Because this guy I’d just figured out was nice was probably going to die of AIDS.

  * * *

  A Christmas Eve call with CJ:

  “I thought you were dancing tonight?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I took the night off. The idea of spending Christmas Eve dancing for strangers struck me as a little too depressing. Thought instead I’d sit in the apartment alone, since Jack is off skiing.”

  “Yes, that sounds way less depressing.”

  He laughed. “Well, at least I’m not also waiting for a test result that will tell me if I’m going to die before I turn twenty-five.”

  I couldn’t laugh back.

  “Nothing?” he asked. “C’mon. Give me something. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.”

  “Yeah, not my favorite Christmas Eve, either.”

  “I thought you’re Jewish?”

  “Yeah, but usually I go over to Deena’s. Her family does stuff. But I can’t be with her right now. She’d know in half a second that something was wrong, and I’d spill the beans, and I just can’t handle that.”

  He sighed. “Let’s play a game.”

  “What’s the game?”

  “Future Christmas wishes.”

  “Ooh, I like that.”

  “You have thirty seconds to describe the perfect Christmas in ten years. The best one wins.”

  Immediately, despite everything, despite the fact that our lives had just become somehow existential, my thought was, With you. You and me. Someplace safe. Somewhere where death cannot get us.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. Well, I guess I live in Los Angeles, because my memoir, ghostwritten by Jackie Collins, has been turned into a movie, with Tom Cruise playing me, of course. I’m sitting in my swimming pool, looking out at the Hollywood Hills. My house is huuuuge, and there’s a big Christmas tree, with zillions of presents under it. The phone is ringing off the hook because Entertainment Tonight and People want to interview me, but I’m like, No, not again. And my houseman, Thomas, brings me hot chocolate by the pool and asks if there’s anything else he can do for me before he heads up to bed, and then the gay porn music starts, and, you know … duh dah duh dah.”

  I laugh. “Sounds perfect.”

  “Okay, yours.”

  “Okay,” I say, finishing up the fry I was chewing. “I have a lover and we’re happy. We live in the mountains somewhere, maybe Vermont. We have a nice house and maybe a dog, and because it’s Christmas Eve, we invite our neighbors over to sing carols by the tree. I’m still Jewish but celebrate Christmas as a national holiday, of course. There’s a lot of laughter and warmth, I guess. Yeah.”

  He was quiet for a while, and we shared a nice silence, all things considered.

  “I like yours better,” he said.

  January 1988

  Worst Christmas and New Year’s ever.

  Until it was the best.

  I rang in the New Year with Dick Clark and the Times Square ball dropping, while CJ kicked off 1988 dancing on a dingy stage, trying to move his feet quicker than a disease that either was or wasn’t inside him, barely missing him thus far, or already silently scheming to take him out.

  On New Year’s Day, I went to Deena’s for the world’s most awkward brunch.

  “So what’s actually going on with you?” she asked over mushroom frittatas and mimosas. “You’ve been ultra-weird all break. Is this some sort of CJ drama? How come I think it absolutely is? You weren’t like this before CJ.”

  I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  “But it isn’t, is it? Some shit is going down, and you used to tell me everything, and now you tell me nothing, and it sucks. Are we even still friends?”

  My heart pulsed. I didn’t want to lose Deena—any more than I already had, anyway. Ever since that night at the Gaiety, something had come between us, and it wasn’t actually CJ. But the idea that I could lose her if I told her what was actually going on was too much.

  “My dad’s best friend has HIV,” I said.

  She stopped chewing. “What?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve sort of been leaning on him because I need some adult advice about some things, and he told me. It’s not exactly the best Christmas gift, knowing that. My dad doesn’t even know, and that’s kind of hard to keep from him.”

  “Jesus, Micah,” she said. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. It all fucking sucks. Did you know Ronald Reagan didn’t even say the word AIDS for years while tens of thousands of people died from it? All because those people are mostly gay or drug users.”

  She wiped her mouth on a napkin and seemed to consider this. “I feel so bad for people who got AIDS way back before we knew how it was transmitted. That’s so horrible. At the same time, can you believe people are still getting it? It’s like, if there’s a disease that could kill you, maybe keep it in your pants, right?”

  Sometimes my hair caught fire. Like I could feel my scalp heating to a scald, and my choices were to say something or to say nothing.

  And I always said nothing, because in a way she was right? And in a way totally wrong. But it wasn’t something I could explain in simple, logical words. The level of wrong was blistering my forehead, and if I even said a single word to convey that, our friendship could end.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  * * *

  That afternoon Napoleon called. Unlike with CJ, I’d been able to tell him in school that I’d been grounded.

  I just hadn’t bothered to tell him when I was ungrounded.

  “What’cha up to?” he asked now.

  “Nothing,” I said, wishing I hadn’t picked up. This was a call I didn’t need today, given that tomorrow I was going to find out if I had the virus that caused AIDS.

  “You wanna come over? My parents are out.”

