~ Chapter 3: Two Firsts ~
Middle school hit me like a truck. I'd been hanging out with middle schoolers since I started sixth grade (courtesy of Jeremiah who I think was only inviting me to stuff because his mom made him). That didn't prepare me for what it would be like to be around all of those hormones.
Puberty seemed to be in the air, and I kept waiting for it. I kept waiting to grow as tall as my classmates. If you think I'm short now, you should have seen me before I hit a growth spurt in ninth grade. It only turned me from one of the shortest people in our grade to one of the slightly below average heighted people in our grade, but it was something. You've heard me complain about this, and I know you always said that you think I'm the perfect height. It took some work before I started to feel okay with it; I think it helped that you didn't call me fun-sized which is an actual thing my girlfriends and some of the guys I was with called me. In middle school, it felt like a direct blow to my masculinity. It was ridiculous and irrational, yes. It was also how I genuinely felt about it. I still don't know if my drinking had anything to do with it. I mean, it was over three years of heavy drinking before I'd get anywhere near a reasonable height, so who knows?
I think that I focused on how physically behind I was because it was easier than acknowledging that I didn't want the same things as my classmates. As they talked about these supposed milestones – girlfriends and making out and touching a girl's boobs – I didn't want any of it. I tried to want it. God, I tried so hard to want it.
While those things started to happen for me, the desire for them to be happening never did.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make myself excited; I couldn't make myself want more. My dreams weren't of girls. That was the scariest part for me. During the day, I could control those thoughts and push them away if they got too close, but I was at the mercy of my subconscious when I went to sleep. I learned that if I blacked out before bed, I wouldn't dream at all so that's what I started to do.
I know it's messed up. That's the point of this, right? I'm not telling you all of this because I had some amazing middle school transformation where I learned all of life's lessons and emerged stronger and smarter. I was hopeless and depressed and broken; I thought I was broken beyond repair… Jury's still out on that one.
It was too much for me to handle. Seventh grade was when the shift happened. It was when I went from really, really wanting to drink to needing to drink to feel normal. I don't remember much of seventh grade. It honestly might as well have just not happened because aside from a few moments that stick out, I couldn't tell you anything that happened that year. Maybe that's why I suck at school. Is what we learn in seventh grade important? Probably.
One of the only things I really remember is that Kieran touched a girl's boobs on Valentine's Day, and he made it seem like he'd discovered the holy grail. In retrospect, so much of what he said was complete bullshit, but I had no doubt it felt real enough to him. I just remember thinking that maybe if I paid attention to what he said, I'd never have to do it myself and could just convince everyone else I had.
It didn't work out like that. The summer before eighth grade, while I was crashing a high school party I'd found while scouring creeksecrets, I met Chrissy Green. She was about to be a sophomore in high school and was new to Creekwood. You never met her. She got pregnant her senior year before you moved here, and I think she started going to a special school for girls like her. Her parents are super religious, so she didn't have much of a choice but to have the baby. They're religious in a different way than your parents. Like, they don't celebrate holidays or anything like that. Chrissy… was not religious. She was about as not religious as someone could get.
The thing is, we met at a high school party, so she didn't know I was only in middle school the first six or seven weeks we were together. She'd just turned fifteen in June, and I told her I was turning fifteen soon, but I left out the whole I-was-held-back-a-grade thing. I told her right before school started because I kind of had to and, by then, I think she really liked me. It's still weird, and I should have been upfront with her from the very beginning but that's not on her. It's important that you know that because Chrissy got a ton of shit for being with a middle schooler once people found out, but I never did. I got cheers and claps on the back and respect for dating a high schooler which is all kinds of messed up.
Chrissy was my first real girlfriend. Real in the sense that we didn't just hang out until an acceptable amount of time had passed for me to break up with her. She was so many of my firsts. We started dating right away after we made out in a pool at that party, and she was the first girl I introduced to my parents. I mean, technically there was Lucy, but she didn't count because she'd practically known my parents as long as I had, and there had never been anything romantic between me and Lucy.
Some random day in September, Chrissy put my hands on her boobs over her shirt. I thought that might be the moment that things changed for me, but they just felt like… I don't know. Boobs, I guess. There's no other way to describe it. It wasn't magical, didn't make me feel more when we kissed, didn't turn me on like it had Kieran. And I'd noticed that it turned him on because that was the kind of stuff I noticed.
