True Letters from a Fictional Life (19 page)

I stared at her. “At a dance. I met him at a dance.”

“Are you—” She repositioned herself on the bed. “Are
you sleeping with this boy? With this young man? With Topher?”

“What?” I whispered. My dad looked as stunned as I felt.

“I think it's a reasonable question to ask after your seventeen-year-old son comes home from school with a black eye and announces that he's gay,” my mom said in a hurry.

“No, it's not a reasonable question. You never once asked me that when you thought I was dating Theresa.”

“I never worried about you contracting HIV when I thought you were dating Theresa.”

I looked for help from my dad, but he just gazed back at me.

“This is a nightmare,” I said.

No response from either of them. They were waiting for me to answer the question. “I mean, I know to use condoms. That's what you want to know, right?”

“Don't raise your voice at me.”

“I didn't raise my voice.”

“I asked you a question.”

I sprang out of my chair. My dad stood up, too, but I stalked past him out of my own room, down the stairs, out the front door. I made it halfway down the driveway, planning to walk to Derek's, when I realized that I'd have to hike along the main road with my black eye. People I knew would pull over, and I didn't want to talk. Or fight. I crossed the lawn. Rex had left a soccer ball outside, and I booted it hard at one of my mother's azaleas. Pink blossoms exploded like
fireworks. I walked faster before anyone could scream from the house, and when I reached the woods, I disappeared.

There's a narrow deer trail a few feet into the woods. It's not easy walking, especially when you have only one eye. Thorny branches and vines caught my shirt, scratched my arms, drew blood. Black flies bit my ears and ankles. Swatting them away, I pushed through a green tangle, and a thorn ripped a long stinging streak across my neck. Then I tripped on a root and cracked my shin against a log. Cursing Mark and my mother, I stumbled into a little sunny clearing.

Beech and ash trees surrounded tall grass and a carpet of moss. There was the old oak cradling the rotting deer stand. I hadn't been in that stretch of woods in a couple of years, at least. I looked around and took a deep breath.

Kicking through leaves, I headed to the stream.

Rex had dammed it with big, smooth granite stones. I recognized some of them from when I was younger—I remembered their size and shape and color, their cold weight in my arms as Derek and I stacked them in walls and towers. Some of the frogs along those wet banks had spent so much time cupped in my muddy hands that they didn't bother to jump away when I crawled close. I didn't remember there being so many fish, though. Tiny trout darted into the shadows beneath overhanging roots. Ankle-deep stretches of stream would've reached my knees now, but the air was the same—that mossy smell you can taste when you close your
eyes in winter and remember green light and birdsong.

I knelt on a sunny stretch of pebbles and splashed water on my cuts and swollen eye. Once when I was ten, I slurped from the stream—it was so hot, the water so cold, I couldn't resist. Somehow I didn't get sick.

I lay down on the sunny stones and closed my good eye.

When shadows fell across me, I stood and followed my old path up to the meadow with the boulder on the hillside. I hadn't been up there since the beginning of April, our last sledding day of the winter. Rex's sneaker prints led the way through muddy stretches of trail. I wondered if my parents were looking for me. Or if they were crying into the phone to their friends. Maybe they were figuring out how to apologize. Maybe they'd take me to dinner. Or buy me something out of guilt. My eye still ached, and I didn't have any ice.

The field, when I stepped out of the woods, was gold in late afternoon light. Crows called back and forth as I crossed the dry grass. I climbed onto the big rock, warm from the afternoon sun. I'd told Topher that I'd bring him here to see this—the view across the valley, Mount Cube and the long slope of Smarts, and in the winter through the trees, the hunch of Ascutney. I'll bring him here in the summer, I thought. We'll watch the stars and my parents can go—

A stone cracked the rock next to me and landed in the grass. I spun, squinting.

Derek was trudging toward me, hands in his pockets.

“I thought I'd find you here. Second time in a single afternoon I get to say that.”

“You see my folks?”

“Your dad answered the door. He said you'd split for the hills.”

