Hiroku

by Laura Lascarso

  “Yeah, and the things we did…” He shakes his head as though he’d like to erase it from his memory. “I’m not that way, Hiroku.”

  It sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of it. Also, we didn’t do “things” just one “thing,” and I’d already promised never to mention it.

  “Right,” I say, then wonder if Ryan is in denial, and this is his way of dealing with it, by pretending I never existed. Me, the great temptress, the body that everyone wants to fuck. I shouldn’t take it so personally, but it never feels good to get rejected by someone you care about.

  “Well, I’d better get back to my room before they realize I’m gone.” I back away toward the door, determined not to put my own drama on Ryan’s shoulders.

  “Good luck out there, Hiroku,” Ryan says as his parting words.

  “Yeah, man. You too.”

  Later, alone in my room, I remember when I first came to New Vistas and memorized the sound of Ryan’s snoring as a way to be comforted in this sterile, cold environment. The way in which I latch onto others’ steady ways in an attempt to steady myself. Always relying on someone else to fill in the gaps and make up for my own deficiencies.

  I hope wherever Ryan lands, he finds a way to make peace with himself.

  We live in a culture of vicious shame.

  Ain’t that the truth?

  THEN

  The morning after.

  I could go the rest of my life without experiencing another morning after. That night after Seth struck me, I curled into a ball on the plaid couch in Seth’s rehearsal garage, writhing and moaning from withdrawal. At some point in the early morning, I texted my mom to tell her I was pulling a double at Sam’s Club. I didn’t know what lies I’d have to spin if Seth didn’t show up.

  But he did show, pretty early for him and an hour or so before the band was scheduled to rehearse. He drew up the garage door with a shuddering groan and stood silhouetted by the stark morning light like that time at McKinney Falls when I thought him to be far more benevolent. He came inside and stared down at me, looking more tired than remorseful.

  “I lost my shit.” He sat down next to where I was huddled and placed a hand on my hip.

  It wasn’t even close to an apology, but it was probably as good as I was going to get. I also wasn’t in the position to be making demands.

  “I didn’t fuck him,” I said weakly, angry at myself for feeling the need to explain.

  “I know,” Seth said in a resigned voice. I couldn’t tell if he was more upset that he’d hit me or that his suspicion had proven false.

  Without having to ask, Seth cut up some lines, and I snorted them. The withdrawal subsided almost immediately, and I waited patiently for the high to overcome me. When it did, my blood and bone liquefied, and I faded into the crisscrossing threads of the plaid couch, the place of so much early experimentation by Seth and me in our first golden months together. The great Before.

  Seth left me alone after that; instead doing laundry and tinkering around on his guitar or whatever else he could find to stay occupied, waiting until I had drifted far enough away that I couldn’t help but boomerang back to him.

  The band arrived sometime around noon while I was still soaking in my high, half-helpless on the couch just like a junkie. Sabrina came over and grabbed my chin between her strong thumb and forefinger, squeezing tightly.

  “What the hell happened here?” she demanded, scrutinizing my face like she was trying to make a diagnosis. “And what are you on, Hiro?”

  I shook my head. I lacked the words or the effort it took to answer her.

  “Leave him alone, Sabrina,” Seth said from across the garage. He was plugging in his amp. The feedback rattled through my bones, and I winced at the jarring sound.

  “Are you fucking high right now?” Sabrina asked me. She swung her fiery gaze on Seth. “Did you get him high? Did you fucking hit him, Seth?”

  Yeah, so… I’d been hiding all of this from Sabrina as well.

  They argued. It turned into a screaming match. I drifted in and out, determined not to let their squabbling ruin my high. Sabrina tried to shake me out of it. Then she tried to drag me out of there, but I clung to the couch like a sailor to his sinking ship. I put a cushion over my head to drown them out. Nothing came between me and my master.

