“It was okay,” he lied. “Mostly just hung around. Did whatever.” His hands were trembling and he clipped them under his backpack straps, holding on as to a mountaineer’s lifeline.
“Summer?”
“Nothing. Just a trip out west. San Francisco. Mom wants to see it.”
“Cool. Yellowstone. Glacier, I think.”
“Glacier?”
“It’s a park.” Andy shook his head. “She wanted me to go to camp again. I told her no fucking way.”
“That’s bullshit.” A boy bumped him from behind as he hurried to one of the far buses. “I hope you told her you’re not a baby or whatever.”
“She doesn’t get it,” Andy said. Colin liked that he was nervous. He felt himself grow bold. If he missed this opportunity he’d never forgive himself.
“We’ll be back in a week, though,” Colin said. “Later this month? So I mean—I won’t be gone all summer, if you—if you want to. Whatever. Come over sometime. I’ll be home.”
Andy nodded, his eyes still locked on the sidewalk. “Yeah, that’d be cool. I was, uh. I was thinking about that.”
“Yeah.”
“You know how we, um…the whole thing with the gun?”
You can come over. You can knock on my window whenever. You can stay the night. You can do whatever you want. It hurt to be so lucky, to have woken up expecting more hell and to have walked right into the clearest, most crystalline heaven he could’ve asked for. His heart he imagined like a machine or a generator, some fusion core at the aft of a starship restored to full power, brilliant blue-white and with a hum that’d take them across the outer reaches of space and time. “I think about it a lot,” he whispered to Andy, and was shocked when Andy stepped in and pulled him aside.
“You know it’s a total secret, right?”
Colin nodded and tried to laugh. “Duh,” he said, but it came out as dhhh, as though he’d been slapped on the back.
“I was wondering,” Andy was saying. His hands were white now and his lip was trembling. He kept glancing around him. Colin’s back was to the crowd and he imagined all the other kids going off to live their stupid, boring lives, while Colin and his boyfriend—would he let him say it?—spent the entire summer in love. “I’m just gonna say it,” and he laughed. “I can’t believe it but I’m gonna say it.” He leaned in. “Do you think if—if I came over, you could…”
“Suck your dick?”
It was like reciting a spell: his body switched over to its too-familiar mode, and he felt pinched and confined in his underwear. He knew if Andy had asked, right there, he would trade everything for it and drop down in front of everybody.
But the look on Andy’s face wasn’t what he expected. How his eyes were fixed on his, how they didn’t blink—Colin thought he saw sadness. Then he laughed, Andy, loud enough for everyone to hear. He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and put it to his ear. “Did you guys get that? I fucking told you!” From across the sidewalk Colin heard his former friends collapse into laughter, cycling through all the slurs, fag queer homo pussyboy cocksucker fag faggot fag, they said them all. Colin knew enough to leave before he started crying. “Hey man, I’m sorry,” Andy called after him. “They put me up to it. I couldn’t resist. Hey—come on, dude.”
Being hated would’ve been so much easier. He pushed through the crowd and stepped back into the school, its air stale and musty after the promise of never having to set foot in it again. He disappeared into the nearest restroom and cried until the buses were gone, until the footsteps of teachers and administrators had diminished, until the humming from the air vents stopped and the room went still. He could poison himself in the science wing. He could wander out to the freeway and jump off the overpass. Like a rat or some other vermin, he could drown himself in the toilet, leaving his body for the janitor to mop up with the rest of the scum and the slime. He wondered if you could die from ink poisoning and shucked his backpack to the floor to look for a pen, and that’s when he found the note that’d been slapped there, when that boy collided with him: I blow like a pro! Will deep-throat! with a phone number. His actual phone number. He screamed out loud and shredded the note, beating fistfuls of it against his skull. He hammered the stall door with his feet until it broke off its hinges and fell against the concrete floor. He was trembling when he heard the squeak of the outer door, the clack of dress shoes echoing off the walls. “Colin,” he heard, before anyone could’ve seen him, before anyone could’ve known.
“Let’s get you home,” Victor said, and collected him from the broken stall.
