by Annie Harper
In his head, Cody can’t stop protesting. No. That isn’t it. That isn’t what he means at all—but none of the words make it to his mouth. He can’t even make his body move, until André turns to go and he chokes out a strangled, “Wait.”
“Oh, it speaks.” André retorts, but he turns, arms still crossed over his chest.
“It speaks,” Cody murmurs. “It doesn’t speak very well, but let me say three things before you tell me to fuck off.” He waits for André’s shrug and rambles on, eyes trained on the ground. “First, you don’t need to be naked or wearing lipstick to be memorable. You just are. I don’t think you could help it if you tried. Second, that headline would end the campaign instantly, and third,” he looks up into André’s eyes and slips into a shaky smile, “if you were naked, I would be okay as long as you weren’t running in the other direction.”
André takes a sudden step back. At first Cody thinks he’s running away, but then he sees the shaking hands: André’s stunned. He opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again without saying a word. Cody desperately wants to stare back at the ground, to make sure that gravel is right where he left it, but he forces himself to look up into André’s dumbfounded gaze. He fights through the blood pumping in his ears, as André’s eyes grow wide.
“I—I don’t—” André tries, one hand reaching to rub at the back of his neck. Just as his eyes start to melt into something warm, a loud bleat of a laugh echoes at Cody’s back. They both turn to find the sound, and Cody remembers that they aren’t alone.
In the last five minutes, Barbara Ryans, a petite blonde reporter with an equally blond cameraman, has set up shop by their group. In front of the camera, Maddie and Juliet are having the time of their lives, apparently working out a comedy routine on local television.
Ryans looks overwhelmed. “Ladies,” she trills in an anxious flutter, “you said that you planned outfits for the group? How did you decide on this look?” She gestures toward Juliet’s midsection as if conjuring an army of coordinated torsos, and Maddie takes the opportunity to steal the mic.
“Barbara, I was in charge of the ‘look,’ so to speak, but I am not responsible for that,” she says, pointing at Juliet’s head.
“My hair?”
“Your lack of hair,” Maddie snorts, poking at Juliet’s skull. “I still can’t believe your parents let you shave your head the night before a gay pride parade.”
“Let me?” Juliet giggles and strikes a pose for the camera. “My mom shaved my head herself, and now she’s waiting to take pictures of me with the drag queens. She thinks I look cute—like a young Grace Jones.”
“Are you kidding me?” Maddie says, deadpan. “What’s wrong with your family that they think Grace Jones is cute?” She pivots as if to make the reporter answer the question, and André waves to catch Cody’s attention.
“I—I should probably save Barbara,” he stutters, still ragged around the edges. He hesitates, but Cody waves him on.
“Go,” Cody says, jerking his head toward the reporter. “I’m right behind you.”
Maddie takes his usurpation in stride, handing over the microphone and stepping back to allow their “fearless leader” to answer the next question for the camera. André still seems off, but Cody can’t imagine anyone else would notice.
Nor would they notice how the sun sets behind the bars on Quentin Avenue, casting a ring of light around buildings that have no business looking so beautiful. They wouldn’t notice the faint dusting of confetti on the grass, or the echoes of the lone trumpet he hears now that the rest of the band has gone home. They wouldn’t be able to see anything that matters. Most of all, he just told a boy—a stunning, confusing boy—that he would quite like to see him naked, and the world hasn’t come tumbling down.
Cody doesn’t realize how far he’s drifted from the interview until he feels André stiffen at his side.
“Could you repeat the question?” André asks, in a monotone.
Barbara smiles, showing off every one of her tiny white teeth. “Of course! Since we got to learn all about that young lady’s parents, could you tell us about your family? Are they here today?”
She tips the microphone back into André’s face with careless ease, as though she’s just asked about his favorite color. Perhaps, in her mind, she did; but André looks quietly terrified. As he blinks into the camera, Cody can see him mentally flipping past all the ways in which he cannot answer her question. Before Cody’s brain has time to talk to his body, he lays his hand lightly on André’s elbow and steps forward into the light.
