Like most people who have fallen for their best friend, I still remember when my feelings leapt from platonic and crash-landed into feel-free-to-do-whatever-you-want-to-my-heart-and-body-and-soul territory. Unlike most people, this realization occurred on the night of my eighteenth birthday after a Carrie Underwood concert. As a result of my shameless begging, I had been invited to join my best friend and his family at the concert, where we sang along to every song while making up hand signals and gestures in the hopes they’d will our favorite songs into her setlist. (They did not.)  But it was later that night, while we slept on the L-shaped couch in his mother’s townhouse, when I glanced over at the silhouette of his unconscious body and just knew that I liked him more than I had ever liked another person—a recognition of something I hadn’t ever felt before but was aware of nonetheless.

Growing up, I was never known to develop crushes. Sure, there was a brief period during junior year when I thought I liked a girl, but upon reflection I think I was more so drawn to the possibility of managing her career as a pop star. (For what it’s worth, she really did have an incredible voice.) And then there was an even briefer period later that same year when I went so far as to actually date a girl, though “dated” is a generous term—the most intimate we’d ever been was holding hands underneath a pillow while watching Brokeback Mountain. At the part when Heath Ledger spits in his hand and mounts Jake Gyllenhaal, she had asked me, “And you chose this movie, why?” To which I whispered, after wiping my own hand which had been sweating profusely, “It has glowing reviews.” Safe to say, I was doing a bang up job of throwing her off the scent of my closeted homosexuality. As for her parents seated beside us on the couch, maybe not so much.

But to actually like somebody so strongly and so late into my high school career—never mind that the somebody happened to be my best friend (and a guy, to boot!)—now this was a set of tracks I was only too happy to tie myself to. Not that I, like many a kidnapped damsel before me, had much say in the matter, one way or the other.

—

I’d first met Jacob and his identical twin brother, Erik, when we were kids on a little league baseball team. While our teammates delighted in chucking balls and swinging bats, the three of us squatted in the outfield and picked dandelions. If prison camps are any indication, nothing binds people together quite like shared misery, so a friendship accordingly blossomed between us. Though, much like my parents’ dreams of me being an even slightly remarkable athlete, our friendship was short-lived, ending as soon as our team lost the final game of the season. Having drifted apart from our days spent in the outfield, they became more involved in theater while I befriended my fellow rural brethren who also lived “in the country” far from school.

We weren’t reunited until sophomore year, when our AP Geometry teacher assigned us to the same cluster of four desks: me next to Jacob, and Erik next to me. The fourth seat was taken by a transfer student named Amanda.

“Where are you from?” Jacob asked.

“Elmira,” she said.

After introducing myself, I told her I was sure that Elmira had been a death camp of sorts during the Civil War, a tidbit of knowledge I’d learned from my father, himself a Civil War buff.

“Oh,” Amanda said, warily. “Maybe.”

With the help of a yet another confined space—this time a classroom rather than a baseball diamond—along with the addition of Amanda, our friendship picked up where it had left off, and we quickly became inseparable. In science class, we’d pass around a notebook and write snippets to each other detailing how we were feeling, funny observations about classmates with whom we weren’t friends, and lyrics from Rent or Wicked. Amanda and I joined Jacob and Erik in the ranks of the drama club, though the roles we played were limited to chorus members with occasional one-liners while the twins were awarded leading roles. We slept over at each other’s houses. We dared one another, often. We went to 99, a restaurant in the mall, and told Amanda to ask for a glass of Merlot, and when she did she pronounced the “t” and we couldn’t stop laughing. We ordered Erik and Jacob to moan loudly during the middle of English class. I had to act like I didn’t understand a basic math equation during Geometry, persisting with clarifying questions until our teacher told me to stop.

This renewed dynamic felt natural, how things should be—an order to be maintained at all costs. And nothing stabilizes a group friendship dynamic like one member developing a passionate crush on another.

