The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli Page A

feel fine, Ollie?” Kaitlyn said.
    “I do!”
    Wes was golf-clapping. “Maybe both a gay guy and a rock and
roll god after all,” he said.
    Everyone suddenly went quiet, as if he’d unplugged a radio.
They looked from Wes to me, from me to Wes.
    Wes whispered, “ Oop ....”
    Then Harriet made a little raise-the-roof gesture that felt
to me like the most welcoming thing in the world, and she offered me her bag of
Doritos. Shelley was tapping her chin as if considering whether there were
signs she had missed. Bruno looked concerned, as he always did when someone
else had a good story. Kaitlyn jumped up and hugged me, knocking the Doritos
out of my hand. “I always wanted a gay friend!” she sighed. Only Amy looked
uncomfortable. (Later Harriet told me Amy had had a crush on me.)
    “My secret talent is outing my roommate, apparently,” said
Wes, giving an embarrassed cough.
    But of course he had done me a favor.

 
    On purpose or by accident, Wesley always seemed to smooth
my path for me. I was starting to love him for it, I knew that, but I wasn’t in love with him, and sometimes I
wondered why. The other hallmates recognized him and me as a duo—Ollie
and Wes, Wes and Ollie—but it wasn’t like how it had been with Boyd. It
felt more sustainable, less like it was tumbling toward some sort of explosion.
Having no secrets from Wes let me feel something new: contentment. Nothing
loomed. We just hung out. We were friends .
    Our evenings were spent in the lounge with the hallmates but
when they started drifting off to bed or to homework and Wesley and I went back
to our room, that’s when I was happiest.
    Using my stereo he played me different songs from his CD
collection, songs I’d never heard but should’ve, apparently—a lot of
which I liked, a lot of which I pretended to like. Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin. We’d lie on our beds and listen to the
mechanical crunching sounds of the Richard
D. James Album . Wes was into old stuff too: Neil Young, Simon &
Garfunkel, Sinatra, Billie Holiday. He liked to play me songs, to be my human
jukebox and my teacher. It seemed so much more important than homework, I
couldn’t deny it. I’d done homework for years. I’d never done this.
    “Try this one,” he would say, and he’d play some weird
ambient stuff it must’ve taken nails, water, rocks to create. He’d lie on his
bed with the stereo remote on his belly, listening. When the song was over he’d
pause the disc and say, “Thoughts?”
    I always told him I liked it, even when I didn’t think it
was anything much, because I wanted him to keep playing me stuff. I’d pick out
some detail of the song to show I was paying attention.
    Sometimes he tossed me the remote and gave me a turn. I
played him R.E.M. songs. I played him “Find the River,” and when it was over he
didn’t say anything, and when I said “Thoughts?” he cleared his voice in such a
way that made me know the song had made him cry.

 
    He told me a lot about his year before UMass, the year he
spent on Cape Cod living in that rented house with his three friends. He showed
me photos he took in those days, black-and-white action photos of late-teenage
fun. The stories that went with the photos were simple and almost mundane and
yet had an air of excitement I could barely relate to. I think his stories
described happiness. He seemed to glow when he was telling me. He seemed a
different version of himself in these stories, different from who he was in
this room and at this school—a do- er rather
than a remember- er . So much so I sometimes wondered,
with a touch of foreboding, why he had come to UMass at all and not stayed on
Cape Cod. The fancy, cared-for camera he’d used to take all these romantic
pictures was sitting on his desk now. He’d only taken a few shots with it here,
though he held it in his hands a lot, as if to be ready for something
worthwhile.

 
    ***

 
    October came, and on the first cold morning I unearthed