Lonely Hearts

by Heidi Cullinan

  “I want to owe someone, though.” Baz paused, not sure how to articulate the emotions swirling inside him. Liz’s absolution felt good, but impatience rushed in its wake. “I don’t want a corner office buying and selling companies or playing pawn in a political chess set. I want…” His brain raced, tripping over itself as he glimpsed the edges of something he’d searched six years to find. “I want…to help.” God, did that sound lame. He shut his eyes, tried to focus.

  He saw a parking lot frozen with snow, Elijah facing a man with a gun. Felt the world rushing in his ears as he leapt forward. Heard the gunshot, felt it pierce him. Felt the pain of it, the warmth of Elijah’s body against his as they rolled. The sense of victory, of saving someone from a horrible fate. Eating the pain for himself, grinning madly at the paramedics as they assured him he’d be okay. Of course he’d be okay. This was fucking nothing. He’d taken a bat to the head without asking for it. Getting shot on purpose had been easy. He could suck up bullets all damn day.

  He opened his eyes, meeting Liz’s gaze with fire in his belly. “I want to help. I want to help people in pain. I want to take pain away. I know I can’t, not really. But I want to. Because surviving has to be worth something.”

  Liz leaned closer to touch his face. She regarded him with eyes both younger and older than her age, her gaze arresting him. “Surviving is worth whatever you wish it to be. It’s not a burden to navigate. It’s a laurel to wear. You’ve seen the darkness, and you survived it. You overcame it.”

  “But I don’t know what to do with it,” Baz whispered.

  “Whatever you want. That’s what you do.”

  “What if I don’t know what I want?”

  “Start with what feels good. What seems right. What fits the bill today?”

  Baz glanced around the kitchen helplessly. His gaze rested on the stacks of mini banana bread loaves. “Baking with you. Being productive instead of sitting around.”

  “Excellent.” Liz pushed to her feet and took his hand to lift him up too. “Let’s stop sitting around.”

  A few weeks into rooming with Baz, or shacking up with him or whatever the hell they were doing, Elijah reluctantly conceded he probably should stop assuming he’d be chucked on the street any second. Some of this came from his own acknowledgment of logic and facts, but it didn’t settle in until one of his weekly sessions with Pastor.

  In the past they’d always sat together in the living room or his home study, but now that Elijah had moved out, he went to Pastor’s office, which was in a kind of octagon turret at the top of a set of nearly circular stairs in the campus chapel. Every wall space was shelving, and each shelf overflowed with books and papers. High windows let in soft light, filtering it in streams across Pastor’s desk and the wingback armchair strategically placed to the side of it.

  Elijah sat in the chair, hunkered against the padded flare of one of the wings, sweating through the Herculean task of admitting what he was afraid of so Pastor could help him exorcise false demons. Which today was addressing his fear of losing his new housing.

  “I don’t actually think I would get kicked out on the street. I mean, I paid for a space in the house. Or rather, Walter’s fund thing did. Even if Baz hated me, it’s nothing to do with him.” He bit his bottom lip. “Well, except his family seems to buy out all his problems. So probably that’s not as safe as I think. Except…I don’t actually have any reason to think Baz will chuck me out of his life on a whim. Though of course it’s what people keep telling me he will do.”

  “Is it Baz you worry about abandoning you specifically, or is he simply playing out more loudly your general fear people will not be there for you?” Pastor uncrossed and re-crossed his legs at his desk chair. “Do you believe Liz and I will turn on you too?”

  “I believe I might disappoint you.”

  “Ah. So we’ll change our minds about liking you, but it won’t be because we’re bad people. We’ll realize you aren’t worthy. Is that the script in your head?”

  Elijah blushed crimson and stared at the pattern in the carpet. “Yes, but it sounds stupid when you say it out loud.”

  “Good. Let’s say it out loud often.”

  Elijah rubbed his arms self-consciously as he stared at the rug. “They told me everything was my fault, every day. Everything bad that happened was because I existed.”

