At my side, and still giving me the silent treatment, Autumn is sitting up, eyes wide. She’s read almost every book on this list, and if I know her, I know what she’s thinking: Is there time to transfer to Shakespeare with Mr. Geiser?
She turns and looks at me, her eyes narrowing as she reads my mind right back. She growls again, and I can’t help the laugh it pulls from me.
I’ve read almost all these books too. Autumn insisted.
I lean back, lacing my fingers behind my head and giving her another good smile.
Piece of cake. I have an easy semester ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time fourth period rolls around, Autumn is buzzing with nerves. She’s excited for the Seminar, but still irritated that I wormed my way into it. I trail just behind her down the hall and try not to let her see me smile when she purposefully evades me inside the door, moving toward a group of desks where only one seat remains free.
“Over here, Auddy.” Standing in the back row, I hold out an empty chair for her beside one I plan to claim.
She has the option to come join me, or look mysteriously petulant, so she shuffles over, glowering. “You’re a pest.”
“I love you, but only a little.”
She laughs. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
And there, right there, it is. I could ruin this by being a total jackass about something she’s put her whole heart into. She thinks I’d want to?
The way I’m acting, she probably does.
“I won’t.” I slide my good-luck eraser onto her desk, the one she gave me for Christmas two years ago, with the old-school He-Man illustration printed into the rubber. What used to be a white square is now a gray nub. Present-day Eraser He-Man barely has a face, and only one leg.
Her freckled nose wrinkles as she scowls at me without much commitment. I am forgiven.
Mr. Fujita walks in, arms filled with a teetering stack of books. He slides them gracelessly onto his desk in the center of the semicircle of worktables and ignores them when they slide onto a messy pile. A copy of Stephen King’s The Stand slaps harshly to the floor, landing facedown and open. He ignores it; in my peripheral vision I can see Autumn sit up straighter, and I know she is now intensely worried about the pages of the enormous book growing crumpled under its own weight the longer it sits there.
“Morning!” Mr. Fujita sings, and then looks up behind us at the clock on the wall. “Oops! Afternoon! I’m Tim Fujita. Everyone just calls me Fujita.”
I’ve always really liked Fujita, but the way he hands out his own nickname makes me like him about 7 percent less.
We murmur greetings in return, quiet from intimidation or because we’re tired after lunch, and he grins at us, taking in our faces one by one. I glance around too at the class composition: Josh, Dustin, Amanda. Julie, Clive, Burrito Dave. Sabine, Soccer Dave, Asher. Kylie, McKenna, James, Levi.
Every single one of them is Mormon. Trimmed hair, modest sleeves, good posture. In the back row, Autumn and I are a pair of gangly trees looming over a lush, manicured lawn.
Fujita winks when he sees me. He thinks my mom is a superhero. Beside me, Autumn lets out a measured exhale through her nose; because of my mom (a computer genius) and my dad (a highly profiled cardiac surgeon who, according to the papers, saved the governor of Utah), I’ve received special treatment from teachers since the day I moved here. Fujita adding me to the Seminar is clearly one such perk.
“Welcome, guys.” He spreads his hands out and then takes another sweeping glance around the room. “Where is he?”
At our puzzled silence, Fujita scans the room again and then looks at us for answers.
“Who?” Dustin, seated—as ever—right up in the front, finally asks.
Fujita glances at his watch as if to confirm that he’s in the right place. “I had hoped this would be a cool surprise, and I assume it will be anyway, but I guess he’s running late.”
We reply with anticipatory silence as his eyebrows slowly lift skyward. “We’ll have a special aide this term,” he tells us. I can imagine the drumroll he’s intending, but his dramatic pauses give the moment a bewildering, anticlimactic feel instead. “You’ll be thrilled to hear that Sebastian Brother will be mentoring each of you!”
A chorus of excited noises pours out of the fourteen other bodies in the room—a Mormon hero, coming to spend time with us. Even Autumn has clapped her hand over her mouth. To her—LDS or not—Sebastian is a local celebrity.
