True Letters from a Fictional Life (23 page)

“What? I don't remember you saying that.”

“Oh my God, yes you do! I said it right behind you in the hallway when we were freshmen. You had to have heard me. You turned around right away. I thought you were going to hit me.”

“I swear I don't remember that.” I laughed.

“Anyway, you've been nicer to me than some people were. Especially during that hellish week right before I got punched. You were never one of the worst.”

It was a grim pardon.

“I called you a homo once,” I said after a moment. “I remember it really clearly. You took my seat on the bus during that field trip to Montpelier when we were sophomores. I think I was probably trying to impress Mark. No, I know I was trying to impress Mark.”

“Honestly, I do not remember that happening.”

“You don't remember someone shouting
homo
at you in public?”

“Do you know how often that kind of thing's happened to me?”

My own problems seemed to shrink next to his. “You hear a lot of that kind of stuff, huh?”

“There are plenty of days when I don't hear anything like that, but there aren't too many days when I don't feel as though . . . I don't know. It always feels like other guys want me to disappear. Every day. I can tell they just wish I didn't exist.”

He pulled his cap down as if he were trying to disappear right then.

I didn't know what to say, because it was true. Some guys did wish that Aaron didn't exist. They didn't know what to do with him.
He's a boy,
they think,
but not a real boy.
And then I realized that they'd think the same thing about me now, too.

“You know,” I said, “I think the thing that scared me most about admitting that I'm, you know, gay or whatever isn't so much that people would taunt me by saying ‘Oh, James likes other boys,' but that they would say stuff like, ‘Oh, turns out James isn't a boy after all.' You know?”

Aaron nodded and curled his legs in, sat cross-legged. “Well, they've always said that about me, so I guess I was never that worried about it. I never bought into what they meant by a real boy, anyway.”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” I said. “But it actually makes me really angry. Like, so angry I want to punch someone.”

“Don't punch anyone.”

“I'm not going to hit anybody.” I laughed. “I'm not looking to get into any fights. But, dude, this morning, I wanted to win that freaking race so badly.” Aaron tilted his head, confused. I'd forgotten that he didn't know about it. “I ran this race against Mark. The Mud 10K.”

“Excuse me?”

“You run around some bogs up in the hills. Mark and I signed up for it a while ago, back in April, before”—I waved my hand—“everything happened. Anyway, the race was this morning, and I was ahead of him right up until the end. I lost by like—” I reached out my arm and grasped at the air. “I really wanted to be able to walk past that guy and with just one look say, ‘You got beat by a gay kid. We win.'”

“Ha,” said Aaron, stretching his legs out in front of him again. “
We
win!”

“For real. That would've been so sweet, you know? You get that sort of chance once in a lifetime maybe, and I blew it. I totally blew it.”

Aaron was grinning and shaking his head, but he held a respectful silence for a few moments while I pitied myself.

“James,” he finally said with exaggerated patience, “that race was not called the Cosmic Gay Vengeance 10K. It was called the Mud 10K. You ran through a bunch of mud. Which is gross. As far as I'm concerned, no one who gets that filthy is a winner. Also, think about it: if you had beaten Mark and then even looked at him the wrong way, he would've taken
a baseball bat and smashed your head like a melon. I'm sorry, but I'm glad you lost. If you had given Mark a reason to kill you, I would have been left with no boy friends. Male friends, I mean. Not boyfriend. You know what I mean.” He shifted back to sitting cross-legged. “How are your parents handling everything?”

“They're coming around. I don't know what my mom expects yours to say about it all.”

Aaron shrugged. “She probably just wants to hear that she didn't do anything wrong. And that even though you're gay, you're normal. She's normal. My mom's had a lot of time to process it all, and she's pretty level-headed. I'm sure she's saying the right things.”

“When did you tell her?”

“I was thirteen. She wanted me to play a team sport. I would have none of it. ‘I'm gay' was number four on my list of ten reasons it was a bad idea.”

“You just slipped it in there, huh? Smooth.”

“Right between ‘I'm allergic to Gatorade' and ‘The other boys smell like sneakers.'”

