Chapter 21
The patterned carpet in the Paumanok East auditorium hides years of stains, but nothing can hide the years of smells.
The room is big enough to hold a crowded pep rally or a sold-out musical, with tall brick walls and row after row of fabric seats.
Mazzei stands at a series of light switches on the side of the stage, flicking from dark red to electric blue and settling on bright white everywhere.
He shouts for everyone to sit up front but they spread out around the room.
It’s after lunch and everyone is excited to be in a new space and do nothing.
I pace up and down the aisles, my stomach growling.
Elijah smiles as I pass him in the first row. “Are you doing the chemistry study date story?”
“I think a different one?” My voice cracks like I’m thirteen.
Mazzei takes to the stage and clears his throat. He turns on the microphone and a high-pitched screech silences the room.
“Jesus!” he says. The mic cuts out. He looks at the bottom and twists the wire, releasing another screech.
Everyone covers their ears.
“There we go.” His voice blares. “Nobody touch this microphone.” He holds up a quarter.
“Heads, Sean O’Brien goes first. Tails, Jay Romero.
After each storyteller shares their story, the audience will score them out of ten based on the rubrics that…
” He frowns, likely trying to remember whether he gave us rubrics, which he didn’t.
“We’ll call up the first person and take it from there. ”
Elijah turns and looks around. I wave to him from the back wall.
Mazzei flips the quarter, catches it, and opens his hand. “Tails. Jay Romero.”
Jay jogs up the side steps to the stage, chewing his tongue like it’s a piece of gum. Mazzei adjusts the microphone for him and walks down to the back of the auditorium, near me.
After the few guys who are loudly cheering stop, Jay sets his jaw and begins, “For Christmas when I was five years old, I got a dog.”
Steph Rooney lets out a gasp and says, “I love dogs.”
“I named him Giant because, well, actually, it wouldn’t be appropriate to say what part of him was giant. Don’t worry, Mazzei, I got you.”
Mr.?Mazzei doesn’t budge.
“But I think you guys can guess.”
A few kids laugh.
“He had a giant tail! What did you think?”
More kids laugh. Have they all been drugged? I need to graduate and move.
Jay goes on to recount the years of “antics” he and his friends got into, and how this dog was there through it all.
What he isn’t saying is the story I thought everyone knew, but judging by how entranced they are, they must not.
This is the same dog that Jay once jerked off to completion.
On camera. And then shared online repeatedly.
Every few days he’d put it up again. ICYMI, here’s my dog ejaculating on the front lawn.
Jay quiets his voice like he’s so moved it’s hard to speak.
“We just found out Giant has cancer—they call it canine leukemia. But he’s taking it like the soldier he’s always been.”
Mr.?Mazzei closes his eyes. I’m almost certain he’s rolling them but doesn’t want anyone to see.
“But I’m not worried,” Jay says. “You know how I know he’s gonna beat it?”
The room listens with rapt attention.
“Because we never got him neutered. This dog has balls. The balls to live.”
People burst into applause. Steph Rooney cries. Jay waves from the stage like he’s a celebrity.
Mazzei turns to me. “You have a story prepared?”
“I do.” My voice cracks again.
“And it’s better than that one?”
“It’s hard to follow a story about a sick dog.”
Mazzei nods slowly. With a long groan, he walks up to the stage and adjusts the microphone, letting out another screech.
He asks everyone to share critical feedback and people respond by talking about their dogs.
Mazzei massages his temples and explains the categories to consider when scoring, including story arc, thoughtful use of language, and emotional depth.
He asks each person to shout a score when he points to them, and he asks Steph to average the scores together.
Every student Mazzei points at gives the story a ten out of ten. He skips me and points to Elijah.
Elijah answers calmly, “Eight.”
“That’s an average of 9.9!” Steph calls to immediate cheers.
“I guess I have to print those rubrics,” Mazzei says. “Next up—”
“Wait,” Jay says from his seat. “Do you have any feedback?”
“That story was about your dog and the assignment is to tell a story about yourself,” Mazzei says, and when Jay tries to respond, he says, “We’re moving on. The next storyteller is Sean O’Brien.”
The crowd does not necessarily applaud this abrupt shift. The only sound comes from Jay, who shouts, “Let’s do this, O’Brien!”
When I step onstage, the eyes of the audience shock me into performance mode. I’ve done this before and I can do it again. I walk with long steps to the mic. Mazzei is still adjusting it when I arrive.
“I got it,” I tell him casually.
“I can do it,” he grunts. He pulls on the stand and the microphone screeches and cuts off. He stomps off behind the curtains.
“I don’t even need a microphone,” I call to him. I project my voice to the room. “Can everyone hear me?”
No one replies. Mazzei calls from offstage, “Hold on!”
I give a calm, everything-is-fine smile to the audience who aren’t looking at me anyway.
They’ve left their seats to crowd around Jay to see photos of his dog.
I don’t look at Elijah. Mazzei returns with a new microphone.
He removes the old one and pops in the new one, tapping it to make sure it works.
“There we go.” Mazzei motions toward me. “Please welcome to the mic Sean O’Brien.”
Only Elijah claps.
I guess I’m taking a while to say anything, because Jay shouts, “It’s okay if you can’t get it up, O’Brien!”
I look at Jay’s face, truly the most irritating arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth that could ever exist, and my disdain for him wipes out every other feeling. I will use this rage as fuel. I will be better than Jay not because I am good but because he deserves to lose.