It was kind of weird because she did it right before I was supposed to meet her family for the first time, so I didn't even have time to do anything about it. We'd been talking about dinner while we walked to her house and how her mom was probably making her infamously dry roast beef. Once we got to her place, she just kind of pushed me up against the garage door. There I was, my hands on her boobs, and the only thing I could think about was how I was going to have to eat really dry roast beef soon. I should have been thinking about literally anything else. Actually, I shouldn't have been able to think of anything. That's how I've always felt with you; it's like my brain just kind of turns off and I become what I feel not what I think, you know? I didn't know that when we were kissing up against the garage door though. I didn't know it could feel like that; I just knew it should feel like something.
When she told me it was time to go in, I knew I needed to break up with her; it wasn't fair to keep stringing her along when she clearly wanted more than I did. She deserved a guy who felt like his life changed when he was with her, not who thought she was a convenient shield from the truth of his sexuality. I almost convinced myself to do it after dinner because there was no way I was breaking up with her right before dinner. The problem was I met her twin brother, Carlos, at dinner that night. Carlos was different than any other guy I'd ever met. We essentially started to text non-stop.
I ended up putting him in my phone as "mom" because I didn't want Chrissy to get suspicious about why I was texting her brother so much… in retrospect, that probably should have been even more suspicious because who texts their mom that often? Even you don't, and I think you were closer with your mom than anyone I know. Somewhere in the thousands of texts we sent back and forth, I started to like him. Chrissy knew we were friends, but our texts were borderline obsessive. The weirdest thing was that we really weren't talking about anything. We spent an entire day sending each other random emojis once. We didn't say a single word. Just emojis. I barely knew anything about Carlos which somehow gave me the chance to build him up into the perfect guy.
When we were together, it was no different. We hung out a few times a week which meant I pretended to like the video games he played and he pretended to enjoy listening to me practice guitar. He was very touchy feely. He always put his hand on my arm when he talked to me. I thought he was just being friendly, but I was feeling things. I was feeling things so much more intensely than I ever had with Chrissy.
On Halloween, I lost my virginity to Chrissy. We'd mostly done it because everyone already assumed we had. I mean, our whole talk consisted of "might as well, right?" We'd been together… almost four months, I think. I remember that I tried to make it bad because the moment we were doing it, it just felt wrong. Don't get me wrong, parts of it felt good. Chrissy was experienced and knew what she was doing, but it mostly felt off. Like it felt physically good but didn't feel good any other way.
I was sleeping over at her place and ended up in Carlos's room because his parents weren't comfortable with letting me and Chrissy sleep in the same room together. It was kind of ironic because we'd literally just done the thing they were afraid we were going to do, and I wasn't eager to do it again, so her bedroom probably would have been far safer. I only spent about fifteen minutes on the floor before Carlos told me I'd be more comfortable in his bed.
After Willacoochee, I thought about that a lot. I still don't know whether I was pulling a Carlos. It's a little different, I guess, but not different enough that I haven't tried to figure out if I subconsciously wanted Willacoochee to unfold exactly as it had.
Being in Carlos's bed was weird for me. I knew I liked him, but I didn't think he liked me, so I thought getting in his bed would mean so much more to me than it did to him. Still, I did it because I couldn't think of a good reason not to.
Once I got settled, he waved around a bottle of vodka. He told me he had the good stuff. We'd both been drinking at the party, but I was starting to come down; I welcomed the chance to delay the inevitable. There wasn't much left, not nearly as much as I would've usually had on my own, but I hoped it would be enough. We started passing it back and forth and got to talking, and then he changed everything.
I remember it exactly because we were both laughing about a costume mishap from the party. I wasn't thinking, and I put my hand on his thigh. He suddenly stopped laughing; I didn't realize why at first. Then he looked at where my hand was, and I was mortified. When I went to move, he grabbed my wrist. "Have you… have you ever kissed a guy before?" My heart stopped the moment the question was out of his mouth. I couldn't figure out if I should tell him the truth that Jeremiah had been the best kiss I'd ever had or if he was looking for me to tell him that I wasn't interested. It didn't matter; I took too long to answer, and he was very direct. "I haven't but… I don't think I'd mind."
And then he did it. He leaned in and kissed me. He kissed me, Vic. I didn't start it, but I also didn't stop it. I like to think I never would've been the one to start it, but who knows? I was definitely crushing on him hard and the moment he kissed me, I didn't care about anything else. I didn't care about how much it might hurt Chrissy, didn't care that I was supposed to be in denial. I'd found the feeling I'd been chasing, and it was everything I'd built it up to be.
When I slept with Chrissy again, because I felt like I had to if I wanted to keep Carlos in my life, I thought about him. I imagined what it would have felt like with him.
