by Kody Boye
“Get in,” he said.
So I did.
I pulled my knuckle gloves off my hands, shrugged my soaking wet shoes onto the floor and stripped out of my drenched shirt the moment I settled into the passenger seat. While he leaned forward to turn the heater on, hands fumbling with the dashboard and eyes darting between my face and my chest, I asked if I could take my pants off. I was freezing and couldn’t bear to have them on anymore, but knew from personal experience that a lot of men, even those looking for a hookup, were uncomfortable with the idea that a cop might pull up alongside them and see a naked guy (who could very easily be underage, as he was only nineteen and could be mistaken as being younger to some) sitting in their vehicle. The man stared at me for a moment, watching me with his brown eyes, then shrugged and told me to go ahead, that I would probably ‘freeze my nuts off’ if I didn’t.
When I was stripped down to my underwear and my clothes were on the floor, he reached into the back seat, pulled a blanket out and handed it to me. He then asked how long it had been since I’d eaten anything, to which I replied a day, before he reached into the center console and pulled out a Twinkie. “It’s not much,” he’d said, “but it’ll do.”
And do it did, at least until we pulled over to the gas station and he ran in and bought each of us a toasted submarine sandwich. He bought me ham, cheese and tomato, “the casual and fairly diverse,” he said, which was fine with me because I would’ve eaten sushi if he’d’ve been so inclined. All I wanted was something warm and that would fill me up, so getting any kind of food was a relief.
When we settled in and finished eating, he told me his name was Josh and offered his hand. I told him mine was Dakota and shook his in turn, then he asked me where I was headed. “Anywhere,” I said, to which he replied, “Where is anywhere?”
Knowing full and well that I could potentially play this situation into my hands based solely on his mannerisms, his attention to my body and his wandering, sidelong glances, I said the one thing that had charmed dozens of men before him into taking me wherever I wanted to go: ‘Anywhere you’re going.’
Three hours later, we were lying naked in a hotel room bed with a used condom on the floor.
I know what you’re probably thinking—I’m gay, but I’m not: at least, I don’t think I am. For the most part, I’ve just done what I needed to do in order to keep myself going for the last three years. I’m not gay, I’m not straight, I’m not anything as far as I know. I mean, I enjoy sex—I can tell you that much right now. The physical act of enjoying another’s naked flesh against you and feeling him inside you is an amazing feeling, but it’s not necessarily a psychological one, at least not for me. Whenever a guy fucks me, I get hard, and whenever he fucks me good he can throw me over the moon and back without me even knowing what the fuck is going on, but I’ve never remotely had a sexual interest in another man, much less another woman. I tried that once, being a callboy. It didn’t work out, so if you want to refer to me as anything, you can refer to me as ‘not straight.’ I guess that’s the best thing to say. Not attracted to women, written on the resume of my life.
Anyhow, getting back to the story—after Josh fucked me, we laid in bed for a long while talking about stuff: where I was from, what I was doing, why I was walking along the side of the interstate with my thumb in my air. I told him I was a runaway and that my dad had tried to kill me because I was gay (a complete lie, but it gave me an alibi,) that where I came from didn’t exactly matter and that I’d been walking along the interstate because there was nowhere else to go. When I asked about him, he said he was from New Jersey and that he was heading south to see his parents. He also said that he was worried about me (particularly because of how red my hands were) and that he wanted me to go to the doctor. I instantly refused, saying that I didn’t want my dad to get called in based on the fact that I was a runaway whom had likely caused the governments thousands of dollars in rescue fees, to which he immediately sobered himself, then asked if I wanted to go south with him.
“My folks live in a beachhouse,” he said. “You can come live with me for a while. You’re what? Eighteen, nearly nineteen? I’ll say you’re my new boyfriend. They don’t need to know anything.”
No one needed to know anything, which was exactly why I agreed to go south with him, toward Florida and where the oranges grew wild.
The following morning, after he paid for the room and we grabbed breakfast in the cafeteria, we started heading down the coast toward the North Carolinian border. At about noon, we stopped at a thrift store and he bought me a few pairs of clothes, particularly board shorts and tank tops because “it was warm down there” and “he thought I looked hot in them.” Playing the game that I did, I smiled, nodded and told him thanks, but even back then, when I was charming the pants off of men and the money out of their wallets, I still felt a sense of guilt for conning them into giving me what I needed. Josh was a nice guy—a nice, misguided guy, tall at six-three and good-looking with red hair and a wild, albeit attractive scruff of beard. I climbed back in the truck and we continued down the coast, passed into North Carolina, then got as far as Atlanta before, again, we stopped.
‘Why did we stop?’ I asked as we pulled into another motel.
“I want to screw around,” he said.
It didn’t surprise me. Few things surprised me, considering what men asked me to do or what they asked me to let them do to me, so I simply shrugged it off and walked into the hotel with him. We fucked for about two or three hours, on and off, until the sun went down and it got dark, before we walked around the corner to pick up burgers and fries. We then returned to our room, ate and laid in bed, him with his arm around me and me feeling like I had some close connection to this guy, even though I’d only met him the day before.
