Page 96 of Sweat

“Mommy says she’s fine, but then she’s always crying.”

“It’s not a sickness, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s nothing you have to worry about. I promise.”

“But what is it?” he presses.

Heaving a sigh, I push myself up to sit facing Mav. “It’s complicated, and it’s really personal. So you can’t tell your grandma, okay?”

“I won’t tell, I swear.”

I tell him to shut the door, and he quickly obeys. Once he’s scrambled back onto my bed, I give him as simple a summation as I can think up on the fly. “Gay is when a boy can only have crushes on other boys, or when a girl can only have crushes on other girls.”

“You have crushes on boys?” he asks.

“I do. Sometimes.”

“How do you know if you have a crush?”

“Well usually, if you have a crush on someone, you think about them a lot, you want to be around them a lot, and you sometimes wanna do special things with them that you don’t wanna do with other people, like holding hands, hugging them for no reason, and giving them presents.”

“What if I don’t have a crush on anyone?”

I chuckle. “That’s fine. Like I said, you don’t need to worry about it right now. A lot of people who are gay don’t figure it out until they’re in high school, or college, or even later, and that’s okay.”

“Are you gonna get married to a boy?”

“One day, maybe. Would that be weird?”

“Kinda, ‘cause if you marry a boy, whose tummy makes the baby?”

“Uhh,” I laugh discomfortingly. “No one would. That’s not how it works.”

“How does it work?”

“That…you’re gonna have to ask your mother.”

After the last of our mid-terms are in, Rowan finally lets me take him to Yard House. Lunch, though, not dinner. There’s a lot less pressure on lunch than there is dinner. Still, when I pick Rowan up, he looks like he tried hard to fix himself up nice. That chain around his neck is a dead giveaway, since he only wears it when he wants to impress. Impressme.Like he even needs to try.

While we wait at the hostess stand to be seated, I finally ask Rowan where he got that chain.

“Just a gift,” he says, “from a guy I used to see in high school.”

A guy?He told me I was his first kiss. Was this guy just a fuck buddy? Were they sucking each other off under the bleachers between math and science class?

Chortling, Rowan slaps my shoulder and says, “You should see your fucking face right now. Jeez, babyface. My social worker gave it to me when I graduated. Can you believe that? On that dude’s shitty salary, he bought me this?”

My relief survives only until I realize why Rowan had a social worker. Whoever his biological family is, they either couldn’t care for him or didn’t want to. I always thought I had it rough with a deadbeat dad, but Rowan didn’t have half of what I did growing up.

I put my hand on Rowan’s back and hope he won’t shrug it off. “That’s really nice of him. He must’ve really liked working with you.”

He scoffs but allows my hand to linger. “Don’t know about that. He was nice, though. Too nice for the shit he was dealing with.”

What shit did you have to deal with?I almost ask, but the hostess returns with two bound menus and takes us to a two-top. She leaves a drink menu for us too, and I wonder if she’d card me if I order an IPA. When Rowan orders an iced tea, I follow suit. Sounds more adult than a Coke, at least.

Eyeing the lunch menu, Rowan asks, “So is this the date where we ask each other about our hopes and dreams, what we’re gonna name our kids, and whether we wanna live in a craftsman or a mid-century modern?”

I know he’s teasing, but my face feels hot at the mere reference to future-plans. “Or we could just playI Spy.”

“I spy a french dip that looks promising.”

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