More Happy Than Not (23 page)

“Is there a young gentleman in your life?” Mom asks.

“Yeah, but I bet you're playing dumb and already know it's Collin.” I talk about him enough. When someone makes you happy, it's pretty impossible to cage the excitement.

She sits down beside me on the bed where we all slept together until I was thirteen, before I moved out into the living room with Eric to sleep in our own beds. “Do you have a photo?”

“I'm sixteen, no shit I have a photo.” I scroll through my phone's photo album with Mom looking over my shoulders. We slide past a picture of me with Genevieve.

“So I take it you and Genevieve aren't actually dating then, are you?”

Telling Mom was one
thing. Telling Dad is another.

He's in the living room smoking and watching what he claims is a very important Yankees game. It's in the ninth inning and the teams are tied. I consider backing out, maybe waiting another week or so, but maybe he won't actually care when I tell him. Maybe all that stuff he said when I was younger, about never acting like a girl or playing with any female action figures, will go away once he realizes I am the way I am without any choice. Maybe he'll accept me.

Mom follows me into the living room and sits down on Eric's bed. “Mark, do you have a minute? Aaron has something he wants to talk about.”

He exhales cigarette smoke. “I'm listening.” He never looks away from the game.

“Forget it, we can do it another time.” I turn around to go back into my parents' room, but Mom catches my hand. She knows I may never feel ready to do this, that I may keep finding excuses to push this off until long after my dad is gone, and then
maybe
I'll go to his grave and come out. But the time has to be now so I can feel as comfortable in my home as I am chilling with Collin.

“Mark,” Mom says again.

His eyes are still on the TV. I take a deep breath.

“Dad, I hope you're cool with this, but I sort of, kind of am dating someone and
. . .
” I can already see him getting confused, like I'm challenging him to solve an algebraic equation with no pen, paper, or calculator. “And that someone is my friend Collin.”

Only then does Dad turn toward us. His face immediately goes from confused to furious. You would think the Yankees not only lost the game but also decided to give up and retire the team forever. He points his cigarette at Mom. “This is all your doing. You have to be the one to tell him he's wrong.” He's talking about me like I'm not even in the room.

“Mark, we always said we would love our kids no matter what, and—”

“Empty
fucking
promise, Elsie. Make him cut it out or get him out of here.”

“If there's something about homosexuality you don't understand, you can talk to your son about it in a kind way,” Mom says, maintaining a steady tone that's both fearless for me and respectful toward Dad. We all know what he's capable of. “If you want to ignore it or need time, we can give that to you, but Aaron isn't going anywhere.”

Dad places his cigarette in the ashtray and then kicks over the hamper he was resting his feet on. We back up. I don't often wish this, but I really, really wish Eric were here right now in case this gets as ugly as I think it might. He points his finger at me. “I'll fucking throw him out myself.”

My mom guards me.

Dad wraps his big hands around her throat, shaking her. “Huh, you still think he's making the right choice?”

I run over, grab his TV remote, and hit him so hard in the back of his head with it that the batteries pop out. He shoves my mom into the intercom phone and she falls to the floor, desperately trying to catch her breath. Before I can check on her, my dad—the man who fucking played catch with me—punches me in the back of my head, and I crash into a tower of Eric's used games. He drags me by my shirt collar and leaves me outside the apartment door. “I'll be damned if I'm alive the day you bring a boy home, you fucking faggot.”

I hear the door lock and I cry harder than I ever have in my entire life because I can't change the way I am, not
as fast and as easily as my father just stopped being Dad.

Last night I was
left out in the hallway banging on the door for over an hour. I didn't want my father to strangle or beat me to death, but I was so scared for my mom. With all my freaking out, someone called the cops. When they knocked on the door, my father opened up and simply left with them. He didn't even look at me as they handcuffed him and read him his rights. Mom went to the hospital to make sure she was okay.

It's absolutely the worst nightmare stored in my memory bank.

I needed Collin and our hangout at Pelham Park today. He taught me how to be my own compass around the city since I'm always getting lost despite having grown up here. We didn't talk a lot about what happened last night, but we did admit that it's time to break up with our girlfriends. Sure, they shield us from events like yesterday unfolding, but we can't expect to keep leading them on to keep ourselves safe.

“You better not get clingy like Nicole,” Collin says while we're riding the train home. “She stays hitting me up in the middle of the night when I'm trying to sleep.”

“Unlikely,” I say, even though it's very likely. It's weirdly possessive and obsessive to like someone; you want to learn all of his stories before anyone else and sometimes you want to be the only one who knows at all.

I bump my leg into his, and he bumps mine back. If we were the typical boy-and-girl couple, we could kiss and hold each other and no one would give a flying fuck. But if you're two guys like us, riding the Bronx tracks, you better make sure you hide any sign of affection if you want to fly under the radar. I've known this for the longest—I just hoped it wouldn't matter. Someone whistles at us and I instantly knew I was wrong.

