by J. C. Lillis
I stop by the marble holy water font. Press a finger in the damp yellow sponge, like I did when I was a kid and St. Matt’s felt like home. Now it feels like a stop on a long trip somewhere else. Until this summer that thought would have made me sad and scared, but now I can’t wait to see where the road turns next.
I just wish Abel was in the seat beside me.
***
My parents are out on the Funfair field behind St. Matt’s, wearing matching sweats in my high school colors and hauling the ring toss platform together. Normally this is where I’d jump right in, grabbing a corner of something heavy and tacking up signs and testing extension cords. Two things stop me: the fact that they possibly want to wring my neck, and the fact that Father Mike is sitting on a stool by the ticket booth, tuning his guitar and blocking my way.
I shove my hands in my pockets and squeeze Plastic Cadmus and Plastic Sim, trying to absorb what I need. Control from Sim. Bravado from Cadmus. The rock in my throat shrinks down to a pebble.
After a minute, my legs start to walk.
“Brandon. Welcome back.” Father Mike doesn’t get up when he sees me coming. It’s a sly calculation: assume friendly nonthreatening pose, let the lost sheep come to you.
“Hi.” I nod. Neutral smile.
“Trip okay?”
“Yep, it was fine. Thanks.”
“Your mom and dad thought you might show up today.” He plucks the A string on his instrument—a haggard old thing with a GOT GOD? sticker on it—and twists the tuning peg. I think of the first time he passed me a guitar, showed my fingers how to shape the C and G chords. “I know they’ve been pretty worried. They’ll be super-relieved to see you here safe.”
“What’d they tell you?” I square my shoulders like Cadmus.
“Well, they—”
“Actually, it’s all right. I don’t want to know.”
“Okay. That’s okay.”
“I’m gonna go talk to them.”
“Want me to come along? It might help.”
“No. No thank you.” Sim takes over: smooth and composed. “I can do it alone.”
“Sure, sure. I know. That’s fine.” He smiles that old I’m-just-a-dude smile, and my shoulders go soft. I’m not Sim or Cadmus anymore. I’m a kid, whispering fake sins to him in the face-to-face confessional, his mellow voice calming my jittering leg. hey_mamacita’s mean Father X caricature pops to mind, and my face heats up. It’s easy fighting villains with daggers for teeth and crosses that shoot hellfire. But he’s not Father X, or Xaarg. He cares about me, the way I hope my own father still does.
“Hey Brandon?”
“Yeah.”
“Give me a few minutes later on. Okay, bud? I’d like to talk to you.”
I pause for a second, the fight draining out of me, and then a whole vanload of kids in matching St. Matt’s Elementary t-shirts come rushing over. They’ve got all the usual grade-school-music-class instruments with them—triangles, egg shakers, jingle bells, probably the exact same ones I played at some point. Father Mike gives them a thumbs-up and a distracted smile. He won’t let me walk without an answer.
“Sure,” I mumble. I’m watching the kids. Pigtailed and sneakered, trusting and open. “I guess.”
“Awesome. Meetcha back here.”
I walk away. I walk fast, but his voice travels. “Hey, guys!” he’s saying. “How’re my SonShiners today?…Yeah? Let’s try that a little louder!” He starts strumming the opening bars of that cutesy “Whatever God Wants” song that still gets stuck in my head; I don’t want to glance back, don’t want my brain to sing along. I look for something else to focus on. I find it across the field by the popcorn stand.
My parents, standing side by side with their arms around each other. Like instead of waiting for me to cross the field and catch up, they’re watching me walk away.
***
We sit at a weathered picnic bench that’s survived about fifty St. Matt’s Funfairs. The bench is etched with decades of graffiti: BILL N SUE, KEVIN + KAYLA 4EVR. I trace the old names and promises, scanning my brain for the right thing to say.
