Making Friends

I arrived for the study-abroad program with one goal in mind: make friends. There's a one-week window during which you're allowed to go up to a stranger and say hi, but after that, friend-groups congeal, and you're golden or you're lonely. 

So, on the first day, during the orientation activities, I was busy looking for the interesting kids: the smokers and the hipsters. All of us American students forced to speak in Spanish were struggling — twelve years of classroom Spanish never prepare you to comfortably speak so much as a sentence. 

And then there was Daniel. He looked like Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Moutain, in that he wore jeans and a cowboy shirt and he was beautiful. Somehow, on the first day, he knew all the instructors' names — and while the rest of us huddled in clumps, Daniel kissed their cheeks like a local, bummed cigarettes, and chatted with them like they were all old friends.

I pointed him out to my new friends, more as a way to come out and break the ice than anything else, since he was surely straight. And anyway, I had a boyfriend back home who I was going to be faithful to, a slouch I couldn't quite get rid of, and paralyzing self-consciousness about my skinny chest. I slept boys with spectacles and bad skin, not cologne models. 

The open-week of getting to know people passed, and I settled happily among my friends without ever so much as saying hello to Daniel. One night, about a month in, my friend Kate and I were walking along when she stopped, "Isn't that Daniel?" We looked to the open-air patio of a nearby bar. It was Daniel, sitting at a low table, with a man, sharing a bottle of champagne. 

"Wait, we can't. He's on a gay date." Saying that, I couldn't help but smile. Gay! She grabbed my hand and pulled me over. It's good to have friends who are braver than you are. It's even better to have friends who know when you actually mean no, and when you're just asking to be convinced. 

Daniel greeted us warmly, and surprisingly, invited us to sit down. The date, it seemed, was going badly. We got another bottle, and did introductions. I managed to work the phrase "an ex-boyfriend of mine" into the conversation. Daniel glanced up and quietly said, "I knew it." When we all parted ways, he kissed my cheeks — which would have customary, if we were locals who'd just met, not two twenty-year old boys abroad for the summer.  

That kiss was like the first scene in a tragedy, after which, everyone's fate is sealed. We texted and agreed to meet for drinks. When the cafe closed, we started walking circles around the park. On circle five, I surprised myself by blurting, "Are we going to make out, or just make another lap?" An hour later, we were slipping off our shoes in the hallway outside his apartment so our footsteps wouldn't wake his roommates. 

At the end of these things, you're supposed to say, "It turned out he thought I was out of his league, too." But I don't think that's true — we had fun together, and he thought I was funny, but I don't think he was ever infatuated like I was. But it didn't matter — he had legs like a statue and gave head like a champ. The summer passed in a blur. — Alex Kelly