by Amy Lane
“Is this Evan?” said a hesitant woman’s voice, and Evan breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yeah, is this Curtis’s mom? God, I’m so happy to get you. Man, we have been worried about Curtis all day, is he okay?”
“No,” she said softly, her voice broken. “I’m sorry. He… he tried to hurt himself today, and… well, I think he’s going to have to be in the hospital for a while.”
Evan leaned against the stall door, wishing he’d dropped his trousers because he would have liked to sit down, sit down and become static, nothing, still, and the only place to do that was the commode. “Oh God,” he muttered, spots swimming in front of his eyes. “God. God. Is he going to be okay?”
“Well, we don’t know,” she said, and it was clear she wasn’t going to make it long on the phone. “We just have to pray to God that some of this evil leaves him, right?”
“He’s not evil,” Evan said automatically. “Can I—will there be a time I can talk to him?”
“Maybe in a few weeks,” she murmured. “I… I can’t… I’m sorry, Evan. I just had to answer so you and your friends would stop calling…. I’ve got to go.”
And she hung up that abruptly, leaving Evan in the men’s restroom, wishing mightily for his shrink.
Step 5—deny accountability
IN THE months that followed, he heard a litany of reasons it wasn’t his fault.
“It’s not your fault, baby,” his mother said. “Those people, they get molested when they’re little and it turns them. He was trying hard not to be that way—”
“What way, Mom? Gay? Because he was that before he got raped by the lawn guy.”
“Don’t get smart with me, dammit. Those people have something wrong with them, and I was right. You need to stay away from them because you’re bad for each other.”
“Fuck you, Mom. Can I go to bed without my dinner now? And don’t have Dad call. I could give a shit.”
And that was his mom. That was also how he didn’t learn to drive until he was seventeen, because that attitude did not get a guy lots of offers for instructors. He was lucky by then that Belladonna had decided he was her new favorite family member, or he would have been riding the bus for most of his life.
“IT’S not your fault, Evan,” Ry said painfully for the thousandth time. Her parents were gone again, and she was sitting in his lap with her hands under his shirt. “I know he told his mom you broke his heart, but you couldn’t control what he did.”
Evan shivered, torn between wanting her to touch him—just to touch him because he needed that, needed the comfort all over—and hating himself for needing it so badly he’d use a friend.
“It’s my fault,” he murmured, because her body was soothing. She pulled off his shirt and he thrust his hands under hers, because even palming her tight little breasts soothed him. He had to think of other things to be aroused, but the skin-to-skin… God, it was everything.
She stripped off her shirt, the better to press them together and kiss him. “How is it your fault?” she asked, and he had to stop talking so he could think hard about Starfighter and get it up.
“DO I have to say it?”
“It’s not my fault,” Evan repeated dully for the thousandth time. “He’s in a mental institution.”
“I know that. You gave me the name of the place, and I checked on it.” Dr. Stottemeyer regarded him levelly, and Evan felt a connection with someone for the first time since he went to the bathroom at the anime con.
“How is it?” he asked. “How is he?”
Stottemeyer shrugged. “Drug abuse, self-mutilation, a suicide attempt, childhood trauma—it’s not looking good, Evan. But all that stuff, that started a long time before you met him—”
“But yeah, I was the trigger, though, right? We were gonna have sex, and it freaked him out, and—”
“And if it wasn’t you and your little high school gang of five—”
“Six. There were six of us with Curtis.”
“Yeah, Ev, but really? There were only five. Curtis was alienated from all of you long before you two decided to look at anime porn—”
“It’s not porn!” Evan argued, because this, at least, he knew for sure. “It’s beautiful,” he muttered.
Stottemeyer nodded in concession. “Yeah, it is. It should be beautiful. Sex is beautiful too. It just got… got twisted for Curtis somehow. I mean, what’s it been for us, Ev? Eleven years? Eleven years to make sure sex and everything else in your life is going to be okay. Curtis never got help, never had anyone to talk to. It just got twisted in him, and it could have happened to you if you’d been all alone too.”
Evan hugged that damned teddy bear to himself and wondered why, as much muscle as he put on, he always felt twelve and scrawny and defenseless in this corner of the damned red tweed couch.
“It’s just so simple when someone’s touching me,” he confessed. “It’s just… girl or boy, it’s just so much cleaner when there’s touch.”
“Yeah, Evan. People have been trying to get that for themselves since the dawn of time.”
“I’M SORRY,” Curtis said, looking about eighty pounds, maybe, and pale like the inside of a mushroom. Evan had taken two city buses to a neighborhood that his mother would go another city bus route out of her way to avoid, because they didn’t put these places in good neighborhoods, no matter how expensive they were.
“It’s not your fault,” Evan mumbled, although he hated it when people said that to him.
“Bullshit,” Curtis barked, sounding bitter. They were sitting on a park bench looking out onto the small backyard of the facility. They had a view of a concrete quad with a bunch of plants—an almost claustrophobic number of plants—crowded around the outside edges. “It’s totally my fault. I led you on, and I treated Brittany like crap, and all because I couldn’t say ‘I’m gay’ and ‘I was abused’ and not have them mean the same damned thing.”
