I checked out the schedule and found there was a panel on queer lit. Since I’ve identified as queer ever since the first time I read the words gender nonbinary, I figured that’s where I’d go. It was in a small black box of a space, and clearly none of the schools had chosen to attend this panel en masse. That meant a profound lack of blazers, and a surfeit of university students with dyed hair, some of whom (I could tell) were gender nonbinary as well.
I walked in. I could’ve sat anywhere. I ended up sitting next to Liam.
First thing I noticed: He’d taken off his blazer.
Second thing I noticed: A copy of Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice in the blazer pocket. Not Yellowcake, but close.
Third thing I noticed: Elvis Costello glasses.
Fourth thing I noticed: Him looking at me looking at him.
“You’ve gone rogue, I see,” I said, pointing to his blazer.
“I like to think of myself as more a rebel than a rogue,” he replied, his self-deprecating tone making it clear he thought of himself as neither of these things. Which was endearing.
He introduced himself as Liam. I introduced myself as Patrick. Because I didn’t want to introduce myself as Peter, and in that moment, my mind couldn’t get that far away from it.
The moderator came on to tell us where the exits were, and the panel began. Even though it was very interesting, I was paying as much attention to the space next to me as I was to the authors in front of me—and I thought I sensed Liam doing the same thing. This thought was confirmed as soon as the panel ended, because we resumed talking as if there hadn’t just been a fifty-minute pause.
Take two queer, bookish teenagers and give them the run of a literary festival—we might as well have been strolling on the Left Bank in Paris, for all the enraptured thoughts that rose into our queer, bookish hearts. Liam was from Melbourne proper; his mum managed a card shop in Fitzroy and his father was an ophthalmologist. I told him I was from Adelaide, in town for the festival with my dad, who worked for a festival there and wanted to scout out the authors. None of this was true, but I also told him the things I felt were the most true about me—about seeing myself as a person, not as a boy or a girl; about feeling like an outsider; about using books as a way to get inside something larger than my immediate life.
I pretended Mr. Williams was my father when I checked in at lunch. Then I went right back to Liam, who told me he wasn’t going to check in with his teachers, even though he was supposed to. We spent the afternoon dipping in and out of panels, jumping from science fiction to environmental essays to debut authors not that many years older than ourselves. At some point, I told Liam my name was Peter, not Patrick. He didn’t seem fazed. I asked him if he wrote, and in a quiet corner of the AMCI building, he pulled out a notebook and nervously debuted some poems to me, saying he’d just written them that morning. He asked me if I wrote, and I told him the truth—that I was still observing, and hadn’t yet found the words.
The afternoon was quickly counting down. His hand brushed mine as we went to see four authors discuss Margaret Atwood. We both noticed, and we made sure to brush them again. Then we were holding them, neither rebel nor rogue, just romantic.
I knew it wasn’t true, but I could believe that the hundreds of people who’d planned the festival had done it just so Liam and I could meet. They thought they were festival planners, but really they were scenic designers. We had stumbled into starring in the production.
Then it was time to go. I gave him my email address, Aemon808. He said Aemon was a cool word. There was no way for me to tell him that it was what I thought of as my real name. Until I found myself saying it was what I thought of as my real name.
He liked it. He liked that I’d chosen it.
We hugged goodbye. And we held that hug for as long as it could go. Our bodies recognizing the thing our minds and hearts already had.
I didn’t want to let go.
* * *
—
The mistake would be to think it would have been better if it had ended there. Just one perfect day.
It still would have hurt. Any ending hurts.
* * *
—
For months, we wrote to each other, about anything and everything. I told him about school, about thoughts I had, about things I read. The weird part for me was that it felt like I was telling the whole truth—the bodies I was in didn’t matter to me, so they didn’t matter to the story, either. We shared secret Instagrams with each other. When he wanted photos of me, I went onto Peter’s social media and borrowed some. When he wanted photos of Adelaide, I made my way there—and, because of the way my life worked, I stayed.
The photos I could take from Peter started to become limited—he’d found a girlfriend, and so many of the photos he posted were with her. I had come to feel this strange kinship with him, as if he was what I really looked like, because that was how Liam was seeing me. I knew it was wrong, but when you’re different from everyone else, you can start to believe you get a pass on certain aspects of right and wrong.
Then I got a message on my Instagram: Who are you and why are you using my photos? Somehow Peter had found me. Right and wrong reasserted themselves. I told him I was sorry and wouldn’t do it again. Which meant I couldn’t do it again.
I told Liam I’d sneaked out to see his favorite band when they’d played in Adelaide, and had been caught by my parents on the way back in. I told him they’d found the Instagram, had taken my laptop and told me I needed to focus on my studies. I made it sound like their fault. I made them sound awful. But I told him I could still email. He went along with everything.
We went on for more than a year, in that strange space that was romantic but not dating, essential but not best friends, tied to each other but not tied to any physical space. We thrived there, and both felt we should want more.
I wasn’t even thinking when the next Adelaide Festival came along. Although I’d kept up the story about my father working there, I wasn’t paying attention. Then, a month before, Liam surprised me by saying he was going to come. So many of our favorite authors were going to be there—and he wanted to see me again. Finally.
I had to tell him not to come. I had to find a way to tell him that didn’t tear down everything we’d built. I had to be as true as I could.
So I told him I wanted to stay in our space. I wanted to be romantic but not dating, essential but not best friends, tied to each other but not tied to any physical space. He was a writer and I wanted to know him through his words, and his words alone. And I wanted him to know me the same way.
Okay, he wrote back. Let’s keep it pure.
I was so relieved. And, paradoxically, so disappointed. But we resumed writing as if there’d never been any chance of being in the same place. He didn’t ask me about the Instagram or any other photos.