“Look, we’ve just reached the point where we can measure gravity waves. It wasn’t long ago that they didn’t even have proof that they existed. It wasn’t that long ago that we only knew of the existence of nine planets in the universe, the status of Pluto notwithstanding. Now, we’ve mapped the existence of thousands of planets, some of them similar to earth.
“I don’t have your background in math… at least not yet, but it seems to me that the greatest discoveries of today aren’t coming from particle accelerators. Chris Nolan made a film called Interstellar. It’s depiction of what a black hole looks like was based on the latest theories, and guess what we saw when we actually got our first glimpse of a real black hole? The astrophysicists nailed it, and not a single particle was destroyed in the making of the movie. It’s a fucking awesome, exciting time.
“Discover the true nature of gravity and you’ll unlock the secrets of the universe. Figure out why mass and momentum are conserved, and you’ll unlock the secret of interstellar spaceflight. And it just so happens we’re gonna be spendin’ the whole summer with two of the greatest astrophysicists in the world.”
It was like an epiphany. I’d been so focused on the great discoveries that underlay the books I’d read when I first became interested in science – discoveries made in the late twentieth century – that I’d ignored the great discoveries that had been made in my lifetime. Freck was absolutely right – if I could discover the true nature of gravity, mass and momentum, I could free humankind from the shackles of Newton’s First Law. As a Chris Nolan put it in Interstellar, humankind has never found a way to go anywhere without leaving something behind. Perhaps I could change that, and what better place to learn about astrophysics than in one of the greatest astrophysics labs in the world?
I was so excited, I grabbed my honey and kissed him deeply, eliciting hoots and hollers from all our friends.
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Although we’d celebrated my birthday on Sunday, today was the actual day I turned eleven, but it was Monday and a school day. My boyfriend, Freck, on the other hand, always had his birthday off because it was on the day after Christmas, a time when no one was thinking about anything as mundane as a birthday. Even in our household, we usually celebrate a traditional Jewish Christmas. By that I meant seeing a movie and eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant. In our case, we usually went to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster and had dinner at one of the best restaurants in Chinatown.
This would be the first year that Freck would spend Christmas with our family, which presented us with a dilemma. Although he was one-quarter Jewish, he was raised Roman Catholic. His parents weren’t at all religious, but they’d always celebrated a traditional Roman Catholic Christmas together as a family, and visibly so. They celebrated midnight mass at Saint Patrick’s cathedral as special guests of the Archdiocese of New York, in thanks for their generous donations to the church.
On Christmas morning, there was a formal giving of gifts, always with special clients of theirs in attendance. Freck’s gift was supposed to be a combined Christmas and birthday present, but the day after Christmas, on Freck’s actual birthday, there was nothing… not even a birthday cake.
Well that was certainly something that would be different this year. Freck’s birthday would not be forgotten. But what should we do about Christmas? Freck had taken it upon himself to learn about Judaism and he and I were even studying in preparation for a joint bar mitzvah service next year. He was looking forward to an authentic Hanukkah with us, but I hated to see him ignore his Christian upbringing. Technically I knew that Judaism doesn’t leave room for belief in Christ as the messiah and Freck actually considered himself agnostic, but with so many children of mixed faith who celebrate both of their backgrounds, why couldn’t Freck celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah?
The two holidays happened to coincide this year, so there was still time to formulate a plan, but not that much time. Christmas was just over two weeks away. And then the next day would be his thirteenth birthday. It was not only his first birthday with my family, but a very special birthday too, as Freck was becoming a teenager. As his boyfriend, I needed to be sure we made it particularly special. But what could I get him for a gift? Freck already had everything a boy could want.
Getting time to discuss plans with the dads was proving to be nearly impossible. With their varied schedule and on-call responsibilities, finding them both together at a time when Freck wasn’t around just wasn’t happening, but even finding either one of them alone was difficult. I knew they wanted to do right by Freck, but their workload at the hospital always picked up around the holidays and this year was proving to be no different. My older brother, Roger, was a never-ending font of ideas, most of them totally impractical. My best friends were Asher and Seth, but they were two years behind me in school and the only time I really saw them at school was at lunch… with Freck.
