Chapter 11
Sam
I’m on my fourth outfit of the night when Gray knocks on the door.
“Gran,” I ask as I frantically do up the buttons on my shirt. “Can you get that?”
First, it was a polo and khakis, but that felt a little too much like I was going to church.
And then it was a hoodie and shorts, but that felt like I was one of those hacky-sack guys I had to give a citation to the week before.
I tried the sweater Gran says looks good on me, but that was back to the church vibes.
And now I’m staring at myself in the mirror: a white button-up and jeans.
I think maybe I look like John Travolta.
“Hello,” Gran croons from the front of the house. “Oh my, don’t you look handsome. Give us a twirl.” Then Gran laughs, and I figure that means Gray gave her a twirl. He says something, and Gran says, “He’s in his bedroom. He’s worse than a girl.”
Gray laughs, and the sound grows louder as he moves through the house. “Back here?”
“That door,” Gran says. “Tell him to quit fussing.”
A rap comes at the door. “Sam?” Gray calls. “You decent?”
“Yeah,” I say, kicking the previous outfits into the closet. “Come on in.”
The door swings open, and Gray says, “Should I close my eyes?”
“Samuel Yarmark,” Gran shouts, “stop fussing about your clothes.”
“Get in here,” I say.
Gray’s grinning as he slips into my room and shuts the door behind him.
He gives the room a quick once over. It’s not anything special.
It might even be a little small for a bedroom, but it’s big enough for my bed and my desk.
Everything’s neat, because respecting your space is a way of respecting yourself, but there are a lot of papers on the desk, even though I try to keep them organized.
Gray looks like he struck the right balance between casual and professional—big surprise, since all this stuff is easy for him.
He’s wearing some sort of sweater-polo, which I didn’t even know was a thing until right now, with a pair of dark jeans.
He gives me a quick look, shoots his eyebrows—like I have any idea what that means—and then starts to move around the room, inspecting it.
“Is this okay?” I ask, plucking at the white shirt with the miserable feeling that the answer is most definitely no.
Gray stops at the desk. “Why do you have last year’s training bulletin?” he asks, working a stapled packet out of the stack.
“Because I wanted to review those topics.” I can’t help but add, “But I haven’t done it yet.”
“Good Lord, Sam.” He glances around. “Why don’t you have anything on the walls?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Should I wear a sweater instead?”
Gray fixes his attention on me. He doesn’t smile. Not exactly. But whatever you call that look on his face, it makes me scowl.
“Easy, tiger,” he says. “That looks nice. Do you like it?”
“No.”
He laughs. “Then why’d you put it on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to wear for this kind of thing.”
“This kind of thing is a college mixer for the queer student life group. People are going to be dressed in a lot of different styles. If you don’t like it, let’s find you something else.”
“Like what?”
He nods at my dresser.
I give a helpless go-ahead gesture.
He puts one hand on the topmost drawer. And then he smirks. “Underwear?”
“Are you for real right now?”
His smirk gets even bigger, and he moves down to the next drawer, with all my shirts.
He rummages around until he comes up with a tee, a nice one—one of my staples.
It’s white, and it’s a nice, heavy material, and it’s soft.
He holds it out to me and moves over to my closet.
He flicks through the hangers. A corduroy shirt I never wear, but I can’t get rid of it because Gran gave it to me for Christmas.
And a Carhartt jacket—brand new, because the old one I’ve got is still good, and I don’t want to get this one dirty.
“This one,” he says, giving the corduroy shirt a shake, “if you want to be the invisible college boy.” He twitches the Carhartt jacket. “This one if you want to spontaneously impregnate every twink in a twenty-yard radius.”
I reach for the corduroy.
Gray pulls it out of reach.
“You are out of your mind if you think I’m wearing that,” I say with a glance at the Carhartt jacket.
“Please, Sam.” He actually sounds like he means it. “Please. I take back the twink thing, but you would look so good in this. You would look so good. Please.”
“I’d look like a hoosier.”
“Oh my God.” He wavers. “Try it on? If you hate it, you can wear the corduroy, but at least see how it looks.”
“I can wear the corduroy if I want,” I say, but I snatch the Carhartt jacket from him.
I’ve been in enough locker rooms that it shouldn’t be any big deal to unbutton my shirt and take it off, but somehow, it is.
Like the air got real thick all of a sudden.
