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Theo can remember being fourteen and thinking that realistically speaking, Andy Barbour was one of the ugliest people he had ever met. He had come up with a whole list of reasons in his head—Andy was ugly in a stark and unrelenting manner. There were beautiful things, like F. Scott Fitzgerald books and nineteenth century upholstery, and then there was Andy. His resting expression was a squinting, nervous stare that made appear to always be thinking about something. Not necessarily his classes or the weather or his younger siblings or organic chemistry or Macro-Altaic language theory. Just something. He looked at the world through an analytical squint but never seemed to really be looking at anything in particular. He was always just looking at something.
And he was scrawny—a string bean by any standard. His coiffed, plastic-shiny light brown hair was practically thicker than the density of his body. He had acne on his cheekbones in a way that was almost symmetrical. He had a peculiar way of scowling and scrunching up his non-threatening blue eyes when he took off his glasses.
So understandably it was hard for Theo, at fourteen already a connoisseur of great beauty, to comprehend why he was now staring blankly at the plastic-wrapped books in the ‘Gay & Lesbian’ section of the east sixty-seventh street branch of the New York Public Library. Theo recalls now that he had never heard of Alison Bechdel or Harvey Milk, and that he could not have possibly been like these people, because there was Pippa and there was nothing abnormal about his life, despite the stolen piece of fine artwork hidden in one of the desk drawers of somebody else’s apartment building.
And Theo recalls all those nights where he had told himself that if he saw Pippa again, these feelings would go away immediately. But he had not seen Pippa again. And would not see Pippa again for quite a long time. Andy Barbour, on the other hand, he saw every day, so much that even now Andy’s adolescent homeliness was fresh in his mind. Andy and his wheezing, stagnant laugh and the reddish blush that sometimes appeared on his otherwise pallid face. Andy’s sharper, higher tone of voice speaking Japanese. The strange, linear drawings Andy had to do for his chemistry class.
Theo had stared at those books in that library, the cheery rainbow letters above them and the Oscar Wilde tome shoved near the bottom of the shelf, at the end of the alphabet where Wilde was always stuck. But Theo wasn’t Oscar Wilde and there had been nothing beautiful about this—it could not have been beautiful because it was Andy, and when he imagined kissing Andy he thought it would be slimy and short, but he wanted it to happen anyhow because he had been imagining it in the first place, right? And he thought and thought about doing it, how to bring it up, whether it would be alone in Andy's room or out on a street corner somewhere, which was safer, which was nicer, what did Andy like? Looking back on it, Theo came to the realization that he had never had feelings for anyone who was as physically close to him as Andy, anyone who he would have actually been able to reach out and touch if he wanted to.
But Theo had picked up Oscar Wilde and walked away, went back to the apartment and tried to imagine that if he just pretended they were beautiful, things would feel better, and they did--eventually, of course, because Andy was ugly and people got older and soon he was in Las Vegas with Boris, who was even uglier.
The only reason that he remembered any of this at all was because he would never see Andy again, that there was more than miles and miles of America between them now. Because Andy had died as Andy had lived: ugly in the eyes of the people who pretended to care about him and afraid of the things he pretended not to care about. And Theo was not so sure anymore that he himself was any different, and he was sure that there was no one left in his own life who could ever think about him the way he had once thought about Andy Barbour. Theo had been whisked off into the desert and Andy Barbour had died alone in the sea and that, Theo thought, was life.