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Being gay sucks. It’s not as bad as say, waking up to discover you have leukemia, but I think it ranks up there with being told you’re a diabetic. My Dad is a doctor so I tend to think of disasters in medical metaphors.
Being a diabetic means you have to look forward to not being able to eat where and when and maybe anything you like. You can’t go to parties because you can’t drink. And you are maybe going to go blind or have your legs cut off.
Being gay is gonna be just as bad. You can’t go to parties because nobody wants you. Boom. The instant anybody finds out, you’re right to the bottom of the cool pile along with the spastic kids from special education. Your best buds get nervous around you. Less than a week later they won’t want to hang out with you anymore. Uh, not this afternoon, Michael. I gotta do my homework. Right. The only homework Terry has ever done is copying from me or phoning me up wailing so I’ll read him my answers over the phone in the morning before school. But I could already picture it.
Maybe nobody’s going to tell you they have to cut your legs off because you’re gay, but what about getting AIDS, huh? I think I could live as a cripple, if I really, really had to. Nobody survives getting AIDS. When I was in elementary school there was a girl in our school who had it. She was a creepy little thing, a grade younger than me with a permanently runny nose. And every time anybody spoke to her or about her, their voices changed, into a sad little coo, kind of a murmur. The same thing is going to happen when people talk to me. Their voices will change, kind of laughing, embarrassed just to talk to me. And when I ’m not there, Wheee! The voices are going to go up, sing song like kids: Na-na-na-na-NAH-na. Michael’s-got-a-BOY-friend. She died. So I’m not gonna die of this. I don’t have to get AIDS. But at least they were trying to be nice to her.
Alright. I’d rather be alive and gay than dead. But it still sucks. I’ve got a terminal condition. I can’t fool myself. I’m going to be gay until the day I die.
I think gay guys had it easier in the fifties. I mean, back then you didn’t have to believe a thing like that about yourself. So I looked at Stewie Coburn and got a hard-on. So what? Musta been my tight pants. I mean, I’m still going to marry my high school date and have kids. I don’t got no other choice about it. At least they could pretend it wasn’t true, it wasn’t them. It just wasn’t so in those days. There was no Gay Rights movement.
But now you know, they still say. “It could be a phase…” But they smile pityingly. They don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the word they use to mean, get used to it slowly. Phase. Fuck that. Nope, It’s not a phase. I looked at Judy Whitemarsh’s tits, and all I could think of was how pink the nipples were. Looked like they were irritated or chapped raw. I wanted to say; don’t you want to put Vaseline on them, or something? And I looked at Stewie Coburn when he was standing in front of his locker, with his eyes almost gummed shut because it was just eight o’clock in the morning and his mouth hanging slightly open, goofy. And he reached down because he wasn’t awake enough to know where he was and he scratched his nuts. Boom. It wasn’t even like I could see what he had in there. Or that you could call Stewie Coburn remotely cute. He was wearing baggy grey sweats, he coulda been a eunuch, but it was enough anyway, knowing it was his balls he was scratching. My jeans get a swollen fly. Joy.
It was never going to be worth getting out of bed in the morning again. Ever. But it was Saturday. At least I could lie there and think about how my life was wrecked. I didn’t have to get up and rush off to school and slam right into faking normal. I punched my pillow.
Faking it, yeah. My life stretched out in front of me dolefully. Faking it. No way I was going to let anybody find out, make the big admission while I was still in high school. To thine own self be true, they say. Right, well to mine own self, being true was to cover it up so I didn’t become the butt of every joke in the school. The butt. That was a joke, got that?
So I’d just keep slogging along and I’d get a girl and I’d do the big thing with her, to prove it wasn’t so, just in case anybody ever got any suspicions about me. I hadn’t been intending to score with a girl. I hadn’t been in any hurry about it. But I’d better get around to it now. That was the plan. Fake it, pretend to be kewl instead of being a total loser, and then, as soon as I was old enough, blast out of here to some big city where I could lose myself in promiscuous gay sex in dirty public washrooms.
