Honestly Ben Read online

  “You did not,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s … information.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No! It’s … kinda sexy actually. You’re a sensitive jock.”

  I winced.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Labels. Not a huge fan. It’s fine, but. I mean, I do Model Congress on Tuesdays. Does that make me a geek?”

  “No, I totally get that,” she said, and she rubbed her pant leg against my cheek, which was a totally new and not entirely unpleasant sensation. “I won’t label you again, I promise.”

  “And I won’t label you either.”

  She bit her lip, grabbed the sides of the slide, and pushed her way down. “I kind of hate that I said that, anyway. It’s like, I say you’re a sensitive jock, and now you’re going to have to prove that you’re not too sensitive.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know. Gender roles. Misogyny is so pervasive that the idea of being associated with female behavior freaks guys out. Even good guys like you. And I think that it says something interesting about men that they love women so deeply and yet hold them in such low esteem.”

  “Hmm,” I said. Hannah was really smart.

  “Nothing?” she said. “No response?”

  “I just sometimes have to think about things before I respond,” I said. “You said a lot and it’s interesting and deserves some thought.”

  I could feel her smile as she stood up from the bottom of the slide. We walked in silence around the perimeter of the playground. I didn’t think I was a misogynist. I mean, guys on the baseball team definitely said things, and while I didn’t always speak up and tell them to stop, never for a second did I think it was okay for them to speak that way about women. What would Hannah think if she knew I didn’t stand up for women at practice sometimes?

  “So what about your family?”

  “Eh,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Not interesting,” I said.

  “Can I be the judge?”

  I shrugged. “We live up in New Hampshire, in a very rural area. My dad is a farmer. My mom minds the farm store attached to our house.”

  “Oh, that’s adorable!”

  I shot her a narrow-eyed look. “Gee, thanks.”

  She made a cute face. “I’m sorry.”

  I walked toward the jungle gym, remembering what it was like to climb on one. There was one at the elementary school playground back in Alton. One time I touched one of the metal bars without my gloves in the thick of winter, and it left a red mark that lasted a week.

  “You don’t respond sometimes,” she said as we got about a foot from the monkey bars.

  I exhaled. That was like my dad. I didn’t want to be like that. Wrapped up tight like in Saran Wrap, like I couldn’t breathe. But how do you battle your biology? Was this just who I was? Could I change if I wanted to? “I don’t always know what to say.”

  “Why do you have to know? Can’t you just say things without knowing if they’re the right thing to say?”

  My lips tightened. This was what I didn’t always like about talking to people. Because they tell you that you’re doing it wrong, and I hate doing it wrong. And I don’t know how to do it right sometimes.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “For a baseball captain, you sure are sorry a lot.”

  “Sorry,” I repeated. I put my gloved hands on the top of the bars and leaned backward with all my weight. It gave me a good stretch.

  “Well, at least we found the limits of your ability to communicate.” She said it in a tone like she was done with me, and a shiver went through my body.

  I pulled harder at the bar, leaning back even farther. “I’m not always great at talking, okay? I have to really trust someone first.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “I get that. I really do. You’re an introvert.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m, like, both. Extrovert and introvert.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I closed my eyes and inhaled frigid wind. “It’s just. The ‘adorable’ thing. My life is not adorable. I grew up in a place called Alton, and in the summer it’s all these rich folks. And we run a farm store, and people come in and they’re always telling us how adorable we are, like puppies. But we’re human beings, you know?”

  “Sorry,” she said, and I could hear a little hurt in her voice.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “No, I get it,” she said, and she reached up to the top bar, jumped up a few inches, and hung from it.

  “I don’t know why that’s such a sore spot for me. It just is.”

  “Well, I guess it would be hard to go to such a rich kid school and not be rich.”

  I put my gloved hands in my pockets. “Nobody seems to understand what privilege is.”

