Autoboyography
Page 4
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“Has he heard of Christopher Paolini?” I whisper to Autumn.
She delivers a shut up by way of an icy glare.
Fujita grabs a stack of papers from a torn folder and begins handing them out. “I assume we can skip the Why-Are-You-Here. You’re here to write a book, right?” Nearly everyone nods enthusiastically. “And you will. Four months isn’t very long, it’s true, but you will get it done. You will figure it out. That’s why I’m here.
“We’re going to hit the ground running.” He makes his way around the room. “I have a suggested reading list, and I have a variety of resources on how to get started and what types of writing processes are out there, but in truth, the only way to write a book is to write it. However you get it done—that is your process.”
I look down at the syllabus and proposed drafting schedule he’s slipped on my desk and feel my forehead heat, feel that prickle-pin crawl of panic up my neck.
I have this week to come up with an idea.
One week.
When I feel Autumn’s attention on me, I turn, giving her an easy smile. But apparently, it isn’t as easy as I hope; her own grin falters, cracking at one side.
“You can do this,” she says quietly, seeing straight through me.
Ask me to differentiate trigonometric functions and I’ll nail it. Give me a molecular modeling kit and I’ll build you the most beautiful organic compound you’ve ever seen. But ask me to pull something straight from my gut and share it with the world? Mental mayhem. I don’t particularly relish working, but at odds with this is my other hatred of doing a shitty job at anything. I’ve never tried to be creative before and realize it only now that I’m sitting here.
To make it worse, Fujita adds, “Now, experience tells me that most of you already have an idea in mind. But over the next week, Sebastian and I will help you hone it. Polish it. And then: You dive right in!”
I can’t even enjoy that he’s repeated Autumn’s inspirational pussy-poster slogan verbatim, because for the first time in . . . well, maybe ever, I feel like I’m in over my head.
Autumn slides my He-Man eraser back onto my desk and uses it as an excuse to squeeze my hand.
The side door opens, and chairs scrape mildly across hardwood as people turn. We all know who it is, but we look anyway.
• • •
The one and only time I’ve ever seen Autumn drunk was this past summer, which is also the one and only time she admitted she was in love with me. I thought we’d been on the same page after our make-out session two years ago, but apparently not. Sometime after drinking four Mike’s Hard Lemonades but before shaking me awake on her floor and begging me with boozy breath to forget everything she said, she babbled for an hour about the secret feelings she’d been harboring the past couple years. From the haze of my own inebriation and the tangle of her alcohol-fueled incoherence, I remember only three clear sentences:
Your face makes sense to me.
Sometimes I get the weird feeling that I wouldn’t be enough for you.
I love you, but only a little.
Being who we are, the only way to move past the potential for profound awkwardness afterward was to joke about it for a solid week.
I love you, but only a little became our new best-friends motto. Autumn tried to explain the logic of my face making sense to her a few times to no real success—something about symmetry of features and how they’re pleasing to her on an instinctive level—but it’s still one of my favorite non sequiturs when I see her getting stressed about anything. I just say, “Auddy, calm down; your face makes sense to me,” and she breaks. Every time, she laughs.
The second sentence—Sometimes I get the weird feeling I wouldn’t be enough for you—hit too close to home. Although I’d been working up the nerve to come out to her, after she said this, I changed my mind. Auddy’s words twanged that dissonant chord inside me, the inner conflict about what it means to be bisexual. There’s the devil on one shoulder, the ignorant perception that I get from all sides, both inside and outside the queer community, who say bisexuality is really about indecision, that it’s impossible for bisexuals to be satisfied with one person and the label is a way to not commit. And then there’s the angel on the other shoulder—who the queer-positive books and pamphlets encourage me to believe—saying that no, what it means is I’m open to falling in love with anyone. I’m happy to commit, but the specific parts don’t matter as much as the person.
But as I’ve never fallen in love and never felt that clawing ache for any one person, I never know which of them will end up being right. When Autumn said that about not being enough for me, I let it go and pretended I didn’t remember. The problem is, I do remember. In fact, I obsess about it, while pretending I’m not painfully waiting for the moment when someone knocks me over, makes me feel sure about them in a way I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life.
