“Could I maybe stay here tonight?” he asks.
Julian is not expecting this. He looks at Cooper’s shirt, tangled on the floor.
“Not this time, okay?” he says. “I know it sounds silly, but that’s a big step for me. Plus, I have to get up so damn early. Another time.”
The next words that want to emerge from Cooper’s mouth are I can sleep on the couch. But this time he manages to trap them, swallow them back down. Were he a better liar, he could probably craft a story to justify the statement (a wild party in the dorm, a roommate’s boyfriend or girlfriend over, a feeling the Jack and Coke is hitting him too hard to drive). But the lies are as inaccessible to him as the truth is to Julian.
Cooper reaches down for his shirt and puts it on, then replaces the change that fell out of his pocket as he and Julian were rolling around. He tells Julian he doesn’t need to drive him or walk him to his car. He says he could use the walk, and that he doesn’t have nearly as early a start as Julian does. Julian hasn’t put on his shoes yet, and because of this, and because Cooper doesn’t really look like he wants the company, he backs down. Together they walk out of the bedroom, to the front door. Julian kisses him again, but Cooper barely feels it at this point. Before Julian opens the door, he asks Cooper for his phone number. Cooper gives him a fake.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” Julian says in parting.
“Yeah, thanks,” Cooper replies. Then he’s out the door.
For a moment when he gets outside, the air feels good. But that’s only because he isn’t thinking about anything else.
Then he starts to think about other things, and he doesn’t feel good. The noise has come to claim him again. The flat, dead noise.
We watch as Julian takes the two glasses into the kitchen, the ice cubes melted now. We watch as he puts them in the sink, then stands over the sink, both hands on the counter, wondering what just happened.
Miles away, Peter and Neil are feeling much more certainty. After dinner, they hid in the basement and made out for a while—an intense interlude that came to a mutually pleasing conclusion. Then they went online and chatted with friends, many of whom were also watching the Big Kiss. Finally, it was time for Neil to head home, so now they are saying their usual goodnights: Peter in his boxers, Neil in his pajamas.
“I could kiss you for hours and still be on my feet,” Peter says.
“Likewise,” Neil says.
Then they wave, and sign off into slumber.
Ryan texts Avery to say goodnight, and asks him what he’s doing tomorrow. Would he be up for another drive?
Avery has about a million other things to do, but of course he says he’s free. Completely free.
He should be floating from the day, but a look in the mirror drags him down. He has a full-length mirror in his bedroom, and it is often his enemy. Tonight he looks into it and tries to see what Ryan sees, and all he gets in return is disappointment. He’s worked so hard to change his body, to make it the right body, but he can’t come close to loving it. He thinks it’s because he was born in the wrong body, but we want to whisper in his ears that many of us were born in the right bodies and still felt foreign inside them, felt betrayed. We completely misunderstood our bodies. We punished them, berated them, held them to an Olympian ideal that was deeply unfair to them. We loathed the hair in some places and the lack of hair in others. We wanted everything to be tighter, stronger, harder, faster. We rarely recognized our own beauty unless someone else was recognizing it for us. We starved or we pushed or we hid or we paraded, and there was always another body we thought was better than ours. There was always something wrong, most of the time numerous things wrong. When we were healthy, we were ignorant. We could never be content within our own skin.
Breathe, we want to tell Avery. Feel yourself breathe. Because that is as much a part of your body as anything else.
Avery, we whisper, you are a marvel.
And he is. He may never believe it, but he is.
It’s eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. Since there is rarely anything to do on a Saturday night in Harry and Craig’s town, a lot of people are dropping by the lawn of the high school to see the two boys kissing. A multitude of cell phone pictures is being taken—the disposable commemoration of this day and age. Sometimes girls have to shush their drunken boyfriends, who want to say something inappropriate. Or maybe the boyfriends say it quietly, and the girlfriends laugh. Not everybody is here to show support. Some are just here because they think it’s a freak show.
“I bet if we wanted to break the world record with a straight kiss, they’d never give us the high school,” one guy complains, as if this is a particular aspiration that’s been robbed from him.
“Totally,” his girlfriend agrees.
“This is bullshit,” another guy loudly declares, his voice and confidence amplified by the Budweiser he’s consumed.
You’re bullshit, the drama club girl next to him wants to say.
Eventually the crowd thins out—there’s not much to see after a while. It’s getting late, a little chilly. People get back into their cars—some to go to late-night parties, but most to go home.
Even within Harry and Craig’s team—that’s what they think of themselves now, over eleven hours into it—there’s a shift change. Harry’s mom blows a kiss to both Harry and Craig, then goes home to get some rest. She’ll see them in the morning. Rachel also heads home, so she can relieve Tariq later on, even though he’s pledged to stay up the whole time. Smita promised her mother she’d be home by one. Mykal has a schedule of a few friends who are sleeping now but who will come in the middle of the night, bearing glow sticks and caffeine.
It’s also the end of Mr. Nichol’s shift. As his replacement comes closer, we can’t believe our eyes.
Look, look, we tell each other. It’s Tom!
He’s Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he’s Tom to us. Tom! It’s so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent’s, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters—anyone who had a hand to be held. He had to watch so many of us die, had to say goodbye so many times. Outside of our rooms he would get angry, upset, despairing. But when he was with us, it was like he was powered solely by an engine of grace. Even the people who loved us would hesitate at first to touch us—more from the shock of our diminishment, from the strangeness of how we were both gone and present, not who we were but still who we were. Tom became used to this. First because of Dennis, the way he stayed with Dennis until the very end. He could have left after that, after Dennis was gone. We wouldn’t have blamed him. But he stayed. When his friends got sick, he was there. And for those of us he’d never known before—he was always a smile in the room, always a touch on the shoulder, a light flirtation that we needed. They should have made him a nurse. They should have made him mayor. He lost years of his life to us, although that’s not the story he’d tell. He would say he gained. And he’d say he was lucky, because when he came down with it, when his blood turned against him, it was a little later on and the cocktail was starting to work. So he lived. He made it to a different kind of after from the rest of us. It is still an after. Every day it feels to him like an after. But he is here. He is living.