  “You know it wasn’t your fault, Elijah. None of it.”

  Elijah cocked an eyebrow at him. “I wasn’t a saint, Pastor.”

  “You were a child.” He paused, then added carefully, “You were grieving.”

  Elijah averted his gaze again and gripped his arms, hugging them to his body.

  They’d never talked about Mark before, Elijah’s brother who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. A minute ago Elijah would have declared he didn’t want to talk about Mark. He wasn’t sure he wanted to now, but he did anyway.

  “They told me it was my fault he died.”

  Elijah felt like he’d been electrified, admitting that. Hot, cold, naked, sick. The way Pastor’s body language became tense and angry didn’t help, even though intellectually he knew Schulz was about to get angry on Elijah’s behalf.

  “Elijah.” Pastor’s voice was tight, tense, like he was trying to be neutral but couldn’t quite make it. “Elijah, there’s absolutely no way that’s true. It was utterly cruel and abusive of your parents to say such things to you. It would be at any age, but at ten, it’s criminal.”

  They hadn’t said it when Elijah was ten. They’d said it later, when he came out. But then, he supposed they had blamed him indirectly when Mark was killed. They blamed the gays for everything starting from that moment. And at that moment, Elijah had known he was gay.

  It was all abruptly too much, and Elijah shook his head as he shrank into the chair. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “That’s perfectly fine. If I may, though, I’d like to keep pressing you on the issue of feeling unworthy. Do you feel that way with Sebastian?”

  “Sort of. He confuses me. I mean, I know I push people away, hurting them first so they can’t hurt me. I’m trying not to do that with most people, but I can’t stop with him. I want—” He stopped, shut his eyes and swallowed before he could continue. “I want…him. A lot. I maybe get a few good tries at not preemptively attacking him, and I fail…but he actually gets more aggressive then. The more I try to run, the more he wants me. I feel like he’s led me way out into the deep water where I can’t swim, and any second he’ll leave me to drown.”

  “What in the deep water makes you so scared?”

  It was a raging sea of terrible darkness in his mind. Huge, black, stormy. The emotion shafted him like cold light. “Loneliness. The water is full of loneliness.”

  “And yet you keep telling me you deliberately keep yourself lonely so people can’t hurt you. You say you fear being alone, but the practical effect of Baz leaving you, given what you admit to doing to people close to you, is that he would only make your heart aware of a state you actively court.”

  Pastor’s observation rang in Elijah’s brain all the rest of the day. He’d grown accustomed to feeling like a peeled grape after therapy, but this time was particularly bad. He’d cried at the end of his appointment, and Pastor had encouraged him to call in to work. He’d dropped heavy hints Liz would be happy to accept his help with the baking and would feed him dinner. Elijah refused, not because he didn’t want to snuggle on Liz’s oh-so-comfortable shoulder, but because he wasn’t calling in sick because sad pants. He did chain-smoke up and down the block past the campus no-smoking zone, in the hour between his appointment and the start of his shift. When he came in the service door to the cafeteria, he smelled like a stale bar and had to drink three glasses of water to repair his throat.

  Lewis, punching into the time clock ahead of him, gave Elijah a small smile and a wave.

 
He’d gotten to know Lewis a little bit more after the chicken-can day. They weren’t exactly besties or anything, but they’d come to a comfortable companionship at work. Smoking together, helping each other when they got stuck with a shit job. A few times Elijah had considered asking him if he wanted to do something after their shift, but he’d always chickened out.

  That day they ended up both assigned to the front end, which Elijah thought was a lovely kick in the ass from the gods. He and Lewis were both runners, in charge of making sure the servers had adequate stock and the salad bars and do-it-yourself stir-fry had sufficient ingredients. This meant bobbing and weaving around chatting sorority sisters and head-butting bros from the football team, and from the latter especially, occasional under-breath murmurs about his orientation. Elijah had long practice ignoring this flavor of bullshit, staving most of it off with his not simply resting but fucking active bitch face.

  What he had no defenses for was what happened when that commentary was directed at Lewis.

