Lonely Hearts

by Heidi Cullinan

  “Do you have a time you need me to work around?”

  Baz didn’t. And on Monday morning Liz called to tell him she was picking him up at three and they were going that very day.

  He was weirdly nervous about it, so he puttered around the house, looking for something to occupy himself. He thought about seducing Elijah, but his boyfriend was holed up in the corner of the practice room, writing up a storm. Over the weekend Mina had helped him upload a few shorts to online vendors, which had sent Elijah into something of a nervous tailspin. He alternated between chain-smoking out back and huddled over his laptop with Aaron’s noise-canceling headphones, endlessly scrolling online sale sites. When asked why he did this, Elijah would say, with excessive consonants and a bulging vein in his forehead, Amazon rank meant nothing, nobody knew what it meant and there was no point in paying attention to it. Yet he refreshed the Gay Erotica page every five minutes, and when Giles unhooked the router to help Brian set up some fancy new hub, Elijah bit their heads off.

  Monday he was in a quieter phase, still checking his stats obsessively but with a new document open on the side. Brian had soothed the savage beast by introducing him to a program called Scrivener which apparently did magical book things. At first Elijah complained it was too complicated and he’d stick to MS Word, but Brian had brushed past the bristles and forced Elijah through a few tutorials, and now Elijah looked as if he wanted to weep with joy. He’d murmured something about this being exactly what his fantasy novel needed, then disappeared inside his now-extensive Joe Hisaishi soundtrack collection.

  Unwilling to disturb the fragile peace, Baz stayed away.

  The rest of the house bustled now—everyone was moved in but Sid, who was staying home to help until just before school started at the end of August. Jilly had a thing for making cookies, and Giles had a thing for eating them. Baz had learned to amuse himself by sitting in the kitchen to watch his housemates weave in and out. Jilly and Mina were thick as thieves, moving like a unit through household chores and huddling together to speak in half-finished sentences as they mocked out possible Salvo songs for the fall. When Giles and Aaron were around, the girls’ dynamic changed. They included the boys, but the color of their tone subtly altered. Sometimes, Baz noted, Aaron and Giles got a bit too self-involved and missed cues from their female housemates.

  It wasn’t anything, though, on how things shifted when Brian was in the room, or rather, how Brian behaved when Mina and Jilly were present. He’d joke with Aaron or Giles, and after their sandwich bonding he was completely easy with Baz, but put one set of XX chromosomes in the room with him, and he turned into a mouse. He wasn’t so bad with Mina, but if Jilly came into his space, he either left or became absorbed in something so deeply he might as well have been invisible. Baz didn’t think it was conscious—something about girl made Brian lose his shit and run. Something about girl Jilly had him melting down.

  Baz still felt slightly outside the others, and he hoped to hell the sensation eased when Sid returned. For now, however, he had his current status quo and his therapy date with Liz.

  The hydrotherapy pool was at Regions Hospital in Saint Paul. Liz parked in the ramp, and they walked together over the crosswalk to get to the therapy unit, where they segregated into their respective locker rooms. Baz undressed and climbed into his swim trunks without excitement, hesitating over donning a T-shirt to hide the worst of his scars. The pool would be full of little old ladies who would want to chat him up, and he wasn’t in the mood to navigate around their queries. Remembering his mother’s impending public-relations nightmare, he decided he might as well keep practicing and left the shirt in his bag.

  He rinsed off in the shower in an effort to keep some of the pool’s chlorine from seeping into his skin. When he re-emerged, he was surprised to see a man only about a decade or so older than him at a locker beside his own.

  The man met Baz’s gaze and smiled. “Hey.”

  The gaze lingered a moment, taking in Baz’s glasses, his scars, but also his damp abs and package outlined by wet trunks. The cruising ended there, but it had happened.

  “Hey.” Baz returned the favor, and he took his time. The guy wasn’t sculpted, but he clearly worked out, and he wasn’t difficult to look at. Bulky, but in a way Baz appreciated. Dark hair, roguish face, eyes promising a good time Baz would have considered teasing out, pre-Elijah. The man came with a gold wedding band on his left ring finger, though.

