Published in the United States in 2020

by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2020

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited,

2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB

Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2020

ISBN 978 1 4052 98056

eISBN 978 1 4052 98063

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start

and

To my parents, there long before the start

Track List

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Track One: Quiz Bowl Antichrist

Track Two: Day 2934 (An Every Day Story)

Track Three: The Good Girls

Track Four: The Quarterback and the Cheerleader (A Boy Meets Boy Story)

Track Five: The Mulberry Branch

Track Six: Your Temporary Santa

Track Seven: Storytime

Track Eight: A Better Writer

Track Nine: 8-Song Memoir

Track Ten: Snow Day (A Two Boys Kissing Story)

Track Eleven: The Woods

Track Twelve: A Brief History of First Kisses (Illustrated by Nick Eliopulos)

Track Thirteen: As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s “Firework” . . .

Track Fourteen: The Vulnerable Hours

Track Fifteen: Twelve Months

Track Sixteen: The Hold

Track Seventeen: How My Parents Met

Track Eighteen: We

Track Nineteen: Give Them Words

Liner Notes

Back series promotional

TRACK ONE
Quiz Bowl Antichrist

I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.

He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.

I, for one, was mortified.

This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.

I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the five other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched Remembrance of Things Past or Cry, the Beloved Country or Middlemarch, I knew what they were about and who had written them. I could only name about ten elements on the periodic table, but that hardly mattered—my teammates had the whole thing memorized. They told jokes where “her neutrino!” was the punch line.

Sung was our fearless leader—fearless, that is, within the context of our practices and competitions. Put him back into the general population and he became just another math geek, too bland to be teased, too awkward to be resented. As soon as he got the varsity jacket, there was little question that it would never leave his back. All the varsity jackets in our school looked the same on the fronts—burgundy body, white sleeves, white R. But the backs were different—a picture of two guys wrestling for the wrestlers, a football for the football players, a breaststroker for the swimmers. For quiz bowl, they initially chose a faceless white kid at a podium, probably a leftover design from another school’s speech and debate team. It looked as if the symbol from the men’s room door was giving an inaugural address. Sung didn’t feel this conveyed the team aspect of quiz bowl, so he made them add four other faceless white kids at podiums. I was, presumably, one of those five. Because even though I was an alternate, they always rotated me in.

I had agreed to join the quiz bowl team for four reasons:

(1) I needed it for my college applications.

(2) I needed a good grade in Mr. Phillips’s physics class for my college applications, and I wasn’t going to get it from ordinary studying.

(3) I derived a perverse pleasure from being the only person in a competitive situation who knew that Jane Eyre was a character while Jane Austen was a writer.

(4) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom.

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there—you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.

Damien was track-team popular and hung with the cross-country crowd. If he didn’t have any problem with Sung’s varsity jacket, it was probably because none of the other kids in our school defined him as a quiz bowl geek. If anything, his membership on the team was seen as a fluke. Whereas I, presumably, belonged there, along with Sung and Frances Oh (perfect SAT, tragic skin) and Wes Ward (250 IQ, 250 lbs) and Gordon White (calculator watch, matching glasses). My social status was about the same as that of a water fountain in the hall—people were happy enough I was there when they needed me, but they didn’t particularly want to talk to me. I wish I could say I was fine with this, and that I found what I needed in books or food or drugs or quiz bowl or other water fountain kids. But it sucked. I didn’t have the disposition to be slavishly devoted to popularity and the popular kids, but at the same time, I was pretty sure my friends were losers, and barely even friends.

When we won at States, Sung, Damien, Frances, Wes, and Gordon celebrated like they’d just gotten full scholarships to MIT. Mr. Phillips was in tears when he called his wife to tell her. A photographer from the local paper came to school to take our picture a few days later, and I tried to hide behind the others as much as possible. Sung had his jacket by that time, its white sleeves glistening like they’d been made from unicorn horns. After the article appeared, a couple of people congratulated me in the hall. But most kids snickered or didn’t care. We had a crash-course candy sale to pay for our trip to Indianapolis, and I stole money from my parents’ wallets and dipped into my savings in order to buy my whole portion outright, shoving the crap candy bars in our basement instead of having to ask my fellow students to pony up.

Sung, of course, wanted us to get matching varsity jackets to wear to Nationals. Damien already had a varsity jacket for cross-country that he never wore, so he was out. Frances, Wes, and Gordon said they were using all their money on the tickets and other things for Indianapolis. I simply said no. And when Sung asked me if I was sure, I told him, “You can’t possibly expect me to wear that.” Everybody got quiet for a second, but Sung didn’t seem fazed. He just launched us into yet another practice.

If there were four reasons that I’d joined the quiz bowl team, there were two reasons that I stayed on:

(1) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom. (These things don’t change.)

(2) I really, really liked defeating people.

Note: I am not saying I really, really liked winning. Winning is a more abstract concept, and in quiz bowl, winning usually meant having to come back in the next round and do it all again. No, I liked defeating people. I liked seeing the look on the other team’s faces when I got a question they couldn’t answer. I loved their geektastic disappointment when they realized they weren’t good enough to rank up. I loved using trivia to make people doubt themselves. I never, ever missed a literature question—I was a fucking juggernaut of authors and oeuvres. And I never, ever attempted to answer any of the math, science, or history questions. Nobody expected me to. Thus, I would always win.

The hardest were the scrimmages, when we would split into teams of three and take each other on. I didn’t have any problem answering the questions correctly—I just had to make sure not to gloat. The only thing keeping me in check was Damien. Around him, I wanted to be a good guy.

If I had any enthusiasm for Indianapolis, it was because I assumed Damien and I would be rooming together. I imagined us talking all night, bonding to the point of knowledge. I could see us laughing together about the quiz bowl kids from other states who were surrounding us in their quiz bowl varsity jackets. We’d smuggle in some beers, watch bad TV, and become so comfortable with each other that I would finally feel the world was comfortable, too. This was strictly a separate-beds fantasy . . . but it was a separate-from-the-world fantasy, too. That was what I wanted.

The closer we got to Indianapolis, the more I found myself looking forward to it, and the more Sung became a dictator. If I’d thought he was serious about quiz bowl before, he was beyond any frame of reference now. He wanted to practice every day after school for six hours—pizza was brought in—and even when he saw us in the halls, he threw questions our way. At first I tried to ignore him, but that only made him YELL HIS QUESTIONS IN A LOUD, OVERLY ARTICULATED VOICE. Now anyone within four hallways of our own could hear the guy in the quiz bowl varsity jacket shout, “WHO WAS THE LAST AMERICAN NOVELIST TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE?”

And I’d say, much lower, “James Patterson.”

Sung would blanch and whisper, “Wrong.”

“Toni Morrison,” I’d correct. “I’m just playing with ya.”

“That’s not funny,” he’d say. And I’d run for class.

It did, at least, give me a reason to talk to Damien at lunch. I accidentally-on-purpose ended up behind him on the cafeteria line.

“Is Sung driving you crazy, too?” I asked. “With his pop quizzes?”

Damien smiled. “Nah. It’s just Sung being Sung. You’ve gotta respect that.”

As far as I could tell, the only reason to respect that was because Damien was respecting it. Which, at that moment, was reason enough.

The afternoon hallway quizzing wore me down, though. Sung got increasingly angry as I was increasingly unable to give him a straight answer.

“WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN’S LAST FINISHED NOVEL?”

“Vaginas and Virginity.”

“WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN OTHELLO ?”

“His manservant Bastardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter!”

“WHAT IS THE ENDING OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID’?”

