A Very, Very Bad Thing

by Jeffery Self

  By the end of the weekend, I had a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, an Instagram, a Snapchat, and all the other apps people use to document their lives and causes. Life had turned into one of the reality shows I loved to watch. The only difference was that watching a reality show and living one are nothing alike. For one, you can’t pause life, go get a bowl of cereal, take a leak, then pick up where you left off. Also, a reality show isn’t real, whereas actual reality is really, really uncomfortably real.

  THE HIGH SCHOOL CROWDS I had invisibly navigated my entire teenage existence all seemed to notice me now. Every single person staring, whispering, pointing. Was this what being popular was like?

  This bizarre feeling lasted the whole day. Teachers treated me carefully and delicately. Lunch ladies smiled at me. A really pretty popular girl even said hi to me. This was a whole new world … and I was beginning to think I preferred being invisible. Toward the end of the day, Audrey came rushing up to me in the hallway.

  “There you are!” she said, out of breath from running in heels. “Have you seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  She looked like she might be sick. “Oh, no. You haven’t. It’s everywhere,” she said, shaking her head, her dangling earrings jingling with her every move. She pulled out her phone and the video was already paused on the screen. The image was of Reverend Jim and Angela sitting across from Liz! My Liz! The Evening Report Liz!

  “Is that Liz?!” I gasped. Audrey nodded with dread and tapped play on the video. The interview began.

  “Look, Liz, we knew our son. We loved our son. And he wasn’t a homosexual,” Reverend Jim said through his perfected fake smile that was both cheerful and respectful of tragedy all at once. He was really good at being on camera.

  “If this is true, with all due respect, why would this young man continue to insist that he was Christopher’s boyfriend?” Liz asked, pen to chin.

  Christopher’s parents looked at each other with forced sad smirks, shaking their heads at the craziness of the world, their scripted answers loaded and ready.

  Christopher’s father said, “What you’re seeing is someone who barely knew our son trying to use his death to get famous. It’s shameful but not surprising in this day and age. All we know is that our son wasn’t a homosexual. He was a good, sweet, all-American boy. And suggesting anything otherwise is just plain incorrect.”

  “But what do you say to the sources who indicate the therapy retreat your son had been on the week prior was in fact gay conversion therapy? A practice you have publicly supported on numerous occasions?” Liz asked.

  But the Andersons didn’t even budge. They were cool, calm, and collected under this kind of pressure. They’d made careers out of it.

  “It was a retreat for many things. Our son was there because he was mentally unstable. And we will not discuss that any further,” Reverend Jim stated flatly.

  “Well, I appreciate your sitting down with me. Next up: Olympians who shoplift, only on The Evening Report …”

  Liz kept going, but I hit stop on the video. Audrey looked up at me with wide, disbelieving eyes.

  “It’s everywhere. All the blogs are on your side, though. Or at least the ones I read,” she reassured me. “But, like, Marley, this isn’t going anywhere. It’s, like … on.”

  Audrey was right. It was, indeed, “on.” However, I was decidedly off. I had this awful vision that Christopher was going to be forgotten, and all that would remain would be the fight over whether or not he was gay.

  I knew he wouldn’t want that part of him to be ignored or changed. But I doubted it was all he’d want to be remembered for. The fact that sexuality is still a way to describe a person will never cease to leave me shaking my head in confusion.

  When I got home I went to the guest room to talk to Harrison.

  He was packing up to return to New York, where he’d continue running my “campaign” (just what I was campaigning to become was still unclear).

  “Come in,” he said, the sounds of NPR playing low from inside the room.

  He had all of his clothes laid across his bed, neatly folded and organized to an almost sociopathic degree.

  “Hi, Marley. Did you get my email? This is all a really big deal! Congratulations!” he said, jumping with excitement.

  “Which email?” I asked, feet firmly on the ground, with zero intention of jumping or being excited.

  Speaking to someone like Harrison was tough because there was so rarely an opportune moment of silence. He spoke as if running through a long-winded agenda.

  “The award! Oh God! You haven’t found out yet. I get to see your face when I deliver the news. Okay, are you ready? You’re being given the Hero Award by the LGBTQ Society of America!” He squealed like a little girl or adult gay man meeting Harry Styles.

  “I am?” I asked, his words successfully avoiding the act of sinking in, more so just bobbing on the water like a fishing lure.

  “Yes! They’re covering the flight to New York, plus they’re putting you up at The Hudson; they do the awards in the ballroom there.” Harrison rattled off the details like a game show host telling you about the brand-new car and state-of-the-art refrigerator a person has just won for successfully coming up with the answer to some stupid trivia question like “Who discovered beets?”

  “That is neat,” I said, which was true. It was just, y’know, completely and totally undeserved.

  “VERY neat!” he corrected.

  “Okay, Harrison. I need to tell you about something,” I said, staring at my shoes and wondering, for just a moment, how shoelaces get so disgusting-looking so quickly.

  “Of course,” he said while rolling a T-shirt like a croissant. “Is it about that Teen Vogue article? Because if so, I agree they should’ve used a better photo. I don’t even know where they got that one. You look like a twink version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. No offense, of course—it was just the lighting. We’ll never let it happen again!”

