“Cool.”
“You need a wet suit that far north. It’s cold. But I kept at it and now I can stand up and catch a wave pretty damn good, if I say so myself.”
“Wow.”
“You would love it. You’re a swimmer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’d be good at it. You have that upper-body strength. Then I drove up to San Francisco,” he went on. “And I heard some awesome bands. You been there?”
“No.”
“It’s amazing. The wildest people walking through the streets. Men in drag. I did an open-mike night with my guitar at this coffeehouse. I pretty much sucked, but I got out in front of people and actually sang, can you believe it?”
“Good for you, rock star.”
“Well.” He laughed. “I felt like a goofball. But hey, I’m never seeing any of those people again, so what the hell?”
“Exactly.” It was very un-Tommy Hazard, getting up and singing badly in front of a crowd, but somehow it made me like Gideon even more.
“I never would have done something like that at Tate,” he said. “When I was here, my whole world was just sports, and parties, and refectory gossip. The Tate universe.”
“Yeah.” I knew all about the Tate universe.
“I’m serious,” Gideon said. “Chinese food like you’ve never eaten. Architecture. Landscapes. Before I came west, I was in the desert in Arizona. I saw the Great Lakes. I hiked some of the Appalachian Trail.”
Mr. Wallace cracked his door and stuck his head out into the hallway. “Van Deusen!” he cried, his face lighting up. “Slumming, are you?” He ushered Gideon in.
I was late for my next class, but I walked there slowly. Thinking about Gideon, naked in the hot spring.
And about San Francisco.
People in general are bad apologizers. Even my dad is—for all his talk about forgiveness. He doesn’t say sorry. He grabs my mom from behind and starts kissing her neck.
“Kevin, I’m still mad at you,” she complains.
“Oh, but you smell good,” he whispers into her throat.
“Kevin!”
“No one smells as good as you,” he moans, or some other ridiculousness, and before long she says, “Fine. Come look at this thing I bought today,” or something like that.
Mom is even worse. She sulks and pouts and storms around the house banging pots and pans, and then after a couple of hours she starts acting like everything’s okay again, and Dad and I are supposed to know that she’s over whatever it was and not to mention it again.
Other people apologize and don’t mean it. “Sorry, but you shouldn’t have …” or “Sorry, but I just didn’t…” They apologize while telling you that they were right all along, which is the opposite of an actual apology.
I am definitely a bad apologizer. I talk too much. I leave the whole thing until way too late, and then I babble on, and end up not saying what I mean and starting whatever argument it was over again. It never comes out right.
Well, truth be told, I usually still think the other person was wrong, and that’s probably why.
The next Thursday, Doctor Z looked down at the list and asked me about Noel. “It was only a rumor,” I said. “About me and him. One of forty-eight rumors, by this point.”
“He’s the one you held hands with at the party?”
“Yeah. He stands on the other side of the studio in Painting Elective now. I never even talk to him.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even think he likes girls.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a mystery.”
“You don’t have feelings for him?”
“It doesn’t matter, even if I did. I told him to fuck off. It’s not like he’d ever talk to me again.”
Doctor Z paused in her know-it-all way, like she was waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. “Why is he on your list?” she finally asked.
“Do we even need the list anymore?” I asked back. “I mean, what are we going to talk about once it’s finished?”
“That’s up to you.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
Silence.
“So why is he on your list?” she finally asked.
The thing is, I liked Noel. He was interesting. He was different. He was outside the Tate universe, at least a little bit. When he took me home after the Spring Fling and held my hand at the party, it felt good. I liked talking to him.
The Sunday after Meghan and I went to the Woody Allen festival,3 I dug my watercolor paints out of the very bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t think I had used them on my own since seventh grade. I got a piece of white paper and folded it in half. “How am I sorry?” I wrote in purple watercolor. “Let me count the ways …”
And inside, I wrote:
Like a shark who ate a license plate by mistake.
Like a movie star caught without her makeup.
Like a lady with a fancy hairdo, in the rain without an umbrella.
Like a cat who rolled in jam.
Like a hungry raccoon that ate its young by mistake.
Like a neurotic teenage girl, traumatized by recent social debacles, who doesn’t know a friend when he looks her in the eye, and gives her a ride home, and offers to ruin his reputation for her.
I painted a tiny picture of each person/animal with deep remorse on its face. The last one was me, down in the bottom corner.
It took me a couple of hours, but it looked pretty good when I was done—although the raccoon and the cat were pretty similar, and the rain didn’t seem very rainy. I blew off my Bio/Sex Ed lab, Geometry worksheet and Brit Lit reading to finish it.
The next morning, I put it in Noel’s mail cubby, feeling embarrassed, but also rather well adjusted, if I do say so myself.
I figured I wouldn’t see him until Painting in the afternoon, and I had no idea what to say to him when I did, or whether I should try to put my easel next to his, or what. But I actually got in line right behind him at lunchtime,4 and he was in the middle of negotiating with the lunch lady about whether she’d be willing to put his slice of pizza in the microwave (she was claiming it was hot enough; he was saying it was cold), and he barely even looked at me, and I almost turned around and snuck back out the door of the refectory—but then he reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and held it all the while he was doing this monologue about the difference in texture between cold mozzarella and hot, while the lunch lady looked at him with murder in her eyes.
He lost the argument, let go of my hand with a final squeeze, took his chilly pizza and went out into the dining hall to sit with a table of freshman girls I’d never noticed before.
I felt like I was walking on air.
1 The part about Noel is at the end of the chapter. I have to write down this other important stuff first.2 The next minute of the conversation is not written down with any accuracy. I wasn’t paying attention, because I was too busy picturing Gideon naked in a hot spring full of steam.3 The movie we saw, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, involves a superenormous breast chasing people across the countryside. They finally capture it in a giant bra.4 I’d been lying low, generally. No fishnets. No wild clothes. At lunch, I was sitting with Meghan and the seniors. Most of the older kids ignored me, except for Bick, who was pretty cool. But I was definitely still a leper. Hutch and I did say hi in the halls now, and the girls from lacrosse were perfectly civil, like if I had a question about schoolwork, or practice or something. But that was it.
15. Cabbie (but I’m undecided.)
It seems weird to me now that Cabbie is even on the Boyfriend List, although it’s true we went on an actual date and there was even physical contact of a strangely advanced nature.