An hour later, the day slowly fades into twilight. From where they sit, on the front steps of Foster Creek Elementary, Cody can just find the moon peeking out over his house across the street. It reflects from the metal jungle gym and the trees, casting striped lines of light across the dark grass and the black pool of pavement between the school and the deserted road. In the wind, the lines ripple with the trees until he can almost imagine the parking lot as an immense lake of murky water standing between his seat and his bedroom across the way. While they’ve been sitting on this stoop, the concrete has grown cold under his legs and the palms of his hands, but he isn’t ready to go inside. His parents are in there, wondering where he’s gone and waiting for the news to start at exactly nine thirty-five.
No one watches the local news anymore. It’s become a joke, all weather reports and puff pieces. No one watches the local news—except his parents, and his aunts and his cousins in Minocqua. They’ll be hanging on every word, and it would be just his luck if they all had their ancient DVRs at the ready.
At the time, the words hadn’t really seemed meaningful. When he started speaking into the microphone, it was just one more riff in the symphony of sensation on Quentin Avenue. André was frozen and someone needed to say something, so Cody spoke.
He’d pivoted from the family question. “Of course,” he explained, as the campaign representative, “the Parker campaign is immensely grateful for families like Juliet’s and for volunteers like those in the St. Claire GSA for giving their time and their energy to a candidate who will stand up for their rights. It’s very inspiring.” He nodded and Barbara nodded back, as if they’d all become friends.
“So inspiring! And from young people too,” she cooed. “So, Mr. Markhausen, do you have any personal investment in the parade today, or is it just another day at the office?”
Cody felt a weight land on his arm and turned to see André’s eyes focused on him. André was ready to jump back into the interview to save Cody from an idiotic question, but for reasons Cody couldn’t fathom, he didn’t let himself be saved. He imagined stepping back. He imagined saying, No, these are not my people, and in that fraction of a second he realized that he didn’t have a choice.
“I am here, first and foremost, to represent the campaign.” He smiled tightly. “But personally, it’s nice knowing that there are organizations in St. Claire that support people like me.” He didn’t elaborate and Barbara didn’t ask. In seconds, she switched to the next interviewee, and Cody stood frozen as the rest of the world moved on without him.
Cody can’t remember what happened from one moment to the next, after that. At some point, everyone else must have gone home. He must have said goodbye and walked all the way to the school, but he can’t remember anything after “people like me.” It’s all a blur of numb movement… or, numb movement and André. When he found himself sitting on the steps, staring out at the blacktop, André was there too, sitting one step up on Cody’s right and staring out into the same empty space.
Cody’s home is right there, but he can’t go inside. He isn’t ready. Reality is in there, in the form of his parents, and he isn’t ready to face them and whatever new version of his life just emerged on camera. He’s so scared he can’t see straight and he can’t put his reasons into words. When he looks at André’s face, his own pathetic terror turns his stomach.
“Where are you sleeping?” he as
ks, and watches André jump at the sound. He’d jump too; he has no idea how long they’ve been sitting here, staring across the street at his front door.
André cocks his head and stares. “At the moment?”
“No,” Cody shakes his head. Words are hard. “Where are you sleeping tonight? Once you finally get rid of me, where are you going?”
“Oh. That.” André hunches over his own knees and fiddles with an errant thread on his hem. “My aunt’s couch, probably. I’ve been there for the last month. What does that have to do with—?”
“Nothing.” Cody cuts him off and looks away, at the ground, at the playground, anywhere but at the face of a boy who has no business comforting him. “It’s just—” he starts. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Your parents literally kicked you out of the house. You’re couch-surfing before you’re old enough to vote, like a living, breathing, after school special, and I don’t know why I can’t just stand up and go home. You know what’s going to happen in my house tomorrow morning? My mom’s going to make me a Pop-Tart. No matter how much they want me to be someone else, I know that I won’t have to go sleep on somebody’s couch.”
