Honesty

by Seth King

  I didn’t respond. He grabbed at my hand, and I pulled away and turned around, my eyes wide caverns of anger. “Screw you, Nicky. Screw. You.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll explain. It wasn’t-”

  “I’m trying, Nicky,” I said as something in me sort of broke. “I’m trying so hard, every day. And it won’t work. We barely go out, at least not when the sun’s up. We don’t touch. We don’t even stand next to each other. And here we are, hiding between rows of stories, as ‘brothers,’ and this is all we have to show for the past two, three months. All we’ve ever had, really. How long are you going to keep me locked in your library?”

  He just stared at me, and that was all confirmation I needed to turn and get the hell out of there.

  I walked home and spent the next day cold and alone, loneliness descending on me like a snow cloud. My dad forwarded me an article about a Mississippi judge denying a marriage license to a lesbian couple, along with the subject line SERVES THOSE BULLDYKES RIGHT!!! Aside from being gross, this email made me mildly panic – what had my dad seen now? What did he know?

  I drank some wine to chill myself out. That night I was watching TV and thinking about what a good Real Housewife I’d be when he showed up unexpectedly at my door, sweaty and blotchy-skinned and endlessly beautiful. Even his eyes swirled. How could I resist this galaxy boy? I looked down the hall to see if anyone was around and then grabbed him by the elbow, pulling him in. Then I kissed him. Hard. He kept his mouth closed, though. I opened my eyes and stared at him. He moved away far too quickly, and it made everything in my eyesight turn red.

  “Chris knows,” Nicky said, wiping his mouth of my spit. “It happened.”

  “What?” I asked, getting myself together and backing away. “Who?”

  “Chris. My friend. He knows. About us.”

  A sound came from the back of my throat that did not mean anything. I stared at the ground as the ceiling fell in. “Okay. Rewind. Chris…is that the religious one? The one who said gays should be lined up and shot?”

  “Ding, ding! That’s the guy.”

  I reached up and rubbed my temples in the silence. “Okay. Okay…okay. Okay. What happened, exactly?”

  He looked off towards the ocean, his mouth a horizon on the globe of his face, looking like someone who’d been awakened from a nap too early in the afternoon, right in the middle of a really good dream. “He saw me with you. At the gas station.” He made a face like was swallowing a tree branch. “He said he saw us…he saw us being…flirty.” He said the last word like it’d been poisoned. Because it had been. By God and religion and the South and friends named Chris and so much more. As everything started spinning, I braced myself against the counter. Honestly, I’d been waiting for this moment. I knew someone had to see, something had to give, something had to fall apart. I didn’t really care that much, but he clearly did. And here it was: the fall.

  So I stood taller and started yanking excuses out of my head. “Okay, well, two guys hang out all the time! He wasn’t there that day I got gay-bashed, so he doesn’t know who I am, or that I like…yeah. Just say we were on the way to the batting cage, or we were going kayaking, and that we-”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “Chris said he saw me kiss you.”

  I clutched my head harder. “What.”

  “And I remember it, too,” he whispered, almost wistfully. “Last week, at the gas pump. I leaned in and kissed you when we were waiting for the receipt to print. It was almost dark and I had no idea anybody was around.” He buried his face in his hands. “What were we doing? God damn it, how could we have been so stupid?”

  My heart broke for him. His voice was bathing in hatred – for himself, for me, for this whole situation. But I wasn’t surprised. The world was built to embarrass me. If I ever did anything bad, the universe would produce an onlooker immediately.

  But this wasn’t bad, I reminded myself. This was love. Love was never bad. That was something I felt in my bones every time I looked into the eyes of the beautiful boy standing in front of me.

  “How could we have been so dumb?” he repeated, and he was crying now.

  “Lie!” I said, desperate. “Try to lie. Say he imagined it.”

  He looked away, shame in his eyes. “I did. I said I was just bending over to look for my phone charger. I swore I had a girlfriend….”

