“It’s fine,” I said. “Enjoy my humiliation. I understand.” I grinned at Calvin to let him know I was kidding. “So, yeah, needless to say, Coach Canuso dragged me into his office to explain puberty and anatomy, which fanned the flames of my embarrassment into an inferno of shame. Especially when he pulled out the illustrated pamphlets.”
Calvin’s whole body was shaking. “I can’t believe you superglued wig hair to your balls.” I loved seeing him laugh, even if it was at my expense. “We used to prank each other on the wrestling team all the time. Like, once, Trent greased the inside of my singlet with Icy Hot before a preseason match. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed that loud in my entire life.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, even though I was laughing. Thinking about Calvin wrestling made me curious about something I hadn’t worked up the courage to ask before. “You dated Jaya Winslow, right?”
Calvin nodded.
“Are you into girls and guys, or did you just not know you liked guys yet?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I still don’t. Girls are hot, and I didn’t hate fooling around with Jaya, but I’ve always liked guys too.”
“So you’re bi?”
“Maybe. I’m honestly just not sure yet.”
“Was it weird wrestling with guys you might’ve been attracted to?” We were nearing our destination, and I slowed so I didn’t miss the entrance. “I mean, the whole wrestling thing is pretty homoerotic to begin with, but how’d you keep from—you know?—getting excited?”
Calvin’s cheeks were still red from laughing, but his expression grew serious. “It’s not like that. I get how two guys with nothing but spandex between them rolling around sounds like it’d be a gay fantasy, but when I stepped onto the mat, the guy I squared off against became my opponent rather than a person. I focused on winning and not what he was hiding in his jock.”
“But you have to admit, it’s kind of hot.”
“You took anatomy, right?” I nodded. “Remember dissecting the cats?”
I shivered at the memory. The stink of formaldehyde still turned my stomach. “Yeah.”
“There’s a point where you stopped seeing it as an animal and learned to view it as merely a collection of skin and muscle and organs.”
“You thought about dissecting your wrestling opponents?”
Calvin shook his head. “No, but I stopped thinking about them as people and viewed them as arms and legs and angles to exploit.”
“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”
I turned into the entrance for Jonathan Dickinson State Park and pulled up to the guard booth. It cost six dollars, most of which I paid in quarters. Calvin watched me curiously but kept quiet until I parked the car.
“Here we are,” I said.
“This was your big plan?” He didn’t sound impressed.
“Not the parking lot. We’ve still got a ways to hike.”
Neither of us was dressed for hiking, but most of Florida is pretty flat, so it’s not like we had to scale mountains. And a welcome cool front had temporarily chased away the heat, though no sane person would call it winter.
Lua and I had visited the park often during her photography phase. We’d spent hours wandering the sandy trails while she snapped hundreds of photos of woodpeckers and scrub brush and palm fronds. The most beautiful picture she’d taken was of a heart someone had drawn in the dirt in the middle of a path, footprints trampling its soft lines. She’d promised to make me a copy, but never had.
Calvin and I walked through the underbrush, while I kept an eye out for snakes—water moccasins and kingsnakes and rat snakes and black racers. The trails held a million places for those beady-eyed death noodles to hide. I couldn’t tell if Calvin was enjoying himself. I hadn’t brought him to the park to hike, but it was necessary to reach our real destination.
“Can I ask you another question?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence.
“Could I stop you?”
“Probably not.”
“Then go for it.”
“The guy you told me about, the older one. Was it serious? Was he your boyfriend?”
Calvin sighed like he wished he’d never told me in the first place. “We were friends at first; he was there for me after my mom left. He took me fishing on his boat, and sometimes I helped him work around his house.”
“How’d . . . you know? When did things change?”
Calvin dragged his feet, his footsteps heavy and plodding. “We were on his boat. He’d brought beer. I was pretty drunk, lying on the deck getting some sun, and he sat down beside me and started rubbing suntan lotion on my back and . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “You know what? I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“He took advantage of you, Cal.”
Calvin clenched his fists. “I knew what I was doing.”
“He was an adult—a teacher!”
“Drop it, all right?”
I didn’t want to drop it. But I worried he’d shut down if I kept pushing.
We walked in silence until the trail ended and we broke out of the woods. Ahead of us, at the top of a man-made hill, stood a five-story wooden tower. It was the tallest object around; taller than the trees.
“Come on,” I said, leading the way. I was winded by the time we climbed the stairs. Halfway, Calvin had stripped off his hoodie, revealing a white tank top underneath, and tied it around his waist. I walked to the edge and looked out over the park.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said. “You can see the whole world from up here.”
I’d visited the Grand Canyon and seen the Flatirons in Colorado, but the view from the top of that platform was the most beautiful. We couldn’t actually see the whole world—we couldn’t even see the ocean—but I imagined we could. Standing there, I could forget the universe had collapsed to less than 1 percent of its original size. Standing at the top of the world, everything I saw was everything, and maybe that was enough.
“I come here to think,” I said. “I look toward the horizon and imagine Tommy’s out there looking back at me.”
“What’s it like?” Calvin asked. “Being in love, I mean.”
I leaned against the railing. “We’ve all got secrets, you know? We’ve all got things about ourselves we hate and these dark places inside of us we’re terrified to show people. We live in constant fear that someone is going to discover the rotting corpses we keep buried in those dark places, and that when they do, they’ll despise us for them.” I glanced at Calvin. He was leaning with his back against the railing, his arms folded across his chest. “Being in love with someone is knowing that no matter what you show them, no matter what you’ve done, they’ll never reject you.”
Calvin didn’t respond right away, and that was fine. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on in his mind, but I sensed he needed space to figure it out.
After a few minutes he said, “If you love Tommy so much, and you’re sure he loves you, why are you spending time with me?” He shifted from one foot to the other. “I know you said we’re just friends, but you can’t tell me there’s nothing going on between us.”
Calvin’s boldness caught me off guard. “I love Tommy, and he loves me. And that confuses the hell out of me—you confuse the hell out of me, Cal, because you’re here and he’s not, and I don’t know what to do.”
“What if Tommy comes back, Ozzie? What happens to me?”
“You’re still my friend. You’ll always be my friend.”