by Seth King
But still, this was the safest public space we’d found yet, lost in a crowd of chattering strangers. Nobody from FitTrax was here to beat me up or catch onto him for talking to me. As far as anybody knew, we were two friends saying hello. I didn’t know him from Adam.
“What’s up?” he asked, and I could instantly tell he was drunk, because he was talking to me in public without a shred of angst. I didn’t know how to take it, but still, his galaxy eyes hurt like heaven. This was just another side effect of him: he made me feel like I was being murdered by joy.
“Not much! I’m, just, um – waiting on a friend.”
He laughed, and it sounded somehow like when you pop open a Coke and hear that soul-warming fizzing sound fill your ears. He had a laugh fit for the commercials. “You’re alone, aren’t you?”
I angled my lower body away. Oh, God – something was happening. In my pants. I had to sort of cross my legs and angle away in a weird way. “I guess.”
A glob of people migrated closer to the DJ’s stage, and we were suddenly alone.
“Sorry we never really got a chance to talk in person before,” he said, and again things lapsed into awkwardness.
“So why’d you invite me here?” I asked before I could shut my stupid mouth. “Considering the jock squad and everything…”
“They don’t own me,” he whispered, his mood turning black on a dime. Then he exhaled. “They also don’t come to this particular bar, so that’s part of it, too, I guess.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He made eye contact with a goon, who shot up an eyebrow. Then he leaned in closer to me, making me feel like I was soaring somehow. “Look…I can’t do this. I thought I could, but I can’t. I don’t want to talk to you here.”
I pretty much gave up then. This was pointless. I had no idea why I’d even come.
“So I’m ditching the boys,” he said. “A sudden stomach cramp has come up, it seems, so I’ll meet you around back. By the bike rack. In ten minutes or so.”
And suddenly, hope flowed back into my soul. I tore him apart with my pupils, trying to see past his angel eyes to the ghost inside. He looked back at me. All that boy did was look at me, and yet I can still feel the glory. Finally I nodded, my eyes popping out of their sockets. Oh, God. I had to stop doing that. The structural integrity of my facial bones depended on it. Ryan could be anywhere, and his fists were horny for my face.
I told Nicky I’d see him soon and then watched him disappear into the crowd. And twenty-five minutes later, he kept his word. He met me. In person. When I saw his face it looked pleasantly surprised, like when you come home from a long trip and find that your dog is super excited to see you. I was so giddy I didn’t know what to do with myself.
“You must’ve waited for me a long time,” he said, and I blushed, because God knows I would’ve waited forever for that boy. I can still remember the way his eyes looked that night: they looked the way music sounds. “Sorry, they wouldn’t let me leave. But let’s walk.”
We walked over to the end of the alley that opened up to an empty street. Beyond that rolled the black Atlantic. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience – I was alone on the street with Nicky Flores. The world wasn’t the world anymore.
An older man walked by, turning to stare at us like we were hoodlums up to no good. And we were, according to the vast swath of humanity. I saw the accusation in the dude’s angry eyes: what kind of boys walk closely together in alleys at night? Or maybe I’d just imagined it. But the way Nicky and I both jerked out heads away and motioned our bodies away from one another proved I wasn’t the only one who thought we were doing bad things. We’d both been brainwashed, and maybe it would never get any better.
“So…what was so important that you had to rush me out of the bar to tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing in particular.”
“Okay.” The liquor tickled my stomach, urging me on. “Well…can I say something you might not like?”
“Mhmm?”
“There was no need to avoid me in the gym for so long. There was never any danger of anyone finding out about you, anyway. You’re much better at…hiding it than I am.”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked away. “I don’t know about all that.”
Shit. I’d said too much again. Being around him felt like being around myself, like he was my reflection in the mirror, and I was letting my mouth say way too much. Coy, Furman – be coy!
“Actually, can I say something you might not like?” he asked soon, his voice cracking the silence, fireworks.
“Sure.”