—

While I certainly hadn’t yet determined my romantic “type,” that night of the concert I realized just how attractive I found Jacob. Hell, I didn’t even mind the patch of hair on his chin he was now sporting. (It was—and is—the only facial hair he could grow. It was also one of the only physical differentiations between the otherwise identical twin brothers.) Though what could really break me into a full body sweat was his being thin to the point of looking helplessly frail. It was easy to imagine a future in which he’d acquire a debilitating illness and need my daily assistance until gradually developing a complete dependence on me for everything.

Of course, my Facebook profile still said Interested in Women— Erik was the only one of us who was out at this point—so the extent to which I could express my feelings was, shall we say, limited. So I did what I could: I moved him to the summit of my MySpace Top Eight, and even though I disliked the very idea of having a bird as a pet—if I can’t suffocate the animal with my love and affection, what’s the point—I doled out compliments to his bird whenever possible. As the saying goes, it’s the little things that count.

Whenever I stayed the night at his house, we’d share a bed. Despite my wanting them to, our limbs never strayed from their respective sides. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find nights less erotically charged: If we weren’t staying up until four in the morning watching videos on YouTube of a musical we hoped would eventually open on Broadway, we were watching movies we rented from Hollywood Video that featured our favorite actresses. But then, on the eve of Senior Skip Day—for which we planned to drive all the way to Albany to buy a couple of five-dollar shirts from H&M—everything changed. To pass the time during the night, Jacob and I had decided to play an innocuous game of Truth or Dare. Who dared whom is lost on me now, but one of us was dared (quite naively, I’m sure) to touch the other’s penis. As is common in dares of this nature, one thing led to another until eventually I let him rest his penis in my mouth for five or so minutes, my take on a blowjob. At the mall the next day, neither of us mentioned what had happened.

Not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, and maybe because we weren’t sure if we should do what we did again, we rarely hung out just the two of us following that night. Nothing avoids suspicion like only being seen together in group situations, we were sure of it. But not even the added variable of potential onlookers could stop us from messing around. During group sleepovers, hours after everyone else had fallen asleep, our hands would slink their way beneath each other’s waistbands while our eyes remained locked on the surrounding bodies of our unconscious friends. (It should also be said that our jerking each other off lacked both confidence and vigor, lest we wake those beside us by intermittently jabbing our elbows into their backs.) These hush-hush nocturnal hookups continued for a few weeks, punctuating the end of our high school years with a throbbing yet curtailed exclamation point. Although we gave it our best shot, we never did ejaculate, always stopping short at the last possible second. While I had no other sexual experiences to compare them to, I remember thinking that our not orgasming was somehow more gratifying. It was in the same vein of shoplifting a gel pen in middle school but never using it or telling anyone about your dabble into petty crime. If you did, it would lose the allure of doing something you’re not supposed to. It hadn’t occurred to me that not cumming also meant there’d be no evidence to wash off or dismiss the next day.

Then, the week after high school graduation, Jacob ceased all communication with me, responding to neither my barrage of texts nor my slew of MySpace messages. Seeing as he spent most of his days on MySpace, it stood to reason that flooding his inbox with increasingly desperate messages would yield a pretty quick response. This was, in fact, not the case. But rather than admit Jacob was actively ignoring me, I was certain his radio silence was the result of something far more likely and reasonable: why, an armed assailant could have easily broken into his mother’s townhouse and shot him point blank in the back of the head while he sat in front of the computer typing his reply message to me. I could imagine trickles of blood running down his slumped body, dripping onto the keyboard below, seeping between the keys. In the days following his death, his mother couldn’t even Google local funeral homes without a majority of the keys sticking. Knowing I was probably waiting for his message with bated breath, his last hope might have been me recognizing the flashing orange icon next to his MySpace profile picture as a beacon for help.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that this had actually happened. Goodness, still fresh in all of our minds was the memory from a few months before of the man who had shot and killed his ex-wife at a local gas station while their daughter watched from the backseat. Anything was possible.

To kick off summer, Amanda and some of our theater friends—fellow cast members from an all-white production of The Wiz—proposed a sleepover at Amanda’s house the following weekend. They hashed out the details in a group Facebook chat for days without the twins or me RSVPing, leaving me to wonder if any of them had begun to suspect that we’d had a falling out. While it made perfect sense why I wasn’t saying anything—after all, I sure as hell wasn’t going to say one word until Jacob properly explained to me what was going on between us—why weren’t the twins saying anything? Had they already written their response in a separate group chat, one in which I wasn’t included?

