Instafamous

by Marcus Herzig

  FUBSTRD: Gym! Now!

  “He wants to see me,” I said, finally looking at Jordan.

  Looking back at me, he said, “So?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He shrugged. “You guys have stuff to talk about, and you can’t avoid him forever.”

  That much was true. Ben was in our history class in the first period also. I was gonna have to confront him sooner or later. I sighed. “All right then. If he makes it to class and I don’t, call the police.”

  “You bet,” he said, and we fist-bumped again.

  When I made it to our secret spot behind the gym, I found Ben waiting for me, nervously taking drags on a cigarette. I was gonna ask him since when he’d started smoking, but then I didn’t because I didn’t really care, and I wasn’t going to kiss him anyway. Not today, and probably never again. That realization, which had come to me overnight, emboldened me, and so I emerged from the bushes with my head held high, looking Ben straight in the eyes.

  “Okay,” I said, “what do you want?”

  For a moment he was too perplexed to reply. Then he dropped his cigarette, scowled at me and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, Noah? How could you tell this freaking weirdo I’m gay?”

  “I’m pretty sure I never mentioned that word. But I needed to talk about that blackmail thing with someone. You know, someone sane.”

  He grabbed my collar and pushed me against the wall of the gym, driving the air from my lungs. “I should beat the shit out of you.”

  I raised my arms and pushed him away. “Don’t touch me, asshole! Get a grip on yourself already. You got us into this fucking mess, and in case you haven’t noticed it yet, we’re in this together. But you’re on this goddamn ego trip the whole time as if this whole thing is just about you. Guess what, it’s not. I’m in this game too, and I’m no longer playing because I’m not your little bitch. Well, not anymore anyways.”

  He glared at me, hyperventilating, his fists clenched. “What are you talking about?”

  “What I’m talking about is go fuck yourself. Because you’re not gonna fuck me, and you’re definitely not gonna fuck me on camera. I’m not gonna commit a felony so some anonymous dickhead can jerk off to it just because you don’t have the guts to come out.”

  “We have to do what he says,” Ben said in a low voice that was trembling with fear. “Or he’s gonna destroy us.”

  “We are destroying us if we keep playing along with this shit. Don’t you get it? This is only gonna get worse. It’s never gonna end unless we put an end to it. We should have done it a long time ago, but we can still do it before it gets a hundred times worse.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to the police. I’d rather kill myself.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “You don’t want to go to the police, so let’s not. And I’m not gonna have sex with you on camera. So let’s not. There, we’ve reached a compromise. Well done. Who knows, maybe he is only bluffing. Maybe he’s only testing us to see how far we would go, and if we don’t play along, he’ll leave us alone.”

  Ben exhaled. “What if he doesn’t?”

  “What if the next time he asks us to kill a dog or rob your grandma? Where you gonna draw the line?” When he didn’t reply, I added, “I’m drawing my line right here. If you can’t accept that, you’re gonna have to kidnap and rape me. Anyway, I have to get to class.”

  “Noah, wait,” I heard him say, but I was already on my way through the bushes, and I didn’t stop or turn back. I was feeling strangely subdued. There was no adrenaline high, no euphoria this time. Where I’d previously had one problem, I now had two, and it was hard to imagine that Ben would simply accept my decision without a fight. We still had six days, and if Ben kept pestering me, he might catch me with my defenses down, and in a weak moment I might end up giving in to him after all. I briefly considered staying home sick for the rest of the week, just to keep out of his way, but my mom wasn’t going to play along with that until I was basically dying. And I probably wasn’t any good at faking to be dying.

  I made it to class just in time. Jordan caught my eye as I was walking to my desk, and he immediately cast a glance past me at the door, looking for Ben, but Ben wasn’t coming. As Mrs. Pomeranc closed the door and I slid into my desk, Jordan turned to me and whispered, “He’s not lying in a puddle of his own blood behind the gym now, is he?”

  I shook my head. “If he is, it wasn’t me.”

  He squinted at me as if he was trying to fathom some hidden meaning in what I’d just said. If there was, I didn’t know what it was.

  Ben arrived to class five minutes late. When he walked in and closed the door behind him, Mrs. Pomeranc just motioned him to his seat without even interrupting her raving review of General MacArthur at the Battle of Inchon. It was another fine example of people letting get Ben away with things they wouldn’t let anyone else get away with. Being late for class would usually earn you a disapproving look at the very least, and more likely an email to your parents, but not so for Ben. No wonder he thought everything would always be coming up roses for him. It was a fateful misjudgment.

  He kept his eyes on the floor as he walked to his desk, carefully avoiding to look at me or Jordan. When Ben had taken his seat two rows in front of us, Jordan looked at me, his eyebrows raised. I looked back at him and shrugged.

  TEN

  The week dragged on at an excruciatingly slow pace. Dazed and confused like in a fever dream, I hardly noticed anything that was going on around me and I was too preoccupied to care. At one point Jordan saved my life when he stopped me from walking into traffic on our way to school. Accompanied by a honking car horn, he slapped my face. Hard.

