Honesty

by Seth King

  The thing was, I already knew the road was going to be bumpy for me, whoever I became. I knew the sun was never going to shine into many corners of my life. I knew I was an effeminate beta male living in the South who liked men and had daddy issues, and I knew I’d probably be a bit of a joke forever. And if not a joke, then at least forever nipping at the periphery, desperate to get into the Circle of Normal but never really allowed in. And it wouldn’t be the smoothest of sailing for Nicky, either – he hated every inch of himself. But we still had the memories of that summer, we still had Savannah, we still had those glory days when he’d opened himself to me, even if we were still languishing under the glare of the South. Maybe those days would glide in the clouds forever, somewhere only I knew, and maybe I’d be able to pick myself up sometimes and grab hold of them for a minute, revisit the old happy time when we’d been together at the top of the world.

  As I headed back to my car, though, I realized I needed closure. Real closure. I needed to say goodbye, if only silently, even if it was only a whisper into outer space. I needed to see his face on my screen one last time…

  First I had to figure out how to reach him, since I was blocked from everything. Where was he out there? All his profiles were hidden. It was like he didn’t even exist anymore. So first I looked at his Instagram. Even though I was blocked from seeing his photos, I could still see that his account had gone dead. There was no other way to put it. It looked the same as always – same profile icon, same two hundred and ninety five photos. He was probably off somewhere making new memories with someone else, letting someone else leave their mark on him, too busy to leave photo evidence of this new chapter. All this and more was on my mind when I pulled out into traffic, typing away, and almost missed seeing the van coming for me until it was too late.

  I noticed a silvery blur in my peripheral vision at the last second and looked up just in time to swerve out of the way. I missed a collision by inches, but coincidentally at the time of swerving I was also on the edge of a man-made ravine next to a drainage lake. I hit the edge, felt my stomach plummet, and down I went.

  My car hurdled down the grass embankment, rolling terrifyingly close to toppling over as it went, as suddenly everything got silent, calm, peaceful, shimmering. I could die in a few seconds – this could be it. I saw glimpses of faraway memories like shards of broken crystal – I saw my father holding me on his lap on the way to the hospital after he’d accidentally shut my fingers in the car door, I saw the time I’d jumped off a too-tall cliff at summer camp and almost been knocked unconscious at hitting the lake’s surface, I saw the morning I’d stood by a hospital bed and watched my grandfather’s last breaths. And then I saw Nicky. He was on my couch. And he was smiling that victory smile.

  As quickly as it’d started, it was over. After one last shudder to the right, my car lurched to a stop beside a lake, and another road was in clear view. I was okay. I was safe. I was alive. And suddenly, for the first time in months, the world truly felt like something worth exploring, instead of hiding from.

  On the muddy, breathless drive home, I found my thoughts wandering back to Nicky. I needed to find him. I needed to feel alive as I had just now, for the rest of my life. So I took out my phone as I turned onto my street. I needed to see who he’d been talking to, who he’d added, who’d been tagging him in pictures. Just to dig in the knife, I guess, and savor the pain I deserved. So I texted my friend and demanded her Facebook email and password so I could view Nicky’s profile from her account, since it was open to everyone but me. After a few minutes she responded, and that’s when I logged into her profile, searched for Nicholas J. Flores, and then read the sentence that imploded my world in a microsecond:

  RIP, buddy. It’s been 4 months today, but we’ll still never forget u down here

  18

  On Venus, a day lasts longer than a year does. I knew this because I was once assigned a group project on the planet and this is the only fact I remembered, as I’d picked my fingernails the whole time and made a band geek named Megan do the whole thing. But a day on Venus lasts longer than a year: the planet takes two hundred and twenty-five days to circle the sun, but two hundred and forty-three days to rotate once on its axis. June 16 was the day my world stopped spinning, the day my sun stopped shining, the day I realized time meant nothing at all.

  June 16 was the day my world became not my world anymore. It was the day a hole opened up inside me and I fell all the way into it.

