Honesty Read online

  The silence filled up with all the things I wasn’t telling him, all the things I’d never told him, all the things I still had no idea how to tell him. Like how my over two-hundred viewings of Titanic over the years had had much more to do with Billy Zane’s blue eyes than my “admiration for the special effects supervisors,” and like how I’d bought all of Hilary Duff’s albums as a kid for reasons that had nothing to do with the “huge crush” I’d claimed to have had on her. Even sitting here tonight, I could feel the weight of who he wanted me to be pulling down at my shoulders. And I knew my dad loved me – more than anything, probably. I was his only kid. That love just came with strings attached, and I didn’t know how much longer I could play this game without reaching up and snipping myself free, no matter where it made me fall. I wanted to say it back, too, but I couldn’t, so I hung up. I reminded myself to keep him in mind, no matter how much I wanted to be who my soul told me I was. I couldn’t forget that the South was an island of ignorance in this new world. I wanted to believe we were changing, with Pride marches and all the gays in the media and everything, but yeah, none of that stuff was really happening down here. We were a thousand miles away from New York, and we were stuck. I was stuck, too.

  I swore I could still hear my father’s voice knocking around in my head until well past midnight. Would he still love me when he knew the truth about me, or did he just love who he wanted me to be?

  And I could see two other things, too, shining at me from the blackness of my mind…

  Those damn galaxy eyes.

  The next day I saw Nicky, my forbidden fruit. He dropped his head, licked his lip, stared at me with all the intensity in the world, and then walked away. He still wouldn’t talk to me, but for now, this was enough.

  And soon I was starting to suspect he wanted me, too. Ever-so-slowly, he seemed to be warming up to me. It was like he was testing the wall between us, dancing up to it and then jumping back again. Sure, we didn’t talk or anything, but he was avoiding me less and less, and each day a little more of the angst would leave his face whenever he looked at me. And every time his eyes would hit me like a shot of whiskey, golden and warm and shimmering. The following week went like this, snapshots of a deepening obsession:

  Monday: I was getting some water at the fountain, trying not to think about him, when he brushed by me. Except he didn’t really brush me at all: he bumped me in a way that could not have possibly been accidental, then turned back and looked me right in my eye. And somehow, it made me remember that I was alive.

  “What’s up, buddy?” he asked me, his voice somehow overpowering like a techno song at full blast. He slapped me on the shoulder, and I realized how high it could make someone fly, just to be touched for the first time by the one that took up all the space in their brain. Then he was gone.

  But a second later, I felt eyes on me again. He was watching me, burning me, and I was his. All he had to do was say the word.

  Tuesday: He put my things away for me after the workout, my exercise band and my medicine ball and all that. He didn’t make any fuss about it or whatever, he just did it, quietly and dutifully. His presence made me panic and made me feel like I was floating on air all at once. I watched him, this sensation running over me like I’d just jumped into a cold pool, and I had no Earthly idea what to say.

  When he finished, I looked over. “Oh, thanks,” I pushed out, like it was the most difficult sentence ever produced. He smiled until he realized someone was watching, then jerked his head away. But I held onto that memory all day, and when I went to sleep, it still burned inside of me. His eyes – they were just too beautiful.

  Wednesday: Before the class leader took roll call, I stood by the front door for what seemed like centuries but was probably only three or four minutes. He never came.

  Thursday: a new sighting. New life in my veins.

  Friday: Nothing much had happened over the last few days, so I didn’t have very high expectations when I came into the gym. (Him: I was starting to realize I only ever thought of him as being “him.” I once read an article a pop star who was so megafamous, all her employees only referred to her as “she” because they were so afraid of her – I assumed this was something like that. I was pudding in his presence.) So I slumped to the gym only to have Nicky get a bar and put it down in front me. I looked up at him as my nerves started feeling more like nerves, clueless of what to say. He was too good looking and I was blinded. That was so cliché, but I didn’t know how else to describe it: when he looked at me, he was all I saw. The rest of the world became a fuzzy, inconsequential silence. The coach was prattling on about some local jump rope legend who had completed thousands of jumps in an hour or something, but I didn’t even pretend to pay attention as I stared at Nicky. In my eyes, he was the only legend.

  Sure, I wanted to be around him as much as possible, but weirdly, I almost started to treasure the scarcity of our run-ins, too, or whatever you wanted to call them. Because love and infatuation fell apart – my parents’ marriage had proved that – but I was getting the best of him, every day. He was like a song you loved immediately, but stopped listening to for a while so you wouldn’t ruin it. You could savor the best things for later, and Nicky was the best. I wasn’t being defeatist – just honest. Everyone in my life had walked away, but as long as he stayed ten feet away, I couldn’t mess things up and make him fully leave. He was mine to admire, just from a distance.

