Honesty

by Seth King

  But on the other hand, art should transform. That’s what art should do. Nicky told me I was good at what I did, and being good gave me power. Could I set aside my own interests and try to transform people with that power and that art? The possibilities were intriguing in the least…

  I touched my phone again and heard the words of my high school art teacher, Mrs. Hargrove: “go to where your passions flow.” For some reason it made me think of the bitter, acid, almost supercharged tone Nicky’s voice took on whenever he talked about society’s treatment of gays. And then his breakdown about not wanting to be gay anymore…every time I thought about that, it made me furious. I wanted to rid our culture of this poison, or at least try to. The things he believed, the things he let the world tell him…maybe I should try to help erase some of that nonsense, scrub it from the world. Or maybe it would end my career before I even started it. Then again, maybe the followers would embrace me – maybe they would appreciate the honesty. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?

  And beyond that, maybe I could do the most noble thing: maybe I could help a little kid just like me a few years ago, a kid who thought he was trapped, a kid who thought he’d never get to wake up in the morning and get to be who he was. Gay guys just weren’t being represented or put on display out there – every Hollywood movie starred the same “brave” superhero chasing down the helpless blonde heroine, every television show featured the same slick womanizer, every commercial had the brawny muscle man selling deodorant on horseback or whatever. And since I wasn’t seeing myself anywhere, maybe I could become my own mirror. There was no seat at the table for me, so why not build my own chair and force my way in? God knows I’d needed it as a child, to see someone like myself and know there was a place for me out there in the world…

  And that did it. The vision of me in elementary school, lost and lonely and confused and in love with boys who could never love me back, made the decision for me. It was getting harder and harder to wake up every day and see the world as being a beautiful place, and I wanted to try to change that. So I walked out onto my porch to get a better signal, then took a breath. And then a kid with a phone pressed publish and tried to change the world.

  ~

  An interesting thing happened the next day: not much. The post got one of the highest reaction rates I’d ever seen, of course, with dozens of teary-eyed emojis and sympathetic comments, but beyond that, nothing much happened. The post didn’t spark a forest fire of outrage, but it didn’t go viral as some case for equality and compassion, either. People just didn’t really care about the lesbian thing – they were more touched by the love itself. It seemed that when confronted by this bit of honesty, most people had responded with a shrug. One woman did comment something like “I like this level of honesty – keep going in this direction,” though, and I printed it out and put it on my desk.

  The biggest shock came from Naomi herself, Ruth’s partner. She knew about Honesty – I’d told her about it once or twice during random chats on the back lawn – and when she passed me, she met my eyes for the first time ever. Then she nodded slowly and respectfully, telling me she’d seen the post. All she did was nod, but her eyes said all the words in the world. I knew I’d never be able to tell her how good that made me feel, and so I turned and walked away, left it all unsaid. But I felt that she understood, just like I understood her. Posting about things I actually cared about, things I believed in, had suddenly opened up a whole new world for me.

  That night, just as I got ready to toss and turn for another endless set of Nicky-less hours, a new message came into my Facebook page. “I cried for hours after reading the thing about the old lady,” a kid in middle school named James said. This surprised me, because my experience with children was that they were meaner than any other age group – kids were fearless and guileless enough to say exactly what they felt, and what a lot of them felt seemed to be hatred. “The honesty in the piece was sort of staggering to me. I just want you to know that it gave me hope and made me feel…cleaner, somehow,” the message continued. “I might even tell my mom I’m gay tomorrow. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this, but…yeah. Just felt the urge to share. Thank you for existing.”

  I fell asleep sobbing into my pillow for that little boy.

  I coasted into the holidays feeling like a gladiator, and on Christmas Eve I stopped by Walgreens for some odds and ends. I first sensed Nicky when I was in the food aisle, looking for something to bring to my dad’s house. (I had nowhere else to go, even though my dad’s wife hated me for no reason and would probably cut me down the whole night.) Nicky was standing in the beverage aisle staring blankly into the wine fridge when my eyes found him.

