Day 6 Brick Township, NJ
SAM
EVERYTHING IS FINE. It’s perfectly fine and nothing has changed. There’s absolutely no reason for me to be freaking out.
Okay, sure, I almost lost my head and kissed Max yesterday.
And he’s been a little — squirrely? — with me ever since.
Like he knows. Like I slip once and all of a sudden he can read every stupid thought I’ve been keeping from him ever since I first realized what a crush was.
But I guess at least he’s not running away screaming?
Instead, he’s — I dunno, hovering. At dinner last night he kept passing me the salt before I even had a chance to ask for it.
And when I woke up this morning, he was fast asleep with his arm thrown across my waist, and I had to sneak away quickly to head to the bathroom and take care of those feelings.
I shouldn’t have done that stupid shit at the diner yesterday.
I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s like I opened some sort of portal to Crazy Town and now I can’t get the lid back on.
I don’t know what to do with my hands, and I don’t know how to act or what to say or how to be.
I’ve gotta get my shit together, or else I’m going to blow this whole thing up.
But I can’t do that if he won’t stop staring at me.
“Dude, what?”
I meet Max’s eyes in the mirror, blotting my lips as I finish applying my lipstick.
We’re in the bathroom of the modest fire hall where we’ll be playing tonight, opening for two local ska bands.
Ska audiences are a lot of fun, more free and less serious than the hardcore and anarchist crowds we’ve been playing for so far.
So I’ve decided to let loose a little bit with my appearance, with a bit of a heavier eye than I usually do and brand-new black lipstick that I’ve been wanting to try.
I’m certainly not going to do any of this tomorrow night when we play for the crustpunks in New Brunswick, where trying too hard makes you look like a poser.
Max smiles softly, and it makes something flutter in the vicinity of my navel. “I dunno. You just look — really different.”
I turn around to face him, slouching against the sink. “Different how?”
Max steps forward, and I have to tilt my chin up to look at him. Speaking of different, he’s wearing a short-sleeved checkered shirt in black and white and a loosely-tied red tie, not quite his usual uniform of ratty punk band shirts. His eyeliner looks amazing, too.
“It’s hard to explain,” he replies. “It’s just — it brings out something in your face, and you look — um, pretty.”
If I don’t break the spell, I’m going to do something colossally stupid, so I laugh. “What’s gotten into you lately?”
“Why? Do I need a reason to be nice?”
“I guess not —” I shrug.
Gently, he pokes the pink triangle in the middle of my chest. “I like it when you wear this shirt. I can’t believe it still fits you.”
The shirt in question is my Pansy Division T-shirt, now with the sleeves cut off because I’m a bit of a slut and I like to show off skin when I play.
I bought it in 1994 when Max and I were thirteen, and Sage took us to see Green Day on the Dookie tour when they came through Allentown.
Pansy Division was their opening act, and I can’t even begin to explain — I hadn’t told anyone I was gay yet.
I had barely even admitted it to myself.
And here were these guys up on stage, singing about blowjobs and dildos and masturbation and butt sex.
People were grumbling about it, shouting slurs at them — but they just played louder, and it was the most punk rock thing I have ever seen.
I had some money from my allowance, and in addition to the shirt, I bought their album — a cassette tape with a picture of two beautiful bare-chested boys cuddling on the cover.
I brought it home and hid it under my mattress and listened to it on my Walkman every day after school, until finally I had the courage to tell Max who I really was.
And I know he knows this whole story — what it means to me.
And so I can feel the color heating my cheeks. “I guess — I dunno, I wanted to be myself tonight.”
“I like it,” he murmurs.
The air is charged, just like it was yesterday at the beach, vibrating so much I can nearly see it, and neither one of us are saying anything, eyes locked on each other, and I’m probably going to pass out if he doesn’t — if he does —
BANG.
The bathroom door swings open, and we both nearly jump out of our skin.
“Oh, um — sorry —” Blake stumbles over his words, his eyes darting back and forth between us. “It’s only, uh — Roxie says that they’re ready for us for soundcheck, and uh —” He swallows hard. “If you guys don’t come out, she’s going to eat your balls for breakfast.”
“Delicious,” Max laughs. I’m about to have a stroke, and he’s laughing. “Tell her we’ll be right out.”
“Sure thing.” Blake waves his hand oddly at the two of us. “And um — sorry.”
What the fuck am I doing? If I don’t get myself under control, something awful is going to happen.
MAX
It’s pretty much impossible to be in a bad mood at a ska show.
Like, shit is fucked up. I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind. Ever since yesterday, every time I’m alone with Sam I start getting this crazy urge to plant one on him. And I have no fucking clue why.
I like girls. I know I like girls. I like their soft skin and their soft hands and the way they always smell like flowers.
I like girls who sass me and give me a hard time and play hard to get.
I like girls who are good listeners and girls who talk so much they make my head spin.
I like kissing girls, losing my head for hours on some grungy couch with a girl I just met.
I like flat-chested girls and girls with big tits and everything in between.
And I like sex, putting everything I have into getting a girl off.
None of this has ever been in fucking doubt.
But tonight, in this moment, who the fuck cares?
I’m young, and I’m here with my best friend in the whole goddamn world, and I’m having the best fucking time.
Our set tonight was fun as shit — the crowd ate up every single song we played, and we went deep into our back catalogue, all the silly songs that we don’t usually play because we want to be taken seriously.
We even played the one that Sam wrote when he was trying to study for his anatomy final, the one where we just scream all the bones in the body back and forth at each other.
And these nerds clapped and danced and yelled for us like we were the fucking Ramones. We have to book more ska shows.
Now, the headliners are playing, and Sam and I are in the crowd, skanking as enthusiastically as anyone else here.
The band has a full horn section, with trumpet, trombone, and saxophone, and their sound is big and brassy and fast-paced, everything you need to keep your heart pumping.
Sam looks like he’s having the time of his life, and every time we find each other in the crowd he gives me a crazy grin like I’m the best thing that ever happened to him.
We’re not even drunk, but I’m high as a kite, riding the wave of pure energy that pulses through the music and the crowd and through Sam and me.
Of course I’m fucking crazy about him. Sam and I — it’s like we’ve been sharing space so long that at some point we got our DNA mixed up, so that I’m a little bit him and he’s a little bit me and that’s the way it is.
It was probably inevitable that we would get our signals crossed at some point.
But the connection we have right now — that’s the important thing.
I don’t need to go and do something stupid and fuck it all up.
As the song draws to a close, Sam ends up right next to me. We’re both hot and sweaty, breathing hard after all the jumping around, but that doesn’t stop me from slinging my arm around his thin shoulders and putting my mouth close to his ear.
“I fucking love you, man.”
Sam turns to look at me, his eyebrows arching incredulously. Then he starts to laugh. “I love you too, you fucking loon.”
He tickles my ribs, and I throw both arms around him, putting him in a headlock and dropping a kiss into his hair. And I know we’re going to be okay, that whatever weird cloud has been following us around the past couple of days, it’s definitely going to pass.