Yuck. What a life plan. I sat straight up in bed. No doubt about it. The idea set up a tiny tight frisson of interest in my lower belly. Lose myself in promiscuous gay sex in… As if I’d want to! But my body reacted to it all the same.
I pulled my jeans on. Then I took them off. I padded into my Dad’s bedroom in my Joe Boxers and borrowed a pair of his sweats. My jeans were snug. No telling who or what was going to give me a hard-on now. I’d take a leaf from Stewie’s book and wear my pants so loose that I could hide a football in the folds of cloth, much less a hard-on. Now I knew what short-term project I had in mind. I had to go out and buy myself the biggest, coolest baggiest pants I could find in the mall. Short term: buy a pair of pants I could hide in. Long term: find a girl and fuck her.
I went to the bottom of the stairs. “Mo-om!” There was no answer. I wandered in the direction of the kitchen. “Mom!”
My Dad was sitting at the table eating cereal. “She’s already gone out.” He looked tired. He always looked tired. I told you my Dad was a doctor. Well it was his fault I’m gay. He’s never around. He’s always getting up at the middle of the night to go in to work. Yeah. I’m gay because I have no kind of a father figure and I got raised by my mother.
And there goes my chances of convincing seventy bucks out of her to go shopping for pants. “Where has she gone?”
I must have sounded forlorn. My Dad looked up.
“I don’t know, Mike. She didn’t say.”
I eyed him, wondering how much money he had in his wallet. My Mom does all the bills. He’s always at the hospital. She has to do the finances or they’d never get paid in time.
“Morning, Mike.” He made an effort to look alive.
I took the cereal box. “You going in to work again today?”
“Not until one.” He smiled slightly for me. I sat down opposite to him and poured the cereal. Cheerios. No fat, no sugar, no preservatives. We eat healthily at our house. They taste good, though.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to make conversation, so we sat there and looked at each other and ate cereal. Maybe he noticed that I was looking at him instead of reading the cereal box. He was starting to look surprised.
“Dad,” I said. “What if I’m gay?”
A look of intense pain came over his face, like as if I’d just told him that I’d been booted out of Science class for the rest of the term for being caught cheating. He just looked at me.
“I mean, I think,” I clarified. I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Here I had planned on telling nobody. This was the kind of thing I didn’t want to tell anybody. Not unless I was much older. And I’d gone and told my Dad of all people.
“What makes you think you’re gay?” he said.
“I like guys.”
He ate his cereal at crawling speed. Maybe he’d forgotten to stop eating. He was moving in slow mo. The expression of stomach cramps still hadn’t left his face.
“Maybe you’re bisexual?” he said. “I mean, you can like guys and still like girls. You don’t have to commit to a lifestyle. You could still be both.” He started to look earnest instead of in pain. “You don’t have to think that because you had some feelings for guys that you won’t ever have feelings for girls. It’s possible to be both.”
“I was kinda thinking that,” I lied.
“They’re… er, strong feelings?”
I looked at the table. My Dad was embarrassed. I made it easier for him by not meeting his eyes. I doodled with the point of my spoon on the vinyl tablecloth. “Sometimes.”
I looked up again. My dad was looking very tired. I mean, very, very, really tired. I thought he might keel over and fall asleep in his cereal, just in order to get away from this conversation. He was sagging at the shoulders. That’s why I don’t talk to my dad much. He’s too tired to raise a son. But who else could I have told? It’s sex. It’s not supposed to be moms who talk to their boys about sex. It’s supposed to be the dad, who tells his son the facts of life. So I didn’t have to feel guilty that I had gone and told him when he was too tired to cope with it. We were just having a man-to-man talk. A man to girl talk, that is.
“I don’t think you have to make any conclusions about your sexuality,” my dad was saying carefully. “If you think you’re gay, you probably are. But this is a big…” He stopped. He was going to say decision. I know he was. He thought I had decided to be gay to get some attention. “…conclusion. You can give yourself some time, Son, to decide how much it means to you.”
