Honesty

by Seth King

  “Oh, speaking of that, how did you know my last name to add me on Facebook?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  And the walls seemed closer than they had a few seconds before. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I look over your shoulder every time you sign in at the computer in gym class. You also wear the same green shoes every day, and you hate doing push-ups.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know, I guess you told me.”

  I shook my head, then remembered I was on the phone. “I did?”

  “Yeah. One day, it was really humid in the gym, and I said that it was gross. I guess I was trying to make conversation. You said something like, at least we’re not doing push-ups.”

  I still drew a blank. I was sure he was telling the truth, I just had no idea he’d even want to store something away like that. “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything you’ve ever said in that gym, Coley.”

  And my insides sort of fell away.

  “So that’s what you meant by, you were sorry? That you couldn’t talk to me there?” I asked him.

  “Yes. And for the…the fact that it has to be this way. I don’t like how my friends act, and how the world is, and sometimes I wish I could change things.”

  I laughed a little.

  “What?”

  “You’re just being sort of a hypocrite. Why are you friends with those douche-heads?”

  “Okay, look, I know they can be a little ignorant, and-”

  “So why are you friends with them?”

  He scoffed. “Like you wouldn’t be, if they offered?”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was probably right. We were both just trying to fit in.

  “Ugh, it’s midnight,” I finally said. “On a weeknight.”

  “Hang up, then.”

  I waited. The silence was warm, fuzzy, generous, inviting. “I kind of don’t want to,” I said. “Is that weird?”

  He sighed, but I thought I could hear happiness in it. “I’m afraid I feel the same way, Mr. Furman. And I kind of have no idea what to do about it…”

  I sat in his silence until he finally hung up and made the night close in.

  At our eye contact the next day, the rest of the world became white noise again. I thought he was going to talk to me, finally acknowledge me, but he didn’t. Instead he motioned an “I’ll call you” sign. He turned away, but I stood taller. I had to do something. I wasn’t going to let him stay away from me. Here I was, alone again, accompanied by nothing except some dust on the rubber mat, another speck of mulch, Nicky’s hat…

  Nicky’s hat, I thought. He’d left his hat under the water fountain. I snatched it up and followed him.

  “Hey,” I said, my adrenaline sprinting away from me, Serena Williams at the net. “Hey. You forgot this.”

  “Mhmm?” he said, turning. Suddenly I was aware of every freckle on my face, every inch of unnecessary flab around my butt. When he saw that it was me, he seemed to hold onto my gaze for a second longer than was necessary. I grasped onto every second of it, of course, as the colors exploded. He was neon purple, blazing orange, vivid yellow, burning red. That’s what I saw when I looked at that boy: all of the colors.

  “Thanks,” he said, reaching for it, although something in me questioned how accidental this had really been. Our hands grazed each other, just like in the movies, but instead of shocking or electrocuting me it made me feel ice-cold, like he’d sucked all the heat out of my body with one touch. I turned away a little, feeling inferior again. Ugh. He was so dumb for being so perfect. He pulled eyeballs toward him just by breathing, absorbed light just by living. He couldn’t help himself, but still it drove me crazy.

  Finally, he spoke instead of me. “You in the business of staring, or do you do it for free?”

  Oh my God. So I hadn’t been hiding it. I was such a creeper. But even then, I couldn’t stop. It was like he swam in the air, shimmered like he might slip away at any moment if I didn’t drink him in quickly enough. Everything he did thrilled me.

  “Oh, um…” I didn’t know what to say. God, I didn’t even know who I was. This creature, this Coley, was alien. “Sorry. I guess I…zone out a lot. But you probably know that by now.”

  He smiled, and it sparkled. He was constantly jumping, shifting, morphing to the point where sometimes he was somewhere else altogether. “It’s okay,” he said. “I was just starting to wonder if I had a rash or something.”

  I stared at him. My tongue retreated down my throat. “A rash?”

