The Book of Joe

will.” He turned to go down the stairs and stopped midway, started to say something, stopped, and then looked up at me. “You know, I never meant to be like this,” he said hesitantly.
    “Like what?”
    He smiled and waved his hand around to indicate himself.
    “Like this. A fag. Believe me, I tried like hell for a while not to be one. Even when we moved here, I still thought maybe in a new town where no one knew me, I could change.” He flashed me a small, sheepish smile. “Obviously, I couldn’t,” he said. “And neither could Wayne.”
    “I don’t think Wayne’s really sure about what he is or isn’t,” I said, sounding a bit more defensive than I’d intended.
    “I think he’s probably gone somewhere to work it all out.”
    Sammy looked at me for a long moment and then shook his head. “If Wayne wasn’t sure, Wayne wouldn’t have left,” he said.
    “Whatever,” I said, and quickly changed the subject. I didn’t need to hear Sammy speaking like an expert on my best friend. “Where are you headed?”
    “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I think I’ll just drive around for a while.” He looked up the stairs to me. “You want to come along?”
    I almost said yes. Since Wayne’s departure and Sammy’s subsequent depression, I hadn’t really had any friends to just hang out and be stupid with, and I realized that I missed it.
    But Carly was waiting, naked and primed, on my bed upstairs, and it was really no contest. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
    “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
    Sammy looked past me into the house and then grinned.
    “I should have figured.” He turned and stepped into the street, heading around the front of his mother’s Chevy.
    “Sammy,” I called out to him.
    “Yeah?”
    “I’ll see you around.”
    He swung open the door and looked over the roof of the car at me. “Take care, Joe,” he said.
    The finality of his salutation struck me as somewhat odd as I made my way back upstairs, but I didn’t have long to contemplate it, because when I stepped into my bedroom, I found Carly jumping up and down in the center of my bed, still magnificently undressed, and all thoughts of Sammy, like my blood, fled rapidly from my brain. “I got a little bored,”
    she said sheepishly.
    “So I see.”
    “Are you particularly attached to those shorts?”
    “Not really. Why?”
    “Because if they’re still on five seconds from now, I’m going home.”
    I smiled and charged the bed, and for the next few hours the world faded to black and nothing existed beyond the universe contained within my four bedroom walls.
    Later that night, after Carly had gone home, I pulled out my cassette of Born in the U.S.A. and played “Bobby Jean” on the stereo. Sammy was right. I’d never really paid attention to the lyrics, and it amazed me how well they articulated what I’d been feeling ever since Wayne had left town.
    Springsteen carefully avoided referring to Bobby Jean as male or female, leaving the listener free to associate as needed. When he sang the last verse, about Bobby Jean’s being out on that road somewhere, on some bus or train, and how he wished he could have just seen him or her one last time, I began to tremble. “I miss you,” came the Boss’s voice mournfully through my speakers. “Good luck, good-bye, Bobby Jean.” He lingered on the name for an extra beat, and then Clarence’s sax came on strong, wailing and rasping with a chilling despondence, and I sat down on my bedroom floor, rocking back and forth to the music, only aware after the fact that I had started to cry.
    I didn’t know yet that Sammy was dead when I got to school the next morning and found Carly giggling with some girlfriends near her locker. When she saw me, she excused herself and came running over to give me a kiss. “Hey, stud,” she said, falling easily into step with me. “I had a lot of fun last night.”
    “What’s all the giggling about?” I said, indicating her friends, who were still locked in an animated huddle.
    “Cheryl lost her virginity last night,” Carly said. “She was at the falls with Mike, and someone went over.”
    “Cheryl Sands was a virgin?” I said skeptically.
    “Strictly in a technical sense.”
    “I see. So, did someone really go over the falls?”
    “That’s what they’re saying.”
    “I miss out on all the good stuff.”
    “Excuse me, sir,” Carly said sternly. “If I’m not mistaken, you got about five hours’