by Adam Silvera
The elevator arrives but we don’t get on. “I just don’t think I’m that different from him.”
“You are, my son, you are. You are kind and too good for the bad you’ve lived through. If you’re sure, if you promise me that in this moment, you’ll forgive me for signing off on your procedure, I’ll do it.”
I hug her, promising over and over that this is what I want, what I need, that there would never be any reason to forgive her.
“Hold on,” she says. Here we go. “I’ll sign off on one condition. I want you to visit Kyle and his family on Saturday.”
I get to see Kyle. That’s more than enough.
9
KYLE LAKE, THE ONLY CHILD
When Kyle and Kenneth were younger—twins still so identical even I couldn’t tell them apart—they made up this game called Happy Hour. They didn’t know what “happy hour” meant in the real world, but they heard it enough from grown-ups. They would come home from school and shout, “Happy Hour!” whenever their parents asked them to settle down and do their homework. They’d be granted one hour of playtime, relax time, whatever, before having to do work and chores. Happy Hour changed as they got older, transforming into a therapeutic judgment-free hour of bitching.
I don’t even know who Kyle bitches to now.
It required a lot of back and forth, but my mom teamed up with Evangeline to make this meeting happen. Mom had to sign a permissions request and a confidentiality form, and some other papers promising never to disclose the location of the Lakes to anyone except me.
I’m not sure what the penalties are, but I guess it would just be really shitty of her to send the block flooding to 174th Street, right off the Simpson Avenue train stop. I guess their housing budget post-procedure wasn’t very high; otherwise, they would’ve escaped to the deep end of Queens, not thirty blocks and several avenues over from where they started.
When I get to their apartment building, right beside a video rental store with a closing sign, I feel shaky. I press the intercom.
“Who is it?” Mrs. Lake asks.
“Aaron,” I say.
They buzz me in without a word. I walk straight to apartment 1E and knock twice. Both Mrs. and Mr. Lake—their first names lost on me—look taken aback when they open the door; it’s the wounds on my face, no doubt. I’m surprised at how happy I am to see them considering how little time I’ve wondered about them. But now I remember the sleepovers where Mrs. Lake would play video games with us, and I remember the times Mr. Lake would accompany us on school trips to the Bronx Zoo, always sneaking us candy. I hug them both at once.
They welcome me inside. It hurts to see an apartment so different from the one I saw my friends grow up in: the walls are beige, not rust orange; the windows have bars, like a prison cell; the TV in the living room is gigantic, not the flat screen Mr. Lake won from a sweepstakes last year. The game consoles are all still here, but all of Kenneth’s trivia and soccer games aren’t. The cat-shaped clock Kyle gave Kenneth for their tenth birthday isn’t hanging in the living room like it was in the last apartment. It really is like Kenneth never existed.
“You want some iced tea?” Mr. Lake offers.
“Just water, please.” Iced tea brings back another memory: of Saturday mornings over at the old Lake apartment. We had cereal in bowls of iced tea because we all don’t like milk.
She brings me the water and they sit across from me.
“How are you both doing?” I ask.
“Do you want the truth?” Mr. Lake replies.
I nod, knowing I’m about to regret it.
“Hurts every day,” Mrs. Lake chimes in. “There’s no forgetting. You see Kyle, and you expect big brother Kenneth to be tailing after him. There are still mornings where I almost ask Kyle to wake his brother up. It doesn’t matter that it’s been ten months or that we’re in a new home. I can never believe I lost one of my boys.”
Mr. Lake stays quiet. He used to make jokes about how Kyle isn’t actually his own person, just an alternate-universe version of Kenneth-gone-wrong.