  Also a pretty nasty scar on his neck. An old one, but it hinted at the kind of fuckery requiring one to pay occasional visits to a warm water therapy pool.

  The man tossed his towel over his shoulder and turned to stick out a hand. “Ed Maurer. You a new patient?”

  Baz enjoyed the firm handshake and added a brief daddy fantasy. “Baz Acker. No, just a bad one. Tired of fighting my hip and shoulder.”

  Ed nodded and rubbed his neck with a grimace. “Yeah, I’ve tried skipping, and I’m always sorry. Are you a student at the U of M?”

  “Saint Timothy.” Baz snagged his towel and walked with Ed down the tiled hall to the pool entrance.

  “The one to the east, right? What’s your major?”

  Baz waved vaguely at the air in front of him. “College.”

  Ed laughed. “I was business management, but I wasn’t terribly good at it. Can’t work full-time anymore anyway.”

  Baz glanced at Ed’s neck. “What happened?”

  “Semi-pro football. Lucky I didn’t die or end up paralyzed for life. Weird thing is, I’m better the more I move, so long as it’s careful movement. It’s a desk that’ll kill me.” He nodded at Baz’s patchwork chest. “You look like you have a better story than a wide receiver’s cleat to the shoulder.”

  “I’m a combo platter. Wrong end of a few assholes with baseball bats several years ago, lunatic religious fanatic with a gun this past March.”

  Ed’s eyes were wide, and he blinked. “Shit—you’re that kid. I read about you online. Jesus. I’m so sorry. The story made me ill. Please tell me the asshole is in jail.”

  Gallows humor took over. Baz raised an eyebrow. “Which one?”

  “Christ. You old enough for me to buy you a drink after the pool?” When Baz’s gaze shifted to Ed’s ring, the man laughed and held up his hands. “Not that kind of drink. I got plenty of man at home, no offense.”

  They were in the pool area now. Liz was already in the water with her therapist, chatting amiably. Baz waded in via the stairs, pleased Ed followed. It would be nice to have a Y-chromosome to talk to. “I could probably work you in for a drink date, but I need to talk with my ride.” He nodded to Liz.

  “You do that. If not today, I’ll catch you next time.”

  They kept pace with each other as they walked laps in the shallow end. Ed, it turned out, was married to some ballet dancer who used to be famous but now taught dance to underprivileged kids in the Saint Paul area. “I help him and work at the Halcyon Center part-time. Working with kids, mostly, though every now and again Laurie makes me put on a suit and shake hands with people with money.”

  “Sounds a lot better than sitting behind a desk.”

  “It is. Wish it paid better, but guess you can’t have it all.” Ed shifted the float weights he was pushing and frowned at Baz. “Is it okay to ask you about the shooting thing? I don’t want to pry.”

  “I’d rather talk about the shooting thing than the baseball-bat thing, so yeah, knock yourself out.”

  “How did it happen? I never understood from the articles. He was after his own kid, right? But you got in the way?”

  Baz shrugged and focused on moving his plastic paddles through the water. “The Princes are pretty grim people. Wanted to correct the wrongs of America through torturing their son. He outwitted them, and when they found out, they were pissed. Nobody quite saw the gun coming, though.”

  “Except you did. You jumped in front
of it.”

  Baz tried to remember the moment, but it was as hot and jumbled as it always was. “Maybe I did on some level. It felt…familiar. I’d seen that kind of rage on someone’s face before. The determination to destroy. I guess I’ve always been a bit more ready to believe in things jumping out of bushes since the…first time.”

  “Is the kid okay?”

  Baz thought about Elijah safe in the White House, huddled over his laptop, swearing at Amazon stats. “Yeah. He’s fine.”

  They switched to lighter topics. Ed told Baz about his former football career and confessed affection for Britney Spears. He apparently also had a passion for ballroom dancing, something he enjoyed doing with his husband. Baz told Ed about being in the Ambassadors, and he talked about Liz’s baked-goods charity business and how much he enjoyed working with her. “I like doing something I know is actually bringing about some good. I mean, I get delivering cookies for resale isn’t directly stopping human trafficking or anything.”

