Birthday Dance

We came out the other side, to where the corridor opened up into the club itself. Though you’d never be able to tell from the outside, the place was packed with people. Every inch of the dance floor was taken up by couples grinding against each other in the darkness. You could see their silhouettes joining together then breaking apart, like amoeba coupling under a microscope.
Blue lighting haloed their undulating forms as pinpoint laser spots darted throughout the crowd, catching a pair of lips here, the curve of a neck there. The music was so loud it struck you in the chest like a fist, forcing your heart to beat in time to its pounding rhythm. Whatever individual song lines there were to the music all blurred together into this single pounding noise, which struck again and again in the solar plexus.
“Where did you find this place?!” I had to shout it three times before he could make out what I was saying.
“I read about it!,” he shouted back. “In a magazine! Pretty fabulous, huh?!”
“Yeah,” I shouted, my throat growing sore, “pretty fabulous!”
“I’ll be right back!,” he called, dissolving into the giant amoeba on the dance floor. When he returned several minutes later, he was carrying two tall drinks in his hands that he had scored from the bar.
“What is it?!,” I asked, taking one of the glasses from him.
“What difference does it make?!,” he said smilingly, reaching into his pocket and coming up with a tiny pill that he dropped into the bottom my glass. I held it up and watched as the pill fizzled like an Alka-Seltzer tablet and dissolved into the clear liquid. “Now drink up,” he said, winking his eye before gulping down his own fizzling drink.
Of course I knew it was the wrong thing to do. Every leftover brain cell from my former days as an athlete/scholar wanted to cry out, “Stop! No! Drugs are bad!” But seeing the look of expectation on his face as he drained his glass and nodded for me to do likewise, I realized I would’ve done anything at that moment to not disappoint him. He had worked so hard to make this a perfect birthday celebration for me, I felt like it would be ungrateful to start saying no now. And though we’d never discussed drugs before — although I gathered from a few stray comments that he’d made that he generally disapproved of pot, finding it low class — I trusted that whatever he put in my drink wouldn’t be too powerful, and I drank it down in one gulp, as I knew he wanted me too.
Before I knew what was happening, the night exploded all around me into a million scattered pieces. Sometimes I was dancing with Evan. Sometimes I was dancing on my own. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt part of the crowd now, like I’d pushed my way towards the warm heart at the center of the amoeba. And though I would miss him when he went away, there was always the shadows flowing all around — pressing close, brushing against my back — to keep me safe until he returned. The shadows would protect me. I was part of their family now, so there was nothing to fear.
I felt as though this was the thing that I’d been searching for my whole life, the missing part that’d left me feeling empty for as long back as I could remember; this feeling of oneness with the people around me. And I wanted the feeling to go on forever, to never stop.
Alone but for the first time not alone, I closed my eyes and tried to push myself even further towards the glowing center of the thing, to feel its absolute truthfulness. When I opened them, Evan was standing there in front of me, looking as though he were about to cry. I drew him into my arms and we moved together in a slow circle, the shadows closing all around us. And though I somehow knew, even in my euphoric state, that the music must still be continuing, the only thing I heard now was his voice in my ear, every word sounding as clean and clear as a bell.
“Do you know how incredible you are?,” he whispered, as the shado

First Kiss

“There, there,” he cooed, dismissing the argument. “Do you want me to stay with you for Thanksgiving?”
“I’m sure your father would love that,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“He probably would,” he sniffed. “It would allow him to indulge the fantasy that he didn’t have a gay son at all.”
“What about your mom?,” I said, slapping his knee. “Wouldn’t she miss you?”
“I think most of the time she wishes I wasn’t there either,” he responded, and the room filled up with one of those silences we were always running into when the humor slipped away to show the sad truth underneath.
“All I’m saying is I’m here if you need me,” he said at last, breaking the silence.
“I appreciate that,” I said “but I’ll be fine. And besides, it’ll give me and my dad some time to spend together. I feel like we hardly see each other any more, with me gone during the day and him always driving at night.”
“What’s that like,” he said, “actually wanting to spend time with your parent?” I laughed but didn’t answer as he began to stroke my damp hair. “Does he know about us?”
“What do you mean?,” I asked, not quite sure what he was implying.
“This,” he said. “Me coming over and cooking dinner and you parading around in a towel?”
“Is that what I’m doing,” I asked, “parading?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, suddenly sounding agitated. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, what is this?”
And he shook his knees, forcing me to lift my head, then got up to go to the window. He pushed back the curtain and looked down on the dark street, giving me nothing but the sullen curve of his back.
“Are you serious?,” I said, suddenly afraid that he might be. But Evan’s thoughts were somewhere out there in the dark, beyond the room, beyond me.
“You should hear him on the phone, talking to my aunt. ‘Well, Evan’s got himself a girlfriend now, so who knows what’s going to happen next. Hardy-har-har!’ I’ve never heard him so happy, like he’s dodged a bullet or something.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had to change the subject, to keep the silence from swallowing us.
“Did you hear about Billy Albrecht?,” I asked, grasping at straws.
“Got a concussion in his last game,” he sighed. “I heard. Only his was a manly concussion, I’m sure; tackled by a hundred men on the field of battle. Not diving into a fire hydrant like a little faggot. Probably got a better scar, too.”
“No scar from what I hear.” The words dribbled out of my mouth. I instantly wanted to take them back, but it was too late.
“Of course not,” he replied, his voice barely above a whisper now. “Real men don’t get Harry Potter scars.”
Suddenly he grabbed hold of the curtain and pulled with all his might, tearing the rod out of the wall as he turned to glare at me. His face was red with anger and he wore a look of rage that was almost comic in its intensity.
He meant to march towards me and throw me back on the bed; to ravish me savagely the way he’d seen men do to women in the movies countless times. And I would’ve let him do it, too. I would’ve done anything to let him know that, in my eyes, he was perfect in every way.
But the curtains caught around his ankles as he crossed, tripping him up, so that instead of overpowering me, he wound up landing hard on his knees on the ground between my legs. Recovering his animal instinct after a moment to absorb the shock, he reached up and grabbed my bare shoulders with his hands, jerking me forward so that our noses almost touched.
And then he kissed me. It was the strangest thing, to be kissed by a man you love when there was no desire in the kiss. It felt as though we were moving apart even as our lips were pressed together; like we were saying goodbye to something beautiful that we both knew would eventually have to leave.
It was sad and it

