My Own Kind of Person

Chapter 1

The night of my seventeenth birthday, I message Christy and tell her I’m ready to have sex.

She writes back, Hopping out the window

My thumbs hover over the screen. We’ve been dating this whole summer, which is about how long she’s been asking.

I know I’m supposed to be excited, but I can’t help thinking I’ll do it wrong.

Like when she puts me inside her, I’ll just start talking about our childhoods, or how deep the ocean is, or how much I like her.

And she’ll prefer to save those conversations for another time because at that moment we’ll be having sex.

So I type, and stare at, and finally send: Woo!

I get down on the carpeted floor and start doing push-ups—one, two, three, three and a half.

I reach under my bed to the candle bin but all I have is Blueberry Muffin.

I light it and hope Christy thinks breakfast is sexy.

The yellow glow falls over my shelves of action figures and LEGO sets from elementary school.

Moving quickly, I carry my cat, a ginger named Ginny we call Cat Cat, into the bathroom for extra privacy.

She curls up in the sink and I close the door.

Mom is out doing food deliveries, so the house is empty.

I put one condom in my pocket, one under my mattress, and one under a paint can in the back room.

Just in case. I wish I had ten more. I know not to pre-condom, but I do think it would make things easier.

A quiet knock comes from the back door.

Christy and I met last year on the literary magazine, the unfortunately titled Long Island Lyfe .

I drew comics, mostly about invisible friends and visible monsters, and she wrote poems, mostly about menstruation.

On the late bus home we got to comparing whose Irish skin was more pale.

She said hers was so pale that it was more like a light purple.

I told her mine was so pale that I got sunburns at night.

Her blue eyes lit up. “You get moonburns?” At the release party in the cafeteria, she walked up to me in her black dress and said, “I think you should ask me out.” I choked on my cookie and said, “You wanna date me?” She replied, “I’m not sure, but I know you should want to date me . ”

I always doubt myself, so it was a relief to have someone tell me what to want.

She was a First-Name-Last-Name person then.

Christy Ryan. A party kid who got suspended for flipping off a teacher and once came to school with a black eye.

And maybe I was a First-Name-Last-Name person to her.

Sean O’Brien. A floppy-haired art nerd who became not-cool-but-still-known-by-people after doing stand-up at the talent show.

I did five minutes about getting beat up by girls, eating gummy bear vitamins, and, finally, what if seagulls could talk?

I got a standing ovation, a video circulated, and I was voted Homecoming Court Jester.

It was the best feeling in the world. Now I go to the open mic at the local comedy club every week.

My dream is to be as good as my favorite stand-up comic, Joe Johnson.

On my first date with Christy, to the playground behind the elementary school at night, she said I wasn’t like the gross guys she’d known.

We walked along the curb and sang “Down by the Bay,” went back to my house and played Yahtzee, and did that thing where you fold a paper into thirds and take turns drawing a creature’s head and middle and bottom.

She left an unstamped letter in my mailbox the next day saying the night felt pure.

Now she stands on the cement steps in my tight-on-her green T-shirt. I drew on it in Sharpie a tree with its branches reaching up. She added the roots reaching down. Her wavy red hair leaves damp spots on her shoulders. She must’ve showered quickly.

“I was just passing by.” She opens the screen door and enters.

“On your nightly stroll?”

“I was strolling by.”

She walks past me and rests her butt against the kitchen countertop, her jeans stretching around her thighs. I’m already extremely turned on, which doesn’t bolster my confidence about surviving physical contact.

“Can I get you a glass of water?”

She smiles. “I’m okay.”

“A bowl of cereal?”

She laughs, but I’m not sure I was joking. “My parents went to bed early, so I made myself some grilled cheese.”

“I love grilled cheese.”

There’s a pause, and I can’t figure out if it’s an awkward pause, which makes it one. Christy motions for me to come closer. I look around the room and point at myself. Me? She nods, and I approach.

“How was the rest of your birthday?” She takes my hands and puts them on her sides.

“My mom made a triple-decker Funfetti cake, so.”

