Then I woke up. I went downstairs, my heart racing with the thought of talking about what had happened, but I was determined to get it out. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t see Nick and Dalton again.
And that’s what I said after I asked my parents to meet me in the living room. I sat across from them, the two of them, a team, on the couch and me, alone, in the recliner.
“Something happened last night,” I started, picking at the arm of the chair with my fingernail. “When I went out to take out the trash.”
Mom paled, but Dad’s face didn’t even tighten. He showed no emotion or anticipation, just sat with him hands folded together, waiting for me to go on. I had the thought later that his calmness should have been reassuring, that his unflappability should have made himfeel sturdy and dependable. It didn’t. It just made him feel cold. I fixed my eyes on Mom as I went on.
“When I went outside, Nick and Dalton were waiting for me in the alley. You know they’ve been giving me a hard time for awhile now,” I cleared my throat. It felt dry and tight. I coughed. “When they saw me, Nick held my wrists and Dalton put his hand down my pants. They said they wanted to check—”
My dad stood from the chair so fast that his knees knocked into the coffee table, flipping it to the floor. He raised his hand so that his palms were flat in the air like a stop sign.
“Do not say another word,” he said. “I am not going to sit here and listen to you complain about how you have the neighbor boys so confused they don’t even know what you are anymore.”
Spit flew out of his mouth with the sharpness of his words and I felt each one like a physical blow. They knocked the wind out of me. I looked away from him again, again fixing my eyes on my mom. She was looking at the floor and tears were like eyeliner against the rims of her eyes. She didn’t speak as my dad stormed out. She didn’t speak as we heard the front door slam shut in the distance. She didn’t speak until I stood up on wobbly legs, planning to go to my room and figure out what to do with my trash heap of a life.
“Your dad didn’t mean what he said,” she called after me, voice soft and shaking. “He loves you, Lennox.”
I whipped around, poised to argue with her, ready to tell her that people who love you don’t make you feel like shit, but then I saw her and froze. She looked so defeated in that moment. She still hadn’t looked up from the carpet and her tears were still perched on the rims of her eyelids, threatening to fall but holding steady.
I walked over to where she sat and nudged her tiny, thin foot with my sneaker. She looked up and the tears rolled down her cheeks, finally succumbing to defeat. Color had drained so completely from her face that even her freckles had gone pale. Our eyes, matching shades of steel grey, locked onto each other’s.
I wish we had one of those mother-daughter bonds where a conversation could pass between us without words being necessary. Where words didn’t even matter because our expressions could communicate everything. I wish I hadn’t found myself practically begging when I did finally find the words I was looking for.
“But Mom, he’s so angry at me. And why? Because I’m gay? Does that really change anything?”
It was like all the air had left the room everything went so still. I had never said the word gay before and definitely not in reference to myself. As soon as my lips were finished forming the words, I could feel a physical change in my own world.
“Don’t ever say that to me again,” my mom said, almost wheezing each syllable. “There is no such thing as gay. Gay is a lie that the Devil tells us to make excuses for our deviance.”
With her weight centered on her hand as she pushed up against the coffee table, Mom righted herself. She crossed the space between us slowly, and I felt guilty, like it was my fault the word gay had knocked the wind from her. She left the room without speaking and I took her place on the couch. I felt the warmth of the fabric where she’d just been sitting. I breathed in the scent of the musky, floral perfume my dad always bought her. We were in the same house, but the distance felt like it was bigger than you could show on any map. I missed her with everything inside me even though she had just been in the same spot where I was sitting.
When Hannah said the word gay so easily, I’d been startled.
That’s weird, I know, but before the day I told my mom that I was gay, I’d never heard anyone talk about it casually. People only said gay in the context of other people being gay and it was never like it was no big deal. It had always been a capital S sin, this thing that was looming in the back of my mind that would make me unworthy to everyone I knew if I didn’t hide it well enough. When she shruggingly announced that she was gay like it was no big deal, it was like my Dad was in the room, like I could feel his eyes on me, catching me in the act of something not only forbidden but dangerous. Even as I insisted to her that I wasn’t, that I wouldn’t be, it wasn’t her that I was talking to. It was Mom and Dad, it was Dalton and Nick, it was everything I had left behind. Everything I hadn’t been able to leave behind.
Chapter Seven
Hannah
The next day was Marley and my annual Christmas Break tradition: crappy holiday movies followed by cocoa and grilled cheese that we cut into bells with cookie cutters. It wasn’t a particularly unique tradition, but it was ours and I had looked forward to it every year since the first one when we were nine and spent the day with A Christmas Story and Home Alone.
Marley came in like a comet, all quick movements and fiery red hair. She had threatened to cut off her crazy red curls for as long as I knew her, but I had begged her not to; with anyone else, I wouldn’t care about hair, but something about the crimson mane that Marley was so well-known for had just become who she was. Everything about her screamed fireball, even the way she walked into my house without knocking, throwing the door wide. She had no small movements, even though she was easily my smallest friend. At five foot even and about 90 pounds, she was the last person you would imagine would take up all the space in every room, but that was Marley.
She plopped down on my family’s old, slightly fraying sectional and produced a Tupperware container from her tote. It was full of Christmas Crack, a crunchy, toffee and chocolate coated treat that had been my favorite for as long as I could remember. I vented the lid and breathed in the sweet smell of toffee and butter before sealing it tight.
“I thought we agreed no crack this year!” I hooted at her. “We can’t all stay at a permanent state of size 00.”
With a roll of her eyes and a shrug of her shoulders, Marley jerked the tub away from me and pulled the lid completely off. She shoved it up under my nose. “It’s Christmas,” she said simply. “Diets are for New Year’s.”
I laughed at that and snatched up one of the bigger pieces I saw. She was right, of course, and it’s not like the five extra pounds I was carrying were crisis level or anything. Definitely nothing that warranted a total refusal of my favorite holiday morsel. As I bit into the cookie, my eyelids fluttered with delight.
“I reject these as a Christmas treat,” I told her, getting ready to start the same dialogue we had exchanged for nearly a decade with absolutely no change to our behavior. “We can make these all year and just call them different things.”