Music was a frequent topic. It turned out Christy dug a lot of the same classic country he did, the stuff Tanya sniffed at as “nursing-home country.” Christy got him to confess that his all-time favorite artist, the one he’d go back to see perform live if he had access to a time machine, was Patsy Cline—something he’d deemed too effeminate to ever reveal to anyone else. Christy adored Patsy Cline. She also adored Broadway musicals, she wrote. He told her he didn’t as much, but admitted he knew the lyrics to every song from Fiddler on the Roof, admitting further, when she pressed, his appearance in a youth production five years before. After breaking off the exchange for dinner, she came back later to ask if he liked “Matchmaker,” one of the musical’s frillier songs, sung by three sisters pining for their shtetl’s matchmaker to find them husbands to love.
Not really my favorite, he wrote back.
I wish I could hear you sing it, Christy wrote. I bet you sing it so beautifully.
Late that night, alone in the house, Cameron found himself humming the song and then, after a while, absently stitching the lyrics onto the melody, and then, propelled by something fluid and ecstatic inside him that he was unable to keep bottled, singing and then flat-out belting the song with a felicity and effervescence he didn’t know he possessed, a south Mississippi football player in his boxer briefs leaping onto the furniture and dancing through the rooms of the house clutching one of his mother’s lighthouse quilts around his head like the babushkas the three girls in his production wore and begging, like them, for a match, for a catch, for the loneliness to somehow end.
As May turned to June, the throbbing green glow of his phone was triggering spurts of anticipatory delight; when the messenger was anyone besides Christy, such as his mom or one of his teammates, he’d frown glumly at the phone, curdling with disappointment. Christy’s presence in his life as a phantom, as a kind of genie wholly contained inside that phone, made him loose and incautious with her—it wasn’t anonymity, for sure, but felt almost as liberating. Occasionally he chided himself for letting his guard fall too low, pricked by abrupt fears—Christy could be the quarterback’s girlfriend, Marissa, whose eye was rumored to be ever-wandering, which would explain her unwillingness to talk—or anyone else, for that matter, anyone whose text messages, if discovered and read by the wrong eyes, could doom him on several levels. Yet it was like he’d threaded some impossible needle, to crib a football saying: He had a sort-of girlfriend who wasn’t technically a girl—she was a girl, yes, but the only thing tangible of hers was her words, and words were just words, neither male nor female, and appearing the way they did on his phone they were pitchless and sexless, unyoked even from the differing vocal folds of men and women, and therefore his to hear how he wanted to hear them. He didn’t want to meet Christy, he didn’t want to hear her voice. He wanted her to stay just the way she was: nebulous, ethereal, a romantic abstract, a perfect vessel of disembodied intimacy.
And then, Cameron remembers, came a stormy June night. He was out on the screened-in back porch that used to hang off the back end of the house prior to Hurricane Katrina, doing homework at a folding table and listening to the approaching mutters of thunder. Inside the house his mother was cleaning up after dinner, the faucet running, dishes clinking against silver, a slow soft-rock bass line slithering from the living room stereo. His mom’s boyfriend, Jim Yarbrough, was over that night, shuffling cards with a cigarette clamped half-dashingly, half-goofily between his front teeth. He was wanting to teach Debbie some two-person Italian card game he knew but she was cheerily objecting, saying he was just going to win anyway so why teach her the rules? A close crack of lightning startled Cameron, and before he’d even recovered, a shock of rain drenched the house, not as drops or even sheets but as a kind of tremendous block of water that shivered the porch’s roof struts and instantly swamped the gutters. Just then his phone buzzed, throwing up its emerald glow.
Are you there? It was Christy. I have to tell you something.
OK, he texted back.
I don’t go to Biloxi H.S., she wrote.
He held the phone in his hand as the glow faded, sensing a disturbance about to come. But then she’d never actually claimed to go to Biloxi High—in fact he’d kind of pegged her for a Long Beach girl—so what did this matter? A quake of thunder shook the house, a shimmery pewter blur of rain and gutter runoff cloaking his view beyond the screens.
