Shopping! OH yeah. Here’s the thing about straight girls and the mall : They need regulation because they can take longer than me, but otherwise they can be fab, and I’m the biggest queen when it comes to shopping. That, Madonna, my hair, my mom, and parties. (Just so it’s out there).

“Let’s find you lingerie!” I giggled as I took Maya’s hand and dragged her into Victoria’s Secret. “Would your mom totally go off if she found this?” I picked up a little black lace thong and held it before her.

“Yes!” she said. “I think I’ll buy it!”

I laughed. She’d told me all about her parents. Her mother ran things, and was very conservative. She was also this ‘proper’ lady and thought Maya was wild. Maya was very sweet, but she wouldn’t play the phony games of propriety that her mother thought they should play. She went to school in sweatpants, she ran around with people of all backgrounds, she listened to Biggie and Tupac, on blast, and when her mother protested, Maya dismissed her as too caught up in trying to forget their roots and be as un-Hawaiian and therefore ‘just like everyone else’ as possible to remember where she came from. And Maya’s father, though pretending to be the patriarch, was simply the pawn of her mother.

Black lace thongs are a fun way to toy with people like that.

“You have to try it on for me,” I winked, and then didn’t even bother to conceal my surprise at such an impulsive statement. “Oh my god, that was the most hetero comment.”

“You were playing,” she giggled, taking the underwear to the register as I followed. “Right?”

“...Yeah.”

In the food court, I listened to her talk while watching people go by. Hot guy in cute jeans. Hot guy with cute hair. Two hot guys who both looked gay. Cute guy with girlfriend, wearing sandals.

“...and you’re totally checking out guys right now and not listening.”

Her expression was amused.

“I was,” I said, feeling some sense of stability in admitting that. “I was just wondering about my ex-boyfriend.”

“What ex-boyfriend?”

“His name was Reggie. He was my first everything. He’s in Cali now; his family moved, but we sort of keep in touch. No need to not be friends, right?”

“So you broke up over that?”

“Yeah. You should’ve seen us carry on when we said goodbye. But long-distance is so hard, and I mean, we’re fifteen. Maybe if we knew we’d see each other, but like... I knew I’d never hold him again.”

“Aww.” She looked at me sympathetically.

“Now I try to act all like I’m mad anti-love when I’m such a romantic,” I confessed. “I just don’t know how I could do it again.”

“I’ve never been in love,” she said. “I thought I was, once, but that wasn’t healthy, I think. Now it’s like all guys want is to fuck me, and then go off with the ‘good’ girl they can bring home.” Her comment was forgotten, manifested by her shrug and the way she sipped her soda and opened her mouth as if to say something else, but she stopped.

... ... I blinked tears. I’d only wanted to fuck her, and now I felt like such a man that I wanted to cut off my own penis.

“Oh! We had sex,” she remembered, suddenly understanding the crushed look on my face. “No, not you. You’re wonderful, Angelo - you’re not really the same.”

“How?”

She looked at me. “Because you’re a friend. And that’s better than anyone’s ever been to me.”

“I still only wanted to get into your pants that night.”

She smiled. “And I wanted to get into yours. We’re not doing that again, now, are we?”

“What, are you saying I'm bad?” I asked, play-offended.

“You’ll get better with practice.”

I gasped when she giggled, and I smiled. Could we really play around like this? I don’t think any of my other girl friends were like this. Oh yeah: add ‘gal-pal’ to my list of gay essentials.

Cute blond country boys... with calculators. Doodle doodle doodle.

I wrote and drew inane little things in my chem notebook waiting for Forrest to

arrive while I waited in the school library.

Are you from Tennessee? Cuz you’re the only ten I see. ‘What if I said that to him?’ I thought, self-amusedly. ‘He thinks I’m funny.’ I liked when he laughed. He laughed like he was trying to convince you he was too cool to laugh, like he wasn’t really amused. It was funny though.

