19 Love Songs. David Levithan
applications, and because at practices, some of the girls and I talked much more than we parried.
I have learned over the years that it’s decidedly uncool to say I enjoyed high school—many people are lucky to have survived it, and others who didn’t have as bad a time like to say they did. Since I was one of the good girls, I found life in high school to be . . . good. It wasn’t always easy, and it wasn’t always nice. But through it all, I felt a passive happiness that would break out sometimes into an intensely active happiness. This would usually happen in the most random ways: Mayling pulling her long sleeve to her nose and proclaiming “I am an elephant!” with the rest of us following suit; me and Lynda holding up signs to each other in the middle of the Metropolitan Opera House, since I was in the balcony and she was in the orchestra, and we couldn’t go the length of an opera without passing some word to each other; me and Jennifer leaving lunch early and sitting on the fenced-off stairway that led to the auditorium, remarking on the people who passed us and, when the hallway traffic was slow, talking about books. If we never felt the full swoon of romance, we often felt the giddy buoyancy of friendship. It was a counterbalance against all the tests we faced—tests in the classrooms, tests in the hallways, tests in what we wore and what we said and who we were.
It was a sisterhood, and I was the brother. There were some conversations I wasn’t a part of—you would think that hanging out with so many girls would open my eyes to their side of the sex thing, but with a few exceptions, this rarely came up. Instead I was exposed to the girls’ emotional landscapes, and even more important, I was allowed to have one of my own. We wore our feelings so openly—whether it was annoyance or distress or delight or anger or affection we felt. In that time and place, I wouldn’t have learned such openness from the boys. There were certainly times when everything seemed like a big traumedy . . . but I learned to deal with that. By talking it through. By talking it out. And if none of those things worked, Lynda always advised a haircut. When you wanted to change your life, she said, a haircut was often the easiest way to start.
We good girls didn’t date much, for the same reason that I didn’t clue in to my own boy thing as fast as I might have. In our somewhat small high school (with 160 or so students in our class), there weren’t that many bookish, articulate, cute, sensitive, clever, crush-worthy boys. In retrospect, I can see a couple of crushes I had without labeling them as such—tangential boys, nobody that close to me. They were usually a year or two older than I was and talked about philosophers and writers like other boys talked about sports or computers. It’s not like I dreamed of kissing them, or dating—I was just fascinated by them, mostly from afar, with occasional glimpses up close.
I also had friendship crushes—on boys and girls—but those were different; those friends I liked because of what I knew about them, not because of their mystery. I didn’t want to be their boyfriend. I wanted to be their best friend. I learned early, and learned well, that the person you talk to about the crush is much more important than the crush itself.
Instead of dating, the good girls and I were one big date-substitute. We played a lot of Pictionary. Sober Pictionary. We ruled the school newspaper and the lit mag. The B. Dalton bookstore was our favorite store in the mall, although we were never above dancing around the aisles of Kay-Bee Toys. We went into the city on weekends and waited in the half-price ticket line for Broadway shows, or went into the Village to shop for secondhand clothes. We went to museums. We rotated between Bennigan’s, T.G.I. Fridays, Chili’s, and La Strada, the local pizzeria. When we weren’t at the Morristown multiplex, we were at the Lost Picture Show in Union, which showed art films and had a roof that leaked. We read Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. (Some even read Ayn Rand, but I could never get into it.) We talked about art without realizing we could treat it as Art. A few of us signed our yearbooks with Sondheim lyrics.
So many gay boys—whether they know they’re gay yet or not—go through high school feeling like they’re the only ones. They think they’re the only ones who will never find love, the only ones who don’t really fit in, the only ones who aren’t coupled off. With the good girls, I was never the only one. Not in that way. I was sometimes the only boy. And I’m sure there were times when I thought it was ridiculous that the “dates” I had were fleeting at best. But because so many of my female friends were in the same boat, I didn’t really feel alone. There were no long, dark nights of the soul, because my soul was keeping pretty good company.
The girls and I flirted and bantered. Nonstop. We passed notes. Lord, we passed notes. String these notes together and you’d get the full symphony of my high school years, an almost minute-by-minute re-creation. Constant observation, reflection, honing life into prose.
Everything remained peaceable until our senior prom came along. It wasn’t a particularly big deal to me—I had already gone my junior year, the date of a girl I barely knew, who clearly had gotten to the bottom of her draft list before asking me. I’d had fun, but I’d also figured that it wasn’t actually a night that would change my life forever. Going into prom season, I was (as always) unattached, and while the question of who I would ask was hotly debated when I wasn’t in the room, when I returned to the room, I was left to my own obliviousness.
I decided to ask Jordana, a member of the junior posse of good girls. Bizarrely, I made this decision while watching her play the Mother Abbess in our high school’s production of The Sound of Music. Seriously. While she was busy exhorting Maria to climb ev’ry mountain, I was thinking, It would be fun to go to the prom with Jordana. Not as a date-date. But in lieu of a date-date.
I knew another boy, Josh, probably wanted to ask her, too. But I figured, hey, I’d give Jordana the option and see what she wanted to do. We went on a nondate to Bennigan’s, and I stalled. I pondered. I worked myself up into an existential crisis while I ate mozzarella sticks and debated whether or not to ask her.
Which is when Roxette comes into the picture.
I almost didn’t ask Jordana to be my prom date. But then a Roxette song came wafting down from the Bennigan’s speakers, and it told me to listen to my heart. I figured this was a sign. My heart said go for it, so I did. I even told her I wouldn’t mind if she wanted to go with Josh. She said she wanted to go with me.
I was so relieved to have it over with.
I was, however, unprepared for the fact that I had just created more traumedy than I’d ever intended to create. By choosing a prom date, I was the one who stopped the music and sent all of my female friends flying toward the musical chairs. Many, it seemed, had thought it at least a possibility that I would ask them. I had, to put it indelicately, fucked everything up. Now the good girls had to grab hold of the nearest boys and hope it would work out. By and large, it didn’t work out well—even for me, since Jordana ended up wanting to go with Josh after all, causing awkwardness all around. Still, we look happy enough in the prom photos—the front row of good-girl friends, and then the back-row assortment of random boys tuxed up to squire them for the evening. All dressed up, we thought we looked so old. Now, of course, I look at the picture and see how young we actually were. We get younger every year.
Our friendships existed on the cusp of a different era; the way we communicated and what we knew were much closer to what our parents experienced in high school than what high schoolers now know. Within five years after we graduated, everything was different. We lived in a time when we had cords on our phones—if not connecting the handset to the base, then definitely connecting the base to the wall. We lived in a time when “chatting” was something that didn’t involve typing, and text and page were words that applied to books, not phones. If we wanted to see naked pictures, we had to sneak peeks in magazine stores, or rely upon drawings in The Joy of Sex, spreads in National Geographic, or carefully paused moments in R-rated videotapes. The only kids we knew in towns outside of our own were the ones we had gone to camp with. The only bands we knew were the ones played on the radio or on MTV. For me, it was a time before all the small pop-cultural things that might have tipped me off to my own identity before I hit college. Because I was happy, I didn’t really question who I was.
I don’t know whether the good girls were as ignorant as I was to my gayness, or if they figured it out before I did and waited for me to piece