by Jeffery Self
“Do you need us to do anything?” Mom asked, timid and a little frightened in her own home.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Harrison asked, squinting at the sundress my mom had chosen.
“Yes?” she said.
“Let’s go for something a little more mainstream, down the middle, crossing the party aisle kind of look. Know what I mean? We want all-American mom, not Stevie Nicks on Earth Day.” Harrison turned his attention to Dad, who wore a plain gray sweater. “And how about you put a collar underneath that sweater and comb your hair? Otherwise you guys are perfect!”
Harrison smiled, the kind of smile I would later learn was as phony as his highlights. Mom and Dad nodded, agreeably yet visibly out of their comfort zone as they went to their room to change. I felt a pang of guilt, a tug in my gut, the kind of tug I would later learn was a whisper from the universe telling me to turn back. But, as I did a lot in those few months, I ignored it.
Alex lugged the additional lights into the room, knocking a framed photo of Mom and Dad’s wedding off the wall in the process. Neither she nor Harrison seemed to notice, or at least they didn’t care. We were doing a Facebook Live “press conference”—which, needless to say, would be the first time I’d done anything like that.
“We’ve got ten minutes, people. Ten minutes!” Harrison tapped his Apple Watch as he checked the camera’s monitor with the new lighting. “Looking good. We’ve got to change his shirt, though.”
Before he could even finish his sentence, Alex was unbuttoning the red shirt and pulling it off my body, switching it out with one that was identical except for its blue fabric. Mom and Dad came back out, Mom now in plain navy pants and a white button-up shirt. Dad had added a dress shirt underneath the sweater and taken off his glasses. They gave a needy look toward Harrison, like two lost children hoping for a father’s approval.
“Fabulous! Perfection!” he shouted at them, clapping his hands. “Sit down right here, on either side of Marley.” He placed them on the sofa, physically shifting their bodies into the angle he wanted. They were both sweaty from the bright lights and nerves.
“Alex, maybe one less light—now it’s too bright,” he said. Alex clicked off one of the movie lights. Finally, Harrison let out a satisfied breath of air. “Just perfect. All right, now, can you read this, Marley?”
He tapped a key on his laptop, lighting up the teleprompter he’d set up. We’d practiced this well past midnight the night before, as if I were studying for a spelling bee.
“Yes, I can.”
“Okay … everyone ready? Here we go.”
He pressed a button on the camera, a red light turned on, as he pointed at me, mouthing, Go.
I closed my eyes. Thought of Christopher. Not of him falling. Not of him on the ground. But Christopher smiling. Christopher, banished to a camp dedicated to undoing his identity. Christopher, not allowed by his parents to be who he needed to be. I’m doing a good thing, I told myself, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
I opened my eyes. And I began.
“Hi. My name is Marley McNally, and these are my parents, Sharon and Greg. I am making this video because last Friday night my boyfriend, Christopher Anderson, took his own life.” The first six times we’d rehearsed, I hadn’t been able to get past this line, the words seemingly lodged in my throat. Now I took a deep breath and kept going. For him. “Christopher was the son of Reverend Jim and Angela Anderson, who you might know from TV. They’ve made big careers out of denouncing gay Americans in the name of God—including their own son. Their son, my boyfriend, was gay, and they hated this so much that they forced him into treatment facilities using the ‘pray-the-gay-away’ method from the time that he was thirteen up until he ran away from one here in North Carolina last week. They don’t want this part of Christopher’s story told. They don’t want the world to know that they had a gay son because they think it would ruin everything they stand for. But the truth is that while preaching this kind of hate, they were also directing it at their own son. And this went on until their son couldn’t take it anymore.” Christopher, I thought. What the hell am I doing? “I only knew Christopher for a short time. We met and fell for each other really quickly, maybe too quickly, but that’s what people my age do. I can’t sit by and let his parents rewrite who he was. That’s why I’m making this video. So that the world knows the real Christopher Anderson. A sweet, funny, loving, silly, and beautiful gay teenager who fought really hard to be himself.”