  It would help if Lewis didn’t hang a sign around his neck. Elijah hadn’t figured out yet if it was legit gender dysphoria or part of a fucked-over attention/martyr complex, but whatever Lewis was working, it came with a spotlight. Today it was a Kiki’s Delivery Service “I Can Fly On My Own” raglan tee, which was feminine enough, but then Lewis had sewed goddamned lace around the neckline. Why the hell he was wearing lace to work in food service was anybody’s guess, but that’s the choice he’d made when getting dressed today. Probably he’d felt the pink polka-dotted hair bow and girls Hello Kitty shoes needed company. Oh, and pink lipstick and magenta eyeliner. Let’s not forget that.

  Elijah didn’t give a shit what Lewis wanted to wear, but the guy might as well have put himself on a golf tee and handed the bros a bag of clubs. He dressed so no one would ignore him, and so nobody did. He didn’t simply parade his fabulous, either. Twice Elijah had caught him deliberately lingering over a tray of olives, crossing his ankles and sliding a shoe up his shin. It was half ballet, half Lolita, and it fucking worked. Elijah tripped at the genderfuck. Whatever game Lewis was playing, he was bringing it.

  The rest of the dining hall felt otherwise. Girls at best exchanged knowing looks or giggled at Elijah, but for Lewis, they’d turn on the bitch and be cruel. The guys all but got their dicks out to piss on him. Faggot got tossed a few times, but it was clear they felt this dagger wasn’t enough. They quickly shifted to fucking freak instead. It got to the point Elijah was queasy every time he went out to the salad bar because the atmosphere was electrically charged. It might or might not have been a real risk, but it felt as if the dining hall patrons were ready and willing to riot.

  In hindsight, Elijah should have seen it coming. It was right out of an 80s teen flick, after all. But Elijah didn’t realize what the blunt-nosed football player intended to do with the tray of pickled beets until the dick hefted it out of the salad bar, and even if he’d stood next to Lewis instead of behind the serving counter, at best Elijah could have taken the hit with him. He could only watch the fuchsia-tinted water and sand-dollar-sized slices of purple vegetable rain over Lewis’s head.

  The hair bow bent and sagged to the side. His carefully arranged hair went flat and covered his face. The robin’s-egg-blue shirt and ivory lace dripped hot pink, and Elijah’s brain helpfully supplied a memory of helping his mother can beets, running upstairs to change his shirt after she scolded him, saying the shirt was new, and she wasn’t having him wreck it with a stain.

  Beet juice never comes out.

  Lewis’s clothes were ruined. But the stain Elijah knew he’d never wash out of his own brain was the laughter. The applause. The whole fucking cafeteria—patrons, serving staff, the goddamned student manager—standing in a ring around bedraggled, humiliated Lewis.

  Elijah’s heartbeat pulsed in his ears. Or maybe it wasn’t his heart. Maybe he pulsed like a nuclear sub, about to explode. His therapy appointment tickled the edge of his consciousness again, and he imagined Lewis dog-paddling in his own black water, fearing not only loneliness but sharks. Standing in a circle, watching him bleed out, in no hurry to move in for the kill.

  The pulse in Elijah’s head broke, spraying no innocent beet juice but blood-red rage over him.

  Fuck this. Fuck this in the fucking face.

  Tearing off his apron, he chucked it at the student manager. He shoved his way past the serving station, put an arm around Lewis and aimed him hard and fast for the exit.

  “Bye, faggots,” somebody called.

  Without turning around, Elijah aimed a middle finger in the general direction of the cafeteria as he slammed open the door to the outside patio with his shoulder.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Elijah got about five steps before he discovered the fatal flaw in his impulsive act to rescue Lewis. Now that he’d tossed a buoy to a drowning victim, he needed to get them both to shore.