“You're starting fights again, dude.”

“I'm joking!” He laughed. “You don't smell like a sneaker. The sweater you lent me smelled liked wood smoke and Old Spice.”

“It's seen a lot of campfires. Are you sure you don't want your PEZ dispenser? I can go get it.”

“No, he's yours. Keep him.”

“Why the pink alligator?”

“They didn't have any white ones. Have you seen the albino alligator in San Francisco? He's on YouTube.”

And that's how we spent the rest of the Fosters' visit that afternoon: watching YouTube videos. First we checked out the albino alligator, then we watched what seemed like every single other video Aaron had found over the previous two months. He had me cracking up the entire time. I was actually a little disappointed when his mom announced that it was time for them all to go home.

My mom found me washing dishes in the kitchen soon after they split. “Did you know that Aaron is a writer, too?” she asked.

“He's written some bad poetry,” I said. I'd read some of his poems in
Sin Qua Non
. They're incoherent.

“He writes a lot. Like you,” my mom went on. “His mom said he let her read some of it when he was in the hospital, but she couldn't get through it all. ‘If only those kids understood how much he dreaded going to school every day,' she said.”

My mom was getting emotional. I deliberately clanged a pot against the side of the sink to snap her back to the here and now.

“I told her how and why you got your black eye. I hope that's okay.”

“I think she'd probably heard. But it's okay.”

“Do I ever get to read what you're scribbling up there?”

“Maybe sometime.” I dried my hands on a dish towel and stuffed it through the handle of the fridge door. The I Heart Vermont magnet that used to hold the photo of Theresa and me caught my eye. The photo was gone.

“Topher's picking me up in a few minutes.”

“Are you really going out dressed like that?”

I was wearing jeans with a hole in one knee and a Henry's Towing T-shirt. “You're right. I'll put on a tie,” I said over my shoulder as I left the kitchen. “Also, I might get my ears pierced.”

No response from her.

As I entered my bedroom, I glanced out the window. No moose. I found my keys in my coffee can of change, slipped the pirate key off the ring, and dropped it back among the coins. And there was Aaron's snaggletoothed PEZ dispenser, half-buried. I grabbed the pink alligator by its head, pulled it from the pennies and nickels, and stuffed him in my pocket.

Topher and I drove up 91 North, way up past Bradford, our windows down, the music loud, the hills electric green, and summer vacation stretching off ahead of us.

“No! Keep heading north!” I yelled when Topher veered up the exit ramp to turn around by Wells River. “They'll never find us in Quebec! Keep going!”

We took winding back roads home, past rusting tractors and a rope-tow ski hill yellow with flowers, past a goat standing on top of a dilapidated doghouse, past a clawfoot bathtub overflowing with spring water that gushed from mossy rocks
on the roadside. On a gravel straightaway, far from any barn or house, we pulled in beside a pasture. Sitting on the fence rail in the shade of a big maple, we pet a pair of brown horses that had wandered over while we kissed.

Rex was talking to himself when Luke and I arrived at the door of his room that night. We could hear
Meet the Beatles
playing, the only album he ever listens to if given the choice. For Christmas, along with the shock collar, I gave him
Let It Be
and
Abbey Road
, but he refused to move beyond 1964. His hair was even looking moppy for a while. Too bad it's blond. Luke opened Rex's door quietly, without knocking, and Rex was hunched at his desk, his back to us. Action figures battled across an open book. One soldier, wearing yellow snorkel gear and fins, dangled from a shoelace noose tied to his desk lamp, and Rex was threatening Chewbacca in a voice that sounded like a cross between a frog and a snake. We crept in behind him, holding our breaths to keep from cracking up. When Luke barked “Rex!” he screamed, spun, and chucked the Wookiee, hard, shattering a framed photograph on his dresser. It was a photograph of Rex and me from a couple of years ago, arm in arm and sweaty after a backyard soccer match.

“That's an auspicious start,” muttered Luke.

Without slowing down, Rex began throwing action figures onto the floor. “I was reading! Why are you interrupting?” He was fighting back tears.

