Spontaneous (6 page)

P
erry Love was gay.

Not the going-on-Grindr-and-meeting-some-businessman-for-a-midnight-tryst-in-the-dark-corner-of-a-Panera-parking-lot variety of gay. Not even the get-drunk-at-a-party-and-make-out-with-Kylton-Connors-on-a-pile-of-coats-because-Kylton-Connors-almost-looks-like-a-girl-and-Kylton-Connors-is-discreet variety of gay.

No, Perry Love was the variety of gay where his parents probably sat around every Christmas, scratching their chins and saying, “What should we get for our gay son, Perry, this year? He's not into those typical gay things like pocket squares and Pomeranians, but that boy of ours is as gay as they come. Let's at least get him a gift certificate to a coffee shop and maybe he can finally meet a nice fella and take him out for a chai. He deserves a nice fella . . . and a chai, don't you think?”

Perry Love was out, in other words. So out that you didn't even know he was out. Well, other people did, obviously. Just not me. The football team knew it and was cool with it. To be clear, there was never some big coming-out in the locker room, never an inspiring video online about how a young man's bravery is supported by progressive teammates who look beyond the petty prejudices, and simply see another comrade in the noble pursuit of concussions, no shared links saying:
Your Faith in Humanity Will Be Restored as Soon as You Find Out What Happened When This High School Football Player Told His Teammates That, Yeah, He Probably Has the Hots for at Least a Couple of Them.

Perry was nothing more and nothing less than a mediocre and gay football player and he had been so since day one of high school. Apparently he came out in the summer after eighth grade to a handful of friends, Harper Wie included. Impeccable timing, it turns out. We were all redefining ourselves that summer, adding or stripping off layers before we plunged into high school. So when Perry slipped quietly into the deep end of gay teendom, it didn't make a splash. I suppose I was too busy gossiping about obvious transformations. Back then, I was discussing Greyson Hobbs's shrinking waistline and Diet Dr Pepper addiction, Poul Dawes's sudden skater-dude awakening, and Tammy Hartwell's shift from a bog of dour and frump to a volcano of smiles and cleavage.

Perry was never flamboyant, never had a boyfriend. He might never have even kissed a guy, but he was out and he was white and his last name was Love, which is a good American name and makes for especially sad headlines, such as,
HOPES DASHED BY TH
E
DEATH OF LOVE
. (Those words actually graced the home page of JerseyReport.com the morning after his demise.) And because of all these factors, discussions of the spontaneous combustions took a sudden turn. If there were no bombs and foreign-flavored folks to blame, then what the fuck were we dealing with here?

I
t's been covered ad nauseum, but I think it helps to go back to the moments after the latest spontaneous combustion. What had been a private phenomenon, experienced and recounted by a few unlucky kids, was now a public event, experienced and, more importantly, recorded by many.

When the flood of videos were uploaded to YouTube that night, there may have been an ethical dilemma among the bleary-eyed gatekeepers who have to sift through all the gore, porn, and adorable hedgehogs. Was this exploitative? Nothing but snuff? Or was it news, a necessary document to help us understand this fucked-up world, like images of burning buildings and rhinos with their horns cut off?

The official verdict was “News! Glorious and bloody news!” Yes, we are a world of Zapruders offering up death from a variety of angles and aspect ratios.

What's remarkable about the videos is the lack of awareness on
display. It didn't go down at a string quartet, after all. Since the place was full-on pandemonium already, most didn't notice what happened, including many with their phones pointed at the field. Chances are, some of them even drove home minutes later, saw the stream of police cars headed the other way, and wondered, “What's all the hubbub?” as their images of Perry Love's exploding body finished uploading to the cloud.

I'll spare you the details of the scene because you can watch the videos and, frankly, it's hard to know whether my perspective is an honest one. Ecstatic flailing and terrified flailing are actually pretty similar, and depending how I've felt on particular days, I've pictured the atmosphere differently. I do remember Rosetti and Meadows fighting their way through the crowd and rushing the field with everyone else. I remember the hollering and the whooping. I remember Meadows diving on Steve Cox and I remember Harper Wie fainting. And, of course, I remember Dylan whispering in my ear.

“
Did something happen?
” he asked. “
Did everything happen?
”

My response was to grab his hand and lead him to the side of the bleachers. An older couple, who had chosen not to enter the fray, noticed us holding hands, and smiled the smile of approval as we slipped by.

Like that, we were a couple. So said the elders.

