Copyright © 2012 by James Lecesne
A Seven Stories Press First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lecesne, James.
Trevor / James Lecesne. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Bullied at school, dumped by his friends, and pressured at home, an artistic teenager struggling with his sexuality and identity makes a desperate attempt to end his loneliness.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-1-60980-420-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 1-60980-420-1 (hardback)
[1. Sexual orientation--Fiction. 2. Sex role--Fiction. 3. Suicide--Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L483Tr 2012
[Fic]--dc23
2012016377
Book design by Jon Gilbert
Printed in the USA
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Randy Stone
cofounder of The Trevor Project
Contents
Trevor
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Resource Guide
The Trevor Project
Trevor
One
There I was, lying on the front lawn in plain sight with a knife in my back. Actually that was the effect I was going for, and to be perfectly honest, I think it looked pretty good—from the street. I had gone to a lot of trouble in order to create the illusion that I’d been murdered. First, I borrowed Mom’s kitchen knife (the big one) and planted it firmly in the dirt. Then I positioned my body so that it looked to the people who happened to be driving by in their cars that I’d been stabbed to death. The fact that Dad was nonchalantly mowing the lawn made the whole thing seem (in my opinion) even more macabre. Imagine that you are driving past a typical suburban house on a typical suburban street in a typical suburban town somewhere in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A guy is mowing his lawn. You happen to turn your head and catch sight of this kid—thirteen years old, brown hair, wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. He’s lying on the grass with a knife stuck in his back. Horrors! What do you do? Do you turn your head away and pretend you didn’t see it? Call 911? Stop and point out to the guy who is mowing the lawn that his kid appears to be dead? Do you stop the car, jump out, and administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? What?
These are a few of the questions I pondered while lying there trying to make it look like I wasn’t breathing by keeping my chest and stomach perfectly still. It’s hard to do, but I had been practicing this for years and eventually I developed a technique to simulate deadness. I can fool trained paramedics, which I did once when I was in seventh grade (the trained paramedic was my cousin Sara, but still). Anyway, I was doing a pretty good job of being a murder victim when I heard my Dad yell over the sound of the mower.
“WHAT?”
“MY KITCHEN KNIFE,” Mom yelled back from the porch where she was standing. “HAVE YOU SEEN IT? THE BIG ONE?”
Dad did not reply, but I imagine that by this time Mom had spotted me lying there in plain sight along with her knife. I opened one eye just enough to see her marching across the front lawn. She was coming toward me, and she did not look happy. I’d say, based on her facial expression and body language, exasperation would be a more fitting description of her mental state. The fact that she was wearing an apron made me deduce that she had been in the middle of cooking dinner and then realized that her knife (the big one) was missing. After looking high and low, the logical next step would have been to ask Dad if he’d taken it from the kitchen. He is always using her kitchen utensils for inappropriate household activities like cutting tree branches or unscrewing something on his car. Once she spotted me, I figured that I’d be receiving a good talking-to, so I shut my eyes and braced myself for her verbal onslaught.
Let me just say that Mom has never been my best audience. Ever. She has always been very busy with either housework or her job. As she often reminds me, she doesn’t have the time or the energy for my “shenanigans” and she wishes to God that I would find something constructive to do with my time, something other than sitting in my room doodling for hours or lying on the front lawn pretending to be dead. What about baseball, she has asked me on more than one occasion. “Would it kill you to go over and ask that gang of boys if they needed an extra outfielder or something?” She didn’t understand that in fact I was being constructive. I had gone to a lot of trouble in order to create the effect of my own murder on the front lawn, but unfortunately, due to her position, it was lost on her. I was really doing it for the benefit of the random people who were passing by our house. From the other angle, it must have looked as though I’d fallen asleep on the front lawn with the knife stuck in the grass beside me. I doubt she would have enjoyed having the whole thing explained to her, so I kept my mouth shut and kept on pretending to be dead. Knowing Mom, she probably was able to figure out what I was up to and just wasn’t that impressed.
In any case, she reached down and quickly snatched the knife from the lawn. Then she wheeled herself around and headed back toward the house without a word. She didn’t even bother to yell at me. Maybe she thought I was doing this as a ploy to get attention, but I was just trying to keep myself entertained. It’s fun to be pretend-dead and then lie there as the world goes on without you. In my opinion, this is a much better use of my time than playing baseball.
The mower started up again, but I could hear Dad’s voice shouting over the sound of the revving motor.
“TREVOR,” he yelled. “GET UP. I HAVE TO FINISH THE LAWN AND YOU’RE IN THE WAY . . . TREVOR!”