On this last part, I lost it. I felt the tightening, then the tears, then the shame for shedding the tears on camera.
I’m not sure if I was crying just for the loss of Christopher or for, in this precise moment, the loss of myself in the midst of everything that was happening.
WITH THAT ONE VIDEO, SHIT hit the fan and my insignificant world exploded, just as Harrison had planned.
The first person to pick up the story was some political gay blog I hadn’t heard of. Then another one, and another one, followed by someone with a verified Twitter check by their name. By the following Sunday, the story had made it to CNN, the New York Times, the Today show. People made reaction videos to it on YouTube. A Facebook page Harrison set up to remember Christopher had hundreds of thousands of likes in its first days. I was officially gaymous.
Harrison was flying higher than a kite about the attention the story was getting, but kept insisting that he wanted it to be a famous story, not just a gaymous one.
“We’re still weighing offers, and we wouldn’t even consider it without something in writing, Gail.” Harrison spoke into his phone now, almost shouting, while he paced around the living room.
Ever since the video went viral, newspapers and TV shows had been calling our house trying to get an interview. It was the first time I’d been grateful for Harrison’s presence in our home, because neither my parents nor I had any idea what we were doing. Apparently, the first interview would be integral to how we unfolded the whole story.
I had been back to school, and it was surreal, like Christopher was the one who’d died, but I’d become the ghost. People told me how sorry they were, but they didn’t talk to me much longer after that. A few cheered to me that they’d seen my video—as if I was a celebrity, not a mourner. Like this was a story line on everyone’s favorite TV show and not my own depressing life. Audrey tried to protect me, but that was hard, because the biggest threat came from within. I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her anything, really. And a part of me wanted her to call me on it—I almost resented that she was letting me get away with my silence.
Mostly she expressed her support for me by saying unprintable things about Christopher’s parents, who had basically responded to my video by saying I was a liar, and hadn’t known their son at all. Which only made me more certain that doing what I was doing was the right thing to do.
If Christopher could no longer speak for himself, I had to speak on his behalf. Simple as that.
When Harrison finished his call, he slammed his phone down triumphantly.
“BAM! We got The Evening Report!” he shouted. “A featured fifteen-minute interview segment!” He danced around the chair my dad liked to read in, pumping his fists in the air. “Boom! Boom! Bam!”
The Evening Report was the biggest syndicated nightly news show on television. It covered every topic from the crisis in the Middle East to why Jennifer Lawrence couldn’t eat turkey (“the reason might surprise you!”).
“That’s good, right?” Mom asked. Through my whole life, Mom had never watched TV for, as she put it, “political reasons.” These reasons were never explained nor discussed nor, for that matter, asked about. I was always happy for the additional space on our DVR.
“Good? It’s one of the biggest outlets on television for this kind of story!” Harrison said so excitedly, he was almost singing. “This is huge. They’ll be here Thursday morning!”
“Here?” Dad asked. “Meaning they’ll be shooting in our house?”
&nbs
p; “Yes! It makes the whole thing far more human!” Harrison said, too busy typing a text to notice the irony of attempting to make death more “human.”
Late that night I texted Audrey. I felt too guilty to sit in silence watching Say Yes to the Dress, which was exactly what I was doing. (Has anyone ever said NO to the dress?)
I wrote: Hey.
She wrote: Hey.
Our generation and its endless contribution to vocabulary.
Sorry I’ve been MIA, I wrote.
I get it, she replied quicker than seemed possible.
Where are you?
In bed, idiot.
It was almost midnight. I really was an idiot.
Wanna meet me by those swings near your house? I wrote, aware that it was a moderately ridiculous request in the middle of the night. The swings in question were in her neighborhood park, a mere ten minutes from my house. It used to be the kind of park kids had birthday parties in by day and that junkies shot up in by night, but ever since the installation of security cameras, it was more just the former.