  “It counts plenty because in addition to raising awareness you’re bringing in cash. Trust me, I know firsthand how vital funding is to charitable organizations. Halcyon Center is always a breath away from closing unless we wring out all the grants and show up at every grand gala ball to beg money off the rich people. Of course, I spend the whole time calculating how much more they could have donated without the catering bill, but my husband tells me to hush and enjoy my rubber chicken.”

  “The thing is, my family has a lot of money. I don’t need to get a degree to get a job. I could make myself the spokesperson of about any cause, but I don’t know where to put my passion. I enjoy working with human trafficking because of Liz. But I don’t want to pick something at random because I’m bored. I don’t want to be that rich asshole.”

  “Having rubbed elbows with great herds of rich assholes, I’m pretty confident you’re not one. And to get it out of the way—yeah, I want to recruit you into my charity because it would suit my purposes. But the thing is, you’re right. You need to have a passion for it because volunteering can be pretty grisly work. It eats at weird corners of your soul. So my question is, what makes your blood pump? If you could develop a superpower, what evil in the world would you try to right?”

  It was the kind of question Baz had posed to himself a thousand times after his conversations with Liz, but something about the way Ed delivered it flattened the usual mental obstacles. The conversation about the shooting rang in his head, the showdown with Lejla’s lunchroom bully echoed around it, and the whole business was laced with the memory of how sometimes Baz saw Elijah out of the corner of his eye, and his boyfriend looked just like he did that night in the alley, hard and terrified and alone.

  “LGBT kids.” He clicked the edges of his plastic paddles together, letting the frustration spill out of him. “The ones who get kicked out for being gay or trans, or the ones afraid if they slip up they’ll get sent into the cold. The ones who do tricks to find a bed. The ones who get HIV and are married to the med regimen before they’re legal adults. The ones who do porn because it seems like a ticket out, not because they get off on fucking for cash. The ones who don’t leave home but need help because there’s no road map for sorting out your gender identity. Who don’t know what their rights are. The ones who need help and don’t have somebody to jump in front of the bullet for them. The ones right here in the Cities, because I know for a damn fact we’re swimming in them.”

  He felt embarrassed at how Hallmark his speech had gotten, but when he glanced at Ed, he didn’t see derision or so much as the hint of an eye roll. If anything, Ed seemed moved. A little excited too, but when he replied, his tone was casual.

  “Kid, I’m not buying you a drink. I’m getting your dinner. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Baz found he was looking forward to it. He exchanged numbers with Ed before they parted ways in the locker room after their session, in addition to setting up a few more therapy times when Ed would also be there. Baz waved his new friend goodbye, feeling not only good but hopeful as he waited for Liz to finish in the locker room.

  In the middle of a Fruit Ninja marathon, his phone rang. It was Stephan.

  “Hello, Sebastian. Everything going well, I trust?”

  “Yeah. Pretty good, actually. What’s up?”

  “Giselle asked me to give you a five-hour warning. The first announcement comes tonight.”

  Baz’s good feelings cracked and shattered quietly around him. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “There’s a great deal we’ll need you to do. We’ll also have a list of things you shouldn’t do. We’ll refresh your media training, evaluate your image. But all that comes later. For now, stand by.”

  “Okay.” Baz hated this already.

  “We’ll keep in touch,” Stephan promised. Then he was gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Right when Elijah was about to concede he’d fucked up their friendship before it began, Lewis called and invited Elijah to lunch.

  Elijah jumped at the chance. At Lewis’s suggestion, they met at a noodle bar in Campustown, and Lewis greeted Elijah with a shy hug. Despite Elijah’s protestations, he insisted on buying both their meals. “I wanted to thank you. For helping me in the cafeteria, for the clothes, but mostly for nudging Pastor Schulz in my direction.”

  Elijah had noticed right off Lewis was wearing almost entirely things he’d bought, tipping harder toward girl than any other time Elijah had seen him. “Does this mean you met with Pastor? Isn’t he great? You need to meet his wife too.”

  “I did. Pastor called me to check up after the beet incident, and somehow I ended up having dinner at his house. I’ve gone a lot, in fact.” The flush of his cheeks consumed his face and part of his neck, and the fingers twirling his noodles onto his fork trembled. “We’re…doing counseling. About Lejla. About how I am Lejla.”

