He kept his eyes closed. “Why?”
“So people will remember them.”
“Who’ll make up songs about us?” He opened his eyes. They were grainy green, like they had texture and depth.
“We’ll make up our own songs,” I said, kissing him lightly on his lower lip. “Deal?”
He nodded and closed his eyes again. “Deal.”
When we were walking home, I stopped and wrapped my hands around him.
“You should be who you want to be,” I whispered.
His hands tightened on my back.
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” I said and then to lighten the mood I licked his ear.
He hollered and chased me the entire way home.
At the Key Club meeting, it is decided that we will sell bracelets at the YMCA’s Middle School dance to try to raise money for a gym at the Hancock Consolidated School. This girl named Gillian was killed in Hancock last summer by a car. She’d been riding her bike. There aren’t any shoulders on the roads in Hancock. It’s a dangerous place to ride a bike. Gillian was big into sports and she would have come in to our high school this year, because Hancock, like lots of towns around here, don’t have their own high schools. Anyway, her parents thought that building the Hancock School a big gym in Gillian’s honor would be a good way to make sure that no one will forget her.
It’s a good idea. Still, Hancock County’s a small place. Nobody will ever forget about Gillian. Her big sister, Anna, is in Key Club, she starts crying when everyone agrees to sell the bracelets.
“Thanks,” she sniffs and wipes her big, beautiful brown eyes with her sleeve. “It means a lot.”
I tiptoe over and sit next to her and hug her, while everybody else finishes up and Rachel adjourns the meeting. Em clicks a picture of us hugging and Anna gives her the finger.
Em lifts her hands up. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know when to quit.”
Anna groans, smiles, and waves her finger a little bit more, before tucking it into a fist. Em’s so cute, everyone forgives her everything. Except for Mimi Cote, who could not get over the time Em took a picture of her leaving the girls’ bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into her thong. You can’t really blame Mimi for that. Em says it’s all in the name of art. I don’t know what kind of art you call it to see Mimi’s butt hanging out of a thong, but whatever.
Anna leans over and whispers to me, “I’m sorry about Dylan.”
“Yeah,” I nod.
She sniffs in again, pushing her long black hair over her shoulder and says, “Is he really gay?”
“Yeah.”
Right then, Em’s eyes meet mine. I move my hair in front of my face in case she’s thinking about taking another picture. My eyes start to tear up. Anna pulls me into the side of her fluffy sweater, her hugging me this time.
“You poor baby,” she says. “It sucks to be you.”
“It sucks to be a lot of people,” I say.
“Yeah,” Anna says, letting go of me. Our sad eyes meet. “Yeah.”
Monday night
I try not to call. I want to call. The phone waits and waits for me to cradle it against my face like a long-lost baby, like a lover, like a teddy bear. Gabriel leans against the wall and waits and waits for me to wrap my arms around her and make her sing.
I pick up Muffin instead. She mews but decides it’s more comfortable to sit on my shoulder than my arm. Dylan would flip her upside down and hold her like a baby and even though that’s got to be an uncomfortable position for a cat she always purred and purred anyway.
She trusted him.
I wait and wait and wait but he does not call me.
He always calls me every night.
It was hard coming home today without him. My bed looked angry at me. It wanted him there. I plopped myself on it, but it wasn’t the same. The bed knows that the weight of one is not the weight of two.
In my room, I pull out last year’s yearbook from its place on my bookcase.
This is what he wrote in his chicken scratch writing. This is what he wrote.
Belle,
What can I say to tell you how I feel about you? I want something you can remember. I could say I love you, but would you remember that since you’re reminded every day. I could say we will get a St. Bernard when we get married, or I could say that you’ll make me happy forever. But what would really stand out in your memory?
Our love will last forever!
I think they all go hand in hand, those things I wrote up there.
No, I’m not done and I know I’m slow but I needed something to say to the one I love. Okay. I’ll get off your back now.
I love you very much.
Dylan Alley
I want to know why he signed his last name. Did he already know then? Did he know the St. Bernard and the happy forever were lies? Did he know that when I’m thirty or forty I might have not talked to him for decades and even remembering the first letter of his last name would be a struggle? Did he know?
I shove my yearbook under my bed, where Muffin’s been sleeping with the dust balls. She scoots out, zips across the carpet, and out the door, abandoning me. I reach under and take the yearbook back and read what he wrote again. And again. Then I try to remember what I wrote in his yearbook. I can’t, but I know it was happy, chirpy, something about making music together and singing Barbra Streisand songs forever. I don’t even like Barbra. She’s so showy.
I clamber off my bed, pull the CD out of the player, and stare at its shiny, perfect circle. My two hands grab each side and that’s when I twist and bend the Barbra CD, trying to break it, but I’m not strong enough. Instead, I unlock my window, open it, open the screen, too, and whirl the CD like a Frisbee into the blackness of the night.
“Have a horrible flight,” I whisper. “Don’t remember to fasten your seat belt. Emergency exits cannot be found to the rear and front.”
It’s a shiny silver UFO glinting over my lawn and then it drops and it’s gone.