  Lewis’s hazel eyes brimmed with tears, but not one of them fell. The cords in his neck throbbed with tension, and the veins of his arms bulged as if the beet bucket had been laced with steroids. Below a trim, pert nose stained with splotches of hot pink, Lewis’s nostrils flared, then contracted. His hands clenched into fists. His jaw trembled, a tremulous fault set to blow. But Lewis held the line, all the way around the union to the street leading away from campus.

  Elijah didn’t know where to take him. What to ask. What to do. What to fucking say.

  Since waiting for Lewis to initiate something was clearly not an option, and everywhere Elijah looked was a possible land mine, he decided he’d call in reinforcements. Except when he pulled out his phone and opened the texting app, he had no idea who to aim the bat signal at. He’d call Mina, but she’d gone last-minute shopping with her parents. Aaron and Giles were doing music camp.

  Elijah’s options dwindled to one.

  His finger hovered over Baz’s name, but he couldn’t press the touchscreen. Putting the phone away, he rationalized his cold feet. Baz couldn’t come pick them up anyway. Elijah would walk Lewis to the White House, and if Baz happened to be there…

  Stomach lurching, he fumbled for his cigarettes which, as had become his new rule-breaking habit, he’d “forgotten” to take out of his pocket and leave in his locker. Lighting two, he passed one over to Lewis.

  Lewis accepted it. The juice on his arms had faded to pink streaks. His jaw trembled as he started to smoke, but it gentled slightly as he took a second hit.

  Elijah smoked beside him in silence for half a block. He felt like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, both for the situation he’d saddled himself with and for the Baz-bomb waiting for him at the White House. He wasn’t sure what he thought about God, but in that moment he prayed mostly there was someone, something up there willing to help.

  Please. He shut his eyes as long as he dared without tripping over the uneven sidewalk. Please, please tell me what to do. Help me figure out what to say. How to help. How to help him feel less alone.

  Maybe there really was a god or goddess listening—or Elijah was a hell of a lot smarter than he knew. He didn’t plan the words. They formed in his mind, accompanied by a great white wave of peace and certainty. Because every time he thought him in reference to Lewis, it felt wrong. Lewis as a name felt wrong. The person performing gender fuck-you wasn’t making a social statement. The bow and the lace and the pink were as personal as the can of beets that had ruined them. Those feminine movements hadn’t been taunts. They’d been tentative steps. Territory staked and claimed.

  The last whispers of doubt died as Elijah pieced together what he’d grown to know, what he’d witnessed, what he’d observed. “What’s your name? Your real name?”

  It wasn’t the question he’d planned to ask, but it worked. It made Lewis pause, almost tripping on the sidewalk. He took a long, slow drag as he recovered, staring straight ahead as a few tears escaped. “I was…thinking…Layla.�
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  Elijah tried it out. Lay-la. “It’s a good one.”

  “I’d spell it L-E-J-L-A. The Bosnian version. Inspired by the supermodel Andreja Pejic. She’s Serbian, but it’s close enough it feels right.” A glance, a sigh, some of the tension cracking away to reveal tenderness. “Because I’m trans. Like she is.”

  Elijah thanked whatever deity was guiding him for also inspiring Mina to have left a pile of GLAAD pamphlets on the kitchen table. “What pronoun should I use for you?”

  More tears, and a quivering lip. But fucking hell, Lewis or Lejla or whoever this was—they were strong. “I…I don’t know. Sh—she, but not…” Steel returned with a jerked thumb toward the dining hall. “I want to be out. But I think I suck at it.”

  Funny. In the cafeteria, Elijah would have agreed. But walking here, now, he couldn’t. How the fuck did somebody come out as trans, anyway? It wasn’t about who you flirted with on the dance floor or walked down the aisle with. It was about who you fucking were. It wasn’t putting on drag. It was God putting it on you without your consent. Elijah had never understood being trans, had frankly been glad to keep his distance because he had his own shit.

  But he’d never wash out those beets.

  When Lewis/Lejla ground out a butt into the sidewalk, Elijah passed over the pack and the lighter. The White House loomed a few blocks away, but Elijah could see the roof, the window of his own room. Was Baz there? What would he do? How should Elijah explain this?