With his hands laced together in front of him, Fujita rocks back on his heels. “Seb has a very busy schedule, of course”—I mentally groan. Seb—“but he and I both feel that his experience can benefit each of you. I believe he will inspire you. After taking this very course, he is only nineteen and on his way toward a prestigious literary career.” Leaning in, Fujita adds confidentially, “Of course, I’ve read his novel. It is stunning. Stunning!”
“Has he heard of Christopher Paolini?” I whisper to Autumn.
She delivers a shut up by way of an icy glare.
Fujita grabs a stack of papers from a torn folder and begins handing them out. “I assume we can skip the Why-Are-You-Here. You’re here to write a book, right?” Nearly everyone nods enthusiastically. “And you will. Four months isn’t very long, it’s true, but you will get it done. You will figure it out. That’s why I’m here.
“We’re going to hit the ground running.” He makes his way around the room. “I have a suggested reading list, and I have a variety of resources on how to get started and what types of writing processes are out there, but in truth, the only way to write a book is to write it. However you get it done—that is your process.”
I look down at the syllabus and proposed drafting schedule he’s slipped on my desk and feel my forehead heat, feel that prickle-pin crawl of panic up my neck.
I have this week to come up with an idea.
One week.
When I feel Autumn’s attention on me, I turn, giving her an easy smile. But apparently, it isn’t as easy as I hope; her own grin falters, cracking at one side.
“You can do this,” she says quietly, seeing straight through me.
Ask me to differentiate trigonometric functions and I’ll nail it. Give me a molecular modeling kit and I’ll build you the most beautiful organic compound you’ve ever seen. But ask me to pull something straight from my gut and share it with the world? Mental mayhem. I don’t particularly relish working, but at odds with this is my other hatred of doing a shitty job at anything. I’ve never tried to be creative before and realize it only now that I’m sitting here.
To make it worse, Fujita adds, “Now, experience tells me that most of you already have an idea in mind. But over the next week, Sebastian and I will help you hone it. Polish it. And then: You dive right in!”
I can’t even enjoy that he’s repeated Autumn’s inspirational pussy-poster slogan verbatim, because for the first time in . . . well, maybe ever, I feel like I’m in over my head.
Autumn slides my He-Man eraser back onto my desk and uses it as an excuse to squeeze my hand.
The side door opens, and chairs scrape mildly across hardwood as people turn. We all know who it is, but we look anyway.
• • •
The one and only time I’ve ever seen Autumn drunk was this past summer, which is also the one and only time she admitted she was in love with me. I thought we’d been on the same page after our make-out session two years ago, but apparently not. Sometime after drinking four Mike’s Hard Lemonades but before shaking me awake on her floor and begging me with boozy breath to forget everything she said, she babbled for an hour about the secret feelings she’d been harboring the past couple years. From the haze of my own inebriation and the tangle of her alcohol-fueled incoherence, I remember only three clear sentences:
Your face makes sense to me.
Sometimes I get the weird feeling that I wouldn’t be enough for you.
I love you, but only a little.
Being who we are, the only way to
move past the potential for profound awkwardness afterward was to joke about it for a solid week.
I love you, but only a little became our new best-friends motto. Autumn tried to explain the logic of my face making sense to her a few times to no real success—something about symmetry of features and how they’re pleasing to her on an instinctive level—but it’s still one of my favorite non sequiturs when I see her getting stressed about anything. I just say, “Auddy, calm down; your face makes sense to me,” and she breaks. Every time, she laughs.
The second sentence—Sometimes I get the weird feeling I wouldn’t be enough for you—hit too close to home. Although I’d been working up the nerve to come out to her, after she said this, I changed my mind. Auddy’s words twanged that dissonant chord inside me, the inner conflict about what it means to be bisexual. There’s the devil on one shoulder, the ignorant perception that I get from all sides, both inside and outside the queer community, who say bisexuality is really about indecision, that it’s impossible for bisexuals to be satisfied with one person and the label is a way to not commit. And then there’s the angel on the other shoulder—who the queer-positive books and pamphlets encourage me to believe—saying that no, what it means is I’m open to falling in love with anyone. I’m happy to commit, but the specific parts don’t matter as much as the person.
