Okay, so maybe it isn’t a secret. Maybe it’s a lie. Have I been kidding myself? All those pats on the back and the football team fake-smooching on the dance floor – maybe there was an edge to it after all, and I was just so caught up in the giddiness of this awful, wonderful day that I misinterpreted it. Has some nasty whisper been invented?
My brain vomits up a trove of poisonous gems:
You know McKee’s a secret slut, don’t you, Ellis? Sucked off half the footie lads before you rolled into town.
I heard he’s been two-timing you with [insert name here] and they’re gonna break it to you soon.
Ellis, man, wake up. He isn’t even gay. He just tried it out for a laugh. You know, like a phase?
Funny how the brain works. I know deep down that it’s all complete bullshit, but each of these imaginary conversations seems more plausible than the last. I even start thinking up ways to counter them:
Holy Christ, Ellis, a slut? Was there anyone on the planet who could’ve out-virgined me back when we met?
Two-timing? Like I’d be able to fit in a secret affair between homework, history club, uni applications and snogging your face off every break period?
Not gay? Seriously? Not gay? The only thing about me that isn’t gay is my dance moves.
But all I can say is: “Ellis. Please, talk to me.”
My heart is like a bird smashing itself against the cage of my ribs. But I decide I have to be brave. I reach for him again.
His reaction terrifies me. He pushes out the flat of his hand to meet mine, and I think, This is it. There’s no going back from this. I don’t know what’s happened, don’t know what’s been said, but if he thrusts me away physically my heart will break and I’ll go right back to being the Dylan of six months ago. Screw that, it’ll be worse, because once you’re out there’s no going back, and now I’ll be out alone. Not just alone either. I was alone for seventeen years, but at least then I didn’t know what the alternative could feel like. I didn’t have this…this fullness in my life – it’s a crappy description, but it’s the best I can do – so what will be left of me, when he goes?
Empty people don’t know they’re empty. It’s a kind of blissful ignorance, I guess. We can try to imagine something different – romantic movies, mushy love songs, other kids holding hands and smiling in that totally alien way – we can make believe we understand all of that. But we don’t. Not really. Not until it happens to us.
Suddenly the pressure of his fingers pushes my hand up to meet his, palm to palm. We stay like that for seconds that roll like oceans. Then he looks at me, finally, from under those endless lashes, and the pain in those tea-dark eyes is unbearable. Pain but no anger, no disgust. I rotate my wrist and feed my fingers between his.
“El, you scared me. You are scaring me.”
“I’m sorry.”
His voice is normal, or at least really well controlled. That’s what no one gets about El: they think he’s this impetuous, outrageous guy who says and does whatever he likes, and I guess that’s partly true. But we’re all contradictions, right? My boyfriend has been through stuff that would break the spirit of any so-called hero I’ve ever idolized in a comic book, but you’d never know it. Not unless you know him. Really know him. That’s why I’m not fooled by his voice.
“So…” He twists back around to sit square in the driver’s seat again. “How was Mike? Did you give him my message? He should really just shave his head completely. It would be like Professor X meets Jack Wills.”
Even after all this time, I can’t help but be impressed. I have no idea how he does this Control Alt Delete thing with his emotions. But I’m not having it. Not tonight.
“El, just stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Deflecting.”
“Hon, if you can’t take me complimenting your best mate then that’s your issue, not mine.”
“Jesus!” I throw my head back against the rest. “Will you cut the comedy routine for just one minute? Mike’s fine, okay? And I know you genuinely care, and you’d have asked anyway, but it’s still kind of disrespectful, you know?”
He blinks, again like I’ve scorched him. “Dylan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t, but it isn’t right, using Mike to wheedle your way out of this. But okay, let’s get it out of the way and then we can get back to whatever the hell is up with you.” I close my eyes. “So Mike’s having his chemo, and he’s tired, and he’s being brave and funny and caring, and he’s worried about us. And Carol’s gonna bake us a cake and march with us in Pride, and fuck!”