And it gets even worse, for some reason, when Gray turns his back like he’s giving me privacy.
I pull on the white tee and the jacket. It looks like what it is: a Carhartt jacket, something you’d wear if you needed to work on the car in the cold. I mean, it’s alright with the tee and the jeans. But it looks like normal clothes.
“Jesus Christ,” Gray mutters. He’s pretending to peek at me through his fingers, because everything is a game to him. “Please do not take this the wrong way, and please don’t think I’m crass, but you are going to make some boys wet tonight.”
“How in the world am I not supposed to think that’s crass?”
“Also, where do we stand on the slutty mustache?”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping.”
Gray gives me a lopsided grin and drops his hand. “What do you think?”
“It’s fine.”
Some of the amusement settles down in his expression, and he says, “Okay, here’s the thing: it’s important to look nice, right?
But it’s just as important for you to feel comfortable in the clothes.
Like, they’re your style, and you can be relaxed and, I don’t know, at ease in them.
For example, you seem comfortable in high-quality solids—you’ve got a good wardrobe you’ve built around those.
You seemed less comfortable, for the record, when John-Henry saw you wearing that shirt that said, Drill, Baby, Drill.
I think I actually saw you hide behind the copier. ”
I groan. “That fucking shirt.”
“Watch that potty mouth, Samuel, or Gran will have to go cut a switch.”
“And he knows I will,” Gran calls from the next room, which seals it: this is the single most humiliating night of my life.
Gray is grinning for real now, but he sounds sincere when he says, “If you don’t feel comfortable, let’s try the corduroy.”
“No.” I give myself another look in the mirror.
The best I can say for it is that it’s fine.
It’s nothing special, not like how Gray looks in his sweater-polo.
The Carhartt jacket, the tee—it’s the kind of thing I would wear anyway, more or less.
A little nicer, I guess. Like I stepped it up a tiny bit. “It’s all right.”
“Yes,” Gray says. And he drags out the s to make a point.
I ignore him.
“Cue the splooging,” Gray says.
Gran cackles.
“Okay,” I say, and I take him by the arm and steer him out of the room.
“You look very handsome,” Gran says as we pass through the living room. She’s back in her rainbow plaid housedress, and she’s eating popcorn. She’s got Vertigo on TV, and I guess that means Dr. Whatever-His-Name is in the doghouse tonight. “You’re going to make all those fancy boys wet.”
“Gran!”
Gray’s laughing so hard I practically have to carry him out of the house.
On the drive to the college, Gray talks.
I try to keep up, but I can’t focus—now that we’re actually doing this, it seems like a bad idea.
Somehow, we make it to the campus, and we find a spot to park, and then we’re walking out into the evening.
It’s dark aside from the security lights, and the only sound seems to be the faint buzzing in the distance.
It grows louder as we make our way between the old buildings, the noise splitting into voices and the thump of bass.
And then we pass between a pair of buildings into a courtyard tucked off the main quad, and we’ve reached the party.
My first thought is that it looks like something off one of those CW shows Gran and I watch sometimes—the one with all the teenagers played by people in their twenties and thirties. My second thought is that it looks perfect.
Little lights hang over the yard, strands crisscrossing above us to shed a warm glow on the surprisingly large crowd gathered here.
Paper lanterns are strung between the lights, lit softly from within.
At the far end of the yard, a tent covers a stage where a DJ plays music over a massive sound system—I don’t recognize the songs, but nobody seems to be complaining.
The sound system has lights that whirl and twirl in time with the beat.
There’s a pop-up bar, and people are crowded around it for drinks.
There’s the usual pride stuff—rainbow streamers, rainbow beads, a rainbow balloon arch where a cute young couple of guys are getting their picture taken, even a rainbow disco ball that sends pink and red and blue chips of light spinning across the lawn.
Lawn blankets and throw pillows provide impromptu seating.
All of a sudden, I’ve got a million ideas for the Greek Life outreach.
And about a million other things I’m definitely going to change.
Gray nudges me toward a table near the entrance to the courtyard, where a person with a lot of piercings is handing out glowing glasses, glowing necklaces, and glowing bracelets.
Gray takes a glowing bracelet for himself, and before I can say anything, he passes one of the glowing necklaces over my head.
“Don’t forget to pick up your complimentary poppers,” he says.
Then he’s gone, plunging into the crowd, and the person with the piercings laughs as I hurry after him.