“Pop-Tarts are crap. You know that, right?” André nudges Cody’s shoulder with his bent knee, and when Cody looks back, he finds a smile at the corners of André’s lips.
Cody scoops up a handful of gravel and scowls as he tosses it out into the darkness. “Yeah, but she makes them because she thinks I like them. That’s the whole point.” He resists telling André to stop laughing at his righteous sulk.
“I thought the whole point was to eat food that isn’t made of plastic.”
“André.” He sounds like a whiny child, even in his own head, but it’s only because he can’t get his thoughts to sit still. He sighs and feels André’s knee back against his side. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe that’s the point. I—I don’t think they’re going to get mad, but—”
He thinks back over seventeen years of mornings, afternoons and nights—seventeen years when his parents just knew that someday he’d get married, or at least take some poor girl to prom. That was never in question. His mom’s still going to want to know about the usual shit, but there’s going to be this entirely new thing in the mix. It feels as if he’s just thrown a bomb into his bedroom window, and now he has to wait and see if it’s packed with phosgene or laughing gas.
“They might be disappointed, but—but I think this thing is going to be bigger than that. It’s going to be everywhere.”
André sighs behind his back. “It really is.”
Cody cracks a smile. “You could have lied to me.”
“Have we met?” André replies, smirking at Cody’s halfhearted glare. “Unless your folks secretly love the gays, it’s gonna be weird for a while. My aunt tries, when she has time, but then she remembers why I’m on her couch in the first place and it’s awkward as hell.”
“Ugh, God.” Cody drops his head into his hands with a groan. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—of course you have to deal with that shit too.” He keeps making it worse. Someone needs to tape his mouth shut before he completely alienates the only person who—
“Hey,” André scoots down a step, and they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on the cold concrete. “You wanna just run away?”
“What?”
André shrugs. “Go. Leave. We could say screw it to the awkward. Screw the couch and the Pop-Tarts and just go.”
“Screw the Pop-Tarts?” Cody echoes.
“Why not?” André waves his hand into the darkness. “Let’s go to Chicago right now. Your folks wouldn’t be able to find you for a while. And, let’s be honest, my aunt wouldn’t even try. I don’t have anything to put in an apartment, but we could probably get one. I’m persuasive.”
“I think you mean annoying.” Cody laughs. “Do you have a couple hundred dollars hidden in those pants?” Poverty wouldn’t stop Cody from going, but André doesn’t need to know that.
André pats his pockets. “Sadly no, but come on,” he prods, poking Cody in the shoulder. “It’ll be an adventure. If we’re going to run away from home, we might as well start robbing banks and forging artwork in our spare time. Voilà, rent money.”
As André gestures over the blacktop, Cody can’t help but see the apartment, like a movie projected into the darkness. It’s a dump. They can’t afford anything better than a hole in a crappy wall. Their imaginary sofa is covered in mystery stains, and André has his feet up on some excuse for a table—but it is beautiful. In his fantasy, a beam of light casts shadows across their floor, and even the empty pizza box feels like home.
“I can paint,” he offers quietly, and André’s smirk stretches into a grin.
“Of course you can!” André pops up and strides into the open darkness. “You can be the artist who makes replicas of the Mona Lisa, and I’ll be the clever man who sells your creations to idiots and thieves. Yes! Not to brag, but I think this may be my birthright. It was meant to be.” He turns with a flourish, eyes lit with possibility, and Cody, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, looks up into the fantasy flickering in André’s eyes. Right now, with the stars at his back, André could convince him to buy the moon and a case to put it in.
“You’re not really going to get me out of here, are you?” Cody asks after a pause.
André ducks his head in silent laughter. “Not a chance in hell. I have work tomorrow, and I’m not tanking my record for any handsome face.” Cody’s ears heat up. Handsome, he said, as though the adjective made sense. Not cute, but handsome.