Two
I don’t want to give you the impression that Mom and Dad are uncaring people who are insensitive to my needs; they are merely busy. Mom works as an administrator processing applications for insurance claims—or something like that—at the local hospital. Dad is a regional manager for a company that distributes products designed to make things that stick, like tape and industrial-strength glue. As an artist, I am not exactly inspired by the type of work they do, but I totally appreciate the fact that ever since I can remember they have kept a roof over my head and sent me to school fed and fully dressed. As their only child, I have always had pretty much everything I need. We are not rich by any means. I guess you could say that we are comfortably well off. Mom and Dad are tired at the end of the day—the result of their hard work—and they like to relax in the evening by parking themselves in front of the TV and watching some dumb game show or a televised talent contest in which people are pitted against one another until one of them wins a chance to be recognized by strangers in shopping malls across the country.
One night, while they were watching TV, I walked into the living room and fell dead to the floor. I held my breath a good long time. No response from them. That was when I decided that their ability to spontaneously respond to their environment (and me) had been compromised by the television. Unless I happened to be dancing with a star, I don’t think they would notice me—and I have never danced with a star in my whole life.
Sometimes instead of hanging around in my room surfing the net, drawing, or just being ignored to death by my parents, I sneak out of the house and go over to Zac’s house, which is just four blocks away. Zac and I have been friends since second grade, but now that we’re in high school and we don’t do kid stuff anymore, we have been working on more grown-up activities. For example, one night Zac asked me if I wanted to come over and check out his new microscope. I said yes, hopped on my bike, and went upstairs to his room without his parents knowing what was up. And wow! Let me tell you, we saw a lot of crazy activity through the eyepiece of that microscope. His sperm was amazing! Zac said that people used to think masturbating could cause a person to go totally deaf. Apparently he had read all about this and, according to the Internet, it was something they told to young boys in order to get them to stop “abusing” themselves.
“I am no expert,” I told Zac, “but I’ve never heard of a single case where someone went deaf due to masturbation.”
“What’d you say?!” Zac asked, pretending to be deaf.
We had big laugh over that one.
Then things got ugly.
He asked me if I was planning to dress up for Halloween, and I told him that I was considering going as Lady Gaga.
“Why?” he asked, and I could tell that he disapproved of my idea.
I explained to him that Lady Gaga was (a) my absolute fave, (b) an icon, and (c) an original who knew how to upend people’s expectations of normalcy. He wasn’t convinced, and announced that he was going to be a superhero for Halloween. He suggested that I join him, or at the very least consider something “less gay.” I informed him that Lady Gaga was certainly not gay.
“You’re missing the whole point,” he told me.
Before he could say anything further, I jumped in: “No, Zac, you’re missing the point. Because anyone who knows anything about Lady Gaga knows that she has had to overcome plenty of obstacles to become the artist that she is today. And in order to be myself and achieve my goals, I will have to do the same.”
He rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever.”
End of discussion.
After that I was even more determined than ever to be the most awesome, gender-bending version of Lady Gaga for Halloween. Mom dropped me at the mall, and with my birthday money, I purchased the following items:
One full-body leotard (black): $14.95
One wig (blond): $18.45
One sequined cape (silver): $19.99
One pair of oversize sunglasses (black): $8.00
One pair of platform slouch boots (black): $27.99
2-lb bag of glitter (silver): $10.00
TOTAL: $99.38
Three
Last week in art history class, Mr. Livorgna explained to us how sometimes great art can be both a reaction to the politics of the moment and an enduring statement about the human condition. To prove his point, he pulled up some famous paintings on his laptop. He showed us a mostly black-and-white painting of crudely drawn people and animals—they all seemed to be suffering violently. A horse, a bull, a baby, and a person lying on the ground stretching out his hand for help. To us, it looked like a gruesome mess drawn by a fifth-grader. Mr. Livorgna explained that the artist was, in fact, Picasso and that gruesome was the whole point. Guernica (that’s the name of the painting) was created to show the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. He said the work gained a monumental status right from the start, becoming famous and widely acclaimed when it was displayed around the world. Incidentally, he said, this tour helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world’s attention. Who knew that Spain even had a Civil War?
“Can you think of any other examples of how artists have brought about change through their work?” he asked us.
Silence.
I almost raised my hand to mention how Lady Gaga had famously worn a suit made entirely of meat in order to protest the fact that gays in the military had to keep their sexuality a secret or else be kicked out with a dishonorable discharge. But then I thought better of it. I didn’t want everyone to think that I followed gay news. Besides I couldn’t say for sure whether Lady Gaga’s meat-suit media moment actually brought an end to the policy the army called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The fact that this policy existed for seventeen years but was overturned by Congress just a couple of months after she wore the suit wasn’t proof of anything. Some people said that Lady Gaga was just an opportunist who was using the politics of the moment to further her career. Some said she was an activist. I wondered if Picasso had the same trouble with Guernica.
