Walrus Publishing
Saint Louis, MO 63116
Copyright © 2020 Bill Elenbark
All rights reserved.
Walrus Publishing is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC
Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical or contemporary accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.
Song lyrics are the copyright of The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and are used with permission.
http://theworldisabeautifulplace.com
For information, contact:
4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116
www.amphoraepublishing.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi & Elena Makansi
Cover art: IStock, Hand lettering: Elena Makansi
Set in Adobe Caslon Pro and Milo OT
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933864
ISBN: 978-1-940442-28-0
To Mike. And Elie.
ONE
EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY send echoing vibrations rattling through the field around Stick and me side by side in the wet tall grass with the heat and the bugs and the sweat, Stick at my side watching the fireworks erupt, one by one then in a sweltering rush with this high and these thick jolting booms crashing through every second with a flash in the distant-splintered darkness like I’m dreaming. Broken dreaming. Fevered images of Stick and me on the grass, sprawled out in the dark, legs splayed gazing up at the lights beaming bright for an instant almost blinding and then fading, flitting fading, disappearing after breaking until I forget that they were there and now they’re gone.
The moon is full. Stick noticed and he mentioned it, but he notices things more than me. We’re lying in the grass near the edge of my development, set back from the road that snakes by his house, the fireworks swelling over shingled roofs beyond the train tracks, and I forget how we got here, why Stick suggested it—but I keep forgetting things, maybe from the glue. They say huffing is worse than other drugs, but I don’t mind, I like the high, and it makes me happy and horny and sleepy at the same time. I close my eyes and find his face inside, his skin against my skin, arms wrapped around mine, this thin, knotted mess of overheated flesh, in my dream fused like freaks until I wake.
A mosquito crawls up my wrist and digs into my hand but it doesn’t move when I slam, it squishes into my thumb, sinking into the blood, and I’m tired but not sleepy it’s like I’m already sleeping or I’m wide awake and dreaming but I don’t remember dreaming and I don’t remember anything with this sticky humidity pressing through me like the blood on my skin and Stick’s skin on my mind, his fingers outstretched in the grass next to mine, and I inch them closer until the tips are touching. Delicate touching.
“You think your parents would mind if I slept over?”
“What? No,” I say but it’s too quick, he’ll think I’m sick. He’s never stayed over my house before.
“It just sucks at home right now, Matt.”
Stick hands me the bag with the glue, but I’ve had enough.
“It’s cool,” I say, as calm as I can manage. “My mom likes you.”
“Really?” He shoots me a wicked grin.
“Not like that!” I slap him and my hand lingers against his chest, soaking up the heat. He lets it linger.
“I hate that I have to work tomorrow,” he says. “Fourth of July.”
He sits up from the grass with the bag and the glue, crinkling the edges and sticking his face into the center, pulling in the next hit long enough and deep enough to force a cough and then he offers me the bag again. I feel the wet of the grass or the sweat on his skin when he touches me. I take it this time.
“How early do you have to go in?”
“Eleven,” he says.
“Oh. You still coming to the party?”
My parents throw a party every Fourth of July—this big blowout barbecue for all our relatives and friends, and since we’re Puerto Rican we’ve got a massive family and it’s a massive party, but this is our first year living in this neighborhood and apparently a bunch of the neighbors have people over, too, so it turns into a monster block celebration every summer, Stick told me.
“Yeah, I should be out in time.”
The lights in the sky are white now, the colors harder to produce someone told me one time, back at my old school before we moved away from all my friends on the baseball team and everything I’d ever known so Dad could be closer to work. I hated him then—I still hate him now—but I wouldn’t have met Stick if we didn’t move, so maybe it’s fate. Like when the Fourth Hokage sacrificed his life to seal the Nine-Tailed Fox into a baby boy, Naruto Uzumaki, the greatest ninja of all time, 412 episodes into an anime series that I watched every day before Stick.
“Maybe I won’t even go in,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been thinking about quitting anyway.”
“You just started a week ago!”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m not beat for the working life.” He smiles and swipes his hair left to right across his forehead, like he always does, the wispy poof at the side near his eye, the sweat matting it down against the skin. “What about you? Is your dad making you get a job?”
“No, not yet. He’s letting it slide for baseball camp.”
His face is clear, a little bright off the moon’s reflection, and I can see the sweat by his ear slipping down his neck, see his lips blotted and chapped or a little charred from the glue. There’s screaming and clapping through the woods by Woodbridge High, and I think about my mother, how we used to watch the fireworks with the teachers from her school and their kids, these blathering girls and smelly boys who didn’t bother with me or I didn’t bother with them, and I think she dragged my brother to the high school tonight, continuing our tradition at a new school without me. Because Stick.
“When does camp start?”
“Next week,” I say. “But I’m trying to get out of it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I told my mom it didn’t make sense to spend all that money on baseball camp when I didn’t even play for JV this year but she said they already put a deposit down and I need to talk to my father about it and he just—I mean, I tried. He wasn’t listening.”
