“And he’d like it!”
They all roared.
“It’s about my parents.”
Ian stared at the floor.
“Who cares about your parents?”
Everyone was looking at me.
“Is something going on?” I asked Ian.
No one spoke.
Ian cracked his knuckles. “Go dance with Angelina.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Go dance with your fat girl.”
The circle of guys around Ian grew tighter. I was outside the circle. Reggae music started playing.
“We have to talk, Ian.”
Somebody started laughing.
“Talk then, you faggot,” Ian said.
They all laughed.
Someone gave Ian some liquor, and he drank it.
“I’m going now, Ian.”
“Suit yourself, buddy.”
Courtney came over.
“Hi, Ian!”
She kissed him.
“Cute tuxedo, Toby!” Courtney said.
Somebody whistled.
“Just how’d you get those tar stains?”
I turned around and left.
Angelina found me crying buckets in a corner. She was standing with her shoes off. “Redemption Song” was playing.
“I wanna know what’s going on,” Angelina began.
“I’d really like to tell you, but I don’t know myself!”
“Something’s going on and it’s been going on all evening!”
“You’re just being paranoid—”
“I trusted you, Toby!”
Angelina broke away and stamped out onto the dancefloor. She wrapped her arms around herself and danced alone awhile. People were watching, but Angelina didn’t care. She closed her eyes and swayed and sang along to the music:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds… .
When I saw her on the floor I stabbed the tears from my eyes. Everyone was staring, but I went out and I joined her.
“May I cut in?”
Angelina stopped dancing.
“Lemme ask my partner,” she said, stepping back. She consulted with her shadow, who was watching from the dancefloor. “Are you big enough to dance with the truth, Toby Sligh? My partner wants to know if you can dance with the truth.”
I nodded.
“All right. But she gets very jealous. She should. She’s my partner. Be careful, Toby Sligh.”
Won’t you help me sing
These songs of freedom?
’Cause all I ever have —
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.
We were boogying together to the tang of kettledrums when Angelina caught me in a newlywed clinch and pointed to a couple making love behind a palm tree.
“Don’t even have the decency to do it with the lights off,” Angelina scolded.
“Who?”
“Courtney and Ian—”
I gulped and my heart catapulted to my throat as I stood on the dancefloor watching Courtney mauling Ian.
“She’s practically got her fucking hand down his jockstrap. And Ian doesn’t look like a very good kisser. And Courtney, she must have a tongue like a plunger! … You all right, Toby?”
“I feel kinda funny—”
I was stumbling toward Ian. I was shouting.
“Ian! I—”
“You fainted, Toby Sligh,” Angelina sighed.
We were lying outside on the grass beside the chapel.
“I dragged you outside. Me and Bubba, we dragged you. Ian didn’t help you. You fainted at his feet.”
Chaperons were standing beside the chapel, watching. Angelina waved. They turned and walked away.
“I haven’t been sleeping. I haven’t been eating. I keep fainting lately,” I said.
She sat up. “I know why you fainted,” Angelina began. “I know the real reason.” Her brassy voice was breaking.
“Please, Angelina—”
“You think I’m a fool.”
“It’s not what you—”
“Toby, I’ve known all along!”
Angelina stood up and straightened her gown and looked at me and blinked and disappeared into the night. Through the strobe-lit windows I could see all the couples laughing and kissing and dancing with each other. Courtney and Ian were in the middle of it all, orbited by couples no less beautiful than they were. I looked at the two of them with envy and regret—after what I had done, I had no right to feel betrayed. And I had to admit it: they made a handsome couple. You could almost imagine the kids they would squirt. Me and Angelina, we were misfits-in-the-making—faggot and fat girl, equipped to face the world with little more than heartache and lowered expectations. How could I have ever thought that Ian Lamb could love me? Look at the way he was dancing with that girl! He had danced with my mother like that, and with me. He would move through life, he would move through partners never knowing how to love, only knowing how to lie.
“Excuse me?” a voice said.
It came from behind me—a voice at once familiar and oddly unfamiliar.
“I couldn’t help noticing that scene with your girlfriend, and I wondered, young man, if you were still interested in your complimentary Polaroid senior prom portrait?”
As I turned, a brilliant burst of light scorched my eyes and put me in mind of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window —of the climax, where Jimmy Stewart, to escape being strangled, dazzles his assailant with bursts of flash photography. As the image ebbed away in the template of my retina, the vision of my father wearing thick nerd glasses blossomed before me like a ’70’s Bad Dream. He was holding a camera, a vintage Polaroid. Only thing was, it wasn’t my father. It was his double—Det. Thomas, undercover.
“Good evening, Toby Sligh! Welcome to the prom! I hope you haven’t forgotten our gentlemen’s agreement!”
The Polaroid camera was whirring in his hands. Thomas handed me a snapshot of my miserable self.
“You’re a dark angel,” I said. “Go away. The day that I met you was the day that I died.”
“I’m not a dark angel! I’m an angel of light!” Det. Thomas said, and set off another flashbulb.