  Shit. I felt like someone had thrown hot coals into my chest. I turned and melted against the side of a Triscuits display, but then I heard him start walking closer, and I knew I had nowhere to go. He’d cornered me without knowing it.

  I felt him, physically felt him, getting closer. I had never in my life been so desperate for anyone or anything. I needed his love all of the sudden, craved it with everything in me. When he came into my line of vision, he stopped to look at some Cheetos and then jumped a little and stared right at me. I stared back as White Christmas played over the intercom. Fate was such an evil bitch. I hated her. But soon something in me twitched, and since I couldn’t escape, I figured I’d might as well talk to him.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi,” he said. Even when caught off guard, he was still so cool, so presidential. He held his head like a crown needed to be on top of it.

  “Are you alone? On Christmas?” I asked him. “Why aren’t you in Savannah with your family?”

  His eyes left me. He seemed dazed for some reason. “Oh, um…well, I thought things were too fresh, actually. I didn’t want to deal with the whole Victoria thing yet. Wanted to let things die down, I guess…”

  “Oh,” I said, heartbroken for him. “Well, do you want to come with me? My family would be totally cool with a…a friend tagging along…”

  “Uh, thanks, but I’ve got a buddy who invited me over.”

  I looked away, and I felt so sad. For both of us. It was Christmas and we were keeping ourselves alone in a dead-end Walgreens in a town at the end of the world, because that world told us we had to. It was all so effing stupid.

  I turned to him. “So you’re back to that?” I asked quietly, thinking about how first cuts dug deepest. “We’re back to this? Really? Strangers in a grocery store?”

  His nostrils flared a little. “For the millionth time, Cole, I don’t see any other options. We tried. We gave it a shot. A good one.”

  “Love is an option,” I whispered, but he looked off at the magazine aisle. Then I laughed sort of incredulously. He asked me what was funny. “What’s funny? You broke my freaking heart,” I said, my eyes on the floor. He glanced around, then touched my chin for one white-hot second. I could swear my body disappeared.

  “So what, Coley? That means nothing. I’m always gonna love you. On Christmas, on Valentine’s Day, on every day and every holiday. You know that. Nothing will ever change that.”

  I screwed up my face. What the hell was love if it was felt alone? What was any of this but a futile wish in a cruel world? We were two boys on the edge of nineteen, climbing out of something we neither understood nor were equipped to deal with.

  “This isn’t you, Nicky,” I said, motioning up and down at his gym gear and his buffed-up body. “I know you. This is a wish…it’s back to the beginning.”

  “It is me,” he said, with a certainty that looked so fake I wanted to both hug him and punch him. “It is. I’m different now. I’ve been going to this Bible class every week, and they’re giving me these ‘tools’ to be straight, as they call them. I’m gonna be alright, I can feel it.”

  I stared at him. What could I even say to that level of delusion? I hate you for every time you take yourself away from me, I wanted to say. You’re a beautiful maniac who hurts me more beautifully
than I’ve ever been hurt before and makes me think cheesy, insane thoughts like the ones I’m thinking right now. My days feel like centuries without you.

  Instead I touched his collar real quick so nobody would see, then looked into his galaxy eyes. “Nicky. Stop. Seriously, stop. This is madness. You don’t know what you’re doing.” I pointed at his heart. “I don’t know much, but I know this. That thing you feel inside your chest – your soul – that thing’s going to shut down if you deny yourself for too long, and you’re going to die. Maybe not now, maybe not in a year, but one day I’m going to wake up and read somewhere that you’re dead, all because you let yourself go dark inside. You’ve got to stop this craziness.”

  He turned his head and dropped his hand in a way that displayed his phone screen, which was showing some Christian-type podcast called How to be Happy. How could I break into this fantasyland? How could anyone do that?

  “Don’t you need me?” I asked. “Don’t you miss me?”

