DECEMBER 12, 2009

For a motel cabin by the side of the highway, the room isn’t horrible. The windows rattle when an eighteen-wheeler passes, the carpet is done in a pattern like pepperoni pizza, and the paintings—a mill on a stream, a pelican in front of a beach sunset—are bolted to the wall. But it is clean and there are no gross smells.

Tyler goes in. I hesitate at the door and wonder what I have done. He takes my hand, rubs it between his. “You sure about this?”

No.

“You can change your mind.”

I step in and shut the door behind us. Tyler closes the curtains, blocking the view of the giant red arrow sign outside that is shooting right at us, and the room gets dark. He adjusts the thermostat on the wall heater until it switches on and the coils heat up and glow orange like a fireplace.

We stand in front of it without touching. Tyler puts his arms out. I look at his fingers, knowing now that, like his teeth, his hands were ruined when he was very young.

He opens his jacket and rolls me into it so that I am between him and the heater. He says, “Heat sandwich.”

The coils ping in the silence. I wish I had a week, a month, to figure out what to say. But I don’t, so I say the first stupid thing that pops into my head: “I think you’re brave.”

“Brave? What’s brave about being a complete and total fraud? About never, not for one day, not to one person, telling the truth about who you really are?”

I tilt away so that I can look up into his face. “That is so wrong. Think about all the guys who hang out at Paige’s. Cody. Colt. All of them. They got it all, the whole eighteen-course banquet handed to them on a platter. All they had to do was pick up a silver spoon and start eating. You, you …” I try to figure out how to say this. “It’s like you had to grow the wheat and harvest it and grind it and bake it into bread. Like you had to earn your place at the table by building the whole damn table.”

“Did I grow the trees?”

Tyler’s joking, but I’m serious when I answer, “You absolutely grew the trees.”

“Did I chop them down and mill them?”

“Yes! You chopped them down and milled them and set the table and … everything, Tyler. Everything most kids get handed, all the stuff parents are supposed to do, you had to do it all yourself.”

“Thanks, A.J. That’s sweet of you to say.”

“Tyler, no. It’s not sweet. I’m not saying this right, but, listen, could a single one of those guys—Cody, Colt, any of them—could they have survived in the world you came from? Could they have made it through a single day with your grandfather? With the Termite Queen?”

A reluctant smile creeps over his face as he imagines one of the guys in flip-flops and Oakley sunglasses bucking bales of hay off the back of a flatbed.

“Is anything you’ve ever done on the football field a lie?”

“You mean, aside from the fact that I stopped giving a shit about it years ago?”

“Which makes what you did even more amazing.”

“Hot,” he says, stepping away from the wall heater. He tosses his jacket over a chair, tugs off his boots, sprawls out on the bed, pats his right shoulder. “Come here. Right here.”

I am woozy with wanting to lie down next to him, but still have to say, “I just want you to understand how much this means to me, your telling me the truth about yourself.”

“There’s more,” he says. “But I’ve been good long enough.” He sits up, takes my hand, pulls me down onto his chest.

I’ve been with two guys before—Damon Shapiro, a trumpet player and fellow counselor at band camp, and Raj Rodke, the really handsome, really spoiled son of two doctors from India. With both of them, sex had been something I was supposed to like. The “normal, healthy human need” my mom was always talking about. Also I was supposed to know what to do. With Damon and Raj, I felt like I was getting graded and not passing. Those boys had learned everything they knew from watching porn on the Internet. So, in their heads, the girl was supposed to be hairless as a newt, with beach-ball tits bouncing up and down, groaning and begging for harder, faster.

With Tyler, it is like being at the quarry. We enter suspended animation together. It is clear that he has had a lot of practice with real human girls. He knows what bodies can do and how to make them do it so well that that part seems to happen all on its own. There aren’t any words like “Less teeth.” He isn’t imagining that I am a Japanese girl in pigtails and knee socks down on her hands and knees. He is not imagining anyone except me.

After the second time, he buries his head in my neck and, for a moment, I think that he is crying. Before I can be sure, though, his mouth is on my neck and I can’t tell if the wetness is his tongue or tears. But I know that he is sad and will always be sad. I wrap him in my arms and kiss the top of his head and say what my mother always said. I say that it is all right, that everything will be fine.

I don’t know when we fall asleep or how much later it is when I wake up. Tyler is heading to the bathroom when I open my eyes. There is a hitch when he walks, a bounce from the arches of his feet that swings upward to his broad shoulders. He is the only person I’ve ever seen who looks better, more relaxed, without clothes.

He pees with the door open. For a boy with nothing but secrets in his past, he has none in the present. He pushes open a curtain on the small window beside the toilet.

“Oh, shit, Aubrey Julie, you have got to see this. Close your eyes! Close your eyes!” He rushes back into the room, makes me shut my eyes, then I hear the scrape of rings rattling along the metal rod as he opens the curtains.

“OK, you can open them now.”

I do and there is so much beauty framed within the cheap aluminum sides of the motel window that I gasp. The giant red arrow, lighted now and blinking, shoots through a sky that vibrates with colors shimmering and bouncing like the aurora borealis. Compared to this every other sunset I’ve ever seen seems painted on. These colors—swimming-pool aqua, pomegranate ruby, neon green—go all the way through like stained glass.

“Do you like the sunset I ordered for you?” Tyler stands to the side of the window, the stained-glass colors reflecting across his face and chest.

“I love it. I want to swim in it.” I reach up and sweep my arms out as if I could breaststroke into the pools of colored light.

He jumps back into bed. It creaks and rattles when he lands. I rest my head on his chest and we watch the colors fade to deep, shadowy tones that make the room feel snug. Like we are alone together in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean with a view of a world that has been hidden from me until this moment.