Free Across a Green Ocean by Wendy Lee Page B

from the way she dressed at school: torn black shirts, ripped black jeans, boots that looked like she would kick someone’s head in if they looked at her wrong. She convinced Michael to join her in a social experiment, in which they wore their clothes inside out for a week. No one noticed, which Amy said was the whole point. When Amy cut her hair and dyed it black, people said they looked like twins, which they did not bother to dignify with an answer. Aside from the fact that Amy wasn’t Chinese, she was short and her body full of curves that she tried to hide beneath her shapeless dark outfits. She decreed that she and Michael should kiss each other on the cheek, twice, whenever they ran into each other in the halls ( So European, Amy had said). No one seemed to notice that either.
    Early in their junior year in high school, Michael discovered that Amy was in love with him. She had kissed him on the mouth one night, when her parents were out and they’d broken into her father’s liquor cabinet. One moment they’d been laughing about Courtney Snell’s ridiculous answer in social studies class (“Where do Chicanos come from, Courtney?” “Um, Chicago?”), and then Amy pressed her lips so fleetingly to his that he thought he had imagined it.
    “Did you feel anything?” Amy asked hopefully.
    Michael shook his head, although he had felt something, besides the burn of bourbon from Amy’s lips. What he had felt was disappointment. He had been disappointed that it had been Amy who had kissed him, not Peter Lawrence, the slender, brown-haired boy who sat in front of him in math class and smelled not only like gym socks, but something that made his very skin tingle. The other time he’d felt that sensation, like an itch somewhere that couldn’t be scratched, was when he was twelve and had been spying over the fence next door. Scott Bradley, Amy’s brother, who was Emily’s age, was swimming in the pool. His body looked long and tantalizing beneath the surface, the points of his shoulder blades glinting through the water. Just then Michael’s father, coming home from work, saw Michael at the top of the fence—although not what he was looking at—and yelled at him for doing something so dangerous. Michael had jumped down from the fence, twisting his ankle in the process.
    After the kissing fiasco, Amy became obsessed with boys at school who would prove to be just as unattainable: guys who had girlfriends, jocks who would never look twice at her. Michael would accompany her to dances where she’d hope to steal some boy away from his date, but it would go off badly, and she’d drink too much spiked punch, and the evening would end with her in the girls’ room, throwing up, with Michael holding back her hair. Why are you so nice to me? she’d say in between sobs. Because I can’t be anything else to you, he’d wanted to reply.
    Amy was the only person from that part of his life who knew he was gay. She’d known from that night when he was sixteen, when he’d had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. She hadn’t treated him any differently since then, except to get a little jealous of the female friends he made when he went away to college; especially Shannon Krist, whom he’d brought home once, even though he told her that Shannon thought she might be a lesbian. Over the years, Amy grew into herself, letting her hair return to its regular strawberry blond, although it was still spiky and short; keeping only a few tasteful piercings; dressing in her own geometric, angular designs that would cause people to stop her in the street and ask her where she bought her clothes.
    Now, Amy asked, her eyes half-lidded from the pot, “Do you wish you’d ever talked to your father about what happened that night?”
    “That was almost ten years ago. He probably forgot about it.”
    “But you haven’t.”
    “Doesn’t make any difference. Maybe it wouldn’t have if I’d reminded him while he was around. He