NAOMI

UP

Was that you I just heard snort from the other side of class?

I didn’t realize the sound of a snort could carry as far as where girl-Robin, sitting on the opposite end of the lecture hall, is IM’ing me during Introduction to Psychology class. At least I didn’t fart.

Yeah, I type back. Bruce the First’s new thing is to e-mail me daily inspirational quotes. I copy and paste today’s installment into the IM screen and send it over to Robin. It’s a Nicholas Sparks quote about flowers and talking to animals and refreshing breezes.

Robin’s hearty snort from the other side of the room is twice as loud as mine. Schenectady really knows how to raise ’em right.

Here’s the math on psych: Probably one hundred students in this class. Eighty percent type lecture notes into their laptops as the professor-drone pontificates about some sick experiment where people were told to perform a task completely unrelated to the behavior they were actually being observed for (shrinks are mean fucks but excellent liars—I respect that). The remaining 20 percent of students appear to be dozing, while easily half the laptop note takers are IM’ing or perusing online dating services instead of paying attention to professor-drone. The likelihood that I will fail this class is about 60/40 (professor-drone’s T.A. has a thing for me, but I can’t bother to fake a girl-crush on her, even for a passing grade). I’m here, though. The odds of me bothering to show at any class these days are nil.

But I had to escape Mom. She took another sick day off work. Since I wouldn’t have the apartment to myself, where I could spend the day not being in class, and I couldn’t bear a third consecutive day of hanging out in Mom’s giant bed reading fashion mags and watching DVDs while she naps, I opted to go to class. But I arrived too late to grab a seat by Robin, dutifully sitting in the front row.

She queries:

I thought Bruce the First was over you.

I respond:

I think he is. But he will never get over Nicholas Sparks.

This time our laughs are in sync. Only mine is louder, and the professor has to stop lecturing to point up at me. “You in the back? Do you have something you care to share with the class? Or are experiments in human reaction to animal torture really that funny?”

A hundred faces turn to me. “Sorry,” I mumble.

I lied. I’m not sorry.

I totally want to stand up and leave. Just like that. Leave this class and leave this university. For good.

Only I have nothing to go to. No one to help me along the way.

Ely.

It’s like I can smell him.

I did want to escape this lecture room, but then I see him through the glass windows in the door at the front of the room, walking through the hallway with a group of gay boys, easily identifiable as such by too much hair gel and clothing choices that are too carefully mismatched, and I’m fine to stay through the end of class. No Bruce the Second in sight. Must be Queer Boys With Assumed Musical Superiority Who Recycle For A Greener Rainbow Environment meeting day.

Then: Ouch.

I know Robin means the Ely sighting and not the professor’s interruption.

They travel in packs, you know, I answer.

Who?

Gay boys .

It’s true. I wasted my time creating rules for Ely and me to avoid each other in The Building when where I’ve really needed to avoid him is Everywhere Else. There he is, standing in line at the Mud-coffee truck in front of the Virgin store in Union Square, about to kiss Bruce the Second. Or I see him at six in the morning, sitting in the window seat at the twenty-four-hour Ukrainian restaurant across the street from the Star-bucks on Second Avenue and East Ninth, where I’ve taken up new residence solely to avoid Ely sightings; he’s dining with a posse of gay boys after what must be a late night out, wearing my pink shirt and compulsively glancing at his cell phone every two minutes even though he knows there’s no text message from me. It’s not The Building that’s too small for us anymore—it’s the whole damn city below Fourteenth Street.

I wish my vision lied, but what I see is that Ely looks happier with him, with them, than he ever did with me. He’s more comfortable, relaxed—like he’s sacrificed a crucial element in his life but won back the elemental right not to have to worry about a bomb randomly and unexpectedly going off in his midst. He probably prefers being surrounded by his own kind. Not every gay boy needs to accessorize with a straight-girl best friend. That is the lie.

Robin asks, What about Gabriel?

He asked me to Starbucks.

That’s big. Did you go?

Not yet. But I’m thinking ’bout it.

Good. If Bruce the First can move on, so can you.

I’m a little awed that Robin can IM so rapidly when I know she is also typing lecture notes. I admire multi-taskers. I decide to follow her lead. I open a new document on my laptop.

THINGS BETTER EXPERIENCED WITHOUT ELY

1. Bingo.

Ely totally messed with my juju. I never won when I played with him sitting at my side, but since we’ve worked out an alternating-Tuesdays schedule for bingo playing, I’ve discovered a lucky winning streak. Who knew? The old people in The Building touch me for luck when I pass by them now, I swear.

2. Frappuccinos.

The tasty treats Ely hates. Yummmmmmmmmm.

3. Dawson’s Creek.

Ely’s a Dawson-Joey ’shipper (and I don’t think that’s because Dawson was so clearly gay; I think Ely really believed that girl-next-door Joey was Dawson’s true love), whereas I am all about the Pacey-Joey true love, and debating the issue with Ely is useless when the final episode proves me so clearly right.

4. Love Thyself.

Okay, I’ve given up on Seventeen entirely (some things are sacred), but even reading Cosmo without Ely is not the same fun, and defacing the models with our crayon collection is rather pointless without him (Ely draws a dick much better than I). But Cosmo does have a point: Thinking about someone you’re really really attracted to while touching yourself can yield satisfactory—very satisfactory—results. And when I think about Gabriel touching me here-there-everywhere while I’m doing just that, I seem to reach a place I never found when fantasizing about doing it with Ely. It makes me want to find that place for real with a real person—a person named Gabriel and not named Ely.

Oh. My. God. No wonder I don’t go to class. The professor has decided to run a slide show sponsored by PETA, apparently. I can’t look. I don’t want Robin to look. So I distract her with a new IM:

What does sex feel like?

She turns around so I can see her face looking up at me. Her jaw drops. Then she types back:

Are you serious? You’ve never done it?!?!? YOU?!?!?

I shrug, then send: I almost did it with Bruce the Second. But I knew we were both going through motions to express a feeling we didn’t actually feel for one another, and he seemed to know the same, and he never pushed it like most guys. And I don’t think that’s because Bruce the Second is so clearly probably gay. I think maybe it’s because he’s just a good guy.

I hate that.

I guess I hope he finds what he’s looking for. Bruce the Second, that is.

Robin responds:

People say you should wait to be with someone you love, but I think it’s more important to be with someone you like. I mean, that person is going to see you naked, you know? Be inside you. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it, but don’t wait for a fantasy, either.

Friends? I type back.

She turns around again, smiles up at me.

Yeah.

And suddenly I want to fall out of my chair with laughter Because I am imagining Ely on top of me, naked, penetrating me, and the mental image is so clearly wrong. The intimacy may be loving, the intentions are good, he’s up and in me, but it’s awkward and forced—worse than the deadening image of watching porn, because the feeling part of the chemical components between us just could not be right. Naomi + Ely should not = sex.

Ely likes boys. I like boys. Ely is a boy. I am a girl.

Ringring, Naomi. How can you even be in college when you’re so dumb as to take this long to make the connection? To truly believe it?

It’s not funny, so I don’t know why I am laughing so hard. But my dream vision, which won’t lie to me even as fantasy, is just that ridiculous.

I will never understand why gender is so important to mating rituals—it doesn’t make sense; love is love, attraction is what it is, and why should the arbitrary assignment of genital parts determine whether or not you want to be with a person?— but the fact is, it matters.

I hate that, too.

But it’s true.

And if I’m going to face the cold, hard truth, someone else should, too.

I’m out of here, I type to Robin.

Are you leaving in the middle of the class? Where are you going?

Home.

Mourning has to end. For both of us.

Time to get Mom up and out of bed.