The parking lot was emptier than it’d ever been. Victor held Colin close, his arm around his shoulder as they walked out in the open. He couldn’t stop crying. Even in Victor’s car he sat with his face in his hands. “No one knows why we cry,” Victor was saying, and went on about the release of toxins, what people once called humors. He described the lacrimal ducts as though they were trees in the background of a painting. Ferrying grief to where all can see. “Of course,” Victor said, and Colin felt a hand on the back of his neck, “from a biological standpoint, it doesn’t always matter.” That hand moved in a circle and it felt too good to send it away. “Poor Colin,” Victor said, as though of a bum found frozen in some alley. “You break my heart.”
They were taking all the old streets, even passing by that old park. Colin glanced down the road into the circle of trees that lined the lot. He’d managed to stop crying, and in the afternoon light he could see the shadows of playground equipment, the shadows of neighborhood children as they leapt here and there like squirrels. Victor didn’t even slow down, one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift. His fingers were still. He wasn’t whispering along to the radio. “How did you know it was me?” Colin asked, his voice froggy from crying.
Victor turned to look at him. For once he wasn’t smiling. “Colin,” he said, and Colin turned away, already wishing for home. “Colin, look at me.” He couldn’t meet Victor’s eyes and only stared at his neck, the low cut of his shirt revealing a necklace that, for all Colin knew, he’d worn from the beginning: a scorpion entombed in glass, pincers and tail poised in permanent attack. “There’s something you should know.” Victor took a turn Colin wasn’t expecting. This wasn’t a park or a road through a suburban wood. SELF SERVE, said a sign above a drive-through cube, and they were alone in the old car wash no one ever seemed to use.
“The car dirty?” Colin said. He fake-laughed at his own joke. “I’m all out of quarters.”
Victor shut off the car. Straight ahead was the windowless back wall of an apartment building, behind them a tall trash bin for the restaurant next door. “I want you to be honest with me. Can you do that?”
“I guess so.”
“Look up at me. Look me in the eye.”
“Um, okay,” he said, but his sarcasm was broken. He was still staring at the necklace when Victor reached forward and put a finger under his chin, lifting until they locked on each other.
“Can you be honest with me?”
It wasn’t quite a yes, what came from his throat—only an “ahh” that Victor chose to hear as consent. He leaned back in his seat and looked out the window. Their view was a dirty wall of instructions, half in Spanish, half washed away from years of winter salt. “Do you think I’m a dangerous person?” He turned back to Colin, holding his gaze as though his hands were latched onto either side of his skull. “You seem so afraid. I just want to know.”
Colin shook his head. He was trembling and he knew Victor could see.
“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”
“No.”
“Then what are you so afraid of?” Victor laughed and slapped his hands on his thighs. “I worry about you. That’s all. I know how kids can be cruel. I know how they are to boys like you, how they don’t understand. All I want to do is help.”
Colin closed his eyes and saw it all, the fleeing from this life into another where he was a grown man’s toy, his accessor
y. In that life there were no decisions. There was no family—no Paul, no Heather, no niece or nephew. There was no one he had to face or fear, no one he had to love. The thought of loving filled him with hate. It felt good to know that, if he asked him, Victor would kill the boy who’d broken his heart.
“You just seem so alone.” Victor returned his hand to Colin’s neck, let it drift down to his shoulder, his upper back. “You don’t have to be so alone.” He leaned in and kissed him, just a peck, on the forehead. It was a trap Colin couldn’t not fall for, and—even though he knew every detail of Victor’s plan—he walked into it. He lunged forward and put his tongue in this grown man’s mouth, ran his hand over his chest, and, if he’d had the strength, would’ve crawled deep inside him and hugged whatever it was at this man’s core that loved—even so wrongly—lonely, stupid, evil boys. He begged Victor to take him. Somewhere, he said, anywhere, just take him, free him, fuck him, use him, kill him. It was nothing you could stop.
Victor pulled away and said he couldn’t. “The trouble I’d be in,” he said, considering the wall as if it were a faraway landscape, as if they were parked on a cliff overlooking an infinite metropolis.
“Please.”
