What It Takes (3 page)

“Food,” Andrew says.

“No joke.” Milo turns away from the machine. “You’re always hungry. Where does it all go? How are you not getting fat, lying around all day stuffing your face?”

“I doubt I’ll ever be fat.” Andrew is usually self-conscious about how skinny he is, but he soldiers on with an only slightly strained smile. “But hopefully it will go to the magical growth-spurt machine you are hogging.”

Milo’s new height advantage is totally cool because he’s always been the shorter one. Andrew doesn’t seem in danger of being short. He’s always been really skinny; they’re all growing, but with Andrew it’s kind of like he’s being stretched.

“Good luck with that one,” Ted chimes in. Like Milo, he’s shot up recently too, leaving Andrew behind in a genetic race for height. They might both be brown-haired and brown-eyed, but Andrew’s hair naturally highlights and his eyes are lighter and much more expressive. Ted’s a really chill guy who doesn’t care about such things; he saves his energy for mischief he ropes them all into. He’s focusing on a racing game, throwing his weight behind a sticking wheel in a booth too small for him.

“Shut up. Let’s get some burgers.” Andrew grabs Milo’s hand to pull him toward the restaurant portion of the arcade, then drops it quickly with an apology, flustered and blushing. “So sorry, I, I didn’t... sorry.”

“Chill, it’s cool,” Milo says. Andrew looks away and walks ahead of him. It’s not as if Milo cares, because he’s thought Andrew might be gay for, like, ages now. Milo’s used to the idea and he doesn’t care and a part of him likes the familiarity they’ve had with each other. Yeah, maybe it’s uncool and the other kids will make fun of them. But they’re not here and every kid who uses the word fag as if it’s funny can fuck off, because he doesn’t want anyone to make Andrew feel bad,
ever
. He has to be careful, though, because word getting around that he’s holding hands with Andrew would be a thing that his father might actually kill him over.

°

They’re in the woods one day in July when they come into a small clearing. Milo has been keeping complaints about the humidity and bugs to himself. He wants to hang out with Andrew and if this is the best he can get, he’ll take it. Andrew comes alive when they’re out here, which is awesome. God knows Milo could use some happiness too.

“You good?” Andrew asks. He looks around the clearing, then sits carefully on what’s left of a fallen tree. Milo kicks at a tuft of grass.

“I’m fine.”

“Milo,” Andrew says in that voice he gets, the one that’s knowing and superior.

“I’m
fine
. Looking forward to school. Less time at home, you know? It’s close but not close enough, and it’s making me crazy.”

Andrew looks at him for a long moment, then away. His eyes explore the fringe of woods, and the scraggly wildflowers in the sunlight. “We should build something out here.”

“Huh?” Milo gives up and stands next to him. A line of sweat slides down his temple, and he wipes it away.

“Like a fort?” Andrew shoots him a shy and hopeful look. Milo resists the urge to point out that they aren’t kids anymore and that they’re too old for that kind of play, because he doesn’t want to hurt Andrew’s feelings. “I know it’s lame. But come on, it’ll be fun!”

“How will we do that? We need wood and supplies and, like, to know how to build stuff.”

“We’ll figure it out.” Andrew’s face brightens; Milo is terrible at resisting this sort of persuasion. “And then we’ll have a place no one knows about. It’ll be our thing.” Andrew looks away then and shrugs. “That sounded wrong. I didn’t mean—”

“No! No, that’s cool.” The thought of a secret place is appealing. If they do this, it’ll be somewhere Milo can go when everyone is busy and he can’t go to their houses. Plus, the thought of planning something to build is exciting. “So we’ll need a plan.”

“Blah,” Andrew complains. He starts circling the clearing.

“How do you plan to accomplish this without—”

“A plan? I’m kidding. Come on, let’s find a spot. We can go home and make the best plan ever and it’ll be like a little wet dream for you.”

Milo blushes and laughs and only looks away for a second before looking for an ideal spot.

°

The fort takes longer to build than Andrew anticipated. The wood was expensive, and they had to figure out how to pay for it, and also, come on, they aren’t master builders yet. Despite all of Milo’s drawn plans—the first drafts roughly scratched into dirt, then, as they sat on the beach, into shifting sands that proved to be a terrible sketch pad, and finally on paper—the process was a whole lot of trial and error.

“It’s not all that big,” Milo says when they’re finally, for the first time, seated inside their little creation.

“It’s fine.” Andrew is unpacking a cooler of snacks and pop he brought for the occasion.

Milo inspects their handiwork. “There’s a huge gap over here.”

“Oh my god, Mr. Perfection, enjoy the moment.” Andrew kicks him in the ankle.