Judging from past battles with Nat, I thought Dad would come down on me like the hammer of God. But he doesn’t even seem angry. It would be easier if he did. He seems remote and unsettled, like an alien’s replaced his son and he’s approaching with caution, trying to figure out what this new thing is capable of.
“Did you remember to clean out my refrigerator?” he finally asks me.
“We did.”
He ignores the we. “And did you empty the tanks?”
“Yes.”
“The black and the gray?”
“Yeah. I returned your camping stove, too. It’s back in the garage.”
“I hope it’s clean. If you let grease and food particles build up it can…”
He keeps going. The checklists and lectures might go on until sundown if I don’t do something. I squeeze Plastic Cadmus and Plastic Sim.
“Hey. Guys?”
“I wasn’t finished,” Dad snaps.
“Greg. Let him talk,” says Mom.
Dad bites his lip and taps the table with his fist. I take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry I lied,” I tell them. “I’m not sorry for what I did, or for anything that happened on the trip, but I’m sorry I lied. I’m not going to do that anymore. And I’m sorry I called you backwards.” I catch Mom’s eye. “Really.”
Mom nods. Dad’s eyes are shiny. He scrapes a splotch of dried mustard off the table with his thumbnail and blows the yellow dust away.
“So that’s all?” he says.
“I guess. For now.”
“We’re glad you’re home safe,” says Mom. “Right, Greg?”
“I—”
Dad just sighs. He looks like he wants to say more, but I know it’s not going to happen. Not today, not here. He drums at the table a couple times and then he gets up slowly and scuffs away, his ancient sneakers kicking up sad little puffs of fairground dust.
Mom watches him go.
“You were…safe, weren’t you? You and…” She clears her throat. “You and him.”
I blush. “Yeah. Of course.”
“That’s the most important thing. I don’t care what you’ve heard—”
“Mom, I know. I know. You don’t have to worry.”
She exhales, long and slow. We sit there for a complicated minute.
“Your dad just—doesn’t know what to say.” She says it like she’s apologizing for him, like she’s got no problem with this at all. I watch him fix a game booth, pounding nails into loose beams. I wonder if it’ll be like this all the time now, if I’ll come home from college and he’ll ask me if I’m passing my tests and keeping the bathroom clean and locking the doors at night, and then go off to the basement and start snipping his bonsai and hammering birdhouses together until I go to bed, and the danger of looking me in the eye has passed.
Mom, softly: “Are you in love?”
“You don’t have to ask.”
“I want to know.”
I squirm in my seat. “I screwed everything up.”
“You did?” Her eyes get big. It’s cute.
“I tried to get him back. Sort of.” I trace a heart carved deep in the bench’s center slat. This is so weird. “But I don’t really know how. I think it’s too late.”
“Oh.” She sighs. “Honey.”
A cursor blinks in the conversation. She looks like she wants to give me advice, the way she gave Nat advice before Nat shaved half her head and stopped listening, but I know she can’t. Especially not here, with the big gold cross on the St. Matt’s spire looming above the trees. She’s probably doing the math: Give your gay son love advice = twelve and a half years in Purgatory.
There’s nothing much else to say. I reach in my back pocket, pluck out the rolled-up David Darras head shot. I push it across the table to her.
“He couldn’t sig
n the TV Guide, but I got this.”
She smiles a thank you—not because of the autograph, but because I’ve changed the subject.
“I forgot I asked you,” she says. Her glossy fingernails rake the rubber band off and the picture unrolls.
“He did sign it. It’s just kind of messy.”
“How was he?”
“Funny. Really nice.”
“Was he just as handsome in person?”
I nod. “Even more.”
She reaches across table and grabs my hand. She pretends she’s looking at the Darras photo, but really she’s looking right through it. A light breeze curls the corners of the photo and ruffles her pale yellow curls. In the distance, Father Mike and the kids are running through “His Banner Over Me Is Love.”
“Are you staying?” she says. “For the fair?”
“I can’t.”