I missed the start of the season after I sprained my ankle and Dad thinks that’s the reason I didn’t play very much, but the athletes here are bigger than me and stronger than me and a different level of competition than I had at my old school. I spent the spring cheering from the bench.
“So no job and no baseball… what are you planning to do?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “This.”
He glances at me and plays with a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “This is nice.”
I watch his shaggy hair and his eyes, bright blue like the sky—not this sky, with its moonlit grays and clouds so high you can’t see them, not even in the glow of the fireworks, but the afternoon skies with no clouds and no smoke and no buildings, no sounds, just silence through the fields where I played as a kid, all alone but not lonely and lost in the spread of the sky.
“You know, Trevor told me the other day that some jerks from school were asking about us.”
“Asking what?”
“You know, whether we’re like a couple or something, the way we’re always together,” Stick says. “Some people think we’re gay.”
I start to laugh but it doesn’t come out, and I want to sink
down and hide but there’s nowhere to hide and all the sounds are obscured and the colors still blurred and this ridiculous heat won’t stop pressing through my skin and it’s beginning again, this sickening feeling that keeps coming up and I can’t stop it, the way it takes hold and it doesn’t let go—these thoughts about Stick—how they keep busting out, like explosions again, high above the trees in a mass of mixing colors, streaming reds and yellows and blues so bright I see Stick in the dark, his face in the light when he looks up at the sky.
“Maybe we don’t tell anyone I’m sleeping over.”
“Okay,” I say.
I pull up the bag and lean forward to take a hit, wrapping the edges around the corners of my mouth and above my nose, a swift rough tug at my throat that surges back like a rusted bolt to my brain, rattling through the crevices and the folds of gray matter at the start of some dream—a seesawing dream soaked in festival sounds, bells and alarms and carnival whistles, loud enough to hear but not quite place the song. Stick shifts forward, sweeping his hair left to right, and the panic queues up like it’s about to attack, crack-crack-crack like a whipsaw chain at my back. I have this saying, whenever I get nervous or afraid, almost like my mantra. I will be okay. Everything.
“Have you ever hooked up before, Matt?”
“Huh?”
“Before I met you, were you ever—you know—with a girl?”
I shake my head. The sky is spinning, black and spinning, but our knees are touching, this delicate touching, and I think we’re at the climax, at first these smallish bursts over the trees in swift succession, then a barrage of light like lightning strikes above the Hidden Leaf Village, an immortal struggle for the fate of humanity in the hands of one young ninja named Naruto. If I was as brave as him, I’d just plain say it. Tell Stick the truth.
“Not even a blow job?”
He laughs and the panic shifts down my spine through my throat, sharp at the edge, pushing out from inside.
“Staci and me fooled around a bit,” he says. “I mean, I told you about that, but I don’t know, I haven’t really talked to her since school ended. I don’t know if I really like her.”
I must be thinking out loud and he can hear me, with all this talk about us being gay and being with girls and the way our hands are touching, he’s letting me touch him, the tips of my fingers on his skin as I breathe him in and catch a glimpse of his eyes, hoping for a sign. I will be okay, I say, possibly out loud this time.
Then the lights beam bright all at once in the sky, explosions of white with deep reds and spinning blues, and I lift my hand to block out the light, to block all this doubt from messing with my mind, and the sound gets louder now so Stick turns to look and I’m staring at the shaggy waves of brown nestled over his neck, tanned and golden from the summer in the sun. He turns back as the explosions crash through the trees, this chaos behind me, the sound of a horn from the train snaking past our development, piercing through the dark until I slip, I lose my grip and fall into Stick, my hands on his thighs and my head on his chest, collapsing in the heat of his chest. The sweat from his shirt seeps down through my skin, sucking me in, and he pulls me up, sliding my head along his neck, lifting my chin against his chin and my face against his face. I press my lips into his cheek like it’s some kind of mistake. But I linger.
I close my eyes so I can’t see his eyes and my lips wander down his cheek to his lips and he kisses me back for a second, this sweet wetness on my mouth for a single second, maybe longer. Longer. He pushes me away.
When I open my eyes, he’s backing away after pushing me away, but I push forward, knocking his hands away, his arms down to his waist and I lean forward with my face.
And he kisses me, above the chin, missing my mouth then finding my lips, a desperate stab of his tongue through my skin and I can taste it I think but it’s all so overwhelming. My eyes are open and Stick is kissing me. We’re kissing.
I reach out to pull him closer, my hands around his back but he stops me, pulling away and breaking the kiss. He slips from my grip and scrambles to his feet.
“Stick?”
The noise from the train scrapes into my brain, this booming braking over trembling tracks, racing past so fast it slips into my dream like it’s all been a dream but it can’t be, I’m awake. And this isn’t a dream.
“Matt.” Stick’s up on his feet, stepping back on the grass in the lights, it’s so bright out now with the moon and the train and the explosions overhead, cascading in rhythm. He stumbles backwards.
“I gotta go.”
