by John Goode
Motherfucking fairy tales.
Again, my common sense had been hijacked and corrupted by tales of down and out girls who barely registered in their worlds as ordinary. They were bookworms and shut-ins who ended up being picked out of a crowd as a beauty, a diamond in the rough, or even a princess. Though I didn’t want to be that kind of person, I had to admit that the thought of one person in the world choosing me over everyone else sounded incredibly desirable, even if it was total bullshit. I would never be the princess, and the sad part was that I had never wanted to be before I met him. It was hard to stare into those bright green eyes and not fall in love at least a little, but to have him over you, kissing you? It was just unfair.
Before him I had been happy, well no not happy.
Before him I had been content, no, not that either.
Before him, I had settled into being quietly miserable for the next four years, and Brad had come and fucked all that up. And now? What was I now? A weak and shattered stereotype in the middle of the dark woods, pining over the love he never truly had. All I needed to do was fall asleep, wake up, find it was dark, and stumble into a house made of candy or some crap. Because no matter how much my mind was trying to tell me Brad and I were something real, I knew the truth.
I had fallen for the happy ending.
I spent the next hour or so packing my emotions back into the containers from which they had escaped. Previously mint-condition desire and love, still in the box, were now forever ruined as I taped up the plastic covers and tried to stack everything back where it belonged. This was not my story, and I had been a fool to think it ever could be. That is the true crime that fairy tales commit—making people like me think that we counted in this world. I was neither hot nor in shape. I was just a normal boy in an extraordinary world, and stories like that, no matter how misleading and destructive, would always appeal to people like me. The Brads and Jennifers of the world didn’t need a storybook to tell them about happily ever after; they were consigned to that fate the moment they opened their perfect eyes and gazed out across the world. They didn’t need a trio of Alzheimer’s-impaired witches to warn them away from cursed spinning wheels, because even if they did succumb to such a cruel deception, someone would come along and make it all better.
As I looked back at the school, I realized I hated The Wizard of Oz even more than I had before. I readied myself to accept my return to my black-and-white world, but unlike that retarded Kansas girl, I was not going to sing a song about it. Returning to a world devoid of joy and light where I simply woke up, went to school, and waited until the day was over so I could go home and go back to sleep was not, in any definition of the word, a good thing. Lather, rinse, repeat. I had no idea how long I would be forced to endure it or what happened next, but I knew wishing for more than that was just foolish.
I packed up my regret, using far more mental packing tape than necessary to make sure it didn’t open up on me by mistake, and placed it in with the rest. A thousand little feelings all locked away, each one of them screaming at me to reconsider. I sighed softly as I closed the box and made my mind up.
Once upon a time there was a boy who didn’t get to fall in love.
The End.
EVEN after all of that, I expected him to be there waiting for me again.
I shouldn’t have, of course. After all, why would he be? My mom was gone, which meant another night of foraging for dinner, but I had absolutely no appetite. I fell back onto my bed in what I was sure anyone else watching would have seen as an over-the-top dramatic flourish. At the moment, I was feeling pretty emo, so I didn’t care.
I tried to push thoughts of him out of my mind, to put him back in whatever box his memory had come from, but it was a waste of time. Every time I pushed mentally, he pushed right back. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine him over me again, the feel of his weight on top of me, reminding me that he was a real person and not some cartoon prince.
But was he?
My eyes opened as I stared at my ceiling for a long time. Was I really someone to him or was I just someone to fool around with on the side? Part of me thought I understood what had been going on, but after today, I only knew one thing for certain.
Brad and I were on completely different paths, and this moment in time was where they had happened to meet.
What we had done was simply satisfying a curiosity for him—a dalliance in a place he would never settle down in. He was just passing through the neighborhood. I knew in my heart the neighborhood was where I was going to live my life. The whole liking guys thing was something he was going to work through, a stage. I was going to be the guy he brought up when he wanted to seem more worldly than he was. “Oh yeah, I messed around with a guy in high school.” And he would be the guy I brought up once I’d had two drinks too many. “Yeah, he was my first love, and he was straight.”
I couldn’t blame him. After all, he was who he was, and I would always be me. I had always known deep down I was different, but now I had a name for it.
Gay.
The very thought of being gay gave me chills. Not because of what I thought of it but because of what others would. Kelly’s words came echoing back in my memory. Queerbait, bitch. All words that I was going to become very familiar with as time went on, I was sure. I didn’t have the same choices Brad had. I couldn’t just stop and walk away, end up dating some girl, settling down, and raising two and a half kids, average job, mortgage, bills, pretty much what the rest of the world considered normal. I wasn’t normal, and no matter how hard I tried, I was never going to be.
And though I didn’t hear it at the time, a small part of me exclaimed, “Good!”
At some point, the darkness of my room gave way to the inside of my eyelids, because when the phone rang, I nearly jumped out of my bed. I looked around in confusion, not quite aware I had fallen asleep. The house was pitch black, and I hit every single sharp corner in the apartment on my way to the phone.