I burst into tears. Real, full-on waterworks with heaving and snot and hiccups, the complete melodrama. Unlike El, I do cry. It’s completely freaking ridiculous. Pixar movies, Oscar speeches, adverts with meerkats – I’m in almost constant danger of serious dehydration. But this feels different.
“Honey.” His long fingers comb through my curls. He cups the back of my neck, pulls me in, and I get the strong, sweet scent of him under his deodorant.
“Just tell me what happened,” I say. “This time, tell me.”
“It’s nothing.”
“El…”
He fixes me with his eyes. “All right then. It’s something. But I don’t want you mixed up in it. And anyway, it’s over.”
Okay, I’ve avoided it long enough – basically because even thinking about that time makes me sick to my stomach – but I have to say something now.
“Has this got anything to do with what happened in December?”
El disappeared on me over the Christmas break. Disappeared completely. No phone calls, no texts, nothing. We’d only properly got together the week before, and without him I tortured myself trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. When he came back to me in the new year, I accepted all his feeble excuses because I was just so relieved to have him back in my life. But honestly, I never believed his reasons for vanishing.
I don’t want to revisit that time – I can’t think of anything worse – but the fear I’ve seen in him tonight? It all feels like a horrible echo of Christmas.
El shakes his head determinedly. “No, Dylan. It’s nothing to do with what happened back then.”
I don’t want to push this but I have to. “You promised you’d never shut me out like that again. El, you promised.”
“And I’m not shutting you out,” he insists. “This thing, it’s different.”
“Well then…” My head’s reeling. I take a breath. “Is it someone else?”
“No, Dylan.” And when I try to look away he takes my chin and guides me back to him. “There is no one else. There won’t ever be anyone else. You dope.” He grins that crooked Ellis grin, brighter than Broadway neon, and the pain in his eyes becomes a memory. “Don’t you know by now? Right, here goes…I can’t believe I’m actually going to say this.” He laughs and makes a grab for my ribs with tickling fingers. “You’re the one, Dylan. You and your gorgeous freckles and your gingery hair and your moley bum and your geeky history stuff and your comic-book crap and your so-cute-it’s-actually-annoying shyness and your eternal klutziness and your passion for Starburst sweets and YOU.”
He releases me and I fall back into my seat, laughing, glowing.
El’s laughing too, and then his predictable switch kicks in.
“It’s you, Dylan,” he says, his voice almost cracking. “And I know you think for some insane reason you don’t deserve to be loved by me, but that makes you just about the most intelligent idiot I’ve ever met. I love you, Frecks. And it’s fairy-tale bullshit, I know, but I’ve sort of loved you ever since the first time I saw you.”
I sit there, stunned.
“You can’t have,” I say quietly. “All I was doing was standing gawping at you.”
El shakes his head. “You couldn’t see yourself. Your gawps are one of the best things about you. You know how everyone stared at me that first night at the bonfire? In I flounced, the new kid, all self-righteous and up
for a row, and I got these looks of shock and laughter and instant hatred and weird admiration – the usual glorious rainbow. But you? You looked at me without any judgement or expectation at all. You just looked as if you’d like to say hello.”
“And I did.”
“And you did.”
Shadows pass the steamed-up windows. Kids lurching, giving each other piggybacks, seventeen-year-olds playing tag.
“You saved me that night. You have no idea, but that’s exactly what you did. The way it ended with my family. The screams and swearing and unholy shit they threw at me after I told them. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’m still me. I’m still Ellis. Still your son.’ And then Dad knocked me to the floor and my mum stepped right over me and started packing my clothes. And I was just lying there, watching my little sister in her playpen. She didn’t cry or anything. She just squatted down in her nappy and reached through the bars with her chubby little arms and she picked up my tooth off the carpet and she…” He takes a huge swallow. “She held it out for me. ‘Ellis’s,’ she said. And then I was in the street and Dad was throwing tenners in my face and Mum was behind him shouting, ‘Don’t you ever come back!’” El looks at me, his expression so desolate it breaks my heart. “You know how you cope with that, Dylan? You either become more you than you’ve ever been before, or you curl up and die. But it’s a hard act, you know? Straining all the time to be who you need to be. And then I came here and I got up that stupid petition—”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I tell him.
