A history teacher. An out, outspoken history teacher. The kind of history teacher we never would have had. But this is what losing most of your friends does: It makes you unafraid. Whatever anyone threatens, whatever anyone is offended by, it doesn’t matter, because you have already survived much, much worse. In fact, you are still surviving. You survive every single, blessed day.
It makes sense for Tom to be here. It wouldn’t be the same without him.
And it makes sense for him to have taken the hardest shift. The night watch.
Mr. Nichol passes him the stopwatch. Tom walks over and says hello to Harry and Craig. He’s been watching the feed, but it’s even more powerful to see these boys in person. He gestures to them, like a rabbi or a priest offering a benediction.
“Keep going,” he says. “You’re doing great.”
Mrs. Archer, Harry’s next-door neighbor, has brought over coffee, and offers Tom a cup. He takes it gratefully.
He wants to be wide awake for all of this.
Every now and then he looks to the sky.
We reach midnight. Tariq can’t keep up with all the comments. Even with Harry and Craig on their phones, also answering, there are too many people to thank one by one. Tariq had thought it would slow down as it got late, as people started to go to bed. But he hadn’t been counting on it becoming so global. As people go to sleep in New Jersey, they are waking up in Germany. Australia’s heading into the afternoon. Tokyo, too. Because of the pink-haired blogger and all the other posts that have echoed out, word is passed on and passed on and passed on. Rachel hastily put together a Facebook page, and it already has fifty thousand fans.
Tariq is exchanging chat messages with someone from the site that’s hosting the feed, making sure there’s enough bandwidth, when he hears an engine gunning behind him, like a truck passing by.
There’s a shout:
“FAAAAAAAAAAGGOTS! DIRTY FAAAAAGGOTS!”
Then laughter and cheers coming from the car that’s making the noise. Everyone turns, and the car rolls through the parking lot, turns around for another pass.
“YOU’RE NOTHING BUT FAAAAAGGOTS!”
Because of the spotlights, it’s hard to see outside of their circle, hard to see anything besides headlights and a blurry head leaning out the passenger window. Tariq feels himself freezing. He knows these guys aren’t going to get out of the car, aren’t going to come over here with all the cameras going and the police officer and so many witnesses. But still, his instinct is fear.
Harry and Craig hear it too. Craig flinches at the sound, and Harry is a mix of amused and pissed. He refuses to take drunk shitheads seriously. He watches as the police officer halfheartedly takes a few steps away from the taped-off area, tries to get a better view of the car. But it’s already speeding away, point made. Harry’s father is asking Tariq and Smita if they know who it was, if it was kids from the high school. But neither of them know. Mykal asks around.
Harry gestures an M for music, then indicates that Tariq should turn it up. Tariq’s planned his playlist well—there’s not a ballad within earshot at this time of the night. Instead it’s all Lady Gaga, Pink, Kylie, Madonna, Whitney, Beyoncé—the gay Sirens, here to lure you away from sleep and onto the dance floor. Tariq’s found an “Express Yourself/Born This Way” mash-up, and as he turns it up, Harry convinces Craig to dance with him. If they’re going to be faggots, they’re going to be dancing faggots. Dancing, kissing faggots.
Tariq’s pulse is still racing, but he lets the music take off the edge, take him away from what just happened. He starts to sway along, show some moves, imagine this is their club, their space, their domain. Smita gets into the groove, too, and even Mr. Bellamy starts to dance in a grown-up kind of way. Tariq can’t believe it when Mr. Ramirez and Mrs. Archer, the coffee-bringing neighbor, start to sing along. They probably know the songs from Glee—who knows? The police officer now on shift is the only one not joining in, but Tariq is pretty sure there’s some Zeppelin later in the mix for him.
It’s crazy, because Harry is feeling fully conscious again. Is he completely tired of kissing Craig? Oh, totally. They’ve both been tired of it for hours at this point. But that’s the challenge, to get through all that. If you’re running a marathon, you’re not expecting to find pleasure in every step. The music is helping, reminding him that the time after midnight can be used for things other than sleeping.
He feels something hit his back, and at first he doesn’t understand what it is. It could almost be Craig’s hand, marking the beat. But then the second egg hits him right on the side of his head. He hears it breaking beside his ear. Feels the shock of it, the slime of it. Another hits his leg. His instinct is to recoil, to turn. But luckily Craig is there, right there, to reach his hand up to shield him, to reach up his hand to remind Harry to stay where he is. The yolk is beginning to run down his face, down his neck. Craig tries to wipe it away, as Harry’s father shouts something, goes running into the darkness beyond the lights. The police officer is on alert now, talking into his radio. Smita is hurrying over with a towel so Craig can get the egg off Harry’s face. (No one else is allowed to touch them, lest it be construed as “propping.”) Tariq is stopped cold for a second, looking in the direction Mr. Ramirez went, wondering what he should do. He looks at his computer, and the feed comments are going crazy, everyone asking, What was that? What’s happening? So now he has something to do, and stupidly he finds himself calling out to Harry and Craig, “Keep kissing!” Because that’s what he needs to see right now, that’s what everyone needs to see. But Harry is shaking. He can’t help it—he’s shaking. He can’t believe what happened, and knows he shouldn’t be embarrassed, but he is. He feels reduced, ridiculed. By shitheads. He can smell the egg, smell it on his skin. Even though Smita’s dampening the towel with bottled water now so Craig can get it all off, he can still feel it on his skin, the shock of its impact.