“Wait—”
I try to stand, but my sneakers slip on the grass and Stick speeds into a sprint across the field, rushing away from me. The train clicks past and the horn fades fast and the fireworks stop. Everything stops.
I look up at the sky in the dark with this high and I want to chase after him but I can’t really move.
I can’t believe he kissed me.
I will be okay. Everything.
TWO
The best part about being a monster
Is not caring what happens to yourself.
Having teeth that can break without breaking.
No one wants to be your friend.
THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. The greatest band that ever existed in the history of recorded music. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, but most people aren’t paying attention. Not to me and not to Stick and not to Stick and me at school, I didn’t think, I don’t know what Trevor was suggesting, there’s no way it’s obvious—we don’t walk around town in tight jeans and blue hair and we don’t have earrings, even though I really want earrings, it’s just that it’s a pretty big sign and I don’t want to give signs, I just want to get through high school without anyone noticing so I press the volume thirty-eight times to blast the rest of the track, The World is a Beautiful Place is never loud enough for me.
I know the name is a bit extra, maybe too emo and not hardcore or punk enough like the hip hop stuff everyone in school loves, but I can’t help it, I’m fascinated with the way their songs bounce around in my head, left to right, soft then loud then another level louder with these jangly guitars and whirling percussion, speeding up and up and up like a train down the tracks, this constant building to breaking that spins through your brain when you’re fifteen and gay and you finally kissed the boy you’re obsessed with, you just haven’t heard from him since.
“Matty, what’s taking so long? Your father’s waiting for you!”
I have The World Is on full blast, bouncing off the tiles around the bathroom, all my thoughts about Stick and our kiss before he left and I stumbled home alone.
“Mateo Luis, are you alive in there?”
Mom knocks on the door in rapid succession, pauses half a second and bangs again. I have issues with taking long showers, even when I was little, before I realized it was the only place I could masturbate without my family interrupting.
“Your father needs help putting up the tent.”
Mom gets manic the week of a party, she’s on the weather app 24-7, tracking cold fronts and jet streams and quoting rain predictions like she has a degree in meteorology, but I don’t think it’s supposed to rain so I’m not sure the point of the tent and I don’t know what the rush is, it’s not even noon and we’re on Puerto Rican time which is at least two hours later than normal time for normal people and no one in my family is remotely normal.
“Matty, come on, I have to pee!”
Nico is next at the door, banging on the wood even louder than Mom, and I don’t respond to him either, I try not to feed his constant quest for attention. He’s three years younger than me but he just turned twelve so it’s more like four and I got enough stress with Mom and Dad and school and baseball, I can’t deal with my little brother right now. Especially when I’m thinking of Stick.
I texted him this morning like nothing happened, like I haven’t been thinking of our kiss every second since he le
ft, my first kiss with a boy, or some kind of god taking on human form in the form of Stick, and I must have been out of my mind to even try, high from all the glue and the fireworks and Stick next to me on the grass, touching my skin. I couldn’t resist. I’ll be sixteen next year and I’m fully desperate.
Stick’s real name is Henry, but nobody calls him Henry, and I get why, it’s not a good name and it doesn’t fit his face and he’s been Stick ever since I met him. Not because he’s good with a bat and not for the size of the stick in his pants, not that I have any clue about that, not yet. But Stick is Stick because he’s tall and thin, or he used to be tall when he was a kid. He’s not much taller than me anymore and he doesn’t use his real name.
I have an ordinary name, nothing cool like Stick. Just Matt, short for Mateo, but I hate it when anyone calls me that and they accentuate the accent like I’m from a foreign country, not some boring suburb in Central Jersey. I used to be Matty when I was younger, but I switched to Matt when we moved to Woodbridge, which sounds older and cooler maybe, to Stick. I want to be cooler to him.
You outside yet?
I thought it was Stick so I jumped out quick, wet and dripping on the bathmat. It’s just Sammy.
No, I text back.
I need to get my brother’s games back, he wants them tonight.
Sammy, who’s not really Sammy—it’s Sameer but we always call him Sammy—he lives in our neighborhood with his parents and his grandparents who kind of hate us—all the Latino boys on this side of the neighborhood. Sammy says the older generation thinks American kids are a bad influence on him, but I don’t know, he smokes more pot than Stick and me combined and he’s always talking about getting laid, which okay, they may have a point about America.
Give me an hour, I gotta help my dad with the tent.The World Is continues to ring out from the speaker and I’ve been testing the limits of its volume controls, every morning in the shower since I got it for my birthday, drowning in the sound of the band’s first album. Stick introduced me to them last winter—I still remember what he said, “Wait, you need to hear this”—like stop, drop everything, this is more important than air or water or Fire Style Jutsu—the art of the Magnificent Dragon Flame—and I think I fell in love with him then, downstairs on the scratchy carpet of our basement, The World Is booming out of this speaker, engulfing us like a giant flame. I even stole my mantra from one of their songs and I need it now, freaking out that Stick isn’t texting back, drying off on the rumpled bathmat, thinking of our kiss.
I Will Be Okay Page 1