Wide Awake Read Free

to tell him it was a wonderful mix, but I couldn’t. We sat there on the floor for a moment, our problem sets spread out like kindergarten drawings between us. I had liked him for so long without being able to say it. Now here we were, the pulleys and the weights and the inclinations moving into their delicate balance, that equilibrium of desire, awaiting the conversion of thoughts and feelings into words and movements.
    My leg shook. He reached over and placed his hand on it. And I…I moved my hand and settled it onto his. He looked into my eyes to see if it was okay, then leaned in and kissed me. Once, softly. I closed my eyes, stopped hearing, shut down all my senses but the nerve endings in my lips. Felt him there. Felt the space after. Felt my own smile as I opened my eyes.
    He loosened me then, with a gentle “Can I kiss you again?” My caution eased. The bad tension turned into good tension. He raised his hand so that my ear was in the crook of his palm. The edge of his hand settled close to my pulse. I moved my own palm up, matched him. We were both so serious, and we were both so smiling. Our homework crushed beneath us.
    We kissed in whispers for minutes, our bodies finding hundreds of ways to hold each other. All the while, the screen unfolded the world to us wordlessly. When we let go, we saw a familiar figure stepping up to a podium, green flags waving in a sea in front of him.
    “Look, it’s Stein,” Jimmy said. He pressed a button and the sound came on. We rested into each other and watched.
             
    “There is no such thing as equality for some . Equality must be for all . That is what freedom is. That is what liberty is. No human being is born more or less important than any other. How can we allow ourselves to forget that? What simpler truth is there?”
             
    As the crowd cheered, I looked at Stein’s husband, Ron, standing by his side.
    “Ron’s pretty cute, isn’t he?” I said. “I mean, for a forty-five-year-old.”
    But Jimmy wasn’t interested in that (although later he’d tell me that, yes, he thought Ron was adorable, especially when little Jeffrey and Jess were around). Instead, he asked me, “Do you believe he can actually do it?”
    I knew Jimmy’s own answer was yes. But at that moment, I had to tell him what I really thought.
    “I’m not sure,” I confessed. “I really don’t know.” I paused for a moment, feeling I had more to say. “I want to believe it. I want to believe there are enough people in this country who agree with us and want to do the right thing. I want to believe that the Reign of Fear is over, and people want true equality and fairness. But I guess…well, I guess I’m still afraid that people’s minds can’t open that far.”
    I was worried that Jimmy was going to correct me, that he was going to say I didn’t believe enough. Instead, he kissed me again and said, “Well, we’re going to have to try, aren’t we?” And I knew he was talking about politics, and I also knew he was talking about us.
    So I said yes twice. I didn’t promise him anything, but I promised myself. I was going to try.
    Now here I was, over a year later, sitting in Mr. Davis’s class, in a changed world that our teacher was in no rush to recognize. I kept looking at Jimmy, but he was concentrating on the front of the room, waiting to see what would be thrown our way.
    I expected Mr. Davis to yell. But instead he started quietly.
    “This is a day,” he began, “that will live in infamy. Our country has been attacked from within.”
    He stopped for a moment and looked at all of us. He appeared genuinely horrified—sleepless, haunted, angry.
    “I’ve had it up to here with this so-called
equality,
” he continued, saying the last word as if it were a curse. “It was bad enough when we called it
tolerance.
This isn’t a question of
rights.
This is a question of
right.
What next? Are we going to start having serial killers elected as