by Eric Smith
“Baby, open your arms and fall into me. Baby, receive me and let me in. You are the one. You are the way. You are the keeper of my heart.”
What. The. Fuck. These lyrics — they’re mine. I mean . . . ours. I wrote this song with Orlando just moments before we shared our first, secret kiss. And now someone else is singing them. I feel like I’m being split at the seams and all of my insides are spilling out for people to see. My fists ball up at my sides all over again, and there’s something building, building, and building deep within me, and something really wants me to act on it.
“Those are my lyrics!” I shout to Charity and Trey.
Charity’s eyebrows rise and Trey’s eyes widen. “What the fuck?” he says.
“I know. We wrote this song together,” I tell them. Orlando owns the rights to sing this song as much as I do, but something feels wrong about hearing this random person sing lyrics that are 50 percent mine.
I run outside to catch my breath. I sit out on the curb in front of the building. It’s dark out and the stars shine bright in the sky like the disco ball inside. The wind blows and I hold my elbows. Cars zoom past on the road across the way, and I can hear crickets chirping in the patches of grass nearby.
“Hey, you okay?” a voice says from behind me. I glance over my shoulder, expecting it to be either Charity or Trey, but it’s not. It’s Fin.
“Yeah,” I lie. The truth is, I’m not okay and I don’t know why I’m not.
“I know a lie when I hear one,” Fin says, sitting down next to me. “Were you not feeling I Want Your P.S.?”
I stay quiet.
“They just announced that they’re uploading a new album to Spotify and are about to sign with a record label.”
“Cool,” I say, sighing.
A silent beat that feels like forever.
“But I’ll take Reckless Love over them any day of the week.”
I kind of laugh, but don’t say anything else.
I don’t know how Orlando did this, how he allowed someone else to sing our song. Suddenly every single one of my limbs feels super heavy and I’m numb. “They stole my song,” I admit to him, this kind-of-stranger, unsure of the reaction he’ll have.
“What?” Fin raises an eyebrow.
“The song they sang. It’s mine. I wrote those words.”
“Oh my God.” Fin puts a hand to his mouth. “How’d they —”
“It’s a long story.”
“Good thing I have time.”
I look at Fin, and he’s smiling at me in this weird way. I look away kind of quickly, hesitating on opening my mouth. I have a tendency to overshare. “An old friend is in I Want Your P.S. We used to write songs together. We were the best of friends, did everything together, like two peas in a pod, but somewhere along the way, our pod split, and we started growing in different directions. And then one day, I got a text that he was leaving Reckless Love to start his own band. We haven’t talked in months. Ain’t that some shit?”
“That feels tough, Q. I don’t exactly know what you’re feeling, but I definitely understand what it’s like to lose a childhood friend. I had this friend, Ray, that stopped talking to me once I went public about being gay.”
“That’s messed up, man.”
“After a while, you get used to the ways the world shits on you. But it did sting to lose Ray. I didn’t think there was anything in the world that would make us stop talking.”
“Yeah,” I say, staring up at the night sky, admiring the constellations.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “What would make you feel better?” he asks me. “I admit that I feel kind of powerless right now, but maybe there’s something I can help you do.” He whips out a shiny object, and it takes me a while to realize that it’s a pocket knife.
“What — what are you doing with that?”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Orlando’s singing my song. I’m not gonna kill him for it, though,” I say. “Prison doesn’t exactly sound like a place I’d like to be. I’ve heard stories from my pops about the one time he got locked up for dealing when he was my age.”
“I don’t mean kill him, O.J.,” Fin says. “But we can fuck some shit up if you want. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.”
I think for a moment. “Nah. I’m okay,” I mutter, feeling like I’m sinking within myself. I just want to stay here, staring up at the sky, wondering about all the things we can’t see up there, forgetting about what Orlando’s doing inside.
