Honesty

by Seth King

  honesty

  seth king

  To my first real love.

  For loving me,

  leaving me,

  and giving me this book

  Based on a true story

  “I love unmade beds. I love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. I love the look in people’s eyes when they realize they are in love. I love the way people look when they first wake up and have forgotten their surroundings. I love the gasp people make when a favorite character dies. I love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. I fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time, with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup. Honesty is just too beautiful to ever put into words.”

  -Unknown

  ~

  “Speak your truth even if your voice shakes. Live your truth even if your body breaks. Spirit survives.”

  -Katheryn Hudson

  ~

  “Man is free the instance he decides to be.”

  -Voltaire, Brutus

  1

  If my life was one of those quirky novels for teens, it would have an orange cover. Bright, though – think tangerine, not pumpkin. The title, something cheeky and hipster-cool like I’d Fall Through the Clouds For You or I’d Give You the Universe or Every Last Star in the Sky, would be splashed across that tangerine cover in a large and very loud handwritten font, and all the characters inside those pages (recycled, organic paper from a progressive Portland publisher, of course) would have improbably trendy names like Finn or Sienna or Agnes. Each of those characters would be quick to crack a joke and make suspiciously eloquent conversation and fall into deep love, and no matter how messy their pasts may have been, their futures would be picnics in July. But my life is not a quirky teen novel, because everyone knows those stories always have happy endings. The kids in those books always find their way back to each other in the final frame, and whoever is supposed to end up together, ends up together. Finn and Agnes always get over their differences and skip off to some cutesy college hand in hand, and nothing else is ever an option.

  But yeah, no, none of that ever happened for me. My story was real, and it happened, and no matter how hard I try to forget it, I will never be able to make it unhappen. There were no witty comebacks to soften the blows that fate lurched my way, no sparkling plot twists to set everything right and send me off to a lifetime of bliss with the one I loved. The world took that from me, and I will probably never get over it. Nobody would ever want to read my story, anyway. Nobody would ever want to read about how this life introduced two kids to each other over one messy year, remade their worlds and taught them what glory tasted like, and then yanked them apart again. Nobody would ever want to read about how I met a boy who felt like he was made for me, the boy who grew me up, and then let him slip through my fingers like an idiot. Nobody would ever want to read the story of how I let Nicky Flores get away. But just in case you do, here it is.

  This is how I lost him.

  ~

  The day after I turned nineteen, I let my father bully me into signing up for an exercise program called FitTrax. Regardless of how many times he had walked in on me reading novels with pink covers and binge-watching episodes of Real Housewives over the years, he’d still spent the better part of my life laboring under the delusion that I was simply one aha moment away from realizing I was actually a crazed womanizer. Since pushing me in the direction of every serviceably-attractive female within a two-hour drive of my house had ended each time in a general series of mehs, he was pulling out his next trick. FitTrax, it seemed, was his latest cog in his evil machine meant to transform me into George Clooney 2.0, and so it was with a heavy heart and a half-erect penis that I shoved my Kindle into my drawer, walked into the giant gym full of sweaty college guys on Third Street, and tried to figure out how to pretend like I wasn’t two seconds away from orgasming into my new workout shorts.

  I went through the motions as best I could, but it didn’t take long for trouble to erupt. In the beginning the jock squad was only laughing at Patty, an overweight girl in the corner. I heard them murmuring and laughing in those bro-ish voices of theirs, and that’s what sounded the alarms in me – so I was eternally relieved when I looked over and saw they were only laughing at her. My relief at this made me hate myself for a second – sometimes I didn’t even know how I lived with me. The Bro Pack was calling Patty a Sea World attraction or something – I didn’t really notice exact details, since all jocks’ lame and unimaginative insults seemed to melt together after a while – and so I laughed to blend in. This was my first mistake. My laugh was more of a girlish cackle than an actual, traditional male’s laugh, which was something my dad never let me forget. My face went numb the instant I heard the sound leave my mouth, betraying me. The jock spotlight fell on me immediately.

  “Faggotsaywhat?” one of them coughed into his hand, followed by some snickering. Our workout coach looked up a little from his chart, then shrugged it off, meaning I was officially on my own. As the panic set in, cold and sharp and biting, I tried to do what I always did during the assaults: I tried to turn my face away. I tried to stay stone cold. I tried not to let them know I was sliding into a hole at the bottom of myself. I’d been called the F word before, of course, and it hurt just as badly every time. Because it was not a word people said, it was a word they hurled: when they used it, their teeth turned to fangs and they threw it out like a grenade. It was a quick, hot little burst of a word: not faggot, but faggot! It reminded me of bubbling anger, bared teeth, deep-seeded hatred – all of those things and more.

  The leader glanced at his friends, and then the Bro Pack did that thing all alpha males did where they laughed and then looked around to make sure everyone else was laughing, too, because anyone who – gasp – emphasized with, or even defended, a suspected gay guy was clearly a gay guy, too, so pounce on him before he could somehow reproduce and populate the world with more faggoty creatures! I focused even harder on a chip of mulch that had somehow been kicked into the gym. It didn’t belong in that place any more than I did, and I suspected we both knew it. Stupid mulch.