“She turns into a fish and marries Nemo!”

“Fuck you!”

These were remarkable words to hear coming from Sung’s mouth.

He went on.

“Are you trying to sabotage us? Do you WANT to LOSE?”

The other kids in the hall were loving this—a full-blown quiz bowl spat.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I joked.

Sung turned bright, bright red.

“I’ll see you at practice!” he managed to get out. Then he turned around and I could see the five quiz bowlers on the back of his jacket, their blank faces not-quite-glaring at me as he stormed away.

When I arrived ten minutes late to our final pre-Indianapolis practice, Mr. Phillips looked concerned, Damien looked indifferent, Sung looked flustered and angry, Frances looked flustered, Gordon looked angry, and Wes looked distracted by whatever game he was playing on his phone.

“Everyone needs to take this very seriously,” Mr. Phillips pronounced.

“Because there are small, defenseless koalas who will be killed if we don’t make the final four!” I added.

“Do you want to stay here?” Sung asked, looking like I’d just stuck a magnet in his hard drive. “Is that what this is about?”

“No,” I said calmly, “I’m just joking. If you can’t joke about quiz bowl, what can you joke about? It’s like mime in that respect.”

“C’mon, Alec,” Damien said. “Sung just wants us to win.”

“No,” I said. “Sung only wants us to win. There’s a difference.”

Damien and the others looked at me blankly. This was not, I remembered, a word-choice crowd.

Still, Damien had gotten the message across: Lay off. So I did, for the rest of the practice. And I didn’t get a single question wrong. I even could name four Pearl S. Buck books besides The Good Earth—which is the English-geek equivalent of knowing how to make an atomic bomb, in that it’s both difficult and totally uncool.

And how was I rewarded for this display of extraneous knowledge? At the end of the practice, as we were leaving, Mr. Phillips offhandedly told us our room assignments. Sung would be the one who got to room with Damien. And I would have to share a room with Wes, who liked to watch Lord of the Rings battle scenes to prepare for competition.

On the way out, I swear Sung was gloating.

If it had been up to Sung, we would have had the cheerleading squad seeing us off at the airport. I could see it now:

Two-four-six-eight, how do mollusks procreate?

One-two-three-four, name the birthplace of Niels Bohr!

Then, before we left, as a special treat, Sung would calculate the mass and volume of their pom-poms. Each of the girls would dream of being the one to wear Sung’s letter jacket when he came back home, because that would make her the most popular girl in the entire sch—

“Alec, we’re boarding.” Damien interrupted my sarcastic reverie. The karma gods had at least seated us next to each other on the plane. Unfortunately, they then swung around (as karma gods tend to do, the jerks) and made him fall asleep the moment after takeoff. It wasn’t until we were well into our descent that he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“It hasn’t even occurred to me to be nervous,” I answered honestly. “I mean, we don’t have to win for it to look good on our transcripts. I’m already concocting this story where I overcome a bad case of consumption, the disapproval of my parents, a terrifying history of crashing in small planes, and a twenty-four-hour speech impediment in order to compete in this tournament. As long as you overcome adversity, they don’t really care if you win. Unless it’s, like, a real sport.”

“Dude,” he said, “you read way too much.”

“But clearly you don’t know your science enough to move across the aisle the minute I reveal my consumptive state.”

“Oh,” he said, leaning a little closer, “I can catch consumption just from sitting next to you?”

“Again,” I said, not leaning away, “medicine is your area of expertise. In novels, you damn well can catch consumption from sitting next to someone. You were doomed from the moment you met me.”

“I’ll say.”

I wasn’t quick enough to keep the conversation going. Damien bent down to take an issue of Men’s Health out of his bag. And he wasn’t even reading it for the pictures.

I pretended to have a hacking cough for the remaining ten minutes of the flight. The other people around me were annoyed, but I could tell that Damien was amused. It was our joke now.

We were staying at the Westin in Indianapolis, home to the Heavenly™ Bed and the Heavenly™ Bath.

“How the hell can you trademark the word heavenly ?” I asked Wes as we dumped out our stuff. We were only staying two nights, so it hardly seemed necessary to hang anything up.

“I dunno,” he answered.

“And what’s up with the Heavenly™ Bath? Am I really going to have to take showers in heaven? It hardly seems worth the trouble of being good now if you’re going to have to wear deodorant in the afterlife.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Wes said, making an even stack on the bedside table of all the comics he’d brought.

“What, you’ve never been dead?”

He sighed.

“It’s time to meet the team,” he said.

Before we left, he made sure every single light in the room was off.

He even unplugged the clock.

The competition didn’t start until the next morning, so the evening was devoted to the Quiz Bowl Social.

“Having a social at a quiz bowl tournament is like having all-you-can-eat ribs and inviting a bunch of vegetarians over,” I told Damien as the rest of us waited for Sung and Mr. Phillips to come down to the lobby.

“I’m sure there are some cool kids here,” he said.

“Yeah. And they’re all back in their rooms, drinking.”

Some people had dressed up for the social—meaning that some girls had worn dresses and some boys had worn ties, although none of them could muster enough strength to also wear jackets. Unless, of course, it was a varsity quiz bowl jacket. I saw at least five of them in the lobby.

“Hey, Sung, you’re not so unique anymore,” I pointed out when he finally showed up, his own jacket looking newly polished.

“I don’t need to be unique,” he scoffed. “I just need to win.”

I pretended to wave a tiny flag. “Go, team.”

“Alright, guys,” Gordon said. “Are we ready to rumble?”

I thought he was kidding, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I looked at our group—Sung’s hair was plastered into perfect place, Frances had put on some makeup, Gordon was wearing bright red socks that had nothing to do with anything else he was wearing, Damien looked casually handsome, and Wes looked like he wanted to be back in our room, reading Y: The Last Man.

“Let’s rumble!” Mr. Phillips chimed in, a little too enthusiastically for someone over the age of eleven.

“Our first match is against the team from North Dakota,” Sung reminded us. “If you meet them, scope out their intelligences.”

“If we see them on the dance floor, I’ll be sure to mosey over and ask them to quote Virginia Woolf,” I assured him. “That should strike fear into their hearts.”

The social was in one of the Westin’s ballrooms. There was a semi-big dance floor at the center, which nobody was coming close to. The punch was as unspiked as the haircuts, the lights dim to hide everyone’s embarrassment.

“Wow,” I said to Damien as we walked in and scoped it out. “This is hot.”

Damien had such a look of social distress on his face, I almost laughed. I could imagine him reassuring himself that none of his other friends from home were ever going to see this.

“The adults are worse than the kids,” Wes observed from over my shoulder.

“You’re right,” I said. Because while the quiz bowlers were mawkish and awkward, the faculty advisors were downright weird, wearing their best suits from 1980 and beaming like they’d finally gone from zeros to heroes in their own massively revised high school years.

Out of either cruelty or obliviousness (probably the former), the DJ decided to unpack Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” A lot of the quiz bowlers looked like they were hearing it for the first time. From the moment the beat started, it was only a question of whose resolve would dissolve first. Would the team captain from Montana start break dancing? Would the alternate from Connecticut let down her hair and flail it around?

In the end, it was a whole squad that took the floor. As a group, they started to bust out the moves—something I could never imagine our team doing. They laughed at themselves while they danced, and it was clear they were having a good time. Other kids started to join them. Even Sung, Frances, and Gordon plunged in.

“Check it out,” Wes mumbled.

Gordon was doing a strut that looked like something he’d practiced at home; I had no doubt it went over better in his bedroom mirror than it did in public. Frances did a slight sway, which was in keeping with her personality. And Sung—well, Sung looked like someone’s grandfather trying to dance to “Hollaback Girl.”