“Loser.” It feels funny that he’s calling me that word, like I’m boring him. It’s a word some people call him, but sitting here with him, while my girlfriend and best friend are both enjoying this night in there, he’s not boring me at all, and it’s easy to talk to him. Even easier to talk to him than to Trey or Charity at times.
“Who you calling a loser?” I play-punch him in the arm.
He just laughs, showing teeth and all, and our eyes lock for a moment; then I look away again.
“Fin?” I ask, picking at a hole in my dark jeans. “H-how did you know about you? How did you accept it?” It’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask someone.
“What do you mean? About me being gay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You don’t have to answer if that’s too weird of a question to answer. I don’t want you to feel —”
“Not weird at all,” he interrupts. “It’s who I am. But I do answer that probably every day. The thing is, you never really stop coming out to people. You just keep doing it over and over and over again forever and ever until you die.”
I swallow whatever lump is lodged in the back of my throat. “That feels sad, bro,” I say.
“It can be. But good thing I like talking about myself.” He laughs. Our eyes lock again, and I finally notice how deep and electric blue his are.
“Yeah, good thing.” I feel like there’s more he wants to say, so I wait. I want to listen, to really hear him.
“But I started thinking about it in the fifth grade when I got my first boner after a kid that I was friends with got changed in front of me. Then, when I eventually read the Harry Potter books, I kept imagining Harry and Draco making out every time they interacted. But what confirmed it all was when I had my first kiss with a boy, and even after already having kissed girls, my first boy kiss felt like the truest, realest kiss in the whole world to me.”
Damn. I feel that. That’s how I felt when Orlando and I kissed. But I can’t be gay. I don’t know another gay person besides Fin, who I barely know. Besides, I’m dating Charity, and I really, really, really like Charity. No, I love her, and I love when we kiss and do other things that you do before sex, too, ya know? I love imagining the two of us doing it someday. But I also loved doing all of those things with Orlando, even if it was in secret. Part of me really liked that we were secret. We were each other’s secret, even if it was really, really wrong. Now it’s like we’re each other’s memory we want to forget.
An owl hoots somewhere that sounds nearby. Fin studies me.
“Why do you ask?”
I have to come up with some sort of answer. I don’t wanna be a dick. “Umm. I just feel . . .” I struggle to legit find the words to say. They’re there somewhere in the abyss of my thoughts but won’t come out. Come out, come out, I want to shout at the words in my head. Still nothing. It’s like there’s something, like a beautiful butterfly, trying so desperately to reveal itself, but its wings are caught in my throat. “I love my girlfriend very much, but I’ve been keeping a huge-ass secret.”
“Can I guess?”
“Sure?” My voice fills with curiosity.
“You’re in love with me,” he says seriously, but then laughs like he’s joking.
I shake my head at him, at him joking when I’m being vulnerable. “Orlando and I had sex, and I never told Charity.”
“Ugh. Straight people,” he says, smacking his forehead. “For some reason, I’m always finding myself in conversations like this.
That’s how Aimee and I became friends.”
“But I liked it, though. He was the first and only boy I’ve ever done anything with that I actually had feelings for. The idea of being with a guy in that way excites me the same way being with a girl does.”
“You’re probably, I don’t know, bisexual,” he says. “But you’re definitely not an alien. And that’s really okay.”
I swallow my spit. “Bisexual?” I say, as though I’ve never really thought about it before. But that’s not true. The thought has crossed my mind before, but for some reason, with Fin saying it to me, it feels like a totally new thought. Like I’m thinking about it in this brand-new way, seeing myself with brand-new eyes.
“Yeah. ‘Bisexual’ means you like —”
“I know what it means . . .” I interrupt him. “But thanks. I just feel some type of way that you’re now the only other person that knows about Orlando and me, and I feel some type of way about he and I not being friends anymore.”
“Look.” He settles closer to me. “Sometimes, people stick around. Other times, people don’t. It’s up to you to let the people go that don’t want to stick around. No matter how much you might think they’re great, some people just aren’t meant to stick around.”