What I See

“I’m serious,” he repeated, “what’s wrong with being you?”
“This might come as a shock to you,” I answered, fuming at him for making me say the obvious, “but unless you’re a lecherous uncle, most guys really aren’t interested in dating the fat dyke on the field hockey team!”
There was a moment where he didn’t say anything, but I could hear him breathing on the other side of the divide. Suddenly the curtain was pulled back violently, so fast I didn’t have time to cover myself up, and Evan was standing there at the side of the tub, looking down at me like he was fit to be tied.
“You’re not a fat dyke! Why do you say those things about yourself?!”
I didn’t know how to respond; his face was so red with anger I thought he was going to spit. Then he bent down and grabbed hold of my hand, pulling me up from the water before I could gather myself enough to resist, and pulled me out onto the carpet so that I was standing there dripping wet in front of the mirror, looking at my reflection above the sink.
I tried to look away but Evan, who was standing beside me, wouldn’t allow it. “Don’t turn away,” he said, shaking my arm roughly to bring my attention back to the glass. “Look.”
And so I did. For the first time in who knows how long, I stood there in front of the mirror and looked at myself. At my stomach. At my face. Really looked.
“What do you see?,” he said, softer now.
“I see a girl.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know, just a girl.”
“You want to know what I see?”
And he let go of my hand and moved out of frame so that I was alone with my reflection, completely alone. The thought that I was standing completely naked in front of a boy my own age didn’t even occur to me any longer. It was just me and the mirror, struggling to come to some sort of peace, and the sound of his voice, like it was coming from a million miles away.
“I see a beautiful young woman who doesn’t know just how beautiful she is. I see a woman who’s been kicking her own ass for so long now she’s forgotten how to be happy unless she’s putting herself down. I see a woman who could outshine all the rest if she would only believe in herself…”

Virg or Non-Virg?

“Are you ready for the big question?”
“That depends,” I said tentatively. “What’s the big question?”
“Virg or non-virg?”
The bath water sloshed violently around me as I kicked away the brush and withdrew my foot. I was relieved, though, that that’s all he wanted to ask; the ‘V’ question. For a second I thought he was going to ask if he could get into the tub with me.
“Stop! You’ll ruin the polish! Give me back your foot!”
I made him wait for a minute, wondering if I’d taken offense to his question, before sliding my foot up onto the ledge again and settling back into the water.
A brief silence returned to the scene as he started in on the big toe once more.
“Well,” he finally said, “are you going to answer?”
I smiled privately, suddenly feeling flirty. “You first.”
I don’t know what I expected to happen next — that maybe he’d lie the way most boys do and suggest he’d a lot more experience than was realistic to believe at our age — but what did happen was far more than I could’ve ever imagined.
Taking me up on the challenge, Evan didn’t exaggerate or give some sort of stock answer to the question. Instead, he told me the story about the first boy he’d ever loved; the boy who made him realize he was gay in the first place. It was when his family was still down in Virginia, and the boy was the son of a highly ranked officer in the military. They were living on an army base and everyday Evan would go down to the athletic fields to watch the boy play soccer.
“The frustrating part,” he said, working his way across my toenails, “is that he looked just like that fool Channing Peat.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s like I can’t escape him.”
“So,” I said, feeling as though I were holding my breath, “what happened? Did you and this boy…?”
“No. Alas, the answer is no. I’m still a virg.”
“Oh,” I managed to get out, somehow disappointed.
“But I knew he knew that I was watching him. How could he not know? I’m sure it was pathetically obvious, the way I’d follow him with my eyes like a dog with its tongue hanging out. And I think he liked it, too; liked having an admirer.”
“Was he…?”
“Probably not. He was probably straight. But you’d be surprised how many straight guys like to be looked at by fags. I don’t know. I guess it gives them a feeling of power or something. I just remember how he’d look back over his shoulder sometime to check that I was there, that I was watching. And sometimes, when he took his shirt off, it was like he was teasing me. Giving a glimpse at the thing I could never have. Not mean or anything. More like it was the most he could offer as a reward for all my silent admiration.”
Suddenly I realized that the nail polish brush was hovering over my fourth toe, wavering. I slowly pulled myself to a sitting position, careful not to tip my left foot into the water, and pushed back the curtain slightly so that I could see his face.
A tear was slowly making its way down his cheek, but his eyes were focused on the boy back in Virginia, still looking over his shoulder to see that he was there. Finally he turned away from the memory and met my eyes with the saddest look of resignation on his face.
“I’ll never get what I want, will I?”

