I Will Be Okay

by Bill Elenbark

  STICK PITCHES FORWARD like he’s under attack, scanning the room for a few frantic seconds before finding my face. He sits up on the pillows. Next to me.

  “What time is this?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, blinking hard in the lights. I might have dosed off while watching him. Waiting.

  “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just—” He shifts on the mattress to push himself up, but he’s trapped under the covers. “Help?”

  I laugh and clear the covers off him, his face pale and his hair a mess, matted down and stringy.

  “I puked?” he says. I nod. “Damn. Did I do anything crazy at the concert?”

  He lets his head slump into the wall behind us and points his eyes at the ceiling and a bit of panic rushes through my head—doesn’t he remember the touching and the holding and the grabbing and the hugging, in the pit and after the pit.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “A little. Mostly.”

  He closes his eyes and I wait for him to speak, half-awake on the bed next to me.

  “Thanks for watching out for me.”

  “Of course,” I say and start to touch, but I switch it to a bro-tap on his jeans.

  “Always.”

  The party’s over, it’s been quiet for a while now, an eerie silence through the apartment before I fell asleep. I haven’t eaten since pizza before the concert and my stomach starts to rumble beside him.

  “You’re not still high, are you?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “A little.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “It’s strange. Different than the glue. It’s like my head is ahead of itself or my mind is just spacing and I can’t really place it. It almost feels like I’m in motion even though I’m not moving. We’re not dancing, are we?”

  “No. No dancing.”

  He smiles and looks down from the ceiling at me. This is everything.

  “We should play some tunes,” Stick says and fixes his phone to play The World Is, some of their older music, this perfect music, but all of their songs are perfect to me.

  “My phone died,” I say.

  “I’m under 20 per cent. Maybe I should save it, in case we need it.”

  “Maybe.”

  We let it play for a bit and I try to clear my head for a bit. I can’t tell how sober he is, if he’d notice if I touched him.

  “You think they have a charger in here?” Stick says and turns too quick, losing his balance. I feel the heat of his body as he brushes my body.

  “I haven’t seen one. I’m a little afraid to read the thirty-eight messages my mom left since we left the concert.”

  Stick laughs and nudges me in the side. This is perfect.

  “I love this song. They played it tonight, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  They did, I recognize the drumbeat spilling from Stick’s phone, resting on the covers over his legs. His eyes begin to focus and his skin is glowing in the globe above the bed.

  “So umm … Kepler… super gay, right?”

  I nod. I guess he noticed.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”

  “Okay.”

  I clamp my teeth against my lips to keep from speaking or reacting. I need to know what he’s thinking.

  “I got that vibe the first time I met him,” Stick says. “But he seems cool.”

  He looks up at the ceiling again and I wait for him to speak but his lids are fluttering like he’s about to drift off again.

  “You want some water?” I don’t want him to fall asleep, now that he’s okay with Kepler being gay. I point at the table where Cara left the water. I think it’s empty.

  “Nah, I’m good,” Stick says. “Is the party over?”

  “I think so. Kepler and Teddy must be sleeping, or—” I stop myself before I finish the thought and my cheeks turn red as fast as I speak.

  “Oh yeah, they are very much not sleeping right now,” Stick says with a laugh. It feels okay to laugh.

  “I’m starved,” he says. “Is there any food left? Or alcohol? Wait, no, I don’t need any more drinks tonight.”

  He looks at me and studies my face and I’m so sick for thinking this, wondering how I look to him and if he’s looking at me like that even though he said we couldn’t do that anymore. He just wants a friend. He closes his eyes.

  “You know, my father never drank. He should have, when you think about it. He would come home every night exhausted from the construction site, like every day someone screwed something up that he had to fix and then he’d come home and deal with us kids and my mother.” His eyes blink open and he readjusts the pillow behind him. The paint above the headboard is chipped and peeling.