“Hey,” he said, approaching me from behind.

“Hi!” I flipped over my notebook quickly and then shut it. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” He sat beside me and we began going over what was going on in class. I was in luck. Ten minutes into our session, the entire school staff came into the library for a teacher meeting.

“You guys are going to have to leave,” the librarian announced to all of the students there, and at first I was genuinely worried.

“I didn’t finish the homework,” I frowned. I was pleased to be in the company of my crush, but I really was trying to not fail. (“Fail” for me meant anything lower than a ‘B’). See? I could get academic, when appropriate.

Forrest bit his lip in the most adorable gesture. “Let’s go outside under the trees, in the shade. It’s quite a lovely place to study, actually.”

Did he just say ‘quite’ and ‘lovely’ in that soft Tennessee drawl of his? The South had never been so poetic.

“Sounds good,” I smiled, images filling my head of doing chemistry side by side with him in the grass, and seeming like quite a lovely thing indeed.

“You little rich brat,” I commented as I gazed around us at the hills and trees that made up the neighborhood Maya lived in. She had invited me to come see her house after we’d spent the day at the mall. Now I would get to see her part of the prairie, and as of yet I was jealous.

“I’m not a brat,” she corrected, as we strolled, platonic hand in hand, sharing a Starbuck’s coffee with caramel. “Maybe we have money but I’m not spoiled. My sister is bratty though, even though she’s supposed to be grown. And my parents, once they come home, are going to make her hang out with us.”

“Why, again?”

She sighed. “Boys can’t come over unless I have another friend that’s a girl with us, or we stay around my family.”

I giggled. “Ha-ha,” I teased. “I could have boys over like crazy AND they can sleep over.”

“Seriously, how does your mother not know?” she wondered with a smirk.

“Because I haven’t told her. She doesn’t know I sleep with boys anymore than yours knows you sleep with boys.”

She laughed.

“Really, I’m not all that obvious, right?” I asked, even though it’s not a matter of being obvious because unless you’re a hairdresser or walk around in booty shorts and fishnets, straight people have no gaydar anyways. “And even though me and my mom are really close, I’m just not ready for her to know who I’m into.”

“Speaking of Forrest. Any luck?”

“No,” I whined. “He’s resistant to my charms.”

She jumped up and down, stopping me and smiling mischievously. “Ooh! I have a cute idea.” She told me her ‘idea’, and I laughed.

“Girl, you’re the bomb.”

“Okay, let’s chill a little bit, cuz we’re close to my house,” she said, letting go of my hand.

“Just tell them I’m gay and they won’t think I’m here to de-virginize you.”

Her expression was pained and embarrassed. “That would make things worse.”

Oh. Say no more.

“I can play it straight, if you want,” I said. I stopped and assumed a ‘hard’ stance, and made a mean face. She shrieked in laughter. “What? Straight guys act mad,” I shrugged.

“You DORK.”

We entered her house, and immediately I felt the extremely strong feeling that I was being watched. By Jesus.

“Holy family,” I commented. Religious depictions adorned the walls, and quoted scriptures were placed everywhere.

“Oh yeah,” she said as if she hadn’t thought about it. “We’re very Catholic.”

“Obviously.”

“That’s why they’re anti-gay. I’m sorry. They use the Bible as an excuse to be really stupid about it though.”

“And WHY did they come to New Rosen of all places?” I stifled my laughter.

“Seriously,” she agreed as we ascended the stairs. “I’ve never seen so many gay people in one place. Which is cool,” she clarified. “The first time I noticed was when I saw you dancing with Jesse, and then realized nobody was paying it the slightest attention.”

“Yeah, New Rosen is the place to be out.”

She opened her bedroom door and I exclaimed, “Sparkly!”

She had a canopy bed and a mural depicting a scene with faeries. Neither was actually sparkly, but she felt my approval when I immediately started jumping on her comforter.