“Hello?” I asked, still not sure how awake I was.
“Hi,” he said, his voice sounding small and miserable.
“Hi,” I said back, feeling exactly how he sounded.
“I tried calling your cell. Can you talk?” he asked, which confused me for a moment until I saw the time. It was after ten at night, a time that any normal kid would get whaled on for getting phone calls.
“Sure,” I said, taking the phone back to my room.
He was silent as I fell back onto my bed, the darkness feeling almost welcoming to me in my misery. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the connection, but it was obvious he had no idea what came next. Finally he said, “I’m sorry.”
And he was; I could hear it in his voice. He was truly sorry, and the very sorrow that his tone conveyed over the phone tore me apart. All I could think of was his pain and his suffering. Even though I was in fourteen types of pain, the only thing that was real was his hurting.
“I know” was all I could say back. What was there to say? I’m sorry too? For what? For kissing him back? For feeling too much? For not knowing he had a girlfriend? My eyes stung as I realized that everything was climbing out of the boxes I had just sealed. Little creatures of discomfort in my mind, pinching and tearing at anything they could find as I struggled not to make a noise.
“I wasn’t just…,” he began and then stopped. I’m not sure if he was close to crying or just choosing his words carefully, taking cues from some invisible attorney who was there to make sure his client walked free from any and all guilt. He finally let out a huge sigh and said, “I don’t know, Kyle. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I know,” I said in the quietest voice I could muster.
“But I did,” he said, not even bothering to frame it as a question.
“I know,” I said again, trying to keep everything held in but failing miserably and beginning to cry.
I could hear him on the other end, the choking sounds of his own sobbing mixing with mine, making the saddest
duet of ruefulness I had ever heard. Finally he sniffled and said with more conviction than I could have mustered at that point, “I’ll make this right, I promise.”
He was making a vow, a vow right there to right what was wrong. Just like a prince.
And damned if it didn’t feel good.
I heard the muffled voice of his mom talking on the other end for a second, and then he came back. “I need to go. Can I drive you to school tomorrow?” I didn’t even know I was just nodding like an idiot until he asked hesitantly, “Kyle? You there?”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. “And yes, you can drive me to school.”
“Sweet,” he said, something other than grief entering his voice. “Night.”
He hung up, but I continued to hold the phone to my ear for a long time after.
He was going to save me. I just knew it.
I BARELY slept that night.
I tried to banish from my mind the image of a prince showing up with a horse-drawn carriage, tried to tell myself my life wasn’t like that. But no matter how I tried to ignore that fantasy, I had to admit Brad would look incredible as a Disney prince, his dark red hair carefully swept back as his bangs danced playfully above those soulful green eyes. In our school, he was practically royalty already. It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine him in the line of succession to an actual throne.
“But you’re still not a princess,” I heard my own voice comment as my alarm clock went off. I felt completely miserable for a moment as the images in my dream drifted out of reach until they flickered out, fireflies heading off to bed in the dawn.
I shook my head and got out of bed. Whatever had bothered me was only a dream. The reality was he was coming to pick me up, and that meant things had a chance to be right again.
Not a huge chance, but any chance was better than what my life had been so far.
I threw on whatever I pulled out of my closet first. I was so excited that I didn’t care what other people thought. Brad Greymark was on his way to drive me to school, and the rest of the world could burn. I ran myself through a shower so quickly that I am sure there were whole parts of my body still dry when I got out. I squirted some hair product in my hand and spent the next twenty minutes trying to make my hair anything better than it was.
Twenty-three minutes later, I jumped back in the shower and washed it out of my hair.
I grabbed my backpack and flew out the door, half expecting to see my prince astride his bright yellow mount, sunlight gleaming off his teeth as the wind moved through his hair. When I saw he wasn’t there, I sat on my front step and waited, knowing it wasn’t going to be long.
Ten minutes into waiting, I put my backpack down. He was going to be there; he was just running late.
Twenty minutes and I started to pick at my shoes. Morning traffic could be horrible, I had heard once.
At thirty, I knew he wasn’t showing up, but I waited anyway.
At forty minutes, I was going to be late for first period.
I snatched my bag up and sprinted down the street toward Foster. I cursed myself silently because I knew I had fallen for the fairy tale again. Instead of sticking to my guns and letting it go, I had to be the one romantic idiot holding up a lighter and asking for more. Life had promised me that this time I would be able to kick the football, and as always, I was lying on my back, staring at the sky and wondering what exactly had just happened.
I knew what had happened. This was the kind of happy endings people like me got.
I could hear the tardy bell ring half a block away, and I stopped running. Ten seconds or ten minutes, late was late. Unless I developed super powers in the next half second, there was nothing I could do about it. When I got to school, I could see his car in the parking lot, and the one last, small shred of hope I had been counting on faded away. Instead of calculus, I plodded to the office, knowing I was going to need a late slip.
