Honesty

by Seth King

  I looked over at him. “Shit. I’ve never even really though about that. I mean, yeah, a lot of people may hate me, but I’m still an upper-middle-class white boy from the suburbs. I can’t even pretend to understand what you’ve gone through in that area.”

  “Hatred is hatred,” he said through bared teeth, shrugging a little. “No matter what you call it. Homophobia, racism – it all comes from the same place: fear. They’ve arranged the world in the way they want it arranged, and any threat to that order needs to be taken out.”

  It was awkwardly quiet for a minute or two. I checked my phone, then rechecked it. Then checked it again.

  “Question,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You talk about being ‘out’ and all that so much, but you never do anything about it. You don’t even know what you’re talking about, really. Say you did…come out, or whatever. Tomorrow. Hypothetically. What would happen?”

  “Well, I-”

  “And be honest,” he said. “No sugarcoating.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I’d probably lose my house, first of all. My dad would tell me he loved me, and then tell me he didn’t want what I did happening under his roof, and tell me to leave. And my mom…I don’t think she’d care that much, actually. She had an inkling about me, and once I heard her tell her friend that she’d be afraid to ever have a gay kid, since that kid would automatically be hated by half the world because of the Bible and everything.”

  “Ugh,” he groaned. “Don’t even get me started on the hypocrisy of all that. The Bible denounces gays? Well, great, but what about all the other verses they don’t teach you about in Vacation Bible School? That Bible also instructs people to kill their own children, gives you tips on how to treat your slaves, and even tells women not to speak out of line or else they’ll be disowned by their husbands. Not to mention how it refers to mixed-race marriages as being ‘evil’ and ‘impure.’ Oh, and in one particularly cute passage, it says that if a girl loses her virginity before marriage, she deserves to be publicly murdered. So why do people just follow the rules about hating gays? How can they pick and choose the lines they let dictate their lives? Don’t stop there – by all means, embrace all the rules in that wonderful book, and see what happens!”

  “Tell that to my mother,” I said quietly, probably sounding sadder than I’d meant to.

  “Why don’t you ever talk about your mom, by the way?”

  “Because I don’t talk to her.

  “Huh? Why not?”

  I bit down on my tongue. How could I explain this? What would I say? Maybe I can’t talk to her anymore. Maybe she made it impossible. Maybe I’m better off without her. Maybe she ended my childhood by forcing me into the adult position while she acted like a kid. Maybe I’d spent so much time helping everyone else, I was nineteen and a stranger inside my own skin…

  “Because of reasons,” I said. “When I was fifteen, my mom went on a vacation to her best friends’ second home in the Turks and Caicos. She was an absolute mess because of how she and my dad had been drifting apart, and everyone thought it would be good for her to get away and be alone for a while. But she called me two days into the trip from the Miami airport, and I remember all she said when I answered was ‘put your father on the phone.’ Her voice sounded like a corpse’s or something. And that’s when I knew.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. The first night there, she got wasted and cheated on my dad. She was so embarrassed, she left the next day and told my dad everything.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Divorce her. That day. She tried to beg and plead and everything, but everyone knew it was over. My life was already a mess, but that shook everything up even more. My parents were all I had, and to lose that, to lose what they had together…it really did feel like the proverbial death everyone describes divorce as.” I paused and realized I’d never told this to anyone in my life before. I didn’t tell him the last thing, though. The day of the Miami call was also the day I’d promised myself to never to cry over love – all love did was end, and so I wasn’t going to be some fool caught in the crossfire. Or so I’d thought…

  Still, I let out a breath that felt a million years in the making. “It’s all better now, anyway. They’re better off apart. But the weirdest thing is that my mom didn’t even want to come back. She wasn’t ever a bad mom or anything, maybe a bit distant, but yeah…she just left after the divorce. She almost seemed relieved that she had a fresh start. But now she wants back into my life now that I’m older, and it’s kinda like…where the hell were you when I was an injured little teenager and I needed you around, you know?” I swallowed, paused. My temper was running away from me, and I was revealing too much.

  “What do your parents do, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “My dad was old money, but trust me, the money ended with him – he’s already squandered his inheritance. His ancestors were huge landowners or something – my dad likes to brag that they once had more slaves than any other family in the Carolinas.”

  He looked like he’d eaten a rotten banana. “Who the fuck would ever want to brag about that?”

  “Exactly. He’s not exactly a gem. And it was just us two after my mom left, which was about as pleasant as it sounds.”

  “Geez. But at least he stayed, right?”

  I blew out some air and shook my shoulders in a shruggy sort of way. “I mean, yeah, technically. He was still gone, though. People don’t have to pack a bag and slip into the night to abandon you. They can disappear and check out of their own lives from right in front of you, go lights out, and they’re as good as gone. My dad abandoned me from six feet away. And holy shit, sorry for unloading on you.”

  “You didn’t,” he breathed. “I’m kinda glad you told me all that.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. It just makes me feel closer to you. Whenever I’m with you, I can just…be. What I am. And I’ve never had that before. Not even close, really.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt the same way, and I sensed that he understood that this was our golden common ground, this ease we felt, this weird sense of understanding. It made me feel so free, just to have someone look into the parts of me the world had always ignored.