  She dropped down from the bar, grabbed my elbow, put my hand on my hip for me, and slipped her arm around mine. She started walking, so I did too. “I know I can’t prove it to you and there’s nothing I can say that won’t sound ridiculous, but I’m not a snob. I need you to believe me.”

  “Thanks.” I took in her beautiful profile. “I believe you.”

  She pulled me close. “I think you’re amazing, Ben.”

  I swallowed hard. Being told you’re amazing shouldn’t be a challenge, but it was one. Because now I’d have to say something, when in reality the only thing in my brain was a voice saying, Don’t get a big head about it.

  I rubbed my ear against my jacketed shoulder and tried to undo the knot in my chest. It felt like someone was twisting the life out of me.

  “I—think you’re amazing too.” I moved my face toward hers. Her breath was sweet.

  “That’s true, I am,” she said, and then she made a face. “Way to take a compliment by making a joke out of it, my psychologist would say.”

  I laughed. “I do that too.” I bent down and kissed her softly on the lips. She kissed me back, but when I felt her lips trying to open mine, I pulled back. “Let’s save it for next time.”

  “You,” she said, her eyes wide. “You are a different boy. You sure you’re not gay?”

  There was a part of me that was rock hard at the moment. “I am more than usually certain of that.”

  She grinned.

  There was a refreshing lack of boys crawling around like dogs before our Thursday practice. Apparently my promise to change the culture of the team had meant something to the guys, because I hadn’t seen any of that since I’d become captain three days ago.

  I went to my locker and got changed, nodding to a few teammates. I allowed the sights and sounds of the room to melt away as I got myself mentally prepared for practice.

  I had a few things on my mind that weren’t leaving me alone. One was Hannah. She was unlike any girl I’d ever met. She said stuff I wouldn’t dare to say, ever, and she made me want to be better than I was just to be worthy of her. That stuff about misogyny was deep in a Bryce way. And that button nose. So, so cute. She might not fully get me yet, but if she was patient enough to get past my stupid defenses, she definitely was the kind of person who at least might understand me. I wanted that. I needed that. And the kiss. Such a warm, sweet kiss. I had been thinking about her so much last night that I almost didn’t finish my calculus homework, which was not advisable. I’d had to do the final problem in class while Ms. Dyson started collecting papers on the other side of the room.

  Two was Rafe. He’d nursed me back to health all weekend, but we hadn’t really talked yet, even after he’d seen what I’d written about him, which was terrible and unfair. The day before, I’d seen him and Toby walking ahead of me, across the quad, toward Albie, who was about twenty steps ahead of them. Rafe whispered something to Toby and Toby laughed. Then Rafe sprinted ahead. Albie turned around and put his hands up, like he knew what was coming.

  “Please don’t tackle me,” Albie said, and I felt myself
smirking, because it was so—them. Silly. Irreverent.

  “My name is Rafe and I’m a compulsive tackler,” Rafe yelled out, and Toby yelled back, “Hi, Rafe!”

  “Please don’t,” Albie said again, bracing himself.

  “I’ve been compulsively tackling for about two years now,” Rafe said, and he sort of leaned on Albie, who stumbled toward a snow bank.

  “This is one of your more annoying idiosyncrasies,” Albie said as he slowly tipped over into the snow bank, like a huge tree that had been chopped down.

  “Yay!” yelled Toby, skipping toward them. “A tackle! A tackle! Yay!”

  I chuckled out loud, remembering the incident, as I tied the laces on my cleats. Never in a million, trillion years would I do that to someone. So why did it make me laugh so much to think about it? And how could I become friends again with Rafe, if I wanted to? And did I want to?

  And yet. Every time I thought about Jeff Frazier, my head pounded, like I wanted to tear his limbs off or something. Which was deranged, given that I was clearly straight and beginning to have an exceedingly fine girlfriend.

  Weird. I was just plain weird, and it was a good thing no one had access to my innermost thoughts.

