Page 30 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
But is it thesamekind of pulse, or is it something different? Is it…Shit.There’s another one.
No. Eliot. Stop. Stop thinking about that region.
But I can’t, because there’s another. And another. Why aren’t they stopping?
That’s it, my mind whispers.That pulse? That’s arousal. That’s all the proof you need.
But I’m not gay.
Are you sure about that?
Well…I’ve only ever had crushes on boys.
But how can you argue with your body?
Well…
Listen to that pulse. It’s telling you something.
It’s too late. I know it’s too late. The possibility of me being a lesbian has entered my mind, and once that happens, it’s over. I’ll never be able to unthink it. It’s just like remembering a past lie; I’ll return to this moment, this pulse, over and over. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never felt even remotely attracted to a woman before. It doesn’t matter that being gay is fine, that my sister is gay, that she would be thrilled if I came out, too. In truth,Ihave no problem with the idea of being gay. What bothers me—what I come back to over and over and over again—is that I know I’mnotgay. I know that, one day, I want to marry a man. But that pulse—that one, insignificant yet somehow more significant than anything else in the world, pulse—it has planted a seed of doubt in my mind. And that seed will grow. It will grow lips and teeth and a jawline. It will argue with me. It will send me in circles. Awful, torturous circles. I will never know the truth. I will never know my own sexuality. Whatmatters is that pulse. I can tell myself I’m straight, but my body says otherwise.
—
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, I ARGUEwith myself over whether or not I’m a lesbian. Every time I see an attractive girl, I check for that pulse, for that sign of arousal. And every time, I find it.
—
AT THIS POINT, THE WORDSmental illnessdo not exist in my vocabulary. Illness is there, certainly, but only in the context of strep throat or the flu or the horrifying wrinkled paper bag of a woman they wheeled into the school auditorium to talk to our health class about cancer. To me, thoughts can’t be an illness. Illness implies that the change within you is not your fault. That it’s foreign. Invasive. That an army of cells broke in and started messing with your insides. That—and this is key, this is the most important part of all—with the right drugs, it will go away.
But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.
—
AT THIS POINT, I STOPconfessing to Speedy. How can I?Dad, is it okay that I might be a lesbian, even though I don’t want to be, even though I don’tthinkI am, really, but still I might be because I felt this thing downstairs, and…No. Not happening. And the relief a confession brings is temporary, anyway. There will always be something new. I see that now. Better to just write it down in my journal. To confess to the nonjudgmental silence of an empty page.
Dad watches me from a distance for a long time, waiting to see whether I’ll approach him with a new confession. When I don’t, I can’t tell if he’s disappointed or relieved.
—
I MEET MANUEL’S PARENTS FORthe first time early one Sunday evening, a few weeks into our friendship. They aren’t home often, but that night is an exception.
Cenaat the Valdecasases’ is nothing like dinner at the Becks’. Rather than laying everything out in a buffet and letting us serve ourselves, Manuel’s nanny, Valentina, arranges a feast right in the center of the table—buñuelosand arepas and plantains and pitchers filled with fresh-squeezed juice, beautiful tangles of color I’ve never seen before—and then we sit down together, all of us, me and Manuel and Valentina and Señor and Señora, but “Oh, no, Eliot,por favor, call me Che, and me Juli,sí sí, por favor, we insist.” Then we fold our hands and our heads, and Che says a prayer in Spanish, and even though I can’t understand his words, I understand that this, too, is different than the hollow demonstrations of Christianity my siblings and I giggle through after we’ve already finished eating. This is what faith sounds like. Real faith. Then the prayer is over, and the Valdecasas family returns to the realm of the living and passes me the first dish.
And the food—well. There’s no way to describe eating homemade Colombian food for the very first time. Especially after a decade of Wendy Beck’s home cooking. How do you describe the first time you get drunk? The first time you fall in love? And I am in love. I’m in love with the newness of it all. I’ve never eaten a tostada or drank coffee after dinner or called adults by their first name. It’s all so new, so wonderful.
So wonderful, in fact, that it quiets the endless spiral, the ever-present flap of moths’ wings wreaking havoc inside my mind. Just for a moment, but I’ll take every moment I can get.
Che and Juli dominate the conversation. They’re best friends, a fact that becomes clear almost instantly. This, too, is new to me. I’m a child with parents who rarely display affection, who tell their children they love them but never seem to tell each other. I never found that fact strange. Not until I met Che and Juli.
Conversation runs at a dead sprint. Che and Juli tell all the stories, and they tell them together. Complete each other’s sentences rather than interrupt them. Never run out of things to say. They speak mostly in Spanish. I don’t ask them to switch. I don’t want to. The words—they’re mesmerizing. All longr’s and shortd’s. Ten thousandb’s in the span of twenty seconds.S’s that disappear. Rapid-fire syllables that tumble from their mouths like rolling pebbles. The stories are intended for the whole table, but the couple seems to speak only to each other.
Manuel whispers translations into my ear from the side, but I tell him not to worry, I can keep up. A blatant lie—which he knows. I don’t care. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, even if I understand almost none of it. I let the rocks roll past, all of them, clicking and clacking and creating a soundtrack of countless stories whose plots I can only imagine. I listen to it, all of it, and I think,This is a language.
This is the moment I fall in love with words.
I look over at Manuel, hoping to share my joy with someone else. He isn’t looking at me. He’s watching his parents. And while he smiles at all the right moments and nods along with details he remembers, there’s something else behind his eyes. Something distant, like a friend excluded or the smallest boy on the baseball field. Standing before the chain-link fence, fists clenched. Waiting. Knowing he will always be chosen last.
—
