by Celia Laskey
One afternoon I take a walk in the nature preserve and I’m finally able to see the silvery green of new leaves without feeling like they’re mocking me. I force myself to do an entire Jillian Michaels workout instead of just watching it. I smile at Christine Peterson unloading her groceries without wanting to punch her in the face. Lorraine leaves messages on the answering machine inviting me to her candle parties or to lunch, but I never get around to calling her back. Richard leaves me notes on our “Yogatta do this” stationery covered in cats in yoga poses. The plumber called. Dishwasher is clean. Leftover meatloaf in the fridge.
* * *
• • •
ON A WARM spring Saturday, I meet Jamal at the south end of Main Street. He’s holding two coffees and two tote bags full of rainbow stickers that read “This business serves everyone.”
“Do you ever get tired of looking at rainbows?”
He laughs. “Whenever I see a rainbow, I know it’s a good thing, so no. Some kid from Kansas came up with it, actually. He sewed the very first flag.”
“That’s kind of ironic.”
“Someeeeewheeeeere over the raaaaaainbow,” he sings in a Judy Garland falsetto. “That movie is gay as all get-out.”
“What do you mean, gay?”
“Friend of Dorothy?” he says in a tone like it should be obvious.
I look at him blankly.
“Think about it. The black-and-white reality of small-town, unaccepting Kansas. Then, somewhere over the rainbow, is the colorful, welcoming metropolis of Oz.”
“So Big Burr is somewhere under the rainbow.”
Jamal laughs. “Come through, Linda! That’s a good way to put it.” He finally talks to me like a close friend, though I’m still learning the definitions of words and phrases I thought I knew: come through means you just said or did something impressive; sickening means amazing; reading means you’re wittily insulting someone.
He hands me a tote bag full of stickers. “So, you can say as much or as little as you want when we go into these places. Just your presence will help.”
“What?” The coffee I was in the middle of swallowing goes down the wrong tube. “We have to go in and talk to people?” I croak.
He tilts his head. “What did you think we were doing?”
“I thought maybe we’d just leave the stickers in the door, like solicitors do.”
“I’m sure they wish we would,” he says.
The first establishment we hit is Barb’s Boutique—Barb, who complained about how warm it was at Dylan’s funeral reception while wrapping brownies in napkins and putting them in her purse. As we walk in, Jamal’s eyes move from a handbag with a bejeweled cross on it to a busty mannequin wearing a T-shirt that says FOOTBALL: WHAT BOYS DO DURING CHEER SEASON. He squeezes his arms around his body like he’s afraid the items in the store will reach out and grab him.
Barb looks up from behind the register as the door dings shut behind us. She zeroes in on Jamal, her eyes narrowing. He smiles at her and interlaces his fingers, holding them in front of his abdomen. I move closer to him.
“Oh, my gosh, Linda?” Barb sits with a red marker poised above a piece of poster board, halfway through coloring in the letter L in SALE. “It’s so good to see you out and about! How are you dooooing?”
I can feel Jamal looking at me, wondering why this woman is talking to me like I’m an invalid. “I’m fine, Barb. How are you?”
“Can’t complain, but I will anyway,” which is what she says every time I see her. “The store isn’t doing so hot, which is why I’m having a big sale,” she says, gesturing to her homemade sign. “If things don’t pick up soon, I might have to close up shop. I blame that gosh-darn billboard. It was enough of an eyesore before it was burned, and now it’s even worse.”
“You know what might help with sales?” Jamal takes a sticker out of his bag and sets it on the counter.
“Let me guess,” she says, placing her pointer finger on the sticker and sliding it back across the counter. “You’re with that task force.”
“The latest study put gay buying power at just under four trillion dollars,” says Jamal. “I’m guessing you don’t want to end up like all the other boarded-up shops on the street?”
She huffs. “If I put that sticker up, I’d definitely be boarded up. I’d lose all my other business.”
“I’d still shop here,” I chime in.