  At practice, a freshman took a ball off his cheekbone. It caromed off his shoulder and into his face, or else he’d have a broken cheekbone, but still, having done that before, I knew it hurt like hell. The kid kept his head down, but I could see him wince at the pain, so I yelled out, “You okay?”

  He averted his eyes and nodded.

  “Stop being a pussy!” Mendenhall yelled.

  Playing tough, I realized. That was part of the game.

  As practice went on, I thought about misogyny, like Hannah was talking about. How boys made other boys crawl and bark like dogs, and how we pressured each other to be a man all the time. What did I think a man was? To me, my dad was a man. He had no emotions ever, at least that he shared. And that wasn’t who I wanted to be, yet I still admired him for it. Which was so strange.

  I thought about how kids mostly knew not to use the word “faggot” now. Like how Rafe was out, and people were basically cool with him and knew not to say certain words. But we still called things that were weak “gay.” What was that about?

  I stayed in the zone and fielded grounder after grounder, and this thought came to me: It’s all about gender. We were an all-boys school. Really, in some ways, it was an all-boys world. Telling someone to stop being a pussy was telling them not to be a girl, as if being a girl was bad. And saying that something weak was gay was saying that straight was better, and gay was weak, and weak equaled effeminate, and effeminate equaled female.

  There had to be a way to fix that. To be better than that. To be more than my dad turned out to be in that regard, with his command over my mom, for instance.

  “Pull up your girl panties and get back in there,” Mendenhall was yelling at a freshman who had bobbled three straight grounders at short. The kid was muttering to himself, clearly mad at his inability to do better, and I realized I could say something.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. I shut my lips and swallowed.

  What good would it do? Am I really going to fix the mammoth problem of misogyny in America by being a killer of fun with my baseball team?

  A grounder came to me. I could hear the sizzle of the ball off the bat. It was a hard one, two bounces, just to my left. I got in front of it but somehow misjudged the hop off the gym floor. It got me right in the shin, and I muttered, “Damn,” and hopped around.

  “Your tampon fell out,” Mendenhall yelled over from short, and a bunch of guys laughed. And there wasn’t a chance I was going to talk back after flubbing a ground ball.

  Crap.

  Clearly I was a puppet captain. I was Ngo Dinh Diem, the team was Vietnam, and Mendenhall was President Eisenhower.

  Dinner with the team on Saturday evening of Martin Luther King Day weekend began with a particularly nonriveting story about exploding cars. Mendenhall was clearly an automobile aficionado. He knew the difference between a Hemi and a V8, and while I generally did not care for stories about my beloved things blowing up, he did.

  “We’re gonna track you down and take you to the blowout,” Zack said to me. At first I thought he meant like a car blowing out, or a tire, but then I realized I’d zoned out and he was now talking about a party.

  I smiled and shrugged.

  “You gotta hang,” Zack said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I begged out of dessert, and I found myself smiling again as I walked solo across the quad toward the dorms. Pappas Award winner, team captain, and yet basically accepted as a recluse. I wasn’t sure why, really. How could a guy be a leader and a follower? A leader leads, like Mendenhall. He speaks up. Me, I barely said a word, and they seemed to like me anyway.

  How lucky was I?

  And at the same time, I thought, nothing anyone on the baseball team had done or said in the past two weeks had made me laugh. I hadn’t done or said anything that made any of them laugh either. Beyond Hannah, they were pretty much the entirety of my social life, and it was—excruciatingly boring.

  Should I just go to the party, maybe?

  I really didn’t want to; the misogyny at practice two days earlier was still bugging me, and it wasn’t like the dinner conversation wasn’t full of that stuff too. But I did want to do something. Hannah had already begged out of plans because she had this choir performance.

  I got a weird idea. What the hell, I thought. I could apologize to Rafe for what I wrote on his letter and clear the air, which was the right thing to do. I could blame alcohol, and anyway I wasn’t going to drink anymore, that was certain. It was a Saturday night, and maybe keeping my head down was a good plan, but I could use a little laughter too. I hurried up the stairs to the second floor and knocked on Rafe and Albie’s door.

