A Very, Very Bad Thing

by Jeffery Self

  And I thought, yeah, little white lies aren’t that bad.

  “So,” he continued, “what does one do at a school dance?”

  I shrugged as Audrey appeared beside us with three spiked apple ciders and the answer to his question.

  “First,” she said, “I’m taking an adorable picture of the two of you. Then we toast. Then we dance. Then, later, I screw off so you guys can make out.” She passed out the cups. “To fighting for what you want. Even if it’s just the chance to dance with a cute boy at the school gym.”

  “Hear, hear!” Christopher cheered, clinking his plastic cup against ours.

  As the dance wore on, the music shifted from loud headache-inducing dance beats to the type of mellow songs that are specifically written for slow dancing in high school gymnasiums.

  Audrey hadn’t properly paced herself as far as the boozy cider was concerned and had taken over emceeing the evening, a position originally held by a perfectly nice but charisma-challenged sophomore from the planning committee. Audrey had literally ripped the microphone out of her hand.

  “Let’s hear it for all the lovers here tonight, ladies and gentlemen.” Audrey slurred like a cruise ship singer asking if anyone is from out of town. A few kids clapped and cheered with the enthusiasm of people watching a documentary on the history of copper. “I’d just like to say, on behalf of our entire class, that this has been one of the best fall dances in the history of the school!”

  Anyone who had attended the previous fall dances could have pointed out that Audrey had in fact never been to one, but the line got her a round of applause nonetheless.

  “She’s a real natural, isn’t she?” Christopher said quietly.

  “A natural what?” I replied.

  “Zing!”

  “Maestro, if you please, a little something slow!” Audrey shouted at the DJ as if he were a twelve-piece orchestra. “This one goes out to my best friend … you know who you are.”

  Christopher squeezed my shoulder as we took each other’s hands and began dancing to the sweet, slow song. Can we all just acknowledge that slow dancing is incredibly awkward? Our bodies are not used to moving that slowly, and certainly not while holding on to another human being, and most certainly not while in a gymnasium filled with our peers. Regardless, I was savoring every moment and lost in a trance.

  “Faggots,” a mid-pubescent voice squeaked from beside us. The squeaky vulgarity was coming from a pimply-faced freshman slow-dancing so far apart from his date you could have built a condominium between them. The girl snickered, the way girls do when stupid boys make stupid jokes and they feel obligated to laugh at them.

  “Ignore it,” I whispered as Christopher’s face twitched in the kid’s direction. “He’s just a kid.”

  “So are we,” Christopher objected, with an air of sadness.

  “Yeah, but he’s an idiot. Don’t let him ruin our night,” I said.

  Christopher took a deep breath and we kept dancing. I took his chin in between my fingers, shifting his face to look at mine. I made a really stupid face to make him laugh. He did.

  “Oh, did I hurt your faggot feelings?” the kid egged us on with a sneer.

  We stopped dancing and I tried pulling Christopher off the dance floor.

  “Let’s just get some more cider,” I said, tugging on Christopher’s arm.

  “What did you say to me?” Christopher demanded, twisting out of my clutch.

  In one quick move, Christopher had the kid by the collar. The kid looked scared as Christopher towered over him.

  “Come on. Just let him go,” I said. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Listen to your little boyfriend, fag,” the kid said from within Christopher’s grip, and that’s all it took. Everything slowed down. The music seemed to fade into a long droning sound as Christopher flung his arm way back, clenched his hand into a fist, and smacked the kid right in the cheek with a loud, pounding boom. The kid fell back, tripping on his own feet onto the floor, as everyone around us gasped.

  “STOP!” The squeaky kid’s date shouted loud enough for everyone to turn and look. Suddenly, teachers and chaperones came rushing over. Taking one look at the short bully on the ground, two grown-ups pulled Christopher away like he was the bad guy.

  “Christopher!” I called out as the two teachers dragged him through the forming crowd. “Let him go! It wasn’t his fault!”