  He tried to play it cool, but his eyes were like a crop top: they revealed too much. Catching this, he glanced away again, leaving me singed and smoldering, burning alone, without him. Why was hating him so freaking exquisite?

  “Okay. Fine. I need you so much it hurts,” he said, watching the tile floor as he licked his lip. “I miss you something terrible. I keep thinking about last summer, trying to imagine how I felt.” His voice dropped even lower, and he shook his head, disgusted. “I was alive then. I haven’t been since you.”

  I breathed.

  “And why would you even want me?” he asked, studying his forearms with pure hatred in his eyes. “Why don’t you find someone else, someone who would treat you better? Someone normal? Sometimes I miss all the love I’m not giving you, and it makes me feel so bad, so guilty…”

  “Is that what you want?” I asked quietly. “For me to…find someone else?”

  He shook his head and slumped even further. “The only thing worse than envisioning me with you is envisioning someone else with you. It makes me want to stop breathing.”

  An old man passed, giving us a politely curious look and killing the moment. I grimaced at him – nosy bastard. He blushed and kept walking.

  We both straightened up and tried to chill out. When we were alone once more, I looked down at his shoes.

  “No, you don’t miss me,” I sighed. “If you missed me, you’d talk to me. If you needed me, you wouldn’t have left. You’re still so clueless, aren’t you? I hope you never have to love anything as much as I love you.”

  He said nothing. I swallowed, and it hurt like strep throat. “God, I wish I had wine right now. Every time I try to be alive without you, I can’t. I don’t know how. Shit, Nicky. What are we gonna do?”

  He threw my sigh back at me. “This is all we can do. It was gonna end eventually, anyway. It had an expiration date, Coley. You were gonna get sick of me. You were gonna be around me too much and realize I scratched my balls too often or something else gross like that, and you would’ve gotten tired of me because I’m not good enough, and you wouldn’t want to be around me anymore.”

  I winced. It broke me to pieces to know he didn’t see “enough” in himself, in me, in us. How was this not enough? We were two kids who loved each other. It was more than enough. It was everything.

  “Enough?” I asked. “I know you’re not enough. You’ll never be enough. And that’s the best thing.”

  “You certainly never acted like it,” he said. Suddenly I could remember what I’d thought about him the first time I’d ever really looked at him: the good kind of trouble. It was an insane how accurate I’d been.

  He looked up at me, mystified. “I mean, what’s wrong with you? If you’re telling the truth, then I don’t get it. How could you love me so much?”

  And my heart broke yet again.

  “Nicky – none of this was your fault,” I said. “I’m mad, Nicky. I’ve had a shitty life and it makes me hate almost everything. And I’m scared, too. My dad left me and my mom left me and all anyone ever does is leave me and, God, that must mean there’s something fundamentally leave-able about me, right? If I was exceptional, wouldn’t they have been compelled to stick around? But please try this with me again. I don’t wanna let the fear keep me from the possibilities of you, of us, of…this. Of…ColeyAndNickyVille.”

  He bit his lip, his eyes wild.

  “So this is it?” I asked, trying not to laugh at the insanity of all this. “Again? Another ending?”

  He closed his eyes. “You know it has to be. Let’s just keep it like it was. Save the good, so it can never go bad. Keep it golden.”

  I stepped forward. I smelled him, packaged him, took in the memory of this boy who’d made me a different person, who was so committed to being trapped in his own shell he kept snails as pets. “Okay. But what now?”

  “We keep doing what we’re doing. I’ll date…girls, I guess. Or try to. You’ll…”

  I glared at this boy who had remade my life. “I’ll…what?”

  “I read all of your posts,” he said, watching me. “Every last one. The one about the old lady was…gorgeous, really. It’s all growing so fast. I know people make fun of you and try not to take you seriously because you post about love and romance and stuff – which humans shy away from because they’re terrified of their own emotions – but anyway, you’re gonna blow. Something’s gonna go viral, and one day the whole world will know your name. Why would you want me hanging around for all that?”