“Don’t I get thrown out of the house?” I asked.
I scored. I made another look of pain cross his face. “You know… Your mother and I… Michael, you will always have a place here whether you are gay or not.”
I knew damn well he was going to say something like that, but I softened anyway when I heard it. “I don’t mean to be a bug, Dad.”
“You’re not. This is important.”
I looked down. “I don’t want anyone finding out.”
He said nothing. He looked grave.
“I figure I gotta hide it. Until I’m out of high school.”
He nodded. He was thinking that was a smart choice. To thine own self be true didn’t seem to carry much weight with him either.
I gave a sigh. “I don’t like this,” I said.
“You’re quite sure?”
“The diagnosis fits the symptoms a hundred percent,” I said glumly
He shrugged sympathetically. Then he started slowly. “You know Michael, if and when you decide to experiment there are certain risks associated with a gay lifestyle that are more pronounced than with boy and girl activities…”
Bingo, I thought sourly. AIDS. As soon as I admit I’m gay that’s the first thing anyone thinks about. Predictable. No wonder my buds are going to shun me like the plague. They’re going to think I DO have the plague.
“Any activity that involves genital contact…” he started.
“Yeah. I know.” I cut him off. “Exchange of bodily fluids. By mouth or by… Yeah. Use a condom. I know all that.”
“There’s, er, dental dams if you want to…” He trailed off.
“Want to what?”
There was a silence. He was too embarrassed to describe it. I was too embarrassed to ask. Shades of the possible, in a context that included my Dad, however peripherally, were inconceivable.
But he’s a doctor. He’s used to saying the un-sayable. “Oral-anal contact can be…”
“YUCK!”
Dad stopped short. I held my lips puffed like I was holding a mouthful of barf. “I am not going to experiment with that!”
“That’s good. But you know how to do it safely. A latex barrier.”
I stuck my tongue out like a gargoyle and grimaced with disgust. “I think I’m going to stay a virgin until I’m eighteen. At least! I don’t have to actually do anything with a guy, even if I want to in some funny way. There isn’t a single other gay guy at my high school so I won’t be able to find a…” My voice dropped on the dirty word. “…boyfriend, even if I wanted to.”
My Dad had managed to finish his cereal. I don’t know how. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?” I said. “I want to be the one to tell her.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
My cereal had congealed into a glutinous mass. I ate it anyway. My Dad got up and put his bowl in the dishwasher. “I’m going back to work,” he said.
“I thought you were going to have a lie down for a couple of hours,” I said.
“Somehow I don’t think I’d be able to get to sleep.” He went upstairs to take a shower.
I went mooching down to Guy’s house. I didn’t have to avoid my buds as long as they didn’t know about it yet. I really should have been hunting up a girl but I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t have any girl’s phone number.
Stewie and Guy were shooting baskets in the drive. I bounced in and intercepted Stewie’s ball. “Hey, guys!” I tossed it at the hoop and Guy failed to intercept it. They were both just shambling. I stopped short. A surge of terror ran through me. Oh God, they got suspicions and they don’t want to hang out with me already!
“What’s amatter?” I said.
“Nothin’” said Guy.
“What?” I repeated. They weren’t trying to avoid my eyes, just looking worried and puzzled. They were preoccupied, that was it. I caught the ball again and held it, and nobody called a foul.
“Ain’t nothin’,” Guy said.
“That asshole, Wayne says he’s going to off himself tomorrow,” Stewie said.
“He is?” We stood there in the driveway, forgetting to play.
“Why?” I said.
“I dunno.” Stewie rubbed his nose with the heel of his palm.
“He’s got to have some reason,” I said.
Wayne was Guy’s best bud. He lived in the house next door to Guy’s. He was probably looking out of his bedroom window at us just at this moment. With a major effort I kept my head from turning so that I didn’t look up at the glass.
