We’re getting plenty of wolfish looks from other guys. It’s really dark and there isn’t much room to move. Even if he’s your best friend who you always end up fooling around with. There is no way whatsoever to figure things out for someone else. There are times I want to shake him and say, Dude, I’m the baseball player with the jock friends and you’re the sensitive poet who edits the lit mag-shouldn’t I be the one who’s scared? But then I think I’m not being nice, or at least not being understanding, since Ryan has to figure things out for himself. I was a little surprised when Ryan said he’d come, because he insists that his being gay is “nobody’s business.” Where this leaves me I’m not exactly sure.

We just had to look like we knew what we were doing, and that got us in. I don’t have a fake ID or anything, but at a place like Happy Happy on the first night of Pride, it’s not like they check. Luckily, I look older than I am-to the point that an opposing coach once wanted to see my records, to make sure I wasn’t a college-age ringer. “Sweet sixteen and never been risked,” Ryan calls my life-as if he’s been sneaking out any more than I have. Only now it’s the last week of junior year, and it felt like it was time to take that forty-five-minute leap into the city. I’ve stuck to the halls of our high school, living my out-to-everyone life pretty much the same as before everyone (including me) knew. It was my idea to come here, but I never would have been able to do it without Ryan at my side. I don’t know what I want, so mostly I go along. We don’t talk about these moments, and I think Ryan believes if we don’t talk about them, then they haven’t been happening. In the context of our relationship, this counts as logic: We are just friends except for the moments when, oops, we’re more than just friends. If someone he doesn’t like approaches us, he’ll hold my hand to make himself seem taken, but otherwise it’s hands-off. Ryan looks a little bit scared, but he’s trying to hide it under an arched brow and a smoke screen of sarcasm. Ryan and I are underage, underexperienced, underdressed, and completely under the spell of the scene pressing up against us. The whole spectrum is in attendance tonight, breathing in the rainbow air and dancing to the rainbow sounds. In reality, we’re in the Castro, at a club called Happy Happy, kicking it up at the gaygantuan kickoff party for San Francisco’s very own Pride Week. At the same time, Ryan’s parents think he’s in the top bunk in my bedroom, slumbering peacefully after a slow night of video games and TV. Right now, my parents think I’m sleeping on the couch at my best friend Ryan’s house, safely tucked into a suburban silence.

You know me well by nina lacour