But as I’ve never fallen in love and never felt that clawing ache for any one person, I never know which of them will end up being right. When Autumn said that about not being enough for me, I let it go and pretended I didn’t remember. The problem is, I do remember. In fact, I obsess about it, while pretending I’m not painfully waiting for the moment when someone knocks me over, makes me feel sure about them in a way I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life.
So when Sebastian Brother walks into our class and he sees me and I see him, I have the sense of falling sideways out of my chair.
I am drunk.
And I know now what Autumn meant about faces.
I’ve seen him before, in the halls around school, but I never paid much attention: He’s one of the perfect, über-LDS kids—the son of a bishop and, as far as I can tell, incredibly devout.
But here I can’t seem to drag my attention away. Sebastian isn’t a kid anymore. I notice his defined jaw and down-turned almond eyes, ruddy cheeks and anxiously shifting Adam’s apple as he swallows under the weight of our stares.
“Hey, guys.” He gives a small wave, walking haltingly, deeper into the room to shake Fujita’s hand. A classroom’s worth of eyes track him like crosshairs.
Fujita beams at us. “What’d I tell you?”
Sebastian’s hair is shaved on the side, floppy up top. His smile is so wide and bright and pure: He is fucking beautiful. But there’s something beyond it, something in the way he moves, that catches my fascination. Maybe it’s the way his eyes don’t settle on any one person too long. Maybe it’s the way I sense he is slightly wary of us.
As he faces the class from the front now, his eyes flash when they meet mine—for a tiny flicker of a second, and then again, like a prism catching light, because he does a double take. That fraction of a heartbeat is long enough for him to register my immediate infatuation. Holy shit, how quickly he recognizes it. This must happen to him all the time—an adoring gaze from across the room—but to me, being so instantly infatuated is entirely foreign. Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage.
“Oh, man,” Autumn mumbles from beside me. “His smile makes me stupid.”
Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won’t be okay.
Beside me she sighs in disappointment, oblivious to my own internal meltdown. “Too bad he’s Mormon.”
CHAPTER THREE
Monday afternoon: We are homework-free, Mom is home early, and she sees it as a sign that she needs to take her children shopping. My sister, Hailey, is thrilled at the opportunity to get more funeral wear. I agree to come, albeit unenthusiastically, mostly because I know if I were left to my own devices, I would spend hours on my laptop, with multiple browser tabs open, trying to learn more about Sebastian Brother.
Fortunately, Autumn is tagging along. Mom’s superpower seems to be her uncanny ability to find the ugliest clothing for her children. In this way, Autumn is a great wingwoman. But unfortunately, having all three of them around means any mobile Sebastian investigation needs to be done covertly. Autumn might raise an eyebrow if she caught me googling pictures of our hot male TA. Mom and Hailey know I like guys, but Mom in particular would not be thrilled to know that the object of my current interest is the local bishop’s son.
Organized religion isn’t something that’s regarded too fondly in our house. My dad is Jewish but hasn’t been to temple in years. Mom grew up LDS, just north of here in Salt Lake City, but defected from the church at nineteen, when her younger sister, my aunt Emily, came out in high school and her parents and the church cut her off. Of course, I wasn’t around then, but I’ve heard some of the stories and see Mom’s forehead vein make an appearance whenever any aspect of the church’s narrow-mindedness comes up. Mom didn’t want to break up with her parents but, like any normal, compassionate human, couldn’t justify alienating someone she loved because of a bunch of old rules in a book.
