by Seth King
Can we talk? he asked after I didn’t say anything.
About what?
You.
Okay? Why?
Because I’m curious about you
And your life.
And my mind filled with fireworks and explosions and laughing babies and everything good and happy in this world. Who was I?
Okay, I said. Fine. Ask away.
Soon he asked me a bunch of really banal questions – where I went to school, how long I’d done FitTrax, where I was from. I could tell he wanted to dig deeper, but he was dancing around it.
What do I need to know about YOU? I asked during a lull.
There’s not much to know.
Try me, I said.
Well…
I have a pet snail named Tammy. I love my mother like I love Nilla wafers, my dad doesn’t exist to me, and…
I’m kinda/maybe/definitely sick of being the dude the world wants me to be.
Hence the messages.
In that moment I was sure that somewhere in the world, violins were playing. I could hear them.
There’s something else… he said.
Yes?
Well…
I wanna keep getting to know you, but right now…it can just be on our phones.
Is that okay?
Please say yes
I said nothing. The violins faded.
I don’t know how to talk to you in person yet, he continued. But I want to.
Eventually.
Is that cool?
Why? I asked. Is it because I’m now a known “faggot” and you can’t be seen with me?
Wait, what?
I waited for him to say more. He did.
Hold up, I think I know what you’re talking about – it’s not that serious. The guys call everyone a faggot. I’m pretty sure it’s a blanket term meaning “we don’t like this kid.” It doesn’t necessarily mean…what you think it does.
I just…I need time to figure this out.
Whatever, I said. I would never be able to live with myself if I had friends like yours.
So you’ve met Ryan? he asked, and for some reason I could swear I could hear him laughing. (By the way, Ryan, Matt, Josh: why did meat-head types always have the same names? Why couldn’t a bully be called Alastair or Melvin or something?) He doesn’t exactly have the highest brain cell count, Nicky said.
Haha. Yeah.
Why do you even want to talk to me, anyway?
Well, isn’t it obvious? he asked.
…No?
Well, for one…have you SEEN your ass?
I knew I shouldn’t have been flattered, but I was. It was true: he liked guys. At least enough to look at their butts, anyway.
Oh, um…
I come from a family of athletes, I said. But trust me, that line of athletes ended with me. As you’ve already noticed…
You weren’t that bad, he told me. So…do we have a deal?
Yep, I said as something in me wished I had the strength and self-respect to say no instead.
Ahh, awesome! I’ve got a ton of stuff to do, so I’ll message you the same time tomorrow, okay?
Wait…
What about FitTrax?
Are we still “strangers” there? I asked.
I’m getting this all straightened out in my head, I swear.
Until then…
Work with me here, Furman.
I signed off before I could let myself become any more desperate.
The next day bled together, and at nine that evening I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting for Nicky and trying to remember how to breathe. He signed on twenty minutes late.
Where were you at FitTrax today? he asked in lieu of a greeting.
Work, I said, even though I was lying – I’d just been too nervous to face him. I’d biked up to the building, caught a glimpse of him with his bro friends, and turned away. Why? Were you disappointed?
Yes. To be honest I was.
I smiled bigger than I had for a long time, and the conversation continued. We talked again, on and off, for a week or two. He would pepper me with questions some nights, and other nights he’d just fall off the grid, and I’d sit there waiting until I wanted to punch myself. He’d make no mentions of his disappearances the next time we talked – he’d just launch back into the questions. He was strangely mercurial, zipping in and out of different moods, hot and cold and up and down, and I couldn’t even keep track of him half the time. All I knew was that I never wanted to stop trying.
As the heart of the summer started to unfurl itself in front of me, Nicky became one of my good friends on the phone, and pretty much ignored me in public. I embarrassed myself by how high I let myself soar whenever I waited for roll call, and by how hard I fell whenever I’d realize he still wouldn’t talk to me. Now that I knew he was a slim possibility instead of a pipe dream, I was addicted to thinking about him. Oh, God – I was obsessed. But I knew this song and dance, but I couldn’t handle it forever. I had to do something. I had to let him know he could trust me with the secret we both shared. But how?
During our talks, he started opening up to me more and more. But it was the weirdest thing: the more he opened up on the phone, telling me about his life and his hobbies and his fears, the harder he’d yank himself away in the gym. If the air had felt electric around him that first day, it was veering extremely close to bursting-into-flames status now. Sometimes I’d get hard just by being around him, and I knew he felt something, too. How could he not? I’d catch him staring at me from time to time, doing that weird lip-licking thing he sometimes did, and it confused me to no end…
One night he messaged me, right on time. But after a few minutes I got so sick of everything I sort of snapped a little.
You should just call me. I’m so sick of typing.
But I wasn’t. I would type to that boy forever.
Okay, fine, he said. I sent him my number, and he called. I held my breath and answered the phone.
“…Hello?”