So when Sebastian Brother walks into our class and he sees me and I see him, I have the sense of falling sideways out of my chair.
I am drunk.
And I know now what Autumn meant about faces.
I’ve seen him before, in the halls around school, but I never paid much attention: He’s one of the perfect, über-LDS kids—the son of a bishop and, as far as I can tell, incredibly devout.
But here I can’t seem to drag my attention away. Sebastian isn’t a kid anymore. I notice his defined jaw and down-turned almond eyes, ruddy cheeks and anxiously shifting Adam’s apple as he swallows under the weight of our stares.
“Hey, guys.” He gives a small wave, walking haltingly, deeper into the room to shake Fujita’s hand. A classroom’s worth of eyes track him like crosshairs.
Fujita beams at us. “What’d I tell you?”
Sebastian’s hair is shaved on the side, floppy up top. His smile is so wide and bright and pure: He is fucking beautiful. But there’s something beyond it, something in the way he moves, that catches my fascination. Maybe it’s the way his eyes don’t settle on any one person too long. Maybe it’s the way I sense he is slightly wary of us.
As he faces the class from the front now, his eyes flash when they meet mine—for a tiny flicker of a second, and then again, like a prism catching light, because he does a double take. That fraction of a heartbeat is long enough for him to register my immediate infatuation. Holy shit, how quickly he recognizes it. This must happen to him all the time—an adoring gaze from across the room—but to me, being so instantly infatuated is entirely foreign. Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage.
“Oh, man,” Autumn mumbles from beside me. “His smile makes me stupid.”
Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won’t be okay.
Beside me she sighs in disappointment, oblivious to my own internal meltdown. “Too bad he’s Mormon.”
CHAPTER THREE
Monday afternoon: We are homework-free, Mom is home early, and she sees it as a sign that she needs to take her children shopping. My sister, Hailey, is thrilled at the opportunity to get more funeral wear. I agree to come, albeit unenthusiastically, mostly because I know if I were left to my own devices, I would spend hours on my laptop, with multiple browser tabs open, trying to learn more about Sebastian Brother.
She delivers a shut up by way of an icy glare.
Fujita grabs a stack of papers from a torn folder and begins handing them out. “I assume we can skip the Why-Are-You-Here. You’re here to write a book, right?” Nearly everyone nods enthusiastically. “And you will. Four months isn’t very long, it’s true, but you will get it done. You will figure it out. That’s why I’m here.
“We’re going to hit the ground running.” He makes his way around the room. “I have a suggested reading list, and I have a variety of resources on how to get started and what types of writing processes are out there, but in truth, the only way to write a book is to write it. However you get it done—that is your process.”
I look down at the syllabus and proposed drafting schedule he’s slipped on my desk and feel my forehead heat, feel that prickle-pin crawl of panic up my neck.
I have this week to come up with an idea.
One week.
When I feel Autumn’s attention on me, I turn, giving her an easy smile. But apparently, it isn’t as easy as I hope; her own grin falters, cracking at one side.
“You can do this,” she says quietly, seeing straight through me.
Ask me to differentiate trigonometric functions and I’ll nail it. Give me a molecular modeling kit and I’ll build you the most beautiful organic compound you’ve ever seen. But ask me to pull something straight from my gut and share it with the world? Mental mayhem. I don’t particularly relish working, but at odds with this is my other hatred of doing a shitty job at anything. I’ve never tried to be creative before and realize it only now that I’m sitting here.
To make it worse, Fujita adds, “Now, experience tells me that most of you already have an idea in mind. But over the next week, Sebastian and I will help you hone it. Polish it. And then: You dive right in!”
I can’t even enjoy that he’s repeated Autumn’s inspirational pussy-poster slogan verbatim, because for the first time in . . . well, maybe ever, I feel like I’m in over my head.
Autumn slides my He-Man eraser back onto my desk and uses it as an excuse to squeeze my hand.
The side door opens, and chairs scrape mildly across hardwood as people turn. We all know who it is, but we look anyway.