“There’s a reason I…did what I did. Came back to you after I swore I’d stay away, I mean. I could just…tell. That you, you know…were who you were.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I swallowed. “I guess I’ve never been like you. I never really had much of a father, so I never got around to learning the whole macho thing.”
“Trust me, it doesn’t take a father to teach you how to be a man,” he said. “Actually, mine taught me everything not to be. Don’t even get me started on the dad issue.”
His nostrils widened.
“You should’ve just talked to me in gym class,” I said a minute later. I could feel our time together coming to an end, and I was already mourning every second. “It’s not like I would ever say anything. You can trust me.”
He kicked a curb. “It’s not that. I just have more to lose than you do.”
“Like what?”
“Everything. My friends, my family…everything.”
We walked by a man speaking in a loud, animated voice to a group of biker dudes outside Lynch’s Irish Pub. His voice drifted to us on the breeze as we passed. “…And I told him, I said, I would never let a coupla damn queers into my party…”
We both winced. Oh, the South.
Nicky stepped a little further away, creating a safer space. I did the same, too. I don’t know which hurt more: his distance, or my distancing of myself. I wasn’t any stronger than he was. They both reinforced a basic truth: we may have been built for this, but our world wasn’t.
And then I realized just how foolish I’d been to think I could just throw a hand in the air and let some stupid rainbow flag ripple in the wind. This was so much more complicated than that – I’d jumped out of a plane without a parachute. We were thousands of miles from New York, and CNN and all it stood for just didn’t matter down here. Liking dudes in These Modern Times of Ours™ was such a funny thing. People acted like it had all become an endless carnival of cupcakes and tank tops and Ariana Grande songs. Equality! Equal opportunity laws! Supreme Court decisions! The continued fame of Lady Gaga! Hold the streamers, though, because most of that was bullshit. I knew what could happen if I “came out” officially, no matter what the MTV specials said. I heard the things my friends and family said in private, when they weren’t being forced to say the right thing and be progressive with a capital P. If I became more open, many people I knew would distance themselves from me immediately. My number would be magically deleted from dozens of phones. Family friends would stop inviting me to Thanksgiving (since my own father rarely invited me to his own house), acquaintances would stare at me on the sidewalk, I’d be hated by a vast number of strangers simply for the act of being me. All this would happen and more. My life as I knew it would be virtually over. It sucked ass, but it was an unavoidable fact of living down here, like hurricanes or humidity, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Because everyone wanted to be accepted at the floor of themselves. Nobody wanted to be shunned. Especially me. How much shunning could one dude even take?
“Look,” Nicky sighed. “Suppose you were a boy. A boy the world believed in. You were big and strong and you lifted a lot of weight and the girls liked you. Then suppose that boy was a lie. He didn’t exist. How hard do you think that boy would cling to that lie? How quickly do you think his life would fall apart if the lie went away? How quickly do you think all those other boys would step aw
ay if they knew the truth?” He gulped. “That lie was the best chance I had for survival. You don’t know hard it was – you don’t know my father…”
“I know mine,” I said, “and sometimes I think that’s enough. But you hate those guys, anyway. You’re miserable with them. My grandma would be able to tell, and she’s blind.”
“Whatever. That lie is the only identity I have. And if it breaks…who would I be?”
He sounded like he didn’t know the answer to the question he was asking. Who would we be, with a little honesty?
“And I almost feel bad for them,” he said. “I was a lie that I let my family believe. What if they knew that every time they set me up with a girl, every time I’d pretended to have a crush on Heidi Klum to fit in with my football-playing cousins at Thanksgiving dinner…all those times were…lies? The person they know…he’s not real. They’d have to get to know me all over again, as a totally different person.”
I listened to the waves. “Well maybe that’s their problem,” I said, and it was just dawning on me that maybe I was right. “Maybe the world forced you into the lie, and your truth is nobody’s issue but your own. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel bad about being who you are,” I said, my voice slipping into the night, unsure of even itself.
“So…does that mean you like who I am?”