Evan looked at him sharply. “Your shrink must be rockin’,” he said in admiration. “That took me years to say!”
Curtis snorted. “My shrink is your shrink, Ev. I guess you worried enough about me that I got one of the best shrinks in the valley.”
Ev grunted. “We live in the foothills.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t anymore. Apparently Mom doesn’t want me back if getting better means getting gay. I get the treatment, but I don’t get the home. Rough trade.”
Evan closed his eyes and tried to remember Curtis’s mother. He couldn’t—he’d never seen her, been introduced, and that sense of alienness, of being separated from the things that mattered, grew stronger, more intense, like that fruit gum that exploded sugar in your mouth.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” Evan said, wanting simple back. Ry’s flesh was simple. It wasn’t the flesh he wanted, but it was simple.
“I’m not okay,” Curtis said softly. He looked at his hands, at the bandages still around his wrists, both of them. “I may be, someday. And I’m glad you came.”
Evan sighed and slouched down. His mom wasn’t letting him use the car or even practice with Belladonna right now—she still hadn’t recovered from the “Fuck you!” moment of their lives.
“I don’t think I can come again soon. This took like, two hours, you know?”
Curtis nodded and cracked the knuckles of one of his hands, one knuckle at a time. “I know. But hey—could you write me? Like real letters? We don’t get computers or Internet here, but real letters—could you do that? It gets boring here. They’ll let us have books too. Man, I’m dying for some manga.”
And for a moment, his thin white face pinked up a little, and his eyes sharpened, and Evan nodded. “We’ll troll the used-book stores,” he said, happy for something to do. “Can I…?” Tough subject. “Brittany would like to help.”
Brittany thought it was her fault too. She’d lost weight—fast—and her grades had dropped, and she’d been prone to crying bursts in the middle of class.
Curtis nodded and cl
osed his eyes. “Just don’t tell her I’m gay,” he said, his lips twisting. “’Cause that would be the last fucking straw for her. Man, nothing draws two freaks together like being more fucked up than everyone else on the planet, you know?”
Evan sighed, thinking about those moments with Ry. They didn’t feel fucked up. They felt precious. She might have been the wrong person, but she was kind, and she was a friend, and he couldn’t make that feel bad if he tried.
“Maybe,” he said quietly, “it would make her feel better if she knew? If she knew you loved her, but not that way?”
Curtis shook his head. “Man, Evan. You’re so sweet, you know that? You’re all wide-eyed and sure that all sorts of shit can just be fixed. It can’t. Brittany? What she went through with her stepdad made my life look like a picnic. People tell each other shit, real shit, when they’re naked. Don’t… don’t poke her, okay? If she gets to the point where she’s okay, don’t make her hurt anymore.”
Evan looked at his friend, thought of their stupid, blind foray into sex and love and touching, and suddenly knew why his shrink had been so worried. “What about you? Are you ever going to stop hurting?”
Curtis shook his head and for the first time lost that cynical, bitter composure that must have sustained him the entire visit. “I hope so, Ev,” he said as a tear made a detour around a blemish on his pale acne-scarred face. “Man, I’m glad I lived—sort of. I’d like to be glad for real.”
Evan put out his hand, palm up. “You can hold it if you want.” He looked around the little asylum. There were people chain-smoking, people rocking themselves in their bathrobes on the porch, people writing in journals with reluctant pen strokes. “Nobody here will care.”
Curtis put his hand, palm down, on Evan’s, and they twined hands in the sun. Their palms rasped together. Curtis’s fingers were ice-cold. Evan tightened his grip, and Curtis’s hand convulsed in it, and for a moment, it felt like maybe it could be fixed, whatever “it” was.
But that moment wasn’t enough. Evan should have known it. He was one person. He was damaged himself. His friends had problems that were bigger than he was. Curtis told him it had taken two paramedics and a fuckton of blood to stop his bleeding.
How did Evan have a chance when he didn’t know how bad everyone else’s wounds were?
THE next weekend, he and Ry took Brittany shopping to the used-book store. They culled it for manga, gathering two entire series of over twenty books apiece. One of the series was yaoi, and Brittany didn’t say a word as they bought it.
Evan and Ry met eyes and kept quiet. If she wanted to talk, she would, right?
That night they took turns writing a letter to Curtis, and after it was addressed and stamped and put in the mailbox, they watched movies and ate popcorn and cookies until they fell asleep in Ry’s living room, all of them snuggling on the couch like puppies.
The next morning Ry’s mom made pancakes, and since she didn’t smoke while she was flipping stuff on the grill, they tasted pretty good. They played outside in the wading pool in the tiny backyard, and Ry made Evan flex for them and do bodybuilding poses and bad guido accents until they were rolling over laughing.
That Monday at school, Brittany wasn’t there.
Ry looked at Evan over the table during lunch, and they both ignored Margot and Jessie talking about Full Metal Alchemist.
“Should we call?” she asked after a minute, and Evan shrugged. Neither of them wanted to be the one to make that phone call, right?
Ry called Brittany. She sounded irritated and out of it, and Evan was just so relieved that she was okay, her mood didn’t seem to matter.