  “No. It’s about everything, actually.”

  He looked up at me, attempting to shield a startled expression. “All right. Of course. Have a seat,” he said.

  I took a seat on the old trunk in the corner of the room, the one Mom kept the Christmas decorations and summer solstice lanterns in.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I said with a clenched throat.

  Harrison sucked some air through his teeth, his mouth stuck in an emotionless poker face.

  “And why is that, Marley?”

  This almost made me laugh, both out of nerves and the absurdity of just how big a why we were dealing with.

  “I’m going to confess something to you, but you cannot tell my parents and you cannot freak out and you cannot get angry and …”

  He waved his hand, the universal sign for shut up and get on with it. I felt like Taylor Swift having to admit she had never actually written any of her own songs or someone else changing the course of human history.

  “My story wasn’t entirely true,” I said after a breath so deep I felt it in my kneecaps.

  Harrison slowly nodded, removing his glasses, cleaning them with his shirt, then putting them back on.

  “All right. What parts?”

  “He was my boyfriend. His parents did send him to those conversion therapy places, but …” I cleared my throat even though I didn’t need to. “He didn’t kill himself.”

  The color drained out of Harrison’s face and the room was eerily still for what felt like a lifetime. He stood up from the end of the bed and began to pace around the room.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, with a vague twang of desperation in his voice that told me I could keep the lie going if I wanted and he’d be more than okay with it.

  “I am sure. He didn’t jump—he fell. He was being stupid and trying to make me laugh and he fell. He slipped and fell. Just like that,” I said with a snap of my fingers. The snap seemed to linger in the air.

  “But he ran away from that week in the therapy re
treat, after everything they’d put him through. He said he wanted to end the suffering.” Harrison rattled off the story with urgency.

  “But he was just going to run—he wasn’t going to die. He wanted to get away from them,” I said, the deep weight of guilt oozing through my stomach. “I wasn’t thinking when I told the police what happened. I just said it and then all of this happened and it felt like we were doing something good, so I—”

  “We are doing something good,” Harrison interrupted. “We are doing something very, very good. The amount of awareness, the conversations we’ve started, we’re making a difference. YOU are. Look at this award, for instance!”

  “But based on a lie. How is that something good?” I said, with a boldness I didn’t know I was capable of.

  Harrison was uncharacteristically without a retort. Instead he sat back down on the end of the bed, closing his eyes and slamming a balled fist onto a pile of socks.

  “All right—story time. I grew up in Utah. Did you know that?” he asked without looking at me.

  “I didn’t,” I replied.

  “Mormon. Big family, all boys. I was the youngest. And the only gay one. You can guess the rest of this story,” Harrison said with a bemused sadness. “That conversion therapy crap, those camps, counseling with men telling me all about the fiery inferno of my future unless I changed my ways. And I tried. I tried really hard to practice everything they taught me to do, to ignore all the feelings they told me to ignore, to push it down so much that eventually it was bound to simply disappear somewhere in my stomach. A dangerous little flaw to avoid and deny with all the power in my soul.”

  “And could you? Avoid it, I mean?” I asked.

  This made him laugh, which was a surprising response.

  “I did. Or at least I told myself I was doing so for a while. And want to know the stupidest part of this whole thing? When I was managing to do so, or at least pretending to, it was the first time in my entire life my mom told me she was proud of me.” He shook his head at the words he’d just said and let out a broken chuckle. “Look, I hope you never have to meet her—she’s such a horrible mother. Terrible bangs too.”

  We both laughed for a second, unable to conjure up something more appropriate. Then it got quiet again, just the hum of a silent house.

  “I thought I might … y’know … pull the big one, off myself, do the unthinkable before I hit my eighteenth birthday. But I didn’t. And I still don’t know why. I held on, who knows how, and then one day I got the balls to do it: I ran. I got on a bus to LA and I never went back.”

  I was lost in thinking about how many kids my age had been through the exact feeling Harrison was describing. Or how many were going through it as I sat there on a trunk filled with handmade Christmas tree ornaments and Chinese lanterns, in our guest room, with the opportunity to help change things. The opportunity I was trying to throw away.

  “I’m sorry. I did a very, very bad thing. And I don’t know why I did it,” I said, as if that would fix anything.

  “Bad and good are sometimes murky. Some things are very, very bad. Some things are very, very good. But most things are somewhere in the middle, in this gray area of intention,” Harrison said, cracking his knuckles so loud I thought he’d broken them. “You went about this in a bad way, perhaps, but if your intention is good, if it’s to try and change things, then you can’t beat yourself up. You just have to keep going.”

  I understood his point but I also understood my own. The reality was that I had done some good while also doing some bad. But perhaps the truth would’ve resulted in just bad. Maybe by lying, I’d turned a bad thing into a good thing. This was, at the very least, the closest thing to an excuse I could find.

  “Do what you want to do, Marley,” Harrison said, looking at me not like a kid, but like a peer. “But remember, you’re doing something. You’re acting. We are fighting. And that, my friend, is a very, very good thing.” As he said this, he looked like someone who had fought for too long to give up now, the face of someone who’d done it, who’d overcome, like Christopher escaping that night. And I wanted to help him. All the versions of him that were out there, that were being born that very minute. I wanted to fight. I had to.