We slid off the bleachers and I pulled Dylan away from the field, in the opposite direction of the kids who had heard the booming announcement of “TOUCHDOWN!” and emerged from their cocoons of cuddling and parking-lot hot-boxing to become one with the tribe.

“We need to be there!” Dylan shouted. “We need to experience this!”

“We need to go!” I shouted back. “We need to get the fuck out!”

I sped up and our hands broke apart. I was in the wide open—past the reach of the lights, past the throb and the thump—sprinting, the chill of the autumn cutting through my shirt, my cardigan flapping and threatening to break free.

“Slow down!” Dylan shouted.

I did the opposite. I put my arms out and head down and I charged toward the patch of woods near East Campus. The leaves had all turned and even in the moonlight I could see the brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds. I ran my hands across the first few trees I passed, feeling the grizzled landscapes of bark, and I imagined this was a haunted forest, a forest that would eat you if it could, that would chew you with its mouth open and swallow half of you in a big gulp, but let your legs writhe in the foggy air.

When I reached a little hill where the trees weren't so thick, I stopped, turned, fell to my butt, fell to my back, looked up at the web of branches and the blanket of stars, and began to wiggle and laugh.

Dylan was soon above me, feet planted next to my hips, arms crossed, a witness to my weirdness. I laughed even harder.

“It happened again, didn't it?” he asked. “Who was it?”

“Does . . . it . . . matter?” I said between gasps.

“Of course,” he said. “It matters to someone. To many people, probably. To me.”

I thrust my arms into the air and he grabbed my hands and pulled me up and against his body. Leaning forward, my nose
grazed his cheek, and I kissed him, a tiny peck on the neck. “I'm pretty sure it was Perry Love,” I told him.

“Crap. I liked that kid.”

I kissed Dylan again, and the little hairs on his neck tickled my lips. “I hardly knew him,” I said, which was the nicest thing I could say at that point. When we lost Katelyn and Brian, it had torched my insides. With Perry, I felt . . . not nothing, exactly, but this particular horror was more communal. It seemed obvious. We were all going down together. Sure, that was worth crying about. But it was also worth laughing about.

“I didn't see it,” he said. “I saw you looking toward the bench instead of the end zone and then I saw the blood and then . . . dammit, I wanted to be there for Perry.”

I kissed him again and whispered, “
Be there? What do you mean?
”

“When you die, don't you want someone to see it? People say that everyone dies alone, but that's a bunch of bull.”

“We do everything alone, essentially,” I said as I kissed him again. I was going to keep kissing him. This wasn't going to be another Brian Chen incident. These lips would not be ignored.

He put his hands on my shoulders and nudged me off his neck. Looking me in the eyes, he said, “To have that moment etched in people's memories, in the very biology of their brains, that's not dying alone. That's a magical thing. And you've been there for three people's last moments.”

“I'd hardly call it magic,” I replied.

“Yet you're laughing. And you're here in these woods, with me, as alive as you've ever been.”

He was right, obviously. I had an undeniable spark in my body. A feeling of lightness, of thereness. So when he leaned in and finally kissed me, it was one motherfucking blockbuster of a kiss.

Sirens in the distance answered one another's howls and the wind gusted as I pawed that boy's body. It wasn't all contoured and smooth. There were riffles and lumps. Not a perfect body, but I didn't want a perfect body. I wanted this body—whole, intact—there in the patch of woods not far from where three of my classmates had blown up.

T
here was chatter about patterns. When one kid blows up, it's an anomaly. When two blow up, it's a disturbing coincidence. Three and you've got yourself an epidemic. So what happens when a kid blows up at a football game that's supposed to symbolize a town's return to normalcy?

Things get weird.

Football season was officially canceled. No surprise there. No real complaints, either. It was easy for terrified players to shoot down arguments from meatheaded fathers waxing nostalgic on how “kids were tougher back in the day.”

“Tougher, eh? Did your teammates randomly splatter all over you
back in the day
? No? Well then, shut the fuck up, Dad.”

School was closed indefinitely. We all learned this via the press conference held on Saturday morning. Press conferences were nothing new to us, but Sheriff Tibble didn't use the steps of the library to deliver his shrugs and empty promises this time. He
moved the production to a vacant field past Brighton Orchards. It was the only way to accommodate the people who had arrived as soon as the death toll had reached
what-the-fuck?-
able numbers.

