by Seth King
“Is this Cole Furman? Sheesh, kid, we’ve been trying to reach you for weeks, we thought you might’ve disappeared – anyway, I specialize in turning blogs into books, and I’ve got editors at four different publishing houses barking up my tree, asking how me to reach you…are you interested in doing a book with me, Mr. Furman? We think it could be massive, spectacular, a real treat for your fans. My office especially liked that post about the old gay women – geez, talk about ripping your heart out…”
I talked to her for a few minutes, real hesitant, and finally I admitted I was scared to go from my own little Instagram account and jump to a stage that big.
“So what, kid?” she’d asked, as the chaotic background noise told me she was doing ten things at once. “I’ve been afraid, too. How do you think I graduated from some second-rate school with a worthless degree and then moved to the city on my own when I was twenty-two with eight hundred dollars in my pocket? Follow your fear. If it doesn’t scare the living turds out of you, it’s not worth your time.”
I’d kind of wanted to say no. I’d almost wanted to tell them I wasn’t a gimmick, that I couldn’t be bought. But then she made me a huge offer, and obviously I said yes. It was funny, the doors that opened just when you thought life had pushed you down a dead-end hallway. I already had a sixty thousand dollar contract on the table with a publisher for a hardcover version of Honesty, with more offers on the way. The publisher I eventually chose would turn my blog into a book, which they’d then market to my fans and sell in bookstores across the country. One publisher even had a beautiful and incredibly ironic subtitle for the book: change the world by being yourself. Whenever I accepted an offer, ten percent would be taken by agents and graphic designers, and countless more thousands would be swallowed up by taxes and other expenses, but I didn’t care. I would still have enough money for an apartment. My own apartment, where I could be who I wanted to be, love who I wanted to love. Maybe here, maybe in Savannah, maybe on Jupiter. But the thought alone made me happy for the first time since I could remember. I was free from my family’s control for definitely a little while, and hopefully forever. I couldn’t believe it: a book, those beloved pieces of trees that we stared at in hopes of hallucinating vividly, was going to have my name on the cover. If only I could tell the twelve-year-old version of me about all this, and watch the joy spread over his face…
I looked up at my father. I told him all of this, including how unbelievably hard my life had been up to this point because of the world’s persecution of my sexuality, and then I asked him to accept me. Or demanded it, really, as I stared at his sky-blue eyes and silver-blonde hair. And deep down, I guess I really did want his acceptance, even if I was starting to learn I didn’t necessarily need it. Somewhere deep within the boy I still was, I really did want my daddy to be proud of me. I would always be somebody’s kid, no matter how old I thought I was getting.
And at the end, my father simply glanced at me and then skipped his eyes over to the blinds. “Come on, pull yourself together,” he said through a clenched jaw. “Boys don’t cry.”
I stared at him as an atomic bomb detonated inside me. “Boys do whatever the fuck they want to do.”
He jerked his head over to me. Here in the South, land of SEC football and hunting trips and camouflage baseball caps, boys were expected to play ball with their fathers, not play with actual balls. Although there were notable exceptions, almost every father I knew detested their gay sons, and if they didn’t, they were still confused and terrified by them. Nobody wanted a freak for a kid, and that was the saddest truth I’d ever known.
Sitting here in my new truth, though, I almost felt bad for my dad. Something else I was learning was that people were never going to be who you wanted them to be – humans were themselves, incurably. Just look at Nicky. And me. So maybe I could accept him, flaws and all. Or maybe I could, you know, not. Because here I was, revealing the horror world I’d called home all my life, and he didn’t even care. But I didn’t need him to care, I reminded myself. And all at once, I realized that my own happiness had never even occurred to me. I could be happy, without strings attached. I deserved that happiness, too. I didn’t have to live inside a lie anymore. I never did at all. I didn’t have to force myself into the shadows and spend my life in some dull state of misery anymore – I could get dressed in the morning in exactly the clothes I wanted and not have to worry about what people thought when they looked at me; I could go on a dating app and act like myself instead of somebody else. I could watch the gay-ass shows I wanted to watch without jumping up whenever someone walked in and pretending I’d been searching for the remote all along. I could be happy, and that happiness did not require my father at all. I felt as good as I had when I’d posted the old woman’s love story and had Ruth’s widow nod at me from across the sidewalk. The fact that I could turn out okay had never occurred to me, ever, as stupid as that sounded. Happiness – what a concept!
Suddenly every insult my father had ever thrown at me, every time he’d ever looked at me with hatred in his eyes, every time he’d scowled down at my tight jeans and told me to turn around and change, lit into me and made me know for sure that I was still alive, on my own, as Coley Furman and nobody else. Of course, my father had every right to have these views – I also had every right to tell him to get the hell out of my life until he changed them. Because now I knew the truth, and it was a taste so bitter I could spit. I would never be free. Not at all. Not until I could wake up in the morning and make my own decisions, walk down the street holding hands with the person I loved. Too much fear and hatred in this world was holding me back. It was holding us all back. We were so far back, we were behind ourselves, actually. We could do so much better.
