Growing up, I was freakishly small and no one paid attention to me. There are always some-those gnomes of the schoolyard running in slow motion toward puberty. We sad sideshows were the same as our peers emotionally, if not physically.
In junior high, I shaved my legs and wore a training bra, which by the way, was too big in the smallest size. I always wore a T-shirt if there was going to be any swimming, until one pool party when Ben DeCroce convinced me to doff my cover-up only to respond in disbelief, “Wow, you really are flat!” And even though there’s no audience of cruel eighth graders (whatever, Ben, like you were some prize with your gross glasses and chinlessness) to stare in appalled silence at this story and all its shirtless flatness, the spirit is the same. Take that, Holly McKinley, who was fully boobed and pubed by age thirteen and getting it on with a twenty-two-year-old.
When I got to college I did what any inexperienced, nubile virgin would do: I overcompensated. I made a habit of sneaking up on my roommate buck naked and jumping on her lap, preferably while she was wearing shorts. I gave ball gags and nipple clips as birthday gifts. I even had a squirt gun with a rubber penis-shaped barrel with which I would accost my neighbors in the elevator. Basically, I was a low-level sex offender.
By this point I had some suitors, but none that suited me. It was the new millennium, and I was twenty. I had a brand new best pal, Tyler, out of the closet since age fifteen. He’d recently finished playing the role of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, and we spent many afternoons contentedly watching Ab Fab or listening to Dar Williams, before he made his surprise move. Perhaps it was my boyish figure, or my overt penis envy—who can say? But for whatever reason, Tyler, who had never so much as glanced sidelong with lust at a lady, made an overture. I went with it.
“But he’s gay!” you’re thinking.
I ignored this fact.
“Would it be weird at school?” Tyler and I wondered.
It would. Our friends were baffled, scandalized, at times angry. Turns out, once you come out of the closet, you’d better fucking stay there. But love sees no sexual orientation, and we only had eyes for each other.
We did, however, encounter one large obstacle.
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