I’d thought about Adam Curtis
more times than I’d cared to admit, but I was me and he was… well, he was
everything I wasn’t. I was the boy in
the background. The boy with the girls
for friends because the other boys were too intimidating or just too goddamned
much for me to deal with.
So I avoided them.
But Adam—well, I’d always watched
him. He was in my Spanish class freshman
year. Tapping that heel over and over
against the well-worn tile as if his leg had a high-powered battery in it. That one piece of overgrown black hair
hanging into his face, nearly brushing his super rosy lips. They were always shiny as if they had a clear
coat of gloss on them—sometimes I wondered… did
they? Did Adam wear makeup? A little mascara on his long lashes? Just a hint of blush on those rounded cheeks?
But surely not.
Surely the other boys in his
fucking ultra-masculine squad would have noticed by now… applying lip-gloss in
the locker room wouldn’t have gone over without a fight, so no… I had to have
been imagining it. Fantasizing about it even… thinking about the way those shiny lips
would taste against mine.
Would they be sticky? Would they leave a tacky residue against my
own, thick enough that I could taste it on my tongue for hours afterwards? Would they taste like strawberry with just
the slightest hint of kiwi?
Sometimes I imagined Adam was
looking at me. Even now, in our senior
year, I would feel his eyes on me from time to time, but… every time I
looked—every single time—he would look away quickly, as if something else had
caught his eye.
As sophomores, we were required
to take an awkward gym class where I avoided every ball in sight. Adam seemed to be a magnet for them. We were all forced to take showers at the end
of the period. There was no getting out
of it; I’d begged my mother to do something—please, Mom! I’ll do anything! Just write a note… just… anything!—but she
wouldn’t. She said that the class would
be “good for me.” It might help to “make
friends.” “Be less shy.” “Be more
social.”
All that it did was obligate me
to shower with thirty other teenage boys who knew nothing about me… who wanted to know nothing about me. So, I kept to myself. Looked down as often as possible at the cold
gray tile as I washed the humiliation of the hour before from my skin with the
medicinal soap they provided and quickly rinsed it from my too-thin body before
wrapping a towel around my waist as abruptly as I could.
But one day, I saw it. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I glanced up on accident, opening my eyes a
fraction as I rinsed the shampoo from my hair.
Adam was looking. He wasn’t focused on my eyes like he usually
did, but his gaze was fixed lower, almost as if lost in thought, as he rubbed a
bar of soap absentmindedly in between already sudsy fingers. He just stared between my legs for a good
fifteen seconds until I turned the water off and covered myself, causing him to
drop the bar and quickly turn toward the wall.
Junior year, I got a job at the
mall. Again, my mother said it would be
good to “meet people.” I will admit that
I had met a few girls and they had let me into their quiet fold. It wasn’t bad to know a few people at
school. It also helped the constant
questioning from my father. “That Ashley…
she was really cute. Are you dating her?” Sometimes I would shrug my shoulders and
smile shyly. “I don’t know, Dad. We work together. It would be pretty weird to date her.”
I had no intention on dating
Ashley or any other girl, but it was easier that way. It was easier to lie to him. So, Ashley and I continued to work together
in the evenings, folding jeans and rating the cute boys at school—“so, scale of
one to ten, Brando… what do you think about Kyle Molner?”—and everything went
on as planned until… he walked in.
Ashley knew immediately, her eyes
scanning over my ashen face before nodding toward Adam’s hulking body hunched
over a rack, eyeballing a few t-shirts and holding them up for size.
“Adam Curtis?” she whispered.
“Shut up, please.” I walked away from her and headed for the
back room. If I were about to vomit, I
at least wanted to find a toilet to aim toward.
“Brandon!” she called.
And when she did, Adam Curtis
looked up. And I ran.
Now, here we were. Seniors.
Finally.
So, I would be gone in three
months and there was nothing my high school crush could do to internally squash
me. I was stronger now (maybe) and had
even kissed a guy (once, on a dare), so I could handle it when he bumped me (hard) and
sent my sketchpad flying, the loose pages fluttering everywhere, just like in
the most humiliating of all films.
Sketches I’d drawn—not of him,
of course, because that would be just
like in the movies—but of other boys… boys together… some of them kissing, some
wrapped around one another, some clothed… some not.
Adam collected them—each one of
the brutal fucking sketches—and looked over them individually, a shy grin
creeping across his face before he handed them over.
“I… sorry,” I stammered.
“No,” he responded, making actual
eye contact now, for the first time in three years. “I’m sorry… Brandon.”
