Dean
Dean Holloway says the things out loud that everyone else is just thinking. It is both a gift and a logistical problem.
Dean || Jamie || Bisexual || Character
Imet Dean Holloway for the first time on a Saturday in October, which was the same Saturday that Priya was on her third date with Zara and I was alone for approximately two hours before Jamie texted: my cousin is visiting and he’s being aggressively social. come rescue me or come join us. your choice. I went, which was a choice I would examine later. Dean Holloway was eighteen, just finished his first semester at Reed, with the specific quality of confidence that a semester of college produced in certain people — not arrogance, not superior knowledge, but the expanded ease of someone who had recently discovered that the world was larger and more interesting than high school had implied. He was tall, mixed race — Black father, white mother — with Jamie’s same quality of complete comfort in his own presence, as if discomfort with himself had been edited out at some point and he had simply never missed it. He was also, within the first fifteen minutes of our meeting, the most direct person I had encountered since Abuela Elena.
We were at the kitchen table in Jamie’s apartment — Jamie lived with their mother, a quiet woman who taught at Portland Community College and who greeted me with the warmth of someone who had heard my name before — and Dean was talking about his boyfriend at Reed, which he mentioned the way people mentioned things they had no anxiety about, as a fact of his life rather than a disclosure. “I’m bisexual,” he said at some point, because it came up naturally in whatever he was talking about, I had lost the thread slightly. He said it the same way Jamie had said they and them in homeroom — as information, as fact, as the specific calm of someone for whom these things were true and that was that. I looked at him. He looked at me. “You doing okay over there?” he said, which was not the kind of thing people said at a kitchen table after saying something personal, which meant he was watching me react. “Fine,” I said. “You’re doing the thing,” Jamie said to me, from across the table. “What thing?” “The thing where you get very still when something lands close to where you live,” they said, with the precision that I was starting to understand was just who Jamie was — accurate, always, about the people they chose to pay attention to. I looked at them. I looked at Dean. “I’m just listening,” I said. Dean smiled — a wide, genuine smile that had nothing predatory in it. “Sure,” he said, agreeably. “I’m bisexual,” he said again, as if repeating it helped, and then he just kept talking about something else entirely.
We stayed for three hours. Dean told stories about Reed — specifically about the experience of being somewhere that handled these things without the apparatus of concealment that high school required. “It’s weird at first,” he said. “Being somewhere people just — are who they are, without the production of it. You spend so long bracing for the reaction and then there’s no reaction and you have to figure out what to do with all that bracing.” He looked at me when he said this, not pointedly — he wasn’t pointing — but directly, in the way that direct people were direct. I thought about the coat. I thought about what to do with all the bracing. “Does it get easier?” I said, and I heard my voice ask the question before I’d decided to ask it. Dean’s expression was kind. “Everything gets easier when you stop spending all your energy holding the shape of something you’re not,” he said. “You free up all this processing power. It’s wild.” Jamie was looking at me from across the table with the brown-green eyes. Not the debate look, not the careful look. Something more like: I see you. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. I looked at my hands on the table. I thought about the third index card. I thought: I am very close to something. “Cool,” I said, which was the most inadequate word available, and Dean laughed, and Jamie smiled, and I went home that evening and sat in my room and didn’t fill out the third card for the first time in three years. I just left it blank. And I thought: maybe the card was always going to be blank eventually. Maybe blank is where it was always going.