Carlos and I never slept together. We mostly just made out a lot; neither of us were willing to cross that line with Chrissy. We both loved her in our own ways, we just also really, really, really liked each other. So, he became my firsts in the same way Chrissy became my firsts. He was the first guy I made out with, the first guy that I sort-of dated in a we–were–both–in–the–closet kind of way, and the first guy I had feelings for.
We were only together during those sleepovers, but we took full advantage of that time. We never had sex but kissing him… there weren't words. It made me feel how I knew girls should make me feel.
We lasted a month. He broke it off with me at the beginning of December when he started dating a senior girl I didn't know. I tried to fight it. I tried to argue that we should keep it going, but he told me that we both knew that this wasn't going to last. That had been news to me.
Carlos told me I'd been convenient. We could have sleepovers together and make out under the covers on his bed behind his locked door. His parents never suspected, Chrissy never knew, and we never spoke a word about it. When we ended things, Carlos told me he wasn't gay and that I was something he needed to get out of his system. It was bullshit, and we both knew it. Carlos wasn't gay in the way that you're not Latino.
Give it a second. It'll click.
When you kissed me in Willacoochee, part of the reason I got so upset was because I know what it's like to be a cheater. I spent months stringing Chrissy along so that I could spend time with her brother. Even after things ended with both of them, I had my romantic life that everyone could see and then I had my gay romantic life that happened in the dark of the night under the cover of secrecy.
Derek was my first relationship where I wasn't seeing anyone on the side. It was something that inexplicably made me proud, even though it shouldn't have. Not cheating on the person you're with is like the bare minimum expectation for being in a relationship, but it meant something that I committed to him, and when you kissed me, it felt like all of that went away. Suddenly, I was right back where I started.
I know it's so different and that you already feel guilty enough about Willacoochee. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but… I guess I'm really tired of keeping secrets from you, and I want you to understand. When you kissed me, it wasn't about you, me, and Derek. It was about Chrissy; it was about Alison; it was about Jessica; it was about every girl I'd cheated on because I didn't want to be gay. Even more than that, it was about Carlos, and Zeke, and Landon, and Pete, all the guys I cheated with.
Carlos was my first real breakup. I couldn't handle being around him after that. I thought I was heartbroken, but I just missed nights passing back a handle of vodka and kissing him until I forgot about how messed up I was.
He came out after he graduated, you know. A few weeks after you and I got together, he texted me to apologize and tell me that he'd worked through his stuff, and he was sorry for the things he'd done while he'd been figuring himself out. I never told you about it because I wasn't sure how you would feel about it. I didn't want you to feel jealous or anything like that. You never really knew Carlos; maybe you saw him in passing or something, but I doubt you even had a conversation with him. It just didn't seem worth it, and it would open that whole can of worms.
So, I made the decision then to completely hide this part of my life from you. You didn't need to know about all the girlfriends and the guys I was with before I came out. They were before you moved, and I so badly wanted a fresh start with you.
Maybe if I'd told you, things would be different. You would've known about some of the skeletons in my closet right away.
You would have known that when I broke up with Chrissy, I told her I fell out of love with her as if I'd fallen in love with her at some point while we were together. You were the first person I fell in love with. Truly. I don't think I was capable of loving anyone until I met you.
Chrissy took it better than I thought she would. She surprised me by agreeing with me. When news started to circulate that we broke up, people were talking about how we'd mutually decided to end things because we'd grown apart. It was such a mature and wholesome lie, and I was unprepared for how eligible that would suddenly make me. A lot of girls wanted to date me, which was mind-blowing because I was actually the worst. I'd cheated on Chrissy a lot, and I didn't feel bad about it at all; I felt like it was worth it for the time I could spend with Carlos.
No one knew about that, so I somehow turned into this guy that was chasing true love. Some of the guys made fun of me for it, but mostly I got a lot of attention for it. A lot of girls liked me, and I almost liked myself simply because being liked is contagious. I liked being liked even if I didn't like them.
I was a little more careful about it though. The guys I hooked up with were never related to the girls I was dating; that became my self-imposed line, and I always broke things off before things could go too far with any of them. I'm getting ahead of myself. All of that stuff would start after winter break was over.
Winter break was an eventful time for me. One of my neighbor's nephews was in town visiting them and because they quote unquote had no idea how to entertain a teenager, he was pawned off on me.
His name was Jason, and he introduced himself to me as their gay nephew as if he was challenging me to have a problem with it. Right away, I saw the perfect arrangement. Jason was temporary. I desperately needed to get over Carlos, and I thought he was the perfect chance to do that. He couldn't be looking for anything serious. He was a grade older than us, but he was actually only a few weeks older than me and since we didn't go to school together, he never knew that I wasn't a freshman.