  “Did I tell you the time I went to his site and he forgot about me? I mean, not completely but he got called off the job and he figured he’d be right back, but he never came back. I was just sitting in this trailer playing my Nintendo DS.” He pauses, scratching at his jeans. “And I didn’t have a phone then, and I didn’t know where he went and I got so scared I started screaming and one of the foremen found me. But I freaked out and yelled at my dad, like the only time I ever yelled at him. I couldn’t believe he left me.”

  He lifts up the water. The bottle is empty.

  “I miss him, Matt. I can’t believe how much I miss him.”

  “I know, Stick.” I drop my hand onto his leg.

  “And I just want to make him proud, you know. I don’t want him to worry about all this crap between Mom and me and the custody. He shouldn’t have to worry about me. Maybe I should just accept it, you know. Stop fighting.”

  “He wouldn’t want that,” I say. “You know he wouldn’t want that.”

  “No.” Stick says, shaking his head. “He hated that bitch.” I start to laugh but Stick’s not laughing. “Can you believe she’s at my dad’s house right now with her boyfriend, her freaking boyfriend—I mean who does that?” He slams his head against the wall so hard it has to hurt. “I fucking can’t with her, I just can’t.”

  He reaches behind him, wincing, and I want to hold him, just to comfort, nothing else, but he wouldn’t take it that way and I don’t know if I mean it that way, glancing down at the covers, wanting to be under them. What is wrong with me?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. It’s all I ever say.

  “It’s not your fault, Matt. It’s nobody’s fault.” He pauses and tosses the empty water across the room. “No, I lied. It’s her fault.”

  It’s bright in the room from the single light overhead and I notice the flat-screen on the opposite wall has a crack, off to the side, not on the screen itself but in the black metal that protects the borders, this fault line running halfway up and wide enough to notice.

  “I’m not going to that house tonight,” Stick says, swiping his hair left to right. “Can we stay here?”

  “Sure. Cara said it was okay.”

  “Cool,” he says and points to the bench underneath the flat-screen.

  “What?”

  “One of us should sleep there, right? Just because, I don’t know, so there’s no confusion.”

  His eyes are blue, free of the red and the gray from the drinking and the drugs. My skin sloughs off into a puddle beneath the covers.

  “I mean, or it’s fine, we can both sleep in the bed,” he says, covering. “I just meant if we were choosing I should be the one who gets the bed, you know. After the vomiting.” He flips half a smile in my direction, from the corner of his eye. “And my father died.”

  “True, all true,” I say. “But you did tell me that you’ve been a horrible friend so maybe I should get the bed—I mean, that’s what you said.”

  I stick it out there like a joke and I hope he takes it like a joke. I think I’m joking.

  “Sure, sure. Throw that back in my face,” he says.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Okay, what about this?” Stick says. “Whoever earns
it gets the bed.”

  “Earns what?” I say and it’s too late to react—he shoves his hands into my side and pushes me to the edge of the mattress but I grab hold and fight back and then we’re wrestling, flailing at each other for several silly seconds, out and between the covers, and I roll on top of him, clutching and grabbing at his shirt and his skin.

  “Ahh!” he screams because I’m punching on him and he can’t defend from underneath the blankets, laughing like he’s crazy until he’s no longer fighting back, he’s letting me punch him until I’m no longer punching, I’m just touching. He’s letting me touch him.

  I find his eyes and pull back a bit. Afraid to keep touching. I wait for the seconds to pass like hours that pass like years that I’ve been waiting. I let his hands escape from under the covers.

  He grabs me by the waist and yanks me into him, and the kiss is so quick I catch chin not lip before drifting, just enough to gauge a reaction before he squeezes my back with his trembling arms and pulls me into him. Longer and deeper against his lips, my chest on his chest and my legs around his legs, clutching tighter. Kissing.

  He moans—I hear him moan—so I press deeper, using my good hand beneath his shirt to his skin and I open my eyes to see his eyes, open and bright in the light above my head. He wants me to.

