Someday, page 2
Wow. Girls kissing. Who’d have thought such a thing?
He bit his lips—thought about it.
Well, why shouldn’t they?
And then Julie was kissing Diego again. And then Diego and Samantha. And then Samantha and Dalton. (Aaaarrrgh!) And then….
Dalton sent the bottle spinning—
(woop woop woop)
—and it landed on Lucas.
Lucas’s eyes flew wide. His mouth fell open. He looked up into Dalton’s equally surprised face. Lucas closed his mouth with an audible click.
Dalton sat back on his heels. “I’m not kissing my best friend!” he objected.
“Oh yes you are!” shouted Samantha. “Julie and I kissed, and I am not missing two boys kissing!”
Lucas’s heart was trip-hammering.
He locked eyes with Dalton.
Dalton locked eyes with him.
“Goddamn do it, Dalton,” snapped Diego.
“Fuck,” muttered Dalton.
Fuck? Lucas had never heard him say fuck.
“Do it!” said Julie.
“Fucking do it!” said Samantha.
Would he?
And then Dalton’s eyes closed and he leaned toward him and—
This is it.
—they kissed.
It lasted only a second. A brief moment. Dalton’s lips against his.
Lucas thought his heart would explode.
And—Oh! he thought. That’s why people kissed.
2
THEY DIDN’T stay much longer. Diego’s parents caught them.
And they made it clear they were calling everyone’s parents. “Drinking, Diego! I can’t believe you all are drinking!” Apparently Diego’s dad hadn’t cared about the kissing.
“Do you think they’ll really call my mom?” Lucas asked. “Mom will kill me if they call. She didn’t want me to go in the first place. She’ll say, ‘This is just what I knew would happen!’”
He glanced down at Dalton’s hand. He shivered. He wanted to take that hand in his. After all, they’d kissed. Shouldn’t they hold hands? He wouldn’t be so afraid of what might happen if Dalton held his hand.
Why didn’t Dalton say anything? Didn’t Dalton care that he could get into a whole lot of trouble?
“I don’t want you to tell anyone,” Dalton said.
Lucas stopped. “Huh?”
Dalton turned. “Nobody can know.”
“Huh?”
“Nobody can know we kissed.” Dalton made a slashing motion through the air. “Nobody.”
“B-but why?” Lucas asked. He felt like Dalton had just reached into his chest and squeezed his heart.
“Oh, come on,” Dalton cried. “How can you ask that? You want everybody calling us fags?”
Lucas opened his mouth to answer and found he didn’t know what to say. Fags. He mulled the word over in his head. A fag was a boy who liked other boys. And it was then that it really hit him. He liked boys.
He was a fag.
I’m a fag.
I’m gay!
Wow….
He smiled. That invisible hand stopped squeezing his heart. It felt like it might simply fly right out of his chest. He suddenly felt like he could fly.
“What the hell are you smiling about?” Dalton snapped.
Lucas shook his head. “Dalton, who cares what people think?” he asked, completely forgetting that he’d been worried to death what Dalton’s friends thought of him only an hour ago.
“Lucas! If people think we’re fags, our lives are over!”
“But Dalton… what if it’s true?”
“What if what is true?”
Lucas shrugged and tried not to laugh. “If they call me a fag, I guess they’ll be right. I am a fag.”
Dalton’s mouth fell open.
Then Lucas saw a sudden dawning knowledge on Dalton’s face: “Oh God,” Dalton said. “That marriage thing! When you proposed to me when you were in kindergarten! I thought you were just being a silly kid.”
Lucas shrugged. “Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I don’t know.”
“Lucas.”
Weird. Now Dalton looked like he was going to cry.
Dalton took a step closer. “Lucas. You can’t know you’re gay.”
“Why not?” He spread his hands. “I asked you to marry me when I was… what… five? Today I kissed a girl for the first time. I didn’t like it, Dalton. Not one bit. But—wow!—I sure liked kissing you.”
Dalton looked at him in complete shock. “Lucas….”