  How could he not understand that he was the only thing I wanted around? I was so stupid to think I could fix him. But I still wanted to try.

  “I’m tired, Nicky,” I said, and my voice sounded a million miles away. “I’m so tired. We’re getting older. My little cousin just posted on Facebook that she’s pregnant, and my dad told me that my mom just got a face-lift. Everyone’s getting so damn old. What if we wake up one day and life has just…left us behind? What if it already has?”

  He bit his lip, then turned away again. “Don’t act like I don’t want this, Coley. That was never the problem. I want it more than anything. I lived you, I breathed you…and it scared me so much…”

  Nicky started to leave. I couldn’t do this anymore – I needed him in my life. So my voice came out small and desperate, but firm.

  “We’re gonna die, Nicky.”

  He stopped and turned around. The summer came rushing back to me, the summer I’d first felt love, palms and waves and sand and grace and fire, and I threw my Hail Mary pass. “We’re gonna die. All of us. The clock app on my phone is ticking, and we’re all gonna be dead one day. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow and maybe it’ll happen in seventy years, but one day we’re gonna be in the ground, and it’s killing me already, and I want to do everything I can to spend every possible moment with you before then.” I stared at the floor, ashamed of my own words. “You’re the closest thing I’ve ever found to heaven, and I want to live in that heaven while I’m still on Earth.”

  I looked up. His galaxy eyes slammed into mine, filling up the stale December air, stiffening it and hardening it and electrifying it with all the things beyond our comprehension, all the things beyond what we could accept or even admit, all the things we felt but couldn’t put to words, would probably never be able to put to words.

  “Nicky,” I said, his name poisonous on my lips like cigarette smoke. He was narcotic, illicit, and I would never get enough. “Look at us. It’s so sad that we like each other this much. We’re undoing each other.” Just like that therapist had predicted…

  He bit his lip again, eyes shining. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Trust me, I’m a wreck,” I told my hands. Then I met his eyes one last time, hoping for a miracle. “Can you hug me?”

  He fidgeted. “Why?”

  “…So I can remember it when I’m eighty and alone and without a boy to hug in a deserted Walgreens aisle on Christmas Eve?”

  “Merry Christmas, Coley,” he finally said, Janua
ry in his eyes, and then he turned and took his wine to the cash register alone.

  16

  And that was it. I spent Christmas alone. And then New Year’s. And then all of January. As winter hit I tried to go back to books, to fly back into the pages that had kept me warm and safe as a child, because books would never leave me. When people failed me, books always stepped in. They would never rearrange my bones and change me, then leave me standing there, different and alone. And if books did tear up my soul, I could always turn the last page and be reminded I was only daydreaming. But I couldn’t turn this page. His page. The Christmas run-in had just reminded me of what I’d lost, and still the whole world whispered his name. What was in the cards for us? For me, now that I was officially gay and officially single? Would I become the sad old shut-in, the proverbial gay uncle? The peculiar man who gardened for fun and never left his house? Or would I perhaps fall in love with a woman like I used to pray I would when I was a boy and have a happily easy after?

  January gave way to February. My life was becoming so dreary and dull – winter just wasn’t my season. One chilly night when I was walking home from the grocery store, I passed what I realized was the gay bar my boss had mentioned. In the past I would’ve turned my face and rushed off into the darkness, but on this night I stopped and peered into the window. I saw lights, smoke, smiling faces; I heard loud, vibrant music and the sound of laughter – everything was whirling together in a show of color and light and joy. For some reason I was blown away that everyone was so happy and carefree – it looked way more fun than any straight bar I’d ever seen, come to think of it. Who knew that being gay could actually be fun? I’d had no idea a secret gay community had existed right under my nose all along. Well, they weren’t exactly secret, but it told me a lot when one couple left the bar, stepped into the light, and let go of each other’s hands and started acting like “friends” as they walked to their car. They couldn’t exist in public, but still, they existed in the first place, and this was a revelation to me.