I bump my leg into his, and he bumps mine back. If we were the typical boy-and-girl couple, we could kiss and hold each other and no one would give a flying fuck. But if you’re two guys like us, riding the Bronx tracks, you better make sure you hide any sign of affection if you want to fly under the radar. I’ve known this for the longest—I just hoped it wouldn’t matter. Someone whistles at us and I instantly knew I was wrong.
These two guys who were competing in a pull-up contest a few minutes ago walk up to us. The taller one with his jeans leg rolled up asks, “Yo. You two homos faggots?”
We both tell him no.
His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin’s eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.”
Collin smacks the dude’s hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.”
Nightmare after nightmare.
One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I’m too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he’s kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he’s kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing.
The train stops and the doors open but there’s no chance for escape. For us, at least. Those two guys laugh while they run out onto the platform. New passengers walk in and some just grab a seat before there are none left. Others act like they don’t see us. Only a couple of people come to our aid. But it’s too late.
Collin refused to go to the hospital. He said he couldn’t afford it and even though my mom could probably help him for free, he knew she would call his parents and maybe tell them everything, including that thing he never wants to share.
I get home thirty minutes later, still holding my balled-up shirt to my nose to soak up the little blood coming down. I came in through the garage so I wouldn’t have to pass any of my friends all fucked up like this. I limp straight to the bathroom and the door is cracked open, lights on inside. Eric’s supposed to be working at GameStop, and Mom’s visiting one of her patients in prison. I open the door and when I see who’s sitting in the bathtub, I drop the shirt and blood just spills down my face and chest.
Holy shit.
Dad.
His eyes are open but he’s not looking at me.
He didn’t take his clothes off before getting into the tub.
The water is a deep red, stained by the blood spilling from his slit wrists.
He came home to kill himself.
He came home to kill himself before I could bring a boy here.
He came home to kill himself because of me.
All this blood.
All this red makes me black out.
My legs hurt like hell but I don’t stop running through the park. I hop onto a bench and soar off of it, landing hard on my bad leg from when I got jumped, but I keep going. I usually slow down when I’m racing Collin so he doesn’t feel as bad. But not today. These pigeons eating bread from a knocked-over trash can scatter when I charge through them. I keep running, but the memory of my father dead in a bath of red keeps chasing me and it’s impossible to stop until I trip over my shoelaces and tumble into dirt.
Collin catches up to me and falls to his knees, panting heavily. “You . . . okay?”
I’m shaking and ready to pound my fists on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. He places a hand on my knee and I lunge up and hug him so hard I pop his back.
“Ouch! Shit,” he says, breaking free. “Cool it with that.”
I look around to see if anyone else is in the park. We’re alone. But Collin has his own ghosts too because of the last time I did something as simple as bumping his leg with mine; naturally someone would burn us at the stake if they caught us hugging. “I’m sorry.”
It’s only been two days, but I miss his face without the bruises and swollen eye.
Collin stands and I think he’s about to help me up but he just scratches his head. “I gotta go get cleaned up before I meet up with Nicole. She wants to talk.”
“Can you stick around for a little bit longer?” I see a no forming so I quickly say, “Forget it. Go do what you gotta do.”
And he does.
(AGE SIXTEEN—MARCH, FOUR MONTHS AGO)
None of us went to the funeral. There was a closed casket. I’m sure the service was poorly attended. The hated and hateful aren’t exactly a popular crowd. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted me there, which made it a missed opportunity to piss on his grave, but I ended up meeting with Collin instead and that’s poetic enough for me.
I’m sitting on the ground, and Collin is pacing back and forth. He still hasn’t really offered any real condolences or even hugged me, and it’s starting to get to me.
“He did this because of me,” I tell Collin, even though I’ve told him this over and over already. “Because of what we do together.”
“Maybe we should take a break,” Collin says. “Some time apart could be good for you.”
“That’s the last thing I want right now.” I don’t add the obvious, that we just got jumped together and my father killed himself. “We need to talk to the girls soon. I need you, uh . . . I need us to figure this out. I can’t have something else going wrong right now.”
“This is shitty timing, I know, but I actually can’t break up with Nicole, Aaron. Everything between us has been a slip. Look at everything that’s happened to you alone . . . You get why nothing else can go down between us, right?”
This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it’s so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you’re completely abandoned.
“You can’t do this,” I say. “I told my mother about you. My father killed himself because of us. We got jumped on the train because of who we are.”
Collin keeps pacing and refuses to look me in the eye. “We chose to be the wrong people. It just can’t work. Nicole’s pregnant and I was trying to talk her into not keeping the kid before I told you, but she is, so I gotta be a man again.”