“I appreciate that, Jay,” I say. “There’s nothing more comforting to me than how consistently boring you are.”
Kids laugh and make sounds like we’re about to fight. Mazzei leans his forehead on the back wall. Elijah would say I’m hiding behind humor just like Jay. He’d say I’m fighting for power just like Jay. He’d say I’m doing exactly what I keep saying I don’t want to do. And he’d be right.
When I look down at Elijah in the front row, he isn’t frowning or scowling. He’s simply looking back.
I keep my eyes on his and I let myself exist only in his gaze.
“Before I met Elijah Summers,” I say, my voice reverberating around the auditorium, “I was the Homecoming Court Jester. I was the scrawny pale guy. By making fun of how I wasn’t the epitome of an alpha male, I turned myself into someone who was still acceptable.
But there were so many things I didn’t know how to joke about, which meant I didn’t know how to talk about them, which meant I didn’t know how to think about them.
That’s why, one afternoon last week, I slipped into the boys’ bathroom in the banana wing to let myself have a minor panic attack in peace.
As I turned into a version of myself I didn’t want anyone to see, a toilet flushed and Elijah exited a stall. ”
I look out at the silent crowd. It’s not too late, I tell myself, to walk off the stage, rent a boat, and set off to sea.
Or, I think, I could keep talking.
“That’s when the strangest thing happened. I told Elijah how I felt, and he heard me, and he accepted me as I was.” I add with exaggerated disbelief, “Could you imagine?”
The room laughs. It’s an interesting laugh.
I’m poking fun at how I couldn’t imagine being accepted as I was, and we’re laughing because we see ourselves in that experience.
Everyone else is also changing who they really are to make themselves “fit in.” And I’m not making fun of us for not fitting in.
I’m making fun of the feeling that we have to try to, the feeling that who we are isn’t enough.
It’s a joke that doesn’t put us all down but instead questions the unspoken social norms that hold us all down.
I tell the room about sharing stories with Elijah in English, and messaging with him, and going to the city with him.
“And whenever I was with him,” I say, “I’d have this warm feeling that I didn’t know how to name and I didn’t know what to do with.”
Mr.?Mazzei, standing on the back wall, uncrosses his arms.
I take a breath and continue. “My first crush was on a girl in kindergarten who mostly pretended to be a panther. I had a crush on a girl in the third grade who kicked a soccer ball into my groin. I didn’t have a crush on her because of that, but that is something she did.
I think I got married to a girl in the fifth grade.
Not sure if we ever got divorced. I knew these feelings were crushes because I’d seen in movies how a kind boy could have an innocent crush on a girl, and I wanted to be a kind boy. ”
I look down at Elijah. He’s holding his closed hand in front of his closed lips, watching me closely.
“But along the way there were also boys who I thought were so cool ,” I say.
“In the seventh grade I thought the lead in the school play was so talented. In the tenth grade I thought a soccer kid’s buzzed hair looked so good.
And I wonder if those were crushes on those kids and I didn’t realize it because I’d never seen an example of a guy who was neither straight nor gay. ”
Elijah’s face doesn’t budge. He doesn’t even blink.
I put my hands in my pockets. A little defensiveness is okay, I think, given the moment.
“But if you imagine being accepted as you are,” I say to the room, to the lights, my voice trembling, “then suddenly you realize who you might be. And it turns out I might be someone who can be attracted to people regardless of their gender.”
When I look back to Elijah, his closed hand hasn’t moved from the front of his face. His eyes are, if anything, distrustful.
But I stay looking at him. “Which is all to say, Elijah, you’ve helped me become who I am. And I am someone who has such a big crush on you.”
Now his hand drops and he smiles. He motions left and right and whispers loudly, “We are in school!”
I make an eek face and turn to the room. “Thank you! Sorry if that last part was awkward.”
I leave the stage as everyone applauds, and I walk toward Elijah as he adjusts his outfit.
I casually sit beside him and look over as he looks away and smiles.
Mazzei goes to the microphone and asks for critical feedback, but I don’t hear anything people say because all I’m thinking about is the side of Elijah’s face.
When he turns to me, his eyes are wide.
“Was that okay?” I ask quietly.
“That was more than okay.”
“I kinda wanted to say it outside at The Moth, but I was too nervous. Then I thought all those performers had the stage as a space to present a cohesive statement, and I thought maybe that’s what I should do.”
He laughs a little, and it’s possible that he’s laughing at me, but in a sweet way. “That makes sense.” He looks up at Mazzei because scores are being taken, and he says, declaratively, possibly proudly, “Ten.”
I don’t hesitate. “This might be a ridiculous question,” I say, and lean so close we’re almost touching, “but would you like to be my boyfriend?”
“That’s not a ridiculous question. I would love to be your boyfriend.”
I nod. “Great.” I nod several more times. “The whole class is behind us, or I’d give you a kiss.”
He leans closer. “Then I guess we have something to look forward to.”
Steph Rooney says the average score is a ten out of ten, and the room cheers, and I stay looking at Elijah, at the long lines of his eyelashes.
“But could I hold your hand for now?” he asks.
I reach over and put my hand in his, but the armrest between our seats props up my elbow in a weird way, so I try putting my elbow on my side of the armrest, but that makes my hand twist in his, so I try putting my elbow on his side of the armrest, but then I’m jabbing him in the ribs.
“This is a disaster,” I whisper.
He laughs. “It’s just right.”
And I fall for him all over again.