“He’s really going to do it,” Guy said. He was staring without looking at anything, introspective.
“Why tomorrow?”
“It’s Sunday. He says maybe he won’t go to hell if he does it on a Sunday.”
“If he really wanted to do it, wouldn’t he do it now?” I said. I let the ball go.
Neither guy said anything. I looked at one of them and then the other. Nobody seemed to have any enthusiasm for throwing baskets.
“Wanna go down to the pool?” Stewie suggested vaguely.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Guy gestured his head sideways towards the windows above us.
“He asleep? If he’s not… If a guy is suicidal you’re not supposed to leave him alone. You’re supposed to keep somebody with him,” I said.
We followed Guy into Wayne’s back door. Wayne’s mother was there and she shot us a dirty look. She didn’t like the noise we made. Stewie in particular was like a thousand elephants going up the stairs with his air walkers flapping.
I was feeling kinda pleased. I didn’t want nothing to happen to Wayne but a crisis like this was good for me. It meant nobody would be looking at me and being suspicious. It meant I didn’t have to think about you-know-what for a while.
Wayne was in bed with the covers pulled up over his knees and a magazine in his lap. Stewie and Guy stood by the wall, but Guy closed the door carefully. I sat down on the foot of the bed. Wayne looked sullen.
“The guys tell me you aren’t going to live no more,” I said.
He didn’t say yes or no.
“You really mean to do this?” I said.
He nodded.
“You made a plan?”
He nodded again. This time more strongly. “My life is the shits. Everybody would be better off if I just got the hell out of here.”
“Why?” I said.
He mumbled dolefully, but it wasn’t an explanation, just a dirty word.
“How you going to do it, then?”
“I’m going to shoot my head off,” he said. “I can get the key to my brother’s gun cabinet. He just keeps the ammunition in a drawer. One bullet. Then it won’t matter anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew Wayne was flunking school, but so was Stewie. If he had a plan like that he was most likely serious. If a guy wants to use a gun to knock himself off, he really means to do it. Other stuff like drowning or taking pills he means to change his mind at the last second. But I had the idea from his plan that Wayne really meant to be dead by the end of tomorrow.
“I think we better tell your Mom,” I said.
Nobody said anything.
“He’s going to do it in the church,” Guy spoke up at last. “So he can pray first. They keep the church open after services so he can take the gun and go in there.”
“I’ve already given my stuff to Guy,” Wayne said. “I’m going to make my peace with God and then die.”
It didn’t seem to me that it would please God very much if Wayne went in the church and blew his brains out all over the altar. “Why are you going to do it?” I said again.
“I hate life.”
“Is there anything we can do, man?” I asked.
“Yeah, Bud?” said Stewie.
“I don’t need nothing,” Wayne said. He was calm. He had a resigned despair about him.
I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “We’d do anything, if we could,” I said.
He didn’t seem to need us there much, so I got up again and we went downstairs. We sat down on Guy’s back step where Wayne couldn’t see us.
“It’s true, he gave you all his stuff?” I asked.
Guy nodded. “His CD’s and his PS2 and all the cartridges and his books. I haven’t taken them yet. He said they were mine.”
“Why’s he going to do it?” I said.
“I dunno. He don’t want to hang out so much anymore. He just lies in there and he listens, you know?”
“Wanting to kill yourself, that’s a mental illness,” I said. “Like your brain chemicals are all out of whack. It can be treated with medication.”
“I don’t think he’s in the mood for trying Prozac,” Guy said.
“Is he really going to do it?” Stewie asked.
We looked at Stewie. “I think,” I said. I didn’t have much experience with suicidal people. I mean, except for the time that Shirley Blackett nearly got herself killed. She got so mad at Kyle Colbert for mashing her Mae West cake into her Spanish book. He’s the biggest guy on the football team and he’s on probation for aggravated assault. He did it on purpose to piss her off. She was screaming, “I’ll kill you!!” She was really going to take him on. He would have killed her so we hadda hold her back.