  But it was too late; he was gone, carried off to the principal’s office, the strangest place to be on a Saturday night.

  WHEN YOU’RE A GAY KID, you get used to the name calling. You get used to the cruel comments made by peers and teachers and people’s parents and on TV. It never ceases to sting, but we build our shells so the words won’t break us. We create our armor for the battle to be the person we were born to be. For some it’s toughness, for some it’s creativity, for some it’s drag, for some we’re still figuring it out. It can be anything. Maybe that’s why gay people are so strong.

  For me, it had always been the ability to tune it out, to ignore it the way my mom ignores it when my dad farts at the dinner table. For each of us it’s different, but that night was the first time I’d seen someone’s shell crack open and watched someone stand up for himself in the face of a bully. In a lot of ways, that night was the beginning of the end for my shell. It would be a while before it shattered completely, but looking back, I can see now that watching Christopher defend us that night was the first crack that led to all of this.

  I HAD GOTTEN TO SCHOOL early for the past three days and waited by Christopher’s locker, in the event that he showed up. I hadn’t heard from him since the dance and he hadn’t come to school. I’d tried to follow him to the principal’s office Saturday night but they wouldn’t let me. I assumed they’d called Christopher’s parents. Which would mean that his parents had found out who he’d been dancing with when the altercation had occurred. Which would mean who knew what for where Christopher might have been at that particular moment.

  Audrey had tried calling for me a few times, but Christopher’s parents had hung up on her as soon as she said her name. The jig was up. I had spent the past three days feeling so depressed that when I was at home I’d stayed in my room, avoiding my parents at all costs. I didn’t want to burden them with my own drama in the midst of theirs.

  Part of me was wishing Christopher hadn’t stood up for us. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have hit that kid, and if he hadn’t hit that kid, our night could’ve ended like I’d imagined: eating fast food and making out by the water tower. (Maybe not in that order.)

  But it’s that kind of attitude, I reckoned, that kept bullies bullying and the homophobes of the world staying the same. Christopher had done the right thing; I just resented the universe for the fact it had ruined our perfect night.

  I waited by his locker for a full hour, making the last-minute decision to skip homeroom altogether, but he never showed up. I had tried to remain hopeful, but after three mornings of no sign of him, I had the overwhelming sensation that something was definitely wrong.

  By biology class, he was still nowhere in sight, and he didn’t show up to lunch either. I had asked around to people I recognized from his classes all week, each of them looking at me like I was some kind of spooky stalker. They all said the same thing: Haven’t seen him.

  By the end of the school day I was at a “someone realizing they left their curling iron on and sitting atop a box of tissues for three hours” level of panic. I tracked down Audrey outside on the quad, where she was taping Into the Woods posters to all the trees.

  “Isn’t this neat? Posters for Into the Woods on wood. Clever, huh?” She smirked proudly.

  “What do I do?” I asked. She didn’t have to ask what I meant, as my question was a continuation of the endless text conversation I had kept Audrey locked into all day.

  “Don’t panic. Maybe he’s sick.”

  “Come on. He’s not sick. Something’s definitely up.”

  Audrey sighed.
She knew I was right. She gave me a big, tight hug that cracked my back.

  “How about this? I’ll drive us by his house and we can see if his car’s there,” she offered.

  It was a drastic move, and a little more Nancy Drew than I was imagining … but it gave me an idea of my own.

  The doorbell at Aunt Debbie’s house chimed out Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in a series of shrill beeps and dings that sounded more like a failing heart monitor than the iconic pop tune—followed by the meowing cries of her veritable pride of stray cats.

  “Are the cats part of the doorbell, or are they real?” Audrey asked.

  “They’re real. Very real,” I grimly offered.

  “Please, whatever happens to me, never let me turn into a cat lady. I’d rather be one of those people they do half-hour reality shows on about being addicted to drinking lighter fluid or eating the stuffing from their sofas. Just not cats.”

