grayscale: ooh my clavicle feels so good.
boundbydad: naughty, naughty clavicle.
grayscale: mmmmmm
boundbydad: wwwwwwww
grayscale: rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr boundbydad: tttttttttttttttttttt
other times we go for the romance novel approach. corn p**n .
boundbydad: thrust your fierce quavering manpole at me, stud
grayscale: your dastardly appendage engorges me with hellfire
boundbydad: my search party is creeping into your no man’s land grayscale: baste me like a thanksgiving turkey!!!
and then there are nights like tonight, when the truth is what comes out, because it’s what we need the most. or maybe just one of us needs it the most, but the other knows the right time to give it.
like now, when what i want most in the universe is to have him beside me. he knows this, and he says
boundbydad: if i was there, i would stand behind your chair and put my hands on your shoulders, lightly, and would rub them gently until you finished your last sentence
boundbydad: then i would lean forward and trace my hands down your arms and curve my neck into yours and let you turn into me and rest there for a while
boundbydad: rest
boundbydad: and when you were ready, i’d kiss you once and lift myself away, sit back on your bed and wait for you there, just so we could lie there, and you could hold me, and i could hold you
boundbydad: and it would be so peaceful. completely peaceful. like the feeling of sleep, but being awake in it together.
grayscale: that would be so wonderful. boundbydad: i know. i would love it, too.
I can’t imagine us saying these things to each other out loud. but even if i can’t imagine hearing these words, i can imagine living them. i don’t even picture it. instead i’m in it. how i would feel with him here. that peace. it would be so happy, and it makes me sad because it only exists in words.
early on, isaac let me know that he always finds pauses awkward - if too much time went by without me responding, he’d think i was typing something else in another window, or had left the computer, or was IMing twelve other boys besides him. and i had to admit that i felt the same fears. so now we do this thing whenever we’re pausing. we just type
grayscale: i’m here
boundbydad: i’m here
grayscale: i’m here
boundbydad: i’m here
until the next sentence comes.
grayscale: i’m here
boundbydad: i’m here
grayscale: i’m here
boundbydad: what are we doing?
grayscale: ???
boundbydad: i think it’s time
boundbydad: time for us to meet
grayscale: !!!
grayscale: seriously?
boundbydad: deliriously
grayscale: you mean i would get a chance to see you
boundbydad: hold you for real
grayscale: for real
boundbydad: yes
grayscale: yes?
boundbydad: yes.
grayscale: yes!
boundbydad: am i crazy?
grayscale: yes! ☺
boundbydad: i’ll go crazy if we don’t.
grayscale: we should.
boundbydad: we should.
grayscale: ohmygodwow
boundbydad: it’s going to happen, isn’t it?
grayscale: we can’t go back now.
boundbydad: i’m so excited . . .
grayscale: and terrified
boundbydad: . . . and terrified
grayscale: . . . but most of all excited?
boundbydad: but most of all excited.
It’s going to happen. i know it’s going to happen.
giddily, terrifyingly, we pick a date.
friday. six days away
only six days.
In six days, maybe my life will actually begin.
this is so insane.
and the most insane thing of all is that i’m so excited that i want to immediately tell isaac all about it, even though he’s the one person who already knows it’s happened. not maura, not simon, not derek, not my mom - nobody in this whole wide world but isaac. he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.
I have to believe that’s a sign.
Chapter five
It’s one of those weekends where I don’t leave the house at all—literally—except briefly with Mom to go to the White Hen. Such weekends usually don’t bother me, but I keep sort of hoping Tiny Cooper and/or Jane might call and give me an excuse to use the ID I’ve hidden in the pages of Persuasion on my bookshelf. But no one calls; neither Tiny nor Jane even shows up online; and it’s colder than a witch’s tit in a steel bra, so I just stay in the house and catch up on homework. I do my precalc homework, and then when I’m done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That’s the kind of weekend it is—the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.
Then on Sunday night while I’m at the computer checking to see if anyone’s online, my dad’s head appears in my doorway. “Will,” he says, “do you have a sec to talk in the living room?” I spin around in the desk chair and stand up. My stomach flips a bit because the living room is the room least likely to be lived in, the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, and where one learns that a man’s station wagon goes inside a woman’s garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized, and etc.
My dad is very tall, and very thin, and very bald, and he has long thin fingers, which he taps against an arm of a floral-print couch. I sit across from him in an overstuffed, overgreen armchair. The finger tapping goes on for about thirty-four years, but he doesn’t say anything, and then finally I say, “Hey, Dad.”
He has a very formalized, intense way of talking, my dad. He always talks to you as if he’s informing you that you have terminal cancer—which is actually a big part of his job, so it makes sense. He looks at me with those sad, intense you-have-cancer eyes, and he says, “Your mother and I are wondering about your plans.”
And I say, “Uh, well. I thought I would, uh, go to bed pretty soon. And then, just go to school. I’m going to a concert on Friday. I already told Mom.”
He nods. “Yes, but after that.”
“Uh, after that? You mean, like, get into college and get a job and get married and give you grandchildren and stay off drugs and live happily ever after?”
He almost smiles. It is an exceedingly hard thing, to get my dad to smile. “There’s one facet of that process in which your mother and I are particularly interested at this particular juncture in your life.”