18. Stuck With You

The calm is over, now onto he storm.

Waking up in a hotel room is a kind of a weird feeling. It’s like waking up in a temporary home; one that’s more nicely put together and homely than where you actually live, but however comforting it may be it’s still just for a night. Or maybe a few nights, but still. I’m sure you understood that temporary comfort, since you were laying in bed right beside me, your head on my shoulder, your bare arm hanging out of the blanket and resting over my stomach

I felt kind of weird just watching you sleep, like some kind of voyeuristic creep, but I didn’t want to wake you, and it’s not like I could go anywhere with your unconscious head on my shoulder. So I just lay there with you, and without thinking about it my eyes wandered to your face. In your sleep it looked so different; still beautiful of course, but it seemed completely new without any passive expressions that were hard to read, without the defenses you put up for everyone. You sleeping in the same space as me, allowing me to see your face like this, felt like some kind of privilege; it was surreal to think I would be trusted with something so beautiful and perfect.

I gently ran a hand through your short, orange hair. I had forgotten it was like that. Suddenly you didn’t look quite the same. My curiosity got the better of me and I slowly peeled down the blanket covering your side, taking another look at the strange cloth thing wrapped around your upper torso. You called it a ‘binder’ and wore it all the time now. At that moment, every thought I had up till then began to feel melancholy and wrong. I pulled the blanket back over your chest and looked away for the remainder of the time you slept.

“Richie…” you spoke softly as you woke up, your voice raspy and tired.

“Good morning.” I said as you got up off my shoulder and moved over to grab your glasses from the nightstand. You sat back down beside me, gently grasping my hand with yours and interlocking our fingers.

“Look at the sunrise,” you said, your eyes drifting to the window beside us. “Isn’t it nice?”

The morning light slowly but surely made its presence known as dawn settled in.

“Yeah,” I replied, watching it with you and clutching onto your hand tighter. “It is.”

You kissed my cheek, then rested your head on my shoulder again, and in complete silence we watched the new day begin.

What I wouldn’t have given to let that sunrise last forever.

Monday

Sometimes two people can have a connection nobody else understands. It can draw them to each other like some cosmic force deciding their fates. They won’t always know what to make of it, but they’ll know neither of their lives will ever be the same again. That cosmic force that binds them together can sometimes be amazing; a miraculous blessing that falls into their lives and gives a meaning to it they were unaware it lacked. Those times are the times we live for. But that force can also be a curse. It can be an ethereal prison shackling them to one another, left to sort out whatever mess it accidentally created. As he stared out through the car window, out into the world that seemed to carry on spinning without him, I knew Theo understood all this better than anyone else.

“Talking to her was surprisingly the easy part,” he sighed, still staring out into space. “It’s explaining this to her parents that’s gonna be the hard part.”

“What about yours?” I asked. “Do they know?”

“Moms does. My dad, not yet. He’s gonna lose his mind.”

“Maybe,” I replied, trying to sound honest but not insensitive. “He’ll get used to it at some point, though.”

“Man, V still hasn’t. I don’t know if it’s her hormones being thrown off by the baby or something but she absolutely hates me right now. I can barely even get her to talk.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in days, which he probably hadn’t.

“It’s so crazy, man,” he continued. “Me and her were this close to never talking to each other again. And now here we are, stuck together for life. Who knows, maybe in some weird way that’s what I wanted deep down. But if I’d known it would be like this…”

“It’s not over, bro,” I said, not even knowing if I fully believed that. “Right now you can’t let the stress of the situation get to you, you gotta focus that energy on figuring out exactly what you’re gonna do.”

“There’s only a few things I can do. I could try my hardest to talk V into getting an abortion. Or, I could just dip and leave her on her own, which she might actually prefer.”

“You say that, but you sound like you’re not gonna do either.”

“I’mma do what I have to do. Regardless of what she says, or anyone else for that matter. I’m gonna step up and raise my kid.”

“Aren’t you scared how different it is now? You had the rest of your life ahead of you and now…”

“Now, this is the rest of my life. Stuck whether I like it or not. I could sit around feeling sorry for myself, or I could get up and do something good for once in my life.”

Theo elected to skip homeroom and spend that time napping in his car, so I entered the building by myself. Despite the hundreds of other students around me, I was alone with my thoughts, as scary a concept as that had become in the past few weeks. When I got to homeroom, I made my way to my usual seat in the back corner of the room and threw my earbuds in to drown out my own head, to little avail. I felt guilty that even though I spent all morning consoling Theo about he and V’s parental situation, all I could think about was my own stupid life and its complications. It was bittersweet, because that of course meant thinking of you.

I had gone my whole life up to that point without ever questioning certain things about myself. I figured everyone did; you know who you are and you should at least have a solid idea about who you’re going to be. Yet here I was, my experience knowing you seemingly re-writing who I was.

You always hear people talking about queer sexuality and their self-discovery of it, making it seem like it could happen to anyone at any stage in their life, but that doesn’t prepare you for it; you never feel like it could happen to you until you’re confronted by it head on and everything you know is shattered. Then again, even when you’re confronted by it, it’s still hard to understand. Every gay person I’ve ever heard talk about it always describes it as some underlying feeling that was always there beneath the surface waiting to come out, but that wasn’t what I was going through at all. I had never, ever, ever had any feeling or inclination like this until you came into my life. And if you hadn’t, I doubt I would be here in my own head grilling myself.

