If You Knew Then What I Know Now Read online

  As soon as I arrived at school, I headed for the library like I did every morning before class. I walked the stacks of books, strolled from A to Z as my finger slid along the slick plastic spines. I could judge books by their covers, so I was looking for unexpected colors or fancy embossed letters, something new. There was a blue book that I’d always liked looking at, though never enough to actually read, and I pulled it down to spread open the cover. The plastic protector cracked and hissed, the sound felt loud. The library was quiet, of course, but suddenly it was too quiet, because there was no one else around. Usually that silence and order was exactly the opposite of the crowded hallways where locker doors slammed and kids jostled your shoulders. That silence had always been a comfort; but that day, to be hidden behind the tall shelves was certain danger.

  I returned to the hall and meandered the maze of the building. I passed the boys who roamed in packs with their hands in pockets and the girls who stood in secretive groups and pointed at each other’s skirts. My first class was Biology, and it wasn’t until I sat down in my desk, the teacher shuffling papers behind hers, that I remembered what went on in there. Behind me, at tall black countertops, just a few weeks before, we had dissected frogs. In my mind, that’s what the abduction was like: my cold body splayed in a metal baking pan and split open with sewing pins. Our poor frogs were stiff and rubbery, and their organs, once we peeled back the skin, were slippery and bloated. We poked them with our scalpels, identified a list of parts, and if one of us (me) was too squeamish to touch something like the gallbladder, our teacher stomped across the classroom, grabbed our tray, and pinched the little round organ with her naked fingers to prove it was that easy.

  At school that year, even before my alien abduction fear arrived overnight, I sometimes felt as if I were a specimen like those dissected frogs. Seventh grade seemed like the year when we were all noticing each other’s bodies. I’d overheard girls discussing boys’ bodies, deciding who had the nicest-looking legs or arms, and once, in music class after careful deliberation with the two top contenders standing side by side, the best butt. (I was so skinny, they told me, that I didn’t even have one.) Of course the boys noticed bodies too: the girls. I watched their eyes as they moved over the females; sometimes I imagined that the girls could actually feel the boys’ eyeballs skimming over their skin like a wet finger.

  I settled into the easy pattern of teachers droning and bells ringing, and felt most comfortable in class. In the halls, the other seventh graders passed and nudged me out of their way, hollered over my head, which was business as usual. But still I wondered if my fear covered my skin like sunburn, the way it felt.

  Then, at lunch, everywhere I looked in the cafeteria made me think of autopsies. All the gleaming trays of knives and forks lined up like medical implements, the pans of sickly-yellow noodles and brilliant red baked cherry crisp, conveyor belts and meat slicers. Because I couldn’t go sit in the library like I normally did, I sat down at one end of a long table full of other seventh-grade boys; I pretended I was one of them by laughing when they laughed—a strategy I’d been working on already. I’d gone to school with all of them since kindergarten, but that year, I was uneasy around them because they always talked about sex, which I dreaded because they all seemed to have much more experience than I did—which was none. In fact, it was a couple of weeks before, the last time the lunch ladies served that cherry crisp dessert, that one of them reached across the table and shoved his thumb into the steaming red stuff on my tray. He drew his hand back, licked his thumb, and announced to the table that he had just popped my cherry. “Now you can stop walking around like you’ve got something stuck up your ass,” he said. Staring down at the hole torn out of my dessert, I sat frozen and unable to speak. The boys around me laughed.

  After lunch was suddenly the worst hour of my whole day: fifth period, gym, when at the end of class, we were required to shower—to stand in an echoing, tiled room under nozzles that poked out of the wall. Like every other day that year, as much as I wanted to look at the other boys in the shower—I was noticing bodies too—I kept my eyes pointed to the floor. I knew looking was dangerous, though I couldn’t help noticing the details of their bodies that made me want to hide mine. Armpit hair, long muscles in their legs, acne bumps on their shoulders, dark fuzz on their chins.

  But that day, in the shower, I realized I really was a specimen worth examining because there was no one in that room who looked like me. In sixth grade, there had been three of us—the short boys shoved to the front row of group pictures and picked last for sports teams. But in seventh grade, I was the last of my kind with the smooth, small, white body. If aliens wanted to study humans, then I was so weird that they would have to abduct me. It seemed inevitable, guaranteed. They were going to take me onto their spaceship and pull me apart.

  Several days passed. My mother slept in my room each night. As far as I knew, she didn’t tell either my younger brother or father why I needed her in there. I’d asked her not to. I knew that thirteen was too old to act the way I was acting.

  On Sunday night, after my brother and father had gone to their beds and most of the house was quiet and dark, I lay alone in my bedroom, and offered God a bargain; if I had to be abducted by aliens, if that was part of His plan, then would He please please let me sleep through the whole thing so I would never know the difference. I took it to God because without my mother saying so, I knew she and I had reached the end of her patience. In the way that she was avoiding bedtime by not taking her bath or changing into her nightgown at her usual time, I could tell she thought I should sleep alone again.