Unless—

What if my imagined armed intruder scenario had actually happened? What if the assailant had taken the lives of two people that day, not just one? Two twins, one stone, as they say.

I allowed my train of thought to chug along this morbid track until later that night when Jacob finally messaged the group apologizing for their delayed response but assuring everyone that he and Erik would be there. Tragically, not only did this disprove my theory of his untimely murder, it also confirmed that I was most definitely being ignored. Still. Knowing that Jacob would be forced into close confinement with me was too tempting to resist. Without bothering to wait an appropriate amount of time that would assure everyone I had absolutely not been waiting for Jacob to speak first, I ferociously typed that I’d go.

—

Since Jacob, Erik, and I hadn’t yet acquired driver licenses, one of our friends had to scoop us up from our respective houses on the night of the sleepover. When her lime green VW Beetle puttered into my driveway, I took my place in the backseat beside Erik, whose placement ensured Jacob’s body was separated from mine, making even an accidental leg graze impossible. It was hard to imagine this not being intentional. Not once during the twenty-minute car ride did Jacob say anything to me, never mind look directly at me. Even when I’d agree with something he said to someone else, he’d continue the conversation as if the sound of my voice were nothing more than the faint thump of a rodent being run over, just minus the fleeting sympathy that typically accompanies instances of involuntary vehicular animalslaughter. Then, as we neared Amanda’s house, our friend started to play the Colbie Caillat song “Realize.” As Caillat lamented her unspoken and unrequited feelings for a friend, Erik glanced at me and then just as quickly looked away, the way someone does when seeing something they should not have. Like any sane person, I instantly grew paranoid and wondered what exactly he knew about Jacob and me, and if he might possibly know even more than I did.

Yet much to my surprise, the night proceeded without even a hint of the rift that had apparently come between Jacob and myself. Now, this isn’t to suggest that he spoke to me, because he did not. But there was pizza, which undoubtedly helped. After a few hours of playing card games and gabbing about who we wanted to emerge victorious at the upcoming Tony Awards, Jacob stood in the center of the living room, cleared his throat, and informed us that he had an announcement to make. Without being asked to, everyone set their grease-soaked paper plates on the table and folded theirs arms across their chests. While keeping my eyes locked on Jacob’s, I took my chance and discreetly reached for the last slice of pizza. Aside from looking away for a second to make sure a strand of cheese hadn’t fallen on my shorts, I watched him along with everyone else in rapt silence.

“I want you all to know that I’m in a relationship…” Then, after a pause so pregnant it’d give the Octomom a run for her uterus: “—with a guy.”

I started to choke on a piece of crust, not that anyone noticed. Instead, the group erupted in cheers as I gasped for air. While this was a significant coming out declaration in its own right, it was especially momentous given its preamble. Not only was he gay, but he’d landed a boyfriend right out of the gate. Once I’d successfully swallowed the crust lodged in my throat, I tried to make sense of it all, gobsmacked though I was. But when it dawned on me just what Jacob was saying, the weight of what it meant, my cheeks flooded with warmth. To my utter delight, I turned to our friends so each and every one of them could see stretched across my face the widest and toothiest smile I had ever smiled. The hours I’d devoted to watching every Julia Roberts movie so I could pause a scene and try to contort my mouth until it resembled hers were finally paying off. The exorbitant video rental store late fees my mother had incurred hadn’t been for naught. While I hadn’t been sure what occasion would call for such a smile when I was younger, I now understood that this moment—Jacob confessing his love to me in front of our closest and dearest friends—was what I’d been waiting for. I didn’t even care that he’d be outing me in the process. If he was ready, then so was I.

Once the group’s chatter had died down, thanks in large part to my emphatic shushing, Jacob took a deep breath and continued. “His name is B— B—.” (I refuse to type his name in full, given how ridiculous it is, but will confirm that his last name is synonymous with a particularly feral seafaring rodent.) “He lives in California.” When someone asked where they had met, he explained they were both attending the same college in the fall and had found each other on a social media website the college required all of its incoming freshmen to use.

