Geography Club (3 page)

At last, she peeked up at me. “Well?”

“You’re gay?”

“Actually, I think bisexual is probably more accurate.” Never in a million years would I have guessed that Min was bisexual. And yet, now that she’d told me, it already made perfect sense. In a way, it explained everything from her general braininess to her ridiculous perfectionism.

I started laughing. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop myself! Almost at once, Min joined in. Soon we were both rolling around on the floor of her room, cackling like barnyard animals.

Okay, this was too weird. Was the whole school secretly gay or what?

The next night, I IMed Kevin and asked him to meet me at the stinky picnic gazebo.

“Sup?” he said when I got there. Was it my imagination, or did he actually look happy to see me?

“Not much,” I said.

Then Kevin’s expression changed from being happy to see me to looking like he expected me to say something else—like he expected me to have a reason for our little get-together. But I didn’t have a reason. I’d just wanted to talk some more.

“I just found out my friend, Min, has a girlfriend,” I said. “Terese Buckman?” I hadn’t planned on telling him this, but I couldn’t really think of anything else to say, and besides, Min had said it was okay.

“Min’s a big ol’ lesbo, huh?” Kevin said. Kevin was gay, but he could still sound like kind of a stupid jock sometimes. I wish I could say I was shocked and appalled by this, but I actually thought it was kind of cute (okay, really cute).

“I think the word she used was ‘bisexual,’” I said.

“And Buckman’s a dyke too? Can’t say that one comes as a total shock.”

I never knew what to say when someone said stuff like this. It was one thing to think it. It was another thing to say it out loud.

“You have any gay friends?” I asked.

Kevin shook his head. “Nope. Not that I know of.”

We both got quiet. I’d hoped we could talk about Min and Terese at least a little longer, but the conversation hadn’t really gone anywhere. So we just kind of stood there with our hands in our pockets, staring out at the grass.

“Well…,” Kevin said, like he was thinking about leaving.

“We should meet!” I blurted.

“Huh?” Kevin said. “Who?”

“Min and Terese and you and me! That’s what I wanted to tell you. We could all get together after school. We could get a pizza or something.” This was a lie. I hadn’t wanted to tell Kevin this, and I didn’t particularly want to get together with Min and Terese. But I’d been desperate for something—anything!—to say. But now that I’d said it, it didn’t seem like such a horrible idea. If nothing else, it’d give me a chance to spend more time with Kevin. I just hoped he wouldn’t embarrass me by calling them lesbos and dykes.

“Oh,” Kevin said. He pondered for a second, looking like he was calculating the odds on a poker hand. But finally, he looked up at me and said, “Okay. I mean, why not? I’ve never known any lesbians before.”

All of us wanted something different on our pizza. It was after school on Wednesday, and Kevin, Min, Terese, and I had come to a pizza place not far from school. Now that I knew for a fact that Terese was a LESBIAN (in capital letters), she didn’t look so much like one anymore. Sure, she had cropped blond hair and, frankly, broader shoulders than me. But she also had these great cheekbones and these really pretty baby blue eyes. She almost could’ve modeled or something.

Terese had brought a friend, Ike, who she’d whispered was “one of us,” which I knew meant he was gay. Ike was a tall, lanky, sort of nervous guy with a wispy goatee and a bandanna over his head. I’d seen him around school, but I’d never actually talked to him. He hung with the lefty activist crowd—they’d had this bust of a rally for animal rights a couple of months ago.

But here we were in this little hole-in-the-wall pizza place with no windows, and booths made of orange vinyl, and we couldn’t agree on a pizza. Kevin and Terese both wanted meat, but Kevin wanted ground beef and sausage, and Terese wanted Canadian bacon. Min and Ike were vegetarians, but Ike didn’t like mushrooms and Min hated olives. As for me, I wanted anchovies and artichoke hearts, but I knew enough not to even bother suggesting this to a group of teenagers.

We finally got it together and ordered one pepperoni and one vegetarian with no mushrooms or olives. Then we took the booth farthest in the back, like we were spies having a rendezvous to talk about something top secret, which I guess we kind of were.

For the first few minutes, we sat around making chitchat with the people each of us knew. That meant I talked mostly to Min or Kevin, and Terese talked mostly to Min or Ike. It felt like right before the start of a class, when you sit there and gab with your friends. But it also felt different from right before class, because there was this definite undercurrent of excitement in the air, like we were waiting for something interesting or important to happen.

