Page 52 of One Little Problem
9. Ryan and Luke. Un-individually?
Fingers crossed.
School was almost over and that thought brought instinctive joy, but then there was the period between school and work that was usually reserved for fun but might be taken up by trying not to cry and bugging Lydia and Zach with my emotions until one of them snapped and tried to strangle me.
Someone should take bets. I’d bet on Lydia and then my little sister could have the proceeds. Hey, I understood life insurance. Zach seemed less likely to murder me because he’d been dealing with me for years, and really, if it was Lydia, then she’d get to be on that show she watched about women who killed people. She thought me and Ryan were totally disgusting together, but her idea of quality relationship time was watching Snapped with Alicia, so she didn’t have room to judge.
Being without Ryan was still difficult, but I had been doing better recently. Then I saw him and I panicked. What if he thought I was moving on? I hadn’t moved on. I just felt a little better after time with my mom. Ryan, on the other hand, didn’t really look better.
“I’m not a mess because of you,” he informed me as soon as I saw him. “I’m just the worst son ever, that’s why I’m a train wreck today.”
I offered a hesitant, “Um, do you wanna talk about it?”
“No, not really, but I came over here anyway and it’s not like I have any reason to be near the baseball diamond.” We stared at each for a moment. He added, “I still hate you, by the way.”
“Okay.” I nodded. That’s why I didn’t think he’d want to talk about it.
“I just.” He made a frustrated noise. “I didn’t want things to change,” he told the ground.
“Are you talking about your dad or—”
Ryan shook his head and it looked like he was a moment away from changing his mind and leaving, so I motioned over to the bleachers and we went to sit down.
Change was… always happening, probably. He’d know better than me, like we learned in science class as kids, the Earth was always moving even when we couldn’t feel it. Change was probably like that. Except there were ways of hiding it.
Like sitting here, staring at the baseball diamond. You could focus on it and ignore everything else that got different while it remained the same as ever. Of course, it changed too. There was just always someone there to change it right back. The grass was carefully taken care of, the lines designating fair and foul were always redrawn when they started to fade, the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home was always measured carefully, and the plate instantly got dusted off every time it became dirty.
“You don’t know what it’s like to always feel like you don’t belong,” Ryan spoke eventually.
“Uh.” Was there a way to acknowledge that was mostly true and I heard and appreciated his opinion while also saying that I had gone through this on a smaller scale and still thought my experience was valid? I knew exactly what that was like and had experienced it very recently, so it was still fresh.
“Correction,” Ryan amended. “You didn’t go through anything like that until recently. Maybe you did feel alone once you began to question your sexuality, when people at school started judging you, friends didn’t look at you the same, when you didn’t know what your parents were gonna say. Yeah, I would understand feeling like you were all by yourself then.” That’s real, that’s valid, he seemed to want to say, that he heard and appreciated my opinion and he didn’t want to question my experiences but still had concerns.
Because hearing him say that, I realized it wasn’t entirely true. “Just because I felt like that didn’t mean it was totally true,” I reasoned, figuring it out while I spoke. “I had you, my boyfriend, and Zach, my best friend, who were both already out before me.” And Lydia and I went through similar stuff at the same time, so I had her to hold my hand through it too. Sometimes literally. But that was a different story.
“Good, you got there, but you didn’t make me say it.” He stared at the field but turned to give me a tight smile. “Would have felt like a jerk if you made me say it.”
“Not a jerk. You just, you felt alone a lot and then you had me and you didn’t want to feel like that anymore.” Him wanting to stay here for the summer made sense in that regard. Still didn’t feel right to me though.
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Zach basically totally me the same thing. That’s why I agreed to the whole fake break up.” The dirt on the field was so even and boring. Nothing compared to all the tones in Ryan’s hair. I gave him a dry look. “Really gotta go and make Zach be right?”
“Sorry about that, believe me,” he assured me.
“You’d think every once in a while, he’d be wrong,” I complained.
“Law of averages,” Ryan said.
“This is what I’m saying.” Except I only understood batting averages. “I think.”
We fell silent. Ryan’s foot started twitching impatiently, so I stayed silent, waiting for him to speak. “I didn’t see an end to it,” Ryan spoke to the field again. “Being the guy on my own. Not until college. There was some comfort in the knowledge that it was them, not me. That’s what Lady Gaga said and I believed in my heart that it was their small mindedness and being wrong that wouldn’t let them accept me but… all those people being jerks to me still had lives, had friends and people they could talk with and laugh with in the halls and the moral high ground sure was lonely.”
He trailed off. “Yeah, it sounds tough,” I said, encouraging him.
“I really wasn’t expecting to be so happy here. I kept looking to the future, but I got something good now, and just, what were the chances that’d happen again while I’m here? I just, I wanted to hold onto that. What we had seemed like something worth holding onto.”
“Yeah,” I offered tentatively.