“No wait, there’s an exposed nail; let me find the hammer—”

“Milo,” Andrew says in his most stern voice, which isn’t that stern at all when it cracks. He clears his throat. “Shut up, sit down and drink your Coke. We can fix that later.”

Milo sighs and sits down. Andrew can tell he’s working very hard not to examine the fort for more flaws.

“We’ll be here again, you know,” Andrew says. “We have time to fix things up if we want. For now, it’s mostly done; it’s awesome
. We’re
awesome.”

“Yeah. True.” Milo smiles; his hair is a shaggy mess and his face is spotted with pimples that have come and gone as they’ve started to hit puberty. His shirt is dirty, they’re both sweating and it’s sweltering in the fort—even though it’s in the shade, the heat of their bodies in the confined space is driving the temperature up to uncomfortable. Milo is right—it is small, and being so close to Milo makes a completely different heat suffuse his body. It’s confusing and new and unwelcome, and, if he doesn’t distract himself immediately, will be very obvious.

Andrew distracts himself by looking over their creation. The wooden floor is rough enough to need more sanding. The walls are made of mismatched wooden boards—some bought and some scavenged—that don’t fit together perfectly, especially around the small window and door. One day, when it’s not about a billion degrees, Andrew wants to paint the walls inside. Milo looks up to examine the roof while they finish lunch, and Andrew contemplates whether making some sort of sign outside the fort would be too childish.

It’s far from perfect, but still, for that moment, Andrew can’t imagine that he’s ever been happier.

chapter three

J
unior year of high school is the worst year of Milo’s life to date. Between balancing swim team, National Honor Society, the volunteer hours he has to do and his grades in AP classes, Milo is always strained and overwhelmed. Disappointment and anger sit like a constant, suffocating blanket over his home.

Two weeks into his fall semester, Milo comes home to a pile of messy papers from his room on the kitchen table. The house is dead quiet, silence so menacing Milo has to swallow down rising nausea.

His room is turned upside down. His mattress is flipped off the bed. Every drawer in his dresser has been removed and emptied.

Privacy in his home is an illusion; there is always the threat that his father might decide to search his room. He is required to turn in homework and assignments randomly when asked, so his father can keep tabs on his progress.

But this—this is new. There’s not a clue in the house, no squeaking floorboard or the ping of a phone chiming. He has no idea if anyone is home. But a cold sweat dews, and his heart begins to race. Panic nips at his heels, ugly and familiar but monstrous, as he struggles to think of what might have set this off, if he left anything incriminating in his room.

He can’t think of anything though, and that’s the worst.

There are no instructions in his room. Down at the table, he finds leftover assignments, papers he turned in, notes from friends at school, all piled up. Milo doesn’t dare read the notes; he knows his shaking hands would find some conversation or joke he’s going to pay for. There are no instructions in the kitchen either. No one is home, there’s no one to tell him what to do, or how to beg to make it well. Any course of action he can think of carries the weight of repercussion, because it won’t be the right one. Nothing he does now is going to be right.

So he sits. He sits at the kitchen table and waits. The shadows grow long, and after a while he silences his phone so Andrew’s texts stop interrupting the punishment he’s taking right now—a sentence of anxiety and fear and anticipation.

His father comes home late from work and deposits his briefcase by the door. He takes off his shoes and carries them in and up to his room, walking past Milo without speaking a word. The sun is setting, and the room has grown very dim, but he doesn’t dare turn up the lights.

When his father finally comes back, the first thing he does is get a garbage bag from under the sink. He snaps it open and holds it next to the table.

“Am I supposed to throw this away?” Milo fidgets. He’s scared of speaking, but holding his tongue when he’s meant to reply is just as bad.

“Read them all. Every grade and every note.”

John Graham is an imposing man, over six feet tall and well built. A life of leadership in the communities they’ve lived in have taught him how to project. When he speaks, people listen. His eyes, a lighter version of Milo’s, are incredibly changeable. Milo has seen him use them to charm and disarm people. His father is good at manipulating people and knows how to change his expression to fit each situation.

At home, he doesn’t need to change anything. Here, he’s himself first; the look in his eyes, steel and disappointment, is as natural as his breath.

Milo swallows and forces himself to maintain eye contact as long as he can. The last thing he wants to do now is to show his father his fear or any weakness. He can’t help that he’s flushed, because his coloring always gives him away, but he’ll be damned if he’ll let his hands or his voice shake. He knows that for every poor grade and every conversation deemed inappropriate, he’ll be punished. The least he can do is take it like a man.