  I lean in, grinding at the waist, my hand under his shirt. Breathing him in. I want to rip off the cotton and claw at his skin, dig underneath until I touch his insides. His eyes are closed, and his lips are warm and perfect.

  I can’t hear the music so his phone must have died, and I let my fingers wander below his stomach to his jeans. Time stops and my mind stops, it’s like I’m watching this image on the television screen, the cracked black metal splitting open and swallowing me whole when I reach beneath his jeans and find his boxer briefs. I close my eyes and touch.

  “Matt, stop,” he says.

  He pulls my hand from inside his jeans and pulls himself out from under me, scrambling on top of the pillows. I’m half sitting, half slipping off the edge, and he curls his legs up to his chest but I’m thirty-eight seconds behind his mind so I press forward, pushing closer, and he slaps my arm away.

  “Matt, stop,” he says, louder now. I stop.

  Neither of us is moving, we’re sort of frozen in place but not quite frozen and my brain is too broken to even attempt a reaction.

  “Matt?”

  I look up and see that he’s pissed, and I’m so confused I don’t know why we stopped.

  “Get off of me,” he says and punches me in the chest and I fall back to the mattress, about to drop over, gripping tight with my cast and losing balance fast. He scrambles over the covers to the other side.

  “You’re sick, Matt, you know that! You keep making me do this. I’m not fucking gay!”

  He spits out the words like bullets through my skin. The pain begins to set in.

  “This is over,” he says as he staggers to the door. “We can’t hang out anymore.” He’s shaking his head and crying. “I just can’t.”

  He pulls at the knob and pulls the door open and the pain in my cast spikes through my wrist until I lose my grip, falling from the mattress like the airship Tobishachimaru, one quick drop from the bed to the carpet and I can’t brace for impact. My face slams into the floor.

  “Ow,” I say, or something equally useless, and I try to stand but my wrist doesn’t work and my legs are too numb to lift my body. I feel the blood trickle onto my chin.

  I can’t hear anything from the hall but everything’s fuzzy all of a sudden and my head is ringing. The blood slips down my lips and drips off my chin onto Teddy’s carpeting. Stick is gone and he isn’t coming back. The pain is overwhelming.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MY LIP IS ENGORGED, blackened and burnt with specks of blood caked onto the skin, and there’s a cut inside, deep and red and bright, I must have bit down when I slammed into the carpeting. I cleaned my face in Teddy’s bathroom and tried to find Stick but my phone is dead and he wasn’t at the station. It’s light out now or the sun is coming out, but it’s cold as hell in the wind on the platform, waiting for Stick to show. He doesn’t come and his bike is gone from the racks at Woodbridge Station.

  Stick and I started biking to school together last fall—I’d pick him up in his driveway or wait in the garage if he was late, and his father would always say ‘hi’ to me on his way to work, more than my father ever did. And I didn’t mind waiting for him, I mean half the time we’d risk our lives dodging traffic across the highway and we’d still miss the last bell for homeroom. But at least I was with Stick. Every morning me and Stick. I won’t ever do that again.

  It’s over. It needs to be over. I can’t take this anymore, it’s too much—the waiting and the hoping and getting everything I ever wanted only to have him pull it back and stop speaking to me. Again. I think about biking past his house next week without waiting for him. I can taste the blood in my mouth.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  My dad is standing in the doorway. Blocking the entrance.

  “Stick’s.”

  “Bullshit. Your mother called there last night, and they said Stick wasn’t even home.”

  He won’t let me pass, his thick body filling the gap in the doorway, and I step back down the steps, the wheels of my bike spinning in the grass on their side.

  “Is that Mateo?”

  Mom calls out from somewhere behind him and my phone is so dead I don’t even know the time except that it’s morning and I’m tired and I’ve never been so happy to hear her voice.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  Dad glares at me like he’s about to hit me and I almost wish he would, just slap the crap out of me so I could focus my anger on him.