“Whoa, dude, relax!” Luke had his hands on Rex's shoulders. “No one's busting you for anything. Believe me. James is the one we're here to laugh at. Slow down.”

“I was reading,” Rex said again. “Look.” And he pointed to two opened books, one about sharks and one about WWII fighter jets.

“You go after them both at once, huh? You're a hungry little reader!”

“Yes,” he replied, standing rigidly and looking at his desk, clearly desperate for us to leave, to let him spend his evening free from humiliation and abuse. I felt bad for him. Luke and I never came looking for him. He knew something was up, and he was scared.

I dropped down onto his bed. “Hey, Rex,” I began. “Relax. For real, man. I need to talk to you.” I thumped the bed so he'd sit down. “And Luke's here to, uh, listen.”

“To listen with you, to cry with you, to laugh when appropriate,” Luke confirmed.

Rex looked up at Luke and me sadly, and then crawled onto the bed and sat cross-legged on his pillow. When he'd arranged himself comfortably and Luke had settled into the desk chair, Rex winced a little and asked, “Are you sick, James?”

I could see his eyes fill with tears, and for a moment I thought I was going to lose it.

“No, dude.” I tried laughing. “I'm not sick. I'm not dying or anything. Don't worry. But I have to talk to you about
some pretty complicated stuff that might take you some time to understand. Okay?”

He looked to Luke, who nodded his head, and Rex nodded back.

I stretched, cracked my knuckles, and sighed, “So, where to begin? You may have already heard about some of this, Rex. I don't know if kids at school have said anything to you about me or what.”

He stared at me blankly, and then asked, “You got arrested?”

Luke cracked up.

“No.” I shook my head. “I didn't get arrested. I'm not sick, and I'm not going to jail. Here's the thing. You know how I was sort of kind of but not really dating Theresa for a while?”

“She's pregnant.” Rex nodded knowingly.

“Unlikely,” said Luke.

“No, she's not pregnant, but that was a good guess. Anyway, the thing is that even though I was sort of going out with Theresa, I actually would rather have been going out with someone else.” I paused for dramatic effect. “And the someone else is a boy.”

Rex looked from me to Luke and back again, then rocked back, smiling, and said, “Aw, c'mon! You guys!”

Luke shrugged. “No, dude. He's serious.”

For some reason I was worried that Luke would say it before I could, so I said quickly, “Yeah, I'm serious, Rex. I'm
gay. For real. And I want you to know what that means, why it shouldn't bother you.”

He just stared at us both, frozen. Not even a nod of the head.

“So,” I began, glancing at Luke for reassurance, “the thing is, it's been really hard for me to admit this, not only to other people, but even to myself. It's been really hard. I've known for a long time, but I was scared to talk about it.”

Rex's eyes were wide and unblinking.

“I didn't know whether Mom and Dad would kick me out of the house, whether I'd lose my friends, whether you and Luke would ever speak to me again.”

“That last one's still up for debate, Champ,” Luke said, grabbing and shaking Rex's knee, but failing to make him smile. “We can discuss it later, when James goes downstairs to watch figure skating.”

“Anyway, I didn't know how any of this was going to go over, but some stuff happened at school that sort of forced me to come out of the closet.”

“He doesn't know what that means.”

“Yes, he does. You know what that means, dude? To come out of the closet?”

“To say that you're a f-f-f,” and Rex stopped himself, reconsidered, and said solemnly, “To say that you like to have sex with children.”

When Luke saw that Rex was actually crying, that he had his hands over his face, and that he shook away my attempt to
put a hand on his shoulder, he stopped laughing.

“Rex! Dude! James does not like to have sex with children! That's not what ‘come out of the closet' means, and that's not what gay means either.” Turning to me, Luke whispered, “Good grief, you are making a mess of this!”

I glared at him. “Rex, would you listen to me? I don't like children! I like other guys—like, my age and older.”

Luke started laughing again.

“A little older. Not old, old. But like a couple of years—I like guys the way you thought I liked girls.”