  But the idea of going back to school the next day had undone me. Something about being surrounded by crowds of students, the heavy steel doors and the green-tiled halls. And as I lay in bed, dreading Monday morning, the gentle pops and ticks of the new house settling into its foundation weren’t helping either. Every little noise nudged my skin with fear. Each one was the opening of a spaceship hatch or an alien’s foot touching down on the roof above me. As I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing sleep would smother me, I thought about how my fear of aliens had become less important than what the fear had revealed—at school, even when I was with all the other kids, I was still always alone, and that solitude had something to do with my body.

  I ripped off my blanket, skipped across the carpet to my door, twisted the knob, and tiptoed fast down the long hallway—each silent step bringing me closer to the warm light of my mother’s lamp. By then, she was in her spot in the living room, playing her game. It was 11 o’clock.

  I stood in front of her, like I had four nights before, and waited for her to notice. The moment stretched out with the TV murmuring from the corner and her thumbs tapping the plastic buttons on the Game Boy. I knew she was thinking about me, stalling and trying to figure out what to do.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “I’m still scared. I still can’t sleep.”

  “You know,” she said, and then stopped, and I thought it was because the bricks were falling down her screen too quickly and she needed a second to catch up, so I said nothing. “You know,” she started again, “if you don’t get over this, we’re going to have to take you somewhere. You’re going to have to talk to somebody.”

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “A doctor,” she said. “A psychologist.”

  I slumped onto the loveseat across from her, and my bare legs disappeared under my T-shirt. I didn’t even need my flamingo pose to pretend I was defeated. A doctor, a psychologist. Her words kept hitting my ears like a ringing phone that everyone thinks someone else will answer. There was something wrong with me, and it was more than just being scared. This wasn’t the right way for a kid my age to act and we needed someone else to fix it. The doctors would probably split me open the same way the aliens wanted to, the long cut from under the chin straight down to the crotch that my Biology teacher showed us with the frogs.

  “Honey, why are you scared?”
she asked.

  I wanted to tell her it was only a matter of time before I’d be abducted by aliens. There was something hidden in my body. That was why I looked so different. And why the other boys said I walked the way I did, and made fun of my voice. I wanted to tell her I tried to protect myself at school by making myself invisible, hoping to slink past everyone in the hall without being noticed. And how the trouble had arrived when I found out that the aliens were after me, when suddenly I needed those people I was trying to hide from to keep me safe. But it was too late. Who could notice an invisible boy was missing?

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice breaking into pieces. “Just don’t make me sleep in there by myself.” I didn’t want to need her so much, not at my age, but that didn’t mean I still didn’t need her.

  She kept playing her game, buttons clicking and clicking. I watched her, and waited. One more night. If she would sleep in my room once more, I could handle the next day. Or anyway I could pretend to, and I thought about how good I was getting at pretending. Staring at her so hard that my vision blurred, I waited for her answer. On the screen in front of her, I imagined the bricks falling faster and faster, and how at some point, she wouldn’t be able to keep up. Which was the tough secret of that kind of game—the better you got at it, the harder it was.

  If You Knew Then What I Know Now

  In your sixth-grade social studies class, fourth hour, when Mrs. Perry assigns the group project on European World Capitals, don’t look at Mark. Don’t look at Jared. See if there’s another group you can get into, the quiet girl who sits in front of you needs someone to work with too. If you could avoid working on this project with those two boys, you could avoid all of this.

  If you do end up in a group with Mark and Jared, you should insist that you meet at the library. If you could meet at the library, then they couldn’t do what they are planning to do. If you do agree to meet with them at Mark’s house, then I don’t know what to tell you. If you meet there, it’s probably all going to happen the way it’s going to happen.

  You will show up at Mark’s. His sister will answer the door. Your backpack will weigh down on your back, and his dad will be watching football in the living room but you don’t see him, you only hear the dull roar of the TV crowd. His sister will point you down the hallway. “First room on the right,” she will say, “across from the bathroom.” You’ll knock on the closed door. You’ll think it’s odd that the door is closed. They know you’re coming over. They know it’s the day before the project is due. They know all of this. You will hear whispering on the other side of door, and then it’s swung open and Mark stands there, smiling. Jared is flung across the bed reading a magazine. The television glows in the corner. A video game is on, but the action is paused, a figure with winged shoes and a bow and arrow frozen in the middle of the arc of his jump. You’ve played this game before. You’re good at it.

  You’ll let your backpack slump to the floor, unzip it, and pull out your books. You’ll balance them in your lap, split open folders and pull out the assignment worksheet. “OK,” you will say. You read over the assignment, the social studies project you’re supposed to be working on, and you won’t notice that they aren’t listening to you. You won’t notice they are mouthing words to each other. You won’t know their plan is about to take shape.

  And you won’t know when they ask you to grab the box of Hostess cupcakes on the kitchen counter that they really don’t care about the cupcakes. They just need you out of the room for a second. Of course you’ll do it. You’ll hop up and head to the kitchen. You’re so excited to be over at Mark’s house, hanging out with other boys. It’s what your mother has been telling you to do for years: “You need to spend more time with boys. You should do more things that boys like to do. Why are you always just hanging around girls?” That’s why what you see when you walk back in the room will be so confusing. You’ll think, “This isn’t what boys do, this isn’t what I thought we were supposed to do.”