En masse, our friends sprung off the couches and started hugging him. They exclaimed how proud of him they were, that he could take such a courageous step forward in his life. I, meanwhile, was perplexed for many reasons, but three jumped out at me in particular. For one thing, I was born and raised and currently lived in upstate New York, not California. Second, Jacob and I were going to two completely different colleges states away from each other. Third, I knew damn well that we had actually met years before on a little league baseball field rather than weeks ago in what sounded like a pedophile-infested Internet chatroom. As Jacob continued to recount his stirring tale of passion, my Mona Lisa smile flattened to a thin hard line, much like that of the actual “Mona Lisa.” I clenched my jaw in the vague hopes of crunching my molars into shards so I could spit them at everyone like shrapnel. The lump in my throat felt as large as a bowling ball, one whose holes had never once been cleaned after decades of being fingered.

When Jacob finally arrived at the conclusion of his whirlwind love affair, he excused himself for a glass of water. What with all its twists and turns and moments that were real nail biters, who could blame him for growing so parched? Once I was certain tears wouldn’t start pouring down my face, I followed him into the kitchen. Without making a sound, I watched as he adjusted the sink knobs so that the water was neither too hot nor too cold. He planted the tip of his finger in the glass and left it there for a second or two—deeming it just right, I imagined.

Remaining behind him, I leaned in close and said, “I’m happy for you.” While I wish I could have looked him in the eye when I spoke, I feared he’d see the pain I’d so far been able to hide. Instead, I stared at his neck muscles that contracted each time he swallowed. Once the glass was empty, he placed it in the sink. “Thanks, Adam.” He wiped his mouth. “I knew you would be.” Despite searching his entire face for a trace of compassion for what I was going through, I came up short. Instead of facial tics that might’ve hinted at the possible emotional turmoil churning beneath, his face was still and blank, as emotive as if he had just informed a wall that it had no say as to what color it would be painted. Presumably satisfied with our talk, he made sure to pat me on the back—twice—before rejoining our friends.

Rather than endure a night of our friends fawning over Jacob and his stirring tale of passion, my mind flew the coop. Now, suddenly adrift and incapable of maintaining my composure, all I could imagine was what it would have been like had my intruder scenario actually happened, the one involving a bullet in Jacob’s head and his mother having to buy a new keyboard. Instead of celebrating this new relationship, we’d be mourning his unfortunate passing. At the funeral, we’d eat little cubes of sharp cheddar cheese (his favorite) and slices of pepperoni, and take turns wistfully recalling our most cherished moments from his short life. His father was a lawyer and presumably made decent money, so maybe edible arrangement centerpieces would be incorporated into the funeral budget. When the time eventually came for me to say a few words about Jacob, I’d deliver a eulogy that would long be remembered in the minds of those in attendance for its heartbreaking eloquence. And upon reading the final word, I’d hold back a sob but let the tears fall from my eyes onto one of the floral fruit displays. Before leaving the podium, I’d nibble on a piece of cantaloupe and taste a hint of salt.

—

Having known for months that we would be attending the same college in the fall, Erik and I considered ourselves lucky—none of our other friends would know someone when they arrived wherever they were going. (Aside from Jacob and his aforementioned boyfriend, that is.) When the time came in July for our mandatory freshman orientation, we packed overnight bags and embarked on a weekend we hoped would be life-changing—an introduction to our new lives. While it might not have lived up to such imagined promise, it at least served a preparatory purpose, as we were told to brace ourselves for heavy amounts of snowfall come winter. With a campus that stretched along the rocky shores of Lake Ontario, the area was notorious for its lake-effect snow that was measured in feet instead of inches.

Later that night, sensing there was no better time to tie up the loose ends of my “questionable” sexual orientation than a weekend specifically devoted to one’s orientation, I came out to Erik. It was the first time I’d told anyone that, believe it or not, my heterosexuality was a total sham. Needless to say, Erik was less than shocked, clarifying that of course he always knew. I laughed along with him, as if it had been an inside joke between us for years.