“Yeah, I'm on my way. Just resting up. Maybe my mother will have moved out by the time I get back.”

“Yikes. The conversation went well, huh?”

“She punched me. In the same eye, luckily. So you can't tell.”

“Seriously, she kicked you out?”

“She didn't kick me out. I just left. She asked me whether I was sleeping with Topher.”

“Huh. I was going to ask you the same thing. What's the big deal?”

“You're not my mom.”

“True.” He picked a grass stalk and stuck it in his mouth. “But. So . . . are you sleeping with Topher?”

I cracked up and ignored the question. “I still don't get how you're so calm about all this. I thought you hated gay people. You used to say some nasty stuff about them.”

“So did you.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I was scared. It's confusing.”

He threw a rock out toward the hills. “It's definitely confusing,” he said.

“So, you don't think I'm an abomination, huh? And you're not going to go to hell for hanging out with me?”

Derek shot me a glance and lobbed another rock. “You know, a few years ago a kid at my church told me I was damned because I'm black. Something about Noah cursing the descendants of Ham. He showed me the Bible passage. I was sort of scared, so I asked my parents about it, and they just laughed at the idea. I remember my father rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Of course you're not going to hell.' But then I asked him whether gay people were going to burn, and my dad stopped laughing. He just goes, ‘Are you gay? No? Then don't worry about it.' Since then, the whole ‘God hates you and you're going to hell' idea has seemed sort of stupid. I don't know. Seems like Jesus probably likes you and Topher more than He likes the Christians who kill people.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked.

“Why didn't
I
tell
you
? We've been talking about girls since we were twelve and you've been gay this whole time and you ask me why
I
didn't tell
you
?”

“Okay, okay. You've said that already.”

“Yeah, that's right. Now climb down off your rock. I have to go home and take all sorts of heat for being a hero.”

“You just got here.”

“I wasn't factoring in the hike.”

I jumped to the ground, and we started back toward my house. We'd just left the bright meadow and stepped into the forest's shade when Derek stopped short and grabbed my arm. “Look,” he gasped. I followed his gaze and there, not twenty
yards away, stood a moose. His gangly legs were white up past his knees, as if frosted by deep snow, and his stubby antlers ended in fists.

“Whoa,” I barely whispered.

The moose stared back at us. We all stood frozen for ten, maybe fifteen seconds.

And then Derek sang just a little too loudly, “Heeere, moosey moosey moosey . . .”

“Don't scare him,” I started to say, but the moose was already galumphing into the woods.

“Whoops,” said Derek. “Should we follow him?”

I considered it for a moment. “No, let's leave him alone. Maybe he'll come back around later.” This is his place after all, I thought. He should be able to be where he belongs without being scared.

“That was crazy!” Derek laughed, back to full volume. “I've never seen a moose around here.”

“You said you saw one on your way to pick me up one morning.”

“Oh, yeah? I didn't. I must've been lying.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Again, you used to talk about girls as if you liked them. That turns out to be false.”

“Well, now we can talk about them much more honestly.”

“Oh, that's generous.”

“Which girl should we talk about?”

“Kim. We're supposed to hang out this weekend.”

“No way.”

“Yup. It's true.”

“Well, that's great. What else can I say?”

“Nothing. It is great. And guess who Hawken's been talking to?”

“Tell me Theresa.”

“Genius.”

As we emerged from the woods onto my lawn, Derek asked, “You going to school tomorrow?”

I shrugged. “I don't want to fall behind in my learning. So, you know, yeah, I'll be there, I think. I might sleep out here, though.”

My phone rang. Hawken.

“Hi, Tim Hawken.”

“I'm sorry he hit you.” No hello or anything. “What's wrong with that kid? Why would he hit you?”

Derek patted my shoulder and jabbed his thumb at his car.

“Hawken, hold on a second.” Derek ignored my outstretched hand and hugged me good-bye. I hoped my parents were watching from the window.

“Sorry, Hawken,” I said as Derek got in his car. “So, I thought you said Mark was okay with your brother.”