She nods; I can tell she expected that. I watch her gaze shift to the crowded food tables and the jumble of raffle prizes. She’s scrawling one of her checklists in her head, thinking about all the stuff she has to do before the Funfair starts, and if I fast-forward the future I can see her and Dad here year after year, arranging decades of gelatin stars and angel eggs and repainting the same ten game booths until the two of them are finally old and sitting side by side in their blue canvas lawn chairs, counting fireworks together.
The sun’s starting to slip away. More volunteers are coming with stacks of raffle-ticket rolls, bags of game prizes. She’s still holding my hand. I let her, for a long time.
Then I’m like, “Save me an angel egg?”
I squeeze her hand twice.
“I’ll save you two,” she says, and then she lets go.
***
I’m already in the car by the time Father Mike realizes I’m leaving. I see him with his guitar as I ride the brakes past the Funfair field: strumming another song with the kids, a whole fresh flock to teach. He looks small and breakable, like one of those ceramic saint figurines Gram keeps on her windowsill.
If this were a hey_mamacita fic, I would have confronted him before I left. The dialogue: “Bring back any nice souvenirs?” “Yeah—a boyfriend.” That would’ve left him comically stewing, his face purple and steam shooting out of his ears. I remind myself he’s not a cartoon. He’s not even a bad guy. I don’t need him now, but I don’t need to hurt him, either.
He glances up, catches me idling in the car. He lifts a hand from the guitar strings and waves, like C’mon over, bud. Come back. I stick my hand out the open window and give him a gentle return wave. Goodbye.
I slip Cadmus and Sim out of my pockets and drop them both in the dashboard cupholder, their limbs tangled loosely together. Then I shift into drive and start rolling forward, down the winding road away from St. Matt’s.
Chapter Thirty-One
I’ve got a plan.
Home first, to shower and change my grubby travel clothes. Francie’s Florals next, for the biggest arrangement of sunflowers I can afford (which at this point isn’t much). Then the candy shop in the mall—do they have cinnamon jelly beans? I call them up while I’m whizzing past the DQ, my old high school, the pizza place where I worked last summer. They do.
I’m three stoplights from my street when the phone rings.
ABEL CALLING.
This was not part of the plan.
I white-knuckle it past the post office. Plastic Sim and Plastic Cadmus shoot plastic glares of judgment from the cupholder: Pick up, dumbass. My thumb hovers over the Answer button. Why did I send him that stupid scene? I know exactly what I’m going to hear. What is this fairy-tale crap? You think this fixes things? Just stay out of my life, okay?
“It’s not completely horrid,” he says, “for your first fic.”
Relief flushes through me. “Hello to you too.”
“I was deeply offended by a few things, though. Number one—Where are you, by the way?”
I picture him sprawled on his fancy metal platform bed, tracing the blue and yellow squiggles on his vintage 80s sheets. “Driving home,” I tell him. “From an errand.”
“What kind of errand?”
“Can’t tell you. So what’s number one?”
“The bubble bath.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, hello. It’s humiliating. You come to my house with sunflowers, all sexy and disheveled in your dirty khakis and your black Castaway Planet shirt, and I’m sulking alone in a lemon-scented bubble bath?”
“Sorry. Is that not in character?”
“Not the point. I could at least be lifting weights or something.”
I grin. “Feel free to edit.”
“Oh, I have. ‘Kay, number two—this is a larger issue with plotting, unfortunately.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Well, it’s really sweet and heartwarming, having Brandon drive out to my house in a summer storm to deliver this impassioned speech and all, but at this point in the narrative it’s basically Abel who’s been the giant jackhole. So that whole scene kind of falls flat—no?”
I swerve to miss a squirrel. “I don’t—”
“—Like, Abel’s the one who broke it off the second Brandon had a relapse, right?’
“He had good reasons, though.”