  Rubbing my stinging cheek, I looked at him. “Wha—”

  “Oh, good, you’re awake. Watch where you’re going and try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  We hardly talked twenty words all week. There was nothing to talk about. Ben was eerily restrained. He kept ignoring me as always, but I noticed how he wasn’t his usual happy-go-lucky self either. He didn’t smile. He hardly talked to anyone. The sparkle in his eyes that had always been one of his most charming and enticing features had all but died. On Wednesday, when members of his posse teased him for being in a foul mood on his birthday, he proved them right by flipping over his lunch tray and stomping out of the cafeteria, his fists clenched, his friends flummoxed. The next day, he bought himself a sandwich that he then nibbled on, sitting all by himself on a bench outside. I was almost beginning to feel sorry for him.

  “Don’t,” Jordan said when he caught me looking at Ben through the cafeteria’s glass front.

  I shook my head, continuing to eat my stir-fried veggies.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

  I nodded, and Jordan said no more. When he got up to return his tray at the end of lunch hour, I asked, “Wanna hang out later?”

  “I got chores today,” he said after a long pause, and I felt a sting in my sinking heart. He’s trying to avoid you, I thought, but then he added, “It’s gonna be late. Six or seven maybe? If that’s not too late for you. I mean, it’s Friday so there’s no school tomorrow, so …”

  “Okay, cool,” I said, feeling a great sense of relief. Saturday was the deadline that was dangling over Ben’s and my head, and I was dreading being all alone with my thoughts the whole time. I needed someone to talk to, and maybe, deep down inside, I was even hoping for a hug. “My mom’s working late,” I added as if that made any difference.

  Jordan nodded. “All right.”

  I spent the afternoon lying on my bed, trying to catch up on the sleep I had lost the night before, but it was impossible. My mind was drifting everywhere except asleep. Every other couple of minutes I checked my phone to see if I had somehow missed a message from Ben. I was sure he’d make one last-ditch attempt to talk me into changing my mind. I wasn’t gonna let it happen, but he didn’t message me anyway. Maybe I had misjudged hi
m and he had finally come to accept the inevitable, and that’s why he had been in such a foul mood all week. Maybe he was mentally preparing for what was going to happen over the weekend and in school on Monday when every last student in our school would have spent their Sunday looking at me giving him a blow job in a toilet stall. Maybe I should throw myself down the stairs, I thought, so I’ll break an arm or a leg and I can stay home on Monday, but then I remembered we didn’t have any stairs. I tried to imagine all the looks and laughs and smirks from a few hundred students when I walked the school halls on Monday, and to my surprise I found the prospect oddly undaunting. I’d never really cared all that much about what people might think of me, and if they saw that video, they’d think I’m gay. Which I was. There would be teasing and homophobic bullying, none of which I’d never experienced before. It wasn’t gonna be pleasant, but it wasn’t gonna kill me either. A bigger problem might be the response of the school administration if they got their eyes on the video, which they most likely would. There was no way they were gonna appreciate our use of the school’s bathroom facilities for purposes not directly related to primary bodily functions, and they weren’t gonna find the argument that sex was a primary bodily function terribly convincing. So there were gonna be repercussions. Detention, at the very least. Probably a couple of weeks suspension, or, in the worst case, expulsion. That would be a pretty shitty outcome, but maybe us being blackmailed could be construed as a mitigating factor, even if the blackmail was an effect of our lewd actions rather than their cause.

  I made it just past six o’clock before I lost my nerves and messaged Ben.

  NoahSimm: u ok?

  I waited. One minute. Five minutes. Ten. I was surprised he didn’t reply, worried even. I had assumed he would jump at the chance to talk if I made the first step. He had to take it as a sign of weakness on my part, a sign that I might be wavering in my decision after all. So why didn’t he text me back? Had he already given up and accepted what was going to happen? I found that hard to believe. Ben was not a giver-upper. He knew that if you were three runs down at the bottom of the ninth with two out and the bases loaded, a curveball could decide a ballgame one way or the other. Suddenly it occurred to me that his silence might indicate something much more alarming than just a guy who was sulking, and that’s when I got really, really scared, so I sent him another message.

  NoahSimm: 714-555-0142 if u wanna talk

  When he didn’t call me within ten seconds after I’d hit the send button, I slid the phone in my pocket and made my way to the living room where I plopped down on the sofa and turned on the TV. After randomly flipping through the channels for a while, I ended up with some tepid police drama, interrupted in regular intervals by commercials for German cars, over-the-counter painkillers, and mesothelioma class action lawsuits. They all made my eyelids heavier and heavier until I finally dozed off.

  I woke up when my phone started ringing in my pocket. Disoriented and with blurry vision, I pulled it out and looked at the screen. Unknown number. I accepted the call and put the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. Not complete silence but the sound of a cellphone mic picking up the sound in a closed space where no one spoke, with faint noises in the distance that might have come from road traffic or a TV, and somebody breathing.

  “Ben?” I said.

  “Noah.”

  “Ben.”

  “I can’t do this, Noah,” he said, his voice sounding weak and frail. “This can’t happen. It can’t.”