  And I suddenly felt so guilty, as if the weight of the world were on my chest. Like poor Napoleon, who I may have given AIDS. Except that, in reality, he could have given it to me and I didn’t even have the guts to say anything about it. “I can’t today,” I said. “Still grounded.”

  “Oh well. No big deal.”

  Yeah, I thought. No big deal at all.

  * * *

  I went down to the Lortel an hour before showtime that night to see Felicia for the first time since everything had gone down.

  “Oh, honey,” she said when I told her what had happened, and she came over and sat next to me and put her arm around me.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re almost certainly gonna be okay. I mean, have you been doing things you haven’t told me?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t told her specifically about Napoleon and Lucas, and I wasn’t going to tell her now because if she freaked out right now, honestly? I wasn’t sure I could take it.

  “Call me as soon as you find out either way, okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. Then I asked, “How’s Walter?”

  She sighed deeply and looked at the floor. “Hospice care,” she said.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes, and then her face contorted, and suddenly Felicia, my rock, was crying. “He looked so scared when we left last night. Like, he was pleading with us not to leave him there with the hospice worker, and we kept delaying leaving, but at some point, you know, we had to go. I can’t get that look in his eyes out of my head. It’s absolutely haunting me.”

  For the first time since I’d known her, I put my arm around Felicia.

  “You’re a really good friend to him,” I said.

  “Yeah. But I can’t fix it. I want to be able to fix it, and I can’t.”

  I squeezed her into me and said nothing, and for a full minute I let her cry, which made my eyes tear up, and I wondered if all the death and despair would ever come to an end.

  Finally, I spoke up. “Is there anything I can do?”

  She put her head on my shoulder. “You’re growing up, kiddo. We got this. Me and Raina and several other friends have put together a schedule, and we have it covered. His folks are around, too. That’s really sweet of you to offer, though. Thank you.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” I said.

  * * *

  I took the subway up to the Gaiety. The lady buzzed me in as if I were now a regular.

  “Did I ever tell you the Italian tourist story?” CJ asked after we’d hugged. I was backstage with him before he went on. Sarge, this steroided-looking guy about ten years older than us with pronounced bags under his eyes, was busy putting tight jeans on his stocky legs, over his G-string.

  “Oh good, a story,” I said.

  “Yeah, this is a good one. I’m sixteen. I meet an older guy on the street after school. We’re talking on the corner down from our building—I know, not a great idea—about meeting up later in Columbus Park. I look to my left and see my mom walking toward us, coming home from work. This was about three months before she got sick. I panic. I tell the guy and he says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a good actor.’

  “So my mom, who definitely has seen us, walks toward us with a blank face, and the guy, in this ridiculous accent, says, ‘Thank-a you for the directions, signor.’ It’s so fake, so cheesy! He walks off and I walk with my mom toward our building and she says nothing. Not a thing. We take the elevator up. Not a thing. And nothing later, when I made some stupid excuse for going out.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. It’s interesting. She just gave up on me, which wasn’t ideal, because I actually loved my mom a lot. And then she got sick, and she went fast, and she left me with Jack. And Jack was okay, but the gay thing was not his favorite when he found out. You met him. Marlboro Man. The first time I told him, he said right away he had no problems with it. I made a joke. I said, ‘I guess now you’ll know I’m fantasizing about Terry Bozzio and not Dale.’ He laughed and we went and threw the football. Then we didn’t talk again for six months. Seriously. I was sixteen, and for six months he gave me the silent treatment. This was back when Mom was already checked out, but before she got sick. It was like living in an emotional vacuum. So I dropped out of school and started just living. Met Carl, who was my boyfriend for a couple months after I turned seventeen. He was thirty. Nice guy. Still talk on the phone sometimes.”

  The story made me want to cry out. Want to scream. I could do neither, because here we were, backstage at a strip club. In the real world, where things like that happened to people all the time, apparently.

  “Wow,” I said.

  CJ limbered up his upper body with stretches. “Well, I’d better make a lot of money tonight,” he said.

  “Why? You need some new records?”

  He shook his head. He stretched his leg on the makeup counter and bent into it. He touched his chin to his knee. “I need a new place to live.”

  “Oh! Moving out?”

  He turned and lowered his voice. His head was still down near his leg, and I leaned in closer, painfully aware of his beautiful body and its proximity to my mouth.

  “I told Jack about the test. He told me if I’m positive, I’d better find a place to live. I decided that means if I’m negative, I’d better as well. That’s not a home. Not anymore.”

  I felt like crying. I felt like screaming. And I felt if I did either, no one would hear me.

  What would become of CJ? What would happen to me if I were positive? In what world was this fair?

  And unlike every other time I’d thought something like this, something about the unfairness of it and the closeness of finding out made me do something I’d never done before.

  A tear fell from my left eye. Then another one. Then my right eye. I didn’t even rub my eyes. It was like too much. I let them fall.

  CJ’s face turned and he tightened his mouth, and I was sure he was gonna call me a pansy or something. But instead, a tear fell from his right eye, and our eyes caught and we stared into each other and cried for ourselves, and for our world.