“There’s gotta be a reason, though,” I said. ”If we could figure out the reason maybe we could help him. Somehow we could fix it.”
“He might be mad at Francine,” Stewie said.
“Who’s Francine?” I asked.
“The girl he used to go out with.”
“How long ago was this?” I probed.
“Last winter.”
“He got dumped hard?”
“I don’t think he got dumped hard,” Guy said. “He only took her out twice. He was kinda sore about it at the time, but he doesn’t talk about her.”
“Is it his grades?”
Stewie looked at me as if I was crazy. “Wayne don’t care about his grades.”
“His parents?”
“They’re the same as they ever used to be. I mean, his parents are the shits. I wouldn’t like to have them, but they don’t seem to be acting any different than usual.”
We sat in a circle, knees nearly touching in a perplexed knot. Guy was bugged pretty badly. He was leaning his elbows on his knees and he had a bleak look on him. We all thought about it. Wayne just coasted along, never really trying or seeming to care very much about anything. And now today, he suddenly started caring, caring so much that he wanted to get away from it real bad. There was no visible reason for it. Wayne had never let on he had any particular problem about anything. He never let anyone anywhere but the surface before.
“Something’s gotta be the matter,” I said. “Something maybe’s going on and he’s not telling about it. He’s keeping it secret. He won’t tell us what the reason is.”
“How do we find it out?” said Guy sharply. He sounded real harassed now more than scared.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Maybe it’s a drug thing,” said Stewie. “I heard that, guys that lost control over the booze or the drugs, they can’t face reality, you know. So then they kill themselves. Is he, like, doing crack or something secretly?”
“I don’t think Wayne does drugs, does he?” I looked at Guy.
“He doesn’t,” said Guy shortly.
“That what is it?” Stewie demanded. “What kind of a big secret would make a guy want to kill himself?”
There was a long pause. I thought of something and didn’t say it. We looked at each other and we all got the same kind of uneasy looks on our faces. It was Stewie that found the words. “Do you think he could be a fag?”
“We don’t know that!” I said shrilly.
“No way,” Guy said. “No way in hell. Not possible. He couldn’t be. No. Certainly not. Oh God, I hope not.”
“Yeah. He did go out with Francine. And before that, the year before, with Angel,” Stewie pointed out. “Wayne goes out with girls.”
“That was six months ago,” Guy said. “I mean he does go out with girls, but not very often. Not very long…”
We looked at the house behind us, because somewhere behind that house was the house that Wayne was in.
“He never told me anything about he might be gay,” Guy said uncomfortably. “But then he wouldn’t tell. I don’t think he would.”
I looked at Guy. I had never really quite looked at him that way before. I’d been trying not to. I looked at him trying to evaluate if another guy could get a crush on him. Guy was slender, graceful, all sleek muscle… and he had a chin with a dimple in it. Yeah, plenty of girls got a crush on him. Could Wayne get a crush on his best bud?
“If he’s gay we can’t cure him,” Stewie said. “That’s true isn’t it? If a guy is gay, he’s stuck with it?”
Guy got a new, alarmed look in his brown eyes. “Oh fuck, I hope he’s not gay,” he said. His thoughts had probably been going where mine were. “I mean, he always liked to fool around. We’d punch one another and fall on the ground and all that. But he hasn’t been doing it the last few months. He’s been doing it less and less. Maybe he started to get nervous about it, like he would, I guess?”
Terry came around the corner just then. He jumped off his bike and it fell to the driveway with a crash that set the wheels spinning. He stood and waited for us to say Hi. I saw the expression on his face go from happy and expectant to startled-looking and then to hurt, and then to blank all because all we did was sit and stare at him. He sauntered over, hands wedged into his pockets. “Hey guys,” he said coolly. He propped himself against the wall of the garage.
“Fuck,” Guy mumbled.
“Shit,” said Stewie.
“Piss,” I said, keeping up.