And my name’s not Christy.
Not a big deal also, he thought. He’d half-suspected as much.
It’s Chris.
He didn’t so much stare at the phone as let the phone stare at him. The crackling air felt ionized by the thunderstorm but the storm had a stench to it, as if the neighborhood were being sloshed with recycled water sucked from a stagnant pool.
I’m a guy.
He covered the phone with his hand, throwing a sharp glance inside to where his mom sat with four fanned cards in one hand and a cigarette in her other, laughing at something Jim was telling her. A fresh glow of green seeped between Cameron’s fingers.
Are you there?
I’m here, he wrote. Deleted it, tap tap tap, wrote it again.
Are you mad?
Was he mad? No, he was sweating. He was sweating so suddenly and profusely, and felt so much electrical force whirling through him, that in that moment the storm seemed centered inside him, instead of in the dank cloud-deck outside, with every length of gutter on Reconfort Avenue brimming because of him.
No it’s cool, he wrote back, at the moment thinking more of Chris’s predicament than of his own. Cameron’s fingers were being piloted by compassion, at this point, and by admiration as well: What Chris was doing, he realized, was gutsier than anything he could even imagine himself doing. Bulging the cockpit door, however, were other, more selfish feelings, gathering quick and riotous might.
It’s cool? Really? I can still have a crush on you?
Cameron’s hand blanketed the screen again, a grin splashing onto his face. The closest thing he’d ever had to a girlfriend had turned out to be—holy shit, a boyfriend. He laughed aloud, then brought the phone to his lips to hush himself. Nothing about what he wrote back felt reckless—just the opposite, in fact. He felt anesthetized by the safety and relief of voicing something true.
Only if I can have a crush on you back, he wrote, sealing it.
And then, like that, Chris disappeared.
Cameron waited.
Are you there? Cameron texted. He waited awhile longer. Can we finally talk?
The storm was passing now, drifting inland, towing a wet tumble of vapors in its wake, stray gusts of wind drawing the screens in and out like bellows.
Chris?
Cameron cursed himself, flinging his phone across his homework. He’d gone and scared him, he figured. Christy/Chris had always been the flirty one, Cameron having always been playing down in a lower key, and that burst of reciprocal affection—it must’ve just freaked him out, Cameron decided. He tried to envision what Chris was doing now—maybe recoiling from his phone like someone who’s just fired a weapon he’d thought was unloaded, terrified by the unexpected bang, panickedly assessing the damage. They’d both just outed themselves, and if Chris was anything like Cameron, he probably hadn’t ever done that before. Lost upon Cameron was the fact that the outing had not been mutual. Chris knew precisely who Cameron Harris was, but, to Cameron, Chris was just Chris—still just a phantom, the only other new detail added to his identity chromosomal. Cameron texted Chris one last time that night—I’ll be here, whenever—and set his phone beside the pillow, hoping he’d be roused from sleep, hoping to wake to the sight of his bedroom walls bathed in pulses of dim green light.
Chris didn’t text back until three nights later. It was late, past midnight. Send me a picture, Chris wrote.
You know what I look like, Cameron answered.
Please?
That Please? was the last text message Cameron ever received from Chris. Cameron wrote back to him—Are you there? What happened? I’m sorry if I did anything—without ever hearing back. After one a.m. Cameron finally tried calling him to talk; the call went to a generic voicemail greeting, and Cameron didn’t leave a message. He dozed into a daydreamy half-sleep with his phone cradled in his palm. At four a.m. he texted him once more: If I call again will you answer? He slept through his six-thirty alarm, missing his daily morning routine of jogging to the high school to run up and down the bleachers. When he finally wakened, his mom mussed his blond hair while pouring him a bowl of Wheaties and laughed that he looked like he’d seen a ghost.
Three days later, she was dead. During the forty-eight hours he spent holed up in his bedroom, when Tanya feared he might die from sobbing, he wrote to Chris one last time: My mother was the one in that wreck on I-10. She died. I don’t know what to do. But Chris’s silence was final. The phone stayed dim.