  ~

  I drove the rest of the way home in a daze and vomited into a recycle bin. Then I sort of collapsed in my foyer, and after that I just remember clouds. Vicious clouds rolling in, suffocating me….for the first time in my life, I understood the relativity of time. A second became an hour, an evening became an eternity. I was being raked over the coals, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. No helping it, no saving myself from this pain. As the waves hit me over and over, I told myself it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t be real…I had to find out it wasn’t real. It couldn’t have happened. Nicky couldn’t have left me here, in this world, without him. It wasn’t a possibility.

  I didn’t know how long I lay there on the carpet. When I could move without shaking too much, I took a steamy shower to clear my clogged nostrils and then crawled back into my dank, sweaty sheets. I opened my laptop as the world closed in around me. And soon I had gathered enough details to discover I knew nothing except that Nicky was dead. He was really dead. Nicky Flores wasn’t alive anymore. And I’d had no idea for four months. He hadn’t dumped me – he’d died. Nicky….my love…my life…my Nicky…was dead. The words would form in my brain, but they would not make sense.

  On his Facebook, and all over Google News, were the details of a death I’d never known about. Comments, pictures, news articles, interviews with his family about their new foundation in his name, all of which had been posted months before, completely unbeknownst to me. I’d stood quietly aside during the biggest event of my life, and I’d had no clue.

  Nicky Flores died on his twentieth birthday, one day after he’d come over. At 8:45 AM, Nicky’s car underwent an unexplained increase in velocity and collided with an oak tree at forty miles per hour. Basically, he’d been sitting at a stoplight when he’d sped up for no reason and driven into a tree. By the time the Jaws of Life pried him from the Pontiac, he was dead. From the tone of the articles, there was a good chance he’d killed himself, but the worst thing was that they never found out for sure. They still had no idea, really.

  I dropped the computer on the floor as it all took hold of me. What could’ve possibly changed between the time he’d made love to me, triumphant, and then died? I screamed, cried, moaned, shook until I couldn’t feel myself anymore. Sickened wasn’t the word for what I felt. I didn’t even know the word. How could he do this? How could he take himself away? I had never known a feeling like this. Ever. For months I’d been pining over a dead boy. A boy who was in the ground. I was disgusted, broken, infuriated, and almost a little embarrassed. And soon I started to panic for some reason. What was wrong with me? I’d been waiting for a dead boy to text me. I’d been having pretend arguments in my head with a dead boy. I’d been stalking a dead boy. I’d been daydreaming about spending forever with a dead boy. I’d been in love with a dead boy. I’d been casually going about my life for months while he’d been below the ground. He hadn’t been ghosting me – he’d been an actual ghost.

  I kept seeing him asleep that cold morning in February, beautiful and silent, the last time I’d ever seen him alive. I could’ve stopped him…I could’ve done so much more…I could’ve helped him love himself…

  Nickicito was dead, and it was all on me.

  I fell into the blackness for an hour, but I wasn’t asleep, I was just a prisoner in my own body, watching my mind play out imagined scenes of his final minutes. I saw flashing lights, heard screeching tires, heard bumpers ramming into things. But I couldn’t see him. He never materialized. And that was the thing I c
ould not live with, the fact that I wasn’t there for him at the end, when he’d needed me. When he’d been all alone.

  I woke up at midnight, and I still felt like I was in some screwed up fever dream. I reached for my laptop again, and the more I read about him, the more I realized nothing in the story made any sense. He’d crashed directly into a tree on a clear, sunny, windless morning. His car had seemed to be in good shape before the crash, but there was also a malfunction on that specific model that could’ve been a factor – but there was no way to say for sure. There was no suicide note, no evidence that he’d had a heart attack or seizure or anything else that would’ve caused an accident. He’d mentioned nothing to anyone. Nobody had had any inkling that anything was coming. They didn’t know about me, though…

  Humans were animals, and before they died they prepared for it. When my family dog, Harper, died of obesity and old age when I was in the fifth grade, he dragged himself across the house, kissing everyone in my family, making sure to gather all of his favorite toys on the way, and then laid down in his favorite corner under a side table and died. Nicky had done none of that. He’d just…died. Was it a sudden deathwish that had come out of nowhere? Had he planned it all to look accidental, to save his parents from driving themselves crazy with questions? Or did he just stop paying attention for a second and crash?