  “Oh, it was…I was just joking…never mind.”

  He looked away. I was such a screw-up. Why was I always screwing everything up? Why did I have to be me? I usually sucked at human interaction anyway due to a debilitating case of social awkwardness that usually came off as arrogance, but Nicky made me a hundred times worse at person-ing.

  “Wow, I killed that vibe pretty quickly, didn’t I?” I asked, regaining some semblance of composure. I looked down and noticed that his leg was positioned in the same exact way as mine. Maybe we were two different people, meant to live different lives, in different places. Or maybe we really were the same.

  An idea came to me. I reached into my bag and took out my phone to look like I had some authority and wasn’t just another idiot.

  “Hey, let me start over. I’m…um, I’m on assignment, and I’m supposed to ask some people a few questions today. For my blog.”

  “Blog?” he said, vaguely interested, since every asshole and their mom had a blog. I didn’t realize I hadn’t told him about this yet.

  “Yeah. Honesty.”

  Those pretty eyes flashed. “Ah. I know who you are. Or, I mean, I didn’t know you were…you, though. Wow.”

  “You know about Honesty?”

  “I’m pretty sure my baby cousins know about Honesty,” he laughed. “That’s awesome. You’re like Peter Parker – normal kid by day, super-famous blogger by night. I’ll do it, no problem. Just don’t show my face.”

  I took out my Polaroid and my phone from my gym bag. He breathed and got going.

  “Every night,” he said, his voice starting to shake a bit, “I dream that my dad is dead. And every morning I am disappointed when I wake up and realize it was just a dream.”

  I just stared at him, dumbfounded. I’d imagined the fiery death of my father more times than I would ever admit.

  “Coley?” he asked after a second, something dangerous sparking in his eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Leaving my hat wasn’t an accident.”

  Suddenly I forgot how to be alive. I studied him, my lips parting, and for the first time I understood the phrase “star struck:” I was tossed down the vortex, into his cortex, and stars were flying through me, piercing me, lighting me up, and I was one with the cosmos. Or something. I didn’t really know. I’d never felt like this and had nothing to go by. But I was just swallowed by him. No one had ever had this effect on me. Ever. I felt like I’d just downed eight cups of coffee, or maybe done heroin, and then gone on the craziest rollercoaster at Six Flags, while wasted. He was everything, and all of my nothing didn’t know how to handle it.

  “Why’s that?” was all I could get out. He didn’t respond. Instead he placed his hand on top of mine, and I felt like I’d been zapped, electrocuted. He looked me right in the eye, which was so weird, you know? Because it was a new century and iPhones existed and nobody even talked on the phone anymore, much less looked each other in the eye, and geez, eye contact usually felt more aggressive than getting slammed against a wall. But with him it just felt soft and beautiful. Some moment flowed between us – it was blue, beautiful, flowing, fluttering. I was the power line and he was the electricity.

  “I just want you to know that I don’t like the rules, either,” he said.

  “The rules?”

  He swallowed something down. It looked large and painful. “Hey, there’s a teen night thing at this bar, th
e Pier…wanna go?”

  “With you?”

  “Uh…yes, with me.”

  “Oh. Sure. Yeah. I’ll be there.”

  Just as quickly as he’d touched me, he turned and disappeared down the alley on his bike, retracting himself in a whir of silvery metal and inhuman beauty. After he left I stood there in the aftermath of him, not moving, not talking, just breathing. Suddenly the streetlights burned clear, the horizon cut a sharper line into the ocean. It was a Friday evening in the dead of summer, and my world was rearranging itself.

  5

  After FitTrax I retreated into the shelves of the library a few blocks from my house, my own little safe haven, as I always did when I was going crazy and needed to scrape out my brain. Basically I’d always been a bit of a nerd. Books had saved me. My childhood had been borderline awful, and I’d escaped into Harry Potter. I insulated myself in a false world, comforted by the fact that even though my life sucked, I could slip away and fall into a world that didn’t, even if it wasn’t real. Because the things you created in your mind were real, too. They just wouldn’t protect you from distant mothers and silent fathers and boys who saw you glancing at other boys on the playground.

