Juan

His name was Juan, and you loved him. You loved how wide his smile was, and how brightly his teeth shone against his beautiful dark skin. You loved the sound of his laugh, deep and lyrical. You loved how the top of your head only came halfway up his chest, and sometimes he would use your head as an armrest before sliding his arm down and wrapping it around your shoulders. You loved how his eyes, the colour of rain-soaked earth, made you feel like maybe your own brown eyes weren’t as plain and unlovely as you’d always thought, and you loved how they never looked anywhere but directly into yours. You loved how the conversations you had in the small, seemingly forgotten corner that was the study hall classroom, the only space you ever shared, were always intensely personal. Not in content, but in the way you spoke. Every moment spent with him was fiercely intimate.

The first time he asked you on a date, it was like being hit in the face with a brick. It was like living your whole life as a fish and then waking up at the bottom of the ocean one day to discover you didn’t have any gills.

It was the first time you’d seen him looking like that – wide-eyed and small-mouthed. Like a dog with its ears flat and its tail between its legs.

“You want to date me?” you asked. He nodded. “N-no.”

And then you were alone in the hallway, alone with the not-quite-white and not-quite-teal floor tiles and the harsh florescent lights and the mural of the not-politically-correct school mascot, and what just happened?

You were afraid to see him again. He’d been so different, so timid and shy where usually there was nothing but confidence, and you’d said the wrong thing. You had made him disappear. You didn’t understand. Didn’t understand his question, didn’t understand his feelings, didn’t understand why your answer had made him run. You just wanted what you already had.

The next day, you approached the study hall door with fear rising like bile in your gullet and your breath trapped in your chest, but you opened the door there he was – wide smile and easy attitude, like the day before had never happened. Maybe it hadn’t. And when you spoke to him, he replied with the same sonorous voice, and when he laughed it was still lyrical, and when he looked at you it was the same piercing eye contact that made you feel as though he were the only person in the world who had ever really seen you.

The second time he asked you on a date, you thought he was joking and laughed, then asked him for help with your math homework. When he didn’t show up to study hall for the next three days, you thought he must be sick. When he finally did come back, he didn’t smile and barely answered when you spoke to him. He wouldn’t look anywhere near you for a week more, and you still did not understand.

It was quite by coincidence that Noah transferred into Juan’s and your study hall the day after you laughed. You were languishing without Juan’s companionship as he avoided you, so when Noah said hello, you latched onto his attentions like a drowning person to a life ring. He was in your German class, although you’d never spoken. But it gave you something to talk about, some small connection with which to forge the beginnings of a friendship. You soon learned you were both taking Algebra II as well, but you had it second period and he had it fifth. You were slightly better than Noah at German, but he was far better than you at algebra. Together you practiced verb conjugation and rudimentary conversation, and he helped show you how to solve for x and plot on a graph. He introduced you to Rammstein and South Park. He’d tell you jokes, and you’d laugh. None of your conversations were intimate, and his eyes always seemed to focus on your mouth.

The day Juan pulled up a chair and said he loved that South Park episode Noah was talking about, you grew so lightheaded you thought surely you were about to faint. His lips kept moving but your head was swimming and your ears didn’t seem to work. Your mouth went dry and your heart was hammering so hard it hurt and he was so close you could reach out and touch him if you wanted, but you thought your fingers might be fire and you didn’t want to set the peace ablaze. You tried instead to tell him without words how ecstatic you were that he was there again, but somehow his eyes always seemed to miss yours.

Study halls with Juan and Noah together were always more like study halls with Noah and not like study halls with Juan, but at least Juan was there. Even if everything you loved about your time with Juan before was gone, at least time with him existed at all. And still, every now and then he’d catch your eye and it was the same as before – just as fierce, just as tender, just as intimate.

Noah gave you his number so you could text him with any algebra questions. You had algebra questions. The class was on Chapter 10 in the textbook and you still couldn’t understand past Chapter 3. Sometimes he’d help you with your homework, or sometimes you’d just vent about how frustrated you were at the discordance between the amount of effort you put into understanding algebra and the results those efforts yielded. And sometimes you’d just talk about what happened in German class that day, or the latest South Park episode you’d watched. Sometimes you’d just tell each other about your day. It felt nice to have someone with whom you could have these conversations, even when you weren’t with them at school. It made you feel important. It made you feel like somebody actually cared. It made you feel like you had a friend, a real friend. Because you did. For once, you had a friend who wanted to talk to you past 2:30 in the afternoon.

We should hang out sometime. You stared at the text in awe, too shocked to respond for several minutes. It had been about two months since Noah had joined your study hall, and now he wanted to hang out. You had a friend who wanted to spend time with you outside of school. No one had wanted to do that with you since the sixth grade. 

Yeah, totally.

Cool, how about Saturday, my house?

And just like that you had actual plans to hang out with an actual friend. It was surreal, it was too good to be true. There had to be a catch, but you couldn’t find it. Every morning that week woke you in a cold sweat, the same nightmare replaying night after night.