  But then he blinked and pulled away, in so many more ways than one. When he was at his best, he could disarm a Navy Seal with his eyes. He made me feel glory, true human glory, like, opening-credits-of-Star-Wars glory or babies-giggling-themselves-awake-beside-you-on-a-Sunday-morning glory. But now it was like I didn’t even know him. And maybe I never would, no matter what came out of his mouth. He was still locked inside himself, and it wasn’t really getting any better, no matter what I told myself.

  Suddenly he pulled off the road so hard, it jerked my neck back. “I can’t do this.”

  “What?”

  “See my family,” he said. “With you. Talking about this gay stuff…it’s freaking me out. I can’t do it yet. I’m scared.”

  I looked at the big green road sign ahead. “…But we’re twenty minutes from Savannah…”

  “My parents’ friends have a hotel where I can stay almost for free,” he said. “We can go there. And still have a vacation.” He stared out the window, into the trees, the woods.

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Hide me again. Put me away like a sweater in a drawer…”

  “Oh, stop. Don’t you think this hard for me, too? The stakes are so much higher for me. Your parents suck, but at least they’re not religious fanatics. They didn’t walk in on you watching gay porn as a kid and send you to some bible camp in the mountains for six weeks where they told you that you were worse than a cocaine addict for being gay…”

  I swallowed. He’d never mentioned that. Maybe I’d been underestimating his family’s fanaticism.

  “Look,” he said. “You don’t get it. It’s just harder for me. And sometimes I…”

  “Yeah?”

  He sighed. “Sometimes feel s
o out of control that I…I don’t trust myself. I’m scared I might do something…something to make it all easier, I guess. There’s a smudge inside me I can’t scrub out.” His eyes were like small volcanoes of misery. “Coley, sometimes I get so mad about all of this that I…I don’t want to be alive anymore.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I bumped my arm against his. “Nicky. I don’t believe that. You would never do that. …Right?”

  “I’ve wanted to. Maybe. In the past. It gets so hard being in my brain sometimes.”

  I felt like crying. “Well do you ever feel those…suicidal type of thoughts anymore?”

  His eyes grew. “Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy, Coley. Are you’re telling me you haven’t felt like this sometimes?”

  I bit my tongue, because I couldn’t deny that I had, occasionally, envied dead people. Sometimes when I was younger and my preacher was spitting fire from the pulpit and Mrs. Combs across the street was talking about how all gays should be sent away on a train and I was getting really tired of feeling like I was crazy, I could remember thinking death would be a better option than what I was feeling. But lately I’d felt better. The world was moving forward, slowly, but still, progress was all around. Just not in the South, perhaps.

  “Nicky,” I said. “The thought of you ever doing that makes me want to…fall into hell.”

  “Well sometimes when I think about who I am, how much I hate myself…I can’t see anything else.” He clenched his fists. “And the way I treat you because of all of it…I don’t want to be like this, and I hate it.”

  My mouth opened a little. I didn’t know why he wouldn’t understand. Death wouldn’t set him free from this. He was locked inside his hate for himself until he stopped giving a shit. Sentence: life.

  And suddenly so much made sense to me: he didn’t even want to love me. Loving me mortified him. Every time he’d walked away from me this summer, he’d been trying to dump me, get rid of me, become “straight” again. But he couldn’t stay away any more than I could. He was just as dependent on ColeyAndNickyVille.

  “Don’t ever say that,” I said, looking away. “Nicky, if you did something like that, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

  He just sighed again.

  “Okay, we’re gonna stop talking about this now. This isn’t Instagram,” I sort of laughed, trying not to cry. “I will never be able to unlike you.”

  “I know.” The way he said it, like it was a bad thing, broke my whole heart. He stared down at his phone, his brow and nose the only parts of him visible in the techglow.

  “Nicky, do you…do you want me to stop liking you?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” he said. “I thought that was clear enough already. I don’t know what to do about this either. Trust me – I hate myself for hiding you sometimes. All I want is…well, the light…”

  I turned my head so he couldn’t see my face while I spoke. Sometimes I hated how completely Me I was with him, because that meant it dragged up all the bad parts, too. I contained multitudes, and most of them sucked. “And I hate the world for making you feel like you have to hide,” I said.

  He considered this, then looked away. When I thought of the trip’s magic already being over I got that sinking feeling again, that dread that reinforced just how much I didn’t want to reenter the real world, the world without him. This thing sucked, and it was so draining, but I was addicted. He was like a good book that sucked me in so thoroughly, I had serious trouble returning to my life again after turning the last page. I could remember this quote my English teacher had used once, and it had always struck me as so idiotic: “man is free the instance he decides to be.” That was just so untrue. We were trapped in ten thousand different ways, and there was nothing we could do about it.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “We need to lighten up. The hotel is right on the water. You’ll love it. But the thing is…”

  “Yes?”

  He breathed. “You can’t come in. With me, I mean. They would notice. I’ll get us booked and then text you the room number.”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  He took off down the road again, but it felt like we weren’t moving at all.