“Haha, it’s just a room, Angelo.” She giggled and joined me and we grasped hands and jumped in a circle before we couldn’t handle our own silliness and fell onto the bed in a gigglefit.

I lied on my back and looked around the room. Posters! “LL Cool J...”

“Is my husband,” she declared, and we laughed again.

“You know who’s HOT, which is really wrong cuz he’s like fifty?”

“...who?”

I said in my dreamiest whisper, “Antonio Banderas.”

“Ehh,” she said neutrally. “I try to stay away from the old creepy men.”

“Haha. What does that mean?”

She rolled over to look at me, and I could see she was serious about what she was

about to say. “There was this guy. It’s the reason they moved me here.”

“What guy?!”

“I met him on the internet, back in Ohio.”

“Wait, how do you meet people on the internet?”

“You TALK to them on the internet, and sometimes people meet in real life. And I met this guy. He asked me to be his girlfriend. He lived like a forty minute drive from me, but we didn’t meet in person for like three months. He was so perfect to me. He listened, you know? No one else did.”

“Eww. Maya...”

“God, I know, okay? But I liked him a lot, and decided I’d meet up with him. After three months, we met and he took me to the lake, alone. He didn’t even try anything that night, Angelo. We talked, and he kissed me, that’s all...”

“Oh my god. But... that’s crazy,” I interrupted. “And he was a creepy old man?”

“He said he was seventeen, at first, online. But before we met, he said he’d been scared to tell me he was twenty-seven.”

“WHAT?!”

“Angelo, understand me. Understand that he was the only person in my life. I forgave him because I loved him. And then my parents found out, and they found out we did things, and they had him arrested and everything. I was so upset. They didn’t listen to me or care, then they tried to take away the one person who did.”

“But didn’t you understand how twisted it was?” I said. “That he was taking advantage of you, that he was this sick old dirty pedophile?”

“I get that now!” she yelled. “Everyone says so, that’s what everyone says, so I know I’m just the crazy one... I still think about him, Ang.”

For the very first time I began to fathom how tortured she was. I also realized that Maya was NOT stable - was she actually saying she still loved this online predator who stole her innocence? That the only reason she knew it was wrong was because we all said so but she couldn’t see it?

“Come here,” I said, bringing her into a hug. She held me back, but I was so frightened for her. Was she crazy? How screwed up was her family life, for her to seek love from someone like that? I realized I loved her, as much as I loved any friend, but how would she survive this world?

“Thanks for being here,” she said into my shoulder.

“Anytime,” I promised.

She smirked. “This can’t be worse than the things you’ve done.”

“Eww,” I pushed her away, play-offended, and flashed a ‘what-everrr’ sign with my fingers. “FYI, Brat, I have never slept with anyone more than two years older or a year younger than me. And I met none of them online, so TALK TO THE HAND.”

“But there’s been like HOW many ?” she smirked, knowing her question would incriminate me.

Ooh, I would put her in her place. “First,” I began, “You’re the only girl. Of guys-”

“Maya.”

We turned to see who was presumably her sister standing in the doorway. She looked about eighteen, and was tall and thin and pretty, save the pissed expression.

“Who IS this? I’m supposed to be watching you, and you bring a guy home? A gay guy? I’m not even going to acknowledge the implications that you had sex, nasty. Make him leave, right now.” With that, she turned and left, pulling the door wide open before she did so.

“Stupid bitch,” Maya called after her, getting up and slamming the door closed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s... okay.”

Honestly I had never seen a situation so dysfunctional, and I hadn’t even met the parents yet. I was kind of eager to go home, and genuinely wished I could take Maya with me. I at least wanted to avoid her parents.

“I should go so you don’t get in trouble. Take care, okay?” I said, picking up my backpack. I kissed her cheek. “I’ll find my way back home.”

“Call me when you get in the house.”

I nodded, and thought all the way home about the misery in her eyes.