“And where would I take you?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. I don’t care. Out west. Mexico.” He wiped his eyes. Victor was waiting. How am I supposed to help you? his look seemed to say. “I, uh. We’re driving to San Francisco,” Colin said, and winced at the truth. “Me and my mom. Maybe…”
“It’s risky,” Victor said. His hand was traveling again, lifting Colin’s chin, down his neck and across his clavicle. “Take off your shirt.”
“What?”
“Your shirt. Take it off. Just for a second.”
There was no lie to back it up. No plausible excuse. But it was a command to obey, and Colin had only ever wanted, hadn’t he, to obey? He slipped it over his head and held it in his lap.
“Mmm.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just never thought this would happen.” He laughed again—almost a giggle—and caressed the spot just under Colin’s collarbone, where the bones and veins wove themselves into lace. “I knew a boy who wrote poems,” he said when he found Colin’s heartbeat. His voice was strained. “He told me something I didn’t know.” He pressed with his index finger, then his middle, feeling with each what lay pounding underneath. “Do you know what iambic means?”
“Um…uh…”
“It’s something from poetry. Just a unit of rhythm, I guess, like da-duh da-duh. I thought, long ago, how the heart is amazing. How it keeps beating. Unstressed and stressed like in poetry.” His mouth hung open, like a cat tasting the air. “From conception to death in perfect meter. A muscle writing an epic poem.” He laughed and withdrew, back to his side of the car. “That’s what he said, anyway. All those years ago.”
If Colin had spoken his voice would’ve wavered. If he’d run, his legs would’ve failed.
“Take it out.”
Victor was staring at him again. Colin knew his eyes betrayed everything. His mouth fell open but all he could do was breathe.
“I want to see it,” Victor said. “You’d show it to me, wouldn’t you? Unless you’ve got something to be ashamed of? A handsome boy like you?”
Freed from the fabric of his briefs, it stiffened like frightened prey. A little droplet appeared and caught the light from the western doorway.
“Excited, are we?” Victor laughed and started the car. He switched on the radio—a song they’d heard a hundred times. “Get dressed. Let’s get you home before one of us does something stupid.”
It wasn’t much farther to his house but he thought of a thousand possible lives on the way. Victor showing up on some California street, stealing him away in that black Toyota. Victor abandoning him forever, embarrassed at his pasty skin or the freckles on his shoulders or how he snorted when he laughed. In one life, Victor used him over the summer and sent him off to high school where he was passed from boy to boy like a porn magazine or a joint. “We’ll see what happens,” Victor said as Colin left the car, but in his room—alone with the bags he’d packed for their trip—Colin knew the ending, and he knew Victor knew. He knew the regretful moan as Colin melted, but it wasn’t about that at all, he realized. Victor wasn’t the type to ask. He wasn’t a man who wouldn’t know. He’d come to him, Colin, because he wanted to watch. He wanted to know each gentle step along the way, each hopeful glance at a heaven he’d never reach. Like a true scavenger, he wanted to taste each drop of blood that fell from that wounded creature stumbling through the trees as it looked only for a place to die.
Origin of the phrase some hell:
At the coffee shop by the library, catching up on work. Diane at home with Heather and pregnant with Paul. Toward late afternoon, a group of men—nothing like you’d expect. A disheveled man in his sixties, a young guy with a backpack who could be in college, a forty-something man in a suit. It’s not the greatest suit but you can tell he has a job, a house, kids. They take the big table that says Reserved 4 Large Groups—which, deceptively, means groups larger than four. The men get settled, seven or eight of them total. They take out folders with loose fistfuls of paper, creased and frayed. They introduce the young kid—I can’t hear his name—as a new “brother of the program,” and he mumbles a “few things about himself.” After he goes quiet, the other men take turns and do the same. It’s some kind of recovery group, but I can’t tell what for. There’s a boisterous one, and it’s easy to hear him say booze but not how it brought him there, drugs but not what kind, sex at least half a dozen times. The young kid mumbles something and the boisterous one laughs. “Yeah, I’ve been through some hell,” he says, and the old disheveled man claps him on the shoulder. A fellow veteran of waste, pain, and destruction. They’ve accomplished nothing in life but climbing halfway out of the pit into which they long ago cast themselves. Some hell. Just a little piece? Or, conversely, “that must be some hell you went through,” to designate wonder or fear? Perhaps it was some hell of many hells. Perhaps it would’ve been better if I’d asked. He wouldn’t have found it rude. None of them would. They were there to illustrate, to show the way. “The stories I could tell,” he would’ve said, but not out of pride. More like an architect who marvels at the Egyptian pyramids’ perfection—I’m here, right in front of you, but can you believe it?
