Not to mention money we don’t have on flowers when I haven’t had a new winter coat in three years, he did not add.
She had waited a moment, then picked up the pallet and took it out front without a word of thank you. Moments later, when he’d changed into his running gear and sprinted past her to start his workout, she was already arm-deep in topsoil at the side of the driveway. She called something out to him, but he had his earbuds turned up loud and was pretty sure he hadn’t heard her.
His parents. They hadn’t always been this angry/wary/scared of him. His childhood had been all right, even filled with talk of “blessings” after four years of effort to have a second child had been so literally fruitless they had just given up. As was often the way with these things, Adam was born eight months later.
My Baby, she’d called him. For too long. For too many years. Until it stopped being a phrase of love and started to contain within it an iron weight of instruction. You will never be our equal, they seemed to be telling him, no matter how old you get. Especially when all his little friends growing up were girls. Especially when he never watched the Super Bowl but never missed the Oscars. Especially when he started to seem “a bit gay”.
She’d actually said that in front of him at a Wendy’s one Sunday night after church. “Do you think he might be a bit gay?” she’d asked across the table to his father, as fifteen-year-old Marty looked furiously into his chocolate Frosty and eleven-year-old Adam’s face stung as keenly as a slapped sunburn.
All he had done was mention how fun the dance classes sounded that the son of his sixth-grade teacher was taking.
“No,” his father said to his mother too quickly, too firmly. “And don’t talk like that. Of course he isn’t.” With his eye on Adam, making clear this was only partly belief and mostly command and one hundred per cent denial of any dance classes.
The subject hadn’t come up again, not once, in the intervening six years.
Nobody here was a fool. Not Adam, who had mastered clever Internet searching before his parents knew what a Wi-Fi child lock even was. And his mom and dad were both educated people, not even a little bit blind to what the world was like, how it had changed even in Adam’s lifetime. But sometimes it felt like change only happened in far-off cities and was having too much fun there to make it out to the suburbs, where the benefit of his parents’ education was merely that they smiled and kept mostly quiet about their certainties rather than discarding them.
His father was an evangelical minister, after all. With Adam as a son. Particular denials of reality were going to be necessary for anyone in that house.
So no one talked about it, but there had been curfew and sleepover restrictions that Marty hadn’t suffered, first in Adam’s friendship with Enzo, and only less in his friendship with Linus because they barely knew Linus existed, Angela covering for him to an extent he’d never be able to repay. Church, twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday, was mandatory, of course, and his regular trips to Christian summer camp were more strictly enforced than Marty’s, too – though Marty had been only too happy to go. Even Adam’s joining of drama club at school was not so subtly resisted until he told them he was also joining the cross-country team.
He crossed mile four at the end of the old railroad path, having to turn sideways to get past five moms pushing five strollers side by side. It was usually at this point in the run that he was no longer arguing with anyone in his head. Oh, well.
Angela loved her parents. They were the kind of family that laughed together over dinner. She hadn’t had a curfew since fourteen because they trusted her not to get in any trouble. When she’d lost her “full” virginity, as she called it, the experience hadn’t been what Angela was expecting and she and her mom had actually talked it over afterwards (though not before Adam and Angela had thoroughly debriefed first).
Adam imagined the look on his dad’s face if he’d gone to him the first time after full penetration with Enzo. An elderly man on what appeared to be a home-made bicycle looked up and grinned at Adam’s passing laugh.
Adam turned down the path that ran along a stretch of lakefront, across a side bay from where Enzo’s party would be tonight. He had only been planning to run six miles, especially with the chrysanthemum delay, but felt like he needed to make it eight, needed to push that little bit further. He had reached the point, that rare point that sometimes happened in a run, where he felt aware of his youth, aware of his strength, aware of the temporary immortality granted in these moments of fullest physical exertion. He could run these last four miles forever. He would run them forever.
He heard the car horn honking before he was a hundred feet along the path but assumed it couldn’t possibly be for him.
His parents had never really liked Enzo but couldn’t bring themselves to say so outright. Enzo – Lorenzo Emiliano Garcia – was from Spain. He’d been born there, though he had no memory of it, his parents having found their way to America shortly after his birth and then to the nearly rural commuter town of Frome just before the eighth grade. He had no accent but had a European passport. Actually, having a passport even without the adjective was impressively strange on its own. But it wasn’t that he was moving back to Spain after tonight. His mother, an endocrinologist, had taken a job all the way across the country, in Atlanta. Adam’s parents were really only letting him go to the get-together out of relief at Enzo vanishing as an influence in their son’s life.
The hilarious thing was that it had nothing to do with all the physical stuff they’d shared, all the sex and love (Could Adam call it that? Did Enzo? Did he, though?), the intimacy and closeness. If his parents had genuinely suspected any of that, he would have been packed off to ex-gay camp faster than a mosquito’s blink.
No, they objected because Enzo was Catholic.
He laughed to himself again as he ran. The endorphins were really cooking now.
