Straight

by Seth King

  “No. You can’t. I want…this. I want you. Remember last night?”

  “No,” I whisper. “I can’t.”

  A feeling sinks into me, a terrifying and final dread I can’t even begin to understand or process. I know that if this is over, really over, I won’t be able to see him again. Not anytime soon, at least. The last day and night alone will be hard enough to scrape from my memory. It will be too hard, too painful to see what I’ve lost. It’s been unraveling for weeks and I knew this was coming. This has to be the last time.

  So I preserve him, distill him in my memory. I reach up and run a finger down his jawline, drinking in all of his wild light. “Ty,” I say. “God. You made my world bigger.”

  Then I realize I can’t control it anymore, and I lean forward just as he reaches over. We collide, then ignite. Together we fall against the wall, grabbing and touching and fidgeting, neither of us really breathing. I give him one quick, desperate gasp of a kiss, and then I pull away.

  And that’s it. It’s done, and this is how it always should’ve happened. Quick and easy. Ty shined like a morning star: too brightly, and with the knowledge that would all be over eventually.

  I walk away and glance back one last time, then look away. I can’t just stand around and cry. There’s something I need to do.

  17

  The next thing I know, I’ve grabbed my bike from the backyard and I am pumping to Caroline’s family’s house, Savannah rushing by in a surreal blur. I have to get to Caro and tell her about this before they hack my Instagram or my Gmail or my God-knows-what-else and post gay porn or something. She still deserves to know I fell in love. I don’t exactly know why, I just feel that she should know. It’s only fair. And at the moment it’s the only thing giving me something to think about and preventing me from falling to pieces…

  I throw down my bike and let myself into her house, her massive immaculate compound off Forsyth Park that takes up almost a full block. How much had I changed since the last time I’d been here? Just the thought makes me shiver.

  I find her immediately, right where I figured. She’s drinking white wine at her kitchen counter, alone, staring off at nothing. She barely even glances at me, like she’s been expecting me.

  “Hi,” I say. After all this, it is still so good to be here. She’s my oldest friend in the world, and I’m about to break her heart. The second heart I’ve broken in half an hour, actually. But still I can’t do this anymore – I can’t have her sneaking around, trying to get me into a relationship again when I’m dipping my toes into the other pool. Also, a strange impulse I cannot understand is making me want to just spill out my story to someone, anyone, and I figure she’s as good a person as any.

  “I guess I know why you’re here,” she says, sounding exhausted. I want to hug her, and that urge makes me realize I was always right – I always did love her, just as a sister or something. But the love is still there. Life gives you a basket of people – you’ve got to pick and choose which ones to keep. And I want her in my basket. Forever.

  “Yeah. You heard what happened?” I ask.

  “Mhmm.”

  “Okay. Let me just be honest, then.”

  I take a breath and close my eyes. “This is the weirdest, and hardest, thing I’ve ever had to tell you, but…”

  The next few words come out of our mouths at the same time. I say “I met a guy, and I like him” and she says “I think I fell in love with Thad.”

  My eyes fly open. “What? My best friend Thad?” I ask, as she blurts out “What? You like a guy?”

  I shake my head a little and try to recalibrate. “Okay, clearly we’re…wait, say that again? You’re dating my best friend?”

  She swallows. A long silence follows. “Um, I mean, I guess. Your aunt came into town and saw us at dinner. That’s what I thought you were talking about just now. I figured she’d told you. But wait, you’re gay?”

  “It’s a long story. I…hold on. I thought you wanted me back, and you were trying to make it work again? I thought you were in love with me all this time…?”

  She sort of scoffs a little. “Um, huh? I wasn’t in love with you. I thought you were clinically depressed, because according to everyone you know, you fell off the Earth. I know how you get. Why did you think I was so desperate to hangout? I wanted to make sure you were okay, and I wanted to find a way to tell you…but I never could. And sure, we got a little flirty here or there recently, but when have we not been like that?”