  Of course, I spent most of my free time stalking the living hell out of his profiles online, and soon I learned more about Nicky Flores than any stranger should ever know about anyone. (What was it about infatuation that made you abandon all logic and become a total psycho stalker?) Soon I knew all kinds of things I would never publicly admit: he was born the day before Valentine’s Day. He was kind to his mother. He seemed depressed. He had zero female friends. And he seemed imprisoned in the way society imprisoned all dudes who liked dudes, even if he buried it deep in his eyes. But the most shocking thing was this: I could not find a fault in him. He was flaw-free. Dangerously so. I was so used to forming crushes on people until I stalked them, only to find they were gross losers or something. But that didn’t happen with Nicky. There were no embarrassing bathroom selfies with a dirty toilet in the background; no ill-advised, grammatically incorrect political rants to let me know he was an idiot or – even worse – one of those self-loathing gay Republicans. I couldn’t find anything wrong with him, and it was a revelation. And not only that, but he also followed a few accounts that no straight guy would ever follow – pages for male models, fashion blogs, and so on. So maybe this wasn’t an impossibility – maybe he was waiting, watching, ready to stick a toe out of the closet and date me. There was so much I wanted to investigate further, and it drove me even crazier than I already was.

  After class on Friday, though, I forced myself to press pause on the Nicky thing and hit the streets for work. If I didn’t post anything soon, my boss would hit the roof again, and I couldn’t afford to abandon my life any more than I already had the last few days. My photo blog Honesty was mine, technically, but I’d joined the masthead at Void, an online network of local zines and blogs, and Honesty had somehow become the most popular part of the empire. It wasn’t really a job, per se, but I figured I’d ride it out for as long as I could and see where it took me. Basically I roamed the sidewalks, passing cafes and bars and bookstores like the stalker I was, and when I saw someone who looked like they had a story in their eyes, I’d ask them a few questions. I’d gradually get more and more serious until I’d hit rock bottom and dig down to their most basic truth, then I’d snap their photo and post it along with the best quote I could get from them. It didn’t always work, and sometimes people clammed up or even got offended when I tried to talk to them, but sometimes I struck gold. In the past two years I’d uncovered shocking and heartbreaking and mind-blowing bits of honesty, all from total strangers. Check out my last post, from a hollow-eyed guy in his forties who’d told me about the
death of his best friend while he sold hot dogs outside a Lowe’s home store:

  I wish I was strong enough to give my brother Eddie a hug the last night I saw him, but now he’s dead and I’ll never get the chance. I wasted so much of my life being strong for everyone else that now I’m all broken.

  I know, I know – heavy shit. It surprisingly wasn’t that hard to get people to spill, though, because I guess something about me had always been disarming. I could still remember when one of my best friends, Quinn, lost her dad on my seventeenth birthday. It was awful: he’d had a stroke and died while she was getting ready for school one morning. Brush your teeth, fix your hair, watch your dad collapse on the floor of the kitchen and pass away: what a morning. She left school for a week or two, and when I saw her for the first time, I smiled and hugged her and asked her if everything was good – and I never thought of it again. When I saw her months later, though, she came up to me and hugged me hard.

  “Whoa, what’s up?” I asked, and she looked me in the eye and told me I’d saved her.

  “What?”

  “You saved me,” she said. “That day I came back, I was famous for five minutes, and everyone wanted to gawk at the girl whose dad had been in the newspaper, treat me like I was wounded or something. But you were the only person who treated me like I was normal and asked me if I needed anything and…made me feel like the girl I was when I had a dad. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.”

  That was the day I realized I could really, truly make people happy just by making them feel comfortable, by making them feel heard, making them feel witnessed, like they mattered. Our generation was nothing until our pain was in lights, after all, so that’s what I did: I was the lights. Maybe because my life had been so messed up, I never judged anyone else when they told me about their problems – mostly because I had absolutely no room to judge them. My mother said that if my heart were any closer to my sleeve, I’d drop it on the ground. Strangers loved to spill their guts to me: drunk girls in bars cried to me about their exes, old women at the supermarket shared dreams they’d had about their dead husbands, a gruff construction guy at McDonald’s once told me his wife was dying from cirrhosis of the liver and he was so guilty about getting her hooked on alcohol, he’d taken a mistress in his own wife’s final days. All I’d done was turn this into a blog. I was freeze-framing shame or pride or terror and broadcasting it. Some magazine had just called me “the storyteller of the South,” and I had thirty-three thousand fans, a number that grew by hundreds a week. Each of my posts got around seven hundred likes and a few dozen comments. My guess was that since we were so used to being assaulted by lies all day – by the media, by your parents telling you everything was going to be alright, by your ex’s well-lit bikini selfie that made her look like a nine when she was really a six and a half – that when confronted by truth, people lost their minds. We didn’t know how to handle honesty, and that was proved every time I posted a truthbomb of a post and got a thousand likes. I made some money from it, and I didn’t really have to work because of that combined with the measly allowance my parents direct-deposited every month, but the blog was still local, and I was restless. Was this it for me? Wasn’t there something else out there? This couldn’t be all, right? A teenaged zombie, nineteen and dead inside?