You'd think a town full of exploding teenagers would scare people away, but no, there was a mass migration here. Scientists came in search of samples—water, dirt, blood, anything they could stick under a microscope. It had been a calm year for hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters, so the storm chasers and aggressively charitable types came rolling through in RVs, hoping to get off on our tragedies. I don't think I need to mention that the religious fanatics swarmed the streets and public buildings like a proverbial plague of . . . religious fanatics. My favorite of their charming picket signs?

THE DEVIL INSIDE YOUR CHILDREN HAS FOUND HIS WAY OUT!

It was inevitable that their signs also zeroed in on the whole Perry “Gay” Love angle. Soon almost everyone would focus on that angle. It was the one obvious and tangible difference he had from the rest of the herd.

But what did that mean about Katelyn and Brian?

“I kissed Katelyn once,” Jenna Dalton told me the Sunday after the game, when she picked me up at Covington Kitchen on the way to an emergency town hall.

“Not listening,” said Joe, who was sitting shotgun and sticking his fingers in his ears. “Do not wanna know who my sister has or hasn't kissed. No thank you. No way.”

“Like
really
kissed?” I asked.

Jenna shrugged. “Yeah, I mean we were on molly and it was dark but, you know, tongue and everything.”

“But you're not gay,” I said.

Jenna shrugged again. “I don't know what I am. I don't know what Katelyn was either. It was a good kiss. I can say that for sure.”

Other girls had also kissed Katelyn and were now telling. The only thing it proved, of course, was that Katelyn was into a bit of experimentation, but when the stories hit the comment sections, suddenly she was gay too. And when photos surfaced of Brian Chen in fishnet stockings, it was
case closed
for an assortment of morons and homophobes.

The seeds were actually sown at that emergency town hall, when Tina Parcells, self-proclaimed “social media guru and internationally renowned mommy-blogger,” grabbed the microphone and asked, “Has anyone tested their DNA?”

Our mayor, the perpetually harried Roger Giancola, answered from the podium. “I do not know all the science behind an autopsy, but you must remember that we don't exactly have a lot of . . . autopsy material.”

There were groans from the crowd, and I looked around hoping none of the Ogdens, Chens, or Loves were present to hear their dearly departed referred to as “autopsy material.” I didn't see any of them, but it didn't mean they weren't there. The town hall was held in the State Street Theater, just like Katelyn's memorial, but it was even more packed than that had been. Priority seating was given to town residents, and the rest was standing room only. When the place reached fire-code capacity, the crowd spilled out into the streets, where there were giant speakers, a projector, and
movie screen rigged up to broadcast the proceedings. There were also live streams provided by major news outlets, which meant some kid in a yurt in Mongolia could fire up his laptop, snuggle under a yak blanket, and join us, so long as he had a decent Wi-Fi connection. It was like the World Cup. Only not boring.

“You only need a drop of blood to do DNA tests,” Tina said. “It's as if you haven't watched a movie or TV show in your entire life.”

Mayor Giancola's tone became decidedly perturbed. “I've watched plenty of movies. I'm quite the cinephile, as a matter of fact, but I don't see what DNA has to do with the crisis we're currently facing.”

“You and the sheriff keep telling us that there's no evidence of explosives,” Tina said. “So if it's not an external problem, then it's an internal one. I've been told Perry Love was a homosexual. And while I don't want to take anything away from the bravery required to live such a difficult lifestyle, I've been told that homosexuality is genetically determined. So maybe this whole thing is as well. Look at their DNA is all I'm saying.”

That wasn't
all
she was saying. By introducing this line of reasoning, she was telling people to consider Perry's sexuality, and by considering Perry's sexuality, they also had to consider Katelyn's and Brian's. The rumors about Katelyn had already been spreading by the time the town hall started, and within a few hours after it, the fishnet picture of Brian was trending.

Never mind that the picture was taken by his mom one innocent Saturday morning last spring when Brian was thinking about auditioning for the community theater's production of
Hedwig
. Never mind that even if Katelyn was gay and even if Brian was
gay—and part of me kinda hoped that he was after that bus kiss snub—there's nothing about being gay that makes a person more combustible. Most sane and reasonable people realize this.

Alas, the world is neither sane nor reasonable, especially when ad-click revenue comes into play. Only the most callous and cynical “journalists” were trotting out link-bait like
A NEW GAY PLAGUE
? But that didn't mean others weren't implying the same thing.

I tried to stay away from all that noise, but what was there left for a girl to do? There was no school on the horizon, and Tess could only afford so much gas, and Dylan . . .