“Stop! Please, I don’t want anyone to suffer on my behalf.” Carroll grabs the pepper out of my hand. “If you must martyr yourself, do it for someone less pathetic.”
“Yeah, okay.” I stir my curry. “What’s with all the self-deprecating comments today, by the way? Is this about that guy you hooked up with? Victor?”
“We didn’t really hook up. And, maybe.” He sighs. “I don’t know. I just feel like I should’ve gotten it over with by now.”
“What?” I say. He rolls his eyes. “Sex?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in New York for what, two months? And what do I have to show for it?”
“A superfabulous new best friend who doesn’t care if you’re a virgin or not?”
“Aren’t you a sweetheart,” he says, but he doesn’t smile. “I just want to do this right. It’s been eighteen long, lonely years.”
I remember feeling like that. Back when I lived in Brooklyn I was always in this huge hurry to have a ton of girlfriends. It was like I thought someone somewhere was keeping score. I wound up having sex for the first time with this girl from my old school who was so uninteresting I’m not even friends with her online anymore.
The whole episode was just really disappointing. It made me not want to try again, at anything.
Then we moved to Maryland and I met Toni and none of that stuff mattered anymore. I couldn’t care less what my stats were or how they compared to anyone else’s. It isn’t about sticking to some made-up timeline. It’s about being with someone you really care about.
I feel bad that Carroll doesn’t know what that’s like. He’ll meet the right person sooner or later, though. Probably sooner. Like he said, this is New York.
“The thing is,” I say, “hooking up with random sketchy guys who leave you feeling like crap the next day isn’t doing it right. You’ve got to wait until you genuinely like someone and take it from there.”
“I like lots of people,” he says. “The problem is, they have to like me back.”
“Oh.” Awkward. “Maybe I can set you up with someone. Briana knows a ton of guys.”
“I don’t need you to set me up. I’m a drama major. I’ve got gay guys crawling out my ears.”
“So, with all these guys around, you really think there’s not a single one who might be interested?”
He stabs a piece of chicken with his fork. “New topic. Did you say one of your brothers is gay?”
All right, then. Later, I’ll ask Briana if she can think of any nice, cute, age-appropriate guys for Carroll.
“Yeah,” I say. “Will. He’s the oldest.”
“How old was he when he told your parents?”
“Hmm.” I do the math. “Seventeen, I guess. I was in fourth grade.”
“Were you there when he did it?”
“Yeah.” I smile, remembering. “It was actually kind of funny. He was taking this fancy cooking class, and he decided to make our parents breakfast before he told them. So on a Sunday morning he got up superearly, while our other brothers were still asleep, and he made a ton of croissants with different fillings. There were chocolate and almond and ham and cheese and all these others. Back then I was obsessed with almond croissants—well, I still am, actually. Anyway, that morning I smelled them baking and I went downstairs in my pajamas and made him give me one right out of the oven. Just then my parents came to the top of the stairs. They were looking right down into the kitchen. They saw all the croissants on the table and me sitting there burning my tongue on this piping-hot almond croissant, and Will is in his apron with baking soda all over the floor, and he yells up the stairs, ‘Mom, Dad, I made you breakfast! Also, I have something to tell you!’ So our parents come downstairs and sit at the table, and Will sits down, too, but there’s this big pile of croissants in between them, and my dad pushes the croissants out of the way so he can see Will and he says, ‘Son, is this about your sexuality?’”
I burst out laughing, because it’s still funny after all this time. Even though back then I’d had no idea what was happening.
Carroll doesn’t laugh.
“Your dad knew already?” he asks.
“Yeah, I guess. Will had this boyfriend guy. They’d tried to keep it a secret, but they didn’t try that hard. Lewis, my other brother, saw them kissing out in front of our building one night.”
Carroll shakes his head. “This was here? In New York?”
“In Brooklyn, yeah.”
“Figures,” Carroll mutters. “New York parents are different.”
“I think my parents were still a little freaked, actually.”
I remember how they stayed up talking every night after that. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They’d just murmur with the door closed.
“That’s nothing,” Carroll says. “It’s not as if they kicked him out of the house.”