  “Mateo!” Mom tries to inch around him but he won’t move so she just bangs right through onto the porch. “Thank god you’re all right! What happened to your face?”

  Nice of her to notice.

  “It’s fine,” I say, brushing her hand from my lips and Dad moves aside so I can step inside, sticking an elbow into my ribs. I collapse on one of the chairs in the entry room. Both my wrists are throbbing.

  “Where were you all night?” Mom says. “We were worried sick.”

  They gave me permission to attend the concert but I was supposed to call right after and we were supposed to come home last night. I wonder if they waited up for me.

  “Your mother asked you a question,” Dad says, not waiting for an actual answer. He’s hovering over me, in his Brew Fest T-shirt and shorts, and I almost feel bad that they were worried if it weren’t for all the hate. Mom steps beside him, as annoyed as he is.

  “We got stuck in Asbury after the concert and missed the last train.”

  “You’ve been in Asbury this whole time?” Mom says. “Why didn’t you call us?”

  Dad backs away, like he’s already bored with the conversation, so Mom takes his place leading the interrogation. I look from her to him and back to her, like I’m a little kid again, bringing home a bad grade.

  “My phone died,” I say and show her the dead screen. “I told you that.”

  “You couldn’t find another phone?” Dad says. “Stick doesn’t have a phone?”

  “His died too,” I say and I kind of can’t lie—I mean I’m no good at it, I feel my face turning red and I look down at my feet, a dead giveaway, so I look back up at him, abruptly. “The concert place had such a weak signal it drained our batteries.”

  I’m hoping a technical explanation might confuse them—they suck at technology—and I wish they would save all the questioning until after I get some sleep or some food at least, I need to charge my phone so I can text Stick, even though he won’t answer and I know I shouldn’t text him, I said it was over and I need it to be over and I shouldn’t want anything from him. But I don’t want it to be over yet.

  “Where did you go after the show?” Mom says. “How did you miss the train?”

  I sink deeper
into the chair as Dad shifts forward and I can’t even think what to say at this point because the truth is not an option and they aren’t buying my only lie and I just want to sleep.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Just punish me and get it over with, nothing they can say will be worse than losing Stick.

  “What do you mean? Where did you go?” Mom repeats. “And what happened to your face?”

  “I’m not sure. The concert got a little crazy.” I look up. “I think I got elbowed in the mosh pit.”

  “Mosh pit?” Dad says. “You were in a mosh pit?”

  “Yeah.”

  He sneers, like he can’t quite believe it. He doesn’t even know me. Asshole.

  “We should put ice on that,” Mom says.

  “He’s fine,” Dad says. “And there’s no way he got that at the concert. It’s way too fresh.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll be here all day until you stop lying. Is that what you want?”

  “No.” I shake my head and look back in defiance.

  “’Cause I got a ton of shit to do to get ready for your mother’s family and I don’t have time for this crap.”

  I see the vein emerge at the side of his head, but he’s not really pissed, it’s not even pulsing, he just doesn’t want to deal with this. I forgot about our Labor Day party.

  “Did you get in a fight, Matty?” Mom tries, stepping closer to me, leaning down on the carpeting.

  “Yeah,” I say. I give up. I just want to sleep. “I guess.”

  “With who?” Dad says.

  “It doesn’t matter. Can I just go to bed, please?”

  I stand up and make a move to move away from him, but he latches a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Jay!” Mom tries to jerk him off of me, but he brushes her away.

  “We’re still talking,” Dad says, pressing all his rage into my arm, so intense I want to wince, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. “Either you were in a mosh pit with your broken wrist because you don’t give a shit about baseball or your future or someone gave you a fat lip this morning. So which is it?”

  He twists his fingers into my shoulder, and the pain starts to pulse like the vein in his head and I want to reach out and strike him, ninjutsu attack straight to the temple, see the blood spurt all over Mom’s carpeting, for everything he’s ever done or said or the fact that he doesn’t give a shit. He pushes me back into the seat like a piece of garbage.