• • •
The one and only time I’ve ever seen Autumn drunk was this past summer, which is also the one and only time she admitted she was in love with me. I thought we’d been on the same page after our make-out session two years ago, but apparently not. Sometime after drinking four Mike’s Hard Lemonades but before shaking me awake on her floor and begging me with boozy breath to forget everything she said, she babbled for an hour about the secret feelings she’d been harboring the past couple years. From the haze of my own inebriation and the tangle of her alcohol-fueled incoherence, I remember only three clear sentences:
Your face makes sense to me.
Sometimes I get the weird feeling that I wouldn’t be enough for you.
I love you, but only a little.
Being who we are, the only way to move past the potential for profound awkwardness afterward was to joke about it for a solid week.
I love you, but only a little became our new best-friends motto. Autumn tried to explain the logic of my face making sense to her a few times to no real success—something about symmetry of features and how they’re pleasing to her on an instinctive level—but it’s still one of my favorite non sequiturs when I see her getting stressed about anything. I just say, “Auddy, calm down; your face makes sense to me,” and she breaks. Every time, she laughs.
The second sentence—Sometimes I get the weird feeling I wouldn’t be enough for you—hit too close to home. Although I’d been working up the nerve to come out to her, after she said this, I changed my mind. Auddy’s words twanged that dissonant chord inside me, the inner conflict about what it means to be bisexual. There’s the devil on one shoulder, the ignorant perception that I get from all sides, both inside and outside the queer community, who say bisexuality is really about indecision, that it’s impossible for bisexuals to be satisfied with one person and the label is a way to not commit. And then there’s the angel on the other shoulder—who the queer-positive books and pamphlets encourage me to believe—saying that no, what it means is I’m open to falling in love with anyone. I’m happy to commit, but the specific parts don’t matter as much as the person.
But as I’ve never fallen in love and never felt that clawing ache for any one person, I never know which of them will end up being right. When Autumn said that about not being enough for me, I let it go and pretended I didn’t remember. The problem is, I do remember. In fact, I obsess about it, while pretending I’m not painfully waiting for the moment when someone knocks me over, makes me feel sure about them in a way I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life.
So when Sebastian Brother walks into our class and he sees me and I see him, I have the sense of falling sideways out of my chair.
I am drunk.
And I know now what Autumn meant about faces.
I’ve seen him before, in the halls around school, but I never paid much attention: He’s one of the perfect, über-LDS kids—the son of a bishop and, as far as I can tell, incredibly devout.
But here I can’t seem to drag my attention away. Sebastian isn’t a kid anymore. I notice his defined jaw and down-turned almond eyes, ruddy cheeks and anxiously shifting Adam’s apple as he swallows under the weight of our stares.
“Hey, guys.” He gives a small wave, walking haltingly, deeper into the room to shake Fujita’s hand. A classroom’s worth of eyes track him like crosshairs.
Fujita beams at us. “What’d I tell you?”
Sebastian’s hair is shaved on the side, floppy up top. His smile is so wide and bright and pure: He is fucking beautiful. But there’s something beyond it, something in the way he moves, that catches my fascination. Maybe it’s the way his eyes don’t settle on any one person too long. Maybe it’s the way I sense he is slightly wary of us.
As he faces the class from the front now, his eyes flash when they meet mine—for a tiny flicker of a second, and then again, like a prism catching light, because he does a double take. That fraction of a heartbeat is long enough for him to register my immediate infatuation. Holy shit, how quickly he recognizes it. This must happen to him all the time—an adoring gaze from across the room—but to me, being so instantly infatuated is entirely foreign. Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage.
“Oh, man,” Autumn mumbles from beside me. “His smile makes me stupid.”
Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won’t be okay.
Beside me she sighs in disappointment, oblivious to my own internal meltdown. “Too bad he’s Mormon.”
CHAPTER THREE
Monday afternoon: We are homework-free, Mom is home early, and she sees it as a sign that she needs to take her children shopping. My sister, Hailey, is thrilled at the opportunity to get more funeral wear. I agree to come, albeit unenthusiastically, mostly because I know if I were left to my own devices, I would spend hours on my laptop, with multiple browser tabs open, trying to learn more about Sebastian Brother.