Terry raised an eyebrow. “Pretty bummed out today?” he commented.
“Wayne’s going to off himself,” I reported.
Terry lost the cool look and dropped into a squat beside us right away. “What!?” he exclaimed.
“It’s true,” Stewie said dolefully. “We don’t know why. Guy thinks Wayne is really a faggot. He thinks that’s the reason. But we don’t know. Wayne won’t tell us.”
“Wayne’s a fruit?” Terry said. He goggled at us. “What do you mean he’s going to off himself? For real? How do you know this? How can you know this?”
“Wayne says it,” Guy said. “He says he’s going to kill himself tomorrow. He made a plan. He’s got a gun to do it with.” Guy sounded tired. “He gave me all his stuff. He says he wants me to have it.”
“Oh, man,” Terry said. “He’s going to do it because he’s gay? Oh man, you mean his parents found out?”
“Wait a minute,” I said uncomfortably, “We don’t know he’s gay. We’re just guessing. It doesn’t mean he’s gay, just because he’s going to kill himself.”
“Yeah?” said Stewie. “My dad works with Wayne’s dad. Let me tell you. I’ve heard what he says about fags. I know. When Wayne’s dad finds out Wayne is a faggot, Pow!” Stewie smacked his palm with his fist. “Wayne is going to find himself on the street so fast the only thing he’ll get to pack and bring along is a couple of black eyes. If he doesn’t kill himself he’s going to wish he were dead.”
“Oh, man,” said Terry.
“It’s not his fault if he’s gay,” Guy said miserably. “You guys have got to realise that. It’s not like Wayne has made a choice to be like that. Maybe he got molested or something when he was a kid. I don’t know what makes a person get bent like that. But it’s not his fault. He can’t help the way he is.”
Terry’s eyes were round. “His parents don’t know yet?”
“Nope.” Guy shook his head.
“Thank God!” said Terry. “We got a chance yet. What are we going to do?” he demanded.
“We don’t know what to do,” I said. “We’re trying to figure that out. We’re not going to let him just go and off himself. We’re going to try and do something. We just don’t know what yet.”
“We’re going to come up with a way to help him, right?” Guy asked hopefully. “You guys, and me, we’re going to find some way?”
“Yeah,” I said. Stewie nodded vigorously. Terry echoed the nod.
“Oh, man,” said Terry. “I had this idea, I mean I knew he was getting fed up with things. He stopped coming to his detentions. I knew he was feeling bad about stuff. But, wow! He’s really got a gun to off himself with?”
“It’s his brother’s gun,” Stewie said.
“Right,” I said. “Look. That gun is the danger point, right? We can’t let Wayne take that gun into the church. We got to make sure he doesn’t do that. Okay?”
The guys all nodded at me, but I was deep in thought. “And we gotta have somebody stay with him tonight. We can’t leave him alone overnight either. We really oughta have somebody with him now.” I looked up at the house worriedly. “The main thing is, like, we got to intervene before he can do it. Whatever it takes, we don’t let him pick up that gun. I mean, even if we have to tell the police or something.”
“So who’s going to sleep over with him tonight?” Stewie said.
“I will,” Guy said immediately. “We used to do that a lot, couple of times a week when we were in junior high. I can do that.”
“You’re going to crash with a fag?” Terry demanded.
“Fuck off!” Guy rejoined fiercely.
“Hey,” I said, “Wayne has been Guy’s bud since forever. It’s not like that.”
“I’m going to bring my sleeping bag and sleep on the floor,” Guy said.
“Okay, but how do we keep him from offing himself when we’re not there?” Terry asked.
“We got to take the gun away from him,” I said.
“What’s to stop him from getting another one?” Terry said. “I mean, if a guy wants to do it, Mike, there’s lots of ways he can do it. He can throw himself under a bus. He can make a noose and hang himself. If Wayne wants to bump himself off he can find another way to do it, even if we do swipe his gun.”