  “And Coley?”

  “Hm?”

  “Don’t tell anyone that you know me if they ask, okay?”

  At the hotel, it took fifty minutes for him to text me. When he finally did, I speed-walked through the modern, hipster-y lobby and found him in a giant, sleek room on the third floor.

  “Sorry,” he said after I threw down my bag and tossed him a look, “they wouldn’t let me get a room first, they said I was too young, so I had to get them to call the owners.”

  “Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? Won’t they tell your parents?”

  “Ehh, doubt it. The owners didn’t really care.”

  He looked back at his phone. He was in one of “his moods” and it made me want to punch him.

  “Should I sleep on the floor again?” I asked after I brushed my teeth. How was it that I liked him more than anything I’d ever liked, and yet he could still make me feel like I was so small, I disappeared? Being next to him sometimes made me feel more alone than I ever had in my life.

  “Are you kidding? Get over here, kid.”

  I came over, and what followed was a kiss – a kiss that made the previous day melt away. What’s a kiss? I thought as our lips combined into one entity. Why did humans feel the need to press their faces together and swap spit with someone they felt feelings for? A kiss was….

  An explosion of forces you never knew existed inside of you, a deep dive into possibilities you never knew to be on the table, a burst of light and color and sound mixed and amplified in ways you’d never experienced, one brave and final step into the breathless and terrifying and undeniable unknown…

  A kiss was a kiss. But a ColeyAndNickyVille kiss was something else altogether.

  We fell asleep with his legs wrapped all the way around me.

  The next day started off strong and only got better. It was one of the best of my life, actually. I kept trying to slow time down, grab it and hold it, but the happier I was, the faster it rushed by. Before we left, though, we hooked up in the shower, and then I found him struggling to get on these chic, buckled boots I’d gotten him at a clearance store. Soon I realized he just couldn’t do it – he couldn’t bring himself to put them on. He didn’t want to.

  “Here, let me help-”

  “I can’t,” he said after I knelt at his feet. “I can’t do it. They’ll see…they’ll know…”

  “It’s okay,” I said, looking up at him. “It’s okay, Nicky.”

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and just held him until his breathing slowed.

  “What are we doing?” he whispered soon, and he was crying and smiling. I could feel it then, ColeyAndNickyVille, our world, closing in around us, whispering into history. “We’ll never come back from this. Everyone knows now. We’re exploding each other’s lives, that’s what we’re doing.” He kind of smiled. “And the weird thing is…I think I kind of like it.”

  “Me too,” I told his shoes. “I think this could save me.”

  I just held him like that until the morning opened out.

  At noonish we left the hotel and walked down a street lined with brick townhouses, oak branches splintering out above, protecting us from the Southern sun. I got a few Honesty shots here and there, but mostly I just let Nicky tell me about his hometown. He knew so much local history, and he spoke about it as people did when they had passion in their veins, quickly and loudly and without stopping. Soon we hit the shops on the main street. I really did love the South, despite it all – the sweet tea, the slowness, the smiling old ladies, the great gnarled oaks standing guard at every corner. The town was so bizarre to me, because with all its brick storefronts and general stores it looked straight out of the 1950s, but it was so full of bohemian college kids from the local art school, it almost felt like a constant pride parade. I saw N
icky looking at two boys holding hands, and as they approached he literally crossed the street to avoid them.

  In a district filled with antique shops, one little store was waving a rainbow flag, and the one across the street had a Confederate flag shirt in its window. And it made me think of my life, this senseless collision of old and new, with so many factors rushing me out of the closet and yet so many more pushing me back inside and nailing the door shut. I thought of a news report I’d seen the other day about a cafe that was suing the government to protect their right to deny service to gay couples. The owners said their religious views needed to be “protected from discrimination.” The restaurant was doing everything they could to discriminate against gays, and yet they needed protection? Bigotry didn’t deserve protection.

  But still, I’d never been to a place like Savannah, where everyone was so…open. You could see every kind of love here, not just the accepted kind. It almost seemed like it wasn’t even in the South, and I almost felt free. So did Nicky. One time he even let down his guard and took my hand. It only lasted for half a second, but still: he’d never done that in public before. He smiled like a little kid, and there were not words for how badly I wanted to put him in my pocket and keep him there forever, for how badly I wanted to disappear into his galaxy eyes and remain there always.

  Later in the afternoon I used the last of my birthday money to buy him some chic (and, let’s face it, pretty gay) clothes from a little boutique, which he reluctantly accepted. Then we tried to get into this pub he liked, but we got turned down for having bad IDs. We ended up hanging out in this park, not really doing much at all, and soon I got all nostalgic, and it struck me: I’m gonna miss this. All of it. The way his eyes were flashing, the way my heart felt too big for my body, the way the sun was skittering off the awning of the pub, even the way a squirrel was trying to sneak food from a lady’s picnic blanket – from galaxy eyes right down to the laces on my shoes, I knew I was going to miss the fleeting blessing of being young and alive and slipping into love beneath an oak tree. I couldn’t have dreamed this into reality any more beautifully than it already existed, and so I took a photograph with my eyes and tucked it away forever.