Barb looks from Jamal to me with a new kind of recognition. “I know you’ve been going through a hard time, Linda, but this?”
“I think Acceptance Across America is doing important work.”
“You never seemed like much of a gay crusader.” She rolls her eyes as she says the last two words.
“Well, maybe I am now.”
She crosses her arms and looks at Jamal. “Do you believe that?”
“We’re happy to have her, whatever her reasons.”
“Did you know her son died?” Barb says, looking at me. “A car accident. He was only sixteen. Such a tragedy.” She brings her hand to her heart. “So you can understand why we’re all so concerned about her.”
A whirlpool of rage and sadness dizzies me, bejeweled handbags and shiny graphic T-shirts making my vision starry. Before I can pass out or vomit I bolt outside, knocking over a miniskirted mannequin in my haste, and crouch on the sidewalk, my arms wrapped around my legs and my face buried in my lap, rocking back and forth.
Jamal appears next to me and squeezes my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“I should be the one apologizing.” I hand him the bag full of rainbow stickers.
He pushes the bag back toward me. “Linda, do you really think we didn’t know about your son? It’s a small town. You seemed like you needed to not talk about it, so we didn’t. But it doesn’t change anything.”
I shake my head. “It changes everything,” I say softly.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I WALK in the house, Richard is sitting at the kitchen table, Dylan’s Converse sneakers in front of him. I drop into the chair next to him.
“You know what my first thought was?” Richard says. “I thought Dylan found the shoes and brought them back inside.”
“I do the same thing. That night you were in Dylan’s room on his laptop, I was so sure it was him.”
Richard picks up a shoe and starts lacing it. I take the other shoe and follow suit, crisscrossing the white laces over the tongue. This is the first time I’ve noticed the black-and-purple cityscape pattern running along the sides. A silhouette peeks out from a skyscraper’s window. “They’re pretty fierce,” I say.
Richard looks at me, confused. “Fierce?” He pushes the plastic-wrapped ends of laces through silver-lined holes. I always thread the lace through the bottom of the hole, whereas he alternates between crossing over and under. I try to remember which one of us taught Dylan how to tie his shoes, but I can’t.
“It’s like another word for awesome,” I say.
Richard looks at me like we’ve just met. He finishes lacing his shoe and ties a bow at the top. I finish mine, and we set the two shoes next to each other, facing away from us, like we’re waiting for them to start walking.
Zach
The phrase run away has always felt like such a cop-out to me, like instead of dealing with an issue you’re taking the easy way out. People are constantly saying things like, He’s just running away from his problems. It sounds so passive, so resigned and negative. But what if running away was actually the opposite of all those things? An active choice made in defiance, not running away but running toward. That’s how I’m choosing to think about it, at least—like I’m fucking sprinting toward happiness and acceptance, which I know I’ll never find here in Big Burr, no matter what the task force says. And Avery is coming with.
After everyone at school found out that not only is Ka
ren Avery’s mom but that Avery lied about it, suddenly I wasn’t the only one getting tormented on the regular. At least once a week Avery’s locker would get egged, or someone would come up behind her in the hall and crack an egg over her head. But the physical bullying was just the tip of the iceberg—psychological warfare is teen girls’ specialty. The cheerleaders who would never have given Jana the time of day before the egging suddenly wanted to be her best friend, not because they had any real interest in her, of course, but because it meant luring her away from Avery. One of the cheerleaders even started dating Jake, constantly texting Avery pictures of them making out. So when I brought up leaving to Avery, she was game.
Since neither of us have a car and hitchhiking is for dead people, our plan is to walk the sixty-five miles to Dry Creek, the closest town with a Greyhound station. Once we make it to Dry Creek, we’ll take a bus to Los Angeles, where Avery grew up and where I’ve been dreaming of living for years. Currently we’re just three miles into our trek, trudging through the flat, boring fields that border Route 83. We’re walking far from the road, with just the moon to illuminate our path, since flashlights would make us too visible. We left right after dark and told our parents we were spending the night at a friend’s house, a classic lie that’s been true enough times that they didn’t think it was shady. They won’t get home from work tomorrow until about six p.m., which gives us a solid twenty-two-hour head start—exactly the amount of time it’ll take to walk to Dry Creek and be on the bus before they even notice we’re gone.