“What, the Jonathan thing? So not an excuse. What kind of self-involved assclown bails at the first sign of Catholic guilt? And then doesn’t even call for like days, which basically forces Brandon to nut up and send him that amazing email even though the last thing Abel deserves is a grand romantic gesture.”
“Abel had a point, though.”
“Doesn’t matter. See, when you love someone, the gentlemanly thing to do is stick with them and willfully ignore your differences and draw little valentine hearts over all their weird hangups and just be in love for as long as you possibly can because how often does that happen? And then when you finally start making each other miserable or you meet some perfect guy in your freshman philosophy class, then you can have your tearful heartrending ‘it’s over’ phone call and a nice long satisfying wallow.” He sighs. “So see, there’s no way we’ve earned a tragic breakup yet. We didn’t put in enough time. I pulled the plug too early.”
My heart’s going phosphorescent. When you love someone. “So you’re saying…”
“We need a rewrite. Abel shows up at Brandon’s house, all apologies.”
“Really.”
“Well, mostly apologies. Know what would really be romantic, too?”
“What’s that?”
“If he’d fixed that mechanical heart he stepped on. Like if Susannah helped him glue it back together, and he wrapped it up in a little silver box and everything.”
“Kind of an obvious metaphor.”
“Yeah, but so? I mean, just think how sweet that scene would be.”
“What if Brandon’s parents were there?”
“Oh, they wouldn’t be. Not in this part of the story.”
“No?” I turn onto my street.
“It would be a criminally gorgeous early summer evening…Abel would be standing on the brick front steps of Brandon’s white split-level…”
I brake in the middle of the street. Plastic Cadmus and Plastic Sim knock heads in the cupholder.
“…taking in a scene of awesomely adorable Americana: the birdhouse, the red geraniums, the Fourth of July wreath made of pom-poms…”
I creep forward.
“…thinking about the ‘hi, we’re boyfriends again’ vlog post we could make from your cute little bedroom if we got back together—oh, and figure out the logistics of doing Castaway Planet recaps from different colleges, and draw up a shared-custody arrangement for Plastic Cadsim…Bran? You still there?”
“Keep going,” I whisper.
“…so I watch a butterfly flutter around your mom’s flowers, and while I practice exactly the right things to say to win you back, I watch patien
tly for an old blue Jetta to putter into view—it is a Jetta, right?” I spot him down the road on my front steps now, a perfect action figure in tight jeans and snakeskin boots. He’s standing up, showing me the back of his head as he cranes his neck at the opposite end of the street. In his hand is a little silver box, glinting in the fading sun.
“You getting any closer, Tin Man?” he says.
I ease my foot off the brake and start the downhill coast to home. “Almost there.”
Acknowledgments
Huge hugs and a bucket of cinnamon jellybeans to the following fine people:
Jarrett and Rosie, the two main planets in my universe, for enduring a houseful of scribbled-on sticky notes and helping me to the finish line with just the right blend of tough and sweet love.
My mom and dad, for teaching me that brains are for using and that real love and respect survives differences.
Margie, Anthony, Kim, & Brett, for understanding when I vanish with my laptop.
Mindy Dunn, cover designer extraordinaire, for being consistently awesome and putting up with my OMG-my-first-book-cover eagerness and indecision.
Andrea Sabaliauskas, for the brilliant cover illustration of Brandon and Abel and nearly two decades of friendship, support, and B&N chats.
Wendy Bond, my lifelong BFF, one of the first people I ever shared my writing with.
The illustrious Dr. Maverick, my partner in crime and #1 fandom-enabler.
My work pals, for being excited about this project (especially Courtney Stansbury, for coding advice, cheerleading, and lively Game of Thrones debates).
My writing mentors who made me think I could do this, especially Charles Marsh.
The magnificent geeks who invented the Internet so other magnificent geeks could find each other and perpetuate the species. Without you, fanfic would be mimeographed and mailed, this story would not exist, and people would not be skimming this acknowledgments page like “tl;dr.”