  The not knowing was the awful thing, the worst thing. What had he even been doing? Where was he trying to go? It was a real possibility that he could’ve just died senselessly – he could’ve just pressed the gas instead of the brake in an absent-minded moment. That theory made something inside me lurch, though, because that would’ve meant he was happy…he perhaps wanted a future for himself…for us…

  But I could also see him killing himself. Or I thought I could, at least. And that was the most horrific thing, to know he could’ve sank so low, become so desperate and hopeless, he’d seen death as his only escape. Thinking about it made me feel like such a failure. I could remember the moment when he’d told me he didn’t want to be himself anymore – at the time, I’d tried to write it off as his typical histrionics. Looking back, though, I could just sense that he wanted to die. I’d just run from the realization with everything in me. And now it didn’t matter.

  When all the realness became too real to deny, I got so mad at him. Not just for dying, but for creating this whole crazy situation, a situation where he could die and leave me with no way to find out about it. For building his world so far from mine, for keeping me a hundred miles away. Overcome with the need to talk to someone, I picked up my phone and went to my address book, and then I realized I’d been subconsciously trying to call him. I had nobody else to talk to. I needed someone to comfort me, tell me everything would be okay, and for some reason my thoughts traveled to my mother – but that idea made no sense. My mom didn’t know about Nicky. She didn’t even know I liked guys. I was still too afraid to tell her. What in the world would I say to her? My family never knew about us, and the awful thing was that I still couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone. Even after all this, I couldn’t tell them. What could I possibly say? Hey there, I’ve been living a secret life and I’m in pieces because of the death of a stranger whose name you’ve never heard, can I come over and fall apart? It just felt too late. Not to mention the whole “my family being huge bigots” thing. My father would shun me, and beyond that, Nicky’s friends either hated me or had no clue I existed. I had nobody to turn to, nobody to grieve with, nowhere to go. Except backwards, into a past I’d never get back…

  This was so unfair. I didn’t just not get to say goodbye – I didn’t even know I needed to say goodbye. Holy God. If I was a girl he’d been dating, I would’ve already been accepted into his family long ago, and I probably would’ve been one of the first phone calls after the accident. But I had nothing. I’d been kept clear out of his life. I didn’t even have a picture with him – after our fight I’d gone into a blind rage and deleted the few he’d ever let me take of us together, and now whatever was on his phone was probably gone forever, too. We didn’t even exist in the cloud anymore. It was so goddamned unfair.

  So I went to bed. Every tear I’d never shed every time he’d denied me, every time he’d turned away from me in public, every time he’d kept his love apart from me…I cried all of those tears that night. Every last one.

  The next night, my mom called. I answered her calls occasionally, and on this night I just picked up and listened to her silence. Suddenly something just burst open in me. I had never, in my life, wanted anything more than I wanted to unlock the gates and unleash on her, sob into the phone and share my pain and tell her all about the boy who had changed me, the boy with glitter in his eyes. Every bone in me ached to have her listen to me, comfort me, come over and hold me, tell me she was sorry, that it was okay.

  “Coley?” she said soon. “Helloooo? You there? You’re acting weird…is something wrong?”

  I swallowed, winced, and hung up. After all this time, I was still too afraid. I still couldn’t do it. And it made me hate myself on a level unlike anything I’d ever imagined.

  When I was nine, I went to Hawaii with my parents and grandparents, and the most vivid memory I have is of visiting all the battleships that had been lost in the Pearl Harbor attacks. The water was so clear, you could still see all these underwater boats that’d been there for the better part of a century – it was so weird. But what I remember most was the oil. For decades, a ship called the Arizona had leaked the very oil that’d been pumped into its tanks on its day of sinking in 1941, sending up its sadness from the ocean floor to bloom on the surface in the form of strangely beautiful bursts of blue and green and copper. And now I was the Arizona, I guess. I would leak for Nicky forever.

