More Happy Than Not (27 page)

5

WINDING BACK THE CLOCK

I
have to see him.

All my memories are so warped right now. I'm pushing my father's suicide out of my head as best as possible because it hurts too much with everything else I'm suffering.

I want to turn back the clock, back to the days where being who I am didn't get me thrown through glass doors; back to the days where he and I ran around laughing; back to the days where there was a chance of happiness despite our circumstances.

It's against my better instinct, but I reach for my phone and dial his number like I never forgot it. I press
call
and don't expect him to pick up.

“You're okay,” he says.

“I've been cooler, Collin.”

6

ONCE MORE

I
'm forgetting about Thomas and Genevieve without any help from Leteo.

Talking with Collin has made recovery pretty easy these past three days. There's been zero reminiscing or any shit like that over the phone. We're trying to keep everything cool and not gay between us, I guess. We talk about meaningless things like movies we've seen—he also hated
The Final Chase
—and how I need to catch up on
The Dark Alternates
because the last issue comes out this month and the story line has gotten crazy. The biggest taboo of all is his pregnant girlfriend; he never even hints at her.

I'm finally being released from Leteo today. Evangeline thinks I should stay for another couple of days as they run more tests, but I will hang myself with an IV if I have to spend another hour in this room. (Not really.) I promised to let her know if I have any dizzy spells, cases of vomiting, or the attention span of a goldfish.

The only time I speak to Mom on the way home is to ask if Mohad is firing me for missing work on account of getting my ass beat. But she's already been in contact with him and he's not. I have that going for me.

I'm a little on edge when we arrive on our block. Brendan, Skinny-Dave, and Nolan better not come at me again. Mom holds on to my arm, squeezing, and I bet she's nervous too. I see Baby Freddy and Fat-Dave playing catch by the trash cans, and Baby Freddy drops the ball when he sees me and runs over.

“No!” Mom screams, guarding me with her body. “Stay away from my son, or I swear I will have you all thrown in jail.”

Baby Freddy backs up a little. He looks straight up embarrassed. “I just wanted to see if he's okay. I'm sorry they did that, Aaron. It was messed up.” He leaves before my mom can threaten him again.

I swallow a deep and sharp breath when we get to our lobby entrance. I used to run through those doors as a kid when we played tag, and manhunt later as a teenager. I would race to hold the doors open for our neighbors, and they would tell my mom she raised such a well-mannered little boy. Now there's nothing but a door frame and a little girl jumping back and forth over it, like someone wasn't almost killed here.

Next thing I know, I'm riding up the elevator with Mom.

Once she crashes onto her own bed for the first time in a week, I change into different clothes and sneak out to meet Collin.

I get to Java
Jack's, this run-down diner on 142nd Street, in no time. Without thinking, I settle into the booth by the window Collin and I always opted for whenever we came here together; it's a prime spot for people watching/mocking. Collin used to hate coffee, but I'm betting now he thinks drinking coffee proves you're a man or something. It's pretty dumb, but I know he struggles with this side of himself way more than I ever have in both of my lives, so I won't call him out on it. I'll also keep everything about our history airtight so we don't tip anyone off.

I stop the waiter. “Can I bother you for another coffee?”

“Be back in a moment,” he says.

The door opens and I shoot up. It's not Collin. It's just some guy in baggy clothes and long surfer hair. If I had the power to snap my fingers and change him, I'm not convinced I would've dressed him in a basketball jersey or made him taller with Collin's golden curls. Maybe I would've transformed him into Thomas, watching his skin turn a shade darker than the weak coffee this place serves, and his regular, boring eyebrows would've grown into the thicker eyebrows I had no business touching before I kissed him.

I just don't know.

Snap, snap
.

There's a hand snapping a few inches from my nose.

“You cool?” Collin sits down across from me like we've spent no time apart. “You certainly don't look it.”

My swollen eye is less swollen, but it's still pretty much an eyesore everyone can't help but stare at when I'm just walking down the street. “Yeah. I ran into a lot of wrong fists. How'd you find out?”

“Genevieve told a friend who told a friend who told Nicole,” Collin says. “What else is new?” He picks up the menu as if he doesn't always order the same thing—omelet with a side of hash browns—and it's a good tactic; I'll give him that. Focus on what's new and what's next instead of what brought him here. “Hey! Can I get some coffee over here?”

“Make that two!”

“Why do you need two?” Collin asks.

“I downed mine already.”

Collin points at the steaming mug in front of me. I could've sworn I drank mine already, especially because of how badly I have to pee now. Maybe the waiter refilled it while I was lost in my head.

The waiter looks confused too. And a little annoyed as he brings two steaming mugs. “What the
. . .
? You still haven't finished the second cup.”

“Uh, no. Sorry about that.”

“Great. I'll just make another batch for the next time you want to waste some more.”

Collin pours sugar into his coffee and tells the waiter, “Don't be a dick, dick.” The waiter curses under his breath and leaves. Collin always used to tell off the asshole waiters who never hang around Java Jack's longer than a month. It started a game where I would draw something crude on the bill to make him laugh. Becoming that person again would be cold and distant, but safe.

