A Very, Very Bad Thing

by Jeffery Self

  Sometime late in the night I drifted off to sleep with my open laptop beside me and every light in my bedroom still on. I had a dream about Christopher. Not even an interesting one where we went somewhere cool or did something exciting; it was just an average day. We saw each other at school, we ate lunch together, we met up in the evening and went to T.J. Maxx and tried on discount jeans. Nothing monumental happened at any point, but even so, the dream still felt important. I could feel the warmth of his hand in mine. I could smell his breath. I could hear his laugh and watch his eyes glancing over at me when he didn’t think I was noticing. It was just a typical day in a typical life and it was the greatest dream I’d ever had.

  I awoke the next morning to the obnoxious beep of my alarm clock. I smacked the snooze button, nearly knocking over the open laptop in the process. As I tossed it to the other side of the bed, I noticed I had an email in my inbox.

  The sender?

  Angela Anderson.

  My stomach tightened so much I almost had abs as I immediately clicked open. I was still in that surreal in-between place your mind tends to hover in after you’ve just woken up from an intense dream, so a part of me wasn’t even sure I was reading correctly as I opened the message and began.

  Thank you for your kindness, Marley. I know you’re going through a lot as well. I wish I had words of wisdom but I do not. I wish this whole thing hadn’t turned so dramatic but such is life, I guess. I hope that doesn’t come across as flippant as I fear it does. All the grief books I read say that remembering this is a part of life and is the only way to get through it but I’m not so sure how anyone can ever fully believe that. Know that I loved my son—no matter what you might believe, I really did. And I can’t speak for my husband, but as the weeks have gone by, I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of appreciation for whatever joy you brought to Christopher’s life.

  Best wishes. Angela

  It was the most words she’d ever offered me, in person or writing, and I didn’t know what to do with them.

  I reread the message a few times to make sure it wasn’t an automatic response. I couldn’t believe she would write me back, and with such humility as well. Was she acknowledging that she believed me? Was she acknowledging the error of her ways? Was she realizing that all of this could have been stopped with unconditional love? I couldn’t answer any of these things. And I was already late for school.

  The school day was as boring as the one before. The month-long change of pace had long since disintegrated back into the monotony of reality. People still looked at me differently; I was still the guy with the dead boyfriend who had been on the news, but a sense of normalcy had even developed around that. That had become my high school label: The Tragedy Kid. And while it wouldn’t have been my first choice, it was strangely and pathetically comforting to have a personal descriptive among my peers.

  The email from Christopher’s mom didn’t leave my mind for a second. I kept rereading it on my phone and searching for hidden meanings buried within the words. Was she openly acknowledging who Christopher was? Did Reverend Jim feel the same? Did she actually understand how much I loved Christopher? And what would I do with this new piece of the puzzle? I knew that Harrison would have the email circulating to every possible media outlet by lunch, the perfectly damning evidence that everything Reverend Jim and Angela had said in the past few weeks was a total sham. And perhaps Harrison had rubbed off on me a bit, because as I sat in the back of American History class I imagined that exact scenario playing out. For just those few moments I sat and allowed myself to hate Christopher’s parents with all the fury that I’d been pushing down since that night when everything had happened. I allowed myself to despise their very beings and allowed myself to take pleasure in imagining their demise.

  “Marley?” Mr. Lester called out to me across the classroom, snapping me out of my spiraling daydream.

  “Sorry. What?” I asked, attempting to sound as much like someone who had been paying attention as possible. Everyone in class was staring at me, awaiting the answer to a question I hadn’t heard being asked.

  “Marley, let’s try keeping our eyes open and our minds alert during class. Okay?”

  I nodded, stared down at my textbook, and pretended to listen for the rest of the class.

  THE NEXT EVENING WAS OPENING night of Into the Woods. The show’s running time was just under four hours but felt like at least seven. Audrey had done everything she could to steal every scene she appeared in, which made her come across as either a psychopath or promising character actress. I’m not entirely sure where the distinct line of difference lies.

  “Darling!” she bellowed from across the stage, running over to embrace me and take the flowers I’d brought for her. “You came!”

  “Of course I did,” I said. She knew just as well as I did that if I hadn’t come she would’ve tracked me down and murdered me, but I let her pretend to be surprised because that’s what friends do.

  “I really felt like I captured the inner human of Cinderella’s Stepmother. Don’t you?” she asked, baiting me to launch into a solid three-minute monologue of praise, which she stood savoring every word of.

  “Can I ask you for a favor?” I said after she’d thanked me for my kind words like I was a random fan on the street. “Would you want to sleep over tonight? I really want to have a night like the old days, and by old days I mean three months ago, before all of this happened. I guess I just need to feel normal for one night. Does that make sense?”

  Audrey smiled coyly.

  “I’m just honored to be your form of normal.”

  I laughed for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long, and it felt good.