His father comes back empty-handed, says something to the police officer. No way to tell who it was. They ran away on foot. Could have gone in any direction. Mr. Ramirez thinks it was more than one kid. But it was hard to tell in the dark.
Craig feels Harry shivering. He holds Harry closer, feels the egg stain on the back of Harry’s shirt. Craig makes a C sign with his hand—clothes—and points to Harry. Mr. Bellamy understands and offers Harry a hoodie. Harry is shivering harder now, and Craig has to hold the back of his head, to make sure he doesn’t shiver away from him. Harry holds out his arms so Craig can help him put on the hoodie, one arm at a time. It feels strange to be dressed in this way, but he’s grateful for the warmth.
It’s over, he tells himself.
But it’s not over. Not yet. Because now there are voices in the dark. Voices getting closer. And pinpoints of light—flashlights. It is 12:23 in the morning, and people are coming to be here, coming to help. They saw what happened, and they can’t stay in their houses. Not just Harry and Craig’s friends. But their friends’ parents, too. Jim from the tech crew has sped over with more lights from his basement. There have to be at least a dozen people. Then more than a dozen. Smita’s mom is here. Two more police officers. And a man Harry’s never seen before walks up and goes straight to Mr. Bellamy, saying, “I’m staying right here with you.” They wear matching rings.
The site becomes a hive of activity. Jim puts up more lights so the lawn can be seen more clearly. And whereas before when people watched, they did so in conversational clumps, now they make a line, a wall, between Harry and Craig and the outside world. Protecting them.
The whole time, the music hasn’t stopped. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is pumping through the air. Harry senses Craig coming alert to something. He looks off to the side and sees the two figures coming closer.
Craig’s mother. His oldest brother, Sam, a senior at the high school.
They head right to Craig, and Craig’s mother asks him if he’s okay.
He nods slightly.
“Sam was watching, and he came to
get us.”
Us. Craig hears the us, and at first doesn’t understand it. Then his father and his other brother, Kevin, are there, too.
“Parked the car,” Craig’s father says. “Your mom couldn’t wait.”
It hits Craig fully: He is, right now, kissing Harry right in front of his father. His mind can’t really acclimate to this. At all.
Harry’s dad comes over to introduce himself to Craig’s father and brothers, and also, more subtly, to make sure they don’t end up blocking all of the cameras. Craig can see his father measure Harry’s dad up; for his part, Harry’s dad is trying his hardest to make a good impression.
Kevin, a seventh grader, seems to not understand why he was woken up for this. Sam, though, keeps staring at Craig. Ten minutes ago, if you’d told Craig that Sam had been in the car with the guys yelling “FAGGOTS!”, he wouldn’t have been that surprised. But now he has to accept that his brother’s staring is more complicated than that. It’s not an older-brother death stare. He’s probably just trying to understand the situation as much as Craig is.
“We’re not staying for long,” Craig’s father is saying.
“But we just got here,” Kevin whines.
“It’s late. We wanted to make sure he’s okay, and he’s okay.”
Craig can feel his father keeping his distance—but still, he’s closer than Craig thought he would be. He wonders what his mother said to him, how she explained.
“I’m going to stay,” Sam mumbles.
Craig’s father does not look happy with this.
“It’s well after midnight,” he intones. “You’re coming home.”
Sam smiles mischievously and says, “But Craig gets to stay out.…”
Craig can feel the tremor of Harry’s laugh at this line.
Craig’s father doesn’t think it’s funny, though.
“Don’t push me,” he says. “This is about as far as I can go.”
Craig can see Sam considering it. He tries to use his eyes to implore his brother, Just go. Not that Sam has ever listened to him before.
Craig’s mom steps in. “We can all come back tomorrow,” she says, shepherding Sam back in the direction of the car.
“We’ll be here!” Harry’s dad says, maybe a little too cheerily.
Craig’s mom takes in the wall of supporters that has formed. When she turns back to Craig, it’s hard to read the expression on her face. Or maybe that’s what’s being expressed: a complete lack of definition.
Craig points toward the parking lot, then makes an okay sign. So she knows it’s okay for her to go. Even though nobody’s asked him.
Just as quickly as they appeared, his family heads back home.
The two of them have twenty-three hours to go.
Harry can still smell the egg on his skin.