  Aunt Debbie wasn’t answering the door and there was no car in her driveway. It had been a long shot, but I knew that if anyone in Christopher’s family would tell me what was going on, Aunt Debbie would.

  “She’s not here. Let’s go.” I sighed, just as her bumper-sticker-covered, dented powder-blue Chevy Malibu came pulling up the gravel driveway.

  “Hey, cutie pies!” Aunt Debbie crowed, rolling down her window.

  She parked and got out of the car, lugging more than an armful of cat food.

  “You wouldn’t mind grabbing the rest out of the trunk, would you?” She motioned back to the car as she breezed past us.

  Audrey and I opened her trunk to discover even more cat food. Audrey was visibly shaken.

  “Promise me,” she hissed under her breath.

  “I promise.”

  Aunt Debbie was already pouring the dry kibbles of food into the bowls scattered throughout the living room when we came in.

  “Just sit those anywhere. Thanks, baby dolls. I’m Debbie, by the way.” She reached her hand out to Audrey, who shook it tentatively.

  “Audrey. Charmed to meet you.”

  Aunt Debbie pursed her lips. “Charmed? How fancy. You from over there in Europe or something?”

  “She wishes,” I said. “Christopher wasn’t at school today and something happened over the weekend at the fall dance and I’m worried something is wrong.”

  Aunt Debbie lit the cigarette she had been holding in her mouth since she pulled up, then frowned, immediately dropping it onto her shag carpet.

  “Shit!” She stomped out the glowing ash beneath her foot. “Well, I’m glad you came by because I didn’t have a clue how to find your address.”

  “My address?”

  She walked over to her purse and began rummaging through it, pulling out an assortment of things a sane person would have simply thrown away: empty cans of Sprite, a Ziploc bag of stale-looking Fruity Pebbles, and finally … an envelope.

  “Here it is.” She handed it to me. “He slipped it to me when I went by there on Sunday. Before they left.”

  “Left?” Audrey asked for me, as I was too confused to even form the word.

  “Oh dear. Those two parents of his, dammit, I just want to wring their necks,” Aunt Debbie snarled between cigarette drags. “Have a seat. Can I get y’all a Diet Sprite or beer?”

  We sat down on the cat-hair-covered sofa, which smelled like a pet store someone had just microwaved a Lean Cuisine in.

  “I don’t know how much you know about Christopher’s past. What his mama and daddy have put him through.” She took a seat on the massage chair she undoubtedly passed out in every night.

  “The pray-the-gay-away camp?” I asked. “He told me about it.”

  Aunt Debbie nodded. “Right. All those counseling retreats. It’s torture, if you ask me. They threw a fit after he brought you to the barbecue and since he was already grounded when y’all snuck out for ‘ice cream,’ they made it even worse when he was caught,” she said.

  “It was frozen yogurt,” I corrected her.

  She rolled her eyes, then winked. “Whatever you boys are calling it nowadays.”

  Clearly, Aunt Debbie had a very different idea of what Christopher and I had been up to, but I was in no mood to explain that frozen yogurt was not slang for gay sex.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I don’t know all the details, but after what happened at that dance, Jim and Angela pitched a fit. Christopher called me and tried to get me to come calm them down, but it was too late.” She shook her head, staring sadly at the cloud of cigarette smoke floating in front of her.

  “What do you mean ‘too late’?” I asked.

  “They sent him off to another one of those awful programs.”

  “You mean another pray-the-gay-away thing?” I could barely speak. I could feel my throat tightening in shock and rage and confusion.

  “I don’t know if they can legally call them that anymore, but yeah, one of those horrible counseling programs. I begged them to let him come stay with me while they cooled off, but once Jim and Angela get an idea there’s no stopping them. And what with the new church they’re starting out here and after what happened back in Missouri, in their batshit-crazy eyes, they’ve got too much to lose.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. When you’d grown up the way I had, these types of homophobic extremists were like the bogeyman. You heard about them on TV or online, but you never really imagined them affecting your own life.

  “What happened in Missouri?” Audrey asked.