  I shake my head and grab the counter. “No. Wait. My best friend has been hooking up with my ex? My ex whom I thought was trying to get back with me?”

  She looks just as confused as me. “And what did you say before? You like a guy? You’re gay?”

  I swallow. “I can’t even process any of this after that…my own best friend…but anyway, um…yeah. A guy came up to me one day and started talking to me, and I think I like him. I think I love him, actually.” I close my eyes. “Is that hard to hear? It was hard for me to say.”

  I can feel the tension vibrating between us. “Yes,” she finally says. “Hard and weird. But…I’ll be okay.”

  I look at her. “You’re not mad?”

  “Mad? Ty, my first crush turned out to be gay, too, and I actually loved it. I thought it meant he gave up women forever if he couldn’t have me. But if you’re happy, and if I have wine in my hand right now, how could I be mad?”

  “I don’t know…”

  She laughs from deep in her stomach, and that’s when I see it – the “love haze.” The same one I’m currently in with Ty, where nothing at all can bother me. I’d dreaded this moment in the back of my mind for months – I know what they say about women whose exes “become gay.” They sneer, they laugh, they call her a clueless idiot, they say she couldn’t keep a man. But Caroline is too dignified and evolved – she’s fine. The realization makes me feel ten thousand pounds lighter.

  “God,” she says soon, “to think that this time last year, I was crazy in love with you…Thad is the only thing that got me through the end of us, did you know that?”

  I shake my head. Then I start scanning my memories, and soon it makes more and more sense. There were so many clues I ignored. I’ve seen her texting him…I’ve heard her mention him countless times for no reason…and why would she have been at his party, anyway? This was right under my nose all along, but I’d been too wrapped up in Ty to notice…

  All in all, it makes me disgusted and relieved at the same time. It’s a bittersweet pill – she’s over me, which means she won’t be too sad about this, but still, she’s over me, and my best friend is what got her over the hill. “No,” I say. “I don’t want to know any details. Seriously. I will kill him. I thought we were distant because of who I was dating, when really it was because of who he was dating…”

  “But you’re seeing someone,” she says. “Seeing a guy, I guess…so why would you care at this point?”

  “So? He crossed a line. Thad’s my best friend, my brother, the kid who helped me through the death of my grandparents in high school, and he’s seeing my ex...”

  “Good point.”

  “Yeah. He’d better stay away for a while and let me process this.”

  “Understandable. But you can’t blame me,” she says. “I mean, come on – do you know how hard it is to be single in my world? Jesus, the pressure alone – you’re seen as a hopeless old spinster if you don’t have a three-carat diamond by the time you graduate college. Every time I get on Facebook and see another engagement post, I want to drown myself in acid. It was either find a guy, or move to a nunnery in disgrace. The third time my mom asked me if I was a lesbian, I knew I had to do something. So I picked Thad.”

  “Ugh. How did it start?”

  Her bottom lip disappears into her mouth. “Well, after the breakup, I was sad, I was lonely, I saw him at Whole Foods one night, he helped me pick out a good bottle of wine…”

  I hold up a hand.

  “Okay, I’l
l stop,” she says. “So…what are you going to do?”

  I sigh down at her white marble countertops. “I don’t know. Things are like a livewire right now. I could lose all my friends, my reputation…”

  “So? I almost lost you because of Thad. Or I could have, at least. But I love him, and it’s worth it.”

  “Okay, please stop, this is still too weird to talk about.”

  “Fine, sorry. But come on – you’re my best friend in the world, and I’ve known you since we were using training wheels. When I realized I had feelings for Thad I was totally thrown…I didn’t want to lose you…I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if we fully lost touch. But one night he took me to that oyster place to talk, and-”

  “Details, Caro! I don’t want to know those things.”

  “Okay. Anyway, all I’m saying is that I knew love was important enough to chase, no matter what I lost. So go find your guy, I guess. Don’t fuck it up.”