Visiting Manhattan

Of course I’d been to Manhattan with you a bunch of times — to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade or the Christmas show at Rockefeller Center — but I felt like I was seeing it for the first time that day with Evan. Always, with you, there’d been some point to our visit, some destination that we had to get to or get from in a specified timeframe. With Evan there was no point to being in the city, other than the fact that it was the place where he felt most himself and most alive. We weren’t here to see or do anything in particular. We were just here to be, to soak in the city like sponges.
As a result, we walked everywhere that day, from Penn Station to Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty. Evan was convinced that the only thing riding the subway had to show you was human misery, the very thing we were trying to escape from in our lives in the suburbs, and paying the high fares to take a taxi was strictly out of the question. So we did it all on foot, every inch of it. There were times when I thought I was going to collapse or that my feet were going to turn to bloody stumps, but Evan never complained or tired once. He was always two steps out ahead of me like the Energizer Bunny, pulling on my arm while pointing out some new and glorious wonderment that I simply had to see.
And what was Evan’s definition of wonderment? A Peruvian family playing their pan flutes on the sidewalk outside Madison Square Garden. A woman in a business suit walking along Fifth Avenue, recounting intimate details from her personal life into her cell phone as though no one else could hear. Old men playing bocce in the park. The jugglers and clowns who performed their elaborate routines in Washington Square for nothing more than a little applause and some pocket change.
No Empire State Building or Wall Street Stock Exchange; this was his city of wonders, the people and the life of the streets. The pushing and the noise and the smells; all the things that were most common, that most people tried to avoid, these were the things that brought him the most happiness. Every time you turned a corner, there was something new and marvelous to see. He was like a child on Christmas morning. You could see it in his face.
That day also marked my first experience cruising with Evan since, regardless of what he was doing, he constantly had his eye out for beautiful men. This took some getting used to. Life on the field hockey team really hadn’t prepared me for the finer points of male watching. But as the day went on, I became better at spotting the specimens he was bound to find attractive.

Becoming Hagitha

Looking back, I can see now that Evan must’ve felt as alone in his solitude as I’d felt in a crowd, and that it was our shared loneliness that made us come together so fast and so completely. This boy who seemed so confident in his role as sex criminal that he didn’t need anyone else, this girl who had her teammates and her friends around her and seemed to have it all figured out, turned out to be two sides of the same coin. Both of us were screaming, albeit silently, for someone else to understand our isolation. And when we found that person in each other, we came together like fire.
Already by that first Saturday, people had started calling me Hagitha. I don’t know who the first genius was to make the leap from Tabitha to Hagitha — probably one of the girls from field hockey, bitter that their team captain was dumping them — but I remember laughing in the cafeteria that Friday with Evan at how simpleminded our classmates were. Girl hangs out with homosexual. Girl must be fag hag. Tabitha rhymes with Hagitha. Viola! A new name is born.
It was all so stupid, but in a weird way I kind of liked it. If there was anyone sick and tired of the old Tabitha, it was me. In a way, the morons who started the trend of calling me Hagitha had actually done me a favor. By renaming me, they had inadvertently made it easier for me to become a whole other person, the person I was desperate to be.
My name wasn’t the only thing to change in that first week. In just a few short days of knowing him, I had already begun to talk and carry myself in ways I never had the confidence to do before. You might think, being as bitchy and smart and funny as he was, that Evan was the one who taught me how to be these things. True, my wardrobe underwent a complete style transformation all on account of him. And true, also, the references he had to art and culture — from the cheesiest television trash to the fanciest doings at Lincoln Center — were ones I would have to quickly absorb at his feet if I ever hoped to keep up. But that other stuff? The confidence to ignore them when I knew they were whispering about me and my gay boyfriend? The wisdom to laugh back at the world as hard as it was laughing at me? Those things were already inside of me. Evan just brought them to the surface.
It was like, having wanted to be someone else for so long, I finally found the way to do it. And it was Evan.

“A Place in the Sun was in the Evan pantheon of all-time greats, given that it starred Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.”

“Evan positively adored Montgomery Clift…”

“We must’ve watched the opening sequence to West Side Story a hundred times.”

“Look at that lighting! And the dialogue!”