Boy Crazy: Coming Out Erotica by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

played hockey in the winter and football in the fall, and fished with his father and uncles in the waters off Mahone Bay.
     
    He must have sensed me watching, because he looked up and turned his head toward where I was hiding. Our eyes met. I froze. He looked mildly surprised, but nonplused, like a lion in a nature film that allows the cinematographer to watch him eat. He smiled and winked. His teeth were very white. His eyes were the color of the sea. Then he turned his head back to the girl. I watched for a few more minutes, then crept away. When I got to the beach road, I ran as fast as I could back to my grandmother’s house.
     
    Over the next few summers of watching him, always from a distance and never under the same circumstances, I would come to know that his face and arms were the only part of him that ever seemed to tan. The summer I was fourteen, I saw Angus with his shirt off behind the shop unloading crates of red Prince Edward Island potatoes that his mother would turn into the most legendary chips on the north shore. Although his neck was burnished, he wore the white ghost of T-shirt that day, and I would wonder why anyone so beautiful would ever cover up any part of his body when the summer sun was so hot. But even then I knew that my desire for him to be shirtless had nothing to do with the heat of the sun.
     

    Every August, my parents brought my sister Eliza and me from our house in the city to stay at Gran’s in Nova Scotia. The house, a rambling, weathered-white clapboard Cape Cod called Flyte Point, dated from the nineteenth century and had belonged to my great-grandparents. After my parents’ divorce when I was eleven, my mother brought us alone. Her family had summered there for the entirety of every member’s living memory. The house was set on a bluff overlooking Shaw Inlet and the green-gray waters of Mahone Bay. The windows and balconies commanded a magnificent view of the sloped, smoke-colored islands in the distance, the closer ones tinted dark green by pine and the shadows cast by ancient rock, punctuated here and there with imperial purple carpets of wild lupine.
     
    After a long day of swimming and sunning at Queensland Beach, Mum, Eliza, and I would load our beach paraphernalia into the back of her Saab and drive back to Prothro along the Lighthouse Route with the windows rolled down. When I was a child, I would often fall asleep in the backseat. In later years, when my father was absent, my mother sat behind the wheel of the car, and Eliza sat in her vacated consort’s seat. My legs grew long enough to warrant Eliza putting her seat forward, and I enjoyed the late-afternoon ride back to town almost as much as the day at the beach. I would lean my head back on the crook of my arm and close my eyes and let the rushing wind cool the sunburn on my face as the wheels of the car kicked up dust and gravel along the ocean road that led back to Prothro.
     
     
    I was sixteen in the summer of 1978. Eliza was nineteen and about to enter her second year at Brown. To her own mind, she’d become impossibly sophisticated over the course of her freshman year. If it wasn’t for the fact that the trip to Nova Scotia and the comforts of Flyte were a welcome—and free—relief from her summer job as a waitress back in the city, she might have given this holiday with Mum and me a wide berth. She had begun to find my presence tiresome, not that she and I had ever been very close.
     
    “I don’t know why I have to work at all this summer,” Eliza had complained to my mother in June after our father had issued his edict that Eliza would have to work a summer job and save her money, even if he was paying her tuition. “Janet and Tommy are going to Europe,” Eliza added, invoking the names of our cousins on my mother’s side. It was a cruel, calculated move on her part. My mother had been jealous of her sister Evangeline for most of their life. Aunt Vangie had always been the more conventionally