Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan Read Free Book Online Page B

are both luminous. He’s let go of my hand, and I try to take his back, but he just smiles. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” he asks. So I lean in and kiss him, but it’s not as warm as I thought it would be. When I pull back, he’s still observing. “Is that all?” he asks. It’s cold in the room, from the window, an end-of-summer chill. And I stand there, waiting. Because I do want to kiss him, and I do want to sleep in that bed, but when I kiss him again, it’s the same feeling of incompleteness, and I don’t know what to do with that. “What’s going on?” I ask. And he says, “I guess it’s raining.” And I say, “That’s not what I meant.” Which only causes him to say, “I’m sorry. This was a bad idea. I should have left you alone.” Finally I decide to take a stand, and I say, “I’ll justgo back to the couch.” And he says, “No, you can stay here. We can just sleep.” But there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep next to him like it isn’t weird—there’s no way I want to stay if staying means nothing. I already feel such a deep sense of being lost—something even more fundamental than confusion, the dark equivalent of white noise. So I say I’ll go back to the couch, and he pulls me into a hug again, and we stay like that for a little while, to the point that it’s almost like we’re slow dancing. We just sway on the same spot as time beats out an empty tune. I look out the window, and the sky lights up into a pure view of electricity. Then he lets me go, and I go. I head back to the couch, turn off the news, and try to sleep. In the morning, he offers me breakfast, and I say I really need to get back home. I have my disappointment and confusion, and he has whatever it is that he has. He acts like nothing happened, and I act like nothing happened. We both hold on to that delicate lie.

LIMBO
Jasper
    I felt there was a piece of me missing, a piece that had become so unnerved that it fell away without me feeling it. I didn’t even know what piece it was—I just felt the gap, and knew that whatever it was, it must have been important.
    I didn’t really leave the house. This wasn’t all that different from my original plan for when Mom and Dad were gone, only now there were people calling all the time, checking to see how I was, asking me if I wanted to meet up. It was like some mass email had gone out, and everybody was going out of their way to prove to me that we still lived in a caring universe. But I didn’t want any of it. The good thing about everyone’s post-disaster catatonia was that nobody wanted to be intrusive—they’d express concern or issue an invitation, but they were more than understanding if you said, “I just want to be alone right now.” So that’s what I did. I didn’t rant like a crazy person. I didn’t tell them to fuck off. I didn’t ask them what the point was. I just said I wanted to be alone. And then when I was alone, I ranted like a crazy person, told the world to fuck off, and wondered what the point was.
    The only exception I made was this boy Peter, because hewas so persistent it was almost surreal. He made it seem like us getting together was a belief he had. So finally I told myself what the hell. I made him come out to Brooklyn, because there was no way I was going into Manhattan until it had straightened itself out. My initial impulse to go save it was gone. The more footage they showed on the news, the more horror stories we heard, the less I wanted to be there. I would just stay in Brooklyn and listen to my Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat until the happy times were here again. Or until I had to go to school—whichever came first.
    Mom was calling two or three times a day—it was probably costing them more than their plane tickets to keep in touch. She wanted to come home as soon as possible, but I kept telling her I was fine, that she and my father should stick to the original plan and take care of my grandmother and