  Mom and Dad never cared if Audrey slept over because she’d done so since we were old enough for sleepovers. Usually our sleepovers consisted of watching a movie and eating whatever food we had in the house until we passed out. This evening was no exception. The movie was Valley of the Dolls, which we’d both watched a million times together and separately but it still always managed to deliver. If you’ve never seen it, it’s basically about a great actress falling apart and taking a lot of drugs in the sixties. Minus the sixties and the great actress part, it’s sort of like a biopic on Lindsay Lohan.

  It was the perfect evening. No one was treading carefully around me like I was made out of highly emotional and breakable porcelain, no one was whispering about how impressed they were at my bravery, and I was just another kid at another sleepover watching a movie with his best friend. It was surprising to see just much I’d missed the boringness of my life. I had considered showing Audrey the email exchange with Christopher’s mom but decided that tonight would be just for comfort.

  We were onto our third bowl of frozen grapes and our second bag of the candy Audrey had stolen from backstage. In other words, we were in a perfectly lucid food coma.

  “I’m getting water,” I said, standing up for the first time since we’d started the movie. My foot was asleep and my stomach felt like it had been hit by a bus full of snacks. “Want some?”

  “Yes, please!” Audrey said, her mouth full of M&M’s.

  Mom and Dad had been asleep since we got home and the house was quiet. It was nice not to have Harrison and Alex working all night from the kitchen table. It was nice to walk into our kitchen and feel like life was almost like it had been before all of this happened. It was nice to just be filling a pitcher with water and taking two glasses back to my room.

  Audrey was sitting up on the bed reading something when I came in. And the second I realized what it was, I almost dropped the pitcher.

  “Audrey,” I said, as if I were stopping her from walking into traffic.

  “Marley. What is going on?” she asked with quiet dread. “This is the letter Christopher’s aunt gave you that day we went to her house, isn’t it?”

  I had kept the letter under a book on my nightstand since the day I’d gotten it so that I could look at it before bed: his handwriting
, his words meant just for me, a part of him I was keeping alive.

  “You need to tell me what’s actually going on right now,” Audrey demanded.

  I was caught, and what’s odd was that I had this immense sense of relief. Like a fugitive on the run who reaches the edge of a cliff with the cops behind him.

  “Okay,” I began, and told her the entire story. From the letter she was holding to the night I picked him up to us going to the water tower to the you-know-what to the fall and how I’d handled it in the moments after. I kept going through everything, all the way to my emailing with Christopher’s mom the night before. The words poured out of me. It was the first time I’d said the entire story out loud, and with each word I felt a little lighter. The weight of this secret getting lighter and lighter. She sat there listening with a blank face, and I dreaded getting to the end of the story and having to hear her response.

  “And it’s wrong. I lied. I am a liar who somehow became a hero, but I didn’t mean for it to go like that. I just wanted to teach his parents a lesson, and make his death mean something. Or else he was just another dead kid whose story no one would ever know.”

  “I see,” she finally said after just sitting there staring down at Christopher’s letter for a while.

  “I’m a terrible person, aren’t I?” I asked. I was already pretty sure I knew the answer.

  Audrey had been by my side through many terrible mistakes and bad decisions. The time I cheated on my calculus final sophomore year. The time I stole a bottle of Coke Zero from a gas station just to see if I could. The time I lied to my parents and skipped school just to go watch the last Hunger Games movie in the theater three times in a row. But those were normal mistakes and lies; these were not claiming someone committed suicide.

  “You have to tell the truth, Marley,” Audrey said carefully, all her characteristic pizzazz disappearing from sight. “Then you have to apologize.”

  “But if I tell the truth and apologize, I make his father look right,” I cried. “Christopher will be reinvented into their version of the story and no one will know how special he was. What if I send the email from his mom to Harrison—he can get it out there and show the world that Christopher’s parents are lying, that they knew he was gay, and then they won’t be able to erase how hard he fought for their acceptance. He won’t just disappear and never come back—”

  “He’s dead, Marley. He’s not coming back,” she snapped, silencing me. “You can’t reinvent your version of the story either. He’s dead and, yes, his parents were awful to him, and, no, they shouldn’t have put him through all those conversion treatments, but he didn’t kill himself.” Audrey was calm and rational, a genuine first for her. And she was making a good point that I so desperately didn’t want to hear.

  “But he wanted to make a difference. He wanted to fight for kids going through what he went through,” I choked through tears streaming down my face. My words sounded more like an apology to the universe than anything else. “And now he is. Right?”

  I hoped so badly to be correct but I knew in my heart I was not.

  Audrey took my hand.

  “We have to fight fair, Marley. Or what’s the point in fighting at all?”

  AUDREY AND I DECIDED THE best way to deal with this would be to come clean at the awards ceremony of the LGBTQ Society of America. It would be the one place I could actually explain what I’d done in full and uninterrupted. My parents had decided to drive up to New York, so Audrey could tag along. The whole ride there had existed in that same awkward silence that has shrouded us in the days since Christopher’s death. The trip almost felt like a second funeral, but one I’d be allowed to attend. But it wasn’t clear whose funeral it was: Christopher’s or mine.

  So here I am, at the spot in our story where then merges with now. The moment we’ve all been waiting for, ready to fix my very, very bad thing.

  “Darling,” Audrey says, coming into my dressing room. “Isn’t this an amusing turning of the tables?”