I can’t believe we have sixty-two more miles, or twenty-one more hours, to go. My calves are already tightening and my backpack straps are digging into the soft muscles between my shoulders and my neck. I wonder what those muscles are called. Thank God I got a burner phone with internet—Google to the rescue. Trapezius! Must be related to trapeze and trapezoid. I look up their etymology. Yup, they all share the same Latin root, trapezium, which essentially means the shape of a trapezoid.
“Hey, Google addict,” Avery says when she sees me on the phone. “You’re going to use all the data and then we’ll be fucked when we actually need it.”
“Okay, okay.” I put the phone in my pocket.
“So what do you think everyone will say when school starts and we’re not there?” she asks.
“They’ll probably say good fucking riddance.”
“You don’t think anyone will miss us even a little bit?”
“They’d only miss us because they’d have to find other people whose lives they can ruin.”
Avery sighs. “Is there anything you’ll miss about Big Burr?”
“Just the triple-A crew,” I say, who have been my education, my family, and—to be dramatic for a second—my reason for living this past year. When they first showed up, I stayed after one of the anti-bullying sessions they ran at our high school and asked if they needed an intern or a volunteer, pretending my interest in them was strictly professional, not personal. Karen gave me a knowing look and invited me out for pizza with the rest of the task force.
Pretty soon I was going to the AAA office every day after school. There, I got an education that felt so much more necessary than my actual high school curriculum: Jamal gave me books by James Baldwin; Karen told me about all the classic film stars who were queer, like Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, and Rock Hudson; Tegan lent me feminist books by Audre Lorde and Gloria Steinem; Harley let me read their personal essays and even helped me write one of my own; David told me what it was like to live through the AIDS crisis. Even though the task force was technically sent to teach homophobes about acceptance, I felt like some queer God had heard my prayers and sent them just for me. I finally felt like I wanted to live.
A few months later, I was even feeling emboldened enough to come out to my best friend Ramona. Which, as it turned out, was a huge fucking mistake. Because right after I told her, she made this completely consternated face and said, “What do you mean, bisexual? Maybe that’s true for girls but not for guys.” And she immediately told some girls at school that I was gay. Once that got around, school became an endless grab bag of loogies in my lunch, lockers slammed on my hand, and water bottles full of pee thrown at me in the parking lot. I developed a crick in my neck from constantly looking over my shoulder and was always late for class because I had to wait for my tormentors to go in first.
All the old feelings I thought I’d left behind in my pre-AAA world began to creep back in—the hopelessness, the desperation, the nihilism—you know, all your classic clinical-depression-with-suicidal-ideation symptoms. I finished my sophomore year with a 2.2 GPA, down from 3.8 the year before. The guidance counselor called me in to speak with her and asked if something was going on at home, like she never saw me getting pushed around in the hallway right outside her office.
Avery became my only confidant. When I told her I was bisexual, she barely blinked. “Oh, cool, a ton of my friends back home are bi,” she said. L.A. sounded like this magical place where no one even had to come out as a certain gender or sexuality—it was probably just assumed you were somewhere on the spectrum.
Things finally came to a head—literally—near the end of the school year, during a game of dodgeball. Tiffany McGackin, the star of the girls’ basketball team, threw a ball at Avery’s face so hard that it broke her nose, then everyone teased her about getting a “Los Angeles nose job.” (Don’t ask me how a Los Angeles nose job differs from a regular one.) Avery tried to convince Karen it had been an honest accident, knowing that if she got involved the bullying would only get worse, but Karen saw through her and went straight to the principal. Tiffany got suspended for a week, and that night she messaged Avery on Facebook: Hope u enjoy ur summer, cuntface. Cuz once school starts again I’m going 2 make ur life a living hell.
