Read The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories for Free Online Page B

Hehehehhe .... Thanks! How about
the billygoat that showed up at the end? Did you like
him?
    Boydyboy: yeah... especially when he pulled the guy out of the
burning reck ...
    OwOw0: That was the hardest part to animate, making all his legs
move right... not to mention the flames.
    Boydyboy: it was Spielberg level shit thoguh Ollie.
    OwOw0: Hehehe ...*grin*

 
    After that he kept the tape for weeks, forgetting and
forgetting to return it to me. When he finally did, the inner air of the
cassette and its paper box smelled like his bedroom. Like his deodorant and his
t-shirts and his socks and his sheets. In the dark of my own room I inhaled the
Boyd-smell from the inner guts of the cassette and felt my heart swell as well
as my penis—a combination so perfectly yin and yang I knew it was love.
    Sometimes after saying goodnight and logging off I would lie
in bed wondering when all these feelings for Boyd started happening. It felt
recent, but it wasn’t as if I’d just met him; I’d known him since at least
kindergarten and we’d been best friends since third grade. Even before we’d
gained and lost Dwight, even before we’d gained and lost Tyson (who went to St.
Mark’s) and Itchy Chin Mike (who hung with the popular kids now), even before
there was OwOw0 and Boydyboy or even an Internet to dial in
to, there was Ollie and Boyd . It was
how life was. We were juniors in high school now and I knew that at some point
my mind had twirled our “and” into an ampersand, and then started wanting to
shape it into a heart.
    Maybe I couldn’t remember the exact moment it happened
because it was still happening—daily, nightly. Falling in love isn’t like
jumping out of an airplane; it’s not like taking a leap. It’s like opening your
eyes one day and discovering you’re already in the air.

 
    ***

 
    In real life, loving Boyd was an easy mixture of longings
and satisfactions. A longing to see his Jeep pull in beside my Civic in the
school parking lot; a satisfaction when it did. A longing to stand with him in
the lunch line; a satisfaction when he would show up and roll his blue eyes at
lumpy mashed potatoes. Seeing Boyd in school was a fact of life as old as we
were, and the days were reined in—even when we were alone together—by
habit and precedent, by customs and boundaries it felt impossible not to
observe. You know? I wasn’t going to say anything in school. I wasn’t going to
take chances. A boy with a secret is a conservative boy.
    Online—that was new territory, a Wild West into which
a new Ollie & Boyd appeared fresh at age sixteen. Often we were groggy,
silly, giddy there; crude and lewd and snarky. School nights soared past 1:00
or 2:00 a.m., weekend nights went till dawn, when it felt to me like we were
the only two people awake in the world. Online the boundaries were so much
looser, had to be felt out and decided upon one at a time, IM by IM. Online my
longings were untethered from routine. I dared to want more than just to see
him. I dared to want to tell him things. I dared to want him to know things.
The one big thing I increasingly wanted to tell him was beyond any boundary,
even here, but I came out with little things, the saying of which was probably
half the reason the big thing had come to exist in the first place. Things
like:

 
    OwOw0: but anyway i’m feeling sad today I
guess.
    Boydyboy: lets hear it. I’m here..........

 
    I was learning what everyone with a modem was learning:
that communicating through text, going through the middleman of a chat window,
was easier than talking face to face. In short, online I opened up.

 
    OwOw0: well my dad is still cleaning out my grandma’s house and he’s
having some trash guy come and get her mattress, and I had to help him carry it
out into the yard tongiht . It’s been a year since she
died but it seems like last week. I still miss her a lot, it was weird. I didn’t
like seeing my gram’s bed laying in the leaves... I don’t