Straight

by Seth King

  “Is it hard?” he asks soon. “The breakup?”

  “I feel him everywhere,” I whisper.

  “Well let me know if you want me to come over and watch a movie or something. I mean it.”

  “Okay.” I rub my eyes and sigh. “Love you, dick wad.”

  “Love you too, idiot.”

  I hang up before I can cry any more.

  ~

  The next day I’m trolling Facebook again in my bed, basically stalking Ty, when I see something that takes all the air out my lungs: a photo of Ty with a dude’s arm wrapped around his shoulder. A good-looking, smiling dude.

  So nice catching up with my old fella, the caption says. Don’t be a stranger!

  Something crazy and desperate comes over me. The misery washes away and is replaced by unadulterated rage. He’s moving on already – this can’t be true. It’s really happening this quickly? What have I done? Did I personally send him back into the arms of his ex?

  I message Anisha to find out.

  Hey. I know this is weird and stalker-ish, but I need help. Who is the guy in Ty’s most recent picture?

  For a second I think she hates me, and she won’t respond. But soon she starts typing.

  Hey. Sorry about what happened, first of all.

  You heard? I ask.

  Everyone did. And I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s his ex. He’s in town, and they met up.

  Everything inside me slides to my feet. The thought of him touching someone else…laughing with someone else…having sex with someone else…it’s too horrific to bear.

  I need help, I tell her. I’m not ready for this. What’s going on? What is he doing?

  Well, they’ve been hanging out a little…

  Are they in love? They are, aren’t they?

  She doesn’t respond.

  Seriously are they???? I ask. Finally she starts typing again.

  Sorry, my dog just shit on the floor. No, are you kidding? He loves YOU. This is only a desperation thing. He’s only hanging out with this guy because he’s miserable and needs to get out of the house.

  This makes me feel better, but only a little. He’s still out there, with someone else, and I still feel like too much of a fucking fool to try to go out and get him back. What would I even say?

  Has he told you any specifics? I ask.

  Nothing too in-depth. But I think he feels bad, and he feels like he scared you off with some speech he gave about how homophobic the world is.

  What should I do, then?

  Just get him! Go get your boy!

  But I can’t. I am frozen in place, paralyzed by the fear that I’ve already damaged things beyond repair. Everything we had, I ruined. Where would we go from here?

  The rest of the day is dull and chilly. Later, I break down and finally do it. Choked by desperation and loneliness, I take a shot of his Fireball whiskey and call him, armed with a few excuses so I can act like I had a real reason for calling besides my depression.

  “Hello?” he asks on the very last ring, as usual. He sounds terse, impersonal. Hearing his voice after these few weeks is like a rush and a case of whiplash a cold bath all at once; soothing and invigorating and heart-rupturing.

  “Hey. It’s me,” I say, but he doesn’t respond. “So, I, um…I found your phone charger behind my bed, and I figured you might want it back. Remember? The blue one, with the-”

  “I have another one,” he says. “From Walgreens. Thanks, though.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  The silence that follows is long and bleak and pathetic.

  “Oh,” I say, “remember how we wanted to see that movie, The Christmas Tree? It’s playing now, and I figured-”

  “I saw it,” he says. “With Anisha. Thank you for the offer.”

  I just sit there. The door has closed. He’s closed it on me. Is he with his ex right now? Is someone else in the room?

  “So…anything else?” he says soon.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything you want to say? Anything that, I don’t know…you’ve never said before? That you want to say now? To make up for putting me through hell?”

  I gasp a little, and I know what he wants: he wants me to tell him I love him. But I can’t, and I don’t know why. Or does he want that at all? Why am I suddenly so unsure of everything under the goddamned sun?

  “Merry Christmas?” I finally force out.

  “Ugh,” he sighs. “You never got it, and you still don’t. Listen, I’m at my mom’s, I need to go now. Bye.”

  “I love you,” I whisper, taken over by the force again, but he’s already ended the call. And just like that, it is over.

  That night the girl from the chat room messages me for one final update. I interject before we can even get too deep into things, though.

  Story’s done, I tell her. I fucked it all up, just like I knew I would. Sorry. Show’s over.

  19

  That Friday evening I get out of bed and take a shower for the first time in days. Nothing seems worth it without Ty anymore. Why bother? My family has been calling for days, but I’ve been holding them off. There’s nothing to tell them, anyway. My life is Kansas. I’ve been trying to ignore how much I miss him, but I can’t.

  When I walk onto my porch to check for the paper my dad pays for, I am assaulted by the chill – it must be thirty degrees, which for Savannah is pretty damned frigid. I see my neighbors decorating their tree in the window and realize it’s Christmas Eve. How could I have missed that? When I was young the holidays were fun and exciting and came in bright, vivid red. Now Christmas was just another day in a sea of many. In fact, Ty elicited a joy in me that I hadn’t felt since my parents would load up the car and drive us around to look at the Christmas lights all around town – he brought back a happiness that was childhood-strength. But he isn’t here anymore. Just my luck.

  Any Christmas cheer is murdered all over again the second I see the article at the bottom-right corner of the front page. “Police sources speak of possible hate crime…a townhouse and vehicle off Forsyth Park were recently vandalized, and law enforcement suspects the incident may have been related to homophobia….”