“I miss when Kenneth would get rage-y whenever someone called him Kenny,” I say. As soon as the words come out, I wish I could take it back. It’s not like I was invited to share a story, but I can’t stop. All at once, I’m spilling out more and more things about Kenneth, like when he faked his eye exam in order to get glasses so people could tell him and Kyle apart. And when they dressed up as storm troopers for Halloween. And that time we were with Brendan in the band room while he rolled up a blunt, and Kenneth discovered he could play clarinet—which I hope to God still exists somewhere in this fake home and isn’t in the hands of some stranger. The Lakes are crying by the time I have to take a breath.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be . . . Aaron, thank you,” Mr. Lake says, staring into my glass of water he’s still holding. “We never get to talk about our son anymore. It’s . . . energizing to hear someone remember him so fondly. Makes me feel less crazy, like I didn’t just make up this second son.”
“How do you do it? How do you not find yourself banging down Leteo’s doors to give you the same procedure Kyle got?”
“We couldn’t dishonor his existence like that,” Mrs. Lake says. “Parents have done it and it breaks my heart tenfold. You move on, you have to—but you don’t write someone out.”
Mr. Lake looks at the timer on the microwave. “Kyle should be getting home soon, Clara. We should fill Aaron in on everything.”
They tell me the story of why Kyle thinks they moved. He had a history of fights with Me-Crazy—no love lost for that psycho when the Lakes moved away—starting from slaps to the back of the head on the school bus to being pushed into lockers and eventually straight-up fistfights. Whoever served as the architect for Kyle’s blueprint—not Evangeline, I learned—tapped into very real emotions to create a very believable narrative that would never send Kyle back to our block. He just accepts his new life as a barber’s apprentice, and boyfriend to some girl Mrs. Lake hopes is around forever.
The intercom buzzes.
“Always forgetting his keys,” Mrs. Lake says. “Why don’t you go wait in his room? We’ll send him in to you.”
I head to his room and Mr. Lake issues out one more obvious and painful reminder: “Aaron? No Kenneth . . .”
I nod, even though he can’t see me. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s the smell of week-old socks and underwear. Kenneth wasn’t exactly a laundry fan either, the two of them putting it off until Mrs. Lake gave in and did it herself. But everything else is different, like the queen-sized bed Kyle now has—bunk beds gone—and the memorabilia from times I wasn’t around for.
The door opens. Kyle, an oblivious “only child,” walks into his room and laughs at me. “Your face is busted, Aaron.”
There’s no hug or fist-bump or how-have-you-been moment. We just are, like we were never separated at all.
“Me-Crazy got me, too,” I say, careful with my words. I’m crossing a field of mines. I want to tell Kyle that Me-Crazy is in jail, but maybe he’ll think the block is safe for visits. God knows what would happen if someone, just to be a dick, straight up told him he went through Leteo and unstitched his shielded memories. “I see why you bounced.”
Kyle leans against his wall, a map thumbtacked to the space above him. “I couldn’t keep risking it. Good thing our lease was up anyway so we could get a fresh start. Shittier neighborhood, but some good people here.”
“I hear you got a girlfriend,” I say, picking up a handball from his bedside drawer. I toss it to him. “Who locked you down?”
We play catch as he tells me all about Tina, a Chinese American girl he met when she brought her little brother into the barbershop. Kyle was giving a Caesar cut and almost messed up. His mentor thought he was distracted because of the work, but it was all because of Tina. I try to pretend
I’m interested, but find myself almost tuning out until he asks: “How’s Genevieve?”
“We broke up.” I remember what Thomas told me when he broke up with Sara. “We just weren’t really right for each other anymore.”
“Damn, man. Any new prospects yet?”
“Nope,” I lie.
I want to come out to Kyle, but he’ll have no idea what I’m talking about if I ask him to set the clock for a judgment-free Happy Hour. He’s changed—not matured, but he’s been changed, obviously. Maybe this new Kyle will be cool with Side A. Maybe it’ll make him uncomfortable. I used to know the person in front of me and I’m tempted to bring him back, to unwind him, since Kenneth’s death is his fault and he should have to live with that. He should know about how Kenneth could walk on his hands, how Kenneth always ate junk food and never had a single cavity, how Kenneth casually played ding-dong-ditch on his neighbors to get a rise out of us.