They brought us our pizzas, and we all stared down at them in silence. I suddenly felt this sense of disappointment from everyone, like we all realized at the same time that the pizzas were the only thing we’d been waiting for—that nothing else interesting or important was going to happen after all.

We started chowing down, and still nobody said anything, except stuff like, “It’s good,” or “Can I get a napkin?” It was strange. Now that the pizzas had arrived, it was like we couldn’t talk in groups of two or three anymore. For some reason, now we all had to talk together as a group.

Things stayed quiet. Ike scratched a tattoo. Finally I said, “So. Here we are.” I sounded like an idiot, I know, but it just seemed like I had to say something. After all, this little get-together had been my idea.

“Yeah,” Min said. “Here we are.” She obviously felt some responsibility too, maybe because she’d suggested this gathering to Terese, who’d even brought Ike.

No one said anything, and I was particularly annoyed with Kevin, just sitting there gulping down pizza like a homeless man at a soup kitchen. He was supposed to be my friend. Couldn’t he at least
try
to help keep this meal from dying an agonizing death?

He kicked back in his seat and looked over at Terese. “You guys got a good team this year?”

Okay, I thought, maybe he isn’t so thick after all.

“Sokay,” Terese said. “We lost a couple of seniors last year, but most of our talent is sophomores anyway. Our goalie’s a freshman.”

“Wish we could say that,” Kevin said. “We lost our pitcher and most of our hitters. We’re goin’ begging.”

Terese looked like she was going to say something else, but then she seemed to realize that no one else was talking. And like I said before, suddenly it seemed like whatever was said was being said to the whole group. So she fell silent.

I thought, So much for sports as a topic of conversation.

Ike stared down at the pizza. “You know they genetically modify tomatoes?” he said. “They tried to make them redder, and it worked, but they ended up really small. And now they’ve made tomatoes that can grow in salt water.”

“Oh!” Min said, perking up. “Is that like when they took genes from a flounder and inserted them into strawberry plants, so the berries wouldn’t be killed by frost?”

Ike nodded excitedly. “I heard they somehow crossed a goat with a spider.”

“There’s a joke in there somewhere,” I quipped. “Something about Little Miss Muffet eating the spider’s curds and whey.” I was trying to be funny, but no one laughed except Min, who only chuckled. Ike didn’t even smile, and I decided I didn’t like him very much. Then I saw him glance over at Kevin, and his gaze seemed to linger. I thought, Why is he looking at Kevin? Min and I were the ones who’d been talking. That’s when I knew the real reason I didn’t like Ike: he wanted to move in on Kevin.

“Know what else they do?” Ike was saying. “Seed companies change plants’ genes so they can’t make any new seeds. Then they sell the seeds really cheap, like in third world countries. That way, farmers have to keep buying new seeds again year after year. And once the farmers are hooked, the companies slowly raise the prices.”

This time, it was Min who looked like she was going to say something. But like Terese a few minutes earlier, she seemed to sense that most of us weren’t interested in this topic either, so she didn’t speak up.

So much for politics.

Here we were, halfway through our pizzas, and it was suddenly clear that, as a group, we had nothing in common whatsoever. We were just five random people. Why should we hit it off just because we all happened to be gay? It was stupid. Ridiculous.

“We’re all alone,” I said.

It was quiet for a second. Then Terese said, “Man, is that true.”

“Sure can’t tell your family,” Kevin said. “My dad would go feral.”

“Mine too,” Min said. “I’m not even sure my mom knows what ‘gay’ is. And even if I could get her to understand that, how do I ever get her to understand ‘bisexual’?”

“Can’t tell your friends either,” Ike said, staring down at the pizza again, but not at the tomatoes this time. “Even if they say they’re radical. They’re not radical about this. Not when they’re still in high school.”

Of course, what I’d meant when I’d said “We’re all alone” was that there were no other customers in the pizza joint. I’d just been trying to make conversation. I hadn’t been talking about being gay at all. But it had finally got the conversation rolling, so I wasn’t about to explain what I’d really meant.