“This shit really is bananas,” I said to Damien. “B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Look at that varsity jacket go!”

“Enough with the jacket,” Damien replied. “Let him have his fun. He’s stressed enough as it is. I want a drink. You want to get a drink?”

At first I thought he meant breaking into the nearest minibar. But no, he just wanted to head over to the punch bowl. The punch was übersweet—Kool-Aid that had been cut with Sprite—and as I drank glass after glass, it almost gave me a Robitussin high.

“Do you see anyone who looks like they’re from North Dakota?” I asked. “Tall hats? Presence of cattle? If so, we can go spy. If you distract them, I’ll steal the laminated copies of their SAT scores from their fanny packs.”

But he wasn’t into it. He kept checking texts on his phone.

“Who’s texting?” I finally asked.

“Just Julie,” he said. “I wish she’d stop.”

I assumed Just Julie was Julie Swain, who was also on cross-country. I didn’t think they’d been going out. Maybe she’d wanted to and he hadn’t. That would explain why he wasn’t texting back.

Clearly, Damien and I weren’t ever going to get into the social part of the social. He had something on his mind and I had nothing but him on my own. We’d lost Wes, and Sung, Frances, and Gordon were still on the dance floor. Sung looked like it was a job to be there, while Gordon was in his own little world. It was Frances who fascinated me the most.

“She almost looks happy,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her happy.”

Damien nodded and drank some more punch. “She’s always so serious,” he agreed.

The punch was turning our lips cherry red.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Okay.”

We were alone together in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. So we did the natural thing.

We went to his room.

And we watched TV.

It was his room, so he got to choose. We ended up watching The Departed on basic cable. It was, I realized, the most time we had ever spent alone together. He lay back on his bed and I sat on Sung’s, making sure my angle was such that I could watch Damien as much as I watched the TV.

During the first commercial break, I asked, “Is something wrong?”

He looked at me strangely. “No. Does it seem like something’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “No. Just asking.”

During the second commercial break, I asked, “Were you and Julie going out?”

He put his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

“No.” And then, about a minute later, right before the movie started again, “It wasn’t anything, really.”

During the third commercial break, I asked, “Does she know that?”

“What?”

“Does Julie know it wasn’t anything?”

“No,” he said. “It looks like she doesn’t know that.”

This was it, I was sure—the point where he’d ask for my advice. I could help him. I could prove myself worthy of his company.

But he let it drop. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to watch the movie.

I realized he needed to reveal himself to me in his own time. I couldn’t rush it. I had to be patient. For the remaining commercial breaks, I made North Dakota jokes. He laughed at some of them, and even threw in a few of his own.

Sung came back when there were about fifteen minutes left in the movie. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about me sitting on his bed, but I wasn’t about to move.

“Sung,” I told him, “if this whole quiz bowl thing doesn’t work out for you, I think you have a future in disco.”

“Shut up,” he grumbled, taking off the famous jacket and hanging it in the closet.

We watched the rest of the movie in silence, with Sung sitting on the edge of Damien’s bed. As soon as the credits were rolling, Sung announced it was time to go to sleep.

“But where are you sleeping?” I asked, spreading out on his sheets.

“That’s my bed,” he said.

I wanted to offer Sung a swap—he could stay with Wes and talk about polynomials all night, while I could stay with Damien. But clearly that wasn’t a real option. Damien walked me to the door.

“Lay off the minibar,” he said. “We need you sober tomorrow.”

“I’ll try,” I replied. “But those little bottles are just so pretty. Every time I drink from them, I can pretend I’m a doll.”

He chuckled and hit me lightly on the shoulder.

“Resist,” he commanded.

Again, I told him I’d try.

Wes was in bed and the lights were off when I got to my room, so I very quietly changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth.

I was about to nod off when Wes’s voice asked, “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Damien and I went to his room and watched The Departed. It was a good time. We looked for you, but you were already gone.”

“That social sucked.”

“It most certainly did.”

I closed my eyes.

“Goodnight,” Wes said softly, making it sound like a true wish. Nobody besides my parents had ever said it to me like that before.

“Goodnight,” I said back. Then I made sure he’d plugged the clock back in, and went to sleep.

The next morning, we kicked North Dakota’s ass. Then, for good measure, we erased Maryland from the boards and made Oklahoma cry.

It felt good.

“Don’t get too cocky,” Sung warned us, which was pretty precious, since Sung was the cockiest of us all. I half expected “We Are the Champions” to come blaring out of his ears every time we won a round.

Our fourth and last match of the day—in the quarterfinals—was against the team from Clearwater, Florida, which had made it to the finals for each of the past ten years, winning four of those times. They were legendary, insofar as people like Sung had heard about them and had studied their strategies, with some tapes Mr. Phillips had managed to get off Clearwater local access.

Even though I was the alternate, I was put in the starting lineup. Clearwater was known for treating the canon like a cannon to demolish the other team.

“Bring it on,” I said.

It soon became clear who my counterpart on the Clearwater team was—a wispy girl with straight brown hair who could barely bother to put down her Muriel Spark in order to start playing. The first time she opened her mouth, she revealed their secret weapon:

She was British.

Frances looked momentarily frightened by this, but I took it in stride. When the girl lunged with Byron, I parried with Asimov. When she volleyed with Burgess, I pounced with Roth. Neither of us missed a question, so it became a test of buzzer willpower. I started to ring in a split second before I knew the answer. And I always knew the answer.

Until I did the unthinkable.

I buzzed in for a science question.

Which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?

I realized immediately it wasn’t Saul Bellow or Kenzaburo Oe.

As the judge said, “Do you have an answer?” the phrase The Double Helix hit in my head.

“Crick!” I exclaimed.

The judge looked at me for a moment, then down at his card. “That is incorrect. Clearwater, which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People ?”

It was not the lit girl who buzzed in.

“James D. Watson,” one of the math boys answered snottily, the D sent as a particular fuck you to me.

“Sorry,” I whispered to my team.

“It’s okay,” Damien said.

“No worries,” Wes said.

Sung, I knew, wouldn’t be as forgiving.

I was now off my game and more cautious with the buzzer, so Brit girl got the best of me on Caliban and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. I managed to stick One Hundred Years of Solitude in edgewise, but that was scant comfort. I mean, who didn’t know One Hundred Years of Solitude ?

Clearwater had a one-question lead with three questions left, and the last questions were about math, history, and geography. So I sat back while Sung rocked the relative areas of a rhombus and a circle, Wes sent a little love General Omar Bradley’s way, and Frances wrapped it up with Tashkent, which I had not known was the capital of Uzbekistan, its name translating as “stone village.”

Usually we burst out of our chairs when we won, but this match had been so exhausting that we could only feel relieved. We shook hands with the other team—Brit girl’s hand felt like it was made of paper, which I found weird.

After Clearwater had left the room, Sung called an emergency team meeting.

“That was too close,” he said. Not congratulations or nice work.

No, Sung was pissed.

He talked about the need to be more aggressive on the buzzer, but also to exercise care. He said we should always play to our strengths. To make a blunder was to destroy the fabric of our entire team.

“I get it, I get it,” I said.

“No,” Sung told me, “I don’t think you do.”

“Sung,” Mr. Phillips cautioned.

“I think he needs to hear this,” Sung insisted. “From the very start of the year, he has refused to be a team player. And what we saw today was nothing short of an insurrection. He broke the unwritten rules.”

“He is standing right here,” I pointed out. “Just come right out and say it.”