This Fin kid is actually really wise, and I don’t entirely know why I’m so surprised. It’s not like I’ve tried having a real conversation with him this deep and intentional at school before. But what he’s saying makes a lot of sense, even if it does feel really hard to hear.
“You’re right,” I admit, kind of huffing out the syllables.
“And you’re the one who chooses who knows about you being bi, or whatever you end up labeling yourself,” he murmurs, lighting a cigarette and taking a huge puff. “When we’re born, we’re so obsessed with putting ourselves in something. We’re so obsessed with putting ourselves in boxes. When we’re young, we put ourselves in cardboard boxes and imagine that we’re on spaceships or in whatever dreamland that makes us happy. When we’re adults, we put ourselves in these metaphorical boxes to hide from who we really are. Let yourself out of the box, Q. You can’t keep yourself in there forever.”
Damn. He’s right about that, too. Fuck . . .
A beat of silence — so quiet I can hear applause coming from inside — so quiet I can hear my stomach rumbling a little bit, reminding me that I need to eat something. I watch the smoke from his cigarette funnel around us, and suddenly our gazes lock again.
“I . . . I like your eyes,” I blurt out awkwardly. There’s no taking this back, even when I instantly regret saying it.
He looks puzzled at first and smiles. “Thank you. Red hair and blue eyes, the rarest combination a person can have. We make up, I think, less than one percent of the world’s population. Pretty cool knowing there’s less than one percent of people like me out there. Scary, too. Now imagine what percentage of the less than one percent is also gay, like me.”
Things go quiet for a long minute.
“It is pretty messed up that he’s doing your song like that.” He finishes up his cigarette and flicks the butt onto a patch of grass.
“Thanks . . . Charity and Trey probably think I’m overreacting.” But they don’t even know why I’m out here. Neither of them has even come to check on me. “Fin. You’re actually pretty dope, bro,” I tell him.
And he grins nearly from ear to ear.
“You still have that pocket knife?” I ask. “I feel like fucking some shit up.”
He grabs my elbow and helps me up off the curb. Though my ass has fallen asleep, I grab the pocket knife and lead him to the parking lot, strolling through to find Orlando’s Honda Civic. When we do, I stab at one of his tires. At first, I feel really bad, like I just committed a crime that I didn’t even want to commit. But then — maybe it’s something about hearing all the air whistle out — it starts to feel really good.
I poke out his back tires, then slash away at them like I’m an angry explorer fighting my way through the jungle. “AGGGHHHH!” I scream at the top of my lungs — surely things are so loud inside no one can hear me — and for the first time in a long time, I feel good. I feel infinite. I start kicking away at the doors of the car, the side mirrors, the trunk, the front license plate that says swinger that he didn’t have the last time I saw his car. The I Want Your P.S. bumper sticker that he also didn’t have before. Kicking the car barely does anything, but it feels good.
“We should piss on the driver-side door,” I joke. That would be another total dickhead thing to do.
“Me first,” Fin says, whipping out his dick through his pants zipper to start streaming all over the front of Orlando’s car before I can even say that I’m kidding. “This is for always asking to see my math homework freshman year.” I’m kind of surprised he remembered that. And I’m dying laughing standing here, taking in the fact that he actually is peeing on Orlando’s car.
“You’re so fucking wild, Fin,” I say through a small chuckle.
“Your turn. Finish him,” he says in a voice similar to the one on Mortal Kombat when you get to use a final combo to do something super sick and gory to your opponent.
I take a deep breath. I don’t know if I can actually do it. I was mainly joking, but I’m impressed that he really did it. I glance around to confirm that we’re alone; then I whip out my dick and start peeing. When I’m done, I zip back up and give the car the finger.
Fin wraps me up in kind of a hug.
“I’m so proud!” He’s acting like I’m some little kid and he just taught me how to ride a bike. In a way, he did teach me something, and for that — I’m grateful.
