Sam – Summer 2007

  It’s dark down here. NoFX is pumping from the boombox. Fat Mike’s Cartmanesque voice is floating around, muffled and behind me, trying to fill up the space in my parents' basement. It's too oppressive down here, though, so it carefully lingers beside the source instead. It’s everywhere, of course. Logically, I know that. It’s just that, well, I’m high as a kite and the way my heart’s beating is kind of drowning out the rest. I’m aware of my breath, but mostly that’s just because I’m trying to control it. I don’t want him to see.

  I don’t know. Something really weird is happening to me right now.

  He’s my best friend, Adam. I tell him everything. But something about the way I’m lifting makes me feel nervous, like this feeling I’m having is a little too dangerous for that.

  I look at him and smile. It’s genuine, and it isn’t. I’m smiling so he won’t see. I’m smiling because, while I look at his face, the contours of which I know better than my own, my stomach feels light. I’ve heard girls call this sort of thing butterflies. At least, that’s what Stacey K told me when we went to the drive-in theater for a showing of Grease I didn’t give a damn about. She wanted to go because she said she doesn’t belong here in this time, the emo-drenched moment that is 2007. I wanted to go because I’m seventeen and I’d heard she puts out. She didn’t disappoint. I didn’t know her well, and still don’t, but I also try my best not to be a complete asshole, so we’re making a go of it. Sometimes we hook up. Sometimes we just talk. I can trust her with a lot, but I can’t tell her everything the way I do Adam.

  Should I tell her about this? About the butterflies in my stomach? The kind she whispered about while we fogged up the windows of my beat-to-shit Pontiac like Jack and Rose did before the ocean’s careless swallow?

  What does this say about me? What does it say about me that I’m sitting here on the couch, the same red one he and I always spend wasting hours listening to music, watching horror films, and shoving processed food down our throats; the couch where he pauses any film that has a whiff of sexual content, the place where we joke, we laugh, we talk about our futures, our dreams, our crushes, and sometimes the traumas of our pasts...what in the hell does it say that I’m here in the presence of the endless shared history of this place, studying his face behind a smile that pretends there are no disruptions in my hollow gut?

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The thing is, when I slept with her...Stacey K...it was great, in that she was someone other than myself. I closed my eyes, and I felt the way another person’s breath, heart, body, and skin could take me to oblivion in ways I can’t alone. I was there, physically, but in my head...well...

  Ah, fuck. I really don’t want to think about it.

  Except I can’t help it because, deep down, I do know what it means. I know what it says. I know what the implications were when, last Christmas, my idiot parents gave me a laptop with no restrictions, and I let myself wander the more sordid parts of the Web. Not that it was unusual for a person my age to indulge curiosity. It’s just that, I may have used that word in a more delusional sense, because at first it was straight couples, but before I could stop and think about the depths of it, I was regularly watching men, men without women, doing things I’ve been trying to pretend I don’t want.

  That was all very abstract, of course. This...this isn’t. This is me, here, in the flesh, in real life, drifting after a satisfying couple of drags on a shared blunt, tracing the outlines of Adam’s jaw, his olive skin, his brown hair, and green eyes, hiding behind a smile that tries to remind him he’s just my friend.

  He is.

  He’s my best friend.

  It’s just that...also...I think, just now, watching him watch TV with oblivious indifference to what’s happening with my face, my smiles, my butterflies, and my heart...I think that I’ve decided I love him.

  My cheeks feel so hot.

  He notices me. My smile widens. I’m just your friend. My heart is pounding, and I think my stomach just fell into my bowels. He smiles back and chuckles. He shakes his head the way he does when he decides I’m being eccentric. He looks back toward the TV, and I know it’s really true.

  I’m in love with you, Adam.

  I’m in love with my best friend.