  Rafe’s expression was an odd combination of confused and hopeful when he saw it was me.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  He motioned me into the room with his head, and I followed him in. Albie was sitting on his bed, reading a science textbook.

  “So, what’s up?”

  Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Not much,” he said unenthusiastically.

  This wasn’t going the way I’d hoped. I looked from Rafe to Albie and back, trying to communicate that maybe we should talk somewhere in private.

  Rafe shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. Anything you have to say to me you can say in front of Albie.”

  “I really don’t think I can,” I said.

  “Surprise yourself, Ben. For someone who is all about being himself, you sure edit yourself a lot.”

  My throat closed up. “Whoa,” I said.

  “Yeah, whoa,” said Albie, not looking up. “A little harsh there, Rafester.”

  “You crumpled up my note. You haven’t said a word to me in a week. Just say what you have to say,” he said, his arms crossed over his thin chest.

  I looked over at Albie. Whom I trusted, but. I really wanted to have this conversation with Rafe only. What if Albie didn’t know about … ? And then I stopped that thought, because of course he knew.

  “Oh, man,” I said, looking at Albie. “You know … ”

  “Well, I am friends with Toby, so. And I’m roommates with Rafe, who is the other half of this drama. So yeah, I know things.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Albie said, “I have two friends in this school. Who the hell am I gonna tell? I don’t give a shit. I’m Albie Gaga. All the gays—”

  “I’m not gay,” I said, my voice sharp and low.

  “All the gays and the gay-adjacents flock to me,” he said.

  I took a deep breath and turned to Rafe. Then I gritted my teeth and made myself say the words even though Albie was there.

  “I shouldn’t have written that about you. I was drunk. I’m sorry. You’re not … alcohol. Okay?”

  “Someone needs to put that in a count
ry song,” Albie said.

  “Shut up!” Rafe and I yelled simultaneously.

  Albie pantomimed zipping his lips, and then he gathered a couple books and left the room.

  “I hate that I acted that way,” I said, once Albie was gone. “I don’t know why you mentioning Jeff made me want to pummel him.”

  “I guess I should be flattered. I should be, but I’m not,” Rafe said, and I could tell he’d softened up a bit by the way his face looked less tense.

  “Do you accept my apology?”

  “Fine. Sure. Yes,” he said, and he stuck out his hand and I shook it, and it sort of felt like we were getting divorced, which was bizarre.

  “If we’re gonna be friends, I think we just need to come up with some sort of agreement not to talk about other people.”

  “That’s so weird,” Rafe said.

  “So you would want to hear about it if I was dating a girl?”

  He shrugged. “I could handle it.”

  “I’m dating a girl,” I said.

  He looked into my eyes and immediately looked away. “Okay. Cool.”

  I kept looking at him, waiting for him to look me in the eyes again. He didn’t.

  “That’s not weird?”

  He sighed. “It’s a little weird, yeah. But what can you do? I’ll call Claire Olivia and ask for the final ruling. But for now, we’ll be like gay friend–straight friend exes. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I think that works.”

  “Well, we’re going to Boston in a bit. You coming?” Rafe asked.

  I wasn’t sure we were done, because it seemed a little easy. But I nodded yes, because, well, I was so damned tired of doing nothing, and doing it by myself.

  I sat behind Albie in his light blue 1993 Toyota Celica as he drove east toward Boston. Toby, whom I still hadn’t quite forgiven for hiding in my closet, was in the passenger’s seat, and Rafe sat next to me in the backseat to my right. When Toby turned around to speak, I noticed he was wearing black eyeliner.

  Toby said, “Why is it that in every book, the new kid always gets the girl? There’s always a new kid in town, and they show him running his hand through his voluminous hair in slow motion, and the main female character swoons and in the end they wind up together? Why is the new kid always such a tramp?”