  And it’s not like I had I many other options as I grew up: although I liked beer, my stomach couldn’t handle taking shots, and I didn’t know how to smoke weed without turning into a white-hot ball of social anxiety. I was more likely to overdose on books on my Kindle app than Ecstasy, I didn’t have a #squad, and my social life was mainly limited to whatever fictional characters I happened to be speaking to in my head that week. But I was fine with it, because you were never alone with books. They would never publicly deny you and try to act straight around their bro-friend before sending you a million mixed signals. They would never paint you a roaring sunset and then blow all the clouds away again. Book lovers were also fools, in a way. Everyone knew they could never find love, because all they did was compare real life to life within the page. And spoiler alert: the page always won. A lifetime of believing in books and their boyfriends had me chasing people that didn’t even exist. (Before Nicky, at least.)

  All I wanted was to find one real-life book boyfriend like they described in the stories – you know, the flippy-haired, preppily-dressed, English-accented, just-the-right-amount-of-cocky dreamboy who would swagger into my life with a few witty jokes and a come-on that was just forward enough to be charming without crossing into creeper territory. I’d catch him staring at me from over his iced latte in some trendy coffee shop with books on the shelves, and then he’d come at me with some improbably-witty comment, and we’d be in love two weeks later. He’d be dead soon, of course, from a dramatic sledding accident or a sudden car wreck or something else that would keep him looking like a Balenciaga model until the very end, but it wouldn’t matter: we would’ve already forged eternal love by then, and he would’ve already rescued me and taught me how to love myself and made me feel All The Feels within my previously feel-less soul. But try as I may, that boy would never walk off the page. The book boyfriend never materialized. And still I slept alone, with my books safely by my side, perpetuating this cycle that both fueled the fires in my soul and made me wish I lived another life, all at once…

  But today my bookthirst went unquenched. I just couldn’t find anything. All the books for teens were out of the question for me at this point, because they were quite frankly extremely annoying. It was like someone had snapped their fingers and decided to make all the books the same. All the characters’ names were, like, Maude or Gertrude or something, which was just…no. Nobody named their kids those things except Gwyneth Paltrow, and even she looked like an asshole for doing it. These teen books were full of twee hipster characters with fantastically improbable and adorkable character traits – they all have the same birthday! they have a rare disorder that makes them allergic to love! they’re obsessed with death and attempt suicide every single day only to adorably evade death at the last minute! – and the book covers made them all look like they were set in cupcake bakeries. These books would take on life-or-death subjects like depression or bipolar disorder or self-mutilation and treat them like jokes, tackling them with the flirty, ironic, light-handed air of an episode of Modern Family. And even if they weren’t suffering from Adorkable Overload, they were one of the parade of romances that, judging by their covers, were all titled “straight white couples embracing on a Southern beachscape at sunset.” I was tired of hearing about blonde heroines falling for tattooed, motorcycle-riding heroes – that had nothing to do with my life. I loved reading, don’t get me wrong, but when was something different going to come along?

  And this was the “something different” I wanted – I wanted a gay book. I wanted to explore the world I was falling into, but the “gay novels” were even worse than the straight ones. They all featured phrases like “turgid member” and “throbbing tool” and showed two muscled torsos wrapped across each other on their covers, with campy titles like GETTING BENT or ROCK HARD STEAMY SUMMER: SAN FRANCISCO EDITION. Straight romances were allowed to be deep and thoughtful and at least halfway poetic; most gay novels seemed to look like sex-fests with a few weightlifting sessions on the side. (And if they weren’t literary gay porn, they were about two closet cases who lived in silent misery and then died alone. Go figure.) They were also filed in their own category called “male/male romance,” which was just essentially not okay. “Gay romance” was just romance, and separating the gays from the straights was like separating books starring blonde heroines from brunette ones. After I watched Brokeback Mountain with my friend Katherine one time, she’d remarked that it “felt almost like a straight romance movie!” and I could remember wanting to shank her. The movie featured two humans falling in love – what else was it supposed to feel like?