  “He’s a faggot,” the ringleader said. “Tell him, Nicky.”

  “Huh?” asked Nicky, a fringe member of the goon squad who was standing apart from the rest, with no particular interest. For one too-short moment, I prayed this boy Nicky would be my savior. I wanted him to throw me a life raft, to step in and break it up like they did in books in movies. No such rescue came.

  “I said, faggot,” the leader cackled, and some of the other goons laughed a little too hard than was called for. Except Nicky, who just stared at me not with pity or anger or disgust or anything, just…curiosity. And for the first time I really looked at him. He seemed like that one kid in every cool crowd who wasn’t really actively interested in being popular, but his empirical beauty just guaranteed him a spot at the cool table anyway. He was tall and curly-haired and sparkly-eyed, and in his deep blue workout shirt with the black piping, he looked like the good kind of trouble. He was the kind of boy that kept me up at night, and always had. Yes, I steered very clear of boys like Nicky.

  The guys laughed again, and the leader gave me one final, hateful glare and waddled away. Burning up under their magnifying glass, I finally made my escape, sort of limping over to the water fountain and contemplating drowning myself in it. I got so mad I started to cry a little, these Hot Tears of Rage that squeezed out of my eyes and betrayed me all over again. The leader said something else then, but in my state of panic it was more of a metallic blur than a word, and I swayed a bit as I stood. I bent down to the fountain and wiped my forehead, throwing my stupid headband to the floor. What was I even doing here, pretending to be this thing I was not? I was too gay for t
his crap, and everyone knew it, apparently.

  As I tried to make my final escape, though, I walked directly into a metal bar and sort of staggered backward a bit, knocking over a medicine ball in the process. I guess I never could win at this game of grace. A few girls giggled by the far wall. The whole thing was a mess, and I had never been more embarrassed. (Well, okay, I was a slightly effeminate guy from the South – I’m sure I’d been more embarrassed at some point, but you get the point.) Soon I was stumbling down the sidewalk toward the bike stand, wishing I could shrink into myself and become nothing and nowhere. And as I pumped my bike home the despair soon turned to anger, then white rage. Before long something snapped in me, like someone had pulled a lever in my chest I hadn’t even known existed. That’s when I knew I was done.

  You know, I would’ve just taken this abuse in the past. Hell, I’d taken it this time like a total doormat. But this was the last time. I’d been swallowing up the poison I’d been fed for far too long. When I got home I yanked my phone off the charger and threw myself on the couch, feeling like boiling tomato soup was sloshing around inside me instead of blood. The idiot jock’s voice knocked around in my head, and then my mom’s joined in, and then my dad’s, and then my Sunday School teacher’s, and soon a whole chorus was in my ears, hating me, and encouraging me to hate myself, stamping out all the traits they found undesirable in me. But I wasn’t going to listen anymore. I was so sick of telling myself I was content with this life, with going to sleep restless and waking up sad, that there was freedom in the lonely nights, comfort in my long weekends with my books and my dog and my hand. I wasn’t free, not by a million miles. I was suffocating here in this society that had supposedly set me free, and this wasn’t a road I was going to let them drag me down again. This time I would kick and scream, even if I screamed like a girl. This time I would fight.

  I guess the gist of my issue was this: my whole life, my world had told me who to be. And suddenly I wanted to talk back. I didn’t want to buy into the lie that I needed to hate myself just because of who I was. Screw society for trying to make my gayness into A Thing – it wasn’t A Thing, it was just a detail about me. I was just a kid with the dreamer’s disease who spent too much time on his phone and read too many books and maybe even wanted a hot boyfriend to go to the farmer’s market with on Saturday mornings sometimes. I never wanted to feel like I had back at that stupid gym again. Hating yourself sucked, and it was the worst feeling in the world, short of that three-second state of panic when you drop your phone on a sidewalk and think you’ve shattered your screen. I didn’t want to ever let myself believe that I was somehow less of a person, somehow not a whole human, because I maybe liked penis and most other dudes didn’t. The jocks were about to find out just how much of a faggot I was – it was as if I’d been sleepwalking all my life, and one six-letter word had just jolted me awake.

  With a mushroom cloud of jock-stoked fire burning in my belly, I downloaded a dating app called Mixr and then did the craziest thing I had ever done in my nineteen years and one day of being alive, something the Me of two years ago would have been scared shitless of doing: I selected “Interested in: Men” instead of women and got going trying to find a match. Every iota of me was rioting and throwing warning bursts of confetti into my bloodstream, but I didn’t care: I was on a mission.

  I got to work sifting through the collection of half-dressed male bodies on the app, since this was still the South and none of them would show their faces because that could possibly result in societal excommunication and/or death, and then I paused and felt my jaw drop out of its socket a little. Because at 8:11 on a windy evening in May, I found myself staring at the unmistakable workout shirt of the boy called Nicky.