“What?” He grinned even wider. “You liked it too. You felt it just like me. I felt you feel it.” Because they’d kissed two times. The bottle demanded it twice. The second time Dalton’s mouth had lingered on his just a little bit. He was sure Dalton had shivered.
Dalton shook his head. “No. I did not.”
Lucas nodded hard. “Yes. Yes, you did.”
Dalton shook his head again. “No.”
Dalton’s denial was pissing him off. “Oh yes, you did,” he said defiantly. “You’re going to kiss me again too. Not only that, but one of these days you are going to marry me, Dalton Churchill.”
“No!” shouted Dalton.
And then his best friend turned and ran down the sidewalk.
Lucas sighed.
There was a part of him that hurt.
But there was a part of him that knew he was right.
Dalton had liked kissing him. He had felt it.
And one of these days—whether it was legal or not—he was going to marry Dalton. If it was the last thing he ever did.
Lucas went home. He’d forgotten all about getting in trouble.
3
NOBODY AT school said anything about the kissing. At least the boy-boy kissing. Junior high started without a hitch for Lucas and continued without Dalton’s macho reputation being damaged in any way.
Everything was status quo.
Dalton was still skittish around Lucas for a while, and that hurt. But once Dalton’s fears were alleviated, he started hanging around Lucas again. For a little while there Lucas was afraid Dalton might end their lifelong friendship, worried that perhaps Dalton thought hanging with the “gay kid” would be bad for his reputation.
After all, Diego and his buddies snickered when Lucas passed them in the hall. Or they ignored him altogether. Or sometimes they would roll their eyes with great exaggeration and say, “Seventh graders!” with great disdain, as if it were the worst thing in the world anyone could ever be. Lucas thought it was hilarious (although he didn’t voice that thought out loud). As if a one-year difference in age gave them great maturity and wisdom.
As it turned out, worry about a gay rumor was needless. Lucas wasn’t ashamed and had been prepared that people might make fun of him, but nothing happened. It was surprising. He figured the word gay was tattooed on his forehead.
Lucas would study himself in the mirror all the time—with his near-perfect skin (he never drank soda or ate so much as a fun-size Snickers bar), the huge amount of gel he used to give himself the perfect JC/Joey Fatone from *NSYNC hairstyle, his long lashes and how they made him look like he was wearing both eyeliner and mascara (he wasn’t), his ludicrously Disney-animation-character-sized brown eyes—and he’d think, God, I look so gay!
But there hadn’t been one whisper.
If he’d wanted a girlfriend, he could have had his pick of at least a dozen of them. Girls told him he was pretty all the time. Pretty! He didn’t want to be pretty!
He longed for a rugged face and body like Dalton’s. Dalton was getting pubic hair. (Lucas had seen him in the shower room at school—it was his first time seeing Dalton naked since they’d taken a bath together in second grade and… wow-wow-WOW!) Who would have thought some hair in a few different places could be so…well, sexy? Could make Lucas feel so excited? Even the hair Dalton was starting to get in his armpits made Lucas get little goose bumps! Dalton was turning into a man.
But that image in Lucas’s mirror? Why, he looked more like a girl than a man! How he had gotten to be twelve without anyone calling him a faggot, he couldn’t guess. But he began to suspect a big part of that was due to Samantha—or Sam, as she liked to be called.
Interestingly enough, they struck up a friendship after the great spin-the-bottle debacle. She’d walked up to him during lunch one day at school—he was sitting all alone—and asked if she could sit next to him, and when he nodded, she sat down.
“You liked kissing Dalton, didn’t you?” she asked without preamble.
Then, before his filters could kick in, the words came out of his mouth as if they’d been fired from a cannon. “Oh God, yes!”
She nodded. “I know, because when we kissed, I might as well have been kissing a mannequin. But when I kissed Julie? Explosions! Waves crashing on the beach like that old stupid movie my mom loves. From Here to Infinity or some such thing.” She shivered. “Kissing the boys was… sorta gross. Sorry.” She did something with her mouth that was a strange combination of a smirk and a sneer. “Nothing against you, Lucas.”
He grinned. “No. I get it.”