  When the fog lifted and my high wore off, I rose from the couch like Lazarus rising from the dead to find the band in the middle of a jam session, except their playing was muffled because Seth had put noise-canceling headphones on my ears. Because he cared about my hearing or he cared about not ruining my high? Either way, it was thoughtful, and I kicked myself for giving him any credit as my jaw was still aching from that stunner of a hit from the night before.

  Sabrina was at her post behind the drums, firing hateful glares at Seth’s back and beating the hell out of her skins. Mitchell was plucking at his bass, but it looked like his mind was on other matters. Dean was giving me the same looks Bobby had given me last night. But none of them would interfere, not even Sabrina, because the band always came first. We were all occupying the same space but on entirely different frequencies, together and so very far apart. Everyone who signed that piece of paper had a job to do, including me. Mine was to bleed.

  Seth was too focused on his music to care what I was all about. I glanced around for a piece of paper and found an old invoice for an oil change on the van. I grabbed a drafting pencil from Seth’s carpentry tools. I could have used my phone, but that wasn’t how I was used to composing.

  I scribbled out the lyrics to the song that would become Petty Crime’s anthem. It went like this:

  I rise and you fall

  I push and you pull

  away

  I scream and you cry

  I beg and you fly

  away

  Take a little at a time

  Give you just enough

  to make you mine

  you waste

  away

  I was still drafting it when Seth’s shadow fell over my paper. I glanced up to find him staring down at me. I couldn’t hear him because the headphones were on my ears, and the band was still playing behind him.

  He yelled something at the band and slid my headphones around my neck. “I said, why are you crying?” He sounded angry and frustrated.

  The garage went silent except for Seth’s inquiry. I reached up to find my cheeks were wet. My body had betrayed me again. I stared back down at the paper, feeling foolish that after all this time, I still couldn’t keep my shit together. I couldn’t hide anything from Seth because my feelings were always on display. There was no escape, not even in the recesses of my mind.

  I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the pile of crushed beer cans. I went out to the van and pulled out my Sam’s Club uniform from the backseat, changed right there in front of everyone. They’d seen everything already. There was no part of my dignity or personhood left intact. Seth tried to call me back, but I ignored him.

  I walked my sorry ass home, avoided my parents so they wouldn’t see the bruises on my cheek or my split lip, collapsed into my mostly unused bed, and slept for eighteen hours straight.

  Seth left me a few voicemails. He wanted to see me. He wanted to talk. I didn’t want to see him or talk to him, but I wanted to get high, so I borrowed my mom’s car and drove over there on Sunday evening. When I arrived, he said he was ordering food and asked me what I wanted from a nearby burger joint. The only thing they had without meat was a veggie burger, so I told him one of those.

  I thought we’d get high after that, but Seth said he was out, and so was Kyle, which meant he had to get some black-market shit from James. I didn’t like James, who as an introduction, said he was the descendent of some high-ranking Nazi like it was something to be proud of. I didn’t like the way he talked about women, didn’t like his aggression, didn’t like the way he sized me up every time I saw him. He was always saying low-key homophobic things about me or to me, sometimes in front
of Seth, sometimes as an aside when Seth couldn’t hear.

  When I heard James was coming over, I told Seth I’d be in his bedroom and listened to some music on my phone with a pair of Seth’s headphones on. A while later Seth popped his head in, “Food’s here.”

  “Is James?” I was still pretty raw from Friday night’s debacle and wanted to avoid Seth’s sketchy friends altogether. Not to mention there were the bruises on my face, which I’d gotten from a spontaneous jiu-jitsu demonstration at work. At least, that was the lie I told my mother.

  “Yeah, but it’s cool,” Seth said. I didn’t move. “Come on, Hiroku. Don’t be a baby. Your food’s going to get cold.”

  I slouched out to the living room. Seth was in a chair, and James and a couple of his drug buddies were on the couch.

  “Your geisha’s here,” James said snidely while eyeing me up and down like a jewel thief. I glanced over at Seth to see if he was going to say anything about that, but Seth was unwrapping his food and acted like he hadn’t heard him.

