Seventh-Grade Pretending

I

“Here. Merry Christmas.”

Tommy handed me a present before taking his seat next to mine. It was our first day back from winter break and I hadn’t seen him in almost a month. The shiny blue wrapping paper, accented with gold stars and bundled together with three pieces of tape (eschewing a more formal ribbon), encased what was to me, at the time, a material embodiment of my worth to him as his friend—a book: The Golden Compass.

Pleased with himself, Tommy smiled and added, “I love that book. You have to read it.”

I’d never before received an unprompted Christmas gift (usually gift exchanges were well choreographed and you knew who was giving whom what, and who, therefore, expected something in return). A slow shame simmered in the pit of my stomach because I had nothing to offer him, because while shopping for gifts he never crossed my mind. I mustered a small “thanks” in response.

The Golden Compass was a light book. A picture of the alethiometer—the story’s namesake truth-finder—dwarfed the background image of the protagonist, Lyra, and her companion, an armored bear named Iorek, gazing at the aurora borealis in the Arctic’s forever-twilight. Sitting next to Tommy, the alethiometer pointed in a cryptic foreshadowing to the hourglass, anchor, and helmet, revealing then what I couldn’t escape. In the many colors of the aurora, I focused on the blue.

After appraising the novel’s exterior, I fanned through it in a backwards speed-read and landed on page 115.

Eight: Frustration

“Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn’t be done in a day.”

I imagined Lyra as a heroine waiting at the precipice of her long journey, ready for her next steps but unsure of where they will take her. (At the time, I didn’t know the book was the first in a trilogy and that her journey would be exceptionally daunting.) Destiny made no sudden movements. So Lyra became impatient. She looked to the alethiometer for answers and it, in turn, suggested that she trek toward the northern lights. With a brief glimpse of fate, Lyra started to run across the snow. In her stride, she found direction. She started with an exiled bear and his stolen armor.

I closed the book and it seemed as if the alethiometer spun its needles, intuiting a subconscious question. The little, golden device pointed to the boy next to me, softly smiling to himself, and I was left to decipher its truth. 

II

“Hi, Trelaine.”

Tommy would often greet me with a smile. He liked to smile—an expression that, by no force of its own, induced on my cheeks quiet blushes. On the first day of seventh grade, recognizing me, Tommy sat in the adjacent chair as if it were assigned to him. Surprised by this stranger’s audacity (no one ever sat next to me by choice), I pieced together fragments of my memories to recognize his face. He looked different without goggles. I didn’t think he knew who I was.

Tommy swam with my older brother, Travis (whose swim meets were actually quite boring). Mom brought me along, subconsciously trying to fit me into Travis’s shadow. Sitting in the stands, she cheered on her firstborn, her heir apparent, as he stretched before his race. He dived in, I looked away, and he won. Mom celebrated, as she usually did, with raucous applause. Wearing a giant black coat with the words “Aloha Aquatics” stitched across the back, he cast a long shadow, both great and expectant. As his successes began to consume me, I fostered resentment as a defense. And I stopped attending his meets.

But Tommy was different. I didn’t mind that he, like Travis, swam or that he, like Travis, exuded an air of easygoing success. He was nice and smiled, so I forgave him.

By January, sitting next to Tommy was a habit. I liked to stare at his wrists, watching as he wrote out sentences on a page. They would bend in a fluid motion, snapping back to dot an occasional “i,” before curling down to travel on to the next word. He used a hybrid style of cursive and print, a lazy string of letters looped and speckled as if smiling.

When Tommy was absent, there was a void. But when he was present, it felt like there was something more than just a friend sitting next to me. At first, the feeling was only a little troubling. Transfixed by my table-partner, January saw many wandering thoughts as they wove together Tommy’s gift and my undeniable fascination with his wrists. 

III

At times, though, sitting next to Tommy was brutal. Something about puberty and middle school made adolescents cruel. Our classmate, Caitlin, teased us incessantly, directing her jabs at Tommy but not at me (she knew that to make fun of me was to ask for tears). Tommy, however, was a cool character with a face that communicated little feeling. He oscillated between stoicism, sarcasm—and, of course, his smile.

Caitlin pointed. “Look! It’s Tommy and his boyfriend.”

Boyfriend? I hated that word. (The way it jumbled out, forcing an open mouth, scraping teeth against lips, pounding tongue against palate.) Did boys even have boyfriends? To a young mind: yes, I was a boy, and yes, I was a friend. But the combination of those two words invoked a different type of connection, something more profound and rarer than either gender or camaraderie alone.

Tommy continued to take notes, unfazed, while I looked away, fascinated by his unbroken concentration but not wanting to prove Caitlin’s point. What was he thinking? Caitlin had said it loudly enough. With her words, she had handed us a puzzle of entangled strings wrapped around Tommy’s lithe wrists and my fidgeting hands.