I was able to completely reinvent myself with him. I introduced myself as Benjamin and, for a few days, I was a completely different person. I loved pretending. I loved being Benjamin because Benjamin was proud and confident and fearless. Benjamin didn't feel fear or guilt or like he was letting the entire world down because he was kissing a guy. He was everything I wasn't. Being Benjamin was the first time I got a taste of what it would be like to be out.
I told Jason that I was out to my parents and to the world but that I wanted us to be casual. I invented this whole story about my ex and my parents being over the top with him. In retrospect, I didn't need to be so adamant because he agreed right away and would have been the one that suggested it if I'd given him the chance.
Jason was out, proud, and seductively single. He told me he felt too young to be in a relationship and wanted to figure out what he liked. His exact words had been, "I want to shop around before I make a purchase." I kissed him the moment he told me that. It was… okay. It was a lot like kissing Chrissy. Then we had sex a few days before Christmas. When we slept together, it… kind of sucked, to be honest, and it had me questioning so much because I really thought it was going to be the best sex of my life. How could it not be?
When it wasn't good, I stopped knowing anything about who I was. Being into guys had been my secret for such a long time, but was I wrong? It didn't occur to me that I could just not be attracted to Jason. I figured that once a guy was interested, I'd like him back and it would be great. I suddenly doubted everything. Had I actually enjoyed being with Carlos and Jeremiah or had I been right that it was actually the alcohol helping me feel things? Was it possible to just not feeling anything with anyone?
It was a long time before I'd be able to bring myself to have sex with another guy. I will get to that later. That particular part of my life is going to take some time to explain. What I will say is that I started to wonder if maybe I just didn't like sex. Jason was the second person I'd slept with and the second person I disliked having sex with.
I think part of the reason it was so bad was because I'd hyped it up so much. I thought he was going to make me feel the same things I felt with Carlos, and he didn't come close. It should've been perfect. He didn't go to Creekwood, and it felt so safe. I didn't have to worry about anyone finding out because our…whatever you want to call it only existed while he was visiting.
The other reason it probably sucked was because he, in no way, took into account that I might not want to have sex with him. One day, we were making out in his living room while his aunt was working and he just… went for it. He jumped in and assumed that I'd like it. I didn't. It's not like he pressured me or anything. I never said no or told him to stop, and I always knew that was an option… but I did sometimes wonder if I would've had sex with him if he asked me first.
Jason, in no way, cared if it was good for me. Sex had been all about him and about what he wanted to do, and it was my first time. I'd been watching gay guys… or at least two guys pretending to be gay for a long time, and I got the idea that that's the rulebook Jason was reading from as well. Afterward, he told me everyone's first time sucked and that we should try again, but I wasn't sure I wanted to.
I would, only two days later in fact, thanks to a quarter bottle of rum, and it sucked every bit as much as it had the first time.
It was mostly because I definitely wasn't ready to be having sex. Not even a little bit. I wasn't ready when I slept with Chrissy, and I went into sex with Jason thinking that it would balance the scales. I know; that was some sexy thinking, right? I figured if I slept with a girl, I should sleep with a guy too which isn't how anyone should ever go into sex.
You have no idea how much I respect that you waited because I wish I had. I know you feel like you made a mess of things when Mia found out about us, but trust me, it would have been so much messier if you'd slept with her.
I wish I had waited for you. Maybe if I'd known someone like you would come into my life, I would have made different decisions. At the time, I just figured that was how things were going to be. Who was I to expect more from life? I was trying very hard not to be gay, was drunk more than I was sober, and was a cheater. I hardly deserved more than that, and I didn't think it existed for me.
The worst part was I didn't care about anything, and I didn't care that I didn't care. There were two things that mattered to me: drinking and convincing everyone I was straight. Everything else was background to me.
I didn't care that I'd cheated on Chrissy. I never even owned up to it. I don't know if Carlos ever told her, but I never did.
I didn't care that I was drinking every day. I still clung to the belief that if I wanted to stop, I could've. I would fill water bottles with vodka to take with me if I wasn't going to be home just so I knew I'd be able to have something, but it wasn't a problem.
I didn't care if I was hurting other people or myself. At the core of it, that's the problem I had. I was dangerously depressed, desperately in denial, and unable to muster up the energy to care about it even a little bit.
There's my problem laid out neatly in a row.
The funny thing is, after Jason, I was just going to swear off relationships. I knew I needed a break, but I never took it.
Because, Victor, before I had the chance to figure out who I was without a girlfriend or a sort-of boyfriend, Simon Spier was outed on Christmas Eve.