“But kissing Julie? Oh. My. God. My insides turned to jelly.”
Lucas grinned even more. “I get that too. But about Dalton—not Julie.”
Sam nodded vigorously. But then she frowned. Let out a long drawn-out sigh. “It’s too bad neither one of our wet dreams is dreaming about us,” Sam stated flatly.
“Oh no, Sam,” Lucas said, shaking his head emphatically. “You don’t understand. Dalton is going to realize he feels the same way I do.”
She raised her eyebrows.
He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t say it, Sam. I know what I know. He’s the one. And I won’t let you say anything to squash my dream. Got it?”
“Okay!” Sam burst into laughter. “I got it! And if there is anything I can do to help, let me know, okay?”
From such a beginning, a friendship was forged.
After that they hung out more and more. It seemed Dalton felt funny about hanging out with a seventh grader at school, but Sam had no such compunctions. She was happy to hang out when Dalton was busy—or grounded—and she often tagged along when they went to see a movie. And of course Dalton had no interest in going to the mall with her and shopping for the things she wanted to shop for, so that was Lucas and Sam alone, and soon everyone assumed they were dating—if what junior high school kids did was called dating. The only trouble was the fact that she was a year older than he was, and some kids didn’t think that was cool.
Sam couldn’t care less. She had, overnight and with no warning, dropped the bleached-blond look and dyed her hair so black it looked wet. She wore tons of black eyeliner and took to using a foundation that made her so pale she looked dead. In time she was a full-fledged goth. What did she care about the no-nos of dating a boy a year younger than she was?
Even Dalton thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend, no matter how much Lucas told him otherwise.
“You’re the only one for me,” he would say, and Dalton would get cross and remind him again and again that they weren’t “fags,” no matter how many times Lucas told him that he was.
“You can’t know you’re gay when you’re twelve!”
“Who told you that?” Lucas asked with a laugh.
“My mother.”
Lucas looked at his hero, dumbfounded. His mother? “Why were you talking to her about something like that?” Lucas wanted to know.
“After Diego’s party. I told her you said you were gay.” Dalton glared at him and put a hand on his hip, then let out a long sigh and shrugged. “I don’t know why.”
Lucas didn’t tell Dalton how gay he looked doing that.
“And she said that at our age we’re this raging cauldron of emotions and feelings and hormones and stuff. That we don’t know what we want, and it’s normal for boys to get crushes on other boys.”
Lucas laughed. “We’re a raging cauldron of emotions? Did she really say cauldron?”
“Yes!” Dalton’s other hand joined his other hip (and Lucas didn’t mention how gay that looked either). “She said we’re all mixed up, and we don’t know anything, and boys get horny and sometimes do stuff with each other because we can’t do it with girls. And she said that was a good thing so we’re not getting some girl pregnant!”
Lucas felt his face flush. “Stuff”? Boys got horny and did “stuff” with each other? Did she mean what he thought she meant? And when Dalton added the part about not getting a girl pregnant, he realized what she’d been talking about. And God! The very thought of doing “stuff” with Dalton turned him into a cauldron of emotions and hormones.
“She said you’d get interested in girls soon enough, and then all this silliness would stop.”
But Lucas knew otherwise. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did—as sure as a compass pointed north.
“They don’t understand,” said Sam later. “Straight people like what they like so much, they can’t imagine anyone liking anything else.”
That was the night Sam told Lucas she had been crying her eyes out because she had finally told Julie how she felt. Julie had not only let Sam know she didn’t feel the same way, but that she thought the whole idea was disgusting.
“She said I was gross,” Sam said and cried on Lucas’s shoulder—literally.
Lucas could only hug her and tell her that he didn’t think she was gross at all and that he could understand how she felt. Dalton said boy-boy stuff was gross.
Which made what happened soon after that all the more surprising.
1999
1
THE NEXT spring, Diego—he who had been ignoring or snickering at Lucas for months—invited him and Dalton to a slumber party.
“He wants me to come?” Lucas asked, incredulous.
“Yup,” Dalton assured him.