°

He can’t tell if his father has become harder over the years, or if his expectations are more demanding, or if it’s just that Milo can grasp how awful his home life is in a different way because he’s older, but everything feels like too much, all the time. Some days he wakes up feeling as though he can’t breathe, days when his heart hurts from beating so hard, days when it’s almost impossible to get out of bed.

The free time he does get, scant as it is, he tries to spend at Andrew’s house. Andrew’s family knows that Milo’s home life sucks. His parents are kind and make room for him every way they can. But as things escalate in his house, and as his father becomes rougher, Milo finds himself keeping secrets from Andrew again. When he was a kid, his father rarely bruised him; his words and anger and booming voice and threats had been too much and enough to keep both Milo and his mother cowed. Sometimes now he has bruises from his father grabbing his arms, and a couple of times he’s been slapped, but that doesn’t leave marks.

What he can’t hide is his fear, the overwhelming anxiety that comes over him—not from Andrew, because it always hits him when he’s with Andrew. Andrew says he thinks it’s because Milo feels safe with him. All Milo knows is that after it happens; when his breath comes so short it feels like his heart will come out of his chest, when his vision goes dark with panic, he feels weak and embarrassed.

One day Andrew pulls him into his closet and closes the door, so that his voice is the only thing guiding Milo through breathing and calming, and eventually crawls out to get Milo tissues. Milo cries into his own arms, folded up on his knees, shaking and wishing the floor would swallow him for being so childish and fucked up. Andrew is always the calm in the storm, and when Milo needs it, he always puts his arms around him or lets Milo lean against him, and never complains about the time he takes up when Andrew surely has better things to do.

“I used to do this when I was little,” Milo says. It’s dark and Andrew’s body is warm—too warm. He’s sweating in the closet because of the stifling air and the heat of his own breakdown seeping through his skin. But it’s good.

“I remember; you told me once,” Andrew whispers. Milo cries, silently, and shakes with his face buried against Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew’s all bony angles and smaller than Milo, but makes room for him anyway.

They never talk about how bad things are getting, partly because they both know it’s hopeless to think there is help other than Milo getting away in two years when he goes to college.

°

“You haven’t complained about this in, like, thirty whole minutes,” Milo says one afternoon. “Are you gonna puke? You’ll waste away.”

“Oh, look, a comedian gracing my presence.” Andrew punches Milo’s arm lightly.

“You both need to shut up and focus,” Ted says. He’s using his whole body, moving the controller and his arms and torso as he navigates the game they’re playing. Milo’s naturally competitive nature kicks in and he turns back to the game. Andrew holds on as long as he can before throwing the controller down.

“Weak man,” Ted says. His eyes never leave the screen.

“Whatever.” Andrew closes his eyes. “Do you guys wanna go out? Movies? Coffee?”

Ted swears when he dies again.

“But this is a tournament!” Milo says. “We can’t walk away.”

“Well,” Ted says as he hits the pause button, “we are getting our asses kicked.”

“Fuck.” Milo puts down his own controller. “Maybe Andrew has a point.”

Andrew’s already texting and checking times on his phone. “Sarah wants to come, and Lindsey.”

Ted moans. “Oh god, not Lindsey.”

“You totally want to get into her pants,” Milo says. “You can’t pretend you don’t.”

“No,” Ted says. He shudders. “She’s so annoying.”

“But you think she’s hot, right?” Andrew says, raising an eyebrow and sharing a look with Milo.

“What movie do they want to see?” Ted stands, changing the subject effectively, but Andrew doesn’t miss the way he blushes. Sometimes he’s grateful that his skin is not nearly as fair as his friends’, because blushing rarely gives him away.

°

They end up watching the sort of slapstick comedy Andrew cannot stand. Thankfully, he’s next to Milo, who also hates this kind of crap. Majority rules have forced them here. They banter in whispers, commenting on the clothes, the awkwardness of cheap jokes and poorly choreographed physical comedy. More than once they’re shushed by other audience members. When a guy, obviously on a date, turns around and tells them to shut the fuck up, Milo sinks down in his seat, shaking with laughter. It sets Andrew off, who is susceptible to the giggles.

“What does he care?” Milo leans in to whisper in Andrew’s ear, setting off a cascade of delicious, nervy shivers. “He’s totally going in for the super awkward, probably sweaty hand hold.”

Andrew leans forward and peeks. He looks over and, in the bright wash of the screen light, half smiles in agreement. Milo’s lips are full and tempting and completely off limits. It’s very, very hard not to imagine him brushing them against Andrew’s neck. He gulps down a breath and leans into Milo’s space. If he inhales again to catch Milo’s scent, he really can’t be blamed. He hopes it’s subtle.