Was I his boyfriend? I didn’t know. (Probably not, though.) But the act of sitting next to Tommy exposed that possibility as a viable option. After all, what could be the culmination of a perfect table-partnership other than a gradual evolution into boyfriendhood? My logic turned on the intimacy of side-by-side chairs.

“Why don’t you sit next to your boyfriend, Tommy?”

Tommy never caved to Caitlin’s words, never took the bait. As he walked from the classroom door to our table, I, in a bout of failed telepathy, dared him to turn to her and say, “Yes. I will.” But instead, he pulled out his chair, flashed me a welcoming smile, and sat down.

(The summer after graduating from college, I mentioned the seventh grade to Caitlin, but she didn’t remember the teasing. She remembered Tommy, but had to squint to see me peeking out from behind my desk, afraid of her abuse.) 

IV

At first, I didn’t feel uncomfortable about the state of our relationship. Should I ask him about it? Tommy hadn’t noticed anything so I didn’t bring it up. If it was pretend, at least it was stable for now.

Per Tommy’s recommendation, I borrowed the other books from Phillip Pullman’s trilogy from the library. The Subtle Knife introduced Will. I didn’t find him a compelling character at first. Will didn’t laugh. He liked the quiet. Will never pulled Lyra along, never asked her to follow him. He persisted as fate merged their lives together. When their paths diverged, he didn’t object. He accepted separation as their doom for the sake of promises kept. Once a year, reliving the moment of their destined parting, he hiked to the north and raised his hand to feel her ghost. A universe apart, he still felt her warmth in the cold.

Lyra and Will, Pullman’s tragic couple, reappeared throughout the trilogy in different skins and with different names: Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel, John and Juta, Baruch and Balthamos. Each coupled embodied a tragic cycle: love, then separation, then death. They felt beyond what their vessels could handle. Their passions consumed them, so they fought, they ran, they hunted, they mourned, and they inevitably succumbed to the doom of their union. To break this vicious cycle, Lyra and Will remained apart, separated neither by time nor space, but by a choice. Different universes protected true love, keeping each piece half-alive and unwhole, tethered together only by an annual trip to the north.

As Tommy started to resemble Will, his fictional twin, I started adjusting to a new sense of my own developing story. 

V

I loved him. I felt it when he gave me his book, but I could name it by February.

Love began with a subtle nagging nestled in my chest cavity. I suffered it whenever I saw him, and, somehow, suffered more whenever he left. It was an uncomfortable rising and receding tide, swayed by lunar movements beyond my control. He would walk near and I’d tense up as the break crashed against the shore. He walked away and the waves subsided, flowing back out to sea.

Tommy wasn’t the same table partner anymore. He conjured up an aura of hidden intentions. His words whispered their own secrets. He walked taller, stretching his shadow further across the table. I tried not to stare too much, but his newness, like polished shoes or a fresh haircut, attracted my every glance.

I knew that I had to hide this feeling, though. I didn’t want him to notice. At least, not yet. The school day became a complex dance of quick look-aways and paper-fiddling. A heavy sigh relieved the burden at the last bell’s ring. Weighted shoulders slouched down on the bus ride home, finally rid of my table partner.

For a time, he was oblivious, and I tried denial because this feeling scared me: the idea of being bound to Tommy, not because of anything extraordinary he did, but simply because of the unique nuances in his routine activities. Lost in a daily web of smiles and wrists and stares and blue everywhere, Tommy was somehow special now. And as I attached myself to him, he merely dragged me along, unaware and unburdened. 

VI

In March, I decided to tell him. The simple act of verbally expressing a feeling—this feeling—would surely compel reciprocity, right? To love was to be loved. (It happened with Lyra and Will, after all.) As the month dragged on however, the idea remained exactly that. Each night, I concluded with, “Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

The longer I waited, the more uncomfortable the feeling became. Internal questions began as nuisances—Did he see me staring? Am I standing too close?—until they swelled into a constant barrage. The stomach knots were simply unpleasant. The tightness wrung my appetite’s neck until it submitted to love’s fasting. And there was something ridiculous about bashfulness—the unconcealable rush of blood to cheeks, the inability to hide what should be explained and not blurted.

Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow.

As the emotion grew (and maybe it was simply literary projection), so too grew a fear of love. At an age where kids were meanest to themselves, to admit openly not only that you loved someone, but another boy, carried with it a heavy stigma. What would I do if I ever faced Tommy’s look of disgust? Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. At least not in the seventh grade.

And what if we tried love and failed. In failure, I’d rather not relinquish my claim to life, as so many of Pullman’s couples did. Or what if we couldn’t sustain being boyfriends. Knowing what love felt like, I’d hate to have to endure it again with someone else. It was an uncomfortable sensation crawling around in some secret crevasse right behind the heart. It pretended to control the flow of blood, but really, every few minutes it crawled up the rib cage and bungee-jumped down toward the stomach. With each fall, it pulled me in further.

Or what if this wasn’t really love?