“YOU ARE NOT TO ANSWER SCIENCE QUESTIONS!” Sung yelled. “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”

“Hey—” Damien started to interrupt.

I held up my hand. “No, it’s okay. Sung needs to get this out of his system.”

“You are the alternate,” Sung went on.

“You don’t seem to mind it when I’m answering questions, Sung.”

“We only have you here because we have to!”

“That’s enough,” Mr. Phillips said decisively.

“No, it’s not enough,” I said. “I’m sick of you all acting like I’m this English freak raining on your little math-science parade. Sung seems to think my contribution to this team is a little less than everyone else’s.”

“Anyone can memorize book titles!” Sung shouted.

“Oh, please. Like I care what you think? You don’t even know the difference between Keats and Byron.”

“The difference between Keats and Byron doesn’t matter!”

“None of this matters!” I shouted back. “Don’t you get it, Sung? NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Yes, you have knowledge—but you’re not doing anything with it. You’re reciting it. You’re not out curing cancer—you’re listing the names of the people who’ve tried to cure cancer. This whole thing is a joke, Captain. It’s trivial. Which is why everyone laughs at us.”

“You think we’re all trivial?” Sung challenged.

“No,” I said. “I think you’re trivial with your quiz bowl obsession. The rest of us have other things going on. We have lives.”

“You’re the one who’s not a part of our team! You’re the outcast!”

“If that’s so true, Sung, then why are you the only one of us wearing a fucking varsity jacket? Why do you think nobody else wanted to be seen in one? It’s not just me, Sung. It’s all of us.”

“Enough!” Mr. Phillips yelled.

Sung looked like he wanted to kill me. And I knew at the same time that he’d never look at that damn jacket the same way again.

“Why don’t we all take a break over dinner,” Mr. Phillips went on, “then regroup in my room at eight for a scrimmage before the semifinals tomorrow morning? I don’t know who we’re facing, but we’re going to need to be a team to face them.”

What we did next wasn’t very teamlike: Mr. Phillips, a brooding Sung, Frances, and Gordon went one way for dinner, while Wes, Damien, and I went another way.

“There’s a Steak ’n Shake a few blocks away,” Wes told us.

“Sounds good,” Damien said.

I, brooding as well, followed.

“It was a question about books,” I said, once we’d left the hotel. “I didn’t realize it was a science question.”

“Crick wasn’t that far off,” Wes pointed out.

“Yeah, but I still fucked it up.”

“And we still won,” Damien said.

Yeah, I knew that.

But I wasn’t feeling it.

Damien and Wes tried to cheer me up. Not just by getting my burger and shake for me, but by sitting across from me and treating me like a friend.

“So how does it feel to be the Quiz Bowl Antichrist?” Damien asked in a mock-sportscaster voice, holding an invisible microphone out for my reply.

“Well, as James D. Watson said, I’m the motherfuckin’ princess. All other quiz bowlers shall bow down to me. Because you know what?”

“What?” Damien and Wes both asked.

“One of these days, I’m going to be the goddamn answer to a quiz bowl question.”

“Yeah,” Wes said. “ ‘What quiz bowl alternate murdered his team captain in the semifinals and later wrote a book, Among Boring People ?’ ”

Damien shook his head. “Not funny. There will be no murder tonight or tomorrow.”

“Do you realize, if we win this thing, it’s going to come up on Google Search for the rest of our lives?” I said.

“Let’s wear masks in the photo,” Wes suggested.

“I’ll be Michelangelo. You can be Donatello.”

And it went on like this for a while. Damien stopped talking and watched me and Wes going back and forth. I was talking, but mostly I was watching him back. The green-blue of his eyes. The side of his neck. The curl of hair that dangled over the left corner of his forehead. No matter where I looked, there was something to see.

I didn’t have any control over it. Something inside of me was shifting. Everything I’d refused to articulate was starting to spell itself out. Not as knowledge, but as the impulse beneath the knowledge. I knew I wanted to be with him, and I was also starting to feel why. He was a reason I was here. He was a reason it mattered.

I was talking to Wes, but really I was talking to Damien through what I was saying to Wes. I wanted him to find me entertaining. I wanted him to find me interesting. I wanted him to find me.

We were done pretty quickly, and before I knew it, we were walking back to the Westin. Once we got to the lobby, Wes magically decided to head back to our room until the “scrimmage” at eight. That left Damien and me with two hours and nothing to do.

“Why don’t we go to my room?” Damien suggested.

I didn’t argue. I started to feel nervous—unreasonably nervous. We were just two friends going to a room. There wasn’t anything else to it. And yet . . . he hadn’t mentioned watching TV, and last time he’d said, “Why don’t we go to my room to watch TV?”

“I’m glad it’s just the two of us,” I ventured.

“Yeah, me too,” Damien said.

We rode the elevator in silence and walked down the hallway in silence. When we got to his door, he swiped his electronic key in the lock and got a green light on the first try. I could never manage to do that.

“After you,” he said, opening the door and gesturing me in.

I walked forward, down the small hallway, turning toward the beds. And that’s when I realized—there was someone in the room. And it was Sung. And he was on his bed. And he wasn’t wearing his jacket. Or a shirt. And he was moaning a little.

I thought we’d caught him jerking off. I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing. And that’s what made him notice we were in the room. He jumped and turned around, and I realized Frances was in the bed with him, shirt also off, but bra still on.

It was all so messed up that I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears were coming to my eyes.

“Get out!” Sung yelled.

“I’m sorry, Frances,” I said between laughing fits. “I’m so sorry.”

“GET OUT!” Sung screamed again, standing up now. Thank God he still had his pants on. “YOU ARE THE DEVIL. THE DEVIL!”

“I prefer Antichrist,” I told him.

“THE DEVIL!”

“THE DEVIL!” I mimicked back.

I felt Damien’s hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

“This is so pathetic,” I said. “Sung, man, you’re pathetic.”

Sung lunged forward then, and Damien stepped in between us.

“Go,” Damien told me. “Now.”

I was laughing again, so I apologized to Frances again, then I pulled myself into the hallway.

Damien came out a few seconds later and closed the door behind us.

“Holy shit!” I said.

“Stop it,” Damien said. “Enough.”

“Enough?” I laughed again. “I haven’t even started.”

Damien shook his head. “You’re cold, man,” he said. “I can’t believe how cold you are.”

“What?” I asked. “You don’t find this funny?”

“You have no heart.”

This sobered me up pretty quickly. “How can you say that?” I asked. “How can you, of all people, say that?”

“What does that mean? Me, of all people?”

He’d gotten me.

“Alec?”

“I don’t know!” I shouted. “Okay? I don’t know.”

This sounded like the truth, but it was feeling less than that. I knew. Or I was starting to know.

“I do have a heart,” I said. But I stopped there.

I could feel it all coming apart. The collapse of all those invisible plans, the appearance of all those hidden thoughts.

I bolted. I left him right there in the hallway. I didn’t wait for the elevator—I hit the emergency stairs. I ran like I was the one on the cross-country team, even when I heard him following me.

“Don’t!” I yelled back at him.

I got to my floor and ran to my room. The card wouldn’t work the first time, and I nervously looked at the stairway exit, waiting for him to show up. But he must’ve stopped. He must’ve heard. I got the key through the second time.

Wes was on his bed, reading a comic.

“You’re back early,” he said, not looking up.

I couldn’t say a thing. There was a knock on the door. Damien calling out my name.

“Don’t answer it,” I said. “Please, don’t answer it.”

I locked myself in the bathroom. I stared at the mirror.