  The door will be shut when you return from the kitchen, though you’ll know you certainly didn’t shut it as you left. The rest of the house will be quiet, though you can still hear the football game from the living room. You will twist the knob and push open the door, and you will see them, on the bed. Jared will be under Mark, and they are turned so you can’t see their faces, not the front of their faces anyway, and they are pretending to kiss. Mark’s thick forearms will be stiffly curled around Jared, Jared’s glasses will be folded, shoved in the corner of the windowsill. Both of them will peek under not-quite-closed eyelids. You will know right off they aren’t really kissing because one of them—it’s hard to tell if it’s Mark or if it’s Jared—will slide a flat palm in between their wet mouths so their lips can’t touch. But they hope you will think they are kissing and that’s the idea behind this. You will know they aren’t kissing, but you will also know they want to pretend they are kissing. You will guess correctly when you think the project isn’t going to be worked on today.

  They will pull away after you’ve stood there for a second. You will start to step back, though you don’t really know where to go, and they will say, “come back, come back in, we’re sorry.” You are back in the room, and they are sitting on Mark’s navy-blue comforter holding hands. You’ll feel immediately nervous, your face will feel suddenly hot and pink. There’s no way now for you to cover your skin for them not to see the blushing color and for them not to see how you try to swallow, though your throat is too dry.

  They will start talking about it, which you were afraid they would do. “What’s wrong?” Jared will ask you. Mark will ask, “Yeah, what’s wrong, Ryan?” They will look at each other and down at their hands, one flopped over the other. “We hope you don’t mind us doing this stuff. This is just something we do,” Jared says, and he will shrug as if it’s normal, as normal as note passing. “Don’t you ever do stuff like this, Ryan?” Mark will ask you, and here you are, at the point of all this. “You like to kiss guys, right, Ryan?” They are trying to get you to say things about yourself that you won’t be ready to say for several more years and that’s what will hurt the most about this afternoon. Hurt more than never hanging out with Mark or Jared again. Hurt more than anything anybody will say at school about what actually happened in Mark’s bedroom. It will hurt most when you realize they saw something in you that you thought you’d hidden so well you couldn’t even see it yourself anymore. They found something in you before you did. They saw it and there it will be, holding a box of cupcakes.

  Years after, you will wonder how you managed to get through the rest of junior high and high school without ever speaking to Mark or Jared again, but somehow you will do it. In high school Jared will trade his brown glasses for contacts, and you will overhear girls in hallways whispering to each other about how pretty his eyes are. Mark will begin hanging out with the boys who wear dark jackets throughout the whole school year, no matter the weather, the boys who smoke in the sunken garden behind the school building, sitting on rotted railroad ties, sharing cigarettes every morning before the bell rings and after lunch. You will eventually find your own friends, and from that afternoon in sixth grade to the evening of your high-school graduation you will never tell another person about Mark and Jared’s kiss.

  One day someone will ask you about the first time you kissed a boy, and you will think of this kiss, the one between Mark and Jared, the kiss that isn’t really a kiss and isn’t really yours. You could almost laugh. It will be funny to you, in a way, how important this kiss will be—it was the first kiss between two men, however young they were, you will have seen. Funny how of all the kisses in your life this is the one you will think most about. It will be the biggest kiss you ever saw.

  Before you will ever be able to actually tell another person about this kiss, you will try to write it as fiction. You will try to recast it as a short story. You will have moved to Chicago by then, after college and college creative writing classes, and you will spend evenings si
tting in cafés, working, bent over a legal pad, and one night, this kiss will come to you, and you will think, “now that’s a good story.” You will begin by vividly describing it, the class project and the bedroom door and the glasses on the windowsill. There will be something about watching it happen on the page, about having control over the afternoon and these three boys. You will try to rename them, but you will never find the perfect substitutes for the names Mark or Jared. Without Mark or Jared the story somehow won’t work. You will read over it, you will witness the afternoon again, and it won’t seem real. You will try to change the layout of Mark’s house, change the ages of the boys, move them through time, make them years older or younger. The boy in the story holding the cupcakes—even in the fictional version, you include the cupcakes—just standing there, blushing, his stunned silence, is something you yourself can’t believe. You will think this doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t sound like something that would really happen.

  Finally, you decide to just tell it. It will be almost eleven years from that sixth-grade afternoon. You will sit with three close friends and together drink several bottles of wine. None of them will have gone to your high school and none of them will have heard of Mark or Jared. You will sit in an old armchair, a plastic cup hanging from your hand. Votive candles will be scattered on a coffee table, their dull lights reflecting across the bare hardwood floor in the dim apartment. When you begin to tell the story you will feel the rise of a familiar panic. There will be the dry throat and the same flushed and sweating neck. Your friends will watch your face turn. And it will feel silly, your body still affected, still intimidated. A man in his twenties afraid of two twelve-year-old boys on a bed, miles away and years gone.