Autoboyography
Page 10

My words slowly morph, turning into something else, a face, a thought.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU.
SO WHY DO I FEEL LIKE
I MIGHT LOVE YOU?
(BUT ONLY A LITTLE)
I look over my shoulder, worried that Autumn might catch me using our line when I’m thinking about something else—someone else—but my breath is sliced in half when I see him standing behind me, reading over my shoulder.
Pink cheeks, unsure smile.
“How’s the outline coming?”
I shrug, sliding my hand over the four stanzas of insanity on the paper. “I feel like everyone is so far ahead.” My voice shakes. “I didn’t actually expect to need an outline before I started. I sort of assumed we’d be doing that here.”
Sebastian nods. Leaning down, he speaks quietly. “I didn’t have an outline for a few weeks.”
Gooseflesh pricks up my arms. He smells so intensely of guy—the tang of deodorant and this hard-to-define maleness.
“You didn’t?” I ask.
He straightens, shaking his head. “No. I came in without any idea what I was doing.”
“But you ended up writing something brilliant, apparently.” I gesture to my mostly blank page. “I’m not expecting lightning to strike this class twice in two years.”
“You never know,” he tells me, and then smiles. “I felt the Spirit with me when I was writing. I felt inspired. You never know what will call to you. Just stay open to it, and it will come.”
He turns, moving on to the next group, and I’m left completely confused.
Sebastian knows—he has to know—that I am attracted to him. My eyes are helplessly bouncing around his face, his neck, his chest, his jeans whenever he’s in the classroom. Did he read what I’d written? Does he realize that just then he was inspiring me? If so, then why throw in mention of the Spirit?
Am I being toyed with?
Autumn catches my eye across the room, mouthing, What? because I’m sure I look like I’m struggling to perform some complex mathematical process in my mind. I shake my head and pull my hand back, revealing the words on my page again.
Something lights up in me, the weak flicker of an idea, the thread unraveling from that night in Autumn’s room to now.
The queer kid. The LDS kid.
“Sebastian,” I call after him.
He looks back at me over his shoulder, and it’s like our eyes are connected by some invisible tether. After a couple seconds, he turns and makes his way back over to me.
I give him my best smile. “Fujita seems to think I need your help.”
His eyes are teasing. “Do you think you need my help?”
“I have two sentences written.”
He laughs. “So yes.”
“Probably yes.”
I expect him to suggest we walk over to the far table near the window, or meet in the library during my free period. I do not expect him to say, “I have some time this weekend. I could help then.”
It feels like the rest of the room falls away when he says this, and my heart takes off in a frantic sprint.
This is probably a terrible idea. Yes, I’m attracted to him, but I worry that if I dig deeper, I won’t like him.
But that would be for the best, wouldn’t it? It certainly wouldn’t hurt to get some time outside of this class, to get an answer to my question: Could we even be friends, let alone more?
God, I have to tread lightly.
He swallows, and I watch as it moves his throat.
“Does that work?” he asks, pulling my eyes back up to his face.
“Yeah,” I say, and swallow. This time he watches. “What time?”
CHAPTER FIVE
My dad is sitting in his standard green scrubs at the breakfast bar when I get up on Saturday, curled around his bowl of oatmeal like it’s the keeper of life’s great secrets. It’s only when I move closer that I realize he’s asleep.
“Dad.”
He jumps, knocking the bowl across the counter before he scrabbles for it clumsily. He leans back, clutching his chest. “You scared me.”
I put an arm around his shoulder, biting back a laugh. He looks so crazily disheveled. “Sorry.”
His hand comes over mine, squeezing. With him sitting and me standing, I feel enormous. It’s so strange that I am as tall as he is now. Somehow I got none of my mom’s features. I am all Dad: dark hair and towering height and eyelashes. Hailey got Mom’s stature, coloring, and sass.
“Did you just get home?”
He nods, digging his spoon back into the bowl. “A patient came in around midnight with a punctured carotid. They called me in to surgery.”
“Punctured carotid? Did he make it?”
He answers with a tiny shake of his head.
Oof. This explains the stooped posture. “That sucks.”
“He had two kids. He was only thirty-nine.”
I lean against the counter, eating cereal out of the box. Dad pretends to not care. “How did he—”
“Car accident.”
My stomach drops. Only last year my dad told Hailey and me about how three of his best friends from high school died in a car accident right after graduation. My dad was in the car too, and survived. He left New York to attend UCLA and then moved to Stanford for med school, where he met and married my formerly LDS mother—much to the chagrin of his own mother and extended family back home in Hungary. But because of his time away, whenever he goes back to Upstate New York, the loss of his friends feels fresh all over again.
It’s one of the only things he and Mom ever fought about in front of us: Mom insisted I needed my own car. Dad thought I could get by without one. Mom won. The problem with Provo is there is absolutely nothing to do, anywhere, and it’s not walkable. But the good thing about Provo is it’s incredibly safe—no one drinks, and everyone drives like an octogenarian.
He seems to notice only now that I’m dressed and ready for action. “What are you doing up so early?”
“Going to work on a project with a friend.”
“Autumn?”
Crap. Why did I say “friend”?
I should have said “person from class.”
“Sebastian.” At Dad’s unsure expression, I add, “He’s the mentor in our Seminar.”
“The kid who sold the book?”
I laugh. “Yeah, the kid who sold the book.”
“He’s LDS, isn’t he?”
I look around us as if the room is full of Mormons hanging out, not drinking our coffee. “Isn’t everyone?”
Dad shrugs, returning to his cold oatmeal. “We aren’t.”
“What are we?”
“We are liberated Unitarian Jewstians,” Mom says, gliding into the room in her yoga pants, her hair in a high, messy bun. She sidles up to Dad, gives him some disgusting, lingering kiss that sends my face deep into the box of cereal, and then makes a beeline for the coffeepot.
She pours her mug, talking to Dad over her shoulder. “Paulie, what time did you get home?”
He studies the clock again, eyes blinking and squinted. “About half an hour ago.”
“Torn carotid,” I summarize for her. “Didn’t make it.”
Dad looks up at me with a disapproving frown. “Tanner,” he says, voice low.
“What? I was just toplining it for her so you didn’t have to go through it again.”
Mom returns to him, quieter now, taking his face into her hands. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but the low murmur of her voice makes me feel better too.