  I winced and closed my eyes. Just picturing this exchange made me want to die. He’d denied me to his own friend. I could see it so clearly because I’d done it, too. We’ve all been confronted before, and we all acted the same. Hell, I’d been attacked and accused by my own father a hundred times. You slipped on the camouflage and you stood taller and you spoke with a deeper voice and you looked them in the eye even though it burned. “I’m no queer!” you might say. “You don’t think I’m a queer, right?” Because it was the South and homosexuality destroyed lives and nothing was freaking changing.

  “Did he believe you?” I asked. Nicky looked away, answering me without words.

  “He said he’s noticed a lot of things that are different about me. He said I’ve been dressing ‘gay’ and doing my hair ‘like a girl.’ He said he’s gonna tell people what I’m doing, because it’s not okay.”

  Now I was getting mad. Really mad. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

  “I don’t know, but he said I should be careful.”

  His voice was becoming softer, further away. I could already sense it: he was flying away from me. This was too much for him.

  So I reached for his shoulder. “Okay, Nicky, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out. I promise. It’ll all be fine, and-”

  “No!” he said, pulling away. “It’s not okay. Don’t you see? It’s not okay. We shouldn’t have to be hiding like this. But we are, Coley, we are. We’ve been hiding our whole lives, and it’s not getting any better, any easier. Don’t you see the way people look at us?”

  I stared off at nothing. Of course I noticed.

  “The whole world is trapped,” he said. “Trapped inside their dogma, trapped inside their fear, trapped inside their own minds…we’re two kids who don’t even pay our own rent or buy our own cars. I can’t lose my family yet – I would be nothing, and have nothing, without them. I’m not ready to be on my own any more than you are. How the hell are we supposed to find our way through this?”

  I stared at him. We both knew I was answerless. “…By loving each other?”

  He didn’t say anything. I was so sick of him not saying anything. Underneath it all, I was the same as anyone else: I was dreaming for the love of someone who wouldn’t give it to me.

  He turned away again, maybe for good this time. “Yeah, um, I’m gonna need some time alone. I’ve been thinking, and I just don’t know if all this is for me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “So…so this is why you came here? To dump me?”

  He was silent. This wasn’t about his stupid friend – this was about Nicky. He liked me, and it terrified him so much he was walking away. Unhinged, I punched him on the shoulder. “Do it, then. Do it, you idiot. I hate you. Dump me and walk out of here and never come back. I dare you.”

  His body language deadened, and the lights in his eyes blew out. Then he smiled, and it looked so empty and cruel, I wanted to vomit. “Nah. I’m not dumping you, bro. How could I dump a friend?”

  And he was right. He wasn’t dumping me. It was worse: he was dismissing me, denying everything that had ever happened between us, sending me back to the bro zone, back to the beginning.

  “Don’t you dare call me your bro,” I breathed. “I forbid it.”

  He looked away, and some of my resolve slipped. In the beginning, before all the complications, he’d looked at me like I was a Ferris Wheel on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, God, I could remember just how sweet that felt, how warm it made me, to be wanted like that. Lately he was just looking past me, and it broke me apart.

  Now, I didn’t know much ab
out the boy standing in front of me, who seemed to be spinning apart at the seams just as quickly and as thoroughly as I was. All I knew was that I would like him, very much, to be the rest of my whole life. So I tried to make him stay. Because everything up to this point had been fake. Everyone else had been…well, someone else. Everyone had been less than Nicky. And I couldn’t let go of this magic yet.

  “Don’t do this,” I whispered. “We’ll figure this out, Nicky. I don’t want to live alone in this place, with no you around.”

  “Why?”

  I breathed and looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. Maybe because you made everything matter again. Like, you’re cute and funny and you’re so close with your mother and it’s adorable and God, you look so good in basketball shorts that it makes me want to kill myself sometimes. I like you more then I’ve ever liked anyone or anything.” I blinked. “You’ve kind of redecorated my world, and sometimes I’m sure that’s a bad thing, because now I’ll never be able to go back. So...don’t do it. Don’t make me go back to that. I don’t think I would survive my life BN.”

  “BN?”

  “Before Nicky.”

  After the longest silence of my life he looked right at me, his eyes opening like shutters. “Cole, you’re right. I like you. I really like you, and that is so rare.”

  “You do?”