I heard Wes murmur something to Damien through the door without opening it. Then he was at the bathroom door.

“Alec? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, but my voice was soggy coming out of my throat.

“Open up.”

I couldn’t. I sat on the lip of the tub, breathing in, breathing out. I remembered the look on Sung’s face and started to laugh. Then I thought of Frances lying there and felt sad. I wondered if I really didn’t have a heart.

“Alec,” Wes said again, gently. “Come on.”

I waited until he walked off. Then I opened the door and went into the bedroom. He was back on his bed, but he hadn’t picked up the comic. He was sitting at the edge, waiting for me.

I told him what had happened. Not the part about Damien, at first, but the part about Sung and Frances. He didn’t laugh, and neither did I. Then I told him Damien’s reaction to my reaction, without going into what was underneath.

“Do you think I’m cold?” I asked him. “Really—am I?”

“You’re not cold,” he said. “You’re just so angry.”

I must’ve looked surprised by this. He went on.

“You can be a total prick, Alec. There’s nothing wrong with that—all of us can be total pricks. We like to think that just because we’re geeks, we can’t be assholes. But we can be. Most of the time, though, it’s not coming from meanness or coldness. It’s coming from anger. Or sadness. I mean, I see people like me and I just want to rip them apart.”

“But why do I want to rip Sung apart?”

“I don’t know. Because he’s a prick, too. And maybe you feel if you rip apart the quiz bowl geek, no one will think of you as a quiz bowl geek.”

“But I’m not a quiz bowl geek!”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Wes asked. “Nobody’s a quiz bowl geek. We’re all just people. And you’re right—what we do here has no redeeming social value whatsoever. But it can be an interesting way to pass the time.”

I sat down on my bed, facing Wes so that our knees almost touched.

“I’m not a very happy person,” I told him. “But sometimes I can trick myself into thinking I am.”

“And where does Damien fit into all this, if I may ask?”

I shook my head. “I really have no idea. I’m still figuring it out.”

“You know he likes girls?”

“I said, I’m still figuring it out.”

“Fair enough.”

I paused, realizing what had just been said.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked Wes.

“Only to me,” he said.

It would take me another three months to understand why.

“Meanwhile,” he went on, “Sung and Frances.”

“Holy shit, right?”

“Yeah, holy shit. And you know the worst part?”

“I can’t imagine what’s worse than seeing it with my own eyes.”

“Gordon is totally in love with Frances.”

“No!”

“Yup. I wouldn’t miss practice tonight for all the money in the world.”

We all showed up. Mr. Phillips could sense there was some tension in the room, but he truly had no idea.

Frances was wearing Sung’s varsity jacket. And suddenly I didn’t mind it so much.

Gordon glared at Sung.

Sung glared at me.

I avoided Damien’s eyes.

When I looked at Wes, he made me feel like I might be worth saving.

Amazingly enough, during practice we were back in fighting form, as if nothing had happened. I felt like I could admit to myself how much I wanted to win. And not just that, how much I wanted our team to win. More for Wes and Frances and Gordon and Damien than anything else.

After we were done, Damien asked me if we could talk for a minute. Everyone else headed back to their rooms and we went down to the lobby. Other quiz bowl groups were swarming around; those that hadn’t made the semifinals were taking the night for what it was—a time when, for a brief pause in their high school lives, they were free from any pressure or care.

“I’m sorry,” Damien said to me. “I was completely off base.”

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have been so mean to Sung and Frances. I should’ve just left.”

We sat there next to each other on a lime-green couch in a hotel lobby that meant nothing to us. He wouldn’t look at me. I wouldn’t look at him.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “Reacted that way.”

It would take him another four months to figure it out. It would be a little too late, but he’d figure it out anyway.

We lost in the semifinals to Iowa. I knew from the look Sung gave me afterward that he would blame me for this loss for the rest of his life. Not because I missed the questions—and I did get two wrong. But for destroying his own invisible plans.

Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever hated any piece of clothing as much as I hated Sung’s varsity jacket for those few weeks. You can’t hate something that much unless you hate yourself equally as much. Not in that kind of way.

It was, I guess, Wes who taught me that. Later, when we were back home and trying to articulate ourselves better, I’d ask him how he’d known so much more than I had.

“Because I read, stupid” would be his answer.

We lost in the semifinals, but the local paper took our picture anyway. Sung looks serious and aggrieved. Gordon looks awkward. Frances looks calm. Damien looks oblivious. And Wes and me?

We look like we’re in on our own joke.

In other words, happy.

TRACK TWO
Day 2934

When I am eight, Valentine’s Day is a Sunday. There is no certain minute I have to wake up, no bus to catch, no homework that needs to be handed in. Sleeping can blur itself into waking, and that is exactly what it does.

I wake up with my face against Yoda’s, my arm gently across Obi-Wan Kenobi. I take in the Star Wars sheets, the Star Wars blanket, the lightsaber lamp beside my bed. I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies, so this is all very strange to me. As I sit up in bed against a robot I will later learn to call a droid, I do my mental morning exercise, figuring out that my name is Jason today and that this is my bedroom. My mother’s room is on the other side of the wall; from the silence, I assume she’s still sleeping.

I know it’s Valentine’s Day because yesterday was the day before Valentine’s Day. I watched yesterday’s sister decorating her cards, putting extra glitter on the one belonging to her crush. She let me put stickers on the cards she cared less about, hearts I laid out in haphazard trails. I tried to imagine each kid opening his or her envelope, knowing full well I would be gone by the time they were delivered.

Now I get up and walk to the mirror. I don’t really pay attention to what I look like, but I do stare for a good long time at the pattern on my pajamas. If you’ve never seen Wookiees dancing before, it’s a very confusing sight.

On my desk, I find a dozen sealed white envelopes, each the size of a playing card. They are all addressed to MOM, the Os shaped into hearts.

It’s as if Jason has left me an assignment. I gather the stack in my hand and leave the room.

Holidays were important to me when I was young, because they were the only days almost everyone could agree upon. In school, there would always be a lead-up, the anticipation gathering into a frenzy as the day grew closer and closer. With Valentine’s Day, the world grew progressively red and pink as February began. It was a bright spot in a cold time, a holiday that didn’t ask much more of me than to eat candy and think about love.

Because of this, I liked it a lot.

Jason’s room is clearly his home base—the rest of the apartment holds fewer representatives from outside our universe. It isn’t a large place—just the two bedrooms wedged together with a kitchen and a den. Big enough for two people, but I feel it’s meant for at least one more.

I try to stay quiet—over the years, I’ve learned to wake a parent only if it’s really, really important. Back before I realized I was waking into a different life each morning, I stormed carelessly into my various parents’ bedrooms, no matter what time it was. Most told me to go back to bed. Some used it as an excuse to get up. And enough lashed out at me that I stopped doing it, terrified that I’d landed in the wrong kind of life, and that my excitement at being awake would be used against me.

On tiptoe steps, I enter the kitchen and find a valentine wonderland awaiting me. The room is aswarm with hearts—dropping from the ceiling, constellated across the cabinets, blooming from the countertop. There have to be hundreds of them, and to my eight-year-old eye, it looks like thousands. They peek out from drawers, scale the refrigerator, conga across the floor. In the silence of my sleeping, my mother has constructed this for me. There are hearts popping out of the toaster. Hearts running away with the spoons. Hearts swimming above napkins and hopscotching the paper towels.