“I thought he
was
okay with Patrick. In fact, I called Patrick a little bit ago to tell him about all of this and I said, ‘Mark's been fine around you, right?' And he goes, ‘I don't
know. We've never had that much to say to each other.'”

“It's easy to misjudge people, I'm learning.”

“I told my mom what happened, and she said she won't let him back in the house. She also offered to call your parents to, you know, talk about, uh, what to do with a gay son and all.” And then he started laughing that scratchy laugh of his. “Sorry. For real. She offered to call. You want her to?”

I hesitated. “You're a jackass. Let me get a read on the situation, but tell your mom I said thank you. I'll let you know. My mom didn't take the news all that well today, and I sort of bolted out of my house.”

“Holy smokes! You ran away? Where are you?”

“On my driveway.”

He laughed harder this time.

“I'll see you tomorrow, dude. Thanks again.”

He hung up, still laughing, but I pretended to still be on the phone as I walked into my house. Rex and my parents were in the kitchen.

“Yeah, yup,” I said into the dead receiver as I walked past them all.

“What happened to your eye?” shouted Rex.

“I got in a fight,” I said over my shoulder as I grabbed a package of mixed vegetables from the freezer.

“Did you win?” he gasped.

“Nobody won,” shot my mother.

Letting the comment slide, I walked out of the kitchen, up to Luke's room, and called Topher. My dad peeked in,
where I lay on the bed relating the day's events, and gave a little nod and wave.

I didn't come down for dinner that night, and nobody came up to get me. I don't know if it was my mom or my dad or Rex who opened my door around 9:30, but I'd already crawled into bed and pretended to be asleep. I got up in the middle of the night and scribbled Derek a letter.

Tuesday, June 7th

Derek,

It's 2:15 a.m. I was thinking back to our conversation earlier, when you pointed out that we've been talking about girls since we were twelve and I've known the whole time that I'm gay. And you were sort of right, sort of wrong. I knew I liked boys. But somehow I managed to convince myself that liking boys didn't mean I was gay. I know it doesn't make much sense, but I believed it.

I guess it was in middle school that I started figuring out that I like boys. Remember that kid Charlie? I can't think of his last name, but he was in our eighth-grade class for a few months, and he had brilliant blue eyes. I'm sure that helps you out. Anyway, I remember Charlie standing near my locker after school talking to Julie Taber, a girl I knew I should like because she was hot, and I couldn't stop staring at him. Man, he had great eyes. I remember it really clearly. He was wearing a blue and black rugby shirt. He was chatting away with Julie, and I felt all sorts of jealous, and then I suddenly realized that my
jealousy was toward her, not him. I wasn't jealous that he was going to get the girl; I was jealous that she was going to get the boy. I remember that dawning on me and feeling sort of sick to my stomach. I turned away and stared down the hallway in the other direction, my books scattered around my feet. I think I probably started drinking heavily right about then. Aaahaha . . . no wait, actually, that's probably true. Hmm. Interesting. Then again, you were drinking with me, so what's your excuse?

Anyway, I didn't have any trouble knowing which girls to like. It's not as though I couldn't tell who was pretty. So it hasn't been tough hiding. I don't feel like I've been lying to anyone, though. I mean, since I was little, everyone's told me that I like girls. Think about it—even when you're in kindergarten, there are all sorts of messages that eventually you'll grow up to like girls. Man, when you're barely able to walk people make these cutesy comments about your girlfriends and how you're going to be a lady killer and all sorts of crap like that. You were an ugly little kid, Derek, so perhaps you didn't get that sort of attention, but I've always been told that I'm straight. And that's the story I was trying to make happen. I didn't come up with the lie. It wasn't mine. They handed the lie to me, and I tried like hell to make it work for a while.

No one meant any harm, but I've spent some long nights unable to sleep, worrying about how it's all going to work out and blaming myself for being some sort of pervert. You know, I was lying in bed at night worrying when I was in, like, eighth
grade. That ain't right.