I turned the color of roses. As Nicky walked, he glowed like a meteorite – he was the boy who fell from the sky. So I looked up at the stars, his home. He needed to stop all this before I fell in love with him.
“Perhaps.” I took out my phone, and he stared at the screen, like he wanted to grab it. I felt panic climb into my throat, because everyone knew the act of people stealing phones was specifically designed by an evil universe intent on exposing closeted gay boys and their screen-shot paparazzi photos of Zac Efron doing pushups on the beach in Santa Monica or whatever. But then I remembered: I didn’t have to hide with Nicky. He was the same as me. He knew. And that felt like walking into the sun after a lifetime of prison.
I slid my phone back into my pocket and looked over at him with wide eyes. The world got blurry, and then there became two worlds. And there he was, in between. The air itself seemed to bend around him, as if his presence melted gravity and all sorts of other laws. I was alone, watching him from a safe distance the world made us keep, but for now, that was okay.
He swerved a little to avoid a bench, and we found ourselves at the end of the boardwalk. We were close now. Very close. His breath smelled like whiskey and something else, some human smell. Pheromones, maybe. It was crazy-delicious and addictive and somehow otherworldly, whatever it was.
His arm fidgeted in an awkward way that matched his awkward words, and he was lit at the edges like he was standing in front of headlights. This enthralled me. Everything about him enthralled me. Even his faint floral smell was blooming in my skull and activating long-dormant nerve endings and reminding me I was alive. Sure, my epidermis had encased a set of functioning human organs before him, but post-him, I was alive. I had lived far too long without anything burning in my belly, and I was only just now realizing this. Was this what all the authors were writing about, with all their lovey-dovey shit? Lovey-dovey had never seemed real before, but here it was, in screaming color.
A shutdown restaurant was on one side, a vast windowless brick wall on the other. It was the two of us, alone in an alley that smelled like wet dirt, in a rude world full of unsayable truths. And he looked at me then, in that way of his, that dazzling sparkling dangerous way that said he knew things about me I didn’t even know about myself. It was terrifying and overwhelming and undeniable. I literally could not deny him. In the distance, I could swear I heard sirens.
“Coley?” he asked, and suddenly I was absolutely sure he was going to kiss me. The funny thing was, I had never done this before, this flirty, walking-together-at-night thing. Not really. I’d never been allowed to. I’d been closeted my whole life, and while everyone else had been getting dating and kissing and breaking up out of their systems in middle school, I’d been going home alone and reading my books. So I didn’t know how to tell him that I heard thunder when I looked at him. I didn’t know how to tell him that he dominated my thoughts and lorded over my dreams. I didn’t know how to tell him that when I was around him I felt like when I’d had a near-fatal reaction to a piece of popcorn shrimp at a gun show and then been strapped into a Life Flight helicopter, like my stomach was disintegrating and the rest of the world was falling away. I didn’t know how to tell him I was burning up for him and he didn’t even really care that I was alive.
“Yeah?” I asked. His posture fell, and he looked at the ocean.
“When I was ten, my mom found a body.”
“A body?”
He bit his lip, but it wasn’t sexy. It was scary. He looked conflicted, terrified. “Yeah. She was walking the dog, and the dog ran into the neighbor’s garage through a side door, and she followed. She…smelled him before she saw him. It was our neighbor. He was dead, in his car.”
“Oh. Yikes.”
“Yikes is right. He was…I guess he was gay,” he said, rushing through the word as I did, too, “and one day he found out he had HIV. Instead of sticking around and finding out if his wife had gotten it, too – they’d just separated – he drove home and killed himself. My mom found him four days later.”
I shivered. I had no idea his self-loathing went this deep. There it was – the HIV subject. Every gay or questioning kid of the ‘90s grew up terrified of the disease, and was sure they’d die of it one day.
“Wow. Did the wife get it?”