“And I see this cute comic-book geek,” he continues, “his face glowing in the bonfire light. I ask him to sign my petition. And he does. And while he’s signing, I can see he just wants to say hello. Because he really would like to know me… Ha! You scared the crap of me, you know?”
“Wait. I scared you?”
He laughs and presses his forefinger to my nose. “Yes, Frecks. Because I thought, what if he gets to know me and I disappoint him?”
“You’re an idiot,” I laugh.
“I don’t know.” He turns and draws a perfect circle on the driver window. “I’m pretty good at disappointing people.”
“You won’t.” I grab his shoulder, but he keeps his back turned. “It’s us now. Just us. You and me, El, forever.”
He sighs. “No such thing as forever, Frecks.”
We’ve been driving for five minutes or so when I circle us back round to the fear that still gnaws inside me. When I start questioning him again, El cuts me short.
“Please, Dylan,” he sighs, “I swear I will be your servant for an entire week. You can ask me to do your homework, walk the dog, give you massages without me getting pouty and expecting one in return, if you just agree to drop it.”
“Ellis, I don’t have a dog for you to walk, I wouldn’t let you within a mile of my homework, and…well, okay, the massage thing might have swung it for you, but you matter more to me than scented oils and erections.”
He flaps a hand over his heart. “That is the single sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
But it’s my turn to jackknife the tone. “I want to know what happened. Listen, if some bastard upset you back there—”
“Enough.” He doesn’t shout but there’s a definite finality to the word. “Dylan, I don’t ask you for much. In fact, apart from the odd shoulder rub, I don’t really ask you for anything, but I’d just like this one thing: let it be. It’s done. Over. It doesn’t affect us.”
“Of course it bloody affects us,” I shoot back. “Do you even remember what state you were in ten minutes ago? You are fearless, El, I mean it, but right then it was like you were trapped inside a nightmare or something.”
“Come on. Don’t be so melodramatic.”
He’s serious, I can tell. He hasn’t called me Frecks or Prof or McKee D for all of five minutes.
“It’s just, I never want to see you like that again,” I tell him. “And if I know why you shut down, why you pulled away from me, why you didn’t even seem to know who I was, well, then—”
“Then what? Then you’ll be able to protect me forever? My knight in shining armour?”
There’s nothing snide in what he says. It actually sounds kind of hopeful.
“If you like,” I say. “Look, I know I’m not Daredevil or The Punisher or anything. In fact, I’m more like Steve Rogers before he took the super-soldier serum and became Captain America. But I would fight for you, El.”
“And I believe you,” he says simply. And for some reason this infuriates me.
“It is, isn’t it?” I stare at him. “Whatever’s gone down tonight, it’s all to do with your vanishing act back in December. Why won’t you just tell me? Whatever it is, I’d understand.”
He nods. “I know you’d understand, Frecks. Of course you would. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to prove anything to me and I don’t have to tell you everything either. Despite what you read in your Teen Vogue magazine, relationships aren’t always about absolute disclosure. What matters is trust. So trust me – that thing back there was a moment of madness. A bit of stupidity and, what with everything else today, I had a kind of weird meltdown. Remember what I said about all that murky sewer water that flowed under my bridge before I hit Ferrivale? Well, maybe some of it is still swirling around my ankles after all. It won’t happen again.”
“You’ve promised that before,” I mutter.
We drive on in silence. For the second time in our relationship, it seems that whatever I say, El won’t open up. It’s then that I realize something awful: I don’t know my boyfriend. Not completely. Maybe I never will.