Upon returning home, I was fully prepared to see Jacob as few times as he would want to see me, if he wanted to at all. Though, for reasons I couldn’t hope to pin down, he no longer avoided me. He sent me an unprompted text soon after I returned home. He responded to every text I sent him, giving our correspondence the novel appearance of an actual conversation between two friends. We saw each other more and more, like two people who enjoyed each other’s company would. And yet, something wasn’t right, at least not quite. While we were hanging out as often as we had prior to graduation, our time together seemed to be predicated upon the condition that Erik be there too. Even though this should have tipped me off that something was still amiss between us, that our current circumstances weren’t so different from the beginning of summer when he’d only see me in group situations, I remained blissfully ignorant of such a logical conclusion. As to why, well, if I were in need of any reassurance that Jacob still cared about me as he had before, I need not have looked further than his MySpace Top Eight, where I was still ranked number one. (Though it was anyone’s guess as to when his boyfriend would knock me off my long-held, rightful position.)

Despite this return to not-quite normalcy, we didn’t discuss what we did or who we were to each other. Whenever the ever-looming fall semester crept up in our conversations, we of course talked of how we’d miss each other, but it wasn’t like how it had been before the summer—which isn’t to suggest that we didn’t mean what we said. Rather, perhaps we both suspected that the pain of missing each other would inevitably be buried under all the experiences awaiting us at college—the amazing friends we’d make, the incredible things we’d do, the future boyfriends who’d hurt us more than we could have ever hurt each other—and everything decomposes after being buried, in time.

By the time August came to a close, Amanda moved to Troy to enroll at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Jacob was carried away to DePaul University in Chicago on the blissful wings of his still-fresh relationship, and Erik and I were painstakingly decorating our SUNY Oswego dorm room as a Celine Dion concert DVD played in the background. Sure enough, the texts between Jacob and me grew fewer and farther between as the weeks passed, until our only communication was the occasional Facebook post and an even rarer message on MySpace.

In the weeks that followed, I remember frequently wondering if there was more I could have done, something that would have altered the courses of our respective lives. But of course there had been. After all, there was only so much blame I could lob at him when I’d never properly verbalized how I felt. In that way, really, the majority of culpability lay with me for how this whole complicated situation had shaken out. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe that the only reason Jacob was even dating this other guy—someone he’d never even met in person, for Pete’s sake—was because I had withheld myself from him when he needed me most. (This is, of course, assuming that he liked liked me and was hoping I liked liked him in return, and was waiting for me to say as much.) More to the point, maybe we had cared for each other in the same way but he likewise felt incapable of voicing that which he couldn’t define.

Or maybe nothing could have been changed, no matter what I’d done differently, because he had simply liked me, just not enough, not in the way I needed him to. That’s also possible, I suppose.

—

While I saw Jacob infrequently in the months and years that passed—brief spurts of hanging out during breaks from school, accidental encounters over summer vacations—I never once attempted to confront him about what had happened between us, never mind broached a conversation about it on the friendliest of terms. But then along came a night during the winter break of my senior year when I was home and feeling particularly lonely following a breakup with my boyfriend of three years. I noticed that Jacob was also home from school. Even though I hadn’t spent the previous four years pining for him or wondering what could have been had we actually dated, in that moment those considerations suddenly flooded my mind until I was convinced that this night was fated, that Jacob and I were meant to find ourselves stranded in our hometown so that our relationship that never was could finally be. So I sent him a Hail Mary text and invited him to steep with me in my family’s hot tub, and he said he’d come.

Despite his having a boyfriend (not B— B—, who had long since been out of the picture) and the fact that we had barely spoken for the bulk of our college years, I resolved to tell Jacob everything I never had in a last-ditch effort to win him over, thanks in no small part to a box of wine I’d procured (read: stolen) from my mother’s stash in the basement; I’d talk of all the holidays we could have spent together, all the funerals we could have accompanied each other to, all the times we could have wallowed in each other’s misery whenever our apartment’s air conditioning was on the fritz, and how experiences like those were still ours for the taking. Though as moment after moment came when I could have said what I intended to say, I let each one just as easily pass me by, suddenly aware of how ridiculous those words would sound once they came out of my mouth. What I did instead amounted to little more than moving closer to him whenever he slid away, leading to me more or less chasing him—albeit incredibly slowly—around the 4- by 5-foot enclosure while he fended off my advances. Thus, his subsequent declining my invitation to stay the night made perfect sense.

