Chapter 1: December 21st-1

“Hey, can you hear me?” I wave at the camera, while my sister’s image pixelates and then clears up enough for me to be able to tell that the newest poster on her wall is of David Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase. She mourned that man for the whole of 2016.

“Hi!” she grins cheerily. My sister has the widest smile. “What time is it in England right now?”

“Early,” I say. “07:00 A.M. What about Japan?”

“Aw, the sacrifices you make for me! It’s 04:00 P.M. here. Just came back from work, actually. I’m going out to dinner, and then I have to prep my lesson plan for tomorrow…pretty busy. How about you?”

I shrug. I don’t want to tell her what I have planned today, because I’m stressed about it, and I don’t need her to hype it up and unnerve me more. She shivers a little and rubs her arms.

“It’s cold today,” she says. “How bad is it over there?”

“Just rain, mostly.”

“No snow?”

“Nope.”

They say it rains a lot here in England, and it does, but we grew up in Seattle, so when others moan about it, I’m like “b***h, please.”

“Is that why you look so gloomy?” she asks.

“All the people here left.”

“Oh s**t, of course,” she slaps her forehead. “It’s Christmas soon, isn’t it! Y’know, they don’t celebrate it here, so you don’t get time off or anything, it just kind of passes you by.”

“You’re lucky. Here everybody goes home and does homey things. And all the stores remind you that you should be home, too, decorating a tree or something.”

“Are you all alone?” she asks. “Is there nobody left?”

“There’s a couple of Chinese kids on other floors. I don’t really know them.”

“Oh, poor baby,” she says, pouting like one of those Japanese anime characters. I laugh and tell her to cut it out.

“What about your roommates? They’re all gone, too?” Brits say flatmates, which describes it better. The floors in our dorm are divided into two apartments, six rooms each. And we live, each of us, in separate bedrooms. We share a large bathroom, where there are three showers, three toilets and three sinks, and the large kitchen/living room. The last of my roommates must have left yesterday—it’s been completely quiet and empty since.

“Yeah, I think so,” I say.

“Well, why don’t you call Mom,” she suggests. “Her boyfriend will spring for a flight for you to wherever they are right now.”

I make a choking sound.

“Ugh, no thanks. The last thing I need is to watch Mom necking with that twink.”

She bursts out laughing, “He’s not a twink!”

“He so is! He’s barely older than I am. It’s disturbing.”

She still finds it funny.

“He’s almost thirty, you i***t. And he’s in love with her, which should make you happy.”

I grumble in response.

“There’s always Dad,” she says. “You could go and see him.”

“Like he’d pay for a flight,” I roll my eyes. “Not to mention that I don’t know anybody in Oklahoma, and all I remember from our last visit is cow dung.”

After divorcing Mom, Dad and his two best buds, Troy and Geoff, bought a ranch in the southern part of the Ouachita Mountains, which has its fair share of beauty, true, but which also is no place for a twenty-year-old gay city boy to spend his free time. Especially since Dad’s reaction to leaving sunny, chatty Mom is to turn into more of a sullen recluse than he ever was before. In fact, I don’t think he talks much to anyone except for his two buddies—and all they seem to enjoy doing nowadays is sitting on their porch, drinking and exchanging conversation that rarely takes on the form of a word other than “yep” and “huh,” unless there’s the Super Bowl to watch/discuss.

“You never know,” Michelle says, “maybe he’s hired some handsome farmhand, who’s just dying to recreate Brokeback Mountain with you, sans the tragic ending of course.”

“Sure thing. The one thing that could improve this holiday is for me to be caught in flagranti with some poor repressed Midwestern boy.”

“Or Troy or Geoff!” Michelle says with laugh. I shudder, which makes her hoot with even more laughter.

“Anyway,” she says, wiping a tear from under her left eye. “Are you doing anything for Christmas? Like, at all? I could call Mom and see if she and boy toy might not want to come and visit you in London.”

“Oh God!” I groan. “I will pay you. I will donate an organ, just, I beg you, don’t!”