  “You need to calm down, Ben,” I said, even though he sounded perfectly calm, but I could tell that his mind was in turmoil. “We’re in a bad place, I know. But there is no way back. We messed up and we can’t turn back time and undo what we did. The only thing we can do is prevent things from getting a hundred times worse. It’s the least of all evils.”

  “You don’t understand, Noah. I can’t be gay. I can’t have people know I’m gay.”

  “These are two different things,” I said. “You are gay. It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, and it’s not something you or anyone can change. If you don’t accept that, how can you expect anyone else to ever accept it?” He didn’t reply, but I heard him sob. “How can you expect anyone to ever accept you for who you are if you can’t even do it yourself?”

  “My uncle is openly gay,” he said, his voice suddenly a little firmer and stronger than before, as if he saw hope in the fact.

  “Well, there you go. You’re not alone. If your uncle is openly gay, he will surely support you if … when you’re out. He’ll be the first person to have your back. That’s a start, and you can take it from there.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, sounding all whiny again. “You don’t understand. He came out a few years back and … my dad, he didn’t take it well. He didn’t say it to his face at first, but I heard him talk to my mom about it. He said his brother isn’t normal. He said he’s sick and he’s going straight to hell and he deserves it. But he wouldn’t say it to his face. For a couple of months he still tolerated my uncle coming to visit, but he’d never speak a word with him. He’d just put on a grumpy face and pretend my uncle didn’t even exist. Then …” he sobbed again. “Then one day … it was my fourteenth birthday, and all the relatives were there, grandparents, cousins, everyone. And my uncle came by and he hugged me and rubbed my back and wished me a happy birthday, and my dad snapped. He told my uncle to get his filthy hands off me and never touch me again. ‘You’re a sick bastard,’ he said, ‘and you’re going to hell where you belong, but I’m not gonna let you make my son gay.’ Then he threw him out of the house and told him to never come back and never talk to me again.”

  I had no idea what to say, but wanted him to hear my voice, just so he knew I was still there, still listening, so I swallowed down the lump in my throat and said in a low voice, “Oh Ben.”

  “That was some birthday party, I can tell you. After he’d thrown my uncle out, my dad kept ranting and raving against gays, and there was no one, not a single person who dared to contradict him or tell him to stop. They were all too scared that if they defended my uncle, my dad would pounce on them too. It was … I don’t even know. I wanted to run away or crawl into a hole or something, but I had to stay there and pretend I was having a happy birthday, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what my dad would do if he knew the truth about me.”

  “I’m so sorry. But—”

  The shrill ringing of the doorbell interrupted me and I winced.

  “Who’s that?” Ben asked, sounding alert. “Is that your emo friend?”

  “What?” I said, making my way to the door. “No, no, that’s … uh, my mom ordered Chinese. Wait, let me go to my room.” I didn’t want Ben to hang up. No matter what had happened between us before, I couldn’t leave him alone now. He was not in a state of mind where he should be left alone.

  “Is there something going on with you and … him?” he said.

  I opened the front door. Jordan opened his mouth, and immediately closed it again when he saw I was on the phone.

  “Jordan,” I said both to Ben and to catch Jordan’s attention. When he looked me in the eyes, I put my finger on my lips to silence him, and I motioned him inside. As he closed the door behind himself, I continued, “His name is Jordan. And we’re just friends. Am I not allowed to have friends? You have dozens of friends. I have only one.”

  Jordan flicked his head at my phone with a questioning look. I put my finger on my lips again, then I turned on the speaker so he could listen in.

  “Of course,” Ben said in a low voice. “At least you have someone you can confide in. I have no one. Not even Troy, not even Tyler, and I’ve known them my entire life.”

  Jordan rolled his eyes. I looked at him and shrugged. “Don’t say that. You have so many friends, and most of them won’t even give a damn that you’re gay. Not if they’re real friends. And you can always talk to me if you want to. And maybe you can even see your uncle agai
n.”

  “I’m still seeing him.”

  “You are?” I said, raising my eyebrows and looking at Jordan. He raised his hands and shook his head, having no idea what we were talking about.

  “I love my uncle,” Ben said. Then he realized how weird this sounded, given the context, and he added, “I mean, not like that. Nothing inappropriate or anything. He doesn’t even know I’m gay. It’s just … he’s a good man, you know? He’s funny. And kind. We meet once a month or so. Have pizza or go and see a movie. Or just talk.”

  “That’s great, Ben.”

  He snorted. “If my dad ever finds out, he’s gonna kill us both. He’ll kill me for being gay and then he’ll kill my uncle for making me gay. I can’t let that happen.”

  Jordan frowned at me, and I shook my head. “Look, Ben—”

  “I can’t let any of this happen, Noah. I’m sorry. I have to end this.”

  Jordan and I looked at each other, our eyebrows raised. “Whoa, whoa,” I said, “hang on, Ben. What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t live like this, Noah. I’m sorry. I can’t. I have to end this. It’ll be quick and easy, and then it’ll all be over. The fear. The pain. The humiliation.”

  Jordan grabbed my arm and whispered, “He’s gonna hurt himself!”

  Covering the phone with my hand I whispered back, “Call 911!”