  I wished there were an adult we could go to who would make it all better. But our president wasn’t doing anything, and my mother and my father didn’t know I was being tested, and Jack didn’t care, and Rick had the disease, and Felicia was there, but she couldn’t fix it all.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you, Micah.”

  My world sighed and stopped spinning so chaotically. I looked at CJ. Really looked at him. Here was a guy who had seen some things, and I couldn’t make it all better, but I could at least try. And mostly, all I could do was think: Me! He loves me!

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  I leaned in and kissed his lips, and slowly he stood, and I rose with him, and we put our arms around each other and it was sensory overload and I felt I could explode into a million stars and cry out in gratitude, even if God had brought this horrible disease here, because he had brought me CJ. My CJ. Finally, mine.

  The kiss went long, and I took the part of my brain that could imagine virus particles in everything and sent it away. Because maybe I had the virus, maybe he did, but a kiss wouldn’t transmit it, and this was bigger than a virus.

  This was love.

  “Why me?” I whispered into his mouth.

  I could feel his mouth curl into a smile, and mine curled, too.

  “Because you’re so … you. You’re kind. You’re earnest. You’re incapable of artifice. I used to have fantasies of the kind of guy I’d marry. You’re him. You’re the only one who’s ever known me. And stayed. You’re my best friend. And also, you have no idea how cute you are, which is so freakin’ sexy.”

  “Don’t go on tonight,” I said. “Just stay here with me, okay?”

  “I have to go on. But tonight I’ll be dancing just for you. ’Kay?”

  Please tell me this is forever, I thought. Please tell me there are no takebacks. Because there could never be any takebacks from me. I was fully hooked on CJ. I had been for what felt like a long, long time.

  “Promise me,” he said. “No matter what happens tomorrow, we will stay for each other. I can’t handle the idea of you going. Like, I truly can’t.”

  “I promise,” I said. “With my whole heart.”

  January 1988

  After my parents went to work and I did a good amount of pacing, I called GMHC to get my test results.

  “Code number?”

  “Um. What? My name is Micah and—”

  “Don’t give me your name. Never give your name. There are lists. If you’re positive, you don’t want to be on that list. Look at the slip of paper you were given. There’s a five-digit code number.”

  “Oh, um. Sorry.” My heart was pounding in my ears. I told him the number.

  “Okay, hold, please.”

  I held. For an eternity. Or for three minutes. It was hard to tell. My entire body was shaking. The only thought I had was what it would be like if he said those words: You’re positive. HIV-positive. You have HIV. What would happen to my life.

  “Thanks for holding. Please state your five-digit code again.”

  I did.

  Silence. Finally: “Negative.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.”

  “Stay that way. Use a condom. Every time. Hear?”

  “Yes. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks.”

  I got off the phone and I jumped in the air, feeling lighter than I’d felt in a while. And then I cried. I cried because it could have been positive. I cried because CJ’s still might be positive. I cried for every person who had ever dialed those numbers and heard the word positive. I cried for Rick. I cried for my mom, and my dad, and the tears they would have shed had my test gone the other way.

  I called CJ.

  No one answered. I tried not to read too much into that. It was six minutes after the hour, and my call had taken a minute less, but that didn’t mean anything, right? That was insane thinking, right? He might not have called yet. Last time he didn’t even call for his results.

  So I hung up and called Rick.

  “Oh, thank God,” Rick said after I told him. “And CJ?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Okay. Fingers crossed. He’s gonna be fine. I know it.”

  God, did I hope so. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m okay. I’ve had nothing. Nothing at all. Not even swollen glands, which is a good sign. This disease is weird. It’s been around six years since it was discovered, and lots of people have died, but some people haven’t. You get it and it’s a death sentence because there’s no cure, but maybe it isn’t, because not everyone gets sick.”

  I wondered if this were true. If it was that some people didn’t get sick ever, or that some people hadn’t gotten sick yet.

  My call waiting beeped. Thank God. “Gotta go. It’s CJ, I think.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Rick said. “Talk later.”

  I pressed the hang-up button to switch calls. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Sniffles on the other end of the line.

  Oh no. No. No.

  “Hello?”

  More sniffles.

  “Will you come look for apartments with me?” the small voice on the other line asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, okay.”

  Sobs from the other end of the line.

  No … No.

  I closed my eyes. I shook my head.

  Terminal. Funny word, that. Sounds like a bus station, smells of death.

  More sobs. I couldn’t. I don’t know why. It was like I was watching a movie of my life. CJ. Cee Jay. CJ Gorman. HIV-positive. This was the scene when CJ called to tell me, and I was utterly unable to do the scene. Be the mature boyfriend who says, Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m here with you. I’ll always be here.

  “No one’s gonna want to … touch me. Ever again.”

  “No,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. CJ had the virus. The one Walter had that had aged him forty years in the half year I’d known him. I’d kissed CJ yesterday, and they said that was okay, but who kisses someone with a fatal disease that is spread by bodily fluids? That didn’t make sense.