“Okay, okay,” she says. “I’d ask them to ship me over, but I don’t get time off.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I lie. I handed my essays in last week, when they were due. There isn’t much else for me to do, but I don’t want Michelle getting any more ideas, so I leave it at that.

I guess I am a little homesick. But aside from that, for the past couple of weeks I’ve actually been looking forward to this time—the two weeks of freedom, during which everybody’s gone and I can do whatever I like. That’s because so far, ever since I arrived in the UK, I’ve been too shy to really meet anyone. The boys in my dorm are all straight jocks (or whatever the British equivalent of that is). In my lectures and seminars all the boys are either straight, or taken, or intimidatingly gay. Like, this one guy, Sam, actually once used my notepad to draw, explicitly, what he had done with some guy he’d picked up at a party. You know, in the way that other people draw flowers or bees, when they doodle while listening to something.

Neither was the LGBT+ society much help. They’re all really nice, and I went to a couple of their events, but between the political part of the society, and the party-going part, there wasn’t room for me to fit in. I like the other Americans I met here best, in that I get along with them, and it helped with the homesickness to do things like Thanksgiving or Halloween together. But the only gay guy amongst them already has a dreamy boyfriend, and they’re so cutesy with each other you could just barf.

Coming to the UK opened my eyes to the many different ways in which it’s possible to be lonely. Like, you can feel lonely in a room full of people. You can feel lonely even when you’re the one making other people feel not lonely. You can be three different kinds of lonely all at once! Like, what is that?

There’s one kind of lonely that really gets to me. It sort of grabs me during the night, sometimes, when I feel this intense longing to have another body near me. Not every night, but some nights I just lie awake thinking about what it would be like to sleep with someone else. I don’t mean s*x, though I want that, too, of course, but just sleeping, or holding, or kissing. I don’t know, I guess some time in the last couple of years, in addition to thinking about s*x all the time, I’d been thinking about love, too. Like, it would be really sweet to be in love with somebody, and have them be in love back with me.

There’s this couple in my Comparing Political Systems class, Naomi and David. I see them around, constantly, either holding hands or just kind of hanging on each other. Like, one time, we were all outside, and Naomi was sitting on this wall that separates our department building from the parking lot, and David was standing with his back to her, her arms were around his neck, and she was leaning her chin on his shoulder. I felt jealous. I mean, I don’t want either of them for myself, but just being with someone, like that, seems so nice.

When you’re shy, like me, it often feels like everybody else pairs off so easily, it’s like they have a code or something, which nobody bothered to let me in on. It’s depressing. But I’m twenty now, almost twenty-one, and I want a boyfriend.

Before now I had classes, essays, and my friends were around, which was distracting and made me self-conscious (what is it with people, that they think they can just shove a shy person and say ‘go on, go over there, say hi!’ and think they’re being helpful?).

But now it’s Christmas. Everybody’s gone home for the holidays. I have no lectures, no essays, nothing to prevent me from focusing on this. I have an action plan: I am going to get myself a boyfriend. I call it my Twelve Dates of Christmas.

With the combined power of Grindr, Tindr and various other places online, I’ve lined up twelve dates.

Starting today.

I’m hoping, deep down inside, that it will also end today. Battle ready as I am, the idea of meeting twelve strange dudes and trying to get them to like me is still pretty terrifying. I’m hoping to simply walk into a coffee shop, see my man, and lock that s**t down, thereby cancelling the other eleven dates and spending my holiday cosily sipping hot chocolate in my lover’s arms. But I wasn’t overstating just how incurably shy I am. The truth is that I’m unlikely to do much more than blush and feel awkward on a date, even if I don’t like him at all.

If I’m very honest, my actual hope is that a guy I like would just do that thing old timey people used to do, you know, when they spotted someone they really took a shine to? He’d point at me, nudge his buddy and say, “That one. I’m gonna marry him!” And the rest would be history.