While we lay there, him stroking the curve of my shoulder and me with my head against his side, I wanted to ask him if he really cared about me, if he liked me for me and not just my ass. I didn’t though. Obviously, that’s more than clear, because asking a guy who picked you up on the side of the road if he’s in love with you is corny and more than stupid, but when you’re in my situation and you’re with a guy who makes you feel like you’re not actually doing it for the money or the need, you feel the urge to ask those kinds of questions.
The next morning, we woke up, ate breakfast again in the cafeteria, then crawled into his truck and started down the road. Two hours later, we were in Florida, and an hour after that, we were pulling into his parents’ driveway. His father was out front, mowing the lawn, when we pulled in and Josh disengaged the vehicle. Josh crawled out the minute his dad killed the lawnmower and I quickly followed suit.
The first words out of Josh’s mouth?
“Dad, I want you to meet my boyfriend, Dakota.”
So began the next year of my life.
Obviously, this part of the story is long, drawn-out and extremely complex, and I think it requires more attention than one entry can detail. I spent an entire year with this guy and his family and it marked (and still marks) an incredibly important period in my life, so I want to do the story justice, because I think I owe it to him (and, most importantly, to you) to give it as much detail as I possibly can.
Wondering what happened next?
I’ll give you a hint—the story didn’t end well, at all.
–Day 31–
December 2nd. It’s started to snow and this morning, while sitting at the kitchen table, John was skimming through my journal with wide eyes and an even wider mouth. Several times, he looked up to ask how long I had spent on this entry, but I shrugged and said it only took me about an hour or so to write. He also said that he hadn’t read it, but from some of the things he caught, it was important progress, progress that he thought was important to the next steps of my life.
Before he left, he asked about Josh and whether or not I loved him, or still do.
I don’t know.
When you ‘love’ someone, does that mean you hav
e an overt amount of affection for them?
I guess I’ll have to keep going with my story, but right now, I don’t think it merits it. I still plan on continuing, John, but it’s Monday and I’m trying to calm myself down before you get home tonight. Hopefully you’ll be fine with taking the night off to spend some time with me. I always hate it when you end up coming home from work only to end up doing more of it. You work too hard to come home to just start over again.
–Day 32–
John didn’t read my journal last night. He did like I asked and sat down and watched TV with me after he made and we ate dinner. I think he might be under the impression that I don’t want him reading what I’m writing, especially since I’m starting to get so personal with my life, but I hope he doesn’t think that just because I’m getting deeper doesn’t mean I want to have my oxygen supply cut off.
Funny—it seems like I’m using allegories more and more often, especially as the days go by.
Oh well—at least it gives John (and, hopefully, my future self) something to relate to.
Last night, after we ate the beef stroganoff he made (from scratch, I should add,) we sat down in the living room and watched TV for about four hours, first a documentary about wildlife, then a crime special on the Black Dahlia. It’s odd to look at something like that on TV. You know it’s real, but at the same time, it’s become so sensationalized that it doesn’t seem that real at all, more like fantasy encapsulated in the world of reality (John said that’s called ‘magic realism’ when I mentioned it. He obviously reads more than I do.) It makes me wonder if people like the Dahlia are kept alive simply because of the way she died and not because she was a budding young talent who was brutally murdered. I mean, yeah—it ties into the same thing, but keeping someone alive because of how they died is far more cruel than keeping someone alive just based on the fact that they did.
Oh, yes, this young woman died.
Really?
Yes! Don’t you know? She was cut in half.
That poor, poor thing.
Same thing, same story, same reaction each and every time—once you tell a person someone was murdered, they react with shock, then when you tell them she was cut in half, they’re mortified, like someone’s just kicked a kitten into the wall in front of their four-year-old daughter and expected her mother not to react.
Seeing that last night, it makes me wonder if they would have had the same reaction if John hadn’t have come along and I had died in that alleyway. Knowing the public though, they probably wouldn’t have bat an eyelash at a homeless person being beaten to death in an alley. In today’s day and age, you have to die tragically to end up on the news, or at least accidentally. A biker can fall into a culvert whilst riding his magical unicycle and get his fifteen minutes of fame, but a man who gets shot will never end up on the news.
That’s the way life works, I guess.
It sucks.
If only people were more caring.
–Day 33–
I’m not sure if John’s read my journal. If he has, he hasn’t mentioned anything about it, though I don’t think it necessarily matters right now. He may not just be saying anything for fear of upsetting me or bringing about any unnecessary feelings, or he may just not have read it at all. I wouldn’t put it past him, considering how he’s been returning from work the past few nights, but I guess that doesn’t matter. Regardless, I guess it’s time to continue, even if I don’t necessarily want to revisit this time in my life.