“What would you know? Whose hand have you been holding?” Milo smiles, but it’s a little weird. Andrew’s wondered about him recently, because Milo never says
anything
about girls or crushes or wanting.

They all eat at a diner after the movie. Sarah’s dressed normally—just jeans and a shirt that would work anywhere. She’s the kind of classic-pretty with sleek brown hair and beautiful clear skin that doesn’t need extra work. Lindsey, on the other hand, tries. She tries very hard. She’s dressed up more than any of them, wearing a glittery, slithery tank top that dips a little too low. She reapplies her lipstick while they wait to be seated, and Andrew wonders if that kind of thing works on Ted. Ted’s hardly said a word to her all night, but that hasn’t stopped him from looking.

At dinner Milo cracks jokes the whole time, poking fun at the movie and actors. He’s in a rare carefree mood, and when he’s on like this, he’s witty and easily funny. Sarah, a notorious food thief, tries to snatch fries from everyone’s plates when they’re distracted, and when Milo catches her, he swiftly smacks her hand away with a fork. Everyone bursts into loud laughter, drawing attention from other patrons. The line cook, visible behind the counter along the left wall of the diner, shrugs at a couple seated on stools. Andrew loves their town, where people know them and make room for rowdy teenagers.

“Okay, okay,” Sarah says, wiping her hand and still laughing. “Ted’ll share.”

“Maybe Lindsey—”

“No, shhhh,” Andrew interrupts Milo in a stage whisper, “don’t ruin the romance.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Ted says over the giddy laughter of the table. He balls up his napkin and throws it at Andrew, but it sails over his head and onto the booth behind them. Next to him, Milo laughs. His hair is a mess, the way it gets by nighttime, after hours of Milo running his hands through it and tugging on it. His freckles are faded as fall has eclipsed the bright rays of summer. When he turns to Andrew, his smile is bright in a way that’s very rare, and this moment of happiness settles into Andrew’s heart with a strong, cramping, longing weight. He wants this boy, but more, he wants this, to see his face creased with youth and happiness.

°

One Tuesday, mid-November, Milo comes home unusually wrung out from swim practice. All he can think about is how hungry he is, and his guard is completely down. His father is at the kitchen table with a stack of papers while his mother hovers at the stove. Whatever she’s making smells so amazing that he misses the lines of worry around her pursed lips and her posture of anxiety: shoulders drawn up and back ramrod straight.

It’s been well over a month since he’s done anything wrong—long enough that he’s stopped tiptoeing around, relaxing carelessly into the calm before a storm he should have sensed gearing up. Being caught defenseless and off guard makes everything worse.

“Are you prepared to explain yourself?” James speaks in the cold, controlled tone Milo knows means trouble. He has a split second to cast back for what he could have done today, before his father’s fist hits the table with a thump that rattles the matched set of salt and pepper shakers Milo’s always thought are hideous.

His father holds up the papers. Though they’re almost the same height, he looms menacingly, always bigger in Milo’s mind than he really is. His father stops shaking the papers long enough for Milo to see what they are: the history exam he hid in his room. How turned over is his room this time? He has to stop fooling himself into thinking he can hide things there.

“I promise to work harder,” Milo says, automatic words he doesn’t have to struggle for.

“That’s what you always say,” his father counters, sneering so his lips peel back. The papers scatter on the floor. Milo’s body goes cold, the way it does when he’s blessedly shutting down, when he’s suddenly not present in his body. It’s a thing that has started happening in the last year. He doesn’t do it on purpose, doesn’t know how it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all and those times are the worst, because there is nothing to protect him then.

After, Milo doesn’t remember what was said next. What he does remember is how it felt to come back to his numb body with a jolt; the throbbing sting where his father’s big palm slapped him is all the more painful for its unexpectedness.

He doesn’t tell Andrew about that. He doesn’t call him that night, but texts, managing to fake a light tone that won’t tip Andrew off. After his father retreats to his study to make phone calls, his mother brings him an ice pack. She kisses him with regret and apology deep in her eyes. Milo closes his eyes and swallows his anger, because the most she can protect him from is developing marks that will show.

° ° °

By Friday
Milo has managed make what happened into a distant memory. His face didn’t bruise, and after a day his father’s tightlipped anger faded a little. But after being given notice of an exam Monday in his pre-calculus class, he follows Andrew home to study, cracks open his textbook and, out of nowhere, begins to hyperventilate.

“Hey, hey.” Andrew’s voice pulls him back. “Here, squeeze.” He picks up Milo’s hand, and that’s both grounding and soothing. Milo closes his eyes, but when he does, he sees his father’s face, and he feels the fear he feels every day when coming home. He’s breathing so fast he’s starting to feel lightheaded.