“I’m going inside,” I said and stood up. “And you can take your camera and shove it up your ass.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way to a figure of authority,” Det. Thomas lectured. “Show some respect!”
“Respect this,” I said. I displayed my middle finger. “I know who you’re here with, and I know it’s not the cops.” Det. Thomas’s eyes went narrow in the darkness. “And you’d better be careful or I’ll tell the police about the Polaroid you planted in the Porsche you trashed today. And I’ll tell them what you did to Leonard Compton in that alley. And I’ll tell them the truth— that you’re the biggest punk in town!”
Thomas whirled around: there was movement in the bushes. A cameraman emerged, and excused himself, and left.
“Do you think I’m afraid of the cops, Toby Sligh? Don’t you think if I were, Juice would have given them that picture? Do you think if I were frightened I would leave a trail of clues as long as a list of Leonard Compton’s drug connections? Don’t you know the Mafia owns the police? Don’t you realize the Mafia owns your buddy Juice? They own everybody here, but they don’t own me. And I can do anything because I’m well connected. I’m down with the cops, and I’m down with the mob, and I’m down with your folks—I’m down with everybody. You know as well as I do that this is bigger, Toby. This is not about the prom. This is about us.”
“Who’s us?”
“Me, you, your father, your mother.”
“You go near my parents tonight and I’ll kill you!”
“That’s not our happy Toby! Big Smile, Toby Sligh!”
A flashbulb exploded and a hand fell on my wrist—it belonged to Leonard Compton.
“What’s that cocksucker want?”
Det. Thomas was vanishing be
hind a podocarpus, camera around his shoulder. Juice started after him.
“Let him go, Leonard!”
“That boy wants trouble.”
“He doesn’t want nothing.”
“That boy wants your soul. You gonna trust me, Toby?”
I looked at him: “What?”
“Are … you … gonna … trust me?”
I nodded at him.
“Sure. I gotta trust someone.”
“I know ya do, G.”
Leonard Compton asked me what I’d done with his stash and I said that I’d hidden it in the chapel tabernacle. I handed him the archbishop’s little gold key, and with only a paper clip—just like in the movies—we busted into the chapel while everyone was dancing and waded toward the altar through the underwater light.
“This is what I do with narcotics, Toby Sligh.”
He took the cocaine—about a cup of it—and mixed it in the chalice with a splash of red wine. Then he took the drug money—$87,000—and tore it in four pieces, just like the Eucharist.
“This is my body,” Juice said, to nobody, and tossed the money high above the altar, like confetti. “This is my blood,” Juice said, and drank the wine, which was syrupy with cocaine, a poppy-red narcotic porridge.
“Don’t, Juice!” I yelled and knocked the chalice from his fingers.
The poppy-red porridge stained the marble altar floor.
“God’s just opium, Tobe. He can’t hurt me.”
And with the rest of the coke, and a half carafe of wine, he made another coketail, and he chugalugged it down.
“Aren’t you gonna die?” I said to Leonard Compton, walking toward the strobelights, his lips bleeding red. “Aren’t you gonna have, like, a heart attack or something?”
“Never felt better.” Juice belched. “Let’s dance! But when the Castoria kicks in—I’ll be squirtin’ for a week!”
At the double doors leading back into the cafeteria Grace Cage was standing by a girl with choppy hair. They spoke in low tones, leaning up against each other, and when I walked by they looked up at me and laughed.
“Pay no attention,” Juice said. “Hold your head up! You gotta hold your head up, Toby Sligh, and be proud!”
“Proud a’ what, Juice?”
“You know what, Toby Sligh! Everybody else does… . There’s Lamb. Talk to him.”
Ian was sitting at a table in the shadows with his back to the wall and his cummerbund undone. In his right hand he held the hospital beeper Lucinda had given him to pass on to me. Courtney Ciccone was seated by the dancefloor surrounded by girls; they were looking at us. Wherever I turned, and whomever I turned to, teachers, students—everybody was staring.
“What’s going on, Ian?”
He wouldn’t look up.
“You might want this beeper.”
He slid it over to me.
“Saw Scarcross,” Ian said. “You’re right. Guy’s dying.”
“He’s not the only one,” I said and sat across from him.
“Everybody knows,” Ian said.
“About what?”
“About you and me. Or about you, at least.”
“What do they know?”
“That you’re in love with me, Toby.”
“I’m in love with someone else. And I don’t think that you’re him.”
“Who am I?”
“You fucking tell me, Ian Lamb. A liar. Somebody I thought that I loved.”
“You’re crying. Don’t be sad.”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, Toby. You’re such a little boy—”
I got up and walked away.
“Toby!” a voice cried.
Everybody was staring.
“Toby! Toby Sligh! Don’t walk away from me!”
With my back to Ian Lamb—and staring at a clock that said a quarter to twelve, and surrounded by faces—I felt Ian’s voice like a wire at my spine, tugging me backward, a dead fish on a line.
“I want to talk to you. Outside, Toby Sligh. Would you let me talk to you?”
I turned and followed him outside.