  On Monday afternoon I found myself watching Nicky, once again, while simultaneously trying not to think about how good at everything he was. He wasn’t the strongest in the room – that honorable distinction went to the other members of the goon squad – but he was the most naturally athletic. Anything he tried, he excelled at, while I stood in the corner trying to master the extremely complicated art of the jump rope. I’d always despised and admired people like him, people who could charm the world just by being themselves. I still didn’t even know who “myself” was, but I did know that person didn’t charm anyone. It was like he was some other species, and it wasn’t even fair for us to be on the same playing field. How could he do himself to me? I was burning up for him, feverstruck, and barely seemed to care that I was alive.

  At the end of class, he walked slowly by me on the way to the water fountain. I felt every inch of his closeness to me: his orbit alone pulled me even closer. He looked even better up close, too. He was just as good as the dream of him had been. I was so sick of being let down by the real world: “freedom” had turned out to mean paying my own electric bill and having to figure out how to get my own medical insurance. But here in this gym, the reality of Nicky Flores was every bit as magnificent as the fantasy had been.

  “Good lifting today, Nick,” some girl said in a voice that sounded like ice cream on a hot day, and he blushed. Slut, I thought as my thoughts turned red. Girls would never understand how much easier they had it, how they could wake up in the morning and like boys and not be conflicted to the bone about it. And not only that, but they could get those boys to actually like them back, too. They had it so easy and they had no idea – straight people lived in a luxury they didn’t even know existed. I also hated Nicky in that moment, too – he obviously loved the attention. Whore.

  “Not as good as you,” he said with a goofy smile that made the concrete under me feel like it had been liquefied. The girl made a kissy sound and got on her bike, and all the while I wished it would crash. I enjoyed the effect of his perfection on me, sure, but when wielded on someone else, it made me want to burn myself. Both whores.

  But then he turned to me, and a blue planet stopped spinning. I swear I could even hear that dun-dun-dunnn sound from the movies. Was that normal? Was anything normal? Why did he make my body react like this? Why were humans and their bodies so effing weird, anyway? As he stood there I wondered more and more about him. What did he go home to? Did he love his father? Did his father love him? Who exactly was this alien? And did he know how happy he made me simply by existing? I also wondered what it was like to be him. He was the guy I’d always wanted to be, the guy my parents had always reminded me I wasn’t. A few details aside, he was strong and masculine and dark and handsome in a classically male way, and it didn’t matter what he was deep down, because he was “normal” enough to blend in. He didn’t have to hide at all.

  Meanwhile I was none of those things: I was skinny and blue-eyed and had wild hair that had once been strawberry blonde but was now more of a burnt coppery color, and I more closely resembled a middle-school art class kid than someone who was two years away from being legally able to buy alcohol. If someone wanted a hot bod and all that, I wasn’t exactly the best place to start. I guess I wasn’t totally fugly – actually, I’d been the unqualified hottie of the Episcopal High School Literary Lovers Club, thanks very much – I was just galaxies away from Nicky’s orbit, and that was totally apparent.

  He came closer. Caught by something foreign and whoosh-y, I let my defenses fall and smiled at him. Even though I was sure I was acting like a psycho, the sparkle didn’t leave his eye. He seemed to look around – to see if anyone was watching, maybe? – then licked his lip in that way that only he could make look natural.

  “Hi, Cole.”

  And all the oxygen in the world disappeared. Everything was a black, empty vacuum. Nicky had turned off all the lights.

  “Wh…hi?” I said, then I inched backward a bit, overcome by the sudden energy the air had taken on. It was like the atmosphere was thicker and heavier than it had been thirty seconds before. Nobody had ever made me feel like this, and I didn’t know how to process it. Didn’t he know I was off limits? Didn’t he know I was that faggot, social kryptonite, not to be messed with? Didn’t he know how reckless this was – for him, at least?

  His eyes sucked me in and pushed me away all at the same time. This could all be so beautiful, I thought, if we let it be. We were right in front of the door and the coach was starting to look, so I knew I had to say something, as impossible as the act of forming words seemed to be. The goons could look over at us any minute and see him talking to me, and it could all come tumbling down just like
that. The phrase “playing with fire” came to mind, but we were playing with the whole atomic bomb.

  “Aren’t you gonna run with the class?” I whispered, fully under his trance, since we were supposed to do a cool-down lap after every workout and everyone else had already left.

  He threw his eyes over to the coach, then looked back. “No,” he said softly. “I might be done running, anyway. From a lot of things...”

  In the end, I was the one who had to tear my eyes away and run around the stupid block.

  Sure, I was disappointed that he hadn’t said or done any more, but it was short-lived. Just as sleep started to take me that night, my phone pinged. I picked it up, and the words Nicholas Flores stared up at me. The boy with the galaxy eyes had added me on Facebook.

  Finally.

  4

  You win, he messaged after I accepted him, and of the lights in my mind flashed at once.

  I win what? I asked.

  I tried, but I just can’t NOT talk to you.

  And I could swear the sun had found a home in my throat.

  Well, hi, I responded. Took you long enough.

  What do you mean?

  You know what I mean. Why not just talk to me in workout class?

  He didn’t respond.

  You’re a bit of a strange one, aren’t you? I asked to move things along.

  All the best of us are. So what’s up?

  I didn’t know what to say. He’d basically ignored me just a few hours before, and here he was, wanting in. I had no idea what he wanted from me, actually.