“It’s not like I don’t have friends,” Terese was saying, playing with her crusts. “I got a lot of friends. Sometimes they rank on me about being a dyke or a homo, but they don’t believe it, not really. I know what they’d say if they knew they were right. So it’s like you can never really relax, not when you’re with other people. I mean, if they knew the truth, would they still be your friends?”

Yes
! I thought. That was exactly how I felt! During our talk at the stinky picnic gazebo, Kevin had said he felt this way too. Did that mean all gay kids felt like this?

“It’s like you’re always wearing a mask or whatever,” Ike said. “Your family, even your friends, you can’t let them see the real you.”

I hated to admit it, what with Ike saying it and all, but this described how I felt too.

“It’s hard,” Kevin said. “Damn, it’s hard.”

It was strange hearing Kevin sound so serious. I was curious to know exactly what he meant, so I asked, “What is?”

He shrugged, his eyes downcast. “You know. Stuff. I guess that’s why I used to drink so much. Not just with my friends. Sometimes even when I was alone. I mean, it’s hard keeping a secret like this. Can’t talk about what you’re really feeling. Especially when you’re a jock or whatever. You probably think it’s great being popular, and yeah, sometimes it is. But there’s pressure. Sometimes, there’s so much pressure, it feels like you’re gonna burst! You wanna be honest and open, even if it’s just with yourself. But it’s hard. Sometimes, it’s just so damn hard.”

“I know,” Min said. “If it wasn’t for Terese these past three years, I don’t know what I would’ve done.” Min glanced around the pizza place, which was still empty. Then she took Terese’s hand. “Probably gone insane,” Min said.

“I tried to kill myself,” Ike said. (If you ever want to stop a conversation dead in its tracks, say these five words with a really serious expression on your face.)

We all looked at him.

“Don’t worry,” Ike said with a half smile. “It was a long time ago. I was fourteen. It was so stupid. Someone told me you could kill yourself if you drank dishwashing liquid. It just made me really really sick. I had to go to the hospital and everything. But when I drank it, I really wanted to die. I told everyone it was because my Science Fair project hadn’t won a ribbon, and my parents actually believed me. But the truth was, I was just tired of trying so hard to not be gay.” He looked around the table. “I never told anyone that before. I never even told my therapist.”

When Ike said all this, I felt bad for before, when I’d thought I didn’t like him.

“Well, someone say something else!” Ike said, already flushing red. “Otherwise, it’ll seem like I killed the conversation.”

We all laughed. Then, just to get things started again, I told everyone how I’d been so lonely I’d been willing to meet some kid I didn’t know—some kid I’d met one night on a computer—at a park in the middle of the night. Kevin smiled when I said this.

We kept talking, and I thought, Except for Min, I don’t know these people—I don’t really even know Kevin. But it was like I could be completely honest for the first time in my life. We were telling each other things we’d never told our best friends before, things we’d never even said out loud.

The five of us may have been alone in the pizza place, but we weren’t really alone. Not anymore.

After we’d been talking for a while, the door to the pizza parlor burst open, and a couple of husky construction workers sauntered inside.

They were a good thirty feet away from our table—they were up at the counter trying to decide on a pizza—but we all stopped talking anyway.

Finally, Terese looked down at her watch and said, “Damn! It’s after six.” We’d been there for three hours. It had seemed like about five minutes.

No one moved. We all just stared down at the wadded napkins on the empty pizza pans. I think we all knew it was time to head home, but no one wanted to let the moment end.

“I wish we could stay,” Min said.

“Yeah,” Kevin said.

“This so sucks,” Terese said.

There was another pause. Then Ike said, “It doesn’t have to. Suck, I mean.”

We all looked at him.

“I mean, why couldn’t we meet again tomorrow? At school? We could eat lunch together.”

It took a second for the idea to sink in.

“Why not?” I said.

“Sounds good!” Min said.

“I’m in!” Terese said.

Once we’d decided this, it made it a hell of a lot easier to leave. After all, it’s not like the conversation was over. We were just suspending it for a while.

We all walked out to our cars and bikes, and then spent another forty minutes or so standing around talking some more. However much we said to each other, there always seemed to be more to say. And no matter what anyone said, it seemed like everyone else understood it perfectly. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was always the way it felt around good friends when you don’t have to hide who you are.

That’s when I remembered the beginning of the meal, and how it had seemed like we were all waiting for some really interesting and important thing to happen. Now I knew that it had happened after all.