At two in the morning, Cooper wakes up in the backseat of his own car. His body is sore from trying to fit. The seat belt has been digging into his back. He looks at his watch and feels only disappointment in the hour—he wants it to be five or six or oblivion. He has never slept in his car before, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to do it. If this is his life now, if this is what his life has become, it’s even more pathetic to him than it was before. He should have taken clothes with him. He should have taken food. There aren’t even voices in his head telling him this—it would be much easier if there were voices, because then it could be a conversation. But these are things that he knows, and no voice needs to bother to say them. He could try to distract himself with his phone, but the battery’s low and the car needs to be on to work the charger. He’s sick of the phone, too. Sick of the men and the boys. Sick of everyone wanting so badly to be turned on that they become these one-track minds living from one one-track minute to the next. And where does that track lead? Men and boys all across America getting off, and not a single one cares about Cooper. Yeah, if they read about him in the paper, they’d be sad. But Cooper doesn’t think they’d realize it was him, the boy they were chatting with last night.
Cooper doesn’t believe tomorrow will be better. Or any tomorrow. Not really. We want to tell him in a thousand different ways that he’s wrong. But who are we? Even if we could speak, even if we could knock on that window and get him to roll it down, he would never believe what we have to say, not compared to what he believes about himself, and about the world.
His mind is on fire now, and it will be hours until it cools itself back into the right temperature for sleep. He is angry at his father, angry at his mother, but mostly he’s come to feel that all this was inevitable, that he was born to be a boy who must sleep in his car, that there was no way he was going to make it through high school without being caught. He feels he’s been soured by his own desires, squandered by his own impulses. He despises himself, and that is the flame that sets his mind on fire.
He is too tired to do anything about it. Too tired to turn on the car to charge his phone. Too tired to figure out a better place to be. Too tired to run away somewhere. Too tired to end it all. So he stays in that back seat, contorting himself but never finding comfort. Unable to sleep. Unable to live. Unable to leave.
We would wake in the middle of the night. Sometimes there were tubes down our throats. Sometimes we were attached to machines that seemed more alive than we were. Sometimes the darkness was laced with light. Sometimes we had been dreaming we were home, and that our mother was in the next room. We didn’t know the room we woke into, or we knew it too well. The last stop. Final destination. And there we were, trapped in those endless, unforgiving hours. Unable to sleep. Unable to live. Unable to leave.
The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses.
There are very few lights on in this town at four in the morning. Most of the ones that are on were left on by accident. There are one or two night readers, one or two night wanderers, one or two night workers to be found. But most everyone else is asleep.
We are the ones who are awake.
Except on the front lawn of the local high school. There, two boys remain kissing. Muscles sore, mouths tired, eyelids weighty, Harry and Craig hold on to each other, hold on to the forces inside them that will keep them awake. At four in the morning, you can be so light-headed that even the stars seem to have a sound. Harry and Craig sway to the sound of those stars—the few that glimmer over their heads—but also to the sound of all of the unseen stars, all the nebulae that are out of reach but still present. At four in the morning, you can imagine the whole universe is looking down at you. Harry and Craig dance for the universe, and also for the friends who have gathered, the ring of people that remains around them. Mr. Ramirez is snoring lightly in his chair. Tariq’s fingers tap out a language on his keyboard as he responds to questions from Rome and Edinburgh and Dubai. Smita’s mom takes orders for coffee. Jim laughs at something another boy from tech crew has said. Mr. Bellamy, our Tom, tells his husband all is well, that he should go home and get some sleep. Harry and Craig dance to these sounds, too. Craig needs to be held, and Harry is holding him. Harry is letting his mind wander—to books he’s read, to movies he’s seen, to things he may want to say to the tens of thousands of people who are watching them. But Craig’s mind doesn’t wander much farther than Harry. With everything that’s happened, Craig is retreating into the closeness of Harry, the familiarity of his body, of him. This is what he missed when it was gone, what his loneliness calls out for. He knows the reason Harry is kissing him, but he still feels it as a kiss. He can’t help it, because it helps him. He can’t help it, because right now he needs it so much.
He is not wrong to do this. When you need to hold on to something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it.
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Harry needs him, too. Even if he’s not concentrating on that need right now, it’s there. He is so safe within it that he hardly realizes it’s present. Like the coolness of the night, like the small sounds that soundtrack the stars.
We know what it’s like to need to hold on. We hold on to you. Which is to say, we hold on to life.
You have music at your fingertips. Any song you want to hear, there it is.
We marvel at that. The infinite jukebox.
If we want to hear a song, we must steal the sound waves that you send into the air. But there are moments that are so palpable, so in sync with a song we once knew, that it plays itself from some long-lost cassette player that even our memory doesn’t seem to control.
Like the moment Ryan wakes up and thinks of Avery, and the moment (forty minutes later) that Avery wakes up and thinks of Ryan. There is only the sound of their breathing as they blink themselves into the day, only the shift in the mattress, the accidental fall of a pillow to the floor. This should be all that we hear, but there is also the unmistakable sound of Aretha Franklin in our ears, singing “What a Diff’rence a Day Made.” They both wake into happiness instead of uncertainty, into a better version of the world because yesterday was so welcome. There is no way they would articulate it in the same way Aretha does, when she bursts out with “It’s heaven, heaven, heaven when you / When you find love and romance on the menu.” Go and listen to it right now—you have it right at your fingertips, for less than the price of a candy bar. The lyrics sound old, but the music is eternal—that joy in discovering that the right person at the right time can open all the windows and unlock all the doors.