(To John—I’m working toward it. Hopefully this backstory, if you have or when you do read it, isn’t detrimental to the process.)
His father’s name was Lenore. His mother’s was Theresa. I only found out their last name was Camble later the evening we arrived, while we were sitting in the living room and someone came asking for the senior Mr. Camble. Even now, writing this, I’m not too sure I would’ve ever found out the family’s last name had that man not come to the door wanting to ‘cause trouble,’ as Josh so kindly put it. I’d never snooped in their mail, checked their records or ever found anything that could indicate what their last name was. At the time, it didn’t necessarily bother me, as I was simply playing a role in order to put myself into a better situation and not thinking much of it. It ‘wasn’t necessary’ was always what I told myself whenever I got a wild hair and tried to find out more about them. Now, though, it makes me uneasy to think that I could have lived in that house for all that time and have never known Josh’s last name.
Anyhow, I’m distracting from the point.
As I was saying, we were sitting in the living room making small talk and watching the tide roll in when a knock came at the door and the stranger asked to speak to the senior Camble. Almost immediately upon turning to look at the front door, Josh had wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close, as though the stranger posed some threat to his livelihood and the relationship he purported we had. When I asked if something was wrong, he simply shook it off and said not to worry about it, then his father went out the front door and his mother stood and made her way into the kitchen. Shortly thereafter, Josh beckoned me to my feet and we went to his room to retire.
You can probably imagine I didn’t sleep very well that night. It was hard enough to go along with the whole ruse—playing ‘boyfriend’ and ‘the new man in the family’ and all—but it was even harder to think that something could possibly be wrong and you couldn’t do anything about it.
Sometime between the time I first crawled into bed and the moment Josh pulled me back against his chest, I stopped caring and pushed the thoughts out of my head. I didn’t fall asleep until sometime after midnight.
At six, Josh woke me up and asked if I wanted to go out on the beach. I said I was tired and didn’t feel like it. He rose and told his mother that I wasn’t feeling well. When she asked what was wrong, he said that we’d had a long drive up here and that he thought I may be catching a cold. However bogus the response was, it kept me in bed for another four hours before I dragged myself out of bed, into the shower and out into the living room in an open vest and a pair of board shorts.
That morning, I learned the first things about my new family—his father read the morning paper, his mother made cinnamon rolls and toast and brought them out to the men in her family and Josh liked to lounge around without his shirt. It established a routine that I came to follow over the next six months.
I didn’t ask about what had happened last night. Though Lenore seemed decent enough, even going so far as to ask if I was feeling better after Theresa asked if I wanted her to run down to the store for some medicine, I didn’t necessarily trust either of them, particularly because of the family matter that hadn’t personally been explained the moment I walked out the bedroom door. No apology, no insight, no excuse for having left the room to leave me and Josh to retire to bed—in some strange, maybe even sick and twisted way, I couldn’t help but feel as though there was a deep, dark secret lying beneath the floorboards, festering like malignant cancer that has been undiagnosed by the world’s greatest physician. That kind of thing doesn’t earn you bonus points, especially when you’re new to a family and they’re already pushing things off the table for the cat to chew on.
As nice as they were, I couldn’t trust either of Josh’s parents. Oddly enough though, I felt as though I could trust Josh, even though he picked me up off the side of the road only to fuck me two times before we got to his parents’ house.
It might be best to start here. I need a while to process how I should tell the next part of this story without overwhelming you beforehand.
–Day 34–
The tests came back.
I have absolutely nothing wrong with me.
When John came home from work earlier, he walked into the kitchen with a smile on his face and a torn envelope in his hand. At the time, I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious and worried. He’s never as manic as he was at that moment, with his face seemingly ready to rip apart at the cheeks
and cheeks so red from what was probably laughter he could have beaten a cherry tomato in a ripeness contest. At first, I wasn’t sure if I should ask what was wrong (or if anything was wrong for that matter,) but before I could, he slapped the envelope down in front of me and grabbed both my shoulders in a death grip.
“Look at it!” he cried. “Look at it!”
Him crying with joy at the top of his lungs didn’t help much either. I didn’t mention that the shaking kind of hurt my ribs, though it doesn’t really matter because it was only a dull pain and it lasted for a brief five seconds.
Anyhow, back to the point—after John had let go of me and began to prance about the kitchen, pulling pots and pans out of the cupboards and throwing random spice and ingredients from the displays, I pulled the letter out of the envelope and started to read over the information laid out in the graphs. In one row were my levels, while the other held the standards that a healthy nineteen-year-old like me should have. A few of my levels seemed off—iron, protein, and a few others I can’t remember—but a note in the margin said that the ‘improvement in my diet’ was standardizing my body and that was why they were partially off (though thinking back on it, they were barely off in the first place.) After reading that, I quickly flipped the page, read a few brief typed sentences on different variations, then let my eyes scramble down the page, toward the rows of initially-blank lines that held both doctor Anderson’s and the blood analyzers notes.
