Read Losing It for Free Online

pile of firewood, all jangly and warm, lying on top of me when we were watching a movie in my basement.
    There was the time we were in his small sunlit kitchen with our homework spread out in front of us on the table. We reached a kind of lull, or resting point, in the conversation and he does this
thing
. I sort of see it from the corner of my eye and then look over, and through some glint of intuition I know that he wants me to see as he tosses his pen up into a flip and then expertly catches it. He looks at me with eyes as hopeful and pliable as a baby bird’s, but there’s also a gleam of pride there. This all happened very quickly, but so much occurred to me in that moment—that he had been practicing this move and waiting for a chance to perform it when it would seem most offhand and casual, like he just had this facility with the world, this capability that he wanted me to see. And in that moment he needed my approval so much that it was embarrassing, and instead of doing what I should have done, which was to just
give him that
by some flicker of awe or grin of admiration, I ignored him. And he saw me deciding to ignore him. And I guess youcould say that it wasn’t a big deal, but a part of me knew that it was in these small transactions that unkindness could be most felling. I would have given anything to go back.
    But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part happened a few months later in a hotel pool in Corpus Christi. Because a few of our friends were going, Eddie and I got roped into a beach trip spearheaded by this Christian organization that was always sponsoring events at our high school. Despite the religious underpinnings, we had heard that the beach trip was basically a free-for-all. It was one of the few weekends I didn’t have a swim meet, so we signed up.
    When we got there, however, it wasn’t long before we figured out that it was going to be a super-structured weekend of indoctrination. The second night we were all corralled into a conference room or ballroom-type area at the hotel where we were all staying, and made to watch a Christian punk band play against a bunch of depressingly stacked chairs. Eddie and I managed to sneak out.
    We ran through the carpeted hallways. We made out against the empty breakfast buffet in the deserted dining room. We found a sitting area centered around a display of mystery novels and a small tree in a geometric pot. Hopped up on the warm hotel air and sense of escape, we decided to find the roof. Instead we found the pool.
    It was deserted, bright, humid, and sultry with a shrine-like stillness and a fake, spiky tree in each corner. We tested the water and it was warm. We stripped down to our underwear and climbed in. Eddie got out, sculpted his wet hair into a Mohawk, and cannonballed. We breathed into each other’s mouths underwater.
    At a certain point, we were kissing against the side, sitting on an underwater outcropping, like a stair or a ledge. Eddie pulled back and said to me, “Do you want to?” He said it without any pressure, as if this was just a one-time thing, a toss-off, the perfect crest to our little escape, and not something we’d slowly, languidly been building toward. He said it with warmth, a sense of adventure.
    I spent a lot of time thinking back and trying to trace the exact pathways of logic or reasoning that led me to, after considering it for a few humid seconds, coyly decline. It’s not like I didn’t
want
to—we had been slowly kissing for a while. It could have been that something about the cold lapping of the water, a less comfortable temperature than it had been before, along with a smudged pelican fixture that seemed to be staring at us from the wall combined to tip the atmosphere just enough the wrong way. It could have been that the stampeding intimacy of not only that moment but the whole half hour before was just too much, and I felt that I just needed a second. But what