Page 2 of My Own Kind of Person

“No words is smarter,” I say. “You are so smart.”

She laughs. My heart is racing.

“Come on, weirdo.” She holds my hand and walks me toward my bedroom. Technically I walk in front of her, but it feels like she’s leading the way.

“It’s hard not to use words though,” I say, “when they keep coming out of my mouth.”

She opens my bedroom door and steps in backwards, gently pulling me along. Even when she trips over her own foot, she recovers quickly and doesn’t make a joke. She leaves the lights off and puts on a playlist of lo-fi beats. She lightly kisses my neck, and I let out a little sound and my knees get wobbly. She pulls my shirt up over my head and takes off her shirt too. I’m scared she’ll think I’m scared, so the next time she kisses me I bite her lip. She squeezes my arm and pulls me onto the bed.

I tug off her pants and start to lower my head between her legs, but she puts her hands through my hair and pulls me up. Usually I go down on her for a while and by the time we get to me I only need a few seconds. It’s nice to take turns. You know your role: You get to make someone else feel good and then you get to let them make you feel good. There’s no top or bottom, and there’s no need to time yourself to finish with someone else. With sex-sex, it seems harder to know how I’m supposed to be. A pure-hearted nice guy who can also do you? I understood how to be a kid who was a boy, but now I’m old enough to be a grown-up who’s a man, and I’ve never seen a man I’d like to be.

She takes off my jeans and boxers in one motion and hands me a wrapped condom. The packaging is purple. She brought her own.

“Purple!” I announce, which doesn’t feel like a useful contribution.

Not wanting her to see me hesitate, I open it. My lungs turn to stone.

Christy was my first kiss, down behind the brush at Lake Ronkonkoma. She’d gotten off work at 7-Eleven and still had on her red polo. I told her I didn’t know how to be sexual and she said everyone does but you have to be brave enough to let it out. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m trying to believe it right now. Like being sexy is a superpower I never noticed and tonight I will embrace my fate. Maybe my voice will drop two octaves and I’ll finally grow some facial hair.

I pinch the condom’s latex tip so air can’t get in and I roll it on. Christy lies down and maneuvers me so I’m suspended above her about to do a push-up. She’s done this with other guys, so I follow her lead.

More than anything, I wish I could take a picture of her face: her open eyes and the light-red birthmark across her left cheek and down her neck. She said it’s called a firemark. It burns a path from her heart to her mouth.

Christy adjusts her legs. She’s waiting.

I guess we haven’t been dating as long as other people, but I can get attached real quick. In June a baseball guy called me queer and Christy kneed him in the junk. I was basically hers after that.

She puts her hands on my lower back and pulls me closer, this one part of me almost touching this one part of her. Does almost touching count as anything? Maybe this could be my college essay.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi,” I say, but it comes out like a question. Like I’m an extraterrestrial learning human speech. What is “sex” and how come everyone takes videos of it? And how come in the videos everyone seems so angry?

“I like you.”

“Oh.” I wish I’d done more push-ups to prepare for tonight. My arms are already wiggling from the strain. “I like you too.”

“Y’know, I used to think you could never be seen as you really are,” she says. “You could be almost-yourself and be understood or you could be fully yourself and be incomprehensible. I feel like this summer with you showed me that’s not true.”

I can barely hold myself up. “It’s not?”

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m rambling.”

She hasn’t pulled me in yet. My brain shouts at me to be a man and do it, and I close my eyes and move my hips.

Chapter 2

“When I was a kid, a girl would tell a guy she liked him by being mean to him and beating him up.” I hold the microphone tight and plant my feet center stage. “And let’s just say all the girls loved me.”

A couple of people laugh but there’s only a couple of people here, so maybe it counts as the crowd going wild. Maybe I am bringing down the house at the open mic night at McGuinn’s, the comedy club behind the McDonald’s across the street from the airport.

“There was one girl I had a secret affair with. Secret because it was only when the teacher wasn’t looking that she’d kick me in the shins.” I look wistfully at the lights. “That girl struck fear into my heart and urine into my pants.”

A little more laughter.

“She would knock me down and kick at my special area until I was numb. Then she’d roar and go, ‘You had enough?!’ And I’d respond—” I mime removing a cigarette from my pocket, lighting it, and taking a long drag. “ ‘Give me five minutes. I can go again.’ ”

Louder laughter.