“He’s from LA,” Ruby’s roommate’s friend Amara had told her, three months later at a party, when Amara had caught Ruby staring at Gabe while he danced.
“Is he seeing anyone?” Ruby asked.
“I don’t know,” said Amara, and blinked eyelashes so long that they brushed her cheeks. Oh, how Ruby had coveted those lashes, and Amara’s long, long legs! “He’s a cutie, right?”
Ruby had nodded woodenly, blushing as she watched Gabe make a fluid turn from the girl he’d been dancing with toward the guy who’d been grinding on him from behind.
“Is he bi?” she asked.
“Bi. Or maybe pan. Anything and everything,” Amara said with a wink.
Ruby nodded, feeling like she’d swallowed stones, like her competition for Gabe’s attention had just effectively doubled, that her chances had just gone from slim to nonexistent, even though she knew it wasn’t true. Liking men and women, one of her friends had once explained, didn’t mean that a bisexual person would like all men and all women. The question was, could Gabe ever like her?
Ruby couldn’t stop staring at Gabe as he closed his eyes, lost in the music, rocking his hips against those of the guy who’d embraced him. He looked like a fallen angel, which was a weird thing for a Jewish girl to think, but it was true. With his beautiful face tilted toward the roof and his hands gripping the other guy’s hips he was a picture of corrupted innocence, like he’d been pure and now couldn’t wait to be filthy. Ruby felt herself shiver. At that instant, Gabe opened his eyes, looked right at her, and gave her a teasing smile before beckoning for her to join him. Ruby shook her head and managed a wave—a stupid little half-hearted waggle of her hand—before turning away. He was, she’d decided, like a statue in a museum. Fun to look at, impossible to take home.
She and Gabe had moved in and out of one another’s orbits through their first three and a half years of college. She’d dated one of his freshman-year roommates for a few months sophomore year; he’d been in her History of Cinema seminar two years after that, loping into the lecture hall seconds before the professor started talking, flipping open his laptop with one languid hand, and lounging in his chair like it was a velvet-covered chaise and not nubbly preformed plastic. Finally, in the fall of senior year, they’d worked on a production of The Bacchae together. Ruby had been the stage manager, and Gabe, who’d enrolled in an Introduction to Stagecraft class, had somehow been assigned the role of assistant lighting designer.
“Danhauser!” the director, Professor Caldwell, had shouted, waving her over. Professor Caldwell was short and round, with a notable wart on his nose. In the course of his acting career, he’d played hobbits, gnomes, and, in a long-running children’s TV show, a troll who lived under a bridge. Each year, the seniors invited all of Professor Caldwell’s new advisees to a party where, at midnight, they screened a highlight reel of the professor making children answer riddles, offering pithy wisdom to questing heroes, and eating second breakfast. “Danhauser! This is…” He spent a moment groping for Gabe’s name, then gave up and just waved toward him. “This young gentleman is going to help run the lights.”
“Hey,” said Gabe, with a friendly smile. “I’m Gabe.” He offered Ruby his hand.
“Hi. Have you ever worked a lighting rig before?”
“I don’t even know what a lighting rig is,” said Gabe. “It’s up there, right?” He’d gestured vaguely toward the ceiling.
Oh, boy, thought Ruby.
“I just changed my minor to Theater Arts, so this is kind of a last-minute thing.” Gabe shuffled his feet, looking so crestfallen that Ruby felt her crusty, on-task stage-manager heart thaw and crack.
“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll show you what to do.”
They’d worked together for eight weeks, through rehearsals and tech week and Caldwell’s inevitable dress-rehearsal-day meltdown, where he’d raged and screamed, announcing that this was going to be the worst show, the absolute worst show that he’d ever had the dishonor of being associated with in all his years in the theater. Ruby, who’d seen this performance three times previously, had watched with a jaundiced eye, with Gabe cringing beside her. “He looks like Rumpelstiltskin when the miller’s daughter gets his name right,” Gabe had whispered, after Caldwell tossed his script to the floor and stomped on the ground. Ruby bit her lip to keep from laughing, and whispered back that Caldwell had actually played Rumpelstiltskin in a direct-to-DVD movie.