She knew how it would go: he wouldn’t like it, her standing here smoking; he would be angry, and would tell her mother. But she didn’t care. She stared the car down and exhaled a cloud of smoke, happy to have him back.

That Daring Young Man

1986

There were times when I saw Frankie as a kind of prodigy. There were other times when he just seemed weird. After coming out at fourteen (before I even realized I was in the closet), he declared himself a gay alien at fifteen, and by the time he turned sixteen he was human again (and still gay), claiming his previous incarnation hadn’t been him but a “proxy clone” marking his place while he explored the galaxy. He wore his clothes backward every third Wednesday throughout his sophomore year because he claimed it helped reset his gravity. He took Grant Jenkins, the drum major, to his junior prom and slow-danced to “I Want to Know What Love Is.” His senior science fair project was a thoroughly illustrated plan to colonize—exclusively with homosexuals and macaws—an as-yet-undiscovered planet called Gaystar. And still, somehow, he managed to make it out of high school without once getting beaten up.

I’d graduated the year before, and because of lousy SAT scores I’d landed at the community college. Frankie, on the other hand, surprised everyone by mopping the cafeteria floor with his college boards and got accepted to Florida State University with a partial scholarship in graphic design. He opted to start in the summer, and two weeks after his graduation he was gone.

When he called home from Tallahassee one night, I carped and complained about how miserable I was, and how badly I wanted to get off Merritt Island.

“Wow,” he said when I was finished. “Mr. Cranky-Pants.”

“Sorry. I just feel like I’m going to be stuck here for the rest of my life.”

“So transfer to FSU.”

I’d thought about it before, but by the same screwed-up logic that made my coming out seem all the more impossible once Frankie had done it, his moving to the state capital virtually sank my feet into the foundation of Merritt Island. I said, “My SATs stink.”

“You can retake them.”

“They probably wouldn’t transfer all my credits.”

“That’s a reason to stick around? Come on, Joe, you ought to give it a shot. Trust me, you’ll love Tallahassee. And I think it’d be good for you. You could, you know, be yourself up here.”

Dodging the implications of his remark, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

“ ‘Do, or do not,’ ” he said, slipping into his Yoda voice. “ ‘There is no try.’ ”

As strange as he could be, I missed him. I had visions of us signing up for the same classes, eating meals together, being known across campus as the Kerrigan Brothers—assuming the powers-that-be accepted me.