My inner conflict projected too many questions for a young mind to bear. I was a boy in the middle of puberty with a penchant for dramatic flair and unnecessary tragedies, losing himself.

“Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow.” 

VII

The attraction was more of a noticing than anything else—the times he made direct eye contact, the length of his eyelashes, the curl of his thumb around his pencil, the way he made more close-mouthed grins than teeth-exposing smiles. My obsession with Tommy, the patchwork of daily feelings that enveloped my nascent sexual orientation with his subconscious tics, became a blanket to wrap myself in, one that kept both intruding doubts and the cold of reality at bay.

Tomorrows arose and all of them I let expire. Then: the eighth grade.

Tommy and I were on different calendars now. To accommodate an influx of new students, our middle school had decided to restructure its multi-track system. The change didn’t faze most of us. It gave everyone fewer school days and more breaks. It let us choose where to go, which schedule we liked best, and who we wanted to learn with. I didn’t know which track Tommy would be on. I couldn’t ask him (that, I thought, would be too revealing). So I guessed (correctly).

But by accident, I turned my form in late and ended up on a different track. I was alone again for the entirety of the eighth grade. Separated, Tommy and I drifted apart. I saw him occasionally in afterschool orchestra, but we played different instruments. We weren’t around each other much in high school either. Different social circles placed him at the round table outside the library and me at the second table from right in the cafeteria’s lanai, some fifty feet away. Still, we were friends, even if only in name.

From a distance, I watched as my old friend left me behind. A universe away, and I was the only one with my hand held up in the cold. No one waited on the other side.

I could not make sense of what I felt in the seventh grade nor the substantive difference that rang after it. So I pretended it never happened. I stripped love of its name to relinquish its significance. It remained static and waiting, fixated on Tommy, as if to sustain his existence on mere memories. And it ended up hidden, but not extinguished. 

VIII

I saw Tommy at a Starbucks a decade after the seventh grade. And while we had both aged (both physically and emotionally), I felt myself shrink all the same, back to the meek boy waiting for no one in particular to take a seat next to him.

I didn’t notice Tommy at first, until he called out, “Hi, Trelaine,” complete with his signature smile. (It, like him, grew up rather nicely.) My hand returned a wave with too much enthusiasm. I hadn’t encountered a wild Tommy in years, so I tried to concentrate on the tiles on the ground while we exchanged greetings.

I hastily grabbed my drink before he could upgrade to small talk. But I needed a cup sleeve. Naturally, the dispenser, sensing my frantic state, positioned its springs at such an angle that, when I took one sleeve, they all jumped out onto the floor. Now, nervousness and embarrassment battled against my hyper-polite disposition to take responsibility and clean up my mess. My fight-or-flight mechanism toggled to “Flee! Now!”

Tommy looked amused. I mumbled an explanation, “Um, so the thing just, like, exploded. Should I…” I made a sweeping motion with my hands.

He smiled an unnecessary apology. “Oh, yeah, you can just leave it there.”

He then began a conversation (while I, on the other hand, sank further into the ground). We did the small-talk dance—“How are you?” “Well.” “Where are you now?” “D.C., but I’m home for the summer.” “You’re in law school, right?” “No, a master’s program.” “How’s Chelsey?’ ‘Engaged.” “Oh, I think I knew that.”—as I desperately, in that moment, tried to teleport away. My answers were vague and I didn’t return any questions. Sensing an exit, I hurled my goodbye back at him and trudged through what was now the swamp of my own embarrassment.

It was, in the end, a laughable experience. But our chance encounter revived my seventh-grade love, not just a memory of a feeling, but the actual feeling itself. For a decade, I had held onto this love story like a secret whispered into a clutched hand. Afraid of the twin tragedies of rejection and loneliness, my repression was based on a trust that love unseen was love protected. Safety allowed love to flourish on its own, a budding flower in a sheltered greenhouse. And once it bloomed, it might be ready for display, justifying my years alone.

But as I parsed through details of my love story, I found it odd that I would fixate not on the last time I saw him, but rather the day he left me: the day I traded him for a well-kept fiction. My fragmented memories were tailored as their retellings aged. Each piece was carefully placed, like stock photos on the mantel of a home for sale, eliciting from potential buyers the faked memory of happiness. Then, each piece fell into the next, like an accidental décor, a chronological tale of someone else’s life. And what had been staged became the past.

Boyfriend. I still hated that word. Ten years later and The Golden Compass resembled a memoir, containing the story of my developmental failing. Because the seventh grade was my forever-twilight and Tommy was my doom. My own universe was lonely and it took some readjustment, to the lack of blue, to the feeling of wholeness accompanied by an acceptance of my half as the only half. I sensed my own developing story needed a shift in purpose, a new focus.

But I still remember the finer details of his wrists.

Trelaine is originally from Hawaii, but, true to form, he saw the line where the sky meets the sea, and it called him, so he currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. He enjoys origami and washing dishes and taking pictures of clouds and sunsets (but never sunrises because he’s not a morning person).