ollie
bolly
bo
bolly
. The way he
almost never talked about girls and the way he griped if I logged off too
early. At the end of our chat sessions, which sometimes went three or four
hours, my face hurt from smiling.

***

At the science fair Boyd froze a wart off the vice
principal’s thumb but his project didn’t win. Probably that was because his
liquid nitrogen sat undemonstrated for most of the fair while he hung out at my
table, on the other side of the school gym, playing with my zoetrope.

“Look,” he said, showing me how he’d gotten the inner ring
to spin more freely. The little animation was flowing better. “Your car cartoon
actually moves now.”

“How did you do that?”

He handed me the zoetrope and I saw that he’d folded a
wrinkle into the
posterboard
to make the ring
smaller.

“Well aren’t you a genius, Professor Wren,” I groaned.

 
Smugly he crossed his
arms over his thin chest and perched his butt on the edge of my table, behind
which I sat like I was having a yard sale. I looked at his back, at his thin
yellow t-shirt, and the butt of his favorite pants, brown corduroys he’d had
since freshman year. I had watched, over time, those corduroys grow worn spots
on the bum and knees that eventually opened to holes that showed underwear and
skin. I thought of them as my holes: I’d been around when they were born and I’d
loved them as they grew. Sometimes when he was sitting I could glimpse pale
white moons of his skin through the holes in the thighs.

Scratching his blond,
cowlicky
hair he said, “It looks like I’m being judged.”

I looked over to his table across the gym. Mr. Gruber was
standing beside it with a clipboard. “You should probably go over there,” I
said.

“Eh.” He sighed.

He went, though—stopping on the way to tie one of his
black Adidas soccer shoes. I watched him explain his project to Mr. Gruber,
while with one finger I idly spun my zoetrope.

***

Because Boyd seemed to like my little animation of a car
chase, I spent the whole next weekend creating a real-life, stop-motion version
on my bedroom floor. Using a feature on my family’s camcorder I filmed Matchbox
cars I had dusted off from childhood skidding across carpet, zooming around
bureau legs. Frame by frame. It took me hours to create fifteen seconds of
video. There were small plastic animals involved, and an explosion made from
crumpled scraps of yellow and orange construction paper. On Monday at school I
lent him the animation on videotape and that evening suffered through
thirty-one disconnects waiting to hear what he thought of it. When I finally
got online he was there. A message popped up.

Boydyboy:
i
watched your
lil
movie 6 times

Six times. I could feel myself glowing. At some point he
had become someone I wanted to impress.

Owow0:
Oh yeah? Cool. you like it?

Boydyboy:
yeah, its
fuckin
awesome. those
explosions must’ve been impossible!

Owow0:
Hehehehhe
.... Thanks! How about
the
billygoat
that showed up at the end? Did you like
him?

Boydyboy:
yeah... especially when he pulled the guy out of the
burning
reck
...

OwOw0:
That was the hardest part to animate, making all his legs
move right... not to mention the flames.

Boydyboy:
it was Spielberg level shit
thoguh
Ollie.

OwOw0:
Hehehe
...*grin*

After that he kept the tape for weeks, forgetting and
forgetting to return it to me. When he finally did, the inner air of the
cassette and its paper box smelled like his bedroom. Like his deodorant and his
t-shirts and his socks and his sheets. In the dark of my own room I inhaled the
Boyd-smell from the inner guts of the cassette and felt my heart swell as well
as my penis—a combination so perfectly yin and yang I knew it was love.

Sometimes after saying goodnight and logging off I would lie
in bed wondering when all these feelings for Boyd started happening. It felt
recent, but it wasn’t as if I’d just met him; I’d known him since at least
kindergarten and we’d been best friends since third grade. Even before we’d
gained and lost Dwight, even before we’d gained and lost Tyson (who went to St.
Mark’s) and Itchy Chin Mike (who hung with the popular kids now), even before
there was
OwOw0
and
Boydyboy
or even an Internet to dial in
to, there was
Ollie and Boyd
. It was
how life was. We were juniors in high school now and I knew that at some point
my mind had twirled our “and” into an ampersand, and then started wanting to
shape it into a heart.

Maybe I couldn’t remember the exact moment it happened
because it was still happening—daily, nightly. Falling in love isn’t like
jumping out of an airplane; it’s not like taking a leap. It’s like opening your
eyes one day and discovering you’re already in the air.

***

In real life, loving Boyd was an easy mixture of longings
and satisfactions. A longing to see his Jeep pull in beside my Civic in the
school parking lot; a satisfaction when it did. A longing to stand with him in
the lunch line; a satisfaction when he would show up and roll his blue eyes at
lumpy mashed potatoes. Seeing Boyd in school was a fact of life as old as we
were, and the days were reined in—even when we were alone together—by
habit and precedent, by customs and boundaries it felt impossible not to
observe. You know? I wasn’t going to say anything in school. I wasn’t going to
take chances. A boy with a secret is a conservative boy.

Online—that was new territory, a Wild West into which
a new Ollie & Boyd appeared fresh at age sixteen. Often we were groggy,
silly, giddy there; crude and lewd and snarky. School nights soared past 1:00
or 2:00 a.m., weekend nights went till dawn, when it felt to me like we were
the only two people awake in the world. Online the boundaries were so much
looser, had to be felt out and decided upon one at a time, IM by IM. Online my
longings were untethered from routine. I dared to want more than just to see
him. I dared to want to tell him things. I dared to want him to know things.
The one big thing I increasingly wanted to tell him was beyond any boundary,
even here, but I came out with little things, the saying of which was probably
half the reason the big thing had come to exist in the first place. Things
like: