I Will Be Okay

by Bill Elenbark

  “How long have you been into them?”

  “About a year,” Stick says, looking to me for confirmation.

  “So you measure ‘forever’ in different units of time than most humans,” Cara says.

  “You’re such a bitch,” Kepler says, slapping her on the arm.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I should stop.” She sips on a bottled water and the opening act starts their set. The sound shakes the floors all the way to outside.

  “It should be a good show,” Kepler says with a weird flashing sparkle like glitter in his eyes. “They’re amazing live.”

  “I know,” Stick says. “I mean I hope so.” He’s as awkward as me in these situations.

  “They are, I’ve seen them four times already. My friends don’t really like them but sometimes you crave something different from all that EDM and grind music, this is real guitars and real drums and they’re just amazing,” Kepler says, elongating the ‘a-maze.’ Stick laughs.

  The opening act continues inside with a steady percussion and a female singer’s screaming pouring out onto the patio through the opening. I never been to a concert before, like a real concert—unless school concerts count, which no, they absolutely do not, and I kind of want to be inside.

  “We’re hitting that party later, if you guys want to go,” Kepler says. “My friend has an apartment downtown.’

  “Oh yeah?” Stick says. “Cool.”

  “I’d hold off on the ‘cool’,” Cara says. “Kepler’s got some weird friends.”

  “Stop, you love Teddy,” Kepler says and sweeps his arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer. She tries to resist but she can’t quite resist and the rolling-eyed glare that’s her default stance fades a bit. Kepler fixes his shirt and lingers on Stick for a second and it freaks me out—stay away from him, you pink-haired freak, he’s mine. Kepler smiles at me. I might be overreacting.

  “How’s Jarrett doing in Maine?” Cara says. “Rhonda’s been FaceTime-ing him almost every night.”

  “I don’t know,” Stick says, dipping his head beneath the Yankees hat. “We haven’t really talked.”

  Stick always looked up to Jarrett and they used to hang out when he was younger so I wonder if he misses him. I wonder if we were hanging out like we used to he’d tell me things.

  “He’s probably busy with practice and stuff,” Cara says, covering. Stick forces a smile.

  “Yeah, there’s a lot going on in Maine these days,” Kepler says, trying to make a joke but Cara elbows him. He’s kind of a dick, I think.

  “When are we going inside?” I say. I kind of want to get away from them and see the opening act, screaming out from the stage. The space under the tent is getting tighter, with streams of people squeezing in around us.

  “Now,” Stick says. “I need to hit the bathroom.” He grabs hold of my arm and pulls me through the crowd away from Cara and Kepler, inside with the fans watching the band on the stage. We stay low along the barrier in case security is looking, around the sound system past a couple bouncers that don’t seem to notice. Or care.

  “Come on,” Stick says and jerks me into the bathroom. It’s small and dark and he pulls me into an open stall, closing the door behind us. “We need to try this.”

  His mouth forms a wide grin, close to my face in the tight narrow space and it feels intimate, or it would be intimate if we weren’t in the middle of a ranking bathroom with drums and guitars slamming through the walls from the stage. He pulls out the baggie from his pocket.

  “Jarrett takes Adderall on the regular so it can’t be that dangerous, we won’t snort it or anything. I mean, it’s medical.”

  The baggie is filled with blue and white capsules and Stick shakes them in front of me.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He smiles, in the way only he can, half excited and almost flirtatious, the music pounding from the speakers into our space.

  “What if we get really fucked up though?”

  “Well that’s the point, isn’t it?” His lips are close to my lips and someone shouts outside at the urinals, a drunken slur I can’t make out. I smell the sweat on Stick’s skin.

  “Jarrett takes one a day and he never got high off it, just more alert. So maybe we just try two each, okay?” His eyes are blinking and he brushes the swoop in his hair back into place. “I mean, I want to be a little high for the band. And I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight but we’re at a World Is show and we need to be friends again like we used to be because I miss you, Matt, and I miss having fun like this and we need to be high for this, okay? Please?”

  I find myself nodding and Stick pulls four pills from the baggie, two for each of us. I’m afraid to try it, I’m always nervous about this stuff, like even the first time with the glue, when Stick convinced me to try, but he’s standing on top of me, his face in my face. Someone bangs on the door.

  “Yo, hurry up homos, I gotta take a shit!”

  The voice is shrill and all this laughter spins through the tiny bathroom but I’m still in a daze from the look on his face when that he said he missed me.

  “You don’t have to,” he says. “I mean, I want you to, but not if you don’t want to. Maybe it’s best if one of us stays sober.”

  “Maybe.”

  The asshole outside the stall bangs on the door once more and I don’t know how long we’ve been in here because time seems to have stopped or gone back to the past when everything was perfect and we were kissing. I hold the pills in my hand, close to my mouth.

  “Get a goddamned room, faggots!” the asshole shouts.

  “I really do have to piss,” Stick says, ignoring the laughter cascading through the bathroom and me standing here, facing him. He unbuttons and spins around to the toilet and I hear the stream before I know what’s happening.

  I focus on the back of his head, the blonde turning brown or the brown still blonde from the summer sun, more blonde by his ear where it drifts onto his cheek, drops of sweat on his skin. I take a breath and inhale his scent, but I don’t want to scare him. I stick one of the pills into my mouth.

  It takes like Advil or something equally harmless and I want to swallow it, I want to live in this moment, with the summer almost over and Stick and me together, all the wasted days in the stifling heat when he was avoiding me no longer as pressing. Not now. The asshole outside our door enters the stall next to us and I hear him clanging in the corners of my mind.

  Stick flushes and turns to face me, zippering. The pill tastes like plastic on my tongue.

  “You took it?” he says.

  I nod.

  “Cool.” He smiles and reaches around me to unlock the door. “This night is going to be legendary.”

  He pushes open the stall and I wait and watch until he can’t see me anymore then I spit the pill into the water circling the bowl. I want to stay sober, a little bit sober, if Stick gets wasted enough to kiss me again.

  I will be okay.

  Everything.

  TWENTY

  We are ageless.

  Holding our breaths and waiting.

  We connect in separate places.

  We’re all aware of our own purpose.

  We all know what makes us nervous.

  Just hold my hand

  And be my best friend.

  SEVEN PERFORMERS FILL THE STAGE at the start. Two singers and a keyboardist, like half a dozen guitarists plus the drummer and a woman playing violin, and the singer is screaming—this short squat dude with a long full beard clutching the mic so tight he might die if he releases, swaying like he’s pacing in place as he pauses through a break in the wall of music, this rhythmic swelling soft and slow building, drowning in circles of sound so loud I can’t even focus, my head is spinning, literally spinning left and right and up and down as the band lines up all at once in a row and the singer turns spastic now, screaming out loud, shaking back and forth until the drums explode, so heavy and harsh that a mosh pit forges in front of us, right at the edge of us,
this girl in restless yellow jeans lifted above me, carried on waves of hands feasting on the sound of the greatest band that ever existed.

  We agree we’re in the same place.

  We agree we can’t relate

  Unless we stay the same age.

  We agree we’ll stay the same age!

  The song slows down and the mosh pit hesitates, the girl in the yellow jeans lowered back to the ground as the guitars crawl through an extended verse before a trumpet appears—from way off the stage, and I think there’s eight in front of us now, more than filling the space because it’s not that big of a stage and this guitarist with long straight hair almost like a girl’s hair—I can’t quite tell if he’s a girl or a boy, but their face is covered by hair hanging down the front as they scream these guttural screams shouting back to end the track. I may never breathe again.

  We’re pretty close to the stage, maybe twenty bodies back, a little off to the right near the bathrooms. Cara and Kepler are next to us and the mosh pit is contained enough not to touch us but Stick is itching to jump in with this frantic energy, up and down bobbing and bouncing into me like he needs to break free and I should have taken the pills, I want to feel the way he feels. To feel closer to him.

  The audience cheers as another track ends and Stick pulls me against him, into him, his mouth on my ear but I can’t really hear him, I’m not sure if he’s not forming words or if my eardrums were destroyed by the unrelenting sound from the speakers but his breath shoots right through me, all the way down my body, and I can’t help but fall, right into his arms, I think I might be high when the next song begins.

  Whenever you find home,

  If everyone belongs there,

  Feeling our bodies … BREAKING DOWN!

  Stick’s arm slides down to my waist and his hand explores the space between my shirt and my jeans and I don’t know what he’s doing, why he’s touching me, but he grabs hold of my belt, tugging at the skin underneath. Cara looks over and shouts but I still can’t hear anything, not with the speakers so loud and these urges overwhelming, twisting pulsations into Stick beside me, pressing with his hand on my waist before he spins all of a sudden, these fitful gyrations in half-circles into strangers, rainbow lights filtering above the stage.

  “Stick, stop spinning!”

  He’s lost in his high and singing along to the wrong song I think, and I watch his face, its clear skin and perspiration, this flawless creation, bouncing beside me. I wonder if I kept the pill on my tongue too long and I am actually high or if it’s just in my mind but he keeps spinning, this manic spinning, tumbling into me. I hold on.

  If your arms are just felt, when you hold me I’ll feel held.

  We’ll sink into these notes.

  If your arms become smoke I’ll have nothing left to hold.

  We’ll dissipate with these notes.

  I keep my hands on him, both hands and casted wrist because he can’t stand up straight, his head is tilted to the side left and right and shaking. There’s a break on the stage and the mosh pit settles down again, the musky scent of weed and sweat slipping through my senses.

  “This is fucking sick!” Stick screams.

  “I know. You won’t stop spinning!”

  Stick laughs.

  “We should go in,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The mosh pit.”

  I point at the crowd as the next song starts, a slow verse at first but I know it won’t last, all their music is just building, slow at the beginning then speeding up faster, guitar licks layered on top of each other with trumpet and drums and that strange violin, alternating singers in perfect rhythm, the musicians lined up again at the front of the stage and swaying in rhythm. Stick pushes me into the pit when the chorus explodes and my body releases. I let go.

  Someone knocks into me immediately and the shock slams me into another moshing body but I manage to stay upright, off-balance but upright, and I can’t really push back while protecting the cast so I’m lost in the swell of these arms and legs and chests, smashing into me in succession. The beat slows down for a second so I try to catch my breath and I try to find Stick, but then the singer screams out and the guitars spring back and I’m sucked into the violence of all these crashing bodies, losing my balance and collapsing into Stick’s side. I close my eyes, so I can feel it inside, these arms and legs and hands pulling at me and slamming into me and Stick’s hands are on me—holding onto me, bracing me from these strangers smashing against me, taking over me, and I open my eyes to find his smile. It’s everything.

  “Holy shit!”

  Stick spits into my ear in between songs, the pit coming up for air. “I want to do this every single night,” he says, pressing his lips against my ear. “I’m so freaking wired, you know, like my skin is itching but I don’t want to scratch it I want to run for twenty miles and live here forever. Oh shit, Matt, what are you feeling?”

  He cups the back of my head with his hand, cradling my neck at the base of my hair, pushing my lips closer to his lips, on top of me like he wants to kiss me and it’s so loud with all the drums and the crowd that I want to scream out to him, shout out what I’m feeling. I want him to kiss me again.

  “This is their last song.” Kepler pushes behind us before the start of the next track, I completely lost track. I might be dreaming.

