Two Boys Kissing(17)
“Hey, Cooper.”
Cooper doesn’t even recognize his name at first. This guy is telling him all the things he wants to do with his mouth, and all Cooper has to do is type Yeah and Wow and Oh man for the guy to go on.
“Cooper?”
It’s the second time that gets through, and he looks up and sees this girl Sloan from school, looking at him weirdly. Shit, he thinks, shoving the phone into his pocket.
Sloan laughs. “You were pretty intense there. Don’t let me interrupt you.”
Cooper wonders what she saw. It was just a chat screen. No photos. She’s not close enough to have read it, right?
“It’s nothing,” he mumbles.
“Oh, I know all about your secret life, Cooper.”
Cooper feels like he’s going to drop something, and he’s not even holding anything. Sloan is in a few of his classes. Sometimes they’re at the same lunch table. He never sees her outside of school. How could she know anything?
“You’re an undercover Walmart cop, aren’t you? Tracking delinquent teens like me. My eyeliner makes me a heavy shoplifting threat. I know the profiling that goes on here.”
Cooper doesn’t know what to say.
“I take your silence as complicity.” Sloan puts up her hands. “Check my pockets if you must.”
Why won’t she just go away? Cooper’s phone is vibrating like crazy in his pocket, and he imagines she can hear it every time it does.
She lets her hands fall. She’s gotten the message that Cooper isn’t playing along.
“But really,” she says. “What are you up to?”
He really wants her to go away. He keeps his answer as short as possible.
“Shopping.”
“For what?”
“Gas.”
“Gas?”
He feels stupid. Why did he say that?
“For the grill.”
“Because it’s supposed to get warm tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
This is the problem with having a barrier between you and everyone else—you see it, but they don’t. They talk to you, but you can’t talk back to them. They care about things like the weather and what you’re shopping for, and you don’t care about a single thing. It is so obvious to you, and it is infuriating that they don’t understand. It just highlights that you’re the one who’s defective, you’re the one who can’t be normal, you’re the one who has to suffer while everyone else gets to live out their delusions. We know. We’ve been there.
If Sloan were a friend, she would see something was wrong. If Sloan were a friend, she would feel comfortable asking what was wrong. But Sloan’s not a friend. She’s just a girl he knows. A contact. His phone is out of control in his pocket. Sloan looks at him funny. Then finally she says, “Okay, Mr. Social. I’ll see you Monday. Good luck with the grill.”
“See you Monday,” Cooper says. He even tries to make it sound like he’s looking forward to it. Because that will get rid of her faster.
The barrier still stands. Sloan moves on, and Cooper takes the phone out of his pocket. These guys have barely realized he was gone. Cooper flicks through, still trying to find the guy he actually wants to meet.
All of these men and boys with their computers, all of these men and boys with their phones. All after the druglike rush of doing something adventurous, doing something they consider to be on the edge of something else. All of these men and boys fragmenting themselves, hoping the fragments are pieced together on the other end. All of these men and boys trying out this new form of gratification. All of these men and boys still lonely when the rush is over, and the devices are off, and they are alone with themselves again.
There is a term for this.
The term is limbo.
Better to be drifting in a canoe. Better to be brushing back your hair as it blows into your eyes. Better to know that everything you say is meant. Better to know that everything you say is heard.
Ryan asks Avery about the pink hair.
“I know, strange color choice, right? For a boy born as a girl who wants to be seen as a boy. But think about it—it just shows how arbitrary gender is. Pink is female—but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It’s something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us. My hair can be pink because I’m a boy. Yours can be blue because you’re a girl. If you free yourself from all the stupid arbitrary shit that society controls us with, you feel more free, and if you feel more free, you can be happier.”
“My hair’s blue because I like blue,” Ryan says.
“And mine is pink because I like pink. And I totally didn’t mean to lecture you. It just makes me mad. All the stupid arbitrary shit.”
“It makes you want to overthrow the world.”
“On a daily basis.”
Stupid arbitrary shit. We know what Avery means, and we also know he doesn’t know the full weight of its harm, or the despair it can cause. He doesn’t know how a single fact about a human being can mean that he and thousands of others like him will die, because nobody wants to talk about the disease that is killing them, nobody wants to spend the money so they won’t die. Stupid arbitrary shit means the president of the United States can wait six years before even saying the disease’s name. Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved. We did not choose our identity, but we were chosen to die by it. For stupid arbitrary reasons instilled by people who refused to see how arbitrary they were. We believe in the golden rule, but we also believe that people fail to live up to it, time and again. Because they fall prey to differences. Because some use the arbitrary very deliberately to keep their own power.