“Hi.” There was a smile in his voice. A rush of something white and terrifying, in the best kind of way, took hold of me, left me reeling in its wake. “What are you up to this fine evening?”
“Oh, you know…reading, doing dishes, that sort of thing,” I said, taking my phone to the couch and diving headfirst into ColeyAndNickyVille, our safe little world that only existed inside our phones.
“And here I thought you were the type to be into doing black tar heroin on a weekday night.”
“Nah, I’m afraid the heroin is only for weekends.”
Who was I? Who was this person who was talking to Nicky Flores and keeping it together?
“What were you doing? I asked. “And…what was up with today?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you stared at me.”
“Oh.” He paused. “I was mad.”
“Mad?”
“Yeah. You were staring right at some other guy.”
Suddenly my face felt all hot and weird. “I was?”
“Unless there was something stuck to his ass, you were checking him out.”
I swallowed. “Okay, but, if I was…what would that have to do with you?”
I heard him suck in some air. “Because I was…jealous, okay? I didn’t like it, and beyond that, I didn’t know why I didn’t like it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“So…do you go on the app a lot?” I asked to change the subject and save myself from Death by Boner.
“Um. No.”
“How often?”
“Well…that night you saw me was my second time ever. The first time, I got scared and deleted it after a few minutes.” He paused. “You?”
“First time. Why were you on it that day?”
He sighed. “You’re lucky I just had a few beers with the guys tonight, so I’m feeling open. The thing is…I don’t know why I went online that night. Seeing what Ryan did to you, it made me…mad. But I
didn’t know what to do. It also got me started thinking about guys, and…yeah. My ‘mad’ cells are very close to my ‘horny’ ones in my brain, if you know what I mean. So I downloaded it, and then you messaged me, and…”
“Okay,” I breathed. “Gotcha. And why’d you flip out and block me?”
I tried to stop asking him things, but I couldn’t. I’d always had the tendency to say too much, reveal too much, let too many words tumble out of my mouth like water from a gurgling hose. But I felt safe here, between this black noise, inside his silence. Nobody was watching. Nobody cared. And I could tell he felt it, too.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I just…I got scared. When I found out who you were, I had to think about things. I didn’t know your motives. You have to understand, I thought you hated me after that whole ‘faggot’ thing, and I was sure you were gonna tell everyone you saw me. I just needed some time to think, and process everything. I’m sorry again, by the way. You didn’t deserve that. Nobody does. Honestly speaking, I hate myself so much sometimes for standing by and letting my friends do the things they do…”
I was silent for a second. I didn’t know how to say how much I appreciated him for saying that.
“And what did you think,” I asked soon, so quietly I wondered if he could hear, “when you found out who I was? That I was from class?”
“I was kinda stoked,” he murmured back, and my heart threw itself around in my chest. “Let’s confess,” he continued, a bit louder. “What all do you know about me?”
“Too much,” I sighed.
“Like what?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I am right now.”
All the blood in my body rushed to my head. I wished I could disappear, but I started whispering instead. “Well, I know people call you Nicky, and not Nick…”
I waited for the recoil. The hang-up. It didn’t come. “Yep. Call me that. Everyone calls me that but my dad. The name ‘Nick’ makes me think of him. I’m the baby of the family, anyway, so it works.”
“Me too!”
“Yeah, I’m a lot younger than my sister.”
“And I was the only child, the baby by default, so I was Coley. Even though my dad used to yell at my mom every time she called me that, and say it wasn’t manly enough…”
“Well I like it,” he said. “Coley and Nicky…it certainly has a ring to it.”
I smiled – he was lighting up my world and he didn’t even know it. Then I thought about what that meant for us, that we were both considered eternal babies by the people who loved us most.
“And I know you’re close with your big sister,” I said.
“How?”
“Instagram.”
“Yeah, well…pictures can deceive. She’s very Catholic, so you know how that goes. I love her a lot, but…if she knew anything about…certain things, she’d disown me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s cool. Anything else you don’t know, but want to know?”
Oh, God. Where would I start? Do you know you’re extraterrestrial? Do you know you fell to Earth from some other realm to visit humanity and show us what real bone structure looked like? Do you know how hard it is for me to breathe in and out right now?
“Never mind,” he said, “I have a question. What is being…gay like?” he asked, his voice soft and inquisitive like a child’s.
“Um…”
He caught himself. “Oh, you know what I mean – I’m asking about, like, a real gay guy. Do you think it’s wrong, like, deep down?”