  That’s when I stop reading. It’s official: the “gay bashing incident” is out there, and I’ve basically been forced out of the closet. After The Monster, this stuff is the talk of the town, every town, and now here’s another story for them to gossip about, another case in the trending topics for them to click. Everyone who already knows about my situation will see this and make the link to Ty and Shepard. Everyone. I can’t hide anymore.

  That’s when a car pulls up, a BMW SUV. I think I recognize it – and I do. Anisha climbs out wearing these wacky red overalls accompanied by Ty’s best friend, Maxwell. Then another car pulls up, and three more people get out, all from Ty’s circle.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Anisha opens her back door, exposing a bunch of construction equipment – a tarp, a gallon of paint, some boxes. “Hey,” she says. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Same to you. What’s this?”

  She turns around. “Sorry, but last night I came by the house with Maxwell – he works for some construction company. We inspected everything. We’re gonna fix the damage from that stupid rock.”

  I turn to my house, which hasn’t been fixed yet – I didn’t even know how to process it yet, really, so I was ignoring it. My face gets all cool and numb. “Wait, really?”

  “Of course. We don’t tolerate this shit. It was the least we could do. The resistance is here!”

  “Um…wow. Can I help, then?”

  “O’course.”

  Thanking everyone profusely, I help them unload and then set everything up. In a quiet moment I let it slip, and ask her where Ty is.

  “Um, he couldn’t come,” she says, pausing. “For obvious reasons. And you not texting him, like I ordered you to, isn’t helping.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Oh.”

  “Don’t be silly, though,”
she laughs, noticing my expression. “He was involved.”

  “He was?”

  “Are you nuts, boy? Who do you think paid for all this and organized everything?”

  I look away before she can see the tears burning the corners of my eyes. We finish setting up, then I get some gloves for them. And then a tiny little revolution made of people of every sex, every gender, every race, comes together to fix a broken wall. And for the first time since the attack, I get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, there might be more good people out there in the world than bad ones.

  ~

  The project takes less than an hour. I offer them all coffee, food, even money, but they wave me off. Maxwell does the work surprisingly quickly, and soon they’re all hugging their ways into their cars and waving through their windows and driving away. After retreating into the warmth of my house, thinking the action is over, I open my laptop and see an email in my school account from someone named Steve Lasseter, whom I learn is one of my neighbors:

  Hello there. Your mom forwarded me your email address, hope it’s okay. I heard about the incident the other day, and I’m very sorry. Just wanted you to know my security cameras captured some of the action, and I wanted to pass it on in case it could help. If you need to forward this to police, I’m fine with providing timestamps and any more evidence they may need. So…yeah. Godspeed, and Merry Christmas.

  Attached is a forty-second clip, which I open and watch with disbelieving eyes. It’s somewhat grainy, but sure enough you can make out most of the action. There’s me, walking out on the sidewalk…there’s Ty, following a few seconds behind…a little flurry of action, and suddenly I am lunging over, pushing Ty, and blocking the rock with my backpack, which must’ve had twenty pounds of hardback books inside. The impact makes a loud smack sound, and then the tape goes black.

  I can’t believe it. I threw myself in front of a rock for Ty, and I’d had no idea. I can’t even remember making the decision to do it, no matter how hard I try – it’s still a blur in my mind. I just did it. I’d heard of adrenaline making people do crazy things, but never anything like this. The video only shows the direct area in front of my house, though, meaning Shepard and his boys are out of the frame, meaning the video would be useless in an investigation – but I don’t care. In the investigation into Henry Morgan’s soul, this was the smoking gun.

  I’d risked myself to save Ty. Sure, it was just a rock, but it could’ve been anything. All this time I’d been terrified of the world and its hatred and its prejudices and even my own feelings, but the things deep down that bubbled up from secret places? Those impulses knew the deal. I was brave down there. Ty didn’t make me stronger, he just showed me who I already was; illuminated what had been there all along. Love. Unconditional love.

  I hear Ty’s voice from that night in the cemetery: did God ever say why he loved humans? Did he ever give them reasons why he loved them? No, he just loved them. Unconditionally.

  My soul knew what my brain couldn’t admit: I loved Ty Stanton so much I would die for him. And that was something the world could never take away from us. It was ours.

  I think back to that first day, when I let myself flirt with him on the bus, completely unafraid. What had changed? Why was I now paralyzed with indecision? And then I realize, of course I know what changed – my eyes were opened. I was only okay with being possibly bisexual at the time because I’d never cared enough to notice the world’s hatred of minority groups. I thought the hatred didn’t exist because I’d never seen it with my own eyes. I’d never been called a fag in public or had a rock thrown at my face. All I had to do was look closer. And now the problem had landed on my doorstep, literally, just as Ty had said. Still I wanted to figure out how to get back to that guy on the bus, back to that place of bravery. But how?

  Of course, the seeds of change had been planted in my soul before I’d met Ty. I was uncomfortable with my life, I was growing frustrated with the status quo. Or maybe I was never okay at all, and it just took him to make me recognize that. But still he’d blown the doors off my eyes and made me see a whole new world in front of me. He’d made my world bigger, and I will never be able to repay him for that. Or will I?