As I stood in line behind the other losers who couldn’t get to class on time, I wondered why we couldn’t get late slips for life. “Please excuse Kyle from heartbreak, as he has lived a sheltered life and has no idea how to handle something as simple as a crush.”
With my luck, I’d get the note and my mom would refuse to sign it.
I groaned under my breath as I realized that they were going to call my mom and tell her I had been late, which meant having to come up with an explanation that didn’t end up pissing her off even more. Once again, I had to label this the worst day of my life.
“I thought nerds like you were never late for school,” Kelly’s voice said from behind me.
Correction, the worst day so far.
I forced myself not to tense up or turn around to confront him. I simply picked a point in front of me and concentrated on it as if it were the center of the universe. It was an oldie but goodie when it came to dealing with stress in my life. The thousand-yard stare, zombie brain, Franken-stare, all nicknames I had cultivated over the years for basically the same thing: shutting down every part of my brain that reacted to outside stimuli.
“Don’t pretend you can’t hear me, you little faggot,” he said, whispering harshly as the various people who worked in the office milled about us. “I know you can.”
The “don’t pretend you can’t hear me” gambit had been a classic in my mother’s repertoire of tactics to Generate a Reaction from me, though Kelly’s “faggot” variation was new. Regardless of what style was used, my defense remained the same: continue to stare straight ahead as though the person had not spoken.
His elbow impacted the small of my back, something between a nudge and a punch. “So what happened?” he taunted. I could see his sneer even though my back was to him. “End up taking too much time to put on your makeup? I know how you girls are, getting ready in the morning.” He thought he was funny, as he half chuckled at his own words. He could have been doing his homophobic stand-up in front of a mannequin for all the response he got from me. I was surprised at how little his words stung. And I continued to dissect the far wall in front of me. I had thought that having verbal grenades hurled at me would hurt, yet all I felt when Kelly continued to taunt me was exhaustion. I was seventeen, and I was already weary of the world.
Kelly’s give and my not-take limped along for a few more minutes as person after person in line ahead of me stood in front of the assistant principal and gave them their sob story of why they were late for first period. I’m not sure why we worried so much about what we were going to say. No matter how creative the excuse might be, we were still going to have a tardy slip pushed into our fingers, and they were going to inform our parents. I tried to focus on the stories instead of Kelly in hopes that, at the very least, it would dissuade him from continuing.
The girl in front of me walked in, and despite all of my intentions, my mind began to prepare an excuse.
I’m sorry, but the guy whom I had imagined into my boyfriend promised he’d pick me up, and like the pathetic little boy I am, I waited for him until there was no way for me to make it on time without using a rocket pack. Can I get a “I’m a new homosexual and fell for my first straight guy” pass and move on, please?
At precisely the same moment, Kelly finally succeeded in getting me to react to something.
“Don’t think I won’t kick your ass,” he warned darkly. “Your boyfriend Brad isn’t here to save you.”
I spun around, dropped my backpack, and shoved him as hard as I could with both hands. “He isn’t my boyfriend, asshole, and I don’t need anyone to save me!”
Kelly fell back on his ass with a loud thud as the people behind him backed away in startled panic. However, if anyone was going to take home the award for Most Shocked, the race was a tie between Kelly and me. He gaped up at me, eyes wide not from fear or pain but from complete and utter outrage. My eyes were wide, not from anger or frustration but from complete and utter terror.
“What the fuck did I just do?” I muttered under my breath.
“What the fuck did you just do
?” Kelly roared, jumping up to his feet. He looked like a bull charging, his face red, nostrils flared. I suppose a quicker man than I would have moved out of the way, but frankly I was still too stunned. I had actually put my hands on someone else in anger.
If I had ever held any illusions about my ability to play football, they were quickly shattered as his head, fist, arms, and shoulders made contact with my abs, and I felt what air I had left in my lungs relocate to someplace less violent than my body.
I went down like a straw man, Kelly’s momentum throwing us into the assistant principal’s office. The girl who was in the middle of her well-rehearsed excuse let out a screech as she stared down at the nightmare sight of two teenage boys struggling for dominance at her feet. I couldn’t draw a breath to save my life, but the fact that I wasn’t fighting back wasn’t slowing Kelly down in the least. He connected two solid hits to my face before Mr. Adler pulled him off me.
My body curled automatically into a fetal position as I struggled to haul any oxygen in the vicinity into my lungs. I could already feel the side of my face pulsing from his punch. Part of my brain judged it to be a solid six out of ten, good impact, decent follow-through, bruising for the next two weeks, and tenderness for at least a month. I’d been hit better by girls—well, by my mother specifically—but for a first-timer, Kelly had made a decent attempt.
It was the second time that week I had to be saved from that troll, and it was getting old fast. As I hesitantly began to draw breath again, I forced myself up off the ground, pushing past the pain that made up my face. Someone as old and out of shape as Mr. Adler could hold someone as built as Kelly only because Mr. Adler was an authority figure. Kelly was the same age as I was, but from that point on, we couldn’t have been more different. Kelly had had respect for adults and their word ingrained into his head since he could walk.