  “Jim’s board of directors at the ministry found out about Christopher’s being gay and all, and somebody told somebody who told somebody until the whole church had turned against them. They all but ran them out of town, which is why Jim decided to relocate his whole business and start fresh here. But if he’s going to make this place a success, he can’t have all that drama again. So he’s nipping it in the bud before it can become a problem.”

  “Nipping it in the bud? By sending their son off to some brainwashing experiment?”

  “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Debbie said, and I could tell she really meant it.

  I didn’t know what else to say. Or how to feel. Or what to do. So I just sat there staring at the envelope. Afraid to open it. Because then all of whatever the hell was happening would be real. I stayed on that sofa for a long time, until a cat peed on my shoe and we got out of there.

  I kept the envelope on my lap the whole ride home. Was he breaking up with me? Or was it a passionate declaration of love?

  At first Audrey remained quiet, eyes on the road. But finally she couldn’t stand it any longer, and asked, “Are you going to read it?”

  “I think I want to wait until I’m home,” I told her.

  She nodded.

  I’d watched the world happen from a safe distance at my little window for as long as I could remember, and now, suddenly, I’d been pulled into the drama of real life.

  Neither my mom’s Prius nor my father’s Vespa were in the driveway when we pulled up, and I breathed a sigh of relief for some much-needed peace and quiet.

  “Are you all right?” Audrey asked as I gathered my things from her backseat.

  “Just confused,” I told her.

  “Me too,” she said. “I mean, I knew his parents were a little nutty, but this is bizarre and intense.”

  I could only nod in agreement. I just wanted to go sit on my bed and read his letter. I kissed Audrey good-bye and thanked her for the ride and the company.

  “Anytime, my darling,” she purred. “Ring me if you need anything.”

  I went inside, not even stopping for a glass of water in the kitchen even though my mouth was completely dry with nerves. I rushed to my room, shut the door, and stretched out on the bed. I unfolded the piece of yellow legal paper with his scribbly handwriting on it and began to read.

  Dear Marley,

  By the time you get this, I’ll be at yet another counseling “retreat” run by my father’s colleagues. Isn’t that a hilari
ous word for a place that attempts to brainwash kids into not being gay? Retreat. Picture a spa but instead of deck chairs and cucumber facials, it’s twelve hours of Bible study and processed food.

  I’m writing you this for two reasons. First and foremost, to tell you I’m sorry for what happened at the dance. I lost my temper. I was so happy that night, so excited that we’d pulled off getting to a school dance together, so relieved to have won in the ongoing game against my parents … that when that kid said those stupid things, I lost it.

  I’m so sick of fighting, whether it’s my parents and their friends or idiots at school or politicians in the news. I’m over it. And I guess I hit my breaking point. Like I said, I’m sorry I ruined what up until then had been a really special night.

  The second reason I’m writing is a bit more complicated. I’m over it, Marley. I do a good enough job of pretending I’m not fazed, but I am so over fighting my parents to accept me for who I am. The reality is that I’m just going to have to keep fighting for the rest of my life or until I give up and they win. Up until I met you, I thought I might let that happen, but not anymore. I’m done. I’m going to run away and I wanted you to know about it because I don’t want to lose contact with you. I’m going to leave the camp Friday night—and I’m not coming back home.

  I hope you’re rolling your eyes at my dramatics because I certainly am, but I guess I just want to disappear from these people’s lives for good, and running away feels like the only option. This isn’t coming out of nowhere for me, as it’s something I’ve thought of doing for a long time; I’ve just been too scared. All I’ve ever wanted in life is to make a difference so that kids going through the crap I’ve been through don’t have to go through it anymore. I used to think I could fight but now all I want is to be free. I want to be happy and to live my life out in the open and not under some evangelical microscope of disapproval.

  I am not sure where I will go. Maybe take a train to New York? Or a bus out west to California? What I’m asking from you is a ride to the bus or train station … and, most importantly, a chance to say good-bye.