  Ty was the biggest Lady Gaga super-fan ever, and he would sit in my kitchen and listen to her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner over and over again. Suddenly I hear Gaga’s theatrical voice booming in my head: the land of the free, and the home of the brave. We weren’t free – this wasn’t freedom. This was the worst kind of fear. My grandmother, who was religious, was always praying for “the serenity to accept what she could not change.” But this wasn’t okay, and I didn’t want to accept it – I wanted to change it. People were getting attacked, and we weren’t getting any better. So maybe I needed to do something brave…

  I sit down as my heart starts pounding. My mind begins racing, buzzing and sparking and making connections, and I am alive. People like Shepard aren’t going away – in fact, they’re getting louder and bolder than ever. And I have to do something about it. I can’t stay silent about this, because the best disinfectant is sunlight. MLK said the arc of the moral history bends toward justice, but it wasn’t bending quickly enough for me. So why not bend the arc myself?

  First things first: I spend half an hour writing a polite and straightforward letter to the editor of the Savannah Morning News. I acknowledge myself as the one who was gay-bashed, because suddenly I know I want to be one of the people pushing this world forward, one of the people doing the bending. I have nothing left to hide, and nobody left to hide it from. Everything Ty said was right – we’d moved too far to slide backwards now. I am not going to be one of the closeted ones, partaking in the joy of a community while doing nothing to help them. I refuse that. We will accept each other or we will go down in flames trying. And I didn’t really care about Shepard and them facing “justice,” anyway, because they were sad, scared, miserable people, and there was no justice in misery. Justice came from waking up every day and living a life you were proud of, and no pride could be found in hatred and fear. I mean, who could even hate Ty Stanton, anyway? The kid was grace and light and beauty and badass-ery, personified…

  I finish the letter and sign it, Henry Morgan – proud “Q” in the LGBTQ banner. The world had launched rocks and bombs and rockets, but my flag was still here – and they couldn’t take it away.

  I stop to think of all the people who may see the letter, and for a moment I am petrified. Things are happening out there. But then the strings from a Christmas song waft into my house from a passing car, and I sit taller and realize I don’t really care that much. It doesn’t terrify me as much as it would have a few weeks ago. Losing Ty means I officially have nothing else to lose, either, and I am suddenly out of fucks to give. I am free now, and freedom feels strangely like insanity. I never expected to meet Ty on that bus and have him start changing everything in me, but he did, and it happened. It actually feels liberating in a way, like a bird is taking off from my chest and I didn’t even know it was there. Ty, and the deep confidence and security he provided, is sort of like a fortress within me now, a deep well spouting hope and goodness, even if he’s not beside me anymore. He flew when others walked, and now I want to fly, too.

  That’s when I decide I am never again going to let the world make me feel bad for something I feel. Because choosing to love is never wrong. Love is the cleanest thing in the world. And they can say “straight” men can’t suddenly change, or try to nullify all the love I’ve ever felt for females before – but I don’t care. I’m not going to let them force me to pick a label, a category, a box. Feelings are the messiest things in the world – how could I ever categorize something like feelings? I couldn’t. All I could do was follow them. Because love does not exist between men and women. Love does not exist between blondes and brunettes. Love does not exist between Caucasian people and Asian people. Love exists between humans.

  I think about everything I’ve learned since September, every
lesson I’ve learned by loving Edward Ty Stanton. I am a different person now. Perhaps the word “straight” doesn’t even mean anything at all, and we are being killed by the categories we force ourselves to live within. In fact, the only thing that scares me about the word “straight” is living my life in a straight line, too terrified to jump off the beaten path and explore something that might light me up inside. And Ty is the thing that turns on every last one of my lights. I need to get back to that. If I don’t try tonight, I will regret it forever. I will become my mother.

  I text him, but he doesn’t respond or even open it. But on some level I know he still cares. I know he’s out there, regretting the end of us in some way. He has to be. It was the strangest thing: sometimes I would walk into the room and look over at him and know for sure that he was feeling the same thing as me. Together we created something bigger then ourselves. With our love, one plus one equaled three. For the first time ever, I knew someone loved me too. Our love created its own state of being, its own little state of grace.

  I turn and head inside to get dressed. I remember exactly what he’d said about that drink he had with his ex every Christmas Eve. This would be the perfect opportunity for that dude to swoop in and save the day once and for all, and it scares me down to my fingernails. I’ve got to stop this, in any way that I can. I’ve got to save us while there is still something left to save. So many people find life-exploding opportunities to get happy and let them get away; fall through their fingers like sand. But I want to grab him. He makes my heart explode with joy again and again in an endless love-supernova, and I can’t let that go. You don’t get to choose who you love in this world, but you do get to choose what you do about it. Everyone always said love was supposed to reorganize your life, make you rip up all your old rules, make you see through brand-new eyes – I just never knew they meant it literally. Every thought in my brain before Ty had been planted there by someone else – Ty Stanton was my awakening, my saving grace. He was my hallelujah.