Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 23821 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 119(@200wpm)___ 95(@250wpm)___ 79(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 23821 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 119(@200wpm)___ 95(@250wpm)___ 79(@300wpm)
I saw the Rossers after that, but only in passing. They were nice people, both in their mid-sixties, and if they missed the money I brought in, they never acted like it. They still waved when I walked by their house for another two years before we moved, the Daciens and I, from Dublin, California, back to Great Neck, on Long Island, in New York, where the family was from originally. Mr. Dacien was a DOD contractor and had been working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but moved to the Brookhaven National Laboratory. I had no idea what he did there. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell me. All I knew was that when they moved, I went as well.
New York was a big change for me, but I fell in love with it very quickly. First with Long Island, and then with Manhattan, where we moved a year later. Central Park, the Met, the neighborhoods, the food, ice-skating in the winter, and the subway. I told Mrs. Dacien it was exciting.
“No.” She shook her head. “The real adventure is the three of you.”
Just getting me and Nico and Varro to all our various activities took up a good portion of her day. At least one of us always had a game or a meet. Nico played football, basketball, and baseball; Varro played lacrosse and ran track, and played soccer with me. I played hockey, which neither Varro nor Nico liked, as well as tennis. I also swam, which I loved the most. How she kept all our schedules together and kept us fed, I had no idea. It was a full-time job she always said she was thrilled to do. She loved her boys—me included—and was thrilled her family, as well as her husband’s, treated me the same as her birth sons.
I loved my new family. I had never known my own. My mother had turned me over to foster care when I was an infant, and there was no father listed on my birth certificate.
Supposedly blond-haired, green-eyed little boys were in demand, but no one ever wanted me, so I got passed around the system until the day I saw Varro on the roof.
It turned out I had fallen in love at first sight.
When Varro came home from the hospital and saw me in the room across the hall, he was more than happy to have another brother to plot escapades with. When he found in me a willingness to follow, blindly, wherever he led, I quickly took Nico’s spot as his preferred partner in crime.
The bond just strengthened the older we got. It was always me and him, inseparable, and while Nico had at first been upset about being replaced, when he discovered girls, we were forgotten anyway.
I didn’t get Nico’s fascination with every girl he saw. I had no interest in them, and by the time I hit high school, I understood why. Women were not alluring. They were nice, I liked them, they made for incredible friends, but not to kiss or do anything else with. Men were a whole different story. The posters in my room were not on the walls because I loved the teams they played for, but instead for the various stages of undress. Removal of sports equipment was a convenient excuse for them to all be half naked. Of course, David Beckham was on the ceiling above my bed in all his tattooed glory, and when Varro was there, splayed out, he never missed a chance to remark on how weird it was.
“That would creep me out, waking up and seeing that poster every morning.”
By seventeen, it took everything in me not to say I wished it was him I could wake up to instead. More than anything, I wanted to sleep with my best friend, have him in my bed, between my sheets.
I dreamed about him being the one who did things to me I read about and saw pictures of on the Internet. Every cell in my body screamed for him, yearned for him. Having him in my room, close to me, stretched out beside me, was maddening, but worse was the realization that, just as Nico did, Varro loved girls. And they loved him back.
I finally got it through my head that my life was not a movie. My best friend would never one day just turn, grab me, and kiss me breathless, no matter how much I hoped. It was a painful realization, but owning it made me feel better, and soon after, I started putting distance between us.
When I came out, the Daciens were fine with it, supportive and accepting, giving me the same safe-sex lectures Varro and Nico got, especially since I was going away to college and they wouldn’t see me every day. Mrs. Dacien was worried as much about me not eating as she was about me not using a condom. I promised to be vigilant about both.