Oh. My. God. No wonder I don’t go to class. The professor has decided to run a slide show sponsored by PETA, apparently. I can’t look. I don’t want Robin to look. So I distract her with a new IM:

What does sex feel like?

She turns around so I can see her face looking up at me. Her jaw drops. Then she types back:

Are you serious? You’ve never done it?!?!? YOU?!?!?

I shrug, then send:  I almost did it with Bruce the Second. But I knew we were both going through motions to express a feeling we didn’t actually feel for one another, and he seemed to know the same, and he never pushed it like most guys. And I don’t think that’s because Bruce the Second is so clearly probably gay. I think maybe it’s because he’s just a good guy.

I hate that.

I guess I hope he finds what he’s looking for. Bruce the Second, that is.

Robin responds:

People say you should wait to be with someone you love, but I think it’s more important to be with someone you like. I mean, that person is going to see you naked, you know? Be inside you. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it, but don’t wait for a fantasy, either.

Friends? I type back.

She turns around again, smiles up at me.

Yeah.

And suddenly I want to fall out of my chair with  laughter  Because I am imagining Ely on top of me, naked, penetrating me, and the mental image is so clearly wrong. The intimacy may be loving, the intentions are good, he’s up and in me, but it’s awkward and forced—worse than the deadening image of watching porn, because the feeling part of the chemical components between us just could not be right. Naomi + Ely should not = sex.

Ely likes boys. I like boys. Ely is a boy. I am a girl.

Ringring, Naomi. How can you even be in college when you’re so dumb as to take this long to make the connection? To truly believe it?

It’s not funny, so I don’t know why I am laughing so hard. But my dream vision, which won’t lie to me even as fantasy, is just that ridiculous.

I will never understand why gender is so important to mating rituals—it doesn’t make sense; love is love, attraction is what it is, and why should the arbitrary assignment of genital parts determine whether or not you want to be with a person?— but the fact is, it matters.

I hate that, too.

But it’s true.

And if I’m going to face the cold, hard truth, someone else should, too.

I’m out of here, I type to Robin.

Are you leaving in the middle of the class? Where are you going?

Home.

Mourning has to end. For both of us.

Time to get Mom up and out of bed.

ELY

EASY

After a few days of awkwardness and avoidance with Bruce, I call an emergency meeting of the Dairy Queens. With Naomi and Bruce out of range, I need to call in the backup support system. I figure if you’re facing big dilemmas or difficult personal problems, it always helps to get the perspective of a few gay boys who grew up in farm country. The shit they had to deal with makes mine look puny. And to survive in style . . . well, we could all learn a lot from that.

We meet right after class. Shaun (linebacker from Nebraska) is wearing his usual rugby shirt and jeans; I used to dismiss him as “straight-acting” until I realized that he was just acting like himself, and that playing the “straight-acting” card was just a weird way for gay boys to hate themselves and each other. Art (from Idaho) is wearing an XXS T-shirt that’s embroidered with the phrase I AIN’T YOUR BITCH. Neal (our F2M transitioning pal from southern Illinois) is sexy as hell in a British-schoolboy-with-his-striped-tie-all-askew ensemble, and Ink (who had such a miserable time in Missouri that his first tattoo said GET ME OUT OF HERE across the inside of his arm) is his usual mess of plaids and blacks. It’s been a while since I’ve needed them like this, and they’re good enough to me not to mention that.

As we’re heading out, we pass Naomi’s psych class. I always learned her schedules before I learned my own, and I feel nostalgic for that now. But I can’t invite her along, not right now—I have to deal with my life one failure at a time, because if I consider them all at once, I might fall into a bucketless well.

I’m not the only one with problems. As we walk past Washington Square Park (too many people we know, too much social noise) and down to the Hudson, Ink talks about how he tried to call his mother for her birthday only to have her refuse to come to the phone, no matter how hard his sisters tried to persuade her. Art then recounts a sadistic night out—“sadistic in the bad way”—with a Facebook date who ended up being forty pounds heavier, six years older, and five blank hours duller than he’d been when they were e-mailing. And Neal says his ex has started calling again, making booty overtures and nearly wrecking his latest like.

Shaun stays silent about himself, and I wonder if it’s because I’m there. Even though I dated Ink for a week during freshman orientation and once made out with Neal at a party, Shaun’s the one who didn’t appear on the No Kiss List until it was too late. I flirted recklessly and it nearly wrecked everything.

We walk ’til we get to Rockefeller Park, right on the river. As soon as we hit the grass, Neal asks me what’s going on, and if I’ve heard from Bruce yet.