  After Harrison returned to New York, where he and his colleagues fielded requests for everything from interviews to endorsement deals to an offer to have me guest judge a cake-baking competition show, life slowly became somewhat normal again. Who knew tragic deaths could bring so much opportunity? I mean, besides pretty much everyone who has ever written a memoir.

  I’d traded in my after-school activity of painting sets for speaking on the phone with reporters about suicide prevention pretty much every afternoon. There were magazine articles, photo shoots, more TV interviews, endless blogs. The attention was becoming less bizarre to me, and I’d successfully started to convince myself that this was a good thing. I’d started to find joy in the fact that I had found a purpose in life, to serve others. If I tried really, really hard, I could almost convince myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong whatsoever.

  After Harrison released the one and only photo of Christopher and me together (the one Audrey had taken at the dance), Christopher’s parents stopped giving interviews and pretty much stopped talking about their son altogether. This was also likely due to the new book Reverend Jim had coming out just in time for Christmas, titled Hands Off My Jesus. I didn’t read it, but judging from the cover image (a group of faceless men in suits attempting to remove baby Jesus from a nativity), it’s safe to say it was about Reverend Jim’s second-favorite topic next to abolishing homosexuality: defending Christmas.

  Mom and Dad were back to forbidding me from eating gluten or processed food. With Harrison out of the house, they even started chanting again. I was back at school full-time. A brand-new Real Housewives had started, and the cast was reliably insane and fascinating to watch.

  Life moved on … for most of us.

  AFTER CHRISTOPHER DIED, EVERYONE AROUND me told me that “time heals everything,” but as the weeks went by, I couldn’t help but realize these well-intended words of wisdom were actually complete and total bullshit. If anything, time rubs salt in the wound as the world goes back to normal and you’re left still in pieces.

  My life, for all intents and purposes, was back to the normal routine, but I was not the same person I was before. I was someone else, someone I didn’t even know, going through the motions of the person I was on the outside and hoping that by doing so I’d forget just how broken I was on the inside.

  I wanted to talk about Christopher. Not about the tragedy or my pain or how grief can be so unpredictable or any of the other BS topics my school counselor, Mrs. Geary, tried so hard to get me to focus on. Mrs. Geary, a nice older woman who looked as if she’d been counseling students at the school since the Stone Age, had only the most positive intentions. However, they were also the most infuriating. She didn’t know Christopher, had never even met him, so attempting to talk to her about him was about as helpful as the five bowls of cereal I’d taken to binge-eating every night before bed.

  It was in the midst of one of those late-night, one-man food-fests that I found myself going down the wormhole of googling Christopher. The one good thing about his father being such a famous bigot was that there were lots of photos of his family. Just getting to stare at photos of Christopher and see his name printed throughout endless articles about both his family and his death was a very small but necessary comfort. Everyone on the Internet seemed to have an opinion about Christopher, his family, and in many cases even me. I couldn’t help but feel a weird sense of pride for getting Christopher’s story out there, the bulk of which was true, except for the big twist at the end. But it was creating a conversation, regardless of what did and didn’t happen. People were discussing something very, very important: acceptance.

  It was through this nosedive into Internet commentary that I found myself on Angela Anderson’s personal website and blog. It was nothing
like the flashy web empire of Reverend Jim Anderson, with its online store and video gospels and message boards. Angela’s website sold no products and included very little except a photo of her family and a blog. The most recent post surprised me.

  I would like to start this out by thanking the countless friends and kind strangers who have reached out to offer their sympathy, support, and unique personal experiences with tragedy. It is impossible to put into words what a mother feels when losing her child, so I won’t attempt to do so now. The tragedy my family has endured has changed me as a mother, as a Christian, and as a woman. I loved my son very, very much. Despite many reports to the contrary, I loved my son unconditionally. And I always will. This type of grief is confusing, to say the least, and I hope that if anything comes from this nightmare experience, it will be a clearer understanding of how to help those going through it in the future.

  Sincerely, Angela Anderson

  Something about her words and the rawness of her honesty told me she understood the full story more than she’d let on in interviews. Or perhaps, more than Reverend Jim had allowed her to do. Unconditionally. It broke my already shattered heart to think of Christopher’s mom being stuck in the position of hiding who her son was while also grieving for his loss. Perhaps I had been awake too long, perhaps it was my desperation, or perhaps I’d eaten far too much cereal, but it was as if I was suddenly seeing Angela Anderson in a different light. Before I could let myself think it through, I clicked the contact tab on the website and began to write her an email.

  I know I’m probably the last person you want to hear from right now, but I just wanted to say that I’m thinking about you. And I’m sorry for what you’re going through. Marley

  A more coherent person would have hit delete but I didn’t because I was not a coherent person. I was a grief-stricken teenager. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but it did seem as if Christopher’s mom was attempting to say she loved her gay son … or, at least, that was the story I was pinning to my every emotion as I sat there staring at the family photo on her website.