I winced, then thought about the question. For a second I just stared at the TV. I was raised in the South, and my family was Methodist. I might as well have been born into a nunnery. People who weren’t from here, they just didn’t understand – we were decades behind the rest of the nation. I loved the South, but it was a beautiful place with hatred baked into its crust, like arsenic apple pie. If you were different – and by “different” I mean anything other than a straight, white, khaki-wearing adult – you were never allowed to forget your differentness for one second. And I was different. I was the minority, and I felt it all day. My childhood had been a horror show of what could happen to children raised under the wing of the religious right, and I’d had hatred and bigotry pounded into me from inception like a butcher beating a pork chop. My Sunday school teachers had preached fire and brimstone to anyone who ever considered straying from the flock, and even my own schoolteachers had regularly made shockingly off-color comments about gays and lesbians. One of my teachers Mr. Stubbs actually was gay, and after word got out that he lived with another man, a group of parents had sent around some weird petition to get him fired for “morality issues.”
And the craziest part of it was that the rest of the country had no idea how bad it still was down here. Everyone thought of Florida and pictured white-sand beaches, crystalline waters, and transplanted Yankees, but my city was eight hours and a whole world away from the relatively progressive Miami area. It was the deepest of the Deep South, and Georgia was twenty minutes up the road. Our high schools were named after Ku Klux Klan heroes, our highways were named for Confederate generals, even our population was still basically racially segregated from east to west, north to south. I’d once had an entire car full of people (male and female) slow down to angrily scream “faggot!” at me for daring to wear skinny jeans on the sidewalk, and when I’d gotten my driver’s license at sixteen, I’d found that the courthouse downtown had two sets of bathrooms for each sex – they hadn’t updated since the days of racial segregation, and the plague that had clearly once said “coloreds” had simply been painted over. That’s what I was dealing with down here. The South was burning, and the rest of the country was turning a blind eye.
But don’t get me wrong – not everyone was awful. Some of the best, most compassionate people I’d ever met had come from my church, for example. (I wasn’t one of those religion-haters who sat and angrily blamed God for all my problems, I just found it to be an uncontestable fact that the majority of Christianity was indoctrinating an entire generation into a mindset of hatred and intolerance that had its roots in a book written thousands of years ago.) Realistically I would guess that twenty percent of people were supportive and accepting, sixty percent were indifferent, and another twenty percent were gun-toting, Bible-carrying types. But that last group was embedded everywhere – they infested law enforcement, courthouses, churches, the state Capitol. You couldn’t escape them.
“I don’t know,” I began. “Whatever my issues with certain things are, they’re not religious. God is not real. Or at least the God they talk about, the one who reigns from on high just to sentence teenaged boys to eternal hell for kissing their male neighbors and falling in love with them, that guy does not exist. Jesus was a long-haired preacher of free love who hung out with prostitutes and outcasts, and using the Bible to defend social intolerance makes about as much sense as using Mein Kampf to spread peace and goodwill.”
He laughed, then mentioned how I sometimes wore a church T-shirt to the gym. I did a double take, unaware that he even cared enough to notice details like this.
“Well, things change,” I said. “Sure, my childhood made Little House on the Prairie look progressive – church three times a week, being forced to watch every Republican debate, being dragged to gun shows, bla bla bla. And a few years ago I would’ve said yeah, I hate myself for all this. Because of church, I was totally disgusted and ashamed and all those other things that religious types are raised to be. But…as I got older I broadened my scope and realized that this same book that disavowed homosexuality also gave you tips on how to treat your slaves, and said women should be servants to their husbands, and gave husbands permission to cut off their wives’ hands if they stepped out of line...so much of the Bible is senseless, weird, outdated gibberish. And now I don’t care anymore.” I paused. “But, like, do I feel gross sometimes? Do I feel dirty on occasion? Yeah, and I guess that’ll never really go awa
y. Those are just the side effects of being force-fed poison your while life. But generally, I don’t really give a damn anymore. What about you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” I said. “I’d never repeat any of this.”
“Let’s focus on you. Do you watch all the girly reality shows? Like, Housewives and stuff?”
“Um…when I want to.” Translation: every single night, but I didn’t want to tell him that and look like a stereotype.
“Do you have...mostly female friends?” he asked.
“Um, I guess.”
“Do you go shopping a lot?”
Come on – was he really this ignorant? “I hate shopping. I don’t care about clothes.” Which was sort of a lie, but who was counting?
“Do you hate sports, too?”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. “I guess that stereotype is accurate. I would rather make out with my grandma than throw a ball.”
“Ew.”
“Ew at sports,” I said. “Why do you wanna know all this, anyway?”
“Because I do. And sorry if I’m trading in stereotypes, but I don’t know anything about all this. Don’t you realize it’s hard for me, too?”
“What do you mean?”
His voice lowered, even though there was nobody except me to hear it. “Well, I had a buddy, Joel. I used to party with him and whatnot. Soon, whispers started going around about how he was staring a little too intently at other guys in the showers after football practice, and…let’s just say I never saw him at another party again. That was that.”
“Oh.”
I heard him sigh, and I wanted so badly to be next to him, touching him, enjoying him. For a moment my brain tried to tell me I was an unlovable garbage can who didn’t deserve him, but I shut it out. “Ugh, why am I saying this? I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this, Coley Furman.”