“Nothing, Mom, nothing,” I say, but it’s too late, she’s standing in the basement and Stick is backing up against the television, away from me.
She’s dressed in her oversized sweats and glasses and she can’t keep her eyes from switching back and forth between Stick and me. I thought I locked the door—I know I locked the door, how the hell did she get down here?
“Wow, umm, wow,” she says, lower now. She turns her focus to me not Stick but I’m stuck to the ragged cushions, unable to push off with my broken wrist to get dressed again, or move again, or do something other than sit and stare and hope for the world to end.
“You should probably go home, Stick,” Mom says. He’s already near the stairs, stepping around her, shirt buttoned now and hanging over his jeans. “I need to talk to Mateo.”
“Okay,” Stick says, and he doesn’t hesitate, he’s up on the bottom step, looking back at me for half a second before sprinting up the stairs out of the basement. I want to call out—I try to call out, but I forget how to speak or I can’t hear myself speak, the piercing ringing in my head shattering the bones of my middle ear—the smallest bones in the body, according to my biology teacher, which—why the hell am I thinking that now?
“What have you—how long have you—are you and Stick?”
My wrist is throbbing, this deep stinging ache, and a pressing rage replaces the shock in my brain.
“How did you get in here?”
She looks at me lopsided because she can’t see without her contacts and Naruto is running an endless loop on the screen.
“Are you gay, Mateo?” Her words spill out at such a high pitch that all the dogs in the neighborhood begin to bark in unison and the tiny bones of my middle ear implode and break. I need to blink to breathe. I can’t breathe.
“What? No.”
She laughs—she actually fucking laughs. “Are you sure?”
She’s staring me down like I’m this alien creature she discovered in the basement and she doesn’t know whether to yell or to scream. I can’t believe Stick is gone—I’m pretty sure I was seconds away from whatever base it’s called where I could touch his dick. I don’t know what the hell is happening.
“Matty,” she says, stepping closer to me on the couch. “You can talk to me.”
I’ve never really thought about the moment of my coming out—like the actual moment, what I would say and how I would say it, I mean I definitely never imagined it would be in my basement with a shirt hanging off my wrist and Mom squinting at me like this. I wanted to be prepared, more prepared, I mean yeah, I’ve always known I liked boys, but I never prepared for this.
“Matt.” She reaches for my elbow but I pull back. I don’t want her to know. I don’t want anyone to know. Not yet.
“It’s okay. There’s nothing to be ashamed about.” She knows she’s lying but she doesn’t want me to freak. “We can talk about it, sweetie, you don’t have to be embarrassed or anything. We don’t have to tell your father.”
“Do not tell Dad!” I say, jumping off the couch. “I’m not gay and you saw nothing, okay?”
I shoot her the angriest glare I’ve ever given anyone in my life but she’s immune to my anger. And I’m not actually wearing a shirt.
“Matty, calm down, let’s just talk,” she says.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” I push past her toward the stairs, my shirt at the end of my cast. “Nothing happened and you didn’t see anything and I’m going to bed.”
She waits without speaking and I know she wants to get it all out of me, how fucking gay I am and how many boys I’ve kissed and I should really use protection because of HIV and STDs and I can’t think of that now, I can’t think of anything except how she ruined it—she ruined everything. I think for a second I should chase after him, try to catch him, but I’m not sure how long we were down there without him and I don’t know where he went. I hear Mom follow me through the kitchen.
I rush up the steps two steps at a time, down the hallway into my bedroom, locking the door three times and sticking my chair against the handle. I text Stick one-handed and bury my head in headphones, to drown out the sound of her existence.
He doesn’t text back, and I can’t help it, I can’t stop them. The tears break the surface. I’m out to my mom and I didn’t want to be out, not like this. Not without Stick.
Kakashi’s Story is on the desk in front of me and I let my face smack the cover when I collapse, headfirst to the surface. Mom knows and now Dad’s going to know and Stick was already freaking before this. Mom knocks at the door and I can tell that she wants me to open it but I’m not going to speak to her. Ever.
Stick may never speak to me again.
TWELVE
“HEY MATTY!” Janice sees me first, along the road to my development, and I pick up my pace on the pedals. Stick hasn’t texted and I tried to wait but I couldn’t keep waiting, thirty-eight thousand Naruto marathons not enough distraction to keep me from freaking, full-on panic every second it seems, and I rushed down the street when I saw him bike home from work. The words come out in a rush.
“Where you guys going?”
“The cemetery,” Stick says.
“We’re going to see Dad,” Janice says, searching through her purse for the keys. “We haven’t been since the funeral.”
I nod and look to Stick but his head is down. Lifeless. It’s been three days.
“What happened to your arm?” Janice says with the keys dangling.
“Baseball. Broken wrist.”
“Oh wow. Does it hurt?”
“Not really.” And it doesn’t, not really. It just itches.
“Did you need something?” Janice asks, clicking open the doors. The awkward is in the air, the ghostly remains of our former friendship.
“Just came to see Stick,” I say, in an appropriate third person since he’s not speaking to me, or even looking at me, three full days since the fated end of it, in my basement on the mismatched cushions, and I can’t get it out of my head.