Cameron gave up after that. Nothing Chris could say or do or be was going to revive his crushed heart anyway. What he had to do now, before anything else, was learn how to survive without his mother. That meant learning how to cook, when Tanya was off at work. It meant learning how to operate the washer and dryer. It meant remembering to turn down the air-conditioning before he went to sleep every night and to water the lantana and the jessamine out front if they got dry. It meant learning how to walk past his mom’s collection of porcelain dolphins and crabs and crawfish and seahorses without exploding into spasms of enraged wet grief and shaking the cabinet so violently that everything else she’d loved would be as shattered as he was. He was no longer anyone’s boy, which meant he had to learn how to be a man, whatever in God’s name that was.
* * *
Until his mother’s death, Cameron had mostly shied away from alcohol. For one thing, it messed with his athletic training and performance. After the first time he tried scaling the bleachers at dawn with a hangover, his body exuding sweat that smelled like kerosene and his muscles groggy and unresponsive, he vowed it would be his last. But he also feared the lack of control alcohol fomented: His inhibitions weren’t merely inhibitions, they were a means of survival, and even after nights with his teammates when he’d nursed just one or two beers, to give the appearance of macho drinking, the following morning would find him replaying the entire evening in his head, anxiously reviewing it for any slips he might’ve made.
His mother’s death changed that. He craved the numbness alcohol delivered, the way it temporarily caulked all the cracks in his heart. Getting drunk crooked his mother’s death offstage and narrowed his focus to the immediate here and now. (For a dark but brief period, a little more than a year later, smoking crystal meth would supply Tanya with a similar solace.) At one beach party, in July, he got drunk enough to rally two girls into attempting a half-mile, nude, midnight swim out to Deer Island. The three of them didn’t make it far, and, unable to find the clothes he’d shed, Cameron spent the rest of the party wearing only a borrowed towel, his teammates repeatedly yanking it down, Cameron flagrantly unconcerned.
Then came August 21, an unruly Saturday night. Nearly the entire football roster was there, funneling beers, throwing back shots of coconut rum, chanting the fight song, tackling one another in the surf, pumping themselves up for the season opener against St. Martin. But this was way more than a football–cheer squad party. Half the school appeared to be there—stoners, preps, band geeks, emos, hippies and hipsters, gangstas and wangstas, everyone—plus a contingent of college-age folks (Tanya among them, though Cameron wasn’t aware of this) throwing a semi-adjacent party a little way down the sand. The night was hot, the crowd muggy, but someone started a bonfire anyway. Cameron had never funneled a beer before, and when the beer erupted onto his shirt he threw the shirt off and pounded his hairless sudsy chest and called for a do-over. He was pumped more than most for the coming football season—he was looking forward to it driving and occupying not just his schedule and his body but his mind as well, to football slapping a lid onto his rolling boil of grief and confusion.
Tommy Landry called him over. Cameron didn’t know Landry all that well—he knew he was a senior outfielder on the baseball team, reputedly a clutch hitter, but he was also aware of Landry as someone to avoid. Landry was known to have a mean streak dating way back. It wasn’t a physical mean streak—Landry was indeed big, his arms widened by years of batting practice, but he carried himself unimposingly, with a rodent’s nimble, nibbly destructiveness. His cruelties were either vocal—his wit wasn’t sharp but, like a chainsaw, could gash you just the same—or they were stealthy and prankish. In eighth grade, after a girl suffered the misfortune of experiencing her first menstrual period during class, he allegedly sneaked into the classroom after school and dribbled red acrylic paint across her seat. More than once, rumor had it, he’d accessed the girls’ locker room to sneak beef bouillon cubes into the shower heads so the girls showered in hot soup. If you were a girl who passed out at a party and woke to find a penis drawn on your face with a Sharpie, you could feel certain who’d done it. Girls weren’t his only victims, however: Hazing had gotten so savage on the baseball team that, earlier that year, two players had quit the team and the school board had had to intervene. Landry’s father owned a seafood processing plant over by Keegan Bayou, and was a big athletic booster; gossip pointed to this as the reason Landry had emerged unscathed.