One time we were volunteering at Living History Day at the Black House, helping kids play nineteenth century games, like walking on stilts, or running around pushing a big hoop with a stick. We volunteered because of Key Club, and because the Black House, this museum that was really just a preserved big, brick mansion, always needed help.
I was holding this little girl up on the stilts when this man came and yanked his little boy away from the hoops. He was this stereotype guy, beefy, angry, with hair short in the front and long in the back, a wardrobe from another decade.
“What the hell are you doing?” he barked at the boy, holding his little arm at a wicked angle.
The little girl on the wooden stilts stopped walking across the perfectly manicured lawn and sucked in her breath. I grabbed the stilts so she wouldn’t fall over and Dylan, Dylan gave this beefy father guy the evil eye.
The guy didn’t notice, just yanked on his son more, pulling at him so hard that the little boy stumbled on his own feet. I had no idea what made him so mad, just that he was mad. The boy fell over and scraped his knee. He started crying.
The dad stood there, hands in fists. Dylan rushed over to the little boy with a first aid kit, washed off his knee.
“Leave him alone,” the dad said like a growl. “Serves him right. Such a freaking sissy.”
Dylan put on the Band-Aid, stood up, and said, “Sir, he’s not a sissy.”
The man huffed. “Like you’d know.”
Dylan stood up straighter then. I sucked in my breath.
“You want me to prove it?” Dylan stared at him.
I helped the little girl off the stilts and took her hand. She whispered to me, “My daddy didn’t want to come down here. We live in Bangor. He’s been grumpy all day.”
She let go of my hand and ran to where her brother, father, and Dylan stood on the perfectly manicured grass. “Daddy! We should go. We gotta get home for supper.”
She grabbed his arm and yanked on it, once, twice, another time.
From behind the house came the splash and screams of someone going into the dunk tank.
The father’s posture eased. He nodded. “Let’s go.”
But Dylan wasn’t ready to let it go. He yelled after them, “Children are gifts, Mister. Treat them with kindness.”
The man turned for a moment, gave him the finger, and then walked away.
Dylan shook his head and I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, “I’m proud of you.”
He nodded. I could hear his heart thunder beneath his shirt, his skin. “There’s no such thing as a sissy.”
How could I not have known?
While my mother sleeps, I wander the house again and stop in the kitchen, open the fridge, pull out the hummus container. In the fridge light, I stand there and I take the knife and spread the hummus on a cracker. Muffin jumps up on the counter and I scream, drop the knife. It clatters on the floor.
My mother yells in her sleep voice, “What is it? What is it?”
“Nothing!” I yell back, scooping the knife up off the floor, into my hand. “Just making a snack. Go back to sleep.”
Some sort of combination growl/slumber noise emits from her mouth, while I stand in the light of the refrigerator, caught, knife on the floor, bruise on the heart.
Since sleep was not an option last night, I scramble out of the house as soon as it’s dawn. I prop up a note by the coffeemaker on the counter: Gone Riding. I’ve put in my mom’s required eight-and-a-half cups of water and three heaping coffee scoops of Folgers Hazelnut. That’s what she needs before she heads out to work. She’ll be all set.
I chug off up the hill with my wheels spinning, wool hat trapping my hair against my head. It doesn’t do anything to keep the cold from hitting my teeth. The shrill pain of it is what I want, anyway.
Tom’s dad, the police chief, drives by in his cruiser. He honks and waves, then he stops ahead of me and rolls down the window. I stop next to him, wondering if I’ve broken some sort of bike road rule.
He leans out the window, but he’s still got his seat belt on like a good cop. He has crinkles by his eyes that make him look old, but other than that, he’s got the same look as Tom: strong, dark, healthy. “Pretty early for biking, Belle.”
I nod. “It’s the only time I’m free.”
“You cold?”
“Yep.”
He nods his head and says, “Get in the cruiser for a sec.”
I walk my bike to the side of the road, brace it against a tree, and hop into the cruiser. Warm stuffy air blasts against my cheeks. It smells like sugar in here. I try to see if there’s any evidence of Dunkin Donuts. Yes! A coffee cup. No donuts, though.
Tom’s dad notices me looking, waits a second, and says, “I gave up donuts.”
I bite my lip, embarrassed, but he just laughs in such a good, friendly way that my nerves calm down just a little.
“The whole stereotype of small-town cop/big-town gut was too much for me.” He pats his stomach, which is flat and lean like Tom’s. He takes a big breath and says, “Belle, I didn’t call you in here to talk about donuts.”
“I didn’t think so,” I say, trying to keep my calm but I’m wondering why I’m in here. Is he going to arrest me? Yell at me about not dating Tom in eighth grade. I’m wearing my dorkiest bike helmet, pink with pictures of Minnie Mouse riding bikes with Mickey so I’m obviously not breaking that law. I sit on my hands to warm them up and keep them from shaking.
He fiddles with the dial to his radio. I notice his gun on his waist. He’s got a police radio on the dashboard, a radar detector, handcuffs. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in here and it makes me nervous, even though I like Tom’s dad.
He takes another big breath and says, “I heard about Dylan.”
Ah, great. It’s my turn to take a deep breath. Dick McKenny drives by us and honks. He runs the county ambulance service. We all wave.