Avery refused to tell Karen about the message, and instead pleaded, for the millionth time, to go back to L.A., while Karen told her, for the millionth time, that Steph traveled too much and Avery would just have to wait one more year. That was when Avery and I knew we had to take matters into our own hands and just GTFO. I picked up extra delivery shifts all summer at Pu Pu Hot Pot and was able to save five hundred dollars, and Avery’s rich grandma sent her a birthday card stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, so between the two of us, we had almost a thousand bucks.
* * *
• • •
IN THE DARK field beside empty Route 83, Avery grabs my arm. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I peer into the blackness, trying to make out an animal or human shape.
“A whoosh somewhere nearby,” she whispers.
I hold my breath, but all I hear are crickets and the faraway revving of a car’s motor.
She hugs her arms close to her body. “What if there’s an ax murderer waiting for us out here?”
“Yeah, ax murderers tend to wait in desolate fields in the middle of nowhere, Kansas.” Just then I hear it, too, or more like feel it: a whoosh of air, a vibration from the ground, a dizziness in my body.
“You just heard it, didn’t you?” says Avery.
I nod.
She turns on her phone flashlight and spins in a circle, illuminating a bunch of brittle prairie grass and not much else.
“It’s probably just the wind,” I say, then google “nocturnal field-dwelling animals” and scroll through images of crazy-eyed possums and flat-faced, sinister-looking owls.
Avery shudders. “I’m starting to have a bad feeling about this.”
“About what, running away?”
She nods.
I let out an impatient sigh. “Why?”
“How often do you hear anything good about kids who run away? Usually something terrible happens, like they end up getting sex-trafficked or killed. By an ax murderer lurking in a field.” She wraps her arms around herself.
I smile and shake my head at her joke, then get serious and pla
ce my hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “I get why you’re scared. Trust me, I do. But if we listened to our fear whenever it started getting loud, we’d never do anything. Do you really want to head back and face whatever Tiffany McGackin has waiting for you when school starts in two weeks? You know how nuts she is. I could definitely see her shanking a bitch.”
“No, but—”
“Besides, we’ve been over this. There are no other options. You already talked to Karen about moving back to L.A., and she said no. And you were right not to tell her about the Facebook message—if you did, she’d probably call the cops, and who knows what Tiffany would do then? It’s not like the police would stop her. You saw how much they cared about your house being egged, or the billboard.”
Avery’s arms loosen and fall to her sides. “I guess.”
“Hey, don’t worry. I’ll protect you,” I say, flexing my nonexistent biceps and giving her my most masculine grin.
She laughs. “Okay, okay. Do you want to play twenty questions or something? I need to be distracted.”
“Sure,” I say, even though I think twenty questions is a pretty asinine game. I volunteer to go first and choose the first thing that flies into my brain.
“Is it a person?” Avery asks.
“Yes.”
“Is it someone you know?”
“Yes.”
“In real life?”
“No.”
“Is it Sam Brinkley?”
“Yes.”
She smacks my arm. “You turd! You didn’t think picking the guy you’ve had a crush on for the last year was a little obvious?”
I shrug. Sam is one of my online friends and he lives in Los Angeles, which is a bonus reason for going there. Before AAA, my online friends were what kept me going. When I finally got an iPhone, I created profiles no one at school would be able to trace back to me. I made friends by searching for queer hashtags, then replying to people’s posts. Once, when I posted a selfie on Instagram with a caption about being bi, I got 237 likes. Everyone left comments full of prayer-hands and heart-eye emojis, saying to keep being me, that I was cute and gorgeous and anyone would be lucky to date me. Given I always thought I looked like Michael Cera’s less-attractive kid brother, this was news to me. Being online was like some incredible alternate universe where I was popular and desirable. Then the task force showed up and I learned it was possible to feel that way in real life, not just in the glow of a screen.