  “What up, James? Henchmen,” I said because I wasn’t going to let him have the last word. There was nowhere to sit except for the spot next to James on the couch, so I sat on the floor instead. Seth passed me my burger and fries. James asked me where I got the shiner.

  “I beat up a Nazi down at the park.”

  “Looks to me like you lost,” James said, probably guessing at its real source because even though punching Nazis had come into fashion again, it wasn’t a common occurrence in Austin.

  Apparently, James and his sidekicks were dining with us as well because they were digging into the food. I unwrapped my own meal and went to take a bite when I noticed it had a distinctly meat smell. I pulled the bun off the sandwich and saw that it was in fact meat.

  “Does someone have my veggie burger?” I asked around the table, figuring there’d been a mix-up. The henchmen checked their burgers.

  James shook his head in disbelief. “You don’t eat meat either?” He looked to Seth like he should be the one answering for me. “I swear you fags are so delicate.”

  I pushed my uneaten sandwich away and stood to go back into Seth’s bedroom.

  “Sit down, Hiroku,” Seth ordered, his voice tense and bossy.

  “Yeah,” James goaded him. “That’s how you talk to a bitch.”

  My gaze veered toward Seth again, but he said nothing and refused to even look at me. In fact, he seemed to be building off James’s toxicity like the way dogs will get extra aggressive when they run in a pack.

  “I paid for that burger,” Seth said to me. “So, you’d better fucking eat it.”

  I glared at him. Another power struggle, only this time it was in front of an audience, and it was one of my absolute hard limits. “Fuck you, Seth,” I said in a low growl.

  Seth glanced up at me, switched his demeanor to cajoling. He smiled as if this were a joke. “One bite, Hiroku. One bite to show me that you love me.”

  In that moment I didn’t love him; I didn’t even like him. “I’m not going to eat that fucking burger,” I said evenly, trying not to let my anger overcome me.

  “Take one bite, or I won’t get you high,” Seth said with a mad glint in his eyes. He loved to push me to my limits to see if I might acquiesce to his demands, but even this was a stretch for him. Meanwhile, I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t speak.

  “I thought queers liked eating meat,” James pitched in.

  Seth leaned back in his chair and tugged at his crotch. “Would you rather eat this meat, baby?” He stared right at me, a direct challenge, with a stupid little smile on his greasy, meat-stained lips.

  “Are you asking me to blow you, Seth? Here, in front of your esteemed colleagues?” I hoped that if I said the thing Seth was asking me to do out loud, he might realize how outrageous it was. Sometimes he backed down; sometimes it backfired on me.

  Seth’s expression went flat, and he motioned to the sandwich. “This or that, Hiroku. Your choice.”

  What a sense of power Seth derived from making me submit to his demands and humiliating me in front of his friends. He thought I would choose the burger—he was counting on it, in fact. And because that was what he wanted, I chose the opposite. I didn’t give him the opportunity to back down, just dropped onto my knees in front of him, yanked out his semi-hard dick, and went at it.

  James and his henchmen hooted and hollered and made several derogatory statements about gays that I won’t repeat. I knew it must have angered Seth even more than it bothered me because if I was performing for these assholes, then Seth was too. My blowjob was without any feeling whatsoever. I made my mouth like a machine and sucked Seth off so robotically that he went limp a few minutes into it, but I kept going until finally, he pushed my face away and buttoned up.

  “That’s enough,” Seth said, not meeting my eyes. I hoped he was ashamed of himself, but who really knew? His ability to justify his actions was some kind of superpower. Seth plucked a baggie from his pocket and passed it over to me. “Go wait for me in my room.”

  I snatched up the bag and bowed dramatically before them. “I’m available for parties too,” I said with the bitchiest glare I could muster.

  I made it to Seth’s room before the tears came—hot and angry. I couldn’t believe I still had some left in me. I didn’t want to sit around and wait for his majesty to grace me with his presence, so I used the fire escape to climb down to the bottom of the second floor and dropped to the pavement from there, landing in a crouch.