Another bad thing but not unexpected, that was always a risk. “So you knocked her up, whatever. That doesn’t make you straight and you’re never going to be—”
“It’s not happening, Aaron.” He walks to the fence. I expect him to come back like he’s still pacing, but he just crouches down and leaves without another word.
Something snaps in my head and I’m fighting back tears.
I slipped too.
Whatever, I have a girlfriend too.
I don’t need him.
(AGE SIXTEEN—APRIL, THREE MONTHS AGO)
I know Dad killed himself because of me.
Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him.
Now I keep searching for happiness so I don’t end up like he did.
I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live.
I teach myself how to say and read and write happy in Spanish, German, Italian, and even Japanese but I would have to draw that last one out.
I discover the happiest animal in the world, the quokka. He’s a cheeky little bastard that’s always smiling.
But it’s not enough.
The memories are still rattling around my head, twisting into me like a knife. I don’t want to wait around to see what comes next for me in this tragic story I’m living. I open up one of my father’s unused razors and cut into my wrist like he
did, slit in a curve until it smiles so everyone will know I died for happiness.
I was expecting relief but instead it’s the saddest pain I’ve ever experienced. I never once stop feeling empty or unworthy of anyone’s rescue, not even when the thin line on my wrist makes everything go red.
I don’t want to die and I didn’t.
I spent a few days at the hospital where I met with this therapist, Dr. Slattery, who was the worst. I thought it was just me who couldn’t stand him, but I read his reviews online and saw I wasn’t the only one who thought the man was a joke:
“Dr. Slattery drove me crazier.”
“Dr. Slattery wouldn’t shut up about his own problems!”
And on and on.
Genevieve is taking much better care of me than that clown did. My mom finally let me out from under her watch, and Eric’s watch, too—both of them missing a lot of work as I stayed home from school. They let me out to celebrate my one-year anniversary with Genevieve.
She must’ve thought we’d run around the city having fun to keep my mind off of things, but instead I’m stretched out on her couch crying with my head on her lap because of all the pain I can’t reach. Pain someone else can remove.
“I don’t see how a Leteo procedure would really help you,” Genevieve says. “When my mother died, it was brutal, and—”
She doesn’t understand. She didn’t have to find whatever was left of her mother’s body on the plane’s crash site like I had to find my father dead in the bathtub. “I would forget finding him. That’s gotta be fucked up enough for Leteo to scrub out.”
“Yeah . . .” Genevieve says, crying too. “It’s gotta be.”
The TV’s volume is raised high so Genevieve’s dad can’t hear me cry. I’m not embarrassed, but I think it makes him uncomfortable. A commercial for this new movie, The Final Chase, comes on and it’s like a punch in the gut when I think about all the new movies I won’t see with Collin, all the comics we won’t read together, and how he’s basically acting like I never happened.
He’s undoing himself and I need to do the same.
(AGE SIXTEEN—MAY, TWO MONTHS AGO)
After an hour with Dr. Slattery, where I cried and cried out of frustration, I decide I want to spend some time outside—even if it means my mom has to sit out here with me. There’s a moving truck parked in front of Building 135. When I go to check out the new neighbor, I see Kyle wheeling a shopping cart of boxes into the back of the truck. I still half expect to find Kenneth right behind him, minding his own business.
One of the boxes falls out of the shopping cart. I pick it up and hand it over to Kyle, who won’t look me in the eyes. “Going somewhere?”
Kyle nods and drops the box into the truck.
“Where?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just can’t be here anymore.”
Brendan, Baby Freddy, Nolan, and Fat-Dave all come over. Brendan nods at me while everyone else looks at my bandaged wrist. He looks into the truck, sits down on the ramp, and asks, “What’s up, guys?”
“Kyle’s moving,” I say, throwing him under the bus because I’d really like an afternoon off from talking about my problems. “He won’t tell me where.”
“Because where I’m fucking going doesn’t fucking matter! I can’t go to Good Food’s anymore without Mohad calling me Kenneth. I can’t play Skelzies with you guys without making tops for Kenneth he’ll never use. I can’t even look at you, Aaron, because you get to live after trying to throw away your life and meanwhile Kenneth is nothing but bones by this point.”
Kyle’s parents come out of the lobby, and he snatches a box from his mother and throws it over Brendan’s head into the truck; we hear something shatter. “Just forget about me.” He heads back into the building and we all go into the third court before he comes back out.
Baby Freddy says, “That was awkward.”
Brendan shrugs. He turns to me and says, “You good?”
I nod, though really I feel like shit.
“That Collin kid coming to check on you?”
“No. And I don’t want him to,” I say, and we all drop it. Brendan even pats me on the back. We hang out for a bit like I never stopped being part of the crew, but then my mom calls me over and I run over ready to argue for more time to stay out.
“Dr. Slattery called,” Mom says, still clutching the phone in her hand.
“Is he giving us all the money back you’ve wasted on him?”