But is that true? Am I… Well, you know. I mean, if I wasn’t, would it be so hard to say even in my own freaking thoughts? Maybe all this stress was just me fighting to not acknowledge it because I have some society-instilled, preconceived notion of what normality was supposed to be, and despite all my desperate clamoring for a sense of individuality, maybe I’m just as brainwashed into conformity as the people around me I make fun of, too brainwashed to see what I really was this whole time.

I tried to envision it in my head, being physically intimate with another guy. I thought of the males around me who were generally considered attractive, Theo and Grant Peters, and tried to picture what it would be like to hold hands and cuddle and kiss them. I got about three seconds into that fantasy before fighting my body to not convulse and projectile vomit.

Okay, so maybe that’s not the approach to finding out. I then tried to picture you, they way you wanted yourself to be: a fully passable man, devoid of any visible femininity. But no matter how much I strained myself, my mind refused to process that thought. Your braided ponytail or eyeliner or plaid skirts would always pop up and destroy the illusion. I sighed out loud as my thoughts became clear. At least wasn’t questioning myself anymore. My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I pulled it out to see a text from you. Simply, “We need to talk.”

As soon as the bell rang I made my way to your locker. As I approached, you were standing there, leaning against it, looking distressed. I tried to ignore your jeans and polo shirt as I walked up to greet you.

“Hey.” I said as you noticed me there.

“Hey.” you replied, a distressed look on your face in place of your usual half-smile.

“I haven’t seen you since the hotel… Is something wrong.”

“No. Yes? I’ve just been thinking.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Maybe it’s not. Look, what happened at the hotel was a mistake.”

That was a knife to my side I wasn’t expecting. “It was?” I asked, sounding more hurt and vulnerable than I could control.

“Not what we did,” you corrected. “I don’t regret that. I just mean letting you call me by my other name, that was the mistake.”

“Oh…”

That was a relief, but also confusing. You seemed to notice it in my reaction and sighed to yourself before speaking again.

“You know by now talking like this isn’t my strong suit, but obviously I still feel the same about you that I always have, and you must still feel the same about me. But you can’t keep thinking of me as a girl.”

I wanted to say ‘I’ll try, Jason.’ or something, but my mouth couldn’t form that name while my eyes saw you.

“I’m sorry,” I cracked. “I’ve never been in this situation before.”

“Believe it or not, I haven’t either.”

You gave a distressed sigh to calm yourself, then reached out to my hand and held it tightly.

“Richie,” you spoke, your voice as sincere and defenseless as I’d ever heard it. “I need you to see me for what I am.”

The bell rang. With one last hopeful glare into my eyes and the tightening of your hand, you let go and hurried off to your next class. I stood there for a moment, just watching you walk away, once again alone with my thoughts.

Walking through those hallways now put my life into a new perspective. All the time I spent bitter, feeling like my life was being drained away by this infernal place, now suddenly felt like time I had taken for granted. These halls were filled of memories I didn’t know I would be making; reflections of a time where the life ahead of me was an open mystery, and where every day brought surprises and connections. If only the halls still felt like they used to, when I was laughing and joking with my friends with the future too far away to worry about.

“Richie,” a familiar voice called out. “Wait up.”

Steve McLeary came speed walking up behind me. But for the first time since I’ve known him he wasn’t by himself. He was holding hands with a girl. I was trying to think of where I knew her from and quickly realized she was the one I had pointed out to him at prom. She was holding his hand, blushing and fighting back smiles. He, however, looked nervous and shaken up.

“Yo,” I answered, caught a little off guard. “What’s up?”

“You haven’t heard yet?”

His voice was timid, as if holding back something.

“No?” I said with a raised brow. He and Random Prom Girl 4 exchanged glances with each other, her face expression now also looking scared and concerned.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“Travis,” he explained with a sigh. “He was really mad at you after what happened at prom, and… I don’t know how to tell you this.”

I had almost forgotten about the Travis incident at prom, or rather I willfully avoided thinking about it. Nobody in our circle of friends had heard from him since then, so I was clueless as I tried to reason what it was Steve was hesitating to tell me.

“Spit it out, man.” I urged. He didn’t say anything at first, he just pulled out his phone and began scrolling through it.

“Look,” he prefaced. “I don’t know who was there and took this picture but whoever it was sent it to Travis and now he’s sending it to everybody.”

“Picture?” I repeated, still unable to grasp what was going on. “What picture?”

He held his phone in front of my face, and I saw it. My heart felt like it stopped, and my throat clenched tight. One of the dozens of people at Jenny Allen’s hotel must’ve been drunkenly stumbling around in the middle of the night, because the picture on Steve’s phone was one of me and you. It was from pretty far away, you could tell this person barely stepped into the room, but it was unmistakably us. We were asleep, your head on my shoulder, our bare arms protruding from the blanket and cradling each other. There was a snapchat caption added under us, reading ‘lmao look at these f*****s’

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