  “We’ll see. The shitty thing is, I think I already did.”

  “No you didn’t. I can see it in your eyes – it’s still there. God, that’s weird to think about,” she says dreamily, shaking her head.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. The Thad thing obviously makes this a lot easier to deal with. Still, can I hug you?”

  “You don’t even have to ask.”

  I wrap her up and just smell her, the past rushing back to me. I hear myself sniffle, and she rubs my shoulder. “Stop, Henry. Maybe this was meant to end this way. And I’m on your team. I’ll be here until the end.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course, even if it’s awkward as shit. The tides are turning out there, and we’ve all been thrown into the same boat, you know? The other day a guy called me an ugly whore on the street because I wouldn’t talk to him, and nobody cared – nobody even batted an eyelash. Female, gay, bisexual, black, immigrant – we’re kind of all on the same page now. It’s time to draw the battle lines and decide where we’re all going to stand, and I would gladly stand with the gays. I mean, could you even imagine the sartorial choices on the straight side? Ew.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” I smile. “Truly. I’ve felt so alone lately.”

  “Aw, Henry. Nobody is ever alone. They just go on detours. Can I meet him, though? Your boyfriend? Or whatever he is?”

  “Sure you can. We’ll get wasted off some mimosas and it’ll be great. If he ever talks to me again, that is.”

  “Perfect. And if anyone has anything to say about your new situation, they can come to me first.”

  “I love you,” I murmur. “Always did.”

  “I love you, too. Remember when we went to that co-ed birthday sleepover in fifth grade and made out behind Angela Hodgson’s fountain after her mom fell asleep?”

  “Like it was yesterday. Let’s keep making more memories. Even if Thad’s around.”

  She stiffens, and I pull away and turn to leave.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, already in the foyer. “I just need to be alone.”

  “For how long?”

  “Maybe forever,” I say as her massive oak door slams behind me.

  18

  The next few days are cold and lonely and awful. I feel like I’m being whipped, lashed by the world, with nobody to hold me – not now that Ty’s gone, at least. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t come around, he doesn’t even Snapchat. I want to fix it, I want to tell him that I want to watch him grow old next to me, but I can’t. I know exactly what I would say to him, if I knew how: I love you for you, and I love you for who I am with you. You made me better than I was before. You taught me the world was so much bigger than I ever knew it was. You are more alive than anyone I have ever known, and it makes me want to live that much brighter, too. It was only ever you. But all that is over. There can be no coming back from how massively I failed him, and his silence proves that. So soon I just accept it: I fucked it up. It’s done, and I lost the best thing that ever crashed into my life.

  I even start drinking again. I wasn’t cognizant of it at the time, but I’ve realized that before Ty, I would make myself an incredibly stiff drink before bed every single night. It would make me feel dull and muted the next morning, sure, but it was better than having to face the loneliness and anxiety that would creep in as I sat alone in my house, or snuggled up in bed with someone I didn’t really love. But by dulling myself, I was also ensuring I wouldn’t be able to experience the opposite of those anxious nosedives: things like joy and elation and unchecked happiness. That’s what Ty gave me: the bravery to face all of life’s spectrum, even the bad parts. Because even if things went south, he would be there to bolster me. But now I’m back to the drinking, and I can’t stop.

  And in my winter, Ty is everywhere. I miss his eyebrows, I miss his smell, I miss the way he put Johnny Harris barbecue sauce on every single thing he ate. He is inside me, he is splashed all over the walls like Technicolor vomit, he is painting the inside of my skull like a demented watercolorist. I smell him when I open my drawers; I hear him when the wind blows; I see him when I walk past a café playing Amy Winehouse’s Valerie, which had been blaring the night I watched him dance. I am drenched in him, and it doesn’t get any better.

