by J L Aarne
He had thought that nothing else they did to him could make him feel that way ever again because there wasn’t anything he could imagine that they hadn’t already done. He had been taunted and hit and spit on and ridiculed and harassed and he had found ways to deal with it or so he had told himself, and he had found ways to avoid it or so he had believed. It had been awhile since anyone had spit on him or called him a fag or a fairy or a faggot or a queer or a fudge-packer or—his personal favorite—a butt-pirate, so he had started to think it was over. People outside of school were always trying to tell him it would get better, the bullies would get bored, they would forget about him, they would move on to someone else. He hadn’t believed the people who said such things because what the hell did they know about it anyway? But he had started, despite himself, to believe it when it looked like they might be right.
He should have known better.
Jesse would never stop. The rest might eventually get tired of pushing him in the hallway or offering to “let” him suck their dicks in the locker room, but Jesse Gleason wouldn’t. His hate ran deeper than the common pack mentality of adolescent boys in a small Midwest town confronted with the socially unacceptable fact of Corey’s gayness. For Jesse, it was personal. Corey would have bet money that it was Jesse who had followed him to Aubrey’s, watched them having sex through the window in Aubrey’s bedroom, taken the picture with his cell phone and made fliers of it on his home computer, then arrived at school early Monday morning to hang one on Corey’s locker so it was the first thing that confronted him when he got there.
He would also have bet money that the one on his locker was only one of many taped up all over the school.
He ripped the picture off his locker and balled it up in his fist. He was shaking. His fingers fumbled at the combination lock for a minute, just long enough for him to realize that he didn’t want to be here, that he had no intention at all of staying. He stuffed the crumpled paper into his pocket and walked down the hallway of lockers, past the front office and back out the door.
On the steps outside, a group of boys huddled together. They looked up when they saw him and they stared and he knew what they had been looking at by their sudden laughter. They all had embarrassing secrets of their own and Corey even knew some of them, but the difference was, his wasn’t a secret and theirs weren’t splashed in pornographic detail out in the open.
He could have told them, the laughing boys, the staring girls, the embarrassed and stubbornly silent teachers, but he wasn’t that guy and not even this would make him into that guy; the guy who made himself popular by picking on the weak, the different, the girls who cut themselves, the boys who jerked off in the bathroom, the girls who threw up after every meal, the ones selling and buying drugs behind the bleachers, the teachers who anonymously blogged rape fantasies starring their students. Corey knew some of those secrets, but they weren’t his business any more than what he had done with Aubrey Friday night was the business of anyone other than himself and Aubrey.
Aubrey.
Aubrey was going to shit kittens when he found out about this.
Corey wished he could be more like Mercy, who was not only smarter than everyone else, but maintained a complete lack of regard for the social expectations of her peers that he envied. She had skipped eighth grade, and her freshman year Mercy had shaved the hair on either side of her head close to the scalp, dyed it purple, dyed the rest in colors of red, orange and yellow and wore it in a cockscomb. She had seen it in a fashion magazine somewhere. The reaction had been instantaneous outrage by the student body. She was a lesbian or colorful synonymous insults to that effect. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One day about a week after she first adopted the style, a boy named Billy had trapped her against the lockers in the hallway and whispered in her ear that he could fix her, he could turn her back, he could straighten her right out. Mercy slammed her knee into his balls and when he stumbled back, bent over at the waist in agony, she socked him in the face and knocked him on his ass.
Everything stopped after that. People stopped on their way to class, they held their breath, they froze. Mercy was suspended for a week, their parents had to talk to the principal and Mercy had to visit the counselor, but everything stopped. A month later, she dyed her hair black and started letting it grow out. She started dating Ezra Banks, who was prettier than her by a mile, but definitely a boy.
Corey and Mercy were the same age, but Mercy would be graduating in a couple of months and leaving this cursed shithole while Corey still had another year to go.
