Page 37 of Gay for Pray
“Keeping up with everything?” Dad says.
“Yes, I’m doing fine.”
“Just fine?”
I hold back a sigh. “I won’t know until midterms, Dad. We haven’t had that many assignments yet.”
“Well, you should have some idea of how well you’re doing even without a grade. You know yourself, Theodore.”
By which he means, I know what he expects of me. He isn’twrong, either. The weight of those expectations are the reason I’m usually two weeks ahead in all my classes.
“Did you call to ask about my grades?” I say.
My mother clicks her tongue, so I must not mask my irritation as well as I hope to.
“We’re your parents, Theodore,” Dad says. “We care about your future.”
There’s that word again: Future. It looms over my life like a rabid animal looming over its prey. Right now, I’m the prey. Every second, it chases me, hounding me for answers I can’t provide. I haven’t had an answer for this my entire life. I thought perhaps I’d suppressed it well enough to get to the finish line, but now it’s bursting out of me in ways I can’t control. I’m starting to wonder why I ever tried. Maybe this moment wouldn’t be so hard if I’d given in to these feelings sooner.
I shake my head, tuning back in to find my father lecturing me about grades. If only my grades were my biggest concern. If only I was tossing and turning all night because I might get a B+ instead of an A- in my philosophy class.
I don’t respond to the lecture, letting the silence stretch out awkwardly.
“Anyway,” my mother says, the first person to break, “Theodore, we are so excited to hear about the choir concert.”
I go cold. I didn’t think I could possibly yearn for my father’s lecture, but suddenly I want nothing more than to talk about my potential academic failures. My parents came to the concert last year. It fell somewhere around midterms and offered friends and family their first opportunity to come to campus. It’ll be the same this year, judging by what Mr. Jones has said during practice, but I’ve been so distracted with my other problems that I completely overlooked the complication barreling toward me.
Now, it smacks me in the face with the force of a freight train.
“We’re so excited to come up for it,” Mom says.
“It should be an interesting experience,” Dad says.
“Yeah, um, I’m excited for it.”
I’m afraid I can’t keep the trepidation out of my voice, but how could I? This won’t just be an encounter with my parents. It won’t just be a concert and a chance for them to lecture me. Jude is in the choir as well. They’ll see him. They’ll seeus. What if having sex has done something that makes it obvious even outside his bedroom that he means something different to me than he used to? I don’t know how these things work, but I’ve seen people in classes and around campus who were obviously together even though they didn’t announce their relationship. Their body language spoke to an intimacy they couldn’t hide.
With how bad I’m doing controlling my urges, what if I can’t hide how I’m feeling even in public? What if my parents see it on me the second they see me and Jude standing together in that choir?
They would never approve. All the justifications that I’ve used with myself would fall absolutely flat with them. They wouldn’t care that it feels good, that it feels natural, that I’m starting to wonder if the kind, loving God I know in my heart could make me this way only to tell me it’s evil. None of that would matter if my parents caught a whiff of this at the concert.
My only choice is to put some distance between me and Jude ahead of the performance. If I can get some space, maybe it will clear my head. Maybe I’ll act more normal around him. Maybe I can treat him like a stranger and my parents will never know.
And as for Jude?
I squash the guilt already boiling inside me as I head to the library for our scheduled meeting about our philosophy project. There’s only a couple hours of space between this study session and my phone call with my parents, and my guts are a tangled mess as I open the door to the study room we booked.
Jude looks up from his laptop, his smile dazzling. It’s likenot a second has passed since I was naked in his bed, touching him until I managed to memorize his skin. It sends my heart fluttering, which only serves to stir the nausea clenching my guts.
I’m going to hurt him, but if I don’t, things might turn out even worse. This is for the best, I tell myself, as I sit across from him instead of next to him like I usually would. I can’t look up at him as I retrieve my textbooks and laptop and search for the document where we’ve been doing a lot of our project planning.
“So,” I say before he can speak, “um, why don’t we start with a general update on what we each got done in the past week?”
“Okay…” he says slowly.
His skepticism is not unwarranted. I know what he’s been up to. Of course I do. We were together all night on Friday, and at some point in the night our conversation wandered to school work and how the project was going. By asking him now, I’m washing that night away, pretending it never happened, and Jude knows it as well as I do.
“Well,” Jude says, “I have to admit I didn’t get much done over the weekend. I had a pretty exciting Friday and was wiped out from it on Saturday and Sunday.”