  Tears fell silently down his face. “Yeah, I do, and I have a sickness, and that sickness is called being unable to think about anything but Coley Furman, and you’re smart and funny and interesting and you make me feel excited about going to sleep because that means I get to wake up again and see you again the next day, and I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

  He turned to leave, and I heard my voice rise from my throat uninvited. Everything I’d worked for, everything I’d experienced over the past few months, was about to walk out the door.

  “Wait.”

  He stopped.

  “Please stay. Don’t go. I never had a home until you, Nicky.”

  He reached for the door, and out it came: the honesty.

  “I wish you were a book, and I’d never read you,” I said as the tears started flowing.

  “What?”

  I started talking, but I didn’t even know who I was talking to – the ground, mostly. “When I was thirteen I picked up Harry Potter and it fixed my life. I was a little gay kid with two absent parents and zero friends, and when I found that book I realized there were other worlds out there, worlds where it didn’t matter what I was, even if they weren’t real. It named unnamable feelings in me and pointed out things in me that I didn’t even know existed – I felt those words to my bones. It described the act of being me better than I could. I had the time of my life inside those stupid books, and then I turned the last page and it was done, and when I looked around at my life again, everything else was so subpar in comparison. So…yeah. I wish I could unmeet you, unread you, unknow you, unarrange my life around you. That way I’d be okay with a downgraded life without you.”

  “Coley,” he said. Then he kissed me like the world was on fire and walked out of my house.

  11

  On Sunday morning I opened my eyes on white light and felt an instant dread smothering me like a nasty woolen blanket. When I squirmed around, I felt a ball of something heavy in my stomach. The light in my room was muted, and the air felt stale and old. I lay there for a long time, not even feeling the need to get out of bed, and that’s when I realized the problem: it was my first time waking up without Nicky in my life.

  Except it was real this time. And he wasn’t coming back.

  ~

  That afternoon I drank a bottle of wine and then threw myself into Honesty, more out of desperation than anything else. The first guy I approached waved me off, and another lady literally ran across a parking lot to avoid me after I tried to flag her down. After twenty minutes or so I found a homeless woman named Kimberly of about sixty years old sitting on a bench by the lifeguard stand, and she opened up a can of worms I didn’t even want to touch.

  “Okay. I’ll give you something. I should’ve chosen love,” she said, her eyes misting over like a cold fog rolling over the ocean in February. Her face had a mean quality in it, but something in her eyes told me she had been beautiful once.

  “W…what do you mean?” I asked, dropping my Polaroid camera for a second.

  “Wait. Are you a Baptist?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “Methodist?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Not even Presbyterian?”

  I shook my head.

  “What, then?”

  “Well, nothing, really. Not right now, at least.”

  She nodded and relaxed a little. “Okay, good, then – you’re unoffendable.” She sighed, then looked around. “Her name was Abigail. She lived next door to me. We were not quite twenty-five, I believe. She’d come around smiling at me, telling jokes, dropping by with a bottle of wine after dinner. By the time I realized I was in love with her, it was too late. She loved me, too, but I was engaged to a man, and I was scared. She had a serious boyfriend as well. So I denied her, cut her out like a tumor. My fiancé found out we’d been talking at night, anyway, and kicked me out. That’s about when I started in on the old drink, here.” She leaned back, smiled, and breathed, and in that moment, she looked free as fifteen. “I still see Abbie’s brown hair every time I close my eyes.”

  She shook the PBR in her hand, turned her head. Some kind of sadness floated up in her eyes, dark leaves in a murky pond, and it looked older than anything I’d ever seen before. I wanted to stop, to say thanks and dismiss myself, but I couldn’t.

  “What ended up happening? Are they all dead now?”

  She laughed, threw up a hand. I studied her closer. She had clear, open brown eyes and a habit of speaking out of the corner of her mouth. “Heavens, no. I’m not that old. She married a man, of course, and had her children. Lived out my dreams with someone else, basically. They’ve retired over in Ortega, but it’s only a bus ride away. I stand on the sidewalk outside and watch them sometimes. She saw me once, looked right at me. And it was like no time had passed at all. We were back. And I could still smell her perfume.”

  This was hitting too close to home, but I couldn’t leave, or even look away. I was inside her memory: I could smell the grass, see the bushes, picture the look in the woman’s eyes. “Did you talk to her? What happened?”