“So it was perfect.”

“Pretty perfect.”

I don’t mention that when Mom brought out the cake and said she loved me, I almost cried.

It’s one thing to be a non-alpha male, but to literally cry about getting older?

No thanks. I made the choice right then to Not Think About Sad Things Ever Again, to be a Regular Guy Who Doesn’t Worry About Stuff, to grow up and lose my virginity already.

When Mom left to do deliveries, I messaged Christy.

I straighten out the bottom of her T-shirt. “I’m trying to figure out the cool thing to say right now but it’s very challenging.”

She kisses me.

“No words is smarter,” I say. “You are so smart.”

She laughs. My heart is racing.

“Come on, weirdo.” She holds my hand and walks me toward my bedroom. Technically I walk in front of her, but it feels like she’s leading the way.

“It’s hard not to use words though,” I say, “when they keep coming out of my mouth.”

She opens my bedroom door and steps in backwards, gently pulling me along.

Even when she trips over her own foot, she recovers quickly and doesn’t make a joke.

She leaves the lights off and puts on a playlist of lo-fi beats.

She lightly kisses my neck, and I let out a little sound and my knees get wobbly.

She pulls my shirt up over my head and takes off her shirt too.

I’m scared she’ll think I’m scared, so the next time she kisses me I bite her lip.

She squeezes my arm and pulls me onto the bed.

I tug off her pants and start to lower my head between her legs, but she puts her hands through my hair and pulls me up.

Usually I go down on her for a while and by the time we get to me I only need a few seconds.

It’s nice to take turns. You know your role: You get to make someone else feel good and then you get to let them make you feel good.

There’s no top or bottom, and there’s no need to time yourself to finish with someone else.

With sex-sex, it seems harder to know how I’m supposed to be.

A pure-hearted nice guy who can also do you?

I understood how to be a kid who was a boy, but now I’m old enough to be a grown-up who’s a man, and I’ve never seen a man I’d like to be.

She takes off my jeans and boxers in one motion and hands me a wrapped condom. The packaging is purple. She brought her own.

“Purple!” I announce, which doesn’t feel like a useful contribution.

Not wanting her to see me hesitate, I open it. My lungs turn to stone.

Christy was my first kiss, down behind the brush at Lake Ronkonkoma.

She’d gotten off work at 7-Eleven and still had on her red polo.

I told her I didn’t know how to be sexual and she said everyone does but you have to be brave enough to let it out.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m trying to believe it right now.

Like being sexy is a superpower I never noticed and tonight I will embrace my fate.

Maybe my voice will drop two octaves and I’ll finally grow some facial hair.

I pinch the condom’s latex tip so air can’t get in and I roll it on. Christy lies down and maneuvers me so I’m suspended above her about to do a push-up. She’s done this with other guys, so I follow her lead.

More than anything, I wish I could take a picture of her face: her open eyes and the light-red birthmark across her left cheek and down her neck. She said it’s called a firemark. It burns a path from her heart to her mouth.

Christy adjusts her legs. She’s waiting.

I guess we haven’t been dating as long as other people, but I can get attached real quick. In June a baseball guy called me queer and Christy kneed him in the junk. I was basically hers after that.

She puts her hands on my lower back and pulls me closer, this one part of me almost touching this one part of her. Does almost touching count as anything? Maybe this could be my college essay.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi,” I say, but it comes out like a question. Like I’m an extraterrestrial learning human speech. What is “sex” and how come everyone takes videos of it? And how come in the videos everyone seems so angry?

“I like you.”

“Oh.” I wish I’d done more push-ups to prepare for tonight. My arms are already wiggling from the strain. “I like you too.”

“Y’know, I used to think you could never be seen as you really are,” she says. “You could be almost-yourself and be understood or you could be fully yourself and be incomprehensible. I feel like this summer with you showed me that’s not true.”

I can barely hold myself up. “It’s not?”

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m rambling.”

She hasn’t pulled me in yet. My brain shouts at me to be a man and do it, and I close my eyes and move my hips.