“He knows someone at Leteo.” Her eyes are closed, like she can’t face me. “He’s spoken with this woman, Dr. Castle or someone, and he’d like to refer us to her to discuss possibilities.”
Holy shit.
I look back at my friends. I know how to make everything right so they’ll never hate me again. I think about how I won’t have to think about Collin anymore.
“I want to do it.”
(AGE SIXTEEN—JUNE, ONE MONTH AGO)
It only took one session with Dr. Evangeline Castle for me to admit the root of my problems: my liking guys. She still made me sit through some sessions before approving me for the procedure, but the day is finally here. Mom can’t come with me because she’s missed too much work after everything and her boss’s sympathy could only go so far. Someone has to pay for our apartment and this procedure, after all, but at least I’ll have Genevieve with me.
“You’re going to be okay, my son.”
She once promised me that nothing bad would ever happen, and then I grew up and everything went wrong, but I believe her this time because the worst thing that can happen is that nothing will happen at all. “I know.”
“Aaron, you understand I’m signing off on this procedure for you, right? It’s not because I want to change you or think you need changing. I believe this will be a fresh start for all of us. I really want my son back, the boy who didn’t hurt my heart by using Genevieve and didn’t try to leave me.” She keeps hugging me, and what she says stings. Luckily I won’t ever have to remember being a complete disappointment to her and my father.
(AGE SIXTEEN—JUNE 18TH)
I trace the smiling scar and I feel like mirroring it. I’m insanely happy.
I qualify for the memory-relief procedure. The operation is scary-sounding and pretty extreme—it is experimental brain work, after all—and the doctors are cautious about administering it to those under the age of twenty-one. But I’m a danger to myself so they’re letting me shake the old ways and days out of my head.
The waiting room is crowded like usual, the complete opposite of the hospital where I saw Dr. Slattery. People aren’t exactly lining up outside for hours to meet with him. But at least the guy got us a pretty big discount with his referral. Silver lining.
Genevieve won’t stop shaking her leg. She can’t keep her hands still. It’s partly why I wanted to do this solo, but she and my mom wouldn’t take no for answer. I consider reading something from the table littered with mental health magazines and booklets and forms, but I know all I need to know already.
They turn away potential clients who only want a procedure to forget spoilers of Game of Thrones or someone who broke their heart. But this isn’t that movie. Leteo helps people who hurt themselves because of harmful memories—you won’t die from heartbreak but you’ll die from, well, killing yourself.
Like this elderly Hispanic guy who won’t stop reciting the winning lottery numbers he lost to; he’ll likely get sent home without a chance to forget.
I recognize some of the patients from the group therapy sessions they forced me to attend, just to see if time was enough to resolve my problems.
Fun fact: sitting through those sessions only made me want to hurt myself even more.
A middle-aged woman banshee-wails from her seat, rocks back and forth, and punches the walls. An orderly rushes to her aid and tries calming her down. I know who she is, not her name or a
nything, but she’s constantly reliving the memory of her five-year-old daughter chasing a bird into a busy street, and yeah, it’s pretty fill-in-the-blank from there.
I try to keep my eyes low and ignore her screams, but I can’t help but look up when another orderly approaches with a straitjacket. They carry her away through the same door I’m about to walk through. I wonder how much of her life she’ll have to forget to live without a straitjacket—and maybe a muzzle if she doesn’t keep it down.
The waiting room is silent now. Any chatter has stopped. Lives depend on this procedure.
This really obese dude—Miguel, I think—told our therapy group that he could stop overeating only after he forgets his childhood traumas. He’s here now, the ketchup stain of his last meal on his shirt. I almost want to hug him. I hope he’s deemed unfit enough to get the procedure so he can be healthy again, physically and mentally.
Like him, I’m here because I don’t want to be who I am anymore. I want to be so happy that bad memories aren’t following me around like unwanted shadows.
Dr. Castle encouraged me to give her a list of happy things I should think about whenever I started thinking about things I shouldn’t. During sessions, I always faked smiles while unhappily answering because she was so nice. She was trying to help.
I hold Genevieve’s hand to calm her down, which seems pretty backward if you ask me. There’s blue and orange paint crusting around her fingernails. “What were you working on?” I ask her.
“Nothing good. I was playing around with that idea I was telling you about, the one with the sun drowning in the ocean instead of setting behind it. I didn’t know how to finish it though . . .”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. Not surprised.
She reaches across me and stops me from tugging at my sleeve, which I didn’t even realize I was doing. She knows all my signs and I can’t even pay attention to her when she talks. “You’re going to be okay, babe. You have to be.”
Empty promise. No one ever thinks they’ll get cancer. No one expects a gunman to open fire at the bank. “I’m more nervous that nothing will happen instead of something going wrong.”