  Her eyes clouded over again. “Nothing happened. She turned away and got back to the life she’d chosen, and I got on a bus and came back here, to…this. It’s okay, though. Pain will never be your friend. But with luck and time, you can learn to make it your acquaintance.”

  Jesus, I thought, looking back down at my phone. I tapped out an overview of her story and then bit my lip. “Okay, um…could I get your contact information, for when I post the, the thing?”

  “Kiddo. Do I look like I can afford a phone to you?”

  I rocked back on my heels. “Oh, um…address, then?”

  Pointedly, she looked down at the sidewalk under her.

  “Oh, um, of course. No address. Well, thanks. I’ll get back to you when-”

  “What about you?” she asked, and I stopped.

  “What?”

  “I said, what about you? You’re puttin’ me on the hot seat here, and I wanna see you drink the same medicine. What are you running from? What makes you drink at night?”

  She smirked, and I knew she wanted my truth now. The words wanted to tumble out so badly. I’m in love with a boy, a boy who makes nothing else matter, a boy who makes me feel like I’m painting with all the colors in the sky for the first time in my life, a boy who won’t even make space for me in his world, a boy who shuts me out and makes me sleep on the floor…

  “Um, I really miss my grandpa,” I said instead. “That’s all I can think of right now.”

  Her eyes glittered. She didn’t say anything, but she knew. She knew my words were hollow an
d false.

  “Thanks, bye,” I said. And then the Honesty boy ran from his honesty.

  As I walked away to find my bike, I buried the woman’s story in a Notes draft and hated myself. Haaaaaated myself, full stop, like when you wake up from an out-of-control night out and realize you’re in for a full day of being disgustingly hungover. Here I was, digging into peoples’ souls to get at their most basic truths, while running from mine with everything in me. I couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t hide. I needed to let out my inside self before it suffocated. I just didn’t know how.

  Nine days. For nine days after the kitchen blowout, Nicky would not talk to me, would not text me, would not breathe in my general direction. I was lost, and lazy, and my general everyday look soon went from “sexless bookworm” to “homeless elderly woman with two ratty bathrobes to her name.” The late summer rains set in with a gross, muddy vengeance, and after the ride of a lifetime, I was slammed back into the friend zone. Or somewhere below the friend zone, if that place even existed. I wasn’t even acknowledged by Nicky half the time in gym, on the off chance that he actually came. He was pulling away and I knew it. One day I handed an exercise band to him, the boy who had held me with all the tenderness in the world just days before, and he thanked me and called me “buddy.” Buddy! He might as well have punched me in the face. And the sickest thing was that he knew the pain he was inflicting. He stared at me after that, almost taunting me, and I lit up with a rage I’d never felt in my life. Ever. For a second I considered going public with it. Touching him or kissing him or doing something to blow his cover. Instead I just walked away. But that night I felt like crying and jumping off my balcony. I would’ve just landed in the pool, but still, I was in the mood for theatrics. What did you live for when the person you wanted to live for wanted nothing to do with you?

  The politics of all of it were explosive, so confusing. There were so many buttons I couldn’t push, so many silent truths I could never convert to words. I looked for him on the Mixr app with a sick, obsessive zeal, certain he was trying to hook up with other dudes again, but I did not find him. Dating someone I’d met on a sex app horrified me in general, because if he’d met me there, what wasn’t to say he’d been meeting other people there the whole time, too? Because it was a new century and sex was always just an app away and, oh God, we were all gonna die in a pit of flames and syphilis! But one night, after I’d abandoned reading two different books and exited out of half a dozen different Netflix shows due to anxiety, I realized something: this went beyond my typical issues. Basically, I did not want to be alive without Nicky anymore. I never had a clue how deeply my feelings had run for him until he’d stepped away. This was something I’d never experienced before, something I’d never even known was possible. I felt like someone had reached into me, taken one of my ribs, and walked away. His name called from inside me, getting louder and louder, until it was not so much a chant, but an anthem. It felt like the sun would not turn on. What was wrong with me? I’d been fine on my own my whole life, and now I didn’t even know what to do with myself.