In the dream, you would arrive at Noah’s house bubbling with excitement, thrilled to be hanging out with your for-real friend. But when you got there, all 683 students who attended your high school would be at his house – a hundred or so inside, the rest spilling out his front doorway and onto his lawn or hanging out of windows or sitting on the roof, all staring at you as you arrived, all laughing. Look at her; she thought someone really wanted to hang out with her! they’d say. She thought he was actually her friend! Dream-you would start crying, which only made them laugh harder, and you’d wake up with wet cheeks, feeling like you were about to throw up.

Saturday finally arrived, nothing but blue skies and sunshine. The high would be 76º, according to your phone. You washed the nightmares off your cheeks, brushed your teeth and hair, and threw on shorts and a t-shirt with a growing pit in your stomach, all but convinced your nightmares were mere hours from becoming reality. At the very least, you were about to discover what the trap actually was, even if your current fears were a little unrealistic. Or maybe you were just about to hang out with a friend. You tried not to let it, but that small thought spread, overshadowing your fears, getting your hopes up when you knew they were about to be dashed.

By the time you informed your mother it was time to leave and climbed into the passenger seat of her car, your mind was abuzz with questions and anticipation rather than fear. It’d been so long; what did people do when they hung out? Would it be like study hall, or would you do more than just converse? And what did people talk about besides homework? You couldn’t think of a single topic that wasn’t related to math or German, despite having talked (or texted) with Noah already about a wide range of subjects over the past month and a half, many of which had nothing to do with school at all. By the time your mother pulled into Noah’s driveway, you were a bouncing bundle of anxiety and thrills. No one was here to laugh at you, and you felt stupid for being so worried about such a scenario. In fact, all of the many fears your mind had so carefully cultivated over the past week seemed silly and faraway. Now you were only anxious about making a good impression, about knowing what to say and do during this casual hangout with your friend.

Your mother backed out of Noah’s driveway and he invited you inside. You removed your shoes inside the doorway and he told you your socks were adorable. They had cat faces on them and were indeed adorable. You said thanks and the vice you hadn’t quite realized was wrapped around your chest loosened a notch or two.

He gave you a quick tour of his house, asked if you wanted something to drink. No thank you, you said.

“Have you seen this one before?” he asked, slipping the DVD into the player, not showing you the title. Not knowing how to answer, you didn’t. You took a seat on the loveseat instead, your right leg pressed firmly against the arm of the sofa, the wool-polyester blend making your legs itch just a little. He joined you on the loveseat and pressed ‘play’ on the remote. You hadn’t seen Shaun of the Dead before, but you spent the entire film trying to figure out why his thigh was pressed up against yours when there was so much empty space to the left of him.

“What’d you think?” he asked as the credits rolled.

“Yeah,” you said. “Awesome, it was great.”

He asked you what your favorite part was, but began describing his before you had to answer. You made sure to smile and nod a lot, not taking in his words any more than you had the movie. His thigh was still touching yours and you still did not understand why.

Noah stood up, and you followed suit. You took a step back as well, regaining your personal space. He suggested you get some ice cream. It was only a mile down the road, he said, so his mother wouldn’t have to drive you. “No one to babysit us,” he said with a laugh and a twitchy smile. You didn’t want ice cream, but you were too busy wondering why adult supervision was a thing to be avoided to object.

That night as you sat alone in your bedroom, you could still feel his fingers slide between yours as you walked to and from the ice cream stand, and your lips were still buzzing from the kiss he’d given you goodbye. You’d jumped when his hand first made contact with yours, and he’d given a nervous laugh and grabbed your hand before it could jump away again. His palm was sweaty and his fingers felt massive and invasive between yours, and you hadn’t known what to say.

He’d ordered two soft-serve vanilla cones and paid one-handed. You took your cone and sat across from him at the picnic table behind the ice cream stand, but he got up and moved so your thighs were touching once more. His fingers were slightly sticky on the walk back, and you could still feel his melty ice cream in the valleys of your fingers even after you’d washed them.

Your mother was waiting to pick you up by the time you got back from the ice cream stand, chatting in the driveway with Noah’s mother. He didn’t let go of your hand.

“I guess this is goodbye for now, then,” he said as you joined your mothers in the driveway.

“Yeah,” you said.

“I’ll text you when you get home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I had fun with you today.”

“Yeah.”

And then he kissed you. His lips were still cold from the ice cream and you were too surprised to even consider the fact that he probably expected you to kiss him back. Out of all the scenarios for which you had prepared, this was never one of them.

And so with sticky fingers and buzzing lips, you sat on your bed desperately scrolling through old texts as your phone was flooded with new ones, wracking your brain trying to figure out which words he’d used exactly when he invited you over, and how you had somehow unwittingly, unwillingly acquired a boyfriend.

You will never forget the last words Juan ever spoke to you: “How come you’ll go out with him but not with me?”

It would be years, nearly a decade, before you discovered the word “asexual” outside of a 7th grade science class, years before you understood the answer he stormed off before you could give, leaving you alone in the empty hallway with the not-quite-white and not-quite-teal floor tiles and the harsh florescent lights and the mural of the not-politically-correct school mascot, alone in the exact same place he’d left you alone when you told him no and you did not understand, except this time maybe you did.

That night you lay awake in your bed, whispering to the darkness that was not Juan, “Because you let me say no.”