  She means the dressing room. It’s endearing to watch her attempt to act unimpressed by the showbiz excitement of it all. She’s militant in her attitude that we’re here to clean up my mess.

  “Are you feeling ready?”

  I shrug. “As ready as I can be, I guess.”

  There’s a knock on the door before Harrison comes in.

  “The stage manager just told me this is the five-minute warning. How’re you feeling?” he asks. I feel bad for Harrison, since I’m about to ruin everything he’s built around me. Hopefully the bigger picture—all those other teens for whom suicide was not a lie—won’t be ruined too. Because that truth is much, much bigger than me. Or Christopher. Or anyone else.

  “I’m feeling ready to get it over with.”

  I consider breaking the news to Harrison about what I’m going to say out there. I haven’t told my parents either. (They’re safely situated in the audience, at a table with Lisa Ling, Ariana Grande’s gay brother, and Megyn Kelly.) But seeing Harrison’s big proud smile, knowing what he’s been through, knowing how his fixing of this situation is more about the fixing of his own past … I can’t do it. I can’t tell him. Yet another cowardly move in this story of a coward.

  “Let’s get you out there.”

  The walk to the stage is dark, narrow, and intimidating. I can feel the pulse of the hundreds of people awaiting me. I can hear the emcee, a drag queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race, introducing me. I can feel the audience adjusting their bodies and minds in their seats to listen to something heartbreaking and moving. I can feel the tone of the evening changing all around me. The expectation of something meaningful to make everyone feel good about themselves. I can feel my gut tightening with the realization that this is really and truly about to happen.

  They call my name, and as I walk across the stage, people applaud. The drag queen gives me as big a hug as her enormous gown would allow.

  Then I step up to the podium.

  “Good evening,” I say into the microphone, one of those skinny bendable ones that looks like a black snake wearing a tiny winter hat. “Thank you so much for tonight’s award.”

  I pick up the silver plaque, meant for an office wall of accomplishments. It’s sweaty and glistening in my hand, catching the pink stage lights above me and mirroring them into my eyes. As I blink the blindness away, the audience is dead silent. They simply sit, waiting for the victim to regale them with his strength. I direct my attention back to the teleprompter screens on either side of me. I scan the words scripted for me to say next: The past three months have been such a roller coaster. I silently fume with resentment at this ridiculous saying—the past three months have not been a roller coaster, because a roller coaster is an amusement park ride that has a beginning, middle, and end, and only lasts for about two minutes. Everyone knows that. The phrase is meant to softly describe the ever-changing insanity of life but only serves to highlight its discomfort and frequent agony.

  “The past three months have been such a … whirlwind.” This is the first thing I come up with, and it feels right. I continue to read the words broadcast on the prompter. “But in the midst of all that, the support of the LGBTQ community has been an endlessly powerful inspiration and comfort. As most of you know, I am accepting this award tonight after the loss of my boyfriend, Christopher Anderson.” The next phrase scrolls up on the screen: who killed himself due to the isolation he felt from his homophobic parents. But my throat tightens. I look to my right, into the wings, and see Audrey standing by the stage manager’s podium, all her attention focused on me, her eyes holding me up, pushing me forward, and willing me to do the right thing. I look to the other side of the stage and see Harrison, his arms crossed and face stern with concentration.

  “I need to tell you the truth. Because I haven’t yet,” I say quickly, afraid that if I slow down, I might chicken out.

  I hear an audible gasp from the wings, Harrison’s panic reverberating off him all the way to me onstage. I can fee
l it but I keep going.

  “This award says the word hero on it and I can’t stand here, holding it, pretending that I deserve it, because I don’t. Christopher did. With all he went through and put up with from his parents, he was a hero. But I am not.”

  I glance over to Harrison, who is looking a little less panicked and more relieved.

  “The truth is way more complicated than I or Christopher’s parents or anyone has been able to explain. Because after what happened that night, everyone had a different version of the story they wanted to tell. People wanted to latch on to the story and use it and discuss it and analyze it until they could come up with the moral of this terribly tragic story. But sometimes the moral of a story isn’t cut-and-dried.”

  I can feel the Facebook comments and the tweets beginning, every stranger on the Internet who felt a stake in my life as of a few weeks ago asking what the hell is going on.

  “Christopher didn’t kill himself. He wrote a suicide note, but his intention wasn’t to die—it was to run away.” I nervously bite a piece of chapped skin off my bottom lip; it stings and feels kind of good all at once. “Here’s what’s true: Christopher’s parents did send him to conversion therapy retreats and pray-the-gay-away camps. Christopher’s parents did know that their son was gay and wanted, more than anything perhaps, to fix this before people could catch on. They also knew about me. I was not some ‘random obsessed kid from school,’ as Reverend Jim tried to have people believe. I was Christopher’s boyfriend, even if for just a short time. And I loved him.”

  The cast of Wicked has gathered together in the wings to watch my speech; it’s a dreamlike sensation to feel the glittery green shadow of Oz’s most talented citizens watching as I give a speech that could potentially destroy my life.