But he caught them, and I and the rest of the players watched in queasy suspense as Errol threw to Reshawn again and again, hurling balls at Reshawn’s eyes, his crotch, at the dead center of his sternum.
Incredibly, we were only now reaching the hottest days of summer. The last week of July topped out at a skin-bubbling 105, while the nights never dropped below 90. Heat that made the blacktop gummy, that turned my Saturn’s pleather steering wheel into a torture device, that kept Blenheim children in swimming suits all hours and killed four nursing home residents when the building’s central air failed.
If I wasn’t in workouts or in class I was back in our apartment, shades drawn and AC cranked, an icy cave where I sat in bed and lamented my stalled relationship with Thao. We had been trading text messages since that night on the porch, half-flirty things I both relished and dreaded receiving. He invited me over, but I was unsure I wanted to spend time with him if we were only going to be friends, unsure I could stand to look at him, smell him, if that’s all I’d ever be allowed to do. I tried telling myself I was lucky, that I had dodged yet another bullet. I had been cycling in with Chase for starting Will all summer in Skellie and was looking forward to a camp in which I stood a real chance of becoming the one for my first season. But this gave me less consolation than I would have expected.
By the time the heat relented on Sunday, I was more than ready to escape the apartment, and when Thao invited me to come over yet again, I forced myself to go. Final exams were Monday, camp started Tuesday, and as painful as I knew it would be to see Thao, I liked even less the prospect of not seeing him again until fall semester.
We sat in his kitchen, an AC unit droning from the window above the sink. The de-thorned rose I’d bought was still there, dried out and sitting in the vase Thao had finally found. He poured two glasses of cheap white wine, took a sip, and winced. To make the stuff drinkable, he chopped up some watermelon from the fridge and mashed the fruit at the bottom of our glasses.
—Jamie said you asked about me last semester, he said.
—She did?
—Don’t worry. She knows not to say anything to Reshawn.
He was right that that’s where my thoughts immediately went, and there was a slight edge in his voice, suggesting that this, here, was why we couldn’t be together. I could feel him pulling away, that we were reverting to being strangers, and to try and stop this slide I said:
—Did you know Walt Whitman wrote a poem about you?
—Oh?
—“Thou the ideal man. Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving. Complete in body and dilate in spirit.”
The next part was “Be thou my God,” but I didn’t think it wise to recite that. Thao smiled.
—He recites poetry, too. What’s the last part again?
—“Complete in body and dilate in spirit.”
The front door opened, and we listened to two boys walk inside, laughing. They hurried up the stairs to one of the bedrooms on the second level, steps reverberating loudly on the house’s wood floors.
—What do you like about me? Thao asked.
—Your knees, I said, trying to flirt.
—What else?
—Everything. I like everything.
—Everything? he repeated, skeptically.
—You don’t understand. If my teammates find out, they’ll crucify me.
He stood and poured us each another glass of wine. I could tell he was considering something. He sat back down and handed me my glass.
—That’s the same shit Chase used to pull with Henry.
Thao had never said Chase’s name—I hadn’t even known Thao knew who Chase was—and the shock of hearing him say it now put me a step behind what Thao told me next. It was like that for the following hour: me scrambling to process what he’d just said while also trying to hear the next part of the unbelievable—the very believable, the inevitable—story.
The day after Thao came out to his parents, he attended an informational session at the office of King’s LGBT association. That’s where he met Henry Bryte, a gay freshman who lived in the dorm next to Thao’s on East Campus. Thao’s parents’ terrible reaction to his news only made Thao that much more resolved to be out at King. Henry, on the other hand, had been raised by a bipolar single mother in Natick, Massachusetts, who used to whip him with the metal end of their dog’s leash whenever she thought he was “talking wrong,” so that Henry was now deeply, often paranoically, circumspect about how and to whom he signaled. The simple act of walking into the LGBT meeting had led him to have a low-level panic attack. Thao noticed Henry’s state and made sure to walk out of the meeting with him, helping Henry calm down as they rode the campus shuttle back to East—a preview of the dynamic that would drive their friendship throughout freshman year.
With Thao’s help, Henry grew somewhat more comfortable in his own skin over the next ten months—enough, at least, not to hyperventilate when he walked into the LGBT association—but the true breakthrough occurred the following summer, thanks to a fellowship Henry received to work at a cancer research lab in San Francisco. Henry lived in the Tenderloin, attended his first pride parade, lost his virginity to a postdoc at UCSF, and by living on the opposite coast from his sick, abusive mother got the perspective he needed to realize he didn’t have to be tyrannized by her anymore. Thao barely recognized the boy who returned to West Campus for