“I was this close, though. You almost had me,” Cody says lightly, and André’s gaze shifts up in surprise.
“Did I?” he asks. Even though André’s smile says he’s kidding, his eyes actually want to know. He stares at Cody’s face, and for a second the question hangs in the air like an open invitation. Cody’s not sure who turns away first, but he finally breaks the silence as he looks toward his own bedroom window.
“I’m sure that if you ever decided to run off to Chicago, you’d have plenty of boys ready to drop everything for your life of crime.” Cody’s voice is intentionally glib, but he’s surprised when André laughs—and keeps laughing.
“Oh, you’re serious!” he grins. “Where do you think I’d find all these boys who date boys, under the floorboards? St. Claire doesn’t have community theater, all of the clubs are twenty-one plus, and I’ve known everyone in the GSA since we were five.” André walks out into the concrete waters until Cody can’t find his face in the darkness. “I’d ask where you were hiding, but I think it’s known as the closet.” His tone lands like a gentle poke, and Cody feels the heat rise under his collar.
“So you’ve never—?” The thought that André, with his legs and his smile, hasn’t been with anyone, feels as foreign as their fantasy apartment.
“Nope,” André shakes his head. “I’d ask about you, but it seems unnecessary— not because you couldn’t,” he clarifies at Cody’s flinch. “You just haven’t gotten there yet.”
And now it’s Cody’s turn to laugh. Hasn’t gotten there yet? He’s a mess. In the last week he’s thrown up outside a campaign office, had a panic attack over a poster and accidentally come out on broadcast television—in front of a McDonald’s. Cody says this last bit out loud, and André rolls his eyes.
“There are less dramatic ways to make an entrance.” André nods, making his way back to the stoop and settling onto a lower step, so that he has to look up, just slightly, to see Cody’s eyes. “You know what happened when I came out? I spent weeks talking to myself before bed. I didn’t know who the fuck I was, so I just kept talking until I started to make sense. It turns out I was still basically the same asshole I was before I came out, but it took a lot of words before I could be sure.”
Cody bites his lip, but doesn’t look away. “Talking, huh?”
André shrugs. “Yup, I still do it sometimes, when the world refuses to listen to my inf
inite wisdom.” He raises his fingers to dangle his imaginary cigarette holder and props his elbow on his knee. “That’s the world’s loss and my pillow’s gain.”
“I think I can do you one better,” Cody responds, and starts digging in his pocket. This is a really bad idea, but as soon as he imagines André alone on his aunt’s couch, talking to a pillow, he knows he doesn’t have a choice. “I told you that I can paint, but I didn’t say what.” André cocks his head as Cody fishes his figurine out of his pocket and holds her in the palm of his hand. “I paint models—for fun. They’re supposed to be for a game with other people, but I don’t really play. I just paint. This one—her name’s Kaelyssa and she’s supposed to be a warrior, but I think she might also be a pretty good listener.”
Cody bites his lip as André stares in open-mouthed confusion at the model in Cody’s hand. For a long, silent minute, Cody’s sure that he’s gone way too far. He’s never shown his models to anyone. And now, he’s just given this boy a homemade doll with plastic boobs. He wants to sink into the concrete, until André abruptly stands and offers his hand.
“Can I see it under the light?” He gestures toward the streetlamp burning by the playground, and Cody lets himself be pulled to his feet. Under the lamp, the light falls around their bodies like a glowing shield. André cups his hands under Cody’s and carefully raises the figurine into the light. “There she is,” he smiles and leans in until Cody’s staring at the top of his head. “Did you really make her on your own?”
“Yeah,” Cody breathes, but he can’t focus on a toy, not with André’s warm hands around his, not with the tips of André’s thumbs drawing circles along his fingers. André might not know that he’s doing it, but right now that tiny motion feels more important than any painting Cody’s ever done.