He should know Kenneth, his twin brother, existed. But it’s not my decision to make.
I hang around for a little while longer until it’s time for him to shower and meet up with Tina. He puts his girl first now, which I like. I promise to visit him again sometime soon, and he tells me to tell everyone on the block he says what’s up. I hug Mrs. and Mr. Lake again, whose faces silently plead: Don’t forget.
10
LETEO: TAKE TWO
It’s the day of my procedure and I’m standing on the corner, outside the Leteo Institute.
Memories: some can be sucker punching, others carry you forward; some stay with you forever, others you forget on your own. You can’t really know which ones you’ll survive if you don’t stay on the battlefield, bad times shooting at you like bullets. But if you’re lucky, you’ll have plenty of good times to shield you.
Being gay wasn’t, and isn’t, the problem. It only seemed that way because of everything that branched out from it—my father taking his life, Collin abandoning me, getting jumped on the train, and all the uncertainties ahead. The problem was that I didn’t know any better because I forgot my life. And now I know I can’t forget.
It won’t be an easy life, but I’ll soldier through. Thomas didn’t even know he was helping me with this—hell, I didn’t even know I would become myself again in need of this guidance. The boy with no direction taught me something unforgettable: happiness comes again if you let it.
I close my eyes and count to sixty, zoning everything out like Thomas taught me to do. I reopen my eyes, turn my back on Leteo, and walk home. I owe my mom and brother an apology.
11
MY UNHAPPY BIRTHDAY
Ever since my first birthday, my mom has written me a letter recording my greatest hits of each year. She leaves the letters in my baby album. She even attaches newspaper clippings so I know what was current.
I caught up on all of them on my twelfth birthday. I wasn’t surprised that the first letter was pretty uneventful, aside from me spitting up on my mother’s graduation gown as she accepted her diploma. Before my second birthday, I walked for the first time when my father came home after being gone for a week—which I learned later was because he got kicked out after assaulting my mom in the street. In the fifth letter, I learned I was once obsessed with collecting key chains. A drawing paper clipped to the eighth letter showed me holding my mom’s hand.
These letters are a map of my life. They bring into focus years that are hazy to me. It hurts to admit it, but there were things in those letters that feel like Mom was taking a shot at me. Why did she write down that I was obsessed with singing songs from girl pop stars? Or how when she took Eric and me shopping for toys at CVS, I didn’t let him bully me into buying a blue Power Ranger because I wanted to play with a Jean Grey action figure? I feel like it was her coded way of saying, “This is when I knew about you.”
I think liking Brendan was the first time I knew. Sure, singing girl songs was a tip-off too, I guess, but that’s when it all clicked that maybe I wasn’t who everyone would like me to be. It’s funny the way that ran full circle. A couple years ago, I threw away old magazines my mother left sitting in the bathroom, but not before I ripped out pages of hot cologne models and stashed all of them inside an old binder for whenever I had urges. But I got rid of all that before the procedure.
I haven’t gotten around to apologizing to Eric or my mom yet, but I will. They were relieved enough the other night when I said I didn’t want the procedure anymore. A cloud over our tiny home had lifted. I went straight to bed.
So now I’m acting like this Leteo episode never happened. Eric has agreed to play Avengers vs. Street Fighters with me. When Mom gave me the game this morning, I didn’t comment on the scratches on the disc. I don’t deserve a mom who works too many hours a week so she can afford our outrageous rent, keep food on the table, and even make sure she has something to give her boys on their birthdays. I lose to Eric because I chose Captain America instead of Black Widow, not trying to draw attention to my growing desire to tell him Side A and be done with it.
Before I leave, I go into Mom’s room to thank her again. There are some bills fanned out next to her and on her lap is my baby album. We have a birthday ritual where we look through it together, but maybe she realized the last thing I want to do is reflect on the old days. I see a photo of myself as a five-year-old holding a figurine of Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
“First love, right?”