I crack my window. A slipstream of forest air. Trees billow in the early darkness, bursting with the smell of new life. Our school sits in the middle of town, just where Ferrivale’s quaint cobbled streets and picture-postcard shops give way to the crescent of lake and forest that divides houses like mine and Mike’s from the estate where El lives with his Aunt Julia.
While the trees flash by, I have a word with myself. So I’m reading a lot right now; this book on the Ottoman Empire, one on Japanese isolationism, and then this one on the American War of Independence, all in my spare time. Yeah, because I have so much of that at the minute, what with final exams and essays looming. Mr Morris says my “commendable but unfocused” love of history might result in me failing the subject altogether, just because I have this irresistible need to satisfy my curiosity. El made a face when I told him. He says education should be about just that – feeding irresistible curiosity. He has a point, but if I want to teach the subject myself one day, I have to pass these exams.
Anyway, the American Revolution, the Battle of Monmouth, 1778 (I’m kind of anal about dates): this guy, Major General Charles Lee, has the British in retreat. Everything’s going great for him, more or less, and then for no reason anyone can really understand, Lee orders his men to retreat. He’s turned victory into disaster and General George Washington basically bitch-slaps the hell out of him, right in front of Lee’s own troops. All this strikes a chord. I’m Lee. All through my relationship with El I’ve been advancing a bit and then retreating. I’m not sure why. Maybe El’s right, maybe it’s because I think I’m unworthy of him. Screw that, I am unworthy. Jesus, just look at him. But I’m done with acting out my own personal Battle of Monmouth.
I’m done retreating.
“Okay.” I nod. “I’ll let it go.”
El turns to look at me, his smile full of relief.
“But,” I add, “this is the last time. You never told me what went on with you at Christmas, not really, and you’re holding back again now. So promise me: no more secrets.”
“All right,” he says quietly. “I promise.”
El’s headlights splash along the forest road, and I give his promise a moment to bed in.
“So,” I sigh, unkinking the stress in my neck, “where are we going?”
“Home, of course.”
“Oh. Yours or mine?” I can’t hide my disa
ppointment. It’s a warm night, full of the kind of possibilities that home won’t allow.
“Neither,” he says. “Ours.”
I grin. “Hideous Beauty?”
He nods. “Check the back seat.”
I glance over the headrest. There’s the wicker hamper from yesterday’s surprise rooftop picnic, one of the sides pushed up, a bottle of red wine poking out. And so the weirdest, but also the most amazing night of my life is about to get a lot more amazing! I can picture it already.
Moonlight in the belfry, the bottle empty, our lips plummy with the aftertaste. The tartan blanket on the groaning wooden planks, rolling and twisting under us. Kisses, caresses, firmness, softness, teasing and tender promises, all under the watch of the gargoyle that El has sketched over and over since I first took him to the ruined country church. Stanley, El’s nickname for our stone protector, will stand watch, keeping us safe from any darkness that might threaten us.
I turn back to El, grinning. “You planned all this? When?”
He shrugs. “However it went today, I thought you might need this.”
God, he is a genius. First the school dance and now this.
“Where’d you get the wine?”
“I have my contacts.” He winks. “And I learned my lesson, by the way. All the food I’ve brought is the most God-awful crap. Pizza slices, crisps, bottles of Coke, chocolate cake. Not a single piece of fruit for the junk-food junkie.”
He smiles. Then, taking a hand from the steering wheel, starts tracing images with his swift expressive fingers. He tells me what will happen tonight. He paints aching pictures with words, with the heavy silences between words, with the sudden flares and then the slow rolling of his fingers. It’s then I realize just how pitiful my imagination is by comparison. The images of us in the belfry become vivid, the voices keener, the promises sweeter, the touching a thousand times more varied. I listen and I watch and my throat runs salty. I hope I can live up to all this.
Hideous Beauty Page 3