Gideon Van Deusen. Shouldn’t I be thankful for what life brings me instead of wanting what I can’t have?
Yes, I should.
That must be the key to happiness, right?
And couldn’t I—as Doctor Z was always implying—couldn’t I
So it wasn’t psychotic to want to kiss Gideon so soon after mooning over Noel. It was mentally stable and healthy!
As we stepped out onto the street, I reached up and put my hand on Gideon’s neck. I drew his face down to mine. He wrapped his arms around me, and he was wonderfully tall, and when I put my hands on him, his waist was hard and athletic and he just seemed like a
I thought: This is such a better idea than being with Noel.
And then I thought:
I wonder if Noel will walk out of the party and see me.
Don’t think that, you boy-crazy lunatic. Just kiss Gideon and feel lucky.
Yeah, but what would happen if Noel did walk out of the party and see me?
Brain, shut up. Shut UP!
Noel didn’t walk out of the party.
Gideon and I spent the rest of the evening strolling the Ave and looking at people in costume. Lots of college kids spilling out of bars and on their way to parties, girls in sexy nurse costumes, sexy cowgirl, sexy devil. We got smoothies from a stand, blackberry for me and strawberry-peach for him. We talked about movies, and Gideon’s travels in Egypt.
I told him this stuff I heard at Woodland Park Zoo: how in China they’ve started breeding pandas to save them from extinction and now there are all these baby pandas in a care center. It’s kind of like an orphanage, only they’re not orphans. You can see videos of them on YouTube: a whole pile of baby bears crawling on each other and squinting out of half-opened eyes. “They’re artificially inseminated, though, because pandas are pretty much uninterested in sex, especially when they live in zoos,” I said. “In fact, a few years ago these zoologists made panda porno to get the young male pandas interested and explain to them what to do.”
“What?”
“Other animals, you put a male and a female together and they figure it out—but apparently pandas really cannot get the hang of it without help. So they made dirty movies. It was the audio component that made the most difference, the scientists found. The panda heavy breathing. If they didn’t have the audio on, the pandas just got bored.”
Gideon laughed. I mean, it’s funny. But I couldn’t help thinking how Noel would have riffed on the whole panda thing. He would have on-the-spot made up silly rhymes about the pandas, or sketched some completely risque panda on a paper napkin, or made up a business plan for renting X-rated videos out to various zoos to help endangered species, probably the only possible career path that would combine porno and ecology. Something.
Gideon asked me serious questions about pandas. Like, did I know how many there were left in the world? And did they eat anything besides bamboo?
I didn’t know the answers. Because I love animals and learning stuff about them, but the truth is, I like amusing and strange animal stories much more than I like factoids about their everyday lives. I like gay egg-stealing penguins better than straight, socially responsible penguins, and I like porn-watching panda bears and piles of itty- bitty pandas in an orphanage better than just regular old pandas doing their thing in the wild.
But I didn’t quite want to admit that to Gideon.
So I kissed him again and he seemed to forget about the questions he was asking.
1 The Sex Pistols: A British retro punk band known for the song “Anarchy in the UK.”
The Mysterious Disappearance of Kevin!
gideon sits on a bench outside his dorm at Evergreen College. He’s wearing a knit cap and a sleeveless parka over a chamois shirt. Birkenstocks and socks.
When I returned home on Halloween, my mother was still out at Juana’s party. Before I woke up the next morning, she was gone, presumably to Oregon with Juana.
She didn’t leave a note and she didn’t call.
Dad was still lying on the floor when I got up, and he grunted at me when I told him Mom was gone, but didn’t answer any of my questions.