It’s a simple question, and my answer takes about twenty minutes. I start with the night Bruce disappeared, because even though Neal and Art were there, Shaun and Ink weren’t. I talk about how confused I was, and how I’m still just as confused, if not more so. I admit: I should have clued in earlier that Bruce had disappeared. At first I thought there was just a really long line for the boys’ room, because a lot of the time, there is. Then I figured he’d found other friends to talk to or something. It was only after he’d been gone for about an hour that I noticed, wow, it had been an hour. I confess I even thought, Oh shit, now I’m going to get in trouble for leaving him alone for an hour. It never occurred to me that he might have left without saying good-bye. I looked everywhere for him and enlisted Neal and Art to look, too. I asked the people on the bathroom line if they’d seen someone fitting Bruce’s description, but they assured me the only person in the bathroom at that moment was a Jewel-inspired drag queen (Family Jewel). Finally I bumped into the Missy Elliot bouncer, who told me my fly guy had flown. I checked my voice mail and texts: nothing. I even had Neal text me and Art call me, just to make sure the phone was working. I tried calling Bruce. No answer. I texted him: Where are you? Are you okay?

Finally, about ten minutes later, I received a text back from him:

I’m safe and sound. Have a good night.

That was it. No apology. No explanation.

Which was so not like him. It was, in fact, more like me. To be so careless.

I texted him again, asking what was going on. Neal, Art, and I left the club and headed to a diner for a three-in-the-morning three-stack of pancakes. We found a larger gay-boy contingent there and pulled up chairs to join them. I was totally in my scene: all the flirty banter, all the caustic observation, all the naked desire for affection . . . this was a game I played well. But instead of playing, I spent the whole time looking at my phone, waiting for him to text back. With other boys, I would have just called back and left a fuck-you message on their voice mail. But the point of Bruce is that he isn’t one of those other boys. He’s Bruce.

Now it’s four days later, and we’ve only had two conversations, both of them rushed, neither of them satisfying. I tell the Dairy Queens that he said he wants to figure things out. He apologized a lot for leaving, but he hasn’t made any effort to come back.

“This isn’t good,” Neal says, shaking his head. “This is like an orange alert, breakup-wise.”

“And orange is such a difficult color,” Art adds.

I am too conscious of having Shaun here. He’s a reminder of everything I’ve done wrong before. It became, for me, a pattern as common as plaid: I’d throw myself on someone, then throw him out. Shaun was different from most of the rest, because he’d actually thrown my actions back at me, yelling and crying as I dumped him, telling me that I was going to end up graduating NYU with a major in Fuck & Run. Because that’s what I was: an F&R boy. Shaun had seen me do it to other guys, which made him feel even more stupid when I did it to him . . . and made me feel even worse. Like I should have known. But the hardest thing was that I always believed in it at first—I never F’d with the intention of R-ing. But in the end—when we got to the end—the boys never believed this. Only Naomi did, really. After Shaun had it out with me, I went straight to her, sobbing. “It hurts to hurt people when you never mean to, doesn’t it?” she’d asked. And I’d said yes. It really, really hurt. When it was casual, when everything was understood ahead of time, it was fine. But when you really wanted it to work, when you really thought it could become something—well, then the F was never worth the R.

But Bruce was supposed to be different. With Bruce, I tried to be more careful. I tried to trick the pattern. I decided that if we didn’t jump to the F stage, then I wouldn’t jump to the R stage. I tried to slow things down—which is not an easy thing for me to do. And I found that slowing down the sex thing actually quickened the heart thing. It was like I’d set up this test, and I was passing it for a reason: I liked him. A lot. The sexual attraction was still there—I wasn’t so deluded as to think I could hold out for someone ugly—but I tried to focus on all the other attractions. To his goofiness. To his goodness. To his sincerity. It made me want to be attractive in those ways, too.

We didn’t F; I didn’t R. I was doing everything right.

And then he was the one who ran.

I can’t say all of this to the DQs, not with Shaun right there, because I know we’re still at the stage where he hears himself in anything I say about boyfriends. So I don’t talk about before and what I was like before.

Instead I say, “I tried. I really tried. And it’s so frustrating that none of that matters.”

“You did try,” Neal says, trying to comfort me.

“You did,” Art echoes.

And it’s Shaun who says, “So don’t stop trying now.”

There’s a remnant of anger in his voice, and I think, Yes, I deserve that—I really deserve that. But I realize he’s not as angry at me for what I did to him as he is annoyed at the fact that it seems I’m wussing out.

It’s like Naomi’s talking to me, calling me on it.

“Listen,” she and Shaun say. “You’re giving up. You’re slipping into being miserable, because if you’re miserable, then it’s all about you again. But it’s not all about you. Love doesn’t work that way.”

Neal looks at me with sympathy in his eyes. “You didn’t think it would be easy, did you?” he asks. “You didn’t think there was a way that you could be so fabulous and so fantastic and so perfect that it would actually be easy? It’s never easy for anyone. Don’t you know that?”

I don’t know why this gets to me. Because, yes, I guess there was a part of me that thought it could be easy. That something that is worth so much could just be given to you. Because you were cute. Or sexy. Or on your best behavior. It can sometimes make it easier, but it can never make it easy. I thought when I found the right person, it would be easy. He would be mine and I would be his and that would be that. And with Naomi. I would be hers and she would be mine and that would be that. The perfect friendship. The ideal. What kind of tension could a straight girl and a gay boy have? None. Easy.

No. No no no no. It is not easy. Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.

“Ely?” Neal asks. I haven’t answered his question yet; instead I’ve started laughing at myself. For being so foolish. For not getting it.