“I like guys,” I told Richard Cole Furman III, “and you don’t like it, and you don’t like me, and right now this is still my house, so please get the hell out of it. I’ll have Mom come over tomorrow and help me pack, but from this day forward, I want nothing to do with you.”
He laughed a little, incredulous. “Really? Really? You’re going to choose Diane over me?”
“Mom may be a disaster,” I said, “and she may have ruined my childhood, but at least I always knew she loved me. You are a sad, scared little man, and I feel sorry for you. Now get the hell out of my house before I call the cops.”
He just stared at me. He was an idiot, and I no longer respected his opinion nor required his approval.
“Oh, and Richard? Nicky was Hispanic, fresh from Puerto Rico, you racist shitbag. He spoke Spanish to me sometimes when we kissed, too. It was really hot. Anyway, call me when you’re not a bigot. Love ya!”
My father turned on his heel and left my sights for what we both knew would be the last time for a long time.
After Richard left I scrolled through my newsfeed. I saw a photo of Jonathan, the beautiful repressed boy I’d fallen in love with back in middle school, and it made me clinch up inside. I felt so bad for him – oh, how the mighty had fallen. The arm of his “girlfriend” was tossed over his shoulder, but he looked absolutely dead in the eyes. And as I listened to the cars driving down the road outside I realized I would never again have to sit through that game. I would never have to play along and live against my own grain and pretend to be a human I was not, in front of my father or FitTrax jocks or anyone else. Nicky had blown the doors off that life, and I had him to thank for it, even if he was gone. As I sat there I imagined what my life would be like now, had I never met Nicky and fallen in love with him.
This morning I would’ve woken up sad, then gone to a FitTrax class I didn’t want to be at, then maybe come home to watch Netflix alone and listen to my dad berate me and lacerate me on the phone while I sat there and said nothing. Maybe I’d zip over to Target to run from the loneliness, where I would’ve watched a mom catch her little boy in the Barbie section and yank him away by the arm, or maybe listened to a bunch of teenaged boys jokingly call each other faggots and cocksuckers. During each of the
se hypothetical scenarios I would’ve bit my tongue and walked away. Finally I would’ve cooked dinner by myself before watching a few Bravo shows and going to sleep in a cold bed, and then I would wake up the next day and do it all over again. I would be comfortable, safe, bored, fed-up, and miserable. Everything was different now, and also new and scary, but still, I was free. This was what Nicky had given me: freedom.
I owed that boy everything.
~
That night I dreamt about him for the first real, tangible time. What I wanted to see in my dreams were the simple little nights I craved more than anything in the world for some reason, when he’d show up at my door, red-faced and excited, and we’d walk down into the dunes and sit on the edge of the sand. We’d love each other under the stars, not doing much of anything at all, just being. But my actual dream was different, not to say it was awful. He wasn’t the Nicky of our last few weeks together, the dark and damaged and paranoid version of him, the runner. In my dream he was the Nicky of July, that smiling triumphant boy with the galaxy eyes and the world opening out in front of him, the boy who would sometimes talk about a future with me like it was an inevitability instead of an impossibility, the boy who wasn’t afraid. We were on his golf cart together on a random evening, in the only town we’d ever known, the last town he’d ever know, the town that had killed him, laughing about something or the other. His hair shined, his eyes gleamed, and he was free. As the light faded from bright to gold and finally to amber, we rode into a burning sunset together, back during the only few months I’d ever truly been alive.
My dream slipped and stumbled and spun forward, and suddenly we were thirty-ish, lying on a bed on a Sunday morning with a galaxy-eyed baby boy between us. Nicky was older and thinner-haired and wrinklier, and I loved him even more. We weren’t hiding, we weren’t running, we were just happy. And this, I suspected, was the life I could’ve had if the world had allowed Nickicito to let himself love me.
I woke up gasping into a pillow as wet as a rainstorm.
19
The next day I woke up pretty early, craving Waffle House breakfast. I couldn’t really find anything clean to wear, so I threw on a beigey-pink Lady Gaga tee from Urban Outfitters I’d gotten in the midst of my post-Nicky revival. When I walked into the restaurant I felt eyes on me, and I made awkward contact with Miss Velma, my bigoted old neighbor. She was staring at me, disgusted, and suddenly I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. “Screw you, Miss Velma,” I whispered as I slid into a booth, middle fingers held high. She turned the color of the maroon jukebox and buried her face in her menu.
Would this last, though? Had I officially stopped caring for good, was this a whole new me, or was I doomed to go back to my old ways in a few weeks? I didn’t really know. But for the first time, the mystery of it all excited me instead of scaring me. This really was a whole new world, and I was gonna dare it to be kind. And if not kind, then at least a hell of a lot less douche-y.