Cameron was just scantly aware of all this, and, at the moment, his own wits were dimming from the effect of the beers he’d funneled. His memory remains blurred. He recalls Landry shooting the shit about the coming football season, wanting to compare his predictions with those of Cameron, who was finding the conversation strained and a little weird, Landry grinning the whole time like maybe he was stoned.
Then Landry curled his finger inward. Cameron frowned. Landry curled the finger again, inviting Cameron to lean in closer. Cameron did. He felt Landry’s breath steaming his ear, his nose catching a yeasty, burpy whiff of beer. In a whisper, his bottom lip brushing Cameron’s earlobe, Landry slowly sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a…”
Cameron jerking his head back ignited in Landry’s throat a blast of roaring laughter. It was laughter unlike any Cameron had ever heard: a hyena’s maniacal skreaks blended with a coughing fit, something vicious and sickly about it all at once. Cameron watched Landry laugh with his hands beginning to clench at his sides. There’d never been a Christy or a Chris. Just Landry entertaining himself, rich enough to possess a spare phone, getting his jollies off when the television lacked a decent baseball game, seeing how far he could take it.
Half an hour later Tommy Landry was in the emergency ward, his pulped face resembling a possum split open on the highway, while Cameron was sitting on a bench in a solitary holding cell at the Harrison County lockup, scraping dried blood from his fingers, a part of him wishing there was more to scrape.
* * *
Nothing ended after that, except Cameron’s high-school football career—three games into the season, and two games after he tied a school record for the most receiving yards in a single game. The reason he gave for quitting was his mother’s death, and while there was truth to that, it wasn’t the entire truth. The sudden distance his teammates put between themselves and him, their averted glances, the mumbly chill that seemed to follow him into the locker room: Cameron felt sure that Landry had outed him, probably before but maybe after the beach beating, and he was further dismayed that no one on the team had enough doubts to confront him about it, or enough loyalty to stand up for him or at least let him know.
There’s no evidence, however, to suggest Landry ever did take his catfishing exploits public. Six of Cameron’s former teammates say they never heard any rumors about Cameron being gay. One of the team’s running backs, Montrell Davis, speculates that Landry would’ve
had a difficult time defending his investigative methods. “Okay, so Cameron might be gay,” he imagines himself responding to Landry, “but you posing as a girl and then a guy for all that time—that makes you some kind of psycho, man.” Moreover, Davis goes on, Landry would’ve likely had to field questions “about how it feels to get your ass whupped by a gay guy. I don’t know that I want to say this, because that was a nasty beating that night, but Cameron opening his can of whup-ass was probably the best thing he could’ve done to stay on the down low.”
Something important to note: Tommy Landry refuses to confirm the substance and/or details of Cameron’s account. But, despite repeated invitations to do so relayed through his attorney, he also doesn’t deny them.
“Thing was, man,” Davis goes on, “Cameron was our brother, you know, he was our teammate, and to be real frank about it, he was a lot of the reason we were putting up scores. So, gay or not, man, it wouldn’t have mattered. I mean that. We would’ve rallied around him, we would’ve circled the motherfucking wagons. If some guys had a problem with it, well, that would’ve been their problem.” Whether this reflects the truth of the atmosphere more than a decade ago, or is just the voice of mature enlightenment, is impossible to know. (Another former teammate is far more circumspect: “I’m not saying I would’ve had a problem with that, but…but, yeah, I might’ve had a problem with that. I think the school would’ve had to figure out something with the showers and all that, would’ve had to build something separate for him.”) Coach Necaise, who retired in 2011, admits the team’s adjustment would’ve been rocky—“that would’ve been a new one on me, after thirty-one years of coaching”—but that, as Cameron’s coach, he would’ve stood by him “a hundred and ten percent.”
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