I can’t help but pick one up, feel the red paper between my fingers. Already, the heart in my hand is forming a personality in my head. This heart—a little squat, a little heavier on the left side—is a bit slower than the rest, but he tells good jokes. I name him Bruno. (I don’t know where the name comes from; it’s probably the dog or cat from a house I once lived in, the name all that remains in my memory.) Immediately, Bruno makes two friends, Sally and Lucy. They talk a valentine language, but luckily I can translate it into English.

This is how my mother finds me nearly an hour later: at the kitchen table, building a jungle gym for my new friends. Celery for a slide. Broccoli to climb. Carrot sticks at fort-making angles. Bruno still has center stage, but the cast of characters has grown to at least a dozen. I believe I know them well.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” my mother says.

Years later, I will remember her voice. I will remember the way she said it. With chime-like clarity, announcing that this is indeed a special day, and that even though I have done nothing to deserve it but be myself, it all belongs to me.

In my haste to get lost in the heart-world I’ve conjured, I’ve forgotten to put out the envelopes Jason left. I’ve stashed them in a corner, by the gremlin-grumbling base of the refrigerator. Now I scoot down from my chair to retrieve them. I have not touched the larger pink envelope I found with my name on it on the kitchen table. I knew to wait until Mom woke up before opening it.

My mother goes to the cupboard and reaches for something on a shelf I can’t imagine ever being able to reach. A few hearts fall as the door swings, but they make a soft landing. Two red-wrapped boxes emerge in her hands. I wonder how long they’ve been up there, and at the same time I could just as easily believe they’ve appeared at this very moment.

It is just the two of us, giants in the world of hearts. It is just the two of us, together in a small kitchen on a Sunday morning. It is just the two of us, and now I am handing over my twelve envelopes and she is handing over the red-wrapped boxes, accompanied by the pink-clad card.

It is a trick I’ve learned, to feel as if a card is for me even if it’s really addressed to the person I am that day. This is the only way I stop myself from falling through the fabric of everyday life. When I was a child, I could make myself believe that the words and the love behind them were always meant for me. Especially if I saw the expression of love in the eyes of the person who was giving the card to me.

As my mother opens her envelopes, I can see I’ve given her a whole pack of Star Wars valentines, providing each character with his or her own elaborate autograph. The card for me, meanwhile, has a pack of walruses on it, making the shape of a heart on an ice floe. (I have to look closely to make sure they’re not Wookiees.) In the first red box my mother has given me, I find a red scarf. In the second red box, I find a pair of red mittens.

When you get older, red becomes more complicated, just as hearts become more complicated. But back then, the world was far from a bloody, angry, embarrassing thing. Red had one meaning, and that meaning was love. There in the kitchen, I wrap myself in it, I clothe myself in it, and I’m sure that my smile is just as red as the mittens, and the heart in my chest is just as red as the scarf.

My mother holds up a card with a masked figure on it. The caption reads, May you HUNT up a BOUNTY of HEARTS.

“I think this is my favorite,” she tells me. “Boba Fett’s a real romantic, isn’t he?”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I nod earnestly, which only makes her smile more.

“So what shall we do with our Valentine’s Day? Maybe some valentine waffles to start?”

She has a heart-shaped cookie cutter at the ready, and uses it to force some Eggos into the holiday spirit. As she does, she hums a song I don’t know. I want to sing along, but I can’t. Most of the songs I’ve learned in school involve grand old flags and amber waves of grain. None seem to apply to this moment.

She tries to shape the butter into hearts, but it doesn’t quite work. The syrup, however, allows itself a heart-shaped pour. I almost don’t want to eat the waffles, they seem so loving.

I think my mother senses I’m on the verge of giving the waffles names. “Go ahead,” she says, now making two for herself. “Before they get cold.”

She turns on the radio, and we’re serenaded by commercials and forecasts. Sitting at the kitchen table, I am reminded how households with only two people have a different kind of gravity than others. We need the background noise, because otherwise the burden is entirely on us. And at the same time, there isn’t that much of a burden, because we are used to the two-person rhythm of things, the constant awareness of one another without much needing to be said. We are the only objects exerting any gravitational pull on our attentions. The pull has some slack to it, some give.

After the waffles are gone, I head back to my room and play some more with the hearts, letting them explore the Millennium Falcon and some sketches Jason has made of the Death Star.

As I do this, my mother washes the dishes, then goes to her room to do other things I don’t notice. When she emerges again in my doorway, she has a bottle of pink liquid in her hands.

“How about a strawberry bubble bath?” she asks.

I am not going to argue with that. I watch, hearts in hand, as she draws the bath, checking to make sure the water isn’t too cold and isn’t too hot. When it’s just right, she pours the pink in, and I watch the bubbles race to the surface. She leaves me alone to submerge myself into strawberry-scented oblivion. My thoughts wander, but not to a place where I can follow them. I turn the bubbles into peaks, into clouds that I toss into the air. It doesn’t occur to me to wash myself. It’s as if I believe the steam will evaporate me into being clean.

From the bathtub, I can hear my mother walking around the apartment. Every now and then, she asks if everything is okay, and I let her know I’m good. Finally she suggests it might be time for me to get out of the tub. I have already used the tap to add more hot water, and the bubbles are starting to wear thin. So I rise from the tub, a foamy tempest, and then towel myself off and get dressed in a red shirt and green jeans. I wish I had red socks and sneakers, too.

I remember this. I remember all of this.

The next thing I remember, we are walking in the zoo. I know we must have talked about going there. I know we must have driven. But those were everyday acts, and I’m sure I didn’t even hold on to them at the time they were happening. The zoo, however, is different. I have been here before, with other parents, on a field trip. And I’m sure Jason has been here before, too, since his mother doesn’t offer much in the way of tour guidance. Instead she brings Valentine’s Day with her. I remember her pink scarf. I remember my red mittens. I remember us making our way to the mother panda and the baby panda, and I remember the story my mother tells me about how they’re going to spend Valentine’s Day. After everyone’s gone—after even the guards go off to do other things, like check the giraffes—the pandas are going to have a party, just the two of them. They are going to sip pink lemonade through bamboo straws and share heart-shaped chocolates they’ve ordered all the way from China. I listen to her tell me all this, rapt, and then ask her wonder-filled questions: Will they play music at this party? Do they give each other cards? Are the chocolates the kind with fillings, or are they chocolate through and through? Do pandas like the peanut butter ones the best, like I do? My mother has an answer for each and every question.

I watch the pandas and smile. Even though they’re chewing bamboo, even though they aren’t really paying attention to us, I know their secret plans. Even though I know they’re bears, just like the bears you have to be afraid of in the woods, when I look at them, all I can see is softness. I want to give them valentines. I want to buy them red licorice for their party, even if it ends up being from CVS, not China.

At eight, I still let myself believe, because it’s more fun and welcoming to believe. The older I get, the more I will feel I have to assert my logic, the more I’ll feel I have to prove that stories are lies. Or at least until I reach the point when I appreciate stories again, until I reach the point when I realize how they help me live my life. At eight, I am on the cusp. I am sure there are so many things about Jason, about Jason’s mother, about the pandas in their pen, that I’m not seeing. But his mother’s love is strong enough that I don’t care about what I’m not seeing. Instead I want to live in the story of what is there.

The pandas don’t get the red licorice, but I do. When we leave the zoo, we go on a hunt for pink lemonade, and when we find it, I use my licorice as a straw, pretending it’s bamboo. When we go for lunch, I don’t notice any of the couples around us. I don’t measure our day against theirs. In due time, I will see the day as a conspiracy to milk romantics of their rose money. But that’s not how I learned it. That isn’t how any of us learn it. Our first valentines are never from someone we’re dating or have a crush on. Our first valentines are always like this.

