Two gay men never seemed more interesting to me. I knew it
was wrong to watch, I knew it was a private thing, I knew I
should have stayed under my blanket and tried my best to
sleep. But they were invading my privacy too, by doing it
right there on the couch with three other girls in the room.
Shelly didn't care. Ever since she'd moved into the half-way
home when she told her parents she was lesbian and her dad
threw her out, she was used to things like two guys going at
it on a couch, and she fell asleep immediately. Jessie was
so tired from hosting the party that the minute she closed
her eyes she was in another world. I, on the other hand,
drank 5 glasses of iced coffee before going to sleep,
because after Jessie and I had made the drinks- it turned
out no one wanted any.
The beginning of that night is a blur in my memory. I
remember talking to Will all night, trying to convince him
to actually sit down and have a decent conversation with
Julian. I remember us going into the very small bath room,
that actually only had the toilet in it, and talking there
in an effort to avoid the crowd. I remember thinking about
other times, about times when Will wasn't gay, or rather,
times I didn't know he was gay, times when Will and I were
together. As together as you can be when you're in the fifth
grade and your boyfriend doesn't like girls.  
One time, in the spring of the fifth grade, Will and I were
on a stone bench in the school yard, during a free period.
He was sitting, and I was lying down, with my head on his
knees; we were talking about stuff, nothing in particular,
just our lives, and the troubles that at that time seemed
oh-so-important. Today they look trivial. Kids passed us by
and stared, and I didn't care. I was happy with him. I'm
still surprised at the notion that once, I was really
happy.
And I remember June of the same year. We had already been
together for six months almost, and I was doubting whether
or not I should break up with him. I talked to my
girlfriends about it, and apparently someone had overheard
us. When we went back into our classroom I saw that someone
had written "Willie is history" in big letters on the black
board. I was humiliated. I took the ring Will had given me
and threw it on our desk. Though I didn't mean for this
gesture to mean anything, when the ring flew off the desk
and onto the floor- it was our official breakup. Later that
month, just a day or two before the end of the school year,
Will showed how nasty he could really be. I had gotten my
first period the month before, and like most girls at the
beginning of their period, was experiencing terrible pain
from cramps. As I took out some pain killers from my bag,
Will read the label on the bottle. It was a brand very
strongly associated with menstrual pain, and by day's end,
the whole class knew that I was the first among the girls to
have had her period. Humiliation struck me again.
But Will wasn't the only one who could be nasty. Soon, the
children of our class, and I am ashamed to admit that I was
amongst them, started to taunt Will. "You're so gay," we
used to say to him, and other things of that sort. It was
just a game, just a kind of vicious chant, a way to make him
stand out from the crowd, to show that his little quirks
were his, and that we were perfectly normal. In a class of
gifted children, anyone would give anything to be ordinary
for a day. And slowly it happened. It started when Will no
longer yelled at us to stop saying it, stopped saying that
he wasn't gay, stopped trying to find a girlfriend, to prove
us all wrong. It started to become just a fact of life -
Will was gay. And it continued when in the seventh or eighth
grade he started saying "in the tenth grade, I'm coming out
of the closet." And it went on with him going to the gay
pride parade in the park, and with lies to his parents. And
even though on the surface I knew that Will was gay, deep
down inside me I didn't believe it could be true. I couldn't
have been the girlfriend of a gay guy, even if it was in the
fifth grade. I couldn't have been the one to turn him. But I
was his last girlfriend. And after me, he didn't seem to be
attracted to girls anymore. And oh, the self esteem problems
that this caused.
But that night, I was hit with recognition. Suddenly, there
was no turning back. When I laid in the makeshift bed in
that living room and heard their whispers, Julian's mumbles,
the tear of the condom wrapper, the hushed sighs, I
understood that Will was mine no more. And we weren't even
in high school yet. As I tossed and turned, the boys took it
to the shower. Jessie finally woke up, and I was no longer
alone. Julian asked us for some sort of spread. We offered
chocolate spread, but he didn't want it. He took a jar of
peanut butter, and disappeared with it in the bathroom.
I don't remember the little while that immediately followed
that, but I remember all of us being awake, Shelly, Jessie,
the boys, and I, and I remember shouting at Will. "Please
tell me you used a condom." Silence. "I can't believe you!
Are you crazy? What exactly do you think you're doing? Do
you want to get yourselves killed? This isn't a game, Will!"
"Relax, Hailey, we used a condom. We did other things, and
we didn't use condoms for that, but we were safe during...
you know." He couldn't even say it without grinning like an
idiot. And them I remembered. Shelly had given them condoms,
anticipating this would happen. And Jessie and I practically
forced them on each other. All the same, I felt as though
Will, my Will, was taken away from me.  
He became a slut after that night. Just that. He became so
obsessed with his boyfriends, with his flings. It was like
he was on a mission to have sex with as many guys as
possible. One time, he told me, a guy came to visit him from
upstate. Within five minutes of his arrival, after Will had
offered him some water, they were on Will's sister's bed. He
disgusted me, and yet, I loved him.
One day in ninth grade I called him after I hadn't talked to
him in a long time. "Wilma, I need to talk to you." I always
referred to him as Wilma when I wasn't upset with him. It
was a habit I got from Jessie. "I'll meet you in the mall in
an hour." He said. "No. I'm coming over; we'll sit in the
park below your building. This isn't a mall talk. Be ready,
I'll be there in the thirty minutes; forty-five, if the bus
is late." The bus-ride over seemed to last forever, even
though it was only twenty minutes long and I had taken it
many times before. I couldn't stand to listen to the music I
had with me, even though it was my favorite band. I couldn't
read, even though I knew I had to, if only to create some
distraction from what I was about to do. All I could think
of was what I imagined he would say when I told him. Would
he be happy? Would he be sad? Would he be apathetic? I
couldn't predict.
"Hey, Wilma. What's up?" I said, avoiding his eyes. "Hey
Hales. I'm fine. You?" I nodded. "Sit." I said, pointing at
a swing in the playground. "Um, yeah. So, I'm moving. My mom
got this big job in Dublin, and apparently she can't pass on
it. We'll be leaving in June. And I know this is sudden, but
I couldn't tell you before. I looked at you in school, and I
thought of how horrible it would feel to tell you, because I
knew you wouldn't care, and I knew that no one else there
would care, and when I told Jessie she cried, but I mean, I
knew she'd be sad, we've been best friends since the sixth
grade, and she doesn't go to school with us, and we've been
through so much together, I mean, I was there for her
through the whole Nathan thing, but she's the only one who
cares. Even Anna didn't cry, and she cries about everything.
Listen to me, I'm rambling..." "June, you said?" "June." I
nodded. I wanted to tell him that we would keep in touch;
that our friendship was not over, even though it had been
staggering the whole year; that I would still be there for
him no matter what. I wanted to tell him that I loved him,
and that I'd missed him that last year, when he got new
friends and I got other new friends, and our worlds stopped
colliding. But words failed me. I couldn't say it, because I
felt in my heart that it was a lie.