After an annoying forty seconds she wrote back, Ugh. I’m not even wearing lashes but fine. See you in fifteen.
I beat her to the park, which wasn’t a surprise. I sat down on a swing and pushed off. Push and pull. That’s what my dad used to say when he taught me how to swing. Push your legs out, then pull them in.
Finally, well over half an hour after the decided time, Audrey arrived.
“Sorry I’m late, doll,” she said. I appreciated her predictability.
She kissed me on both cheeks, undoubtedly leaving enormous red lipstick marks on both sides of my face. I both couldn’t and fully could believe that she was wearing a fresh coat of bright red lipstick in the middle of the night. She dropped down on the swing beside me and pushed off. Then pulled.
“Why is that the way we all learn to swing?” I asked, soaring through the air. “Push and pull.”
“No clue. But it’s a nice metaphor, isn’t it?”
“How so?” I asked.
“Life is kind of like that. You have to push it and then pull it back.”
“Calm down,” I said at her uncharacteristic sincerity, and she cackled into the night like a witch.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on these swings. Maybe someone’s birthday party? Maybe just a random afternoon after school with Audrey before we both hit puberty and turned into such terrible weirdos who resented everything that once brought us joy.
“So, you’re having quite a week,” Audrey said, after a long bout of silence accompanied by the rustling of squirrels and who knew what else in a bush behind us.
“Ha! That’s one way to put it,” I replied.
We kept swinging for a bit. Push. Pull.
“Are you okay?” she asked. I had hoped she would ask this very question … but I didn’t have an answer. I guess part of me wanted to confess everything to her, to unload the guilt I was carrying.
“I guess so,” I said, a coward pushing down the truth I so desperately needed to share.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The rusty chains of the swings sounded like they were whining back and forth to each other.
“What’re you going to do?”
“About what?
“All of this. That video you did. It’s going viral. People at school won’t shut up about it—and we’re talking about some of the most cluelessly out-of-touch people in the history of humanity.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said freely into the night air. Something I hadn’t been able to do this entire time of dealing with Harrison.
“What do you mean?” Audrey asked.
I had a lifetime’s worth of telling Audrey everything. The first time I had a sex dream, the first time I watched All About Eve, the first time I said I was gay out loud, the fact that I didn’t think Ryan Gosling was that hot, the reality that the cast recording of Hamilton went completely over my head. I had confessed everything to my best friend and here I was, biting my tongue.
“I don’t know,” I faked. And I could tell that in the back of her mind she knew I was pretending.
“What do you mean that you don’t know what to do?” she pried.
This was my chance to unveil the truth to someone, a person who would understand. And I wanted to. I want you to understand that I really wanted to. But I wasn’t sure what would happen. Not to me but to Christopher’s story. I wanted people to continue talking about it, him, all of this. And maybe that was a selfish desire. Maybe my need to have the world talking about him was so that he wouldn’t go away just yet. He could live on a little longer in the news articles, the flashes of his picture on the nightly news, and the whispered conversations of others. If I couldn’t see or speak to or touch Christopher ever again, maybe I could at least live in a world where everyone else mourned him as much as I did, and maybe that would make the numbing pain that I felt all over my body subside, even for just a second. And, most important, maybe if enough people said his name out loud, then he would never disappear at all.
“I just don’t know,” I said.
“All right. Well, I understand where you’re coming from, darling. Just know that you’ve got someone on your team. And it’s me. You can tell me anything. Deal?”
This statement alone made me feel calmer. I locked my hand around hers as we swung in the nighttime silence. We kept swinging. Pushing and pulling. As if we’d never grown up.
“What’s this for?” she asked, her eyes motioning to her hand.
“I don’t know. Just you, I guess,” I said. And I meant it. Maybe later it would be considered deceitful, but in this exact moment, I really, really meant it.
