Twenty-Five #2
Garrett and I catch each other’s eye a few more times but never get a chance to be alone. A party doesn’t seem like the right place to talk about big feelings anyway. At the end of the night, I watch him say goodbye to his brother and mother and walk home with Aunt Liz.
When I go upstairs to my bedroom, I find my phone and send him a text.
Tomorrow at sunset, I type. I’ll pick you up.
“What made you change your mind?” I ask. “A few weeks ago, when you chose to stay. Why did you decide not to go with your parents?”
Garrett sits next to me on the rocky shore of Lake Superior, glassy waves lapping over his bare feet. It’s a sunset like something out of an epic movie: purple thunderheads gathering across the horizon, violent sprays of orange and pink bursting around each one.
The evening sunlight sets his hair on fire, the red-brown of it glowing so warm it’s like he’s lit from the inside.
Both the lake and his eyes are bluer than usual, and the waves’ iridescence casts reflections on his freckled skin.
He’s wearing the kind of shorts and tank top that make him almost too hot to be allowed.
He picks up a glossy wet stone and passes it between his hands.
“It was your family. Seeing my parents next to them. Seeing the difference and knowing how much of myself I’d have to sacrifice just to make things bearable with them.
I want to believe my mom … that she’ll try.
And maybe someday we’ll make our family work.
” He tosses the stone into the lake. “But I saw your family standing there and realized I didn’t have to do anything for y’all to love me right now.
What you said then is true: This place is already home. ”
Garrett glances at me, eyes narrowed against the fiery sky.
“I think it also had to do with being good enough.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“That’s what it’s been all about for me, you know?
Being likable enough, smart enough, athletic enough.
Like, if I was as close to perfect as possible, maybe my parents would love me, maybe they’d be okay with me being bi.
I think this year made me realize that I’m already good enough for so many people without doing anything: your dad, Aunt Liz, Charlie, my friends back in Atlanta, my friends here.
I can stop trying to get everyone to love me; they already do.
And there are so many awesome decisions to make and people to meet and places to go; I can’t spend all my time working for my parents’ love.
I should get on with living my own damn life.
” He nudges me with his bare shoulder. “Does that even make sense?”
It makes all the sense in the world.
I used to arrange other composers’ music, taking their genius and passing it off as my own, my life filled with the melodies and chords of other people’s stories.
This year, I had to learn to make my own music, to make my own choices.
I had to learn that this town I love doesn’t have to be my only home, that Dad and Emma and Aunt Liz don’t have to be my only family, that my relationship with Garrett doesn’t have to last forever to be worth it.
I had to learn to write the soundtrack of my own life. The same was true for Garrett.
We look at each other, and I’m not sure if it’s a shift in sunlight, or if his face really does turn golden, but for a second, the radiance of him is dizzying.
I pull him to me and then we’re kissing and I’m straddling him and our hands are all over each other and nothing on this planet could stop the energy blossoming between us.
He still kisses like the bass line of a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, but now it’s the part reserved for that one moment of total clarity in the movie where all the events, past and future, seem to collide.
I eventually pull myself off him, wishing that we weren’t on a public beach or that there wasn’t a twenty-minute drive to my bedroom. I slip my fingers into his, and we gaze at the sun for another minute.
“Does it change things?” I ask. “Me going away, and you…” I trail off, realizing he still hasn’t settled on what he’s doing in the fall.
He shrugs. “Would having this summer together not be worth it either way?”
The thought of three golden months with him outshines any complications or heartbreak that might happen in some gray, imaginary future. These three months are now.
“What will you do in the fall?”
“I have no fucking clue, and I love it. I might apply to a few places with rolling admissions, but I also want a school with a kick-ass pre-law program. So I am going to take my time and shop around, maybe take a year off and work somewhere in Blue Harbor. Don’t tell Aunt Liz this, but she’s been talking more seriously about opening up that art shop she’s always dreamed of, and I thought I could be part of it. ”
I love him like this, so full of hope. The brilliance of possibility looks beautiful on him.
The last time I sat in this spot with him, the sunset washed over us through the cold walls of an ice dome. The music I wrote the following day—the music that has played through my head every day since—ended on an unresolved chord, like there was another note waiting just out of reach.
Now, sitting with Garrett under a darkening June sky, I hear the strains of the next movement beginning.
Maybe it’ll only last the summer, a brass fanfare, bright and blazing and short.
Maybe it will grow into a lush symphony, long and fulfilling and complete.
Or maybe it will be a wild rhapsody that ends on the most unexpected chord, dissonant and sharp.
Either way, in this moment, we are writing it, Garrett and I together. He is part of my home and my family, and though I don’t fully know what that means, though the changes we have ahead of us will likely be complicated and messy and painful, I suspect that this next movement will be beautiful.
Music usually is.