  What makes people stay, I wonder? What makes them leave? What bonds us to the ones we love? I know my mom loved her first boyfriend deeply and fundamentally, and she never got over it. She admitted it that night she got drunk with me. She married my dad because he was nice to her, and because his family was rich. The night of our drunken conversation she insisted she didn’t mourn her first love, but her eyes were screaming as she said it. How would I look back on the Ty period of my life when I was her age one day? With nostalgia, with regret, with disgust, with embarrassment? With love?

  I scroll through my photos over and over again until my phone dies, just so I can look at us back when we were still us, and then I plug it in and do it again. I keep stopping on one picture of him I’d taken in bed – you can’t even see his face, just his graceful neck, his high cheekbones, that artfully-built hair. Once I get lost in the photo, staring for twenty minutes, and then I finally say it. Bursting out of me like a diva’s unexpected climax during a quiet moment of a play, it just flows out of me, the thing I never said to him: “I love you.”

  But he’s not here anymore, and we aren’t us anymore. He’ll never hear me. And the words are sent into silence.

  ~

  One empty week bleeds into two, and then three. School fades into holiday break, and I am listless and unoccupied again. The police come and document everything, of course, but since there were no cameras focused on the alley, they pat my shoulder and tell me to call my insurance and tell me how sorry they all are, just as I knew they would. (I imagine that there would’ve been a national manhunt if the crime had been committed against a heterosexual, though.) But still, the case is listed in the newspaper, and people talk. The noise of it all makes me hide even harder.

  I try to move on, but I am rattled. I keep getting flashbacks of how I felt in the immediate aftermath of the attack, how I felt like they’d taken my humanity from me, in the strangest way. It made me feel unprotected and inferior and exposed to have them feel free enough to do that in the middle of the day, on a public street. What other group would someone feel that comfortable committing a hate crime against? Or was Caro right, and were we all equally fucked? Was this how my brother-in-law had felt when we’d dragged him into that white restaurant and they’d sat and stared for an hour, robbing him of his dignity?

  Soon I log onto Facebook and see a strange post from Shepard. That fucking maggot…I’ll kill him when I find him…

  Underneath, Thad’s little sister has commented a bunch of laughing emoji symbols with the message “serves you right, you homophobes.” Curious, I call Thad.

  “Hi,” I say as soon as he answers, still pissed. “How’s my ex-girlfriend doing?”

  “Henry, p
lease don’t.”

  “Fine,” I swallow. “So…what is Shep talking about? On Facebook?”

  “That’s a better introduction. Hello to you too, stranger.”

  “Yeah, yeah, please just tell me.”

  He inhales.

  “What is it?”

  “Well. Don’t tell anyone, but what he did to your car, I did ten times worse to his. But this time I made sure there were no witnesses or video cameras. He’ll be paying off those bills for a long time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Serious as a baseball bat.”

  Chills cover my face. “I…don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything, then. You’re my best friend and I would do it again in a second. They were wrong, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there to stop them. And if he ever has anything to say to me about it, I will tell him two things: that I proudly voted for Hillary Clinton, and that he can suck my white ass if he doesn’t like it.”

  I laugh a little, then swallow. “Then why-”

  “I never had a problem with this,” he interrupts. “At all. Any of it. I just wish you would’ve told me before. It pissed me off that you were sneaking around and hiding shit and shutting me out. I hate that you had to lie to me. I know I might joke around and be off-color sometimes, but I would never judge you. I view everyone equally. None of it matters, and I thought you knew that.”

  “You’re really one to talk about hiding things, Mr. I’m-Secretly-Dating-Caro.”

  “Henry…I know. Trust me, I know. I was lonely, she was lonely, and it just happened…”

  “It’s okay. If anything, it probably helped me.”

  He pauses. “So can I meet him one day?”

  I want to cry, but I swallow it and look at the ceiling. This was my worst fear and suddenly it’s becoming nothing at all. I was dumb to be so afraid. “Of course you can. If we get back together, that is. I kinda fucked it up...”

  “Wow, I’m sorry.”

  “Happens every day.”