We walked across the campus of Sacred Heart High, spotlights intercepting helicopters in the sky, steeldrums from the senior prom sounding vaguely tribal, pine trees and buildings and television news crews lit by the wilting blue light of the moon. We had never been more publicly in need of privacy: every gesture we made was now officially on display. Word had leaked out to several hump-busting journalists, and already camera crews were trailing at a distance in the hope that this lead wouldn’t prove to be false, that these two disheveled boys with their hands in their pockets were discussing matters less mundane than cars and beer and girls.
I didn’t have anything left to say to Ian, and I refused to award him the trophy of my tears. But still, all the same, I couldn’t stop looking at him—at those lips I had kissed I didn’t know how many times, at those eyes, those mismatched eyes, that had inspired my devotion. It struck me as ironic that the boy who had kissed me not three days before in a jam-packed coffee shop was passing up the chance to go flamingly public in a way that would make modern media history. If only he had stopped, turned to me, and said, “Toby,” and taken my face in his hands and French-kissed me—what a picture for the front page of the daily newspaper, or the local gay weekly, or The Florida Catholic! But even these fantasies tasted sour now. Ian was a liar. He could keep his goddamn distance. We would talk, that was all. What were kisses now were words.
“I never loved you, Toby Sligh. I never really loved you. And you didn’t really think that I’d have the strength to do it?” Ian Lamb began, in an inaudible voice. “I only lied to you because you wanted me to. I can’t even be sure at this moment that I’m gay.”
We had come to the track. We were walking circles round it. Above us, helicopters swarmed in the sky.
“I knew it tonight. When I saw Fr. Scarcross. When I saw his body, Toby. Ill never be gay.”
“You’ll never be gay ’cause you’re straight, Ian Lamb? Or you’ll never be gay because you’re frightened of AIDS?”
“I’ll never be gay because it’s all so complicated,” Ian Lamb said. “All the pain, all the lies … You lied to Angelina. Have you seen the way she looks at you? How have my lies been any different from yours?”
“It’s true, we’re both bastards,” I agreed and looked away.
“But of course,” Ian said, “you’re a different kind of bastard… . Did you like your parents’ wedding? It almost never happened. I talked your mother into it; she didn’t want to do it. Your mom used to be in love with somebody else. But now she loves your father. At least she thinks she does—”
“Did you sleep with her, Ian?” I asked.
He was silent.
“Did you sleep with my mother?”
Ian Lamb kept walking.
“I used to be in love with somebody, Toby Sligh. You’ll never guess who.”
A helicopter chattered by.
“Are you HIV-positive?” I asked Ian, finally. “Did you infect my mother? Have you infected me?”
Somewhere across town my folks were making love. If my mother had the virus, then my father …
“Toby Sligh—?”
“It’s just like the Mickey in your motherfucking eye!”
“Don’t talk that way, Toby.”
He was walking with his head down.
“You know I would love you in a perfect world, kiddo. You know I do love you. It’s all just so—”
“Gay.”
Above us, a helicopter made a pass at us. The grass on the football field divided like a dress.
“I’d kiss you right here if I could, Toby Sligh.”
“Don’t start that shit again.”
“I would. You know I love you.”
We were standing somewhere on the fifty-yard line. I could swear, in the night, I heard the ghost of Leonard Compton running with a parachute strapped to his back.
“You’ll never know how much I really love yo
u, Toby Sligh. You’ll never believe me, after tonight. I’m not the one to blame if your parents never married. I’m not the one to blame if you fell in love with me. I’m innocent, Toby. I’m my own victim. I’m not betraying you. I’m betraying myself.”
I thought of everybody laughing at me back inside.
“But I’m the one they think has a crush on you, Ian.”
“It wasn’t my fault that you fainted at my feet. You gave yourself away.”
“And you helped.” I turned on him. “What did you say when people asked about me? ‘Is it true Toby Sligh invited you to the prom?’ ‘Yeah, poor faggot, I couldn’t break his heart. Even bought him a tux, just to cushion the blow. I can’t help it if everybody falls in love with me—girls, guys, even best friends’ mothers.’ Just what kind of special strain of liar are you, Ian? How can you tell me after six months together, after everything we’ve said, after everything we’ve done, that tonight is nothing more than a goddamn complication, and that you never loved me? You even cried to me! You held me on the beach with your arms wrapped around me and you made me swear forever that I’d never let you go, and now you say you’d love me if the world was fucking perfect? Well, the world’s not fucking perfect! It gets less perfect by the minute! I’m a bastard, we’re faggots, my parents just got married, and right now there’s a Jesuit dying across town because people like you can’t face up to who they are! I’m here , Ian Lamb! Toby Sligh is right here! And when we say goodbye we’ll never have this love again! You wanna come out? We’ve got fucking helicopters! We’ve got the Mafia, the media! They’re prob’ly phoning CNN! The biggest fucking lie you’ve told all evening is that you never loved me! Why else would you be crying? … If you love me, let’s do it! Right now , Ian Lamb!”
Ian stopped crying. The chapel bell struck midnight. He handed me something in a brown paper bag.
“All right. Let’s do it. Let’s waltz, like we said.”
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