My mother convinces the amused waitress to convince the chef to make our pizza so the red will be on top, the cheese underneath. When it arrives at our table, the chef has even added red peppers, shaped in a heart. I am delighted. (A wonderful word for a wonder-filled feeling, delighted.)

I can coast on my excitement for a while, but by the time we get home, I’m tired. I don’t remember napping, but I must nap, because I remember waking up. I remember it being light out, but just barely. I play for a few minutes with Bruno, Sally, and Lucy, and introduce them to Chewbacca, Han Solo, and C-3PO—although, not knowing these guys’ true names, I call them Rex, Harry, and Goldie, respectively. They are planning a valentine party of their own. Chewbacca Rex is a little in love with Sally, but Sally has no idea. Bruno is secretly jealous. Goldie C-3PO consoles him.

When the story has played out for as long as my attention span will allow, I decide to leave my bedroom. Quietly, I venture toward the kitchen, probably to retrieve more of Bruno, Sally, and Lucy’s heart-shaped friends. When I get to the doorway, I see my mom inside, but she doesn’t see me.

Here my memory takes hold. Here I contradict my earlier statement, because isn’t this an everyday moment, too? Why do I end up remembering it so many years later—why do I remember this woman, who I only know for one day? She is sitting at the kitchen table. A pink-frosted cake sits in front of her, the container of frosting still on the table beside it. She has a bag of candy hearts open, and she has been putting them onto the cake. I have caught her pausing in the middle of this task. A small green candy heart is held between her thumb and finger. The bag is right by her wrist. But she isn’t looking at the bag, or at the cake, or at me in the hall. She is looking at something that isn’t there. She is looking at nothing at all. She is seeing something without looking. She is in the room and she isn’t in the room. She is lost in her own private universe, a vast and small place that I can only see as it’s reflected in her body. It is not sadness I see. I would understand sadness. I see, instead, what an adult looks like when she is unmoored from gravity. When she forgets what gravity is like. When the pull of other universes is so faint that there is only the private universe left.

I remember this so well because one day I will understand it. What’s important isn’t what I notice—it’s this recognition beneath, and what comes next. Because the minute she sees me, gravity returns. The minute she sees me, the private universe expands. The minute she sees me, she comes back. And I think: love. I know then, without being able to articulate it, that love is the gravity.

She asks me if I want to finish decorating the cake. I ask her who it’s for. She tells me it’s for us . . . and Boba Fett, if he drops by.

I don’t want Boba Fett to drop by.

We eat two slices of the cake, and I’m sure we eat dinner, too. Afterwards, I help with the dishes and steal fingerfuls of icing from the cake that remains. Pink frosting is, to me, toothpaste’s super fun cousin. My mother, however, will not allow me to brush with what’s left.

Instead I am asked to use the less fun cousin before I change back into my Wookiee wear and jump into bed. I am not tired, not tired at all, but then my mother comes in and says she’ll read to me for a little while. I don’t remember what book it was—it almost doesn’t matter, because the sensation of being read to is so much more powerful than any individual story. Easing myself into her words allows me to loosen my grip on the fierce wakefulness I’d proclaimed when she entered the room. When she finishes, I am nearly in a dream state. But not quite, because I still remember her turning out the light, and then, by the glow of an R2-D2-shaped night-light, singing me off to sleep.

I could have panicked. I could have mourned ahead of time that I was going to lose this all the next day. I was old enough to know what was going on.

But I didn’t do any of that. I let myself take it as mine. I let myself enjoy it.

I let myself believe.

We give each other gifts. Red scarves, red mittens. Cards and licorice. Upside-down pizza. We give each other gifts, but really we give each other details. When days are gone, whether they be holidays or ordinary days, when you are nowhere near where you once were, the details have a way of staying. Trips to the zoo. The decorations on a cake. We keep them. They keep us. Bedtime melodies. Constellations of construction-paper hearts. I have added them up, and in my memory, I see love.

TRACK THREE
The Good Girls

In high school, I was one of the good girls.

My parents didn’t know what to think. Every night, there’d be the parade of phone calls for their son. I’d slip out of the room, behind closed doors, to talk about friends and homework and relationships (rarely my own) and, every now and then, the meaning of life. They didn’t know all these girls’ voices like I did, so they were never really certain who was calling, or why. Either I had dozens of girlfriends or I didn’t have any at all.

The truth was most of my friends were girls. Mayling, Elana, Joanna, Carolyn, Lauren, and Marcie were the good girls. Lynda, Dvora, Rebecca, Susannah, Dina, Meg, and Jinny were the good girls who hit on the boy thing when we hit high school. Eliza, Jodi, Jordana, Jeannie, and Maryam were the good girls one grade below us. Jennifer, Sami, and Tracey were the good girls who didn’t do the group thing with us as much. There were boys, too . . . but there weren’t that many of them. The girls were the nucleus of my social life.

We didn’t talk about sex; we talked about love. We never, ever used party as a verb. Awkwardly mixed drinks and the occasional beer or wine cooler were as alcoholic as we got. Pot was a big step. Cocaine was unimaginable. We were the kids for whom VCRs had been invented. We watched When Harry Met Sally . . . over and over again and pondered its lessons like it had been filmed in Aramaic. The central question, of course, was: Can guys and girls really be friends? I liked to think I was the proof positive, because even though I fell for one of my female friends every now and then, friendship always managed to win out in the end.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me to like boys.

We good girls coveted our phrasings like they were SAT flash cards. We honed our wits like Dorothy Parker at an Algonquin lunch table. We were smart, and we knew it. We were dorks, and we knew it. But instead of hiding both things, we embraced them. We created our own form of popularity. In our town of Millburn, New Jersey, where the football team never won, this was surprisingly easy to do.

Many of the girls were in the Millburnettes, the girls’ singing group. If any of them dated, odds were that she’d date one of the Millburnaires. I myself failed my Millburnaire audition because I tried to make every song sound like “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables. Mr. Deal, the fussy, testy diva of a chorus director, was half-appalled and half-amused. He gave me another chance, and I decided not to take it. I hadn’t wanted to wear the ultra-blue polyester Millburnaire outfit anyway.

Instead I became a Millburnette groupie. And a school musical groupie (memorably playing the one-lined doorman in Kiss Me, Kate). I joined the fencing team—because all my friends were there, because I needed a sport for my college applications, and because at practices, some of the girls and I talked much more than we parried.

I have learned over the years that it’s decidedly uncool to say I enjoyed high school—many people are lucky to have survived it, and others who didn’t have as bad a time like to say they did. Since I was one of the good girls, I found life in high school to be . . . good. It wasn’t always easy, and it wasn’t always nice. But through it all, I felt a passive happiness that would break out sometimes into an intensely active happiness. This would usually happen in the most random ways: Mayling pulling her long sleeve to her nose and proclaiming “I am an elephant!” with the rest of us following suit; me and Lynda holding up signs to each other in the middle of the Metropolitan Opera House, since I was in the balcony and she was in the orchestra, and we couldn’t go the length of an opera without passing some word to each other; me and Jennifer leaving lunch early and sitting on the fenced-off stairway that led to the auditorium, remarking on the people who passed us and, when the hallway traffic was slow, talking about books. If we never felt the full swoon of romance, we often felt the giddy buoyancy of friendship. It was a counterbalance against all the tests we faced—tests in the classrooms, tests in the hallways, tests in what we wore and what we said and who we were.