My Twelve Dates of Christmas:

21 December—Guy

22 December—Kevin

23 December—Mark

24 December—Daniel

25 December—Owen

26 December—Neil

27 December—Pedro

28 December—Ben

29 December—Lee

30 December—Oliver

31 December—Andy

1 January—Craig

I tell Michelle nothing of this, and once she has me approve her outfit for dinner (she is seeing some Japanese guy and is dining with his family tonight), we finish talking, because the internet in my room is, as usual, s**t. I close my laptop and take it to the kitchen.

Now that everybody’s gone, the kitchen seems enormous. When I sit down, the scrape of the chair on the linoleum floor is weirdly loud. I tidied the room yesterday, after Theo left for home. Normally, all my roommates hang out here, with their girlfriends and other friends, and it’s loud and busy, with beer cans crowding the table, and dirty dishes stacked in the sink, collecting cultures of bacteria. That’s another reason I’m glad those people left. I can at last live as I like. Maybe I should get a plant?

I open my laptop again, and log on to Goodreads. That’s where I met Boy Number 1, Guy. We agreed yesterday to go to lunch together today, but still haven’t established where exactly, so I send him a private message, seeing if he’s there. What can a boy called Guy look like? Not that names can tell you that much about people. Like, my parents named me Lance, and let me tell you, when you picture a Lance, you’re not picturing a short, skinny guy, whose only sporting achievement is to have beaten his sister at ping pong. Once.

I refresh the site, to see if there’s a reply, when I notice movement from the corner of my eye. I jump up, surprised.

There, standing in the door, glaring at me, is Tom.

Tom’s the Polish guy that lives with us. He doesn’t speak to anybody, and there’s a rumour going around that he killed someone. That’s probably an exaggeration, but they say he’s been to prison and if you look at him, you wouldn’t put it past him. He’s tall, and his pale blond hair falls forward in a way that just reveals his cold, murderous, grey eyes.

He came into the kitchen while I was typing, and now he’s standing there, scowling at me, like he’s angry that someone else is in here. You and me both, buddy!

My heart has just received a shot of adrenaline, so I can’t really talk, and all I can think of is that kitchens are where knives are and why would they put a homicidal maniac in dorms anyway? Haven’t they ever seen, like, any horror movie ever? But Tom just casts me this cold look and then turns away and puts bread in the toaster.

I think he hates me more than anyone else in our dorm. It’s because of how we met. Just after my arrival here, I bumped into Tom as he was coming out of the bathroom. He’d clearly just had a shower, and so he was almost entirely naked, except for the towel wound around his hips. I need far less to get flustered and nervous. Momentarily, I was struck speechless by his tall, lean body, and I couldn’t think, so I just sort of gaped at him with my mouth open. He stared at me, surprised, and then said, “I am Tom?” He said it like a question, as though to give me a prompt. And I, because my blood was rapidly pooling way down between my legs, could only hear his accent, and so I said, stupidly, “Oh, you’re Russian?”

His expression changed into one of complete disgust. You’d think Russians had killed his family or something. Which, you know, having looked it up, who knows? But anyway, he just walked past me, slammed his door, and that was the last time we’d spoken.

Then, later someone told me about how he was this dangerous sociopath and I was kind of glad he kept himself to himself. He was never really around anyway. So why the hell was he here now? Now that there’s nobody here to protect me!

I see a white 1 in a red circle appear in the messages corner of my Goodreads profile. It’s Guy. Thank God for Guy. Guy, who will be my rescuer. Guy, who maybe has a place of his own, where I could spend my two free weeks, far away from Polish assassins.

“Let’s go to Brixton,” Guy writes. “That should be fun.”

I met Guy discussing the Farseer trilogy, which he wrote a very analytical review of. He is the one I have the highest hopes of, given our mutual interest in fantasy literature.

“How will I recognize you?” I ask him. We haven’t exchanged pictures yet. At first it seemed unnecessary, and now I think neither of us wants to appear shallow. He gives me the address of a Jamaican restaurant and tells me we’ll meet in front of it—there’s no way, he says, that we can miss each other.

Tom has meanwhile finished putting a hell of a lot of Nutella on his toast, poured hot water into a cup of entirely black coffee, and then simply leaves the kitchen without saying a word.