He thought of the picture in his pocket and inwardly cringed. Someone behind him on the steps of the school called his name and he cringed on the outside, too. He walked faster.
“Hey, Rollins! I got a question! You always play Juliet or does the big guy sometimes let you put it to him instead?!”
That was Jesse. Corey knew his voice anywhere; it still cracked sometimes like his throat wasn’t quite used to the deepening timbre of puberty. Corey wanted to run. He didn’t because there was every chance in the world that Jesse and his new friends would give chase. He wanted to go back, march up the steps and punch Jesse in the nose, but he wasn’t brave and crazy like that.
It was what Mercy would have done, but Mercy probably would have done it a long time ago. Mercy would have done it that night at the lake. With fireworks and the smell of beer all around and Jesse’s outrage like a fist in the gut, the memory of his kiss still in her mouth, she would have drawn blood. Corey had thought Jesse would get over it, that his apology would be enough and they would still be friends the next day. In a million lifetimes he could not have imagined it would come to this.
In the picture in his pocket, Corey was on his side facing the window—facing the camera—and Aubrey was behind him, mostly hidden by his body, his face buried in the curve of Corey’s shoulder and neck. Aubrey had no distinguishing marks that could be seen in the picture. There was a tattoo on his back of a gold koi fish, another on his chest, the name of his brother who had died in infancy, there was a scar bisecting his right eyebrow—an aluminum baseball bat to the face in the seventh grade. You couldn’t see any of it in the picture.
And thank God. Thank God for that. Aubrey was twenty-one. It wasn’t a huge age difference, but Corey was still a minor and Aubrey could still be arrested for having his naked cock within sight of him, let alone inside of him.
“Hey, Rollins!”
Corey turned his head to see Jesse and one of his friends, a whipcord thin, ferret-faced boy named Wayne, following casually along behind him. The terrified instinct to run almost overwhelmed him then, but instead, he froze. In his mind, he said something witty, something scathing, something like what would have come effortlessly to mind and slid carelessly over his tongue and out of his mouth not even a year earlier. It was funny how having friends and being liked could make a person brave, how being hated could sap them of that bravery and turn them into a coward even they were embarrassed to know.
There was something fundamental about human nature in that thought somewhere, Corey was sure. Or maybe it was just his nature.
Jesse walked up to him and shoved him back hard against the wire fence that separated the sidewalk from the softball field. Corey could taste his heart pounding on the back of his tongue, bitter and sweet like unripe fruit. Wayne’s laughter was a nail sliding deeper and deeper into his skull. The crumpled up paper photograph of his boyfriend fucking him by moonlight felt like illegal contraband. He had been caught red-handed covering up the evidence.
“Why don’t you tell me his name, Rollins?” Jesse said, his face too close, his hand flat on Corey’s chest pushing him painfully back into the wire. “Who’s the guy drilling you in the ass, huh? Don’t tell me you didn’t see the picture. I know you did. Who is it? What’s his name?”
More than anything he had ever done in his life Corey wished that he had never kissed Jesse that Fourth of July. They had both been a little drunk and they had been so close, li
ke brothers almost since they were five years old, and Jesse’s blond hair was a mess. The colors of fireworks were in his hair.
Once, Corey would have known how to really twist the needle into Jesse, but no more. He shoved him back to get away from the metal biting into his back. “Fuck you,” he said.
Wayne laughed, but Jesse just grinned. It was a cruel expression. I’ve got your number, it said. I will hurt you, it said, because I like it. “I know you want to, don’t you, faggot? You want this pretty ass of mine, huh? Is that what you think about when you—?”
Corey found a tiny reserve of his shattered confidence, a scrap of his once-upon-a-time bravery and leaned his face close to Jesse’s. Jesse took an involuntary step backward, his eyes widening a fraction in surprise. It made Corey smile. He still knew where to dig the needle in after all.