“What about Dylan?” I say to buy time.
Tom’s dad raises his eyebrows and gives me a look that says he’s used to the runaround and has no patience for it. “That he’s gay.”
He just flat-out says it like that.
“Do his parents know?” he asks me.
“I don’t think so,” I say, gulping, but if he already knows, maybe everybody knows. I look away, out at the woods. The thick, overgrown, trees lean every which way, worried down from ice and wind. They make everything claustrophobic like the entire town is leaning in, listening. They block out the sky. Sometimes I long for a big sky and no more listening trees, for horizons and no more neighbors knowing your business.
Tom’s dad says, “Belle, I know this is hard on you, so I’m going to cut to the chase. Okay?”
I nod, bite at the side of my lip, unbuckle my helmet, and tuck some of my hair back into my ponytail. “Okay?”
He locks me in with those charcoal eyes, just like Tom’s. Someone else honks but neither of us look to see who it is, we just raise our hands in an automatic wave. He sighs and says, “I wish you never went out with that boy, Belle. He’s a great kid, a smart boy, but not for you. We both know that now, right? When Tom told me what the two of them agreed to back in eighth grade.”
“You mean the deal?” I say, smirking.
He nods. “Stupid business. But what I want to say Belle is that they call Eastbrook a city, but with 6,000 people or so, it’s really just a town, a small town. You and I both know that.”
He looks straight ahead, grabs his steering wheel, bites at the side of his cheek, and says, “You and I both know that some people in Eastbrook aren’t all that forward thinking. They might give Dylan trouble. I told Tom. He’s going to be on the lookout in case anything happens, but when I saw you riding your bike, I thought maybe I should tell you too.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“It was only twenty years ago when those boys dropped that gay guy off that bridge up in Bangor, you ever hear about that?”
I nod. It was horrible. They chased him out of a bar and down the street and then dropped him into the river. He died, of course he died. Just because he was gay. I cringe because I don’t even know his name. What if that happened to Dylan? Although, it’s hard to imagine anyone chasing him down, intimidating him, he’s so strong, but still . . . What if they did and then twenty years later nobody ever knew his name and he was just the gay guy someone murdered. I blow on my hands. I press my lips together. That can’t happen.
“Not that anyone’s going to drop Dylan off a bridge or anything, but there are some people in this town who think like that, who believe being gay is being evil.”
“They’re stupid,” I mutter like I’m five years old or something.
“Yep. They’re stupid. But they exist and Dylan . . . Well, he needs to be careful,” Tom’s dad taps me on the head. “You’re a smart girl, Belle. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. I want you to watch out for Dylan, tell him to be cautious, okay?”
I nod and a huge gulp of fear wedges itself in my throat. It’s all I can do not to cry, all I can do not to sob in Tom’s dad’s cruiser, sob and wish it could all go away. I don’t. I manage to say, “I’ll tell him.”
“Good,” he nods. “Good. You know, you might want to look for signs of depression too, a lot of boys who are outed in high school get depressed, suicidal.”
I whirl on him with big eyes and stammer out, “Suicidal? Dylan? That’s crazy.”
Dylan’s always been one of the most together, happy people I know. He glows. He dances around. He’s a star. My Dylan could never be suicidal. I gulp and swallow, gulp and swal
low again and then I lean my head back against the seat. Tom’s dad pats my arm awkwardly and says, “Not all boys, Belle. Just some. I’ve asked Tom to keep an eye out for you, too. I know this has got to be hard for you.”
“You asked Tom to look out for me?” I say. My words come out slow like they are numbed. My heart presses in on itself for some stupid reason. Of course, Tom was only being nice because his dad asked him to. You can’t be mean to poor, pitiful Belle Philbrick, the girl who was so clueless that she didn’t know that her boyfriend was gay.
Tom’s dad turned down the heat a little. “This is hard on you, too, Belle. You need support.”
My heart drops but I nod and wipe at the corner of my eyes and then Brian Barnard, the accountant whose daughter was an all-state basketball guard two years back, drives by in his big black Dodge SUV and honks. We both look at him and wave and smile, but I wonder. Is he one of those people? The people to look out for?
When Tom’s dad lets me go, I ride up hills, down hills, past the cemetery where Dylan and I had our first kiss, past the spot Dylan, Emily, Bob, and I thought we saw a UFO once. We were driving home from one of Dylan’s recitals. Bob’s mom didn’t show up to pick him up so Em brought him home.
I pass houses just waking with sleepy coffee smells, stale breath, orange juice, cinnamon-roll hangovers.
The cold and a fog hangs about the trees, clings to them, shrouding everything in grayness. It’s a gray town, a bland nothing town, but if Tom’s dad is right it’s got little slashes of red fire hiding in there, red-colored hate waiting to burn through the fog.
I ride and ride and my quads start to burn and the sun starts to rise and my heart doesn’t ache anymore ’cause it’s too busy just beating, trying to pump the energy through my broken-horse body, trying to keep up with the demands for blood, blood, blood.
Then I realize where I am. My hands squeeze the brake pads. The back tires skid on the frozen gravel, but I don’t fall over. My feet stomp to the ground, holding me steady.