It was a sisterhood, and I was the brother. There were some conversations I wasn’t a part of—you would think that hanging out with so many girls would open my eyes to their side of the sex thing, but with a few exceptions, this rarely came up. Instead I was exposed to the girls’ emotional landscapes, and even more important, I was allowed to have one of my own. We wore our feelings so openly—whether it was annoyance or distress or delight or anger or affection we felt. In that time and place, I wouldn’t have learned such openness from the boys. There were certainly times when everything seemed like a big traumedy . . . but I learned to deal with that. By talking it through. By talking it out. And if none of those things worked, Lynda always advised a haircut. When you wanted to change your life, she said, a haircut was often the easiest way to start.

We good girls didn’t date much, for the same reason that I didn’t clue in to my own boy thing as fast as I might have. In our somewhat small high school (with 160 or so students in our class), there weren’t that many bookish, articulate, cute, sensitive, clever, crush-worthy boys. In retrospect, I can see a couple of crushes I had without labeling them as such—tangential boys, nobody that close to me. They were usually a year or two older than I was and talked about philosophers and writers like other boys talked about sports or computers. It’s not like I dreamed of kissing them, or dating—I was just fascinated by them, mostly from afar, with occasional glimpses up close.

I also had friendship crushes—on boys and girls—but those were different; those friends I liked because of what I knew about them, not because of their mystery. I didn’t want to be their boyfriend. I wanted to be their best friend. I learned early, and learned well, that the person you talk to about the crush is much more important than the crush itself.

Instead of dating, the good girls and I were one big date-substitute. We played a lot of Pictionary. Sober Pictionary. We ruled the school newspaper and the lit mag. The B. Dalton bookstore was our favorite store in the mall, although we were never above dancing around the aisles of Kay-Bee Toys. We went into the city on weekends and waited in the half-price ticket line for Broadway shows, or went into the Village to shop for secondhand clothes. We went to museums. We rotated between Bennigan’s, T.G.I. Fridays, Chili’s, and La Strada, the local pizzeria. When we weren’t at the Morristown multiplex, we were at the Lost Picture Show in Union, which showed art films and had a roof that leaked. We read Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. (Some even read Ayn Rand, but I could never get into it.) We talked about art without realizing we could treat it as Art. A few of us signed our yearbooks with Sondheim lyrics.

So many gay boys—whether they know they’re gay yet or not—go through high school feeling like they’re the only ones. They think they’re the only ones who will never find love, the only ones who don’t really fit in, the only ones who aren’t coupled off. With the good girls, I was never the only one. Not in that way. I was sometimes the only boy. And I’m sure there were times when I thought it was ridiculous that the “dates” I had were fleeting at best. But because so many of my female friends were in the same boat, I didn’t really feel alone. There were no long, dark nights of the soul, because my soul was keeping pretty good company.

The girls and I flirted and bantered. Nonstop. We passed notes. Lord, we passed notes. String these notes together and you’d get the full symphony of my high school years, an almost minute-by-minute re-creation. Constant observation, reflection, honing life into prose.

Everything remained peaceable until our senior prom came along. It wasn’t a particularly big deal to me—I had already gone my junior year, the date of a girl I barely knew, who clearly had gotten to the bottom of her draft list before asking me. I’d had fun, but I’d also figured that it wasn’t actually a night that would change my life forever. Going into prom season, I was (as always) unattached, and while the question of who I would ask was hotly debated when I wasn’t in the room, when I returned to the room, I was left to my own obliviousness.

I decided to ask Jordana, a member of the junior posse of good girls. Bizarrely, I made this decision while watching her play the Mother Abbess in our high school’s production of The Sound of Music. Seriously. While she was busy exhorting Maria to climb ev’ry mountain, I was thinking, It would be fun to go to the prom with Jordana. Not as a date-date. But in lieu of a date-date.

I knew another boy, Josh, probably wanted to ask her, too. But I figured, hey, I’d give Jordana the option and see what she wanted to do. We went on a nondate to Bennigan’s, and I stalled. I pondered. I worked myself up into an existential crisis while I ate mozzarella sticks and debated whether or not to ask her.

Which is when Roxette comes into the picture.

I almost didn’t ask Jordana to be my prom date. But then a Roxette song came wafting down from the Bennigan’s speakers, and it told me to listen to my heart. I figured this was a sign. My heart said go for it, so I did. I even told her I wouldn’t mind if she wanted to go with Josh. She said she wanted to go with me.

I was so relieved to have it over with.

I was, however, unprepared for the fact that I had just created more traumedy than I’d ever intended to create. By choosing a prom date, I was the one who stopped the music and sent all of my female friends flying toward the musical chairs. Many, it seemed, had thought it at least a possibility that I would ask them. I had, to put it indelicately, fucked everything up. Now the good girls had to grab hold of the nearest boys and hope it would work out. By and large, it didn’t work out well—even for me, since Jordana ended up wanting to go with Josh after all, causing awkwardness all around. Still, we look happy enough in the prom photos—the front row of good-girl friends, and then the back-row assortment of random boys tuxed up to squire them for the evening. All dressed up, we thought we looked so old. Now, of course, I look at the picture and see how young we actually were. We get younger every year.

Our friendships existed on the cusp of a different era; the way we communicated and what we knew were much closer to what our parents experienced in high school than what high schoolers now know. Within five years after we graduated, everything was different. We lived in a time when we had cords on our phones—if not connecting the handset to the base, then definitely connecting the base to the wall. We lived in a time when “chatting” was something that didn’t involve typing, and text and page were words that applied to books, not phones. If we wanted to see naked pictures, we had to sneak peeks in magazine stores, or rely upon drawings in The Joy of Sex, spreads in National Geographic, or carefully paused moments in R-rated videotapes. The only kids we knew in towns outside of our own were the ones we had gone to camp with. The only bands we knew were the ones played on the radio or on MTV. For me, it was a time before all the small pop-cultural things that might have tipped me off to my own identity before I hit college. Because I was happy, I didn’t really question who I was.

I don’t know whether the good girls were as ignorant as I was to my gayness, or if they figured it out before I did and waited for me to piece it together. One of them definitely got it—during my freshman year of college, Rebecca sent me a letter saying, basically, that it was totally cool if I was gay, and that I didn’t have to hide it anymore. I was hurt—not that she thought I was gay, but that she thought I was hiding something so big from my friends. I assured her that I would tell people if I were gay—and as of that writing, I was correct. Later on, in my own time, I’d figure it out. And as soon as I did, I didn’t really hide it. It seemed as natural as anything else, and I didn’t go through any of the anxiety, fear, or denial that I would have no doubt experienced had I figured it out in high school. It was a gradual realization that I was completely okay with, and everyone else was completely okay with. The good girls would have been much more shocked if I’d told them I was going premed.

Because I’ve grown up to have a writing life that brings me into contact with a lot of teens, I see all these possibilities open now that weren’t open then. I see all the fun trouble we could’ve gotten into. I see how late I bloomed into being gay. I see how being a good girl means missing out on some things, closing yourself off to certain experimentations and risks. It was a sheltered life, but I’m grateful I had the shelter. I needed the shelter. I bloomed late in some things, but I bloomed well in so many others. I know some good things I missed, but I also know a lot of bad things I missed, too.

Now most of the good girls—from high school, from college, from after—have found good guys or good girls to be with. And I have found the other boys who were once surrounded by good girls. Together we boys form our own good-girl circles, doing all the things we used to do exclusively with the good girls: confide, support, chatter, have fun. I don’t think many of us would have imagined in high school that we would one day have such circles, that we would one day find so many guys we liked, so many guys like us.

High school does seem a long way back now. But I will say this: I’m really glad I was raised by the good girls. I wouldn’t have become the guy I am without them.

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