“TELL ME ABOUT WHEN YOU and Christopher met,” said Liz, the reporter from The Evening Report. For emphasis, she held a pen up to her chin, the signature body language for a reporter who wants to indicate to the audience that this is a serious interview.
We were seated in two chairs across from each other. Three cameras loomed down on us. The pressure on me was so palpable it was almost comical.
“I saw him first at school. The first day of school, actually,” I said. “But we didn’t talk until we ran into each other at Shoppers Plus.”
“Aw. Don’t you just love Shoppers Plus?” the reporter asked with a bubbly demeanor of someone interviewing a talking cat.
“Um. Yeah. Sure,” I said.
“What’s your favorite thing to buy at Shoppers Plus?” she continued with an eager grin. I looked to my parents, who shrugged.
“I buy batteries sometimes. And groceries.” This was the best I could muster, and it seemed good enough for Liz, who leaned back in her chair, nodding enthusiastically.
“And was it love at first sight?” she asked. I winced at the absurdly clichéd phrase. “For Christopher, I mean, not Shoppers Plus. We all love Shoppers Plus!”
Christopher would find this funny, I told myself. If Christopher saw this, he would be laughing.
“I really liked him, if that’s what you mean,” I said with a nervous laugh.
I locked eyes with Harrison, who was nodding along with every question and answer, like a proud parent watching his child’s piano recital.
“I’ve been told that Reverend Jim and Angela Anderson forbade you from entering Christopher’s funeral. Is that correct?” Liz asked, her voice firmer and more direct.
“Well, forbade seems like a strong word,” I said, catching sight of Harrison furiously shaking his head out of the corner of my eye. I backpedaled. “It was my dad they spoke to, but they basically said that they didn’t want us there. So, yeah, I guess they did.”
Harrison gave me a thumbs-up.
“If you could say anything to Christopher’s parents now, what would you say?” Liz asked. You could hear how proud she was of her question from just her tone of voice.
I had so much I wanted to say to them. Some of it too explicit for national television. Most of it, actually.
“I guess I’d just say that they had a really special son. And I was lucky enough to get to know him for a few weeks. And I’m so sorry they lost him. But I wish they’d honor who he was and not try to reinvent him for their own sake. The world is full of gay kids just as wonderful as their son, a lot of them going through the same disapproval from their families that he went through. And it’s bullshit.” I slipped, hearing the bleep in my head that they’d be sure to add in. “Sorry. I guess what I’m saying is, I hope that if his death can mean anything, it’s to remind parents to unconditionally love.”
Liz smiled at me without appearing to have heard a word I even said.
“Well, that’s great. Let’s hope something can come out of this tragedy. Here’s Kyle Rogers with a report on gay suicide in the United States.”
The interview was over—the monitor cut to a prerecorded segment about kids all across the country who’d been like Christopher: denied their identity, forced to change … or at least forced to try to change. I could hear their stories as I took the mic off and handed it back to the technician. I could see their faces on the monitors as Liz thanked us and the producers pushed release forms into our faces. Each kid’s story was unique, but they also had so much in common. Their fates could have shifted so easily, if the people they loved had been kind to them. Yes, their ends were different, in truth, from Christopher’s. But that seemed like a small detail.
“You did well,” Harrison said as we headed to the kitchen (aka the greenroom).
“And you did good,” Dad added.
I really hoped he was right.
AFTER THE INTERVIEW AIRED ON The Evening Report the following night, it felt like everyone in America was talking about the story. Reporters and news vans were parked outside our house all weekend, attempting to get a comment from me or my parents. Harrison handled them like the pro he was.
“We appreciate your interest in the story, but the McNally family is not conducting any further interviews at this time. This is private property and we ask that you remove yourselves from the premises,” Harrison announced from the steps of our front porch to flashing cameras and aggressively shouted questions like he was the president of the United States announcing a ban on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.