  I just wanted a realistic, accurate, measured depiction of what it was like to have a crush on dudes in today’s world, with some hot gay boning as a side dish, maybe, but never the main course. And all I seemed to have were six-pack-abbed dudes staring into each other’s eyes under a sexy waterfall. The gay experience was hard as shit, and for women to take all that and reduce it to two jocks boning each other on a book cover – it just felt cheap to me. I guess I just wanted a gay book that was – gasp – allowed to act just like a straight one! I wanted something real, and beyond that, I wanted to know that it could get better for me, not “get better” in the sense of the messages offered by cheesy YouTube video or ad campaign on the side of the bus. I wanted to know I would be able to talk down a street one day and see it for what it was – a street – instead of imagining a million different faces that might disapprove of me, a million little opportunities for people to hate me and tell me I wasn’t good enough. I was alone, and I wanted to not be alone anymore. I just didn’t know how to get out of alone-ville. Maybe books could do all that for me.

  As I browsed, I spotted a gorgeous, golden-haired boy writing at a table alone by the computers. I snuck half a peek at him from behind a bookshelf, my cheeks flushing, until a rich-looking blonde sat across from him and smiled. “What’s going on, Cooper?” she asked as I turned away. Ugh – of course he was straight. All the good ones were.

  I steered clear of the section condescendingly called “homosexual issues,” but as I passed a certain shelf on the way out, I spotted something featuring two guys together that sparked my interest. Just as I reached for it, though, a helpful clerk came out of nowhere and threw a smile at me. “Hey, that shelf is super high, would you like some help with that?”

  I blushed and shook my head as I stumbled away. No matter how badly I wanted the stupid book, I was still more afraid of being seen with it in my hand. I could not even buy a “gay book” in public without being choked by fear – what was wrong with me? Forget my father’s insanity he called conservatism – I was my own biggest enemy. Wasn’t I supposed to be part of the solution, and not another facet of the problem? How was I ever going to even get close to dating a guy when I was t
his terrified of my own feelings? Was this whole “gay” thing even something I could really, truly, honestly even do?

  I biked to the bar that night, out of my mind with nerves and panic and something tickly that felt like butterflies in my throat. I’d saved Nicky’s Polaroid and put it on my bedside table – I knew I’d never tell anyone about him, as he was my little secret – and the picture had stayed in my mind all day. So I ordered a Fireball and Cream Soda, my trademark drink, and then turned around and saw Nicky Flores standing in the middle of a pile of girls. And he was staring right at me with a look in his eyes that could’ve disarmed an entire squadron of assassins.

  He burned me. It was that simple. I sped back around so quickly, the bartender gave me a weird look as she dried some glasses. Oh, God. I turned away and, of course, found myself looking into a mirror. Only now was I noticing my not-quite-strong chin, my pinkish complexion, my flaws. Would being around him get any easier? I was fully aware of him, even from across a room. Did he feel the same? Or was I back in high school, falling for the straight linebacker again, one eager blonde away from heartbreak?

  Soon I glanced back again. The various girls were looking at him like he was a freshly-roasted turkey on the counter and they were hound dogs on the kitchen floor. It made me want to punch something.

  Ten minutes after I got there, he bumped into me, and it made me feel like I was losing control on a dark highway at 200 MPH. I had no brakes. He’d taken them from me. Seeing him in regular clothes, and not workout crap, was…too much. He was in black jeans and a grey shirt made of some thin, expensive-looking material, and very quickly I realized I could not even look at him. Not directly, at least. He was making my insides scream, and I didn’t want it to show on my skin.