What We Left Behind

“WHAT?”

“I’M GAY!”

“OH.” The guy pauses. “THAT’S OK. GAY CHICKS CAN STILL BE HOT.”

I laugh.

The guy takes both my hands and we start dancing the way you do in middle school—step-together, step-together, one-two-three. I’m laughing even harder now. We dance like that through all of “Hips Don’t Lie.” Then the guy leans in and yells, “IS YOUR FRIEND OK?”

“WHY?” I look where he’s pointing. Carroll and the sketchy guy have broken their lip-lock, and the sketchy guy is talking really emphatically to Carroll. Carroll’s trying to back away, but he can’t get through the wall of bodies behind him.

I wave goodbye to the brown-haired guy and push my way through the crowd.

“IT’S TIME TO LEAVE!” I shout at Carroll. I grab his hand and tug him toward the door.

He tugs back, not moving. “IT’S EARLY!” he yells.

I look at Chest Hair Man. He’s grinning at me. It’s creepy.

“HEY, SORRY, WE GOTTA GO,” I tell the guy. Then I have a brilliant idea. “HIS MOM WILL KILL US IF HE MISSES CURFEW.”

I expect Chest Hair Man to be horrified at the implication of underage debauchery. Instead he licks his lips.

Okay, ewww. I stop smiling and turn back to Carroll.

“THIS GUY IS A DOUCHEBAG,” I say. “WE’RE LEAVING RIGHT NOW.”

This time I tug on both of Carroll’s hands. After a second of resistance, he lets me pull him across the floor.

I look behind us a few times as we fight our way through the crowd, but Chest Hair Man has upgraded (downgraded?) to a kid with bleached hair who doesn’t appear to have entered puberty.

We have to wait ten minutes for a cab. Carroll’s annoyed with me at first. I’m irritated, too. I was having fun before.

It all fades fast, though. We’re both too exhausted to be mad now that the high of the club music is gone. And suddenly we’re both starving.

We get the cabdriver to let us off at the pizza place down the block from our dorm and eat our slices as we walk home, the grease dripping down our chins and onto our sweaty clothes.

“Can I tell you something superembarrassing?” Carroll asks me in the elevator after he’s shoved the last chunk of crust into his mouth.

“Course.” I wipe grease off his cheekbone and reach for my phone. I haven’t looked at it since we got to the club. I have twelve new texts.

“That—” Carroll grins up at the ceiling, but he doesn’t look amused. “That was my first kiss.”

I gape.

“Don’t laugh,” he says.

“I’m not!” I sort of am, though, so I bite my lip. “But—seriously?”

“Yeah.” We’re at our floor, so I follow Carroll to his room. It’s empty. Juan is always out all night on Fridays. Some sort of track team hazing thing I don’t want to know the details of. “I told you before. I wasn’t lying. There were no other gay people in Arneyville.”

“I didn’t think you were lying.” I lie down on Carroll’s bed while he changes. “Anyway, congratulations.”

“Thanks. At least it’s over with, right?”

“Right.” I yawn. I’m tired but not sleepy. My muscles ache from dancing. I want to curl up here and not get up for hours, but I have to stay awake until it’s time to leave for the bus. “Wow, and on your very first night at a club.”

“With an ugly guy, though. Then I look over and see you dancing with a hot one.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure that guy was straight.”

“Like it matters.” Carroll pushes me over to one side of the bed and lies down next to me. “Your turn. When was your first kiss?”

I laugh and start thumbing through my texts. Two are from Briana, asking my advice about whether to ask out a girl she thinks is cute. “You really want to hear about that?”

“I want to hear everything about that. I’m praying it’s more humiliating than mine. Was it the girlfriend?”

“Oh, no. Toni and I didn’t get together until we were sixteen.”

I smile. That night was magic.

It feels like a lifetime ago. I was a different person back then. We both were.

I have a bunch of texts from Toni, too. I glance down the stream. Something about the trip tomorrow.

“So, how old were you the first time?” Carroll asks.

I shift my head onto his shoulder so I won’t have to meet his eyes. “Um. Eleven.”