  2

  Hi, I said before I could stop myself. I heard a ringing in my ears and suddenly I couldn’t believe I’d actually messaged a guy. Masturbatory fantasies in the safety of my room were one thing, but actually acting on this urge? Whoa. When I was younger this would’ve pulled up a white, paralyzing, almost sickening terror in me, terror that I was Different. Terror that someone would find out and expose me, terror that everyone in the world would point and laugh at me, terror that the secret that I was not worth loving would be exposed to the world. All of it together brought up a very specific and urgent fear in me, a fear that simply said: everyone will hate you. Everyone will look at you. Everyone will talk about you. Nobody will want you.

  But suddenly I didn’t really care. Not enough to stop, at least. I just waited. And waited. And waited...

  Hot guys always took longer to respond than regular people. I’d always noticed that, just from texting my few straight friends. It was the same with pretty girls – I guessed they were all just busy being hot. It took up more time than being ugly did. But I didn’t think they’d take this much time.

  Hey, he finally said, and suddenly I was without a chill. I was rendered chill-less. Goosebumps spread over my arms like breeze on grass: Nicky, he of the glorious hair and beautiful eyes and goon squad, was talking to me. This was a thing that was happening. Nobody like this had ever even acknowledged me, much less messaged me. I had no idea what I was doing, but all I knew for sure was that I couldn’t stop.

  What’s up? I responded. Then my mind went insane – all of the lights in me flashed at once. What the hell was Nicky, certified member of the bro pack, doing on a gay messaging app in the first place? It was too delicious to be true. I hadn’t really wondered about him earlier, mostly since he’d appeared to be a beautiful pipe dream, but now that I knew he was…well, possibly like me, I wanted to toss over every stone, investigate every avenue. Had he searched for men on accident? Or was he just getting home from the gym, too, and was now tossing his sweaty shirt on the ground, chugging some water, and wishing for someone to love? Was he exploring a long-suppressed urge, or was he a philanderer who came on every night to get sexy times from dudes and somehow just managed to keep it hush-hush? Soon a whole hurricane of questions erupted in me: who was Nick, really? What did his life entail? Was he lonely like me, or did he have someone? What beautiful guy, or girl, was lounging by his side this very minute, feeding him grapes or charging his phone for him or something? For some reason I became instantly jealous of these hypothetical people for hypothetically getting to hangout with him. Hypothetically, of course.

  But then I told myself to chill the hell out. This also could’ve been some kind of trap – maybe the jocks weren’t satisfied with not getting to beat me down, and now they were trying to bait me into showing myself to confirm their suspicions and take me to pound town. But then again, why would Nicky hide his face? What were the odds that he knew I was me?

  Not much, he finally said. You?

  Same, I said, and then the conversation went dead for a minute. Okay, so he was a boring texter. There were worse issues, like a having a raging cocaine habit or being one of those kids who posted eighteen thousand Snapchat stories a day or something. But the conversation was fizzling, and I had to push it along – so I pulled out the one card I knew would blow things up in his face.

  Could I get a face picture?

  My throat seemed to shrivel into my stomach as I sent the message. This was the big one: I was asking him to “out” himself, basically. I knew who he was, of course, but obviously I couldn’t admit that. But would he even show me? How “in the closet” was he? Was I crazy to be asking him this?

  I waited. My stomach disappeared into itself, reminding me of those YouTube clips of office buildings being detonated into dust. This was it: the point of no return.

  Yeah, he said, after you.

  I froze. I couldn’t possibly show myself after that scene back at the gym. How could I tell him that his own friends had just gay-bashed me half an hour ago, while he’d stood there letting it happen? This was a Macarena in a minefield, and it was getting messier by the second.

  You first, I said out of a sheer inability to come up with anything else.

  Ugh, fine, what
ever.

  He sent a photo. It was grainy, but it was him, really him. And he was so beautiful. I tried to recover from the moment of paralysis that came from corresponding with a hot boy, but it never came.

  Oh, I said. I kind of know you.

  I regretted sending this message instantly, though. I’d never used an app, but I’d still trolled enough message boards to know the basics of how this all worked. Talking on these apps required a degree of trust, because in the South, all of this had to be conducted under the radar. You had to know the other person wouldn’t talk to people about seeing you, and a good way to ensure that was to talk to a total stranger, since they wouldn’t give a shit about who you were or what the world knew about you.

  A tangy metallic taste erupted in my mouth, and my vision seemed to melt together in a weird way. The tone between Nicky and I seemed to change, as if I could actually pick up such things over a phone. But for some reason, something told me I could.

  You do? he asked. From where?

  Do you really want to know?

  Yes.

  FitTrax, I said.

  Who are you? he asked after a long pause. Show me.

  I didn’t say anything. My heart was beating too loudly, and in my ears. Was he daring me to show myself so he could beat my ass back to Sweden, or did he really want to know? I’d never even talked to a guy like this before, and it made me want to do a bunch of very filthy things to myself in my shower immediately. My neighbor’s cat was mewing on the porch and pawing my door, but all I could think about was this beautiful boy and the unexplainable fact that he was messaging me.