He breathed deeper than I knew anyone could breathe. “No. She had a meltdown, of course, and had every test known to humanity. Healthy as a marathon runner. But he never knew that, though. He didn’t stick around to find out. He let the…the guilt take him. The fear.” He stared off at something I couldn’t see, something I didn’t want to see. “But you wanna know the thing I’ll never forget? The thing I still see in my dreams? You want to know what my dad said before my mom pushed him out of the room?”
I swallowed. “I don’t know. Do I?”
He ignored me and took on an acid, bitter tone. “He said something like, ‘serves him right, for being such a deviant and diddling with guys, and all.’ Honestly, if they hadn’t done a full suicide investigation on the body and confirmed my neighbor had done it himself, I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad had pushed him along.”
I sucked in some air through my teeth. This all made me feel so dirty, I itched at my arm. Nicky swallowed hard, and I know right then that this thing was going to harder than I’d ever expected. He hated himself far more than I ever had.
“I’ve had the same dream ever since then,” Nicky said. There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were dry. “This ghoulish, awful, ridiculous thing. I discover the body, and he’s dead, but he’s still staring right at me. He knows I’m like him. And then he opens his mouth and tells me I’m next.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. So, if it’s gonna be like this,” he said to nobody at all, “if we’re gonna hangout, it’s gotta be…friendly.”
“Oh,” I said, as all the fires within me extinguished themselves.
“Yeah. You’re super cool and everything, and I would like to be around you more and stuff – I would probably love it, actually – but it’s gotta…it can’t be like that.”
I felt my shoulders slump. Ugh. So much for stepping out of the closet – he wasn’t even going to stick out a toe. And things kept in the dark could not grow. Just ask any gardener or closeted preteen.
“Is that cool? Are you okay with that?”
As he spoke, he looked sort of nervous. Or did he? How much of what I was seeing was just what I wanted to see? How much of Nicky was I wishing into a tenuous reality?
I tore my eyes away. He didn’t deserve my gaze. He was making me an offer any sane person would refuse: have him in my life, but in the last way I wanted. I k
new I could refuse him. I could tell him I didn’t want to play this game, that we weren’t in middle school, that we could do whatever we wanted, and that he was crazy and cowardly for being so scared of being seen with me, even as a friend. This was the last thing I needed in the world: a beautiful, intelligent, galaxy-eyed boy who was ashamed of me.
Or I could be real and acknowledge that he had to be careful. He operated in a different world than I did. But it wasn’t just because of the goon squad. Our lives weren’t just about us. We weren’t on our own any more than our dogs were when we walked them down the block. We were playing by the rules of our parents, and their money and acceptance were our leashes. Maybe we’d never be free. Not really. Or maybe we could break free of this. That was the thought that kept me going.
I could just take the leap and see what happened. I guess I didn’t how to hang out with a guy in public anymore than he did. In my nineteen years, I’d never gone out alone with someone who had a penis. And ultimately I supposed this was the saddest thing: I would take any amount of Nicky that he gave me, and we probably both knew it.
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Of course. But relax. Friends hang out in dark alleys at night, you know.”
He smirked, and it made the whole world shine. Maybe my chances hadn’t totally been smashed to bits. “That right?”
I nodded.
“Okay, well…I’m glad to have made a new friend.”
My face collapsed again. I couldn’t help it. Friend…the word suddenly felt so hollow, as if it had been carved out like a turkey.
I sat on the sidewalk and put my back against the brick wall. “Me too, Nicky Flores.”
He smiled this too-big smile and sat next to me, and all he did was put his hand next to mine. But that was enough. That one gesture made everything in my life up until tonight – all the deleting of web histories, all the rolling up of car window at stoplights so nobody would hear my Britney Spears songs, all the concealment and shame and evasiveness – it made all that nonsense suddenly seem worth it. This was all I wanted for now, anyway, and now that I had it, I suddenly felt like I could rise into my own giddiness and hit the sky. Because the clichés were all so suddenly true now: Nicky Flores was almost holding my hand. It felt sweet like the purr of a sleeping kitten, or triumphant like the Fourth of July. I couldn’t tell which one. Basically it just felt like everything.