Mom strokes the picture as if she can twirl my old curls. “You carried her everywhere.”
“I remember telling everyone she was my girlfriend.” I remember believing it too.
“Until you broke up with her for the pink Power Ranger.” Mom half smiles. “Tale as old as time.”
She flips through the album and this reel of my life is lost to me. There are pictures of me on my father’s shoulders when he was still Dad; one of me taking a bath with Eric when we were kids; another one where I’m wrapped in a towel, lying across his lap. Another, another, another, another, and in all these photos is something hard to find now: smiles. “I’m going to go run out for a bit.” She looks up at my face and I know she’s studying my bruises, yellowed but almost healed. Sometimes I look out the window to try and catch Brendan chilling, thinking maybe I can run downstairs and snuff him. “I’ll be fine.”
“How’s Genevieve?”
“Happy,” I lie, and it’s a lie because you can’t be happy with someone who can’t love you back.
“Are you meeting up with her today?”
“Nope,” I say. She hasn’t even called or texted me.
“Going to go see Thomas?”
That one stabs me hard. I haven’t heard from him either. “I’m linking up with Collin.”
She holds my hand and nods. “Okay, my son. Go have fun. Be safe.” She dismisses me but doesn’t release her grip on me, not for a while, and when she does, she holds on to the baby book the way someone would hold on to the edge of a cliff, feet dangling.
I think Collin has legit forgotten it’s my birthday. But maybe it’s because he’s been really stressed lately. Nicole is demanding more attention from him since he’s been spending his free time with me behind her back. His other complaints are small, like how she’s craving ice cubes. The crunching bothers him.
Screw all his bitching because it’s his fault she’s pregnant—okay, our fault for being cowards—but he’s 100 percent to blame for letting her fall in love with him. I never really understood why he “liked” Nicole, and you can argue that I’m looking at her with the wrong lenses, but I know she’s the type of thoughtful girl who will wish you happy birthday every hour of the day and get you presents you never realized you wanted. I can’t pretend Collin is the only guilty one—I’m not an asshole, too. I let Genevieve fall in love with me. But that means Thomas is also an asshole because he let me fall . . . Yeah, he definitely let me fall and couldn’t bother to pick me up.
&nbs
p; But I have Collin. I never admitted loving him to his face, not even to fill these holes of loneliness. When he tells me to follow him, I’m expecting a surprise, but instead we end up at our spot behind the fence. We have sex quickly, and he heads off to work without wishing me a happy birthday, just a pat on the back after he pulled up his pants from around his ankles.
I go the long route so I can walk past Thomas’s building in the hopes of seeing him outside or staring out of his window. Yeah, there’s the risk of seeing him holding hands with Genevieve as they go upstairs and probably have sex so he can feel straight. But I’ve been through that pain before with Collin, and I just want to see him for at least a moment.
I spot Skinny-Dave across the street and when he sees me, he stays underneath the traffic light even though it’s signaling for him to cross. He knows better now that Me-Crazy isn’t around.
Maintenance has finally boarded the lobby door with plywood. I check the mail. There are two birthday cards from my eighty-year-old aunt with dementia; I’m not as surprised that she sent two cards as I am that she remembered my birthday at all. I walk down to the elevator and—just like he surprised me the day Me-Crazy almost killed me—Thomas is there.
He’s leaning against the wall and I want to smile, but I don’t because he isn’t.
“I didn’t get the procedure,” I tell him.
He looks at me for a second. The circles under his eyes are darker than when I last saw him at Good Food’s. He opens the staircase door and rolls out a dark blue mountain bike. It’s either a new bike or something he waxed and fixed up until it looked new. I’m not sure which it is because he’s capable of both. He presses down on the kickstand and walks over to me. I’m scared he’s going to walk past without saying anything but instead he hugs me hard, and I hug him back—also hard because there’s something that feels very final about this hug.