“Have you been a witness to this boy?” his father would ask. “It’s what the Lord wants of us. What He demands of us.”
“They go to church every Sunday, Dad. I think they’ve probably got a Lord of their own.”
“Don’t blaspheme.”
“How is that–”
“You can talk him away from the lie of the papacy.”
“That’s probably what I should start with, huh?”
“Dang it, Adam! All this, this, this charisma you have. All this drive–”
“You think I have charisma?” Adam was genuinely astonished.
“You’re not like Martin.” It sounded like a painful admission. It almost certainly was. “Your brother … has different blessings, but he’s never going to be as effective with words as you.” His dad shook his head. “I prayed for a preacher as a son, and God, in His infinite humour, gave me one with all of the faith but none of the talent and another with all of the talent but none of the faith.”
“That’s a little hard on Marty, don’t you–”
“Just be a witness to this boy, son.” Adam was astonished (again) to see what seemed to be tears in his father’s eyes. “You could be so effective. So, so effective.”
Well, Adam had thought to himself, I’ve had my mouth on his bare skin. That seemed to be effective.
He didn’t say that, though.
Mostly, he was confused by the conversation. Not his dad’s evangelizing, of course, but that it was the first time in a long time, too long, that his dad had expressed any hope in him. They’d seemed to decide he was the Prodigal Son in waiting and were happy to let that story play out.
Even the endorphins as he crossed mile five weren’t enough to make this feel joyous. He pushed himself, ran harder.
He had loved Enzo. Loved him. And who cared if it was the love of a fifteen- and then a sixteen-year-old. Why did that make it any less? They were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet. Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and eupho
ric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young.
He had loved Enzo.
And then Enzo, for reasons Adam could – still – not quite understand, had stopped loving Adam. They became “friends”, though how that was supposed to work, Adam also still didn’t know. He’d witnessed to Enzo with his love. If he was as charismatically effective as his father seemed to believe, why hadn’t that been enough to make Enzo love him back?
“Shit,” he said, stopping on the lake path, putting his hands on his knees and just panting–
“Shit,” she hears, as she continues through the trees away from the lake, and there it is again, the same pricking on her heart.
A part of her wants to move towards the sound, feels the pull of something, perhaps as simple as the warmth of another human, and so she goes, three, four, five steps deeper into the trees–
But the warmth is moving again, away from her.
She’s not worried. If it’s who she is looking for, she will find him.
Of this – and maybe this alone – she is certain.
–the sweat quickly dripping from his nose in three, four, five black circles on the path’s pavement. It had been months since it ended with Enzo, months spent happily with Linus, how ridiculously lucky was that, approaching the twelfth grade of a public high school in the sub-sub-suburbs? And they were good months, months full of laughter and tenderness.
So why did it still ache?
“You okay, son?” The old man on the home-made bicycle had caught up to him.
Adam popped out an earbud. “Just a broken heart.”
“My advice?” The old man didn’t stop, just kept slowly pedalling by. “Whiskey. And lots of it.”
Adam laughed in a single syllable, shaking his head as he took off running again.
He was at the point – he checked his phone – just over thirty-five minutes in, where nothing hurt. His legs were in rhythm, his feet hitting their strike at the right cadence, his arms swinging their counterweight.
I feel strong, he thought, almost consciously. I feel strong. He ran a little faster.
Still, his parents loved him. They must. In their own way. But that way seemed to depend on an unspoken set of rules Adam was expected to know and abide by; and to be fair, he probably did know them. It was abidance that was a problem.
He had loved, though. And been loved himself. That he was sure of, even if it was Angela. Plus, she was the one who told him he was in love with Enzo (and, in fact, was the one who told Enzo that, too). He’d given his feelings for boys a name not long before then, had even already somehow lost his virginity (though that was another story), so it certainly wasn’t just being oblivious, though Angela had proved strangely vehement about naming anything.
“Let’s say I want to kiss Shelley Morgan,” she’d said.
Adam had looked over from the throw pillows they were sharing on the floor of her family’s TV room. “You do?”
“Well, kind of. I mean, who doesn’t? She’s part-vampire, part-baby marmot.”
“And that does it for you?”
“It does it for most people who aren’t you. Now, shut up, I’m making a point: I’d also be interested in kissing Kurt Miller.”
“Ugh, you already have, though. And all that peach fuzz.”
“Really? I find it endearing. But say I want to kiss both Shelley and Kurt and I want to do this on the same day. What would that make me?”
“Hungry?”
“No, you’re supposed to say ‘bi’ and I’m supposed to yell at you. Or you were supposed to say ‘slut’ and I’d really yell at you.”
They waited a moment while a handsome-but-stupid-and-very-waxed frat jock got flayed by the hillbilly zombie in the movie they’d downloaded. One of the many things Adam and Angela bonded over was a shared hatred of drippy teen movies. Horror all the way.
“Sick,” Angela said, eating a Dorito.
“But wouldn’t that make you bi, though?”
“Oh, my God, no, you label fascist!”
“There it is.”
