“I’m like your grandma?” This is more “not sexy” than I was hoping for.
“You make me laugh, I mean.” He nudged me hard with his shoulder. “You know what I meant.” He takes a breath. “She died a few years ago.” He looks out at the camp, his legs swinging over the side of the cliff.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “If you don’t want to talk about it …” Though we already have, only he doesn’t recall it.
“No. I was just remembering. I’ve tried not to think about her for a while, but now … it feels good actually? She was just this amazing person. She watched me a lot after school when I was little. I went to her house and we … would just hang out. Or we’d go to the movies. I remember once, and … I haven’t thought about this in years. But once when I was really little, we went to see some movie, and it was kind of scary and I screamed at one point—I don’t remember what it was. Teeth, I think? Like an animal? Anyway, I scream, and burrow myself in her arm, and some guy behind us leans forward—and this is an adult—and he says, ‘Hey, don’t be such a girl about it.’ And my grandma, she just turns to him and says, ‘Don’t be an asshole about it,’ and he snorted and leaned back, and she said to me, ‘You scream whenever you want, baby.’ She was so great.”
I look at him and I can see his eyes are wet, like he’s trying not to cry, so I clasp his shoulder tight and he leans against me, wiping one of his eyes.
“Sorry,” he says. “I haven’t talked about her in years.”
“That’s okay.”
“When I was like ten, my parents said I could start going straight home instead of taking the bus to her house, and I saw her less. But when I was twelve, and I knew—like knew I was gay ’cause I just really wanted to kiss this guy in my grade. And I didn’t want to kiss any girls. And I knew it was … not great to be gay. I knew people didn’t like it. And this was on top of being like one of five Asian kids at school. Not a good combination for popularity. So, anyway, I snuck out of the house and walked a few miles—in Virginia heat—to my grandma’s place. Just so I could tell her.”
“She take it well?”
“Yeah. I mean, that’s why I wanted to tell her, I think. I knew she’d love me no matter what.”
I want to tell him, suddenly, about our first summer, talking about her in the dark. But I don’t, of course, because it would give everything away.
“She gave me a big hug and said it didn’t matter to her at all, and yes, it would matter to other people, but who cared about them? I cried so hard, and she hugged me for what seemed like an hour, but when she let go, I felt so much better. She said I should be proud of myself for knowing who I was and what I wanted, and to never let anyone tell me that anything about myself that made me happy was something to be ashamed of. I’ve tried to keep that in mind.”
“That sounds great. So she was fine with it.”
“Yeah. My folks weren’t as cool …. So she drives me home, and they didn’t know where I was, so they’re freaking out, and she sits us all down and tells them I have something to say, and I tell them, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m gay.’ And Mom says Grandma is putting ideas in my head, and Dad says I’m not and we can worry about it when I’m older, and that was it for a while.”
“But they sent you here. They must believe you now, right?”
Hudson shifts uneasily in my arms, pulling away and lying down on the grass to look up at the trees. I lie back, too, but he’s farther away now. “My grandma died a little after that.” He takes a deep breath. “A lot of stuff happened. We were all upset. But I told them about it again, and I’d found out about this camp with Grandma—she’d wanted me to go, so I could make queer friends, have fun. And I told my parents that, and I told them it was like her last wish for me. So … I came.”
“That’s really great, though,” I say, taking his hand and lacing our fingers. “That she could still do that for you.”
“Yeah.” Hudson sniffs. I look over and he wipes his eyes with the back of his arm. He turns his face away from me. “Sorry, I shouldn’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Crying. It’s not … I don’t like people seeing me cry.”
“I don’t mind,” I say, turning my whole body toward him. I take him by the hip and turn him toward me, too. His face is a little wet from tears. “It’s okay to have emotions.”
“No, it isn’t,” he says with a half-hearted laugh. “You ever cry in front of other people? They will give you a hard time about it. I remember I got hit in the nose with a soccer ball once in middle school, and the guys on my team all yelled at me to stop and called me crybaby for the rest of the year. It was already hard enough to get them to realize I wasn’t, like, a math nerd, and then I screwed it all up by making them think I was, like, a girl. That’s sexist, I know, but that’s just how guys talk about other guys who cry. So I don’t do it.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” I say, wiping a new tear away from his face. “You can have whatever emotions you want around me. That’s what boyfriends are for, right?” I squeeze his hand.
“I don’t know. I’ve never cried in front of a boyfriend before.”
“Well, you can cry in front of me. I don’t mind. I’d rather you feel okay having emotions in front of me than hiding them or something.”
“That’s nice to say, but …” He brings his hands up and wipes away his tears, and leaves them there for too long, covering his face.
“Really,” I say, pulling his hands down. His tears are mostly gone.
He smiles. “Okay.”
“Your grandma sounds like she was amazing.”
“She was.”
We lie there in silence for a few minutes, staring at each other. The tears stop running down his face.
“Have you ever done the trees into stars thing?” I ask him.
“The what?”
“Here, turn onto your back and look up at the trees and the light coming through.” We both shift onto our backs. “Now unfocus your eyes a little, and imagine that the leaves are actually the background. They’re the darkness, and the light coming through is stars. Like full galaxies, not just little winking ones far away. Like you’re right under the Milky Way.”
“I … oh,” he says, gasping slightly. “I see.”
We lie there, staring at full galaxies that don’t exist, our hands intertwined, until Hudson sits up suddenly. “We’re going to be late for lunch,” he says.
“Oh, right.” Attendance is required at all meals. Last summer someone slept through lunch on a Saturday and the whole camp had to go on a search for him. He ended up getting teased pretty mercilessly once he was found, and Joan was very angry.
We quickly put our shirts back on and start hiking back. Downhill goes faster than uphill, but we still go quickly enough that we’re not talking, and still burst into the cafeteria five minutes late. The whole camp looks up at us. Joan glares. George, Ashleigh, Brad, and Paz all snicker.