The next morning, while throwing up in the bathroom with the door open, I was harangued by my mother for letting him walk home in the middle of the night in subzero temperatures. She asked me how I could have done such a thing. I told her that, to my credit, I offered him a room to sleep in so I could drive him home in the morning—but save slipping some Rohypnol into his glass of wine or knocking him over the head with one of our croquet mallets, there was nothing I could have done to make him stay. When my phone buzzed shortly after she shut the door so I could vomit in peace, I knew better than to check and see if it was a text from Jacob.

Within hours of me being back on campus the following week, Oswego was engulfed by one of its signature lake-effect blizzards. Despite enduring similar weather conditions every winter for as long as I could remember, I still found walking around campus in such storms challenging at best, and damn near impossible at worst. While trekking up one stretch of road that had a reputation for its relentless gusts of wind, I was reminded of the campus tour Erik and I had taken during our orientation the summer before our Freshman year. At one point, someone had asked the guide how students managed walking to and from classes during hazardous winter weather conditions, saying she’d heard rumors of students holding onto ropes that were tied from building to building. Someone else then mentioned he’d heard students could escape into tunnels that connected many of the buildings, to which our guide cackled and slapped his knee, sufficiently tipping us off that those people had been grossly misinformed.

Snow, ice, and wind pounded my face as I stomped across campus, with no sign of letting up any time soon. As I hoped against hope that I’d make it to class with my nose intact, and because I was sufficiently beaten down by the arduous conditions of the walk, I surrendered myself to the conflicting feelings that had been hounding me ever since my final night with Jacob: equal parts unbelievable guilt over having made him so uncomfortable that he’d rather drunkenly walk home through miles of darkness in the bitter cold than spend one more night with me, and sanctimonious unaccountability for doing what a me from a few years before—a me who had gone through a lot of hurt because of Jacob—had wanted most in the world. Because of the pain I’d perceived to be inflicted upon me in the past, I’d considered myself absolved from any presumed wrongdoing, as if this past pain was a sort of Get Out of Jail Free Card. In theory, this checks out, as it was only too easy for me to nurture the resulting indifference in an attempt to be unconcerned with the consequences of my behavior. In practice, however, with someone I actually cared about, not so much. Considering how we left things, there seemed to be little reason for Jacob and me to ever see each other again.

But no matter how in the right I considered myself to be—or how in the wrong I’d actually been—I had to accept that we no longer mattered to each other in the same way we once had. Moreover, there was the very real possibility that he had never felt as strongly for me as I had for him, that any romantic reciprocation I thought I’d detected was a delusion I’d been far too happy to indulge myself in. Or maybe it had less to do with him not reciprocating my romantic feelings and more to do with our no longer being the focal point in each other’s lives, and that we hadn’t been for quite some time. While I was aware—both in that moment and, to a degree, back in high school—that many friendships didn’t survive into and past college, ours had seemed to die before that last summer was even through.

Like the nonexistent tunnels students could travel through, maybe our friendship had also been a passageway through which we had more or less safely navigated our young adulthood. I could see now what I hadn’t been able to all those years before, that the whole purpose of a tunnel is so one can travel through a seemingly impenetrable mass. What I hadn’t known then was that at one point we had unknowingly diverged but kept moving forward. With no rope binding us together, we had emerged on the other side, separated. If we had looked back to see where the other went, we’d have seen that the way from which we came had caved in, the entrance blocked. Locating the exact moment the collapse had begun would be futile, impossible even, its foundation having long since shifted without our noticing, the walls unable to withstand the weight of questions never asked and answers never given. All that remained was an unidentifiable heap bearing no resemblance to what it once was, that had no hope of ever being walked through again. If we wanted to get to the other side, we’d have to go around.