His arms feel warm around me, and I really want to tell him that I’m scared of what comes next, but before I can say anything, someone’s shouting at us.
“There you are! There you are! We’ve been lookin’ for you, bro,” Trey says, running toward me with Charity. “We’re on next.”
Shit.
“You’ve been with Griffin this whole time?” Charity’s nose kind of turns up and flares. I can tell she’s pissed. My smile fades. I don’t even wanna really play anymore.
“No — I mean, yeah,” I say. “I came out here to get some air, but then Fin came to join.”
“Why are you holding a pocket knife and why does it smell like pee over here?” Trey asks.
“Mind your business,” I tell them. “We’ve got a show to do.” I return Fin’s knife and push past them, heading for the entrance of the building.
“Wait. Wait. Wait!” Charity screams at me. “Before we go in there, we’ve gotta do our thing.”
I almost forgot. Before every show, the three of us do, like, a team handshake that’s waaaaaay too complicated, but we’ve never not done it before a show or performance, and despite me being in a weird place right now, I can’t let that stop us from doing it right now.
“Good luck,” Fin tells us.
“Are you not coming in?” I ask, concern probably obvious in my voice.
“Oh, I am. Just after I finish this cigarette,” he says. I look down at his right hand, holding a new cigarette.
“Well, see you inside,” I say to him before turning away and walking toward the building, emotionally preparing myself for this performance. I’m sure Orlando’s somewhere around, and while neither of the songs we’ve prepared to do are ones that I wrote with him, one of our secret songs, one is a song I wrote about love and how love has this way of lying right to our faces — a song that I listen to when his face inevitably pops up in my head at night, when I’m winding down and trying to shut off my brain to sleep.
As we get closer, I can still hear people cheering. There’s a girl with a clipboard and a headset who’s all like, “Umm, are you a part of Reckless Love?”
“Uh, yeah. Why?”
“Well, we needed you and the rest of your band backstage like five minutes ago. Follow me.”
I wait a little bit for Trey and Charity to catch up before I follow this girl through some hidden,
really bright hallway, up a small set of stairs, and around to where the stage entrance is.
“Take your places, everyone,” someone shouts around us, but I’m too focused on my thoughts.
Trey yanks at my shoulder. “What’s goin’ on, bro? You seem . . . not like you right now.”
Charity gets close to my face. “Is this another one of those anxiety-attack moments?”
I’ve not had an anxiety attack since last summer when we went to see that one horror movie about the killer clown. Yet she keeps bringing it up.
We listen to Mr. Bolivar’s muffled voice introduce us, reading the blurb about us on our website word for word. The blurb we wrote back when Orlando was still a part of us. I make a mental note to change that at some point also. I hear people stomping their feet and cheering our name. It’s so loud it feels like the floor is rumbling, and I can feel it in my legs and stomach.
“Ready?” the annoyed girl with the headset says, lines forming on her forehead.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I mumble under my breath so quietly no one hears.
Thankfully Trey answers for the three of us by saying, simply, “Yep.”
I listen to her countdown before the curtain opens and we’re exposed, before we have to resume our places and perform.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
“Showtime,” she says, and the thick black curtain pulls back slowly and then all at once.
“Welcome to the stage, Reckless Love,” Mr. Bolivar announces. Everyone’s screaming their excitement at us. People even have signs with our faces on them.
I approach the mic at the center. Trey gets on the drums, and Charity sets up her bass.
I clear my throat into the mic a little. “Hey. My name’s Quinton Kerr, that’s my bro Trey Watson, and my beautiful girlfriend, Charity Carson, and the three of us are Reckless Love. Our first song is one we wrote just for tonight called ‘How Could You.’” It’s not a rager, like all the other songs have been. It’s more of a relaxed, slightly medium-tempo ballad.
“One, two, three, four.” Trey clicks away with his sticks. And then I begin strumming my guitar between a C and F chord. Most of the song uses those two chords.