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“What in the fuck happened to you?” Ginger says, blowing the gum out of her mouth like a spitball from a Bic pen. I shake my head in disbelief.
Ginger looks at Rex, who’s by my side again.
“Seriously, babycakes, what the fuck is going on?”
“Colin’s gay,” I say, and it’s a screech, like how my voice is after a particularly late night of bar tending when I’ve had to shout at people all night.
Ginger laughs uncomfortably and cocks her head.
“I don’t get it,” she says.
“Colin is fucking gay, Ginger,” I say. “I just saw him.”
She searches my face and when she sees I’m not joking or messing around, her mouth drops open.
“Holy…,” she breathes out.
Rex tries to put his arm around me, but I feel like fire ants are crawling all over me. I’m covered in dust from the floor of the shed; I can feel that there’s blood on my face in addition to tears, and traces of the puke taste are creeping back into my mouth. For all that, I can’t stand still. The idea of getting in the truck makes me nearly come out of my skin.
“I’m going to walk,” I say, though it sounds like every word scrapes my throat. “I’ll meet you guys at Ginger’s.”
“Are you kidding? It’s like six miles,” Ginger says.
“I’ll be fine,” I say, shoving some more gum into my mouth. “I just need to get some air.”
Ginger and Rex are looking sideways at each other in an extremely irritating way.
“I’ll walk with you,” Rex says.
“No,” I say. “Thanks, but you don’t have to. I’ll see you later.”
“It wasn’t a question,” Rex says, and tosses Ginger the keys to his truck.
I WALK in the general direction of Ginger’s, looking at the city I’ve lived in my whole life as if I’ve never seen it before. Rex trails along gamely beside me, not saying anything, but never letting me more than a few paces out of his reach. At first it’s fucking irritating and I want to turn and yell at him that I’m not a child. That I’ve gotten along just fine without him for this long and he can fuck off back home. But the truth is that I haven’t.
I haven’t gotten along just fine. In fact, I’ve barely gotten along at all. And always, always, some of it has been because of Colin.
I’ve been mad at him and—if I’m being honest—scared of him for so long that I’ve forced myself to forget that I used to worship him. When Mom died, he was the one I ran to after the nightmares woke me up. When I was eight and he was fourteen, I’d watch him get ready for high school, wishing that I looked just like him. He was the one who first got me into music, blaring rock stations whenever he was in the shop instead of sports radio. He had a great voice too, and he would wail along with Steve Perry, Axl Rose, and Freddie Mercury while he changed oil and rotated tires. I’d sit in the doorway to the kitchen and listen, thinking maybe we’d start a band someday. When I was ten and he was sixteen, even though by then he was too cool to bother with me, he crashed our dad’s car and broke his arm and I ran back and forth from the kitchen to the living room to bring him sodas and chips, desperate to make him feel better.
He was never exactly nice to me back then—he’d always pat me on the back a little too hard and take the last cookie out of my hand—but it felt fraternal, just regular brotherly shit, the same as he gave to Brian and Sam gave to him.
It changed before he ever found me with Buddy McKenzie, though. Around the time I was twelve or thirteen, I gave up on trying to be like the rest of them. I stopped pretending I was watching the football games or that I cared when they discussed the fall lineups. I didn’t hang out in the shop anymore, letting my dad tell me which tool was which. I stopped laughing at their unfunny jokes and pretending that I didn’t care when they “accidentally” ripped my library books. I stopped talking and asking questions. I pulled back every overture that I’d learned from experience would be met with disapproval and rejection because that’s when I knew.
Knew I was gay. Knew that I wanted to get the fuck out of that house. Knew that I wanted a different kind of life than beer and ball and cars. And they knew it too.
Colin was the worst, but it was all of them. They took it as disapproval. They became convinced that I thought I was better than them when the truth was that I just knew they would never like me if they knew who I really was and what I really wanted. Love me. They would never love me.