When I left, I knew I didn’t want to go home. Not yet. There was one more person to try to contact. She was the last person on Earth I wanted to talk to, actually, but I needed to do this. So I pulled into Dairy Queen, shaking off the vivid memories of Nicky and I getting dipped cones there one rainy day in the summer, when the roof was leaking and the employee lady yelled at us for walking through the puddle on the tile. I parked the car and took out my phone with trembling hands. First I looked at the last text Nicky ever sent me before everything went to hell – it was a perfectly normal snapshot of a perfectly normal conversation. Ok, see you later, loser, he’d said, since “loser” was something he’d call me as a term of endearment whenever he was in a mushy mood. I cried for a moment, then I brought up the profile of the person I needed to talk to. She probably wanted nothing to do with me in this life and a million more, but I had to try.
I added her on Facebook, and to my complete shock, she accepted me immediately. Not one to wait around anymore, I tried to type her a message, but my app told me she was already typing. I sat back, speechless, and waited for her message to come in:
I remember you, she said. I know you.
You do?
I knew she knew of me, of course, I just had no idea she’d actually admit it.
I do. I’m running errands soon, so meet me at the Starbucks in downtown Savannah.
Okay…when?
As soon as you can, she said as I took a terrified breath and put the car in reverse.
~
Two hours later I sat in a corner of the massive Starbucks in downtown Savannah, both reveling in and repelled by the presence of Nicky Flores’ sister. She’d aged five years in a matter of months, but her eyes were still alive and all-knowing. I felt like I’d seen her a million years ago and five seconds before, all at once. She still looked so much like Nicky that it was almost like seeing him again, which felt horrible and awkward and weird and gorgeous. And again I thought of all the things the world did to love, and sighed. Mr. Brightside by The Killers played in the background, a lovelorn old rock song about a man despairing over his lover moving on with her life, and I realized that for the first time, I understand every lyric. It had all been senseless nonsense to me before, but suddenly every word hit me like a gust of cold air. Love had taught me a whole new language.
“So…” she said. She sounded pissed, and her body couldn’t have been angled further away from me. Which reminded me of a Flores I’d once known…
“Yeah…so.” For some weird reason I laughed a little. The disappeared quickly, though. “This is kinda awkward.”
“I know. The thing is…I, um, wanted to talk to you about…everything. I’d been thinking about you a little, ever since that night, and then when you added me, I knew exactly who you were…”
She trailed off. I hated this girl on a cellular level, but I tried to hide it. So she’d known exactly who I was, and what I’d meant to her dead brother. She could’ve done more to find me. I would’ve given anything to have been there with them, to grieve with them, to sit with them and talk about him. But I’d lost that chance forever.
“I’m sorry about everything,” I said to move things along, and she looked away. “How’s your family?”
“Uh. Not good. Their only son is gone. My mom’s a mess and my dad is worse.” She looked out the window. “Anyway. How are you?” she asked, her eyes so far away from me, in so many ways.
“I am…well, nothing,” I said. “I’ve been…nowhere, mostly.”
“Okay. When did you know? How did you know?”
“It took…a while,” I swallowed. “Too long, actually. It’s only been about a week or so. We weren’t speaking, and so…I didn’t know.”
“Oh, God,” she said with wide eyes. I didn’t know what to tell her. I was sitting there, half alive, because of her brother. And she knew. She could’ve tracked me down and included me in it all. But she didn’t.
“Yeah. It hasn’t been fun,” I said. This was so awkward. “So…let’s get to why I added you today.”
“Yes?”
“If there’s one thing I know, but don’t want to know, but feel like I have to know…it’s about…that day. I feel like that was taken away from me. I should’ve been there,” I said, and then I looked away, because I didn’t want to get her mad before I could get the details out of her.
“Yeah, I know, and I’m sorry about that,” she said, except she didn’t look sorry at all. “You know, my parents, they have their views and their opinions and everything…” She trailed off again, unwilling or unable to finish. I understood. I had spent my life understanding. “Okay,” she sniffled. “Okay, I get it. Details: you deserve that much.” She leaned her body back, but put her head forward. “I talked to him the night before it happened. He was maybe a little quiet, but there was no absolutely no hint that something would happen so suddenly – he was always a little low, you know? He asked me when I was coming down, mentioned his pet snail, said something senseless about how he missed chandeliers-” I ch
oked up at this, but kept listening- “but yeah, everything seemed normal.” She swallowed. “And then…and then. The next day. I saw him, first of all. When he was…dead.” We both winced at the word. “I didn’t even mean to, and I’ll probably regret it forever, but I saw him. I was at a bachelorette in St. Simon’s Island when I got the call, and I drove down as soon as I heard. They were still getting…getting him out, of the thing. The car. He was…”
She trailed off again in a way that was beyond mortified, then shook her head, meeting my eyes for the first time. I’d never known what the word “horror” meant until that moment. Neither of us knew what to say for a minute, because suddenly the distance between me and the event seemed to disappear. Suddenly I was right there in the car with him, and I wanted not to be. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to envision. I wanted to erase that image forever, and that just made me feel worse.
“But he was still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful,” she said in a defeated way that told me she was perfectly aware that her little brother was now a rotting corpse and was not beautiful at all. It made me shudder. Sitting with her, knowing we both cried about the same person every night, was massively uncomfortable in a way I could not describe. And we were all rotting, really. All of us. This futureworld was breaking apart and headed to hell and we were all passengers, burning together.