I’ve spent years imagining his life, Colin’s father had written.
Had he ever looked at his own son and thought the same? What was it like to be imagined?
They didn’t go to San Francisco. A few miles south of the metro they hit traffic, a long, wavy line of cars that led to flashing lights. Colin had the atlas in his lap and had told his mother twice how they should take I-80 west when they got to Des Moines, in 219 miles. They’d been at a standstill for ten minutes when she turned to him with something like panic on her face. “If we went to Hollywood instead, how would we do that?”
He didn’t look at the atlas. He wanted to show her how much he’d learned. “I-70, I think. Kansas City. All the way through, uh…Colorado?” He flipped the pages to Missouri. “Or there’s a state highway. It goes through Kansas down into New Mexico. We’d end up on the 40, which is like…the expressway to LA.”
“That sounds perfect. Frisco’s too cold, don’t you think?” The car behind her honked and she glared at the rearview mirror. It took over an hour to pass the accident—an overturned motor home in a ditch. They drove by just in time to see the medevac glide over a grove of trees. Colin watched them load the body into the helicopter. “That hurts my ears,” she said. He rolled his eyes and said of course it does, like an expert, and she gave him a shove that he tried to dodge. He laughed. Every chance they got, these last few days, they laughed. He knew that she knew something was wrong in his life, just as he knew something was wrong in her own. That she changed her mind about the whole trip wasn’t even a surprise. He knew not to protest when the entire idea o
f San Francisco vanished from their future, all his planning and research for nothing. As long as he didn’t have to see her cry.
Diane had begun to think of Los Angeles a few days before. A long time ago she had read that the sun in Southern California is like the sun nowhere else, and the phrase “another world’s sun” came loose in her head one morning. She’d woken up early and was drinking coffee in the living room, and for that whole day she tried to place it. At work she was certain it was a song lyric but the song eluded her. On her way home it joined itself to the word California, and she no longer cared. She dreamt up Los Angeles from how it looked in movies: palm-lined boulevards that brought you straight to the sun, people sitting at tables on sidewalks, that theater where you could see Bette Davis’s handprints. What dainty little hands, she imagined saying while Colin took pictures. “There’s a reason people fall in love with LA,” she said as they passed through Des Moines and kept heading south, giving up I-80, San Francisco, bitter summer fog, and everything else that would now remain exactly as she’d left it, twenty-some years ago.
She didn’t believe she was going out west to kill herself. At their first hotel—a chain in Dodge City—she tried to imagine how Colin would live. Whether she did it here or in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard—who would he go to? How would he ask for help? What would help even mean? In Kansas City they’d lost track of time, gorging on barbecue, and meandered through the southern part of the city where you could be in Missouri on one street and Kansas on the next. She wasn’t impressed. They left the city as the sun began to dip into the freeway ahead of them. At some town called Emporia, Colin told her to turn off onto a state highway. He spent most of the night with his face against the window, looking at the stars. “Are you ever going to stop?” he asked around midnight. In truth she hadn’t even thought about it, but as soon as she imagined the sign—some gold or bright blue blinking beacon in the shape of a bed, towering over an entire town—she felt tired. There wasn’t much out there, and a little after one in the morning she pulled over so Colin could pee in someone’s cornfield. He made her stand guard, her hands in her pockets as she looked one way and then the other, not a hint of headlights anywhere. This is how people get murdered, she thought as she heard Colin’s splatter against the ground’s carpet of husks. She was glad for the gun, driving past the walls of corn that led to Dodge City, and she was glad for the overweight teenage girl who sat up all night at the hotel, watching reruns, just so Diane could give her son a place to sleep.
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