“That’s why we got to stay with him,” I exclaimed.
“We got to babysit him?” Terry said. “But how long? I mean, how is that gonna help?”
“You think of something then!” I said.
Terry didn’t come up with any suggestions. “My uncle killed himself. Well, really he was my great uncle. He did it in his truck. He had cancer and he didn’t want to live anymore so he did that, put his truck off the road, on purpose and it made my Mom cry. But he was old. He must have been nearly fifty so it doesn’t count.”
Most of the time hearing something like this would have made me interested. I get curious about gruesome stuff like that. But this wasn’t the time. I was trying to stretch my brain and think of what we could do for Wayne. I didn’t want to hear about anybody who had succeeded in committing suicide.
I don’t think Guy wanted to hear it either. “How do we make the guy want to live again?” he asked thickly. “That’s what we got to find out. How do we make the guy wanta live again?”
“We can get him a girl and cure him of being a fag,” Terry said.
“You’re a dumb shit, Terry,” Guy exclaimed. “That doesn’t work. They can’t cure you of being gay. If you’re bent that way you’re bent.”
“Yeah, right,” said Terry. He stood up and leaned over lopsided and dropped his wrist. He walked funny on purpose, mincing. “I’m a born faggot. I’m really bent,” he chanted. “Anybody want to kiss me, cause I’m feeling oh so down…”
I thought about leaping up and belting Terry to make him shut up, but all I did was stiffen up and then freeze with my butt a half inch off the step. I started a lunge towards Terry and then stopped. I couldn’t go defending faggots or the guys might think I was as big a fag as Wayne. It was Guy that cut him off short. “You gonna do that cakewalk at his funeral too, Terry?”
Terry stopped and just stood there. Terry had an oops look on his face. Then he came quietly and sat down, nearer to me than to Guy. We just sat there. I put my chin on my fists and Stewie looked at the toes of his sneakers and Guy scowled into space. He was eying his Mom’s rhododendron like he wanted to chop it down.
We were sitting there when Nikolas came around the corner. “Hey!” he said, brightening up visibly at the sight of us. “Anyone catch the new Survivor on TV last night?” He chortled. “When she took her bikini top off I just died…!” His expression faded, the smirk dropping away. He put his hands in his pockets staying at the other end of the drive and staring at us bleakly. None of us said anything.
“But I thought you guys liked Survivor,” said Nikolas plaintively.
“Wayne’s in trouble, Nik,” I said.
Nikolas brightened up instantly. “Ooh, poor prick! Did he get kicked outta school or something?”
I shook my head.
“You gotta understand,” Guy said slowly. “None of this is Wayne’s fault. None of this is anything he can control. Like, it’s the genes you’re born with, right? And the depression, suicide stuff, it’s the same way. It’s brain chemicals. Right, Mike?”
“Right,” I said.
“Wayne is dead!!” Nikolas lost his cheerful look. His eyes went round and full of pain. “Aw, no! Suicide??!”
“Not yet,” said Stewie. “But he’s gonna, because he’s gay and thinks everybody hates him.”
“Tomorrow,” added Guy.
“Do something!!” Nik yelped. “Mike! Do something! Whaddya do to stop a suicide? You’re the doctor’s kid. You should know!”
“I dunno,” I said. “We’re trying to think of something.”
“Go up there and tell him we don’t hate him! I don’t care if he’s gay!” Nik exclaimed. “You can’t fucking let him kill himself because he’s gay. He can get himself cured or something, or go into the ministry. You don’t let him just kill himself!”
“You think we don’t care, Nik?” said Guy bitterly.
But Nik had stopped short, eyes going round again. “Ooh, no wonder he hides out in the gym lockers when he’s cutting a class. Omigawd, the year before last we hadda share a locker! You know how many times I been naked around him? Ooh my fuck! All those times he must have been looking at me.”
He sat down heavily. The shock was so bad that his eyes stayed round while he stared at us.