  I drove over to the park by my house and swung as high as I could, trying to get airborne only to become nauseated instead. Seth caught up with me later in the cement tunnel where I’d ducked in to get high off his shit. I didn’t know how he found me—he’d probably installed some GPS app on my phone during one of his search and seizures. I thought he’d chased me down to recover his drugs, but he was after something else altogether. I was in the throes of pleasure when Seth came in with that crumpled-up piece of paper where I’d scribbled down the lyrics to a song I’d already abandoned. He must have retrieved it from the trash pile.

  “Your song needs a chorus,” Seth said to me, using his knees to flatten out the paper. I didn’t know why, but there were tears in his eyes. I also couldn’t find it in me to care.

  “It’s not a song, Seth. It’s a receipt for an oil change.” He was sitting right next to me, but it felt like I was shouting at him from across a vast distance.

  “It’s our anthem, Hiroku,” Seth rasped in a husky voice. I touched my finger to the moisture on his cheek and tasted his tears to make sure they were real.

  “How do I know you’re not faking?” I asked, which to anyone else would seem nonsensical, but Seth understood my meaning.

  “Fine, I can figure out a chorus,” he said. “What about a name?”

  “Queen of Hearts,” I said dizzily, too high to give a shit about anything, which was just the way I liked it.

  “Why that name?”

  “Because all ways are the queen’s way,” I singsonged.

  “And am I the queen?” Seth asked as if he already knew the answer.

  I dipped my head in mock deference, “Yes, your majesty.”

  NOW

  There’s a pastor who comes into New Vistas on Wednesday evenings and gives a sermon. Attendance is optional, which I appreciate, not being the religious-type myself. Usually I’m bored enough to wander into the group activities room to see what’s being said.

  He’s all right, Pastor Dan. I believe that he believes what he’s saying. That Jesus is the answer and that by putting your burdens on His shoulders and giving yourself up to God, you’re making the weight of your sins a little less heavy. Distributing the load, as it were—it makes mathematical sense as well. And the idea that someone cares enough to keep a watch over you, like a benevolent parental figure, that’s all good.

  The thing I get tripped up on is the forgiveness aspect. Confess and you will be forgiven—seems way too easy. No punishment? No conse
quence? What’s to stop you from doing it again? Where’s the incentive to stay on the straight and narrow path if all that needs to be done is say you’re sorry?

  In rehab, we call that shit being an enabler.

  I have regretted nearly every decision I’ve made in the past two years, but I don’t feel forgiven. My parents haven’t forgiven me, and I can’t forgive myself for what I put my family and Sabrina through. I couldn’t forgive Seth then, and I sure as hell can’t forgive him now. I doubt he’d forgive me either. Maybe I’m missing some aspect of the sermon, or maybe my forgiveness bone is broken.

  Seth used to marvel at my ability to freeze him out when I was upset. He said I made it look so easy. But it was never easy. It was survival.

  I feel it happening in here too. Only this time, I’m shutting out my former self. The Hiroku who loved Seth is dead and gone. Here in the incubator of New Vistas, someone new is forming in his place. He’s harder, more bitter, and generally pissed off all of the time. I hardly even recognize him, and that’s a good thing.

  This is a much easier concept for me to grasp than forgiveness.

  THEN

  After that weekend with Seth—the first time he hit me—I determined that I needed to do something about my addiction to free myself from his control. I had the money Seth had deposited into my bank account. It wasn’t a ton of money, but if I rationed my habit, I could float my addiction for a couple of months at least, and maybe I could even wean myself off of the drugs altogether. Then I could stop lying to my parents as well. What a relief that would be.

  With that plan in mind, I approached Kyle at school on Monday and asked him if he could hook me up with some pills.

  Kyle took me to a secluded corner of campus, near the bus drop-off where kids sometimes went to smoke weed or cigarettes or vape. He told me Seth had spoken to him that weekend and told him that if I came asking for a hookup to tell me no.