These two guys who were competing in a pull-up contest a few minutes ago walk up to us. The taller one with his jeans leg rolled up asks, “Yo. You two homos faggots?”

We both tell him no.

His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin's eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.”

Collin smacks the dude's hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.”

Nightmare after nightmare.

One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I'm too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he's kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he's kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing.

The train stops and the doors open but there's no chance for escape. For us, at least. Those two guys laugh while they run out onto the platform. New passengers walk in and some just grab a seat before there are none left. Others act like they don't see us. Only a couple of people come to our aid. But it's too late.

Collin refused to go
to the hospital. He said he couldn't afford it and even though my mom could probably help him for free, he knew she would call his parents and maybe tell them everything, including that thing he never wants to share.

I get home thirty minutes later, still holding my balled-up shirt to my nose to soak up the little blood coming down. I came in through the garage so I wouldn't have to pass any of my friends all fucked up like this. I limp straight to the bathroom and the door is cracked open, lights on inside. Eric's supposed to be working at GameStop, and Mom's visiting one of her patients in prison. I open the door and when I see who's sitting in the bathtub, I drop the shirt and blood just spills down my face and chest.

Holy shit.

Dad.

His eyes are open but he's not looking at me.

He didn't take his clothes off before getting into the tub.

The water is a deep red, stained by the blood spilling from his slit wrists.

He came home to kill himself.

He came home to kill himself before I could bring a boy here.

He came home to kill himself because of me.

All this blood.

All this red makes me black out.

My legs hurt like
hell but I don't stop running through the park. I hop onto a bench and soar off of it, landing hard on my bad leg from when I got jumped, but I keep going. I usually slow down when I'm racing Collin so he doesn't feel as bad. But not today. These pigeons eating bread from a knocked-over trash can scatter when I charge through them. I keep running, but the memory of my father dead in a bath of red keeps chasing me and it's impossible to stop until I trip over my shoelaces and tumble into dirt.

Collin catches up to me and falls to his knees, panting heavily. “You
. . .
okay?”

I'm shaking and ready to pound my fists on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. He places a hand on my knee and I lunge up and hug him so hard I pop his back.

“Ouch! Shit,” he says, breaking free. “Cool it with that.”

I look around to see if anyone else is in the park. We're alone. But Collin has his own ghosts too because of the last time I did something as simple as bumping his leg with mine; naturally someone would burn us at the stake if they caught us hugging. “I'm sorry.”

It's only been two days, but I miss his face without the bruises and swollen eye.

Collin stands and I think he's about to help me up but he just scratches his head. “I gotta go get cleaned up before I meet up with Nicole. She wants to talk.”

“Can you stick around for a little bit longer?” I see a
no
forming so I quickly say, “Forget it. Go do what you gotta do.”

And he does.

(
AGE SIXTEEN—MARCH, FOUR MONTHS AGO)

None of us went
to the funeral. There was a closed casket. I'm sure the service was poorly attended. The hated and hateful aren't exactly a popular crowd. Besides, he wouldn't have wanted me there, which made it a missed opportunity to piss on his grave, but I ended up meeting with Collin instead and that's poetic enough for me.

I'm sitting on the ground, and Collin is pacing back and forth. He still hasn't really offered any real condolences or even hugged me, and it's starting to get to me.

“He did this because of me,” I tell Collin, even though I've told him this over and over already. “Because of what we do together.”

“Maybe we should take a break,” Collin says. “Some time apart could be good for you.”

“That's the last thing I want right now.” I don't add the obvious, that we just got jumped
together
and my father killed himself. “We need to talk to the girls soon. I need you, uh
. . .
I need us to figure this out. I can't have something else going wrong right now.”

“This is shitty timing, I know, but I actually can't break up with Nicole, Aaron. Everything between us has been a slip. Look at everything that's happened to you alone
. . .
You get why nothing else can go down between us, right?”

This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it's so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you're completely abandoned.

“You can't do this,” I say. “I told my mother about you. My father killed himself because of us. We got jumped on the train because of who we are.”

Collin keeps pacing and refuses to look me in the eye. “We chose to be the wrong people. It just can't work. Nicole's pregnant and I was trying to talk her into not keeping the kid before I told you, but she is, so I gotta be a man again.”

Another bad thing but not unexpected, that was always a risk. “So you knocked her up, whatever. That doesn't make you straight and you're never going to be—”

“It's not happening, Aaron.” He walks to the fence. I expect him to come back like he's still pacing, but he just crouches down and leaves without another word.

Something snaps in my head and I'm fighting back tears.

I slipped too.

Whatever, I have a girlfriend too.

I don't need him.

(
AGE SIXTEEN—APRIL, THREE MONTHS AGO)

I know Dad killed
himself because of me.

Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him.

Now I keep searching for happiness so I don't end up like he did.

I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live.