“Yeah, why don’t we just tell him we don’t blame him for being gay?” Terry said. “We could tell him we don’t mind it and we’ll still be his buds and he doesn’t have to hide it no more. If we all go up there in a group and we say it together…”
“Right,” said Guy. He gave a hard nod.
“Don’t say you don’t blame him for being gay,” I said. “That sounds like you do think it’s his fault.”
Terry gave a worried grimace.
“We tell him we love him, he’s our bud, he’s just like the rest of us. He’s our amigo, right? No matter what,” said Guy.
“I’m not telling Wayne I love him,” Nik said. “I’ll tell him he can be gay if he wants to, but just not at me. He already has a thing for my ass. If I tell him I love him he’s gonna think I have a thing for his ass. I can’t say I love you to a faggot!”
“You don’t have to tell him you love him,” Guy said sharply. “You don’t have to be in this at all.”
“I don’t want Wayne dead,” Nik protested. “I just don’t want him after my ass.”
“What? You think Wayne being gay means he’s after your ass?” Guy said. “You don’t know nothing. You didn’t even suspect he was gay, or know he meant to kill himself until we told you. He’s not after your ass.”
“He’s after your ass?” Nik said. “Omigawd, Guy! Are you going to let him?”
“Of course I’m not going to let him!” Guy glared at Nik.
“We got to quit talking and go back up there,” I said. “Guys? I mean, it’s a shock and all that, but come on, can we get to the plan? You wanna just sit here talking about it and meanwhile he’s all alone there, feeling alone there, maybe he’ll do it early? This is no bullshit argument we’re having. We are trying to save a life.”
“Yeah,” said Terry. “Let’s go back there, tell Wayne he don’t have to kill himself, it’s not so bad that he’s gay. We can tell him we don’t mind having a gay in our gang at all.”
“Don’t tell him you don’t mind,” I said.
“Okay, we’ll tell him we don’t care,” said Terry.
“You want to go tell a suicidal guy that you don’t care??!” Guy’s voice went up. “You dumb turkey! Terry, you don’t say anything! You’re such a dumb shit! You can come with us. You can nod. But if you open your mouth, I personally am going to put my fist so far down your throat I’ll get your tonsils stuck in my knuckles!”
He was so forceful that we didn’t say anything. Guy had stood up. “Right,” he said. “What are we saying? Let’s get this straight. What are we saying and who is saying it?” He looked around.
“We tell him he can’t have our asses but he can still hang out with us,” said Nik.
Terry gave a nod, but he was speaking slow and looking at Guy cautiously. “Yeah, we say we won’t let anyone know, we’ll keep it a secret, just the bunch of us. Tell him we won’t tell nobody about his problem.”
“Don’t tell him he has a problem,” I said.
“So now it’s such a big bad guilty secret we got to tell him he shouldn’t admit to it?” Guy was looking bad. His voice was wobbling and it sounded like it wasn’t just anger. “We got to tell him he should be ashamed? It’s guys like you…” He trailed off. He couldn’t talk.
We had all stood up. Terry moved behind me. “Umm… Mike?” said Terry.
I pulled a big breath in. “Ahh… Stew? Why don’t you go up there, right now and sit with him. But don’t say nothing about what we’re planning. You just want to stay with him, no matter where he goes, like if he goes out, you go along with him. ’Cause he can’t be alone.” I picked Stewie because out of the lot of us he was the one who ran off at the mouth the least. I figured he’d have the best chance of not saying anything that would make Wayne fall right over the edge.
“And Nik? Can you go hunt down Wayne’s brother and ask him can you borrow his gun? You don’t say nothing about Wayne being suicidal; you just see if Miller’ll let you have it, and then we can hide it, make sure Wayne doesn’t get it.”
“Okay,” said Nik.
“And Terry, you can look in the phone book and see if there’s some suicide crisis line. You call them and tell them about Wayne. That way we can ask an expert and make it anonymous so we don’t get Wayne in trouble, right?”