The one window of opportunity to speak to anyone was after school, during basketball practice. Our good friend Carl was one of the leading scorers on the varsity team and his boyfriend, Clarke, always sat in the stands during practice and at most of the games. Because Freck was on the swim team and had his own practices to attend, he wasn’t around for most basketball games or practice. It was thus that I found myself sitting next to Clarke at basketball practice on Tuesday afternoon, the day after I turned eleven.
“Clarke,” I began the conversation, “you come from a family of means and always got what you wanted, right?”
Laughing heartily, Clarke responded, “Oh yeah, I come from a family of means all right. My dad went to college but he started his professional life as a garbage man and worked his way up through the union. Although we never were poor, we lived in a much more modest neighborhood when I was growing up. It might have been called a detached house but in every way, it was a row house with about a foot of space between houses… just enough that I had to take care of what passed for a lawn. The entire back yard was taken up by a pool… an above ground pool built into a wooden deck that was too shallow to dive into and too narrow to swim across. It wasn’t until my dad threw his support behind a dark-horse candidate for mayor and the schmuck actually won that we were able to move into our current place. And then it was more a matter of kickbacks, bribery and embezzlement that made it all possible.
“So now we have a nice house, but it’s on Staten Island… not in Riverdale. I think you’re the one who knows what it’s like to grow up in a family of means, Kyle.”
“Gees, I’m sorry, Clarke,” I replied, feeling a bit sheepish for bringing it up. “I just assumed you always lived in that mansion of a house where you live now. Our house is really small compared to all the teardowns around us. It’s what they call a front-to-back split level. I never really thought of us as being affluent or anything. I mean, know people think all doctors are rich, but my dad’s still paying off his medical school debt, and he didn’t even finish his training until around the time I was born…”
“How much did you say that fancy music player cost that you’re always carryin’ around with you?” Clarke interrupted. “And isn’t your swimming pool indoors?”
“Technically it’s under a terrace that was added on after the house was built,” I answered, “so it’s an outdoor pool that was later enclosed and heated, but yeah, I guess we’re doin’ okay. It’s just that Freck grew up in a freakin’ penthouse apartment in the shadow of the World Trade Center, with billionaire parents, all the toys a boy could hope for and season tickets to the Met…”
“And he was a pothead by the time he was eleven,” Clarke interrupted, “and he tried to kill himself. He was rich beyond measure, yet bankrupt when it came to love. I know something about what that’s like. My dad beat the shit outta me, all the time, and then gave generously to the Church so the nuns all looked the other way. Even when I got to Stuyvesant, he made sure I knew just how worthless I was. That’s why I became a bully, ’cause I learned from my old man that the only way to earn respect was by making others fear you. How fucked up was that?”
“Yeah, but you really turned your life around after meeting Carl,” I pointed out.
“No doubt, that boy saved my life,” Clarke acknowledged as he looked down at his boyfriend in a sweat-soaked tank top, shooting three-pointer after three-pointer. “It seems to me that you saved Freck’s life too, literally,” he added.
Shakin’ my head, I countered, “He had a major relapse over the summer, while we were in Paris. A stupid little argument about Parisian architecture was all it took. He thought he knew better than the Parisians and when I stood up for them, he took it to mean I was repudiating him, and he ran away. It took us three days, 25 thousand euros and a hired investigator to find him, but that was the least of it. The worst was when we had to go to the morgue to identify what the police thought was his body.”
“Fuck,” Clarke responded. “I couldn’t stand it if something like that happened with Carl. Then looking right at me, he continued, “I guess the real difference with me is that with my parents going to prison, I got closure. My wounds were mostly physical, and those wounds healed. With my brother moving back home and my boyfriend and his mother moving in with us, I have more than enough people loving me and showing me I’m not a worthless faggot.