Brittany was there the next day, but she’d butchered her hair short and bleached it, showing off the new thinness of her face and her wide-spaced gray eyes. She walked right past the anime club table and sat at the Spanish club table instead. They were only slightly higher in the pecking order, but Evan and Ry could hear her giggling from across the cafeteria.
“What’s with her?” Margot muttered, pushing her thick, curly black hair from her face.
“Someone wants to get laid!” Jessie snapped, and Evan jerked his head back and met Ryane’s eyes.
Yeah. That was it, wasn’t it? That was it exactly.
Oh, dammit, Curtis. Damn you.
“Should we say anything?” she asked hesitantly, and Evan thought maybe yes. But Brittany didn’t return their phone calls, and she didn’t sit with them at lunch. She didn’t talk to them in class, and she didn’t come to anime club anymore.
She barely came to school.
The rumors circulating about her were awful—parties, back rooms, drugs, pictures on Facebook.
Evan and Ryane wrote letters to Curtis and attended anime club and, when Ry’s parents weren’t home, fucked like bunnies.
And pretended Brittany had never been their friend.
At the end of their senior year, they were fully immersed in things like graduation gowns and final requirements. Evan and his mother had reached détente, and Evan had his driver’s license, which was good, because he and Ryane could have even more sex then.
Even Ry had to admit it was just friends with benefits.
“Do you think I’m gonna find another guy who’s willing to go down on me for forever?” she asked one hot spring night when they were parked by the lake.
Evan shrugged and grinned. “I don’t see why not.”
Ry was snuggled back into his chest, which was the best part of sex as far as he could see, and now she turned around and looked him in the eyes. “Do you think you’ll find a guy who’s willing to go down on you for hours on end?” she asked seriously.
Evan tried a game smile. “I’ll have to,” he reassured her. “You’re going off to college, and where else am I going to get head?”
She snuggled back farther. “Anywhere you want,” she murmured, and he just drank her in. She’d let her hair grow out in the past two years, and it was plain brown, but he didn’t mind plain brown. Her eyes were narrow like her mom’s, and her cheekbones weren’t high and princess-classic. But she’d been his fuck buddy and his friend, and they’d written Curtis a letter every week, and sometimes had even gotten one back. She was good people.
When they got back home, Belladonna met him at the porch after he dropped Ryane off. Apparently Brittany’s mom still had all her daughter’s old contact information. She thought Evan and Ryane would need to know Brittany had died of an overdose in some guy’s bedroom.
Curtis didn’t make it to the funeral. He tried to hang himself the day he heard the news. He failed, but that was Evan’s first real moment, his first realization that Curtis, who had seemed to be getting better, might be broken for the rest of his life.
And that some people, like Brittany, might always be broken.
And that maybe Evan was fooling himself to think he’d ever be fixed at all.
Step 6—commit
HE COULDN’T see Dr. Stottemeyer anymore. His parents’ health insurance only covered the shrink until he was eighteen, which was a shame, because they were getting along really well.
And when the idea first dawned on him, he really wanted Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer’s input.
After he’d found Starfighter, and then Teahouse, and then YouPorn.com, finding exclusively gay porn wasn’t a stretch. Johnnies had jumped out at him because it was based in Sacramento when nothing was based in Sacramento, and even though (according to the bios and the interviews) a lot of the guys were flown in to Sacramento or Florida, he always held a faraway hope that one of them might drive up to El Dorado Hills and they could bump into each other at the gas station.
And then they could, well, bump into each other behind the gas station, because that’s what fantasy was all about, right?
But Ry left for college near the end of summer, and in the first three months she was gone and he was left attending junior college, he… well, he more than missed her.
He woke up at night with the shakes, missing her.
He couldn’t concentrate on his studies, he couldn’t sit still, when his entire life had been sitting still, because he was missing her.
He still wasn’t attracted to girls on the Internet, and he hadn’t had a hug in months. He wasn’t stupid. He’d taken basic psych classes—hell, his formative years had been a basic psych class. He knew the word “skin hunger,” and now he believed it, believed it with all his soul.
He needed to be touched.
So there he was, watching the free preview because he couldn’t afford a subscription, and touching himself, when he saw the little online application.
Submit a selfie and fill in the questionnaire.
Consent to an interview when they got back to you.
The selfie featured Evan in front of the mirror, holding his thick cock—eight and seven-eighths inches, now that he was grown. He was grinning, because he was imagining a porn scene in which he was touched and hugged—there was always touching and hugging, because they liked to get the straight guys comfortable, and there was tenderness at the end.
Fantasy?
Yeah. So what.
He’d be living a fantasy.
The day after he submitted his app, a guy named Dex got back to him.
Evan drove his mother’s car to a nice office building down in Sacramento three days later, which was the soonest he could get his HIV test back from the doctor. He was freshly showered from the top to the bottom and everywhere in between, because although Dex (who sounded really young on the phone) told him this was a solo gig, Evan hoped. That was all. He just hoped.
When he got inside, there was a sweet-faced young man with blond hair and blue eyes and a wicked grin manning the phones, and Evan almost had himself a fangasm right there.