“Sorry, man, not a good time,” Stick says, opening the passenger side. He’s wearing his bus boy uniform—white shirt and black bow tie loose around his neck, smatters of grease along the leg of his pants. He always works the lunch shift on Saturdays so I’ve been watching down the street, waiting for him all day. He climbs into the car without waiting.
“Do you want to come with?” Janice asks. Stick’s not bothering to hide the tension and she can sense it.
“That’s alright,” I say. “It’s a family thing.”
“You know you’re family, Matt. You’re more than welcome to join.”
Stick’s door is open, but he doesn’t want me to come, he doesn’t want to see me after Mom ruined everything and I get it—I’m pissed at her too. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I nod and climb into the back seat.
Janice does most of the talking on the ride to the cemetery, about her apartment search and her morning sickness—vivid descriptions of the volume and the color of the chunks spewing from her gut—and no one is protesting because no one is speaking, we’re just listening to the stereo but nothing’s on, there’s never anything good on, so Stick keeps switching stations and ignoring me completely, the entire way through the black iron gates into the cemetery.
“Do you remember which way it is?” Janice asks. She glances at Stick, but he doesn’t say, he hasn’t turned his head away from the street. He hates me.
“I think it’s this way,” she says to herself and turns down a dirt road a few hundred feet past the entrance. The headstones are low and shrouded by tall weeds and Stick turns off the radio so we sit in silence as we ride, the trees partly green but covered with patches of brown that make it look dark even in the daytime, this boundless gray suffocating the light. I don’t know how I feel about an afterlife, like I don’t believe in ghosts and stuff like that—zombies yes, but only in fiction, I just wonder what happens when you die, to your body I mean—how far down it goes and how long i
t takes to decompose, how many years before the wear of the soil cuts through the wood and the bugs bore into your bones.
“We should have brought flowers,” Janice says, swinging left into a newer part of the cemetery, the road paved with stones and the lawns freshly mown. “Every site has flowers.”
We drive through a mass of trees to a dead end it seems, even darker now, the oversized houses of some new development separated from the cemetery by a high white fence. Janice’s car is sputtering, and the air conditioner isn’t reaching the back anymore, so I shift in my seat, struggling to breathe.
“Which way do you think?” Janice says, looking over to Stick but he doesn’t respond. “You know, you’re really being helpful today.”
He still hasn’t spoken. Even Janice noticed. Finally.
“Sorry,” Stick says. “I think it’s over there.”
She pushes the car into park and shuts off the engine. “You okay?”
“No,” Stick says.
I tense up, sinking down in my seat.
“Mom?”
“Yeah,” Stick says. “What the hell is she thinking?”
Janice reaches over to take his hand and I know they’re pretty close—Stick told me that when Sherry moved out, Janice took care of him, because his mom never really mothered them, and I kind of wish I had a sister, or an older sibling, someone who understands the anger I feel for my parents in a way Nico can’t.
“Our lovely mother showed up this morning with her boyfriend,” Janice says through the rearview mirror. “She might be moving back in.”
“Really? She can do that?”
“Yeah. The house is still in her name and she’s fighting Sherry and Aileen for custody of Michaela. And Stick.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it’s bullshit,” Stick says. “It’s all for show, you know it’s all for show. She doesn’t give a shit about me.”
“I know,” Janice says.
“Don’t say ‘you know’—you’re not even going to be there,” he snaps. “You’re leaving.”
“You know I have to move out,” Janice says, touching her stomach. “I said you could move in with us.”
“To some tiny apartment with your loser boyfriend?”
“He’s not a loser.”
Stick rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying.”
“You can watch the baby,” Janice says, and she laughs when she sees Stick’s reaction—if there’s one thing Stick and me have in common it’s that we’re not about children. Especially babies.
“Do you think Mom’s boyfriend is moving in too?”
“Probably.”
“Fuck that shit,” Stick says. “I can’t. You know I’m going to tell him to get the fuck out on day one.”
Janice laughs but Stick’s not laughing and the sun peeks through the leaves into the front seat between them.
“I’m serious. How the hell can she cheat on Dad and then bring him into our house?”
“Yeah,” Janice says, reaching out again but she can’t calm him, nothing’s going to calm him. I can’t stand my mother for what happened in the basement, but at least she didn’t break up our family. I have no frame of reference.
“And David and Marcus were all smiley with her, laughing and joking like nothing happened.”
“They just want to live there without paying rent,” Janice says.
“Yeah.” Stick drops his head. “But it’s not the same. You’re moving out and Jarrett’s leaving for school and Michaela’s never around. I can’t live in a house with just David and Marcus and Mom, of all people.”
He trails off and faces the window. It’s hot in the car with the engine off. I try the window by my side but it doesn’t go down.
“What did Sherry say about moving in with her?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Stick says. “She hasn’t said.”
“I don’t think there’s room right now with Michaela there,” Janice says. “What about Aileen?”
“I’m not living with Aileen. She’s like a drill sergeant. And she lives way the hell out in PA.”
“Yeah,” Janice says. “Well, maybe Mom won’t end up moving back.”
