SPOTLIGHTING
I was eighteen when I saw Paul again. It was my senior year, and my folks insisted we drive the three hours to do a campus tour where my dad used to teach, where Paul’s father still taught. I had no intention of applying. It wasn’t like I had the grades to get in. I didn’t tell Paul any of this. Instead I listened to him talk about his own college plans, how he had his eyes set on Duke or maybe Georgetown, and not some townie school. I mean, it’s okay as a backup school, he kept saying. At least the sorority chicks are hot. He shot me a grin. It’d only been eight years since we’d last seen each other, but his face had changed so much; I supposed mine had also. But I was still scrawny while he’d somehow muscled up. To think we used to be mistaken for twins.
We were in his parents’ old Volvo on the way to pick up his girlfriend, Marti, and her cousin, Danielle. I didn’t want to go, but Paul insisted. Besides, it was better than listening to my folks suck up to his dad in the hope he’d put in a good word with the admissions staff. We were going to see The Blair Witch Project though we’d both seen it. Paul said scary movies make girls horny and talked about how far he’d gone with Marti. I still wasn’t sure what third base meant—a blow job? Fingering? I knew first base meant kissing, though I’d never gotten that far.
Danielle was a dirty blonde; Marti, a brunette. Paul always liked brunettes. He used to say I was cliché for liking blondes. This was when we were ten and he started calling everything cliché. I had to ask my sister what it meant. She had dark hair also, and Paul sometimes asked if I’d seen her naked. That was the summer my dad found out he wasn’t getting tenure, the summer my mom had to pick up extra shifts at Dillard’s. She’d shunt me and my sister off to Paul’s. We’d spend hours there reveling in his new pool—they were the first in the neighborhood with an in-ground—and Paul talked nonstop about how to spy on my sister changing into her swimsuit, whether he could use mirrors, maybe build a periscope, or drill a hole through the linen closet into the bathroom where she’d change. I hadn’t yet told him we were moving.
The theater was nearly empty, and we sat in the back beneath the large air-conditioning vent that blasted chalky air across us. Danielle sat to my right and chewed stick after stick of gum. I kept looking to see where she disposed of the chewed-up pieces, but never did see. To my left, Paul was kissing Marti, had been since the lights went down, as if I wasn’t there at all. Their faces were a confusion beneath their dark hair, almost black in the flickering light of the opening credits. Soon his hand snaked up her shirt; her own hand pressed against his jeans, feeling for the shape of his cock through the fabric. I had a hard-on too, but Danielle didn’t notice. She was putting another stick of gum in her mouth. Her braces glinted, and I wondered if kissing her would cut my lips.
Halfway through, Paul and Marti pulled away from one another, breathless. Marti leaned across Paul and mouthed something to Danielle. Then they rose and sidled their way out to the lobby. Paul gave me his lopsided grin, said, You’ve got to make a move. Put your hand on her leg, like this, and he ran his fingers along the inside of his thigh. His jeans were smooth now. He looked ready to say something else, but we’d gotten to the part of the film where the Blair Witch hunters were panicking in the woods, their flashlights swinging frantically from tree to tree. Paul sank lower into his seat and tugged at his lip the way he always used to. The one girl sobbed into the camera about how scared she was, her face awash in the beam of her flashlight, and I remembered those times when we held flashlights up to our faces or swept the beams down our bodies in the shadows of Paul’s tent. Spotlighting, we called it.
The girls returned to their seats. As soon as Marti sat down, she wrapped her arms around Paul’s neck. He didn’t turn and face her but kept staring straight ahead, his jaw slack, his fingers still pulling at his lip. Marti buried her mouth into his neck, and he shifted toward me until our legs touched. When Danielle offered me some gum, I jumped in my seat. I’d forgotten she was there.
Back in the car, Paul pulled a flashlight from the glovebox and mock-cried, I’m so scared! with the beam flooding his face. I wasn’t scared, I said, but the girls only laughed. Then Paul shined the light in my eyes until I said, Cut it out, as if I was ten again, camping in his backyard, his dad’s Playboys spread out between us. Cut it out, I’d said then, until he laughed and returned the beam to Miss June’s breasts. They seemed to float off the page. He said, Let’s put a spotlight on it, and aimed the flashlight at his erection, then mine. He would measure himself against the length of the flashlight to see if he’d grown and bigger since last time, then he’d ask me to touch it, and I would, softly, as if petting my sister’s hamster.
We dropped the girls off. I waved bye to Danielle while Paul gave a drawn-out kiss to Marti. Then they were gone, and we were heading back to his house. The flashlight sat between us, rattling in the center console. We didn’t speak. He pulled into his neighborhood—my old neighborhood—but in the tight beam of the headlights, everything looked alien. I tried to spot my old house, but perhaps we passed it already, and soon he was pulling into his drive and parking beside my parents’ minivan. Paul turned off the car and picked up the flashlight. He didn’t look at me when he asked, Do you think what we used to do was gay?
Maybe I said no too quickly. Or not quick enough. I said we were just kids and meant it. I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or not.
He turned, his eyes rabbity, the cords in his neck tight. I don’t think either of us breathed. I’ve tried to reconstruct that moment so many times, but I’m still not sure if it was him who leaned forward or me. It was slower, softer than I expected, his stubble a pleasant burr. Nothing like his frantic tonguing of Marti or the way my wife now brushes her lips against mine before saying goodnight. His lips barely parted. I inhaled, smelled his sweat, a sweet, almost briny scent I’ve never smelled since. Then the headlights clicked off and we separated, our nostrils flaring rapidly. I groped for the door handle and stumbled out into the night.
I didn’t hear his door slam shut. I only felt him beside me. He stared straight ahead, up the steps that led to his fenced-in patio. Through the wood slats we could hear muffled conversation and the slosh of the pool. I followed him up the steps, through the gate. My parents sat across from his, a glass table between them. My mother had a tired smile stretched across her face, and my father bobbed his head up and down while Paul’s dad told some story, waving his hands about the same way Paul did. Someone asked how the movie was, and we both said It was ok in unison, and they laughed at how alike we sounded. Like twins, they said. But I didn’t laugh. I just stood there, staring at the pool and how it refracted its underwater light across the side of their house. It lit Paul’s face from below making him appear older then younger then older again. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Paul or his parents or clambering into the back of my parents’ minivan and backing out of the driveway. I only remember staring out the window on the way out of the neighborhood, looking for our old house and not finding it, not finding it anywhere.