Embarrassed, and pissed off that I was embarrassed, I answered him truthfully: “I answer phones for the college I should have left by now and I make copies for a woman who calls me ‘sugar bear.’ I’m also really good with a shredder. I can barely afford my rent, I think my degree may be useless, and I have no idea what I’m going to do about any of that.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’m cold-calling for an insurance salesman and living at home with my parents.” He grinned. “I win.” That brilliant grin, paired with the bracing shot of humility, was the thing that let me see him anew. All the old facts I knew about him—that he loved classic rock and drove a pink and white ’55 Ford Fairlane that he and his dad worked on together, that he was an Eagle Scout raised in a conservative, churchgoing home but was nonetheless very convincing vamping onstage in drag with Doug for a contest in high school, that he’d earned a private pilot’s license during his summers cleaning airplanes at the municipal airport and that he hoped one day to fly fighter jets for the Navy but he’d applied twice and been rejected—all these things hovered in the back of my mind. I was cynical and defensive when it came to guys, never fully convinced they weren’t secretly laughing at me, but all the things I knew and remembered about Ross, along with the things I was newly discovering, turned, over the course of an evening, into the beginnings of a powerful attraction. But the biggest thing was that he kept making me laugh—actual bursts of it, not the polite snicker I generally used with guys.
Two years after college, I was still tenderly excavating myself from the wreckage of high school, and I hated the idea of parading my emotional baggage in front of someone I considered a golden boy. We exchanged phone numbers and began to e-mail each other to occupy the long hours of our soul-crushing jobs. When we started meeting up on weekends, I knew that if we continued on this path, I would have to fill him in on the convoluted story I was only just learning how to tell. Through my brother, Ross already knew the outline, but it was important that I tell it to him myself.