  Soon I retreated from the world. I lost my laptop in the mess in my room, stopped answering my phone, let my mail pile up unopened. I fell away and let the fury take me to some horrible place nobody knew but me. I never expected how painful this would be, to fall apart in secret. Every time a grandparent had died or something had gone wrong in my life, I’d had family there to hold me. But now I had nobody, and it was all my fault.

  To get the memories back, I’d look to my past and hug my ghosts, hoping they’d give me something to hold. I’d try to remember how he made my feet feel, like the ground wasn’t so solid anymore. I’d try to remember how his eyes made my skin feel, like I’d never looked at anything before in my life – like I was a newborn baby and he was the doctor, first sight. I’d try to remember how my whole body felt whenever I thought of him: light and heavy, lovestruck, full. But there in the cold of night, alone, mostly I just remembered the way he made my soul feel:

  It was something like flying.

  One night in the midst of my empty misery my mind took me back again, and there was nothing I could do but watch. My memory tied me to the posts and got out the whip. This scene was from near the end, after we’d torn each other up, just before the war had come.His mood had slipped up some kind of slope for the night, though, and momentarily he was the boy I’d fallen down the hill for, the boy for whom I’d joyfully thrown away my life.

  “I like you so freaking much,” he’d whispered, holding my eye contact for once. We were finding heaven between the red lights and the stop signs, too in love to let it go.

  “Stop,” I’d said. “The game is over. You don’t have to play anymore.”

  “I do,” he’d smiled. “It’s so funny. And weird. I used to be made of stone, but I don’t even recognize me anymore. You make me want to listen to fuzzy ‘80s love songs in the rain and you make me see neon lights even when the room is dark and you make me feel like the world isn’t such a bad and scary and shitty place anymore. You make me so happy, and I never thought my life would be like this. You’re my best friend.”

  And I realized why my memory was showing me this moment: it was the first time I’d ever truly admitted to myself that liking guys wasn’t wrong. For the first time, I didn’t believe t
he world was right in its belief that this was sinful. I could remember staring at him that night and just luxuriating in him, feeling the pain fade away. Because two humans with brown hair falling in love was okay. Two humans with blue eyes falling in love was okay. And two humans with two penises falling in love was also okay. The world was messed up, not us. This, what we shared, was beautiful and right and pure. They were so dirty out there, so tainted in their hatred. And I hated them for hating me. It wasn’t Nicky’s fault that he’d had to hide, that he’d maybe chosen to die instead of live in his truth. They were the problem. My boy wasn’t…

  But as the memory faded, I got so mad again. He was so annoying. He was so frustrating. He was so perfect. I would give anything to get annoyed by him again. Just one more time. Now that I’d ruined everything and lost him, I wanted to undo everything I’d ever done, remake all the decisions I’ve ever decided, go back to square one and do it all again.

  Except Nicky. He could stay.

  The next week was a cold, furious purgatory unlike anything I’d ever known before. The Year of Nicky was over, and I’d been tossed back into the blackness. Every morning when I woke up, it did not feel real. I would delay the realization until boom, it would hit, and I’d come apart again. I was imprisoned by him, just like I had always been imprisoned by him. Friends texted several times. Most of them looked something like: Dude, your mom said you’re not normal, or more “not normal” than usual. What’s going on? Plz text me!!! I never did, though. I didn’t want to talk to any of these people. Where were they before? Where had they been when I was happy?

  I couldn’t shake my obsession with the case, with his death. I wanted answers. Why had he done it then? Why that morning? What had set all this into motion? It wasn’t enough. I didn’t really believe my psycho text had sent him over the edge, because we’d fought all the time and insulted each other constantly – it wasn’t that out of the ordinary for us. I wanted to ask his family every last detail, try to learn everything I could so I could form my own opinion, make all the pieces fit together, but I couldn’t. His parents didn’t even know about me, and there was a one hundred percent chance his sister wanted nothing to do with me. But I couldn’t leave his death in my mind like this. Because at least the loved ones of suicide victims knew it was suicide. At least they had that much. At least they knew their loved ones had gotten so miserable, they’d chosen to take themselves out of the equation. But I didn’t even have that knowledge. I had nothing. And where did I go from nothing?