“My point: why do you have to call yourself anything? Because, if you don’t, freedom. Because, self-actualization. Because, fluidity and not calcifying into what that label will make you.”
“How about, because having an identity can be just as powerful as actualizing my fluidity?”
“But are you sure you only like boys? Why not keep your options open?”
“Because my entire upbringing has told me there was only one way to be. That any other way is wrong. A deviation from their certainty.”
“All the more reason to–”
“I’m not finished. When I realized how things were, when I said to myself that I am not this thing I’ve been told I have to be, that I am this other thing instead, then Jesus, Ange, the label didn’t feel like a prison, it felt like a whole new freaking map, one that was my own, and now I can take any journey I want to take and it’s possible I might even find a home there. It’s not a reduction. It’s a key.”
Angela ate another Dorito, thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “I can see that.”
“And if I felt anything like that for a girl, don’t you think it would only ever be you?”
“Oh, fuck off, Disney Channel, you’re way too tall for me.” But she scooted across the Darlingtons’ shag carpet and put her head on his shoulder. She stared at the screen for a minute while a topless blonde was beheaded. “I think I want to kiss Shelley more than Kurt, though.”
“Whatever, I promise never to call you anything until you tell me to.”
“And I promise not to care about your small-minded label because you insist it’s liberating.”
“Good.” He kissed the top of her head.
“Now, when are you going to get into Enzo Garcia’s pants already?”
“Enzo?” He’d been genuinely surprised. And then, suddenly, not. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
And that was how, not three weeks later, at Angela’s sixteenth birthday party (she was four months older and surprisingly gracious about not lording it over him), the only other guests besides Adam were a pleasantly surprised Enzo and a slightly baffled but really quite sweet Shelley Morgan.
“Here’s how it is,” Angela said in a low voice to Adam and Enzo after her parents had dropped them off at the bowling alley. “I’m going to spend this whole evening seeing how well worth getting to know better Shelley is, and you two need to leave us to it. Fortunately, Enzo, Adam is totally in love with you, so you’ll have lots to talk about.”
She’d left them to their stunned silence, Adam realizing too late that he should have been laughing it off immediately.
He hadn’t. Enzo noticed. At the end of the night, they kissed in a shadow outside. Enzo tasted of pretzels and warm, his lips as soft as a sleepy puppy. Adam had almost been literally dazed, like he’d never been so thirsty.
Angela ended up kissing Shelley Morgan, too, but said that she had smelled of grape. “It was like kissing a Care Bear.”
That had started Enzo and Adam, though. All seventeen months, one week, and three days of it.
Adam passed six miles where the path on the lakeside started a long curve back into the woods. His music still blasted in his ears, but it all somehow felt silent back here. The path was empty, the lake steadily disappearing behind thickening trees. His breath pulled one pattern over the slightly different one of his feet. He passed into some shadow and the sudden coolness made him realize how wet with sweat he was, his shirt soaked all the way down to the hem.
He checked his phone again. No wonder. The running app showed he was at top pace. One that, if he’d been able to keep it up over all these distances rather than so late into them, might have made him a competitive cross-country runner after all.
Maybe Angela’s joke, if that’s what it was, had been the problem with Enzo in the end. She was trying to be helpful, assuming Enzo was just as interested in Adam, but if he was
n’t, she had effectively handed over all of Adam’s power in one simple sentence.
“Do you really love me?” Enzo had asked, just before they kissed, a smile half disbelieving, half intrigued across that beautifully handsome face of his.
And why not? It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.
A square slab of grey concrete abruptly ends the treeline. She almost falls into the empty air, as if a wall has been removed.
She stands, astonished.
I am here.
There are cuts on her feet from her walk through the forest. The ground was littered not only with the green detritus of a mature woodland but the garbage of humans. Broken glass, a rusted shopping cart, so very much plastic in a limitless array of colours, all of them ugly, and in one small clearing, a bed of used hypodermic needles that stabbed her feet as she walked over them, bite after bite, until she looked as if she’d been attacked by a porcupine.
Though she does not bleed. And the pain is so distant as to be in another room.
Ahead of her now, across the square of concrete, stands a closed-down convenience store, fading to dereliction.
I have thirst, she thinks.
“I have thirst,” she says aloud.
“You won’t find any help there, little lady,” a voice answers.
A man. His clothes, his skin, his hair, all the colour of camouflaging dust, hiding him as he sits in the shadow of an elderly dumpster along the side of the building.
She tries to answer, tries to ask him what he means, but her mouth struggles and all she is able to say is, “I have thirst” again, frowning at the effort.
The man leans out of the shadows to get a better look at her. His face is a mask of beard and sun-damaged wrinkles, but the concern there is plain. “Are you coming down off something?” His voice changes, as if he is talking to himself. “Probably meth, yeah, probably meth, all those labs out there in the trees, but the face, the face, meth melts your face, and that face ain’t melted, that face is the sun on water, man, the sun on water, the sun on the water.” He speaks up again. “Do you need a doctor?”