“I know your big bad secret, Jesse. I know what you’re afraid of,” he said. His voice was pitched low enough that Wayne couldn’t hear him from where he was standing a few feet away, but Jesse could. He glared, eyes shiny as mirrors with a fascinating combination of hate and fear. “Maybe you want to back the fuck off or I might have to tell everyone about it.”
Jesse pretended to laugh, but it was forced and fake. “You don’t know shit, faggot.”
“I know enough.”
“You shut your lying, cocksucking mouth if you know what’s good for you.”
“Let me go,” Corey said calmly, “or I’ll tell Wayne. I’ll tell him my side of the story, and you know he can’t keep a secret.”
He pushed by Jesse and started walking away from the school again, away from Jesse and Wayne. Wayne wanted to come after him, but Jesse said, “No.” Jesse said, “Let the little queer go home and cry. He’ll be back.”
He was right, of course. Corey could walk away now, but he couldn’t stay away forever. He couldn’t drop out. His dad was the town sheriff—he’d kill Corey if he even mentioned it. He’d kill him twice if he ever found out why he wanted to.
Corey walked the two and a half miles back to his house with his head down, his mind still racing. He couldn’t see a way out of it. He might get away with missing a day, but with those pictures up all over the school, someone was going to call his house. Someone was going to call his dad and his dad was going to freak out and Corey knew he wouldn’t understand, but that wasn’t the worst part; the worst part was, he might not really even try to understand. Mercy said their folks didn’t know he was gay because they didn’t want to know he was gay, and there might have been some truth to that, but mostly Corey just figured that sometimes adults were the dumbest people alive.
It hadn’t always been this way. Before that summer two years earlier, Corey had even been kind of popular at school. He’d had friends, he had gone out sometimes and they stayed over sometimes. The last time Jesse had called him at his house had been a few days before the end of that summer and Mercy’s mom, Audra answered the phone. It was Jesse, she told him, completely clueless, and handed it to him.
“I want you to stay the fuck away from me at school, you got that?” Jesse said as soon as Corey said hello. “You stay the fuck away from me.”
It was like a hard punch in the stomach. He had known Jesse was upset because he hadn’t seen him since that night, but he had said he was sorry when he realized it wasn’t okay and Jesse wasn’t cool with it. Jesse had just mumbled something at him, went to get another beer and avoided him the rest of the night, then the rest of the summer.
“Jesse, what—?”
“You stay the fuck away and you’re not gonna say anything,” Jesse insisted.
“Okay,” Corey said, confused.
“Say it!”
Instead, he hung up the phone. It started ringing again immediately as he was going back upstairs. “If it’s Jesse, tell him I’m not here,” he told Audra.
Kids fight had been Audra’s assessment of the way the friendship between her stepson and his best friend had dissolved. Kids fight and they make up or they make other friends. No big deal. No one tried to correct her assumption.
More than anything, more than Corey wished that he had never kissed Jesse, he wished that Jesse hadn’t, for just a moment, kissed him back. Jesse could have forgiven him for the kiss, but he couldn’t forgive him for that one instant of weakness, that second where his tongue met Corey’s. He couldn’t forgive him for the way it made him feel. He had wanted him back for a moment, just a moment, and forgotten what that meant, how wrong it was, and he had been hard in his pants when he pulled away and Corey knew it. That was unforgivable.
Mercy
The Edge of the World
She had been sitting beside Corey’s bed at the hospital for three days. She wasn’t aware of the time passing or the nurses and doctors moving in and out of her peripheral vision, asking her if she wanted blankets, water, coffee, if she needed to take a break, maybe go home. There was nothing she could do for him they kept telling her with increasing frustration. She didn’t speak to them; they didn’t exist. She sat by Corey’s bed while Corey fought to live or die, and watched the hospital grounds through the half open slats in the Venetian blinds: people in wheelchairs, people with briefcases, overdressed women, underdressed men, little kids in their pajamas, ambulances, vans, interns. All of them passed by the window where she watched, walking in front of a grotesque fountain made of rocks and concrete intended to be therapeutic. She was so unpleasantly numb to all of it.