“All of Freck’s wounds are internal,” Clarke continued, “and although he has you and your dads now, he still doesn’t feel secure. There’s no easy fix for it either. It’s gonna take time for him feel worthy of your love.”
“We’re both in counseling,” I responded. “He sees a therapist once a week and we have family counseling every week too. We’ll continue that until we go away to MIT in the fall.”
“Maybe goin’ straight from Stuyvesant to MIT isn’t the best thing for you guys,” Clarke suggested. “There’s no question you’re both ready academically, but the pressure of trying to live up to bein’ adults might be too much. I mean, Freck’ll be thirteen, and you’ll be only eleven, and you’ll be in with kids who are mostly eighteen. At least Freck looks like a teenager and his voice has changed, but he’ll still be a good foot shorter than a lot of his peers. It’ll be even worse for you, but I think Freck’s more fragile and the stuff you just brush off could wound him deeply.”
It was like bein’ struck by a thunderbolt. Here, I’d been worried about what to get Freck for his thirteenth birthday when that was nothing compared to the stress we’d both be facing next fall. We were only months away from graduating from one of the best high school’s in America, and we’d be interning over the summer at one of the premiere astrophysics labs in the world, and then we’d be freshmen at MIT. We’d already been accepted for studies in the fields we wanted and our carrier paths were set, yet we were still children, both legally and emotionally. Freck was just beginning his teens and I was still a pre-teen who’d yet to even need to use deodorant. How could we expect anyone to take us seriously?
Yet if we didn’t go to MIT next fall, what else could we do? Living at home would make it easier, but the stress of competing in an adult world would be no less at Columbia. But if we delayed starting college for a year, what else could an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old do in the interim? It wasn’t like I never heard of taking a gap year, but we weren’t nearly old enough to work and it’s not like we could go traveling the world on our own. I just didn’t see an alternative to going through with our plans to start college at MIT.
“Yeah, I think you guys should think seriously about spending another year or two in high school or maybe even doing something else entirely,” Clarke continued. “I know that it’s not uncommon for some students to take five years to finish high school. There are even some schools that offer five-year programs for students with special needs, and it isn’t because they’re dumb. I don’t think you’re obligated to graduate when you have enough credits, so maybe you can postpone graduation and take another year of classes. You can take courses for dual credit at City University and accumulate credit you can apply at MIT. You might even have enough advance placement and college credit to start as a sophomore or even a junior there.”
Clarke’s idea was a revelation. I’d been thinking that the only alternative to going to MIT next year was to start college somewhere else, but that would solve nothing. However, by extending our time at Stuyvesant, we could take much of our first-year college coursework at City University Community College, which was located right across the street from Stuyvesant and where the students were used to the presence of high school students from Stuyvesant. And we’d have the support of Stuyvesant for another year, including all our friends and our dads and Roger. Freck could even spend another year on the swim team if he wanted. It’d be a chance for us to be kids for another year. It’d be another year for Freck to heal and for our love to grow.
My worries about finding the perfect gift for Freck’s thirteenth birthday were quickly forgotten. No matter what I got him, Freck would probably love it because it was from me, but that was immaterial. The opportunity to spend another year at home with our dads and another year with all our friends would be priceless.
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I came close to bringing up my thoughts at dinner that night but decided to wait until I had more information. It was thus that I found myself seated in the counselors’ office the next day. It was the first time I’d actually met with my counselor since beginning at Stuyvesant last year. I went to make an appointment, first thing in the morning, but with the winter break coming up, Mr. Reynolds didn’t have many appointments scheduled in the first place and asked if I’d like to meet with him then. Of course I agreed.
“Mr. Reynolds,” I began, “I don’t know if you remember me…”
“It would be pretty hard to forget you, Kyle,” he interrupted. “As far as I know, you’re the youngest person ever to attend this school, and your attitude is, shall we say, memorable. So what can I do for you today?”
“Well, this is really a question that affects both my boyfriend, François San Angelo, and me…”
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