When no one could come up with any examples, Mr. Livorgna clicked on to the next image, and started to describe a painting entitled La Mort de Marat, which is French for The Death of Marat. The style of this painting was much more realistic and it depicted a man who had been stabbed in his bathtub while writing a letter. It was very dramatic, and the guy was obviously very dead. Little spurts of blood stained some sheets that spilled out of the tub; he was wearing a white turban and held a feather pen in his right hand, which had dropped dramatically to the floor at the moment of his murder. Mr. Livorgna told us that this was one of the most famous images of the French Revolution, and it referred to the assassination of a radical journalist named Jean-Paul Marat.
When I got home I Googled the image and read all about Monsieur Marat. Not only was he a journalist, but he was also a doctor, a statesman, and a great public speaker. I don’t know why, but I became fascinated by this image and the story of how Jean-Paul had been killed in his bathtub by a French revolutionary named Charlotte Corday. Perhaps it reminded me that anything could happen to any one of us at any moment. Our lives could change—or end—with a moment’s notice.
For my art history extra credit project I decided to recreate the scene from La Mort de Marat. An artist that Mr. Livorgna visually introduced us to the week before had inspired me. Her name was Cindy Sherman, and starting in the 1970s she began to make a name for herself by being photographed in the guises of random people. My plan was to take a picture of myself in the bath in the pose of poor old Marat, and then maybe be discovered as the youngest artist of my generation. I got a hold of my mother’s terry-cloth shower turban, I found an old quill pen that I had purchased years ago when I went to Philadelphia on a school trip to view the actual Declaration of Independence, and I bought a packet of fake blood from the Halloween section of the local card shop. I was all set and super excited. After applying the blood to my body and the sheet, I sat in the bathtub and tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be murdered by a revolutionary who was brave (or crazy) enough to come to where I live and stab me in my bath.
Unfortunately, I was interrupted by the sound of my mother pulling back the shower curtain and then turning on the faucet. Before I knew what was happening, a steady stream of cold water had extinguished my French Revolutionary fantasy, and any chance of extra credit went swirling down the drain.
“Clean up this mess,” said Mom, as she presented me with a wet sponge mop.
What Mom failed to understand was that, just like Lady Gaga, I refused to be discouraged from becoming an artist or expressing my true self in an artistic way. And just like Lady Gaga, I intended to change the world.
Four
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked me.
I was pushing my breakfast burrito around on my plate, not exactly eating, but not exactly not eating either.
“Nothing,” I told her.
She wasn’t convinced.
“Why don’t you invite Zac over after school and play a board game? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
A board game? I haven’t played a board game since I was in fourth grade. Sometimes Mom can be so retro. Hasn’t she heard of computers? The Internet? Facebook?
“You mean, a bored game?” I asked her, wi
thout looking up from my plate.
Mom shook her head, downed the rest of her coffee, and went about her business. What I couldn’t tell her was that Zac and I were no longer friends; he had stopped returning my calls, and when I passed him in the hallway at school, he kind of totally brushed me off. Finally I confronted him at his locker, saying, “What’s up?”
He responded by looking around and saying in a voice that was louder than necessary: “Well, if it isn’t Lady Gay-Gay.”
As a result of that experience, I made a decision to expand my social horizons and accept an invitation to hang out with a gang of kids I hardly knew. Katie Quinn said it would be cool for me to join her and her posse after school because they were planning to hang out at the Quality Courts Motel, and another body wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.
“Cool,” I said in response.
I didn’t know what to expect, but what I discovered was that the motel hadn’t actually been completed; it was just a construction site at the far end of town with a “COMING SOON” sign. We all scaled the fence, boys and girls together, and then once inside the structure, we checked the place out, wandering from floor to floor and calling to one another like idiots. Eventually, someone yelled that they’d found a few habitable rooms, and one of the guys declared that these rooms would be our new clubhouse until further notice.
Somehow I ended up alone in a room with Katie. Since we had nothing better to do and there was no place to sit, I suggested that we try to French-kiss. I told her that we could consider it a controlled experiment. To tell you the truth, I had no trouble controlling myself. I didn’t feel anything. Maybe it was the fact that Katie has braces on her teeth, but I remember thinking: Is this what all the fuss is about? And what makes it French?
In any case, Katie and I made a date to try it again soon.
Trevor Page 1