She reaches out to Stick again but he retreats to the corner of his seat, cheek flush against the window. His mom left before I met him, but he hasn’t forgiven her and he says he never will. So, I guess this isn’t about me. Not completely.
“You can stay with us,” I say.
The silence spreads through the vehicle, this sudden silence in the whole of the graveyard. The gravesites rise around me.
“I mean, if there’s nowhere else. You wouldn’t have to change schools.”
I shift in my seat and he still doesn’t speak, but I didn’t mean anything by it, I really didn’t. I just want to be there for him.
“See, there you go,” Janice says. “We’ll figure something out.”
“I’m sure your mom wouldn’t be opposed to that for any reason,” Stick says, turning halfway, and it stabs me in the gut—the way his eyes shoot out of his skin with his anger over everything.
“Come on, let’s go see Dad,” Janice says, and Stick jumps out of the car behind her. All I can do is follow.
The gravesite isn’t far from the road, halfway up a hill, and their father’s headstone is the standard straight-up marble kind, but most of the others are lower, tucked into the ground, so you can almost spot his from the street, if you know where you’re looking. It’s a simple engraving cut into the stone, his name and the dates and “Beloved Father and Grandfather” in cursive text. No mention of a wife.
“Come on, Matt, you can come closer,” Janice calls, waving me forward. They’re arm in arm at the headstone and the sun is bright, the trees around this site less covered with leaves. I step over the dirt in my Vans and board shorts, not exactly dressed for the occasion but then Stick and Janice aren’t dressed up either. Maybe cemetery visits are come as you are.
“You know Dad didn’t like too many people who came over—like with David and Marcus, their friends are degenerates, so Dad would openly moan when anyone showed.” She laughs and wraps her other arm around me, pulling me closer. “But he liked you. He even told me one time that he was glad Stick was hanging out with a ‘good kid,’ not the idiots Marcus brings home.”
She smiles and I look past her to Stick, and I think he might be crying, the way the blurred streaks trail along his cheeks.
“Shit,” Janice says, pulling out her ringing phone. “It’s work.”
She walks off to take the call and Stick steps closer.
“What did your mom say?”
The tears are still wet on his skin, deeply tan like it’s been since the start of the summer.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t play dumb, Matt, what did she say?”
“I told you she hasn’t said anything. She tried to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let her. I denied everything.”
“Denied what?” He glances behind him to make sure Janice isn’t listening but she’s halfway down the hill with the phone in her hand. “She saw us, didn’t she?”
He moves on top of me, almost into me, and my mind is swimming with all these propositions about how nothing needs to change, we can make it all the same, like before Mom came into the basement. She doesn’t even care—I mean she cares but I can put her off and we can be more careful about where we do things together and go back to the experiment with the dating because it was working—he knows it was working. We could start again.
“She doesn’t know what she saw, and I told her it never happened before, and she promised she wouldn’t say anything.”
“Did she ask about me?”
“No,” I say, and that part is true. All of it is true. I need him to believe me.
He turns to the headstone, the words big and bright in the sunlight. “I wasn’t here when they laid the stone.”
“No?”
He steps back one step. Closer to me.
“Yeah, I was working, and
I tried to take off but it was too late and my sisters didn’t tell me. Apparently, I’m too young to be a part of the decisions that affect my life.” He sniffs. “I mean, even when Dad went to the hospital and I was with you, they could have called, I had my phone on, but no one thought to call me. They never think about me.”
I reach out but he shakes me off, his head still low, and I want to put my arms around him, take all that pain and put it on me. I love him. He needs to know.
I try again to take hold of his fingers. He lets me.
Janice returns and says she’s got to go to work and Stick asks to be alone for a moment. By the stone.
“Okay,” she says and gives her father a weird giggling goodbye before retreating to the car in a rush. Stick speaks to his father with his lips moving but no words coming out and his fingers are tight around my thumb.
“I miss him so much,” Stick says, out loud, the tears flowing again.
“I know,” I say and extend an arm around his back. It’s quick and he resists but then he lets me. I don’t want to let go.
THIRTEEN
“STRIKE ONE!”
“Good pitch, Nico, good pitch!”
Nico’s on the mound in the second game of possibly three, a long, long night on the hot metal stands with the heat seeping through my shorts into the skin, melting my legs into puddles of sweat dripping onto the grass but I don’t mind, I don’t even notice the pain, I’m too focused on Kakashi trying to prevent the Tobishachimaru from floating too high and taking all their lives, or worse, getting shot down from below on orders from Lady Tsunade.
“Take your time, Nico, don’t rush the pitch!”
Dad is barking out orders at the top of the stands, teetering on the edge of my row, and he might collapse if that vein explodes, like the ballast on the airship, shattered in an attack between the clouds, and the Tobishachimaru keeps rising, thirteen thousand meters above the ground.
“Ball three!”
“Come on, Nico, take your time.”
Nico’s team won the first game, and he’s pitched well in the second so this night might mercifully end if he doesn’t give up any runs this inning but he must be struggling—Dad’s been on his feet for a while now.
I Will Be Okay Page 9