Free The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli

michael stipe says and it’s true.
    Boydyboy: still with the stipe. somethings never change. i need to log off now, i’m expecting a call.
    OwOw0: yeah. good luck finding your someone.
    Boydyboy: you too.

 
    But like I said, I have no idea. Everything I believe
about it now is filtered through my own unreliable memories of hastily typed
words read off a blurry laptop screen when I was going on seventeen. Maybe it
was all in my head. Maybe he’s married to a woman now, a woman who had once
been the girl he was talking about when I believed he was talking about me.
    Maybe, but still—I have what I had. I had the tingles,
I had the desperation, the butterflies, the lust, the happiness. I had the
fuck-up, I had the miscommunication, I had the fallout, and I had the broken
heart. That’s what first love looks like for almost everyone, right? No, I
never kissed him; no, we never connected that way. But it’s hard to deny that
these were all the moments of love, and there were a lot of them. Love is a
perpetual discovery, and for part of it you’re discovering that it’s coming to
an end.

 
    ***

 
    After his name disappeared from my buddy list that last
time, I signed off. “Goodbye!” I wound up the cord and shut down the computer.
In bed I let my mind wander.
    It wandered to Boyd and me, back when the ampersand was at
its most heart-shaped. We were in physics class, a few weeks into junior year,
outdoors on the football field, sitting on a modified seesaw attached to a
motorized turntable Mr. Gruber was using to demonstrate centrifugal force. I
was on one end of the spinning plank, Boyd was on the other; we’d been paired
because we had similar mass. While we spun, everything was a blur of nonsense
and confusion—classmates’ onlooking faces like
some kind of abstract painting; the school, bleachers, trees just smudges that
didn’t seem to fully exist. It looked like my life, a confused mess. But across
from me, almost within reach, was Boyd, crystal clear, laughing, the only thing
that made sense in the spinning.
    But it couldn’t stay that way; it was simple physics. When
the force got too strong we both tumbled backward off the plank and went
careening in opposite directions onto the grass.

 
    OwOw0: I felt pretty nauseaus after that
spinning thing today..... Still do...... *blows chunks*
    Boydyboy: yeah that was so nauseating... but fun though!
    OwOw0: Yeah, it was fun.
    Boydyboy: do you want to do it again monday ??
    OwOw0: Hahaha . I don’t know if i can!
    Boydyboy: you have to. i want to do it
and i’ll only do it with you Ollie bolly bo bolly .
    OwOw0: Fine, then yes.
    Boydyboy: :-)
    OwOw0: If I can handle it first period.
    Boydyboy: Baby :-)
    OwOw0: hey my mom needs to use the phone. Will you still be online
later? I can’t promise itll be soon with all these
fucking disconnects
    Boydyboy: If you’re here i’ll be on.
    OwOw0: Cool.

 

 
    (Age
18)

 
    THE WEIGHT LIFTER

 

 
    Knuckles
knocked the hollow door as my father’s thin shadow slid across my bedroom wall. I was hidden b ut not hiding, not exactly . I was lying on the floor be sidemy bed, on my stomach like a kid, writing—re-writing,
re-re-writing—the speech I hoped would make me a man. It was afternoon,
August, the day before college.
    “Ollie,” I
heard him say, “I was thinking—” He stopped when he didn’t see me in the
room.
    I pushed pen,
paper, clipboard into the newly empty space under my bed and raised one hand
over the mattress to signal my presence.
    “Oh,” he said,
coming closer and peering across the mattress at me, “I— What are you
doing?”
    “Pushups,” I
said, doing two and counting “Seventy-four, seventy-five” before standing up
and shaking out my arms. And from this I knew of course I’d been hiding.
    “Good warm-up,”
he said. “Lots of stuff to move in the morning.”
    He meant the
boxes, the duffel bags, the big Tupperware containers bulging so much I had to shut them with