So then, you might ask, why are we here, living in the most LDS-dense place in the world? Also, ironically, my mother. Two and a half years ago, a massive, super-loaded software startup based here lured her away from Google, where she’d been the only senior software engineer with an XX genotype, and she basically cleaned the floor with everyone around her. NextTech offered her the CEO position, but she asked for the CTO job instead, which came with an almost unlimited tech-development budget. Right now her team is developing some 3-D holographic modeling software for NASA.
For any other family with two six-figure incomes still barely cutting it in the South Bay, the decision would have been an easy one. A salary hike in a place where the cost of living could fit in our smallest Palo Alto closet? Done. But because of Mom’s past, the decision to move was agonizing. I still remember hearing my parents arguing about it late into the night while Hailey and I were supposed to be sleeping. Dad thought it was an opportunity she couldn’t possibly turn down, and one that would feed her imagination. Mom agreed—but worried about how it would affect her children.
In particular, she worried about how it would affect me. Two months before the offer came in, I admitted to my parents that I’m bisexual. Well, “admitted” might be taking too much credit. For her graduate school project, Mom created undetectable software that helps employers keep track of what their employees are doing. Turns out it’s so user-friendly and has such a pretty interface that a consumer version was created and sold to nearly every household with a working computer in the States. I probably should have put two and two together and realized my parents would also be using it on our home network before I discovered I could stream porn on my phone.
That was an awkward conversation, but at least it resulted in a compromise: I could go to certain sites, and they wouldn’t stalk me online as long as I didn’t lurk on places that, as Mom put it, “would give me unrealistic expectations about how sex should be or what our bodies should look like.”
In the end, my stridently anti-LDS parents moved their emo-scene daughter and queer son back into LDS wonderland. To compensate for their guilt over making sure I protect myself at all costs (read: be very, very careful about who I come out to), my parents have made our home a gay, gay den of pride. Autumn and I spend most of our time together at her house, and Hailey hates almost everyone (and no one from her angry coven ever comes over), so LGBTQ essays, PFLAG pamphlets, and rainbow T-shirts are handed to me at spontaneous moments with a kiss and a lingering look of pride. Mom will slide the occasional bumper sticker into my pillowcase, to be found when the sharp corner meets my cheek at night.
&nbs
p; NOTHING WOULD BE THE SAME IF YOU DID NOT EXIST!
COURAGE IS BEING YOURSELF EVERY DAY IN A WORLD THAT TELLS YOU TO BE SOMEONE ELSE.
LOVE KNOWS NO LIMITS.
NORMAL IS JUST A DIAL ON THE WASHING MACHINE!
Autumn has found a few of them here and there over the years but shrugs it off with a murmur of “San Francisco, man.”
It’s funny to think about these now in the car, surreptitiously scrolling slack-jawed through photos of Sebastian, because I start imagining them read to me in his deep, gentle voice. Even hearing Sebastian speak a mere three times today, the sound of it still hovers like a drunk honeybee inside my head.
Hey, guys.
Oh, the book is out in June.
I’m here to help, however you need me, so use me.
I almost lost it when he said that.
A Web search doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Most of the results for “Sebastian Brother” are for a steakhouse in Omaha, links to articles about the Seminar, or announcements about Sebastian’s book.
Google Images is where I hit the jackpot. There are photos of him playing baseball and soccer (yes, I save one), and a few of him doing interviews for local papers. When I click through, his answers don’t say much about him—they seem pretty canned—but he’s wearing a tie in a lot of the photos, and combined with his hair? I’m ready to start the Sebastian Brother Spank Bank folder.
Really, he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in person.
Facebook is a dead end. Sebastian’s account is locked (of course it is), so not only can I not see his photos, but I can’t see his relationship status, either. Not that I care, or will beyond a few days. He’s Mormon eye candy. This flash of infatuation won’t go anywhere interesting. I wouldn’t let it—we’re on opposite sides of a very thick fence.
I close every window on my phone’s browser before I fall prey to the worst social media stalking possible: the futile hunt for his Snapchat or Instagram. Even the idea of stumbling upon a sleepy shirtless Sebastian selfie wreaks havoc on my nervous system.