“Wow,” he said.
“But he doesn’t want you to broadcast it, okay?”
Lucas looked at Dalton, hurt.
“You have to understand,” Dalton explained, fidgeting, which Lucas thought was odd. “Diego is one of the most popular kids in school. He has a reputation. You’re… well… you’re just too….”
“What?” Lucas asked. Too faggy?
“Girly,” Dalton said, and then at least he had the class to flinch.
“Girly?” Lucas asked, surprised. He slumped. Girly? How many times had he worried that was just how he looked? “Do you think that, Dalton?”
Dalton quite suddenly looked miserable, and Lucas’s heart sank. He does. Lucas was prepared to be called gay or faggot or fairy. But he’d worried himself sick that other people thought he looked girly. Especially Dalton.
“Well, you’re certainly not a stud,” Dalton said.
“And you are?” Lucas gritted his teeth, afraid he might start to cry. How would that look?
He knew the answer to his question, of course. Yes. Dalton was a stud. He was as manly a man as a thirteen-year-old could be. Not only was Dalton getting pubic hair, his legs were starting to get hairy, and so were his armpits. Lucas would find himself gazing at Dalton’s legs when he was wearing shorts, trying not to stare at his pits when Dalton’s arms were raised. The hair was starting to mesmerize him, and he found he longed to touch it. To see if it was as soft as it looked. But it was more than that. Dalton was starting to get more muscular—his chest was getting broader, his biceps bigger. Yes. A stud. Dalton really was turning into a man. It was very exciting and made Lucas’s tummy all fluttery and filled with apprehension.
“Oh, Lucas,” Dalton said, and the look on his face hurt Lucas all the more. It was pity. And the last thing Lucas wanted Dalton to do was pity him.
“Well, if I’m girly, then why does he want me sleeping over?”
Dalton looked away. Cleared his throat. “He likes you, Lucas. He just doesn’t want other people to know he likes you.”
The words hurt. They physically hurt. “Do you feel like that, Dalton?” Like me but don’t want people to know you like me?
Dalton looked back at him, and then to Lucas’s relief, a steely expression came to his face. “No,” he stated firmly. “You’re my best friend.”
His best friend! Lucas’s heart leapt. It wasn’t a declaration of love, but he’d take it!
“I don’t give a shit what people think about it either.”
Lucas laughed. Joy filled him. At last! What had changed? “Thanks, Dalton.”
“You got it, tiger!”
Tiger?
Lucas’s heart leapt again.
2
THEY WENT skinny-dipping as soon as Diego’s parents left for the evening, making them promise to be good and not to get into the liquor cabinet—
“I’ve taken stock,” Diego’s father had said, “and I’ll know if anything’s missing!”
—and not to have any girls over.
Fat chance of that.
Lucas hadn’t expected the pool to be open. Sure, it was spring, and the temperatures had been in the seventies for some weeks, but he hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t brought his trunks. But then Diego announced that there weren’t any bathing suits allowed in the pool tonight—this was guys only after all—which solved that problem. But it was no relief. Lucas became so anxious at the idea he thought his heart would explode.
He hadn’t seen Dalton naked except for that quick glimpse in the shower room at school, and now that he could really look (although surreptitiously at first), what Lucas saw that evening was amazing. Dalton had gotten so… big. And he had a lot more hair down there. Sure, it was night, but the lights coming up from the pool were enough for Lucas to see.
Lucas could not ever remember being so excited. He could hardly breathe.
He’d been very shy to take off his clothes in front of the two older boys. But Dalton assured him that it was okay, and then, oh, the way he smiled when Lucas finally stood naked before them. And the way Dalton and Diego looked at him! It was making him begin to get hard. That made him seriously blush until he saw the same thing was happening to them.
He wasn’t as big as them down there, but then Diego wasn’t as big as Dalton either—a fact that made Lucas immensely proud of Dalton. That was the way it should be. Diego also had foreskin, which Lucas had never seen in real life, but he knew about it from sex education class, and he thought it made Diego’s penis look kind of funny, like an elephant’s trunk or something.