The paramedics had injected her with a sedative that Monday night after she found Corey because, her mom said with that defensive whine in her voice she sometimes had when she was worried, Mercy had been hysterical. Hysterical. She could believe it even if she couldn’t really remember it.
She had skipped school that Monday with Ezra. They had gone for a drive, ended up at the movie theater one town over and sat through a matinee showing of some superhero movie with Robert Downey Jr. in it, then drove out to the river, went swimming, and made out in the bed of Ezra’s truck while their clothes dried on the hood. She didn’t know about the pictures of Corey and Aubrey tacked up all over the school until much later. She didn’t find out about the video Jesse Gleason had emailed to his friends, who had emailed it to their friends and so on, one of whom uploaded it to a porn site online with the title “Underage Twink Gets Fucked,” until days after that. Monday night, Ezra took her home around seven and they walked through the door, still damp from the river, still pretty horny but with their minds more on food than sex, and found Corey hanging above the stairs.
His face had been blue. She still couldn’t get it out of her head. His face so blue he had to be dead, his mouth open and slack, lips the color of candle wax. She remembered grabbing him and almost falling then Ezra taking him from her and how she’d fought him until the words he was screaming at her registered: “Get the rope! Get the rope, Mercy, get the fucking rope!”
She cut the rope with a kitchen knife and when they put him on the floor Corey was still alive. Incredibly still alive, though everyone kept saying that he shouldn’t have been. He was still in critical condition. Loss off blood and oxygen to the brain. If he lived, he might be a vegetable, he might never walk or talk again, he might be retarded. If he lived. He might not. The doctors were very careful to make sure the whole family understood that he might still die.
These were the same doctors who told Mercy that she could talk to him or read to him because he might hear her, like that would make any difference at all to whether he lived or died or woke up a brain-dead moron. She didn’t read to him and she would not believe that he was going to die.
She reached over on the bed and picked up Corey’s hand. She laced her fingers through his, felt no responding clench in his hand, squeezed lightly and said, “You’re going to live, baby brother. You’re not allowed to die. They’re going to pay for it and you have to be there. You have to see it.” She leaned on her elbows against his bed and stared at his face for a while. “When you’re ready,” she said, and put his hand
back down on the mattress.
Her mother was at home taking personal leave from work so she could sit on the couch and cry or lay in the bed and cry. Corey’s father, Don was on a mission to have the video expunged from the internet, to have everyone who had even set eyes on the lewd screen cap picture of his son expelled from school or arrested, to find the other man in the video and bring the “sick pervert” to justice.
He wasn’t having much success on any front. Corey and Aubrey were both very attractive people and the video was clearly genuine and not staged pornography, which meant that the moment it was taken down from one site, it popped up on two more. Don was having the most trouble with websites hosted in other countries, but it didn’t matter. It was out there. It would always be out there. Forever. The school didn’t want to get involved at all and Don was having a difficult time getting much sympathy from the legal system or other parents. Jesse was a minor. All of his friends were minors. Boys will be boys. It’s a rite of passage. It’s what kids do. At least no one so far had said that it wasn’t that bad, that he would survive, that it built character. Or maybe they had. Mercy hadn’t really been listening and people actually could be that stupid and insensitive.
Aubrey was still in town. She could respect that even if she thought it was a pretty dumb move on his part. She had called to warn him when Don first started his crusade. It was harder to see Aubrey in the video than it was to see Corey, but not impossible and someone could still recognize him. He was the one person she was fairly sure Don wouldn’t have much trouble arresting. Aubrey felt guilty about Corey because he had broken up with him on top of everything else that had happened that Monday, so he blamed himself. He didn’t tell her so out loud, but Mercy could tell.
She didn’t tell him it wasn’t his fault, though she suspected that was what he truly wanted to hear. Fuck him. She didn’t care about what he wanted. He was lucky she wasn’t giving her stepfather his name and address.