Goodbye, Evan

26 (THE END)

For a while, I didn't even consider that I wasn't like other kids.

When my neighbor, a little girl named Rosemary, kissed my cheek and held my hand and told me she wanted to marry me one day, I thought I didn't feel anything because I was just a kid - ten years old, at the time. When my aunt sat me down and gave me a talk about growing up and liking girls and the dreaded s-e-x, I was just mildly uncomfortable and more than a little bored. I didn't think I was any different from anyone else.

I didn't look at girls like all my friends did. They were nice, yeah. I liked being around them, liked playing their games and being friends and making up stories with them. They were pretty and funny and nice, but I still didn't seem to see their appeal. I still didn't wonder if I was different.

Then I got older.

I wasn't allowed to talk to Rosemary's brother for years - she always kept me away from him, saying he would spoil our fun - until I was about eleven years old and Oliver, the first person I might have called friend, chased that cat into the street and narrowly avoided being killed by that car. Rosemary's brother, who neither of us had heard emerge from her house, pulled him out of the way, then pushed him over once he was safe for kicking Rosemary's tabby. When he walked back into the house, he looked at me like I was dirt.

He was my age. I knew, from Rosemary's jealousy, that his name was Matthew.

When Rosemary invited me over a few days later, I became fed up of playing with her dolls went looking for her brother. I don't know why, other than that I hated the way he had looked at me.

He was in his bedroom, furiously tuning the radio. When I knocked on the door, his expression soured even further.

Without any introduction, I said: "I tried to stop Oliver from chasing the cat."

"And why didn't you try harder?"

"He punched me. Twice."

Matthew raised an eyebrow, which I was immediately impressed by. "You should find better friends."

I nodded, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. He was grinning. After that, I started avoiding Rosemary in favour of her brother. I usually found him in his bedroom, listening to the radio and writing something in a notebook that he never let me read. But when I knocked on the door and came in and sat on the end of his bed, he turned off the radio and put down his journal and listened and talked to me. And I decided, privately, that I had found my better friend.

It was like that for two years. Good, normal friendship.

Then, around the time Oliver and my other friends were sharing around photos of teenage girls that they stole from their fathers, I started watching Matthew. In our shared classes, outdoors, while I was at his house. (I never let him come to mine.) During physical education, I tripped up several times due to how fixated I was on him. In school, I noticed how he would chew on his pencil and not listen to the teacher and somehow know all the answers anyway. He was a genius.

I didn't just watch him. I saw other boys, too. To learn about myself, I said. My body was changing, and it wasn't like my parents were going to explain what was going on to me.

That just wasn't the whole truth. When I saw boys in the changing room, I saw that they were loud and stupid and annoying and immature. And I saw that they had different body types and had slightly soft stomachs and hair on their chests and skin, skin, skin. And I couldn't figure out how they made me feel.

When I passed the other boys in corridors, I didn't see backpacks and ties and uniforms and satchels; I saw green eyes and blue eyes and brown eyes and sweaty foreheads and mussed hair and smiling lips that I wanted to touch.