The house lights dropped and a single lamp above the stage snapped on, casting a cone of light onto a floor mat. Thao stood directly beneath the lamp, dressed in black tights, no shoes, and no shirt, every twitching torso muscle, every smooth sinew hungrily delineated. I had been expecting something along the lines of the ballet I’d seen on television or in movies, Swan Lake or The Nutcracker Suite, but what I got was something far stranger, something that seemed the very antithesis of football’s motion. Whereas a player’s movements were concrete and linear, Thao’s were abstract and proceeded with no discernible rhythm; whereas I was to keep my body as coiled and compact as I could, Thao’s seemed to want nothing more than to stretch itself in all directions, to kiss and caress maximum space. In the middle of the performance he transitioned to dancing with an invisible partner, reminding me of players in pregame warm-ups; but rather than trying to fool or truck or flee the invisible, Thao coaxed it, desired it, embraced it. I could not get enough—of the irregular patter of his feet on the mat; of how, when he stepped into the light, he seemed to escape the darkness surrounding the stage; of how, when he retreated from the light and disappeared for a moment to chase after his partner, I held my breath until he reappeared.
At the end of the show Thao and the rest of the dancers grabbed their duffel bags from backstage and exited through the auditorium with the audience. I shuffled down my row to meet him in the aisle, running my hand through my hair, worrying I had put on too much cologne. Thao smiled and stepped into my row. I could smell the dried sweat on him.
—New shorts? he asked.
—No. Why?
He peeled the size sticker off my left pant leg. I had been surrounded by mirrors in the locker room and still somehow missed it. I wanted to evaporate, to run back to my car and drive it straight into the Atlantic. But then Thao did something wonderful. He folded the sticker in two and slid it into his shorts pocket, as if for safekeeping.
—I’ve never been to ballet, I said.
—You told me that already.
—Right.
—That’s okay, I’ve never seen a football game.
The witty words I’d practiced in the mirror rose into my throat, but it felt like my pulse kept pounding them back down, like the hammer in whack-a-mole. Another dancer, a young straw-blonde woman who’d tied her hair into a hasty bun, was passing our aisle. Thao stopped her.
—Can you hold on to this? he said, handing her his duffel bag.
He led me outside, behind the auditorium, down a little hill and across a little campus road into the Alice M. King Gardens. We entered through the arboretum, taking a gravel path past trees with placards pinned to their trunks that gave the trees’ common and Latin names. The gravel became flagstone and the landscape opened into a meadow adorned with frog-songed lily ponds, wooden trellises hung with gourd vines, lanes of cherry trees and rose bushes, Italianate fountains whose white marble figurines had taken on a bluish cast. We climbed a knoll and sat on its flat grassy top, looking down on a moon-dimed lake and the woods lining its shore.
Thao hugged his knees to his chest and caught me looking at his bubbles of bunched-up quad muscle.
—Does your family know? he asked.
I shook my head.
—Colorado, he said, stretching out the a.
—Colorado, I agreed, shortening the a the way most natives do.
—My dad was still a teenager when he fled Saigon. He got resettled in Saginaw. My mom was his caseworker, and they say they fell in love over failing to get him to pronounce the difference between “Saigon” and “Saginaw.” She still works with refugees, and my dad opened an Asian grocery in Lansing. He’s pretty—well, he’s really fucking traditional. Sometimes it’s like he never left Vietnam.
He took out a pack of cigarettes, lighting up. I was learning to love the smell of freshly ignited nicotine.
—They drove me here for freshman orientation. I’d decided I was going to be out at King, and I practiced what I was going to say the whole ride, this elaborate, passionate confession, like my big number. But we got here and I clammed up. Didn’t say anything while we were moving in, or at dinner that night. They stopped by my dorm room the next morning to say goodbye. It was now or never, and so I blurted it out. I’m gay! My dad’s face looked like a boiled tomato. He ranted for like twenty minutes, switching between English and Vietnamese, saying he was going to stop payments on my tuition, I was a disgrace, he didn’t have a daughter he had a son, blah blah blah. Mom kept tugging at my dad’s shirt cuff, telling him to lower his voice. They left without hugging me, and it became this saga the rest of the year. My dad didn’t follow through on his threat, but I still try not to go home. Every time I do, there’s another girl he wants me to meet.
He tried to blow a smoke ring, but it just came out like a bad cloud.
—Your turn, he said.
What was there to say about my own parents? When I’d been home between spring semester and summer, Dad had made a crack