  “That’s fantastic.” Elijah paused when Lewis didn’t return his smile. “Or…not?”

  Lewis hunched over the noodle bowl. “I’m nervous. I mean—I can’t transition fully yet. It’s not simple at all, and I’m not talking about people making fun of me in the cafeteria. There are all these stupid legal things, and it’s all fucked up because I can’t legally change anything until I’ve gone through a period of living as Lejla even though all my documents and things will still say I’m male. We have to change my registration forms. I’d have to get a single, or live off-campus.”

  “You’d have to?”

  “Well—I don’t know what the legal angles are exactly, but I’d need to, let’s put it that way. For me as much as anyone else. But it’s going to cost more no matter what I do. So if—” He stopped, drew a breath and continued. “When I transition, it all has to happen at once. Which means I can’t right now. Except I have to do something.”

  He hunched his shoulders. “It sounds stupid, but the living arrangements are the thing driving me the most crazy. I don’t want to live on my own, but I don’t see how a roommate I didn’t choose would work out right now. I hated having a roommate last year, but being all by myself makes me feel like my skin is crawling. Plus I can’t afford a single, even if I could get one. Except I’d rather do that and get a second job or pretty much anything than keep living as a guy, though, with no hope of ever living as who I truly am. This is what talking to Pastor cleared up—how this has hurt me. That and when you bought me all those clothes. I kept all of them. Every morning I went to war with Lejla over wearing them, battles I didn’t want to fight anyway.”

  Elijah winced. “Sorry.”

  “No. Not sorry. It’s not as if they were magical clothes making me suddenly want to live as a woman. It was someone else giving them to me. Somehow those clothes became the point where I couldn’t lie to myself anymore, couldn’t put it off any longer.” His hands shook until he closed them into fists, and his gaze was laser-fixed on his barely touched food. “I don’
t think I can be out full-time, though. Not on campus. People will be horrible. I know my rights, thanks to Pastor, and how to get help—campus escorts, and so on. But it’s going to be awful no matter what.”

  “We’ll help you.” With more than a buddy system. Elijah itched to send a text, or blurt out the offer he was dying to make about housing, but he had to check with the others first. Because holy crap, would that suck to invite Lejla to live at the White House and then find out it wasn’t possible. Except there was a space available, and if people would be willing to shift a little bit…

  Lewis glanced up with a shy smile. “I haven’t made up my mind yet for sure this is what I’m doing, and I don’t know the particulars of how it would shake out, but I know I probably will make this leap soon, because of you. Thank you. I’m sorry I was such a freak-out jerk. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was trying to sort myself out.”

  “It’s a big thing. You get to react however you need to.” Elijah twirled a forkful of noodle. “Where do your parents fit into this?”

  Lewis looked sick. “I’m telling them next weekend. Whenever I transition, I’m telling them it’s coming. Pastor and Liz are helping. We’re doing it at their house. Liz is making dinner.”

  Elijah put his fork down. “Listen—no matter what happens, I’m here. I don’t care if they disown you. I’ll help. Trust me on this. Okay?”

  “They won’t disown me. They’ll be angry, or scared, or disappointed.”

  They sat in awkward silence a few seconds until Elijah cleared his throat and nodded at the boxes for leftovers by the soda machine. “What do you say we box this up and walk instead? I’m not really hungry, and you don’t seem to be either.”

  They buttoned up their food and began the walk to campus. They lit up twin cigarettes almost before the door closed behind them.

  “I have to give this up if I start hormone-replacement therapy.” Lewis grimaced. “It won’t be for awhile no matter what, because I have to see a psychologist first. Pastor did some research. They’re likely going to say I have to do RLE—real-life experience—for at least three months. Which doesn’t seem fair. They want me to go bigger, harder, so people can make fun of me for looking like a man but dressing as a woman? Though I guess this means I get to smoke a little longer. Because once I start getting injections, cancer sticks are gone. For good. Right when I’ll be the most stressed and wanting a fix. But the risks are crazy huge to smoke and get HRT.”