  “Really?” Stick yells and I recognize at once, the song that first turned me onto the band, my favorite song and Stick’s favorite too, pretty much the greatest song ever written by any human ever. Seriously. Kakashi levels of ninjutsu skills all over these verses. Stick played it for me last Christmas, alone in my basement, and it felt monumental at the time, like all my life after I listened would be different, be better, and nothing that mattered before would ever matter again. Stick wraps his arm around my back.

  “This is always their last song,” Kepler says and I don’t know why but I don’t mind. I mean I feel like the concert just started and I wish we could stay here forever but I’m also exhausted and sweaty and shredded by the mosh pit, like I just ran thirty-eight laps after baseball practice and I can hardly stand up. I can’t even see.

  The song starts with a harsh percussion, this series of spiking sounds loud and abrasive with the singer screaming in the way only he can. I step forward into Stick and guide my hands to his waist. He lets me.

  “I’ll let you enjoy,” Kepler says with a laugh and the mosh pit is swelling and pushing into us again and I want to give in, collapse into him, kiss him hard in front of Kepler and everyone at this concert, convince him what he’s missing until he finally gives in.

  But he’s off into space in his head in that place and I’m alternating stares between Stick and the stage, a series of flailing arms and legs and bodies escaping from the pit and slamming into me, over and over this crashing up and over and I’m holding onto him and he’s holding onto me. I forget how to breathe.

  The chorus begins so I know we’re at the end, but I don’t want it to end, this song and this night with Stick’s body so close to my body, his arms so tight around my waist. Someone flying overhead launches into us like a Shinobi and I lose my balance, thirty-eight seconds from being crushed in the wake of this massive celebration but Stick hangs onto me, grabbing hold of me despite his space-dream, screaming out the words of the song, the greatest song in history. I close my eyes so that time will stop and I won’t need to breathe.

  The world is a beautiful place but we have to make it that way.

  When everyone belongs here, it will hold us all together.

  It’s dark inside the club and his arms are wrapped around my waist. I could live here forever.

  The world is a beautiful place but we have to make it that way.

  Whenever you find home we’ll make it more than just a shelter.

  If everyone belongs there it will hold us all together.

  And if you’re afraid to die, then so am I.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I NEED TO PEE. Like rea
lly, really bad. I should have peed in the bathroom at the concert with Stick, but I was distracted by being in the bathroom with Stick. Even more distracted by Stick pissing in front of me, baring everything, and I forgot I needed to pee. Then we were moshing and we started touching and then Stick got wasted, maybe not in that order, but there was a whole lot of touching right out in the open and I don’t know what he was thinking but I still need to pee.

  Like really, really bad.

  Two girls are in front of me waiting for the bathroom. Oblivious.

  We walked straight from the concert and it wasn’t that far, like half a mile maybe but Stick was wasted, fully wasted, he bummed a cigarette off Kepler even though he never smokes, and his eyes were rolled up in his head.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket and I’m tempted to look but Mom’s been calling nonstop and I keep avoiding. I sent a text that my phone was dying and I was staying over at Stick’s but she won’t stop calling. She even called during the concert, but I couldn’t hear anything with the music so loud and the mosh pit intense and Stick standing so close to me, touching my skin. The sweaty grip of his pressing flesh.

  “What the fuck, there’s a line?”

  I feel a meaty paw gnaw at my shoulder.

  “Goddamn bitches.”

  I crane my neck at the massive man clutching my arm, his gut testing the limits of his extra-large T-shirt.

  “You know what I’m saying?”

  Gigantaur chugs a beer and smashes the can in his hand, his eyes raging and breath rancid and I don’t know what happened to Stick.

  “You need a beer, little man,” Gigantaur says, shoving an open can in my hand. The bathroom door opens and two guys come out giggling.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gigantaur shouts as the guys walk by without turning. The women laugh and go inside together. Gigantaur snatches at my shoulder and chugs another drink.

  “What the hell man, I got to piss with you now?”

  Uh, no. No way I’m going into any enclosed space with him. His arm around my neck weighs a ton.