Orange （1976）
“Can I ask you a question?”
Sure,” I said. No one really talks to me, so I was curious.
“Why are you always staring at Rio? What do you see in him?”
“He’s so…handsome.” Realizing I’d probably said the wrong thing, I quickly added, “I wish I looked like him.” I knew that wasn’t true. It was more than that. It was simpler than that, but it was also more than I could tell this strange boy.
“Yeah, he is. And he has a great body. But he knows it. It makes him arrogant. But you’re really cute…”
“Me?” I asked, literally pointing at my freckled, speckled self and my jug-handle ears.
“Yeah, you. You’re cute, but you don’t seem to know it. And you’re sweet and kind, even though people aren’t kind to you. That, to me, makes you far more handsome than Rio, so I don’t know why you’d wish to look like him.”
When I said nothing, he seemed to grow exasperated. “Look,” he said, “you’ve clearly not noticed, being so obsessed with Rio and all, but I’ve liked you since sophomore year.” Still, I said nothing, and he continued in a rush, “I mean I like you—like I’m supposed to like girls.”
His words made me feel unmoored, light-headed. This is what it must feel like to be intoxicated, I thought. How had my parents stood it?
When I still said nothing, he hesitated, then, less sure, continued, “You like guys, right?”
I thought of Rio, how that day last January, he walked into our homeroom and changed everything. I thought of Juan, the only boy I’d ever kissed and had sex with. I’ve been bereft and alone ever since he left, but he left me entirely sure of who and what I am.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Would you like to hang out sometime?”
“Hang out?” I repeated stupidly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like go on a date. We could go on a picnic or maybe go swimming in the quarry. I just want to hang out with you. OK?”
I recognized him, of course. His name is Jackson.
He is Reverend Jack’s son. “My name is Jackson,” he always says whenever some new person calls him Jack.
“Jackson, not Jack. Jack is my father. Please don’t ever call me Jack.
” I know him from school and from church, where people are always praying over us, which feels like bludgeoning, the New Testament their cudgel.
I hadn’t understood why until Rio. These prayers are led by Reverend Jack, who is like a Nordic wind: cold, relentless.
His voice, though, is all heat: hellfire and damnation.
Even his comfort, offered grudgingly to his flock and under extreme duress and filled with resentment, is cold.
There is no shelter in his Bible. Reverend Jack is terrifying.
I looked at Jackson more closely. We are roughly the same height and build, but where he is muscular, I am slender.
I look like my mother; if she had been a boy, she would have looked like me.
He gives off a heady masculinity that is absent from me.
I find it enticing, dizzy making, like smelling strong perfume or drinking pop too fast. His eyes are melancholy, his mood blue.
He is square jawed; even at just seventeen, his face is craggy, pitted with the memory of pubescent acne.
He looks like he was hacked from flint. Jackson looks like a thug, but there is nothing of the thug in his manner or demeanor.
He’s handsome. I’m not, even if he says I am.
His manner is as rough as his hands. I tried to remember what I know about him.
The other kids dislike him, freeze him out.
If I am outside their circle, Jackson is on the moon.
They say it’s “cuz he ain’t like us.” Him asking me out on a date made me realize that he isn’t like them, and neither am I, but now I understand he is like me.
They say he can’t be trusted because he is a PK, a preacher’s kid, and assumed to be a “narc,” spying for Christ, reporting, judging.
And maybe that’s why Jackson likes me, sought me out—because he is different, as different as I am.
If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit I’ve noticed Jackson before.
He is one of those masculine boys I admire.
He can catch a baseball and dribble a basketball; he’s good at shop class, whether it’s building a birdhouse or a transistor radio or a small motor.
He’s helped me a few times when I’ve struggled to complete whatever project we are assigned.
He is singularly attractive in some indefinable but concrete way—but even in my lonely state, it hadn’t seemed wise to spend too much time lusting over the son of Reverend Fire-and-Brimstone.
“So do you want to go out with me or not?” he asked, pulling me from my thoughts.
I remembered my first time with a boy—my only time, actually.
It had been awkward and hurried. After, he’d seemed embarrassed, though when I asked if I could kiss him, Juan said yes.
That kiss, more than the sex, is what convinced me, solidified the knowledge of who I am, that this was what I wanted.
What I did not want was secrecy, to be forced to skulk about like a criminal, clinging to the shadows, unable to make or endure eye contact.
Rio and I, I had decided, would love in the light.
Now here was this boy, a boy like me who liked me, offering to pull me into the light.
“Yes,” I said.
Saturday, April 3, 1976, Locust Hollow—Today, Jackson and I went on our first date. He drove me in his old bright-orange pickup truck up to the orchard for a picnic. His mother had packed him a wonderful lunch, no doubt expecting he was going to take some girl a-courting.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I said, biting into a slice of watermelon; its juice ran down my chin. Jackson wiped the trailing juice away with his finger and placed his finger in his mouth, sucking off the juice. I was instantly aroused.
“Why would you,” he began, withdrawing his finger from his mouth, “like Rio? I mean, why would you like a boy who doesn’t like other boys?”
“I didn’t know there were other boys who liked other boys.
I thought I was the only one.” Normally, I would have been embarrassed to admit something so na?ve, but already with Jackson, I felt safe and able to express any thought I had.
“I thought Rio might end up liking me because I am me, as I like him because he is he.”
Jackson cocked his head to the side and pulled a slice of watermelon out of an iced plastic bag. “You’re a strange bird,” he said. “You don’t think like—or even talk like, for that matter—anyone I’ve ever known, but I’m glad you like boys because I really like you.”
I was getting warm, so I pulled my long-sleeved polo over my head. Noticing the series of tiny spots lighter than the rest of me and red in some places along my arms and around the fingers of my left hand, Jackson asked, “Do you have a rash?”
“Sort of,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “I have eczema. It’s on my legs too.”
“Does it hurt?” he asked, looking concerned.
“No, not really. It’s uncomfortable, and sometimes it gets really itchy.
” I did not tell him that when I was younger, I used to run my hand and my arms under the hot water faucet in the bathroom, preferring the feeling of being burned to the ceaseless itching.
I did not tell him the worst part of it had been the constant teasing, the echoing taunts…
icky skin, icky skin…and my grandfather’s insistence, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with you, boy. It’s all in your head.”
“Is there anything you can do for it?”
“Yeah, I use a steroidal cream when it flares up and Lubriderm lotion, which the apothecary orders special for me. I lotion…a lot. That helps. Doctor says I’ll outgrow it.
” Which I found ridiculous because he made a skin condition sound like the pair of high-top white shoes a toddler might wear.
Still feeling self-conscious, I reached for my polo shirt again.
“You don’t have to cover up from me,” Jackson said softly. He cocked his head. “Is that why you’re so shy? You know, it’s not so bad to look at, and besides, it makes you, you.”
I closed my eyes and tried to let his words wash away the years of misery, the teasing.
We talked of other things after that—I don’t remember what. But I remember never having felt so at ease with someone before.
Saturday, May 1, 1976, Locust Hollow—It’s been a month since Jackson told me he liked me.
We’ve become friends. I definitely like him back.
When I’m with him, I have a sense of contentment that I haven’t felt since we moved to the farm.
So, I was disappointed today when he told me we couldn’t meet up because his father wanted him to plant a garden in front of the church.
I couldn’t imagine this because the ground in front of the church is all concrete slabs, hot as hell in the summer and slippery as an iceberg in winter.
Curious, wanting to see him, I hopped on my bike and rode to the church.