“So you were about to tell me what's new with you,” he says.

“Nothing besides getting thrown through doors.”

He stares at his coffee. “Where was Genevieve when all this went down?”

“I kind of quit her.” I lock eyes with him when he looks up. “What's going on with you and Nicole? How's her pregnancy coming along?”

Collin covers his mouth, coffee dribbling down his chin. “Uh, she's about to enter her third trimester.”

“Boy or girl?”

He takes a second to answer. “Boy.”

Now would be a good time to have a fully functioning crystal ball so I could divine whether or not Collin is going to be a good father to his little boy. I don't just mean whether or not he'll take his son out to play and feed him spoonfuls of medicine when he's sick, but if Collin will let his son listen to songs sung by women and let him date a dude if it made him happy.

“Congratulations,” I say.

“I know you don't mean it.”

“No, I think it's cool,” I lie.

“That sucks about you and Genevieve.”

“I know you don't mean it,” I parrot with a grin.

Then we just look at each other, the same way we did during school when we passed each other in the halls. “Want to get out of here?”

“Let's get the check,” I say.

“And the waiter's pen,” he adds.

We're going to Comic
Book Asylum, laughing as we throw the waiter's pen at each other, overdramatic, like gladiators hurling spears. After we started hanging out last year, we would go to the comic shop when it was too cold out to do anything else. It didn't matter to me as long as we were chilling. We'd spend hours sitting in the aisles, as close to each other as possible, checking out what we wanted to read but were positive we didn't want to buy. Man, I spent so much time at Comic Book Asylum that Genevieve brought me there for Trade Dates. Then again, she also created Trade Dates because there was a strain in our relationship, also because of Collin.

He always surprised me whenever he brought up things that weren't related to comics and fantasy books. One afternoon I thought we were about to leave the shop, but he pulled me back down to the floor beside him. I was both nervous and hopeful he was going to kiss me, but instead he said he was done caring about what others thought of how he lived. That sentiment didn't survive any longer than a shadow-basilisk did against a black sun phoenix, but in the moment it made me happy to believe it. And then I lost him and his conversations and touches, and I couldn't fill that hole. So forgetting the hole was even there turned out to be the next best, saddest thing.

But I have him back now,
I think.

Stan is by the door, doing a poor job installing a Captain America gumball machine. He smiles at us. “You two done fighting?”

Collin is looking at me funny, sort of like that time I echoed the ending to his bad haircut story because he'd forgotten he told me already. I paid attention, made him feel worth it, and I promised I always would.

“We're good,” he answers for us. He leads me to the graphic novel section.

“What was that about?”

“I came in here a few times without you, and Stan kept asking me where the Robin to my Batman was.”

“That's bullshit,” I say. “I'm totally Batman.”

Collin snickers. “For a while I made excuses, said you were sick or working, but eventually I accepted we probably wouldn't ever talk again. It sucked, but it made sense with how I ditched you.” He trails a finger across the spines of graphic novels and says, “I gotta ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“When you saw me here and were being extra nice and fake, were you doing it to impress that guy you were with? Was he your boyfriend?”

I completely forget that happened on account of having forgotten my relationship with Collin. Two worlds, ten feet from each other—and Collin was the only one who knew, the only one who was affected by it. “He was never my boyfriend and you were barely anyone to me. I went through the Leteo procedure and forgot my time with you.”

“Sure you did,” Collin says.

He doesn't believe me. Why would he? But I told him.

We sit against a bookcase, our elbows touching. We're both reading the same graphic novel about zombies invading a heavily guarded garbage dump, where they find their master's decapitated head. Not really sure what the zombies plan on doing with the head if they manage to retrieve it, but we lose interest anyway.

“Remember our spot behind the fence?” he says out of nowhere.

It's not a game of Remember That Time.

“It's been a while,” I say.

“Want to go?”

I close the graphic novel. We tell Stan we'll see him later and I wonder if he knows about Collin and me. As long as he's not outing us, it doesn't matter.

We head to our spot between the meat market and flower shop. I steer Collin toward the fence from behind, but he shrugs me off and I don't give him any shit for it, even though there's not a single gay-hating soul in sight. The smell of dead cow is way more pungent than the flowers this evening. There's a sign that reads:
community service gathering on friday, august 16th
. Who the hell knows what that entails? But it's pretty awesome to find our graffiti still on the wall.

We crawl through the open spot in the fence into the side where history is pulsating with memories of our first time, second time, third time
. . .
you get it. Collin scans the area for any wanderers or birds with cameras on their heads before coming back to undo my belt buckle. It's so dark someone could murder us and get away with it, which we prefer—the darkness, not the murder part. I pull him into a rough kiss and I don't doubt that whenever he's kissing Nicole he's pretending she's some other guy—maybe even me—and as I kiss him now I pretend he's someone else, and it's just so fucking sad.