The awkward silence that descended upon Shane and me as we stood there alone was crippling – at least for me.
Wordlessly, we walked back to our room. After tossing my key on the desk, I flopped back into my bed and stared up at the ceiling. “You can have the bathroom first. I’m gonna go call Reid. Check up on him.” Shane’s words clogged in his throat with some kind of unnamed emotion, one which I chose to ignore.
Shane slipped back out the door so quickly, I didn’t have any time to respond, not that I would have known what to say. Reaching for my journal, I pulled the pen out from the spiraled wire, my words flowing with more clarity than my brain was capable of.
I don’t think most people can pinpoint the actual moment they discover who they are. I mean, you hear stories all the time about people wasting their life trying to figure out their purpose, trying to figure out who they are and what they’re meant to be. I’m not going to pretend that I know all of the answers – that’d be a huge fucking lie, but I do know more about myself now than I did an hour ago.
I guess I’ve always known I was different somehow, but I just wrote it off with a million different excuses. Maybe I’m different because my parents are still happily married or because I’m an only child.
But when those excuses run out and you start thinking that you’re different because there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with you, that’s when it gets complicated. Yeah, I know they say – whoever the hell ‘they’ are – that growing up isn’t easy, that being a sixteen-year-old boy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but I’ve known for maybe longer than I care to admit that whatever is making my life difficult, whatever is screwing me up in my head is much more than normal teenage shit.
Watching what I watched tonight only confirmed what I’ve known for probably my whole life.
I’m gay.
The door slamming shut scared the shit out of me and I quickly tossed my journal under my pillow, my heart pounding like crazy in my chest. Shane didn’t notice as he crashed his phone down on the desk angrily.
“Everything okay?” I asked as I tossed back the covers.
His fists were clenched at his side; the anger vibrated off him, filling the room with a palpable tension. “What the fuck do you think?” he roared, punching the door with rage.
I jumped off my bed as he clutched his right hand and winced in pain. “What the hell did you do that for? You’ll break your throwing hand, asshole.”
“I don’t fucking care, anymore.” Some of the bite left him, and he calmed marginally. He slinked down onto his bed, hanging his head in his hands. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he gritted, stifling back his rising emotions.
I sat next to him, far enough away to leave him some space, but close enough to let him know I was listening. “What happened? Is it Reid?”
He punched the bed with his good hand – at least both wouldn’t be broken. “No, it’s my fucking asshole father. Reid came home late the other night and dear-old-dad knocked him around a bit,” he snidely remarked as he stood from the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal. “I don’t know what the fuck to do. He’s getting out of control. At first, he would just yell at Mom. Then he would just lash out at me, smack me around a little, but now, this. Reid says he can barely open his eye; it’s so swollen.” He flopped into the chair at the desk and looked at his hand as it turned purple and swelled.
“You need to put ice on that. Let me go get it so Coach doesn’t see you.” I moved to the door as he muttered, “thanks” before I left.
In the two minutes it took me to walk down to the water cooler to grab a bag of ice, I tried to make sense of what made it okay for a father to beat his own son, but it turned out that two minutes wasn’t enough time.
I twisted the knob to our door and saw Shane sitting on my bed, my journal open and in his hands.
He looked up at me as if I was some kind of intruder, or as if he was seeing me for the first time. Considering what I was sure he’d just read, that was certainly true. “What are you doing?” Shock colored my words as I tore the spiral notebook from his bruised hand.
He looked up at me, sadness and confusion mixing on his face. “You’re gay?” he whispered as if anyone else was in the room to hear his words. Hearing Shane say it somehow made it feel more real than when I had written it, thought it, knew it in my own soul.
In the few moments it took me to answer him, I considered denying it, but there was no point. The words were messily scribbled right there on the page for him to read. I was just happy I hadn’t finished my thoughts. The ones where I wrote about how confused I was for wanting my best friend, for thinking that he was gay as well – even though I knew he would never admit to it himself.
“Yeah, I am,” I admitted sheepishly before sinking onto my bed. With my secret out in the open, there was no sense in hiding the journal any longer, but out of the habit that I had developed over the last week, I tucked it in between my mattress and box spring, even though Shane looked on.
“How? When?” he barely whispered as he scrubbed his hand over his face and through his sandy-brown hair in disbelief.
“I don’t know,” I said after taking a deep breath. “I guess I’ve always known, as cliché as that sounds.” I stood to walk over to him, but he held his hand out to stop me. “Look, I don’t want this to change things. We’re still friends, right?” I held my hands up, palms facing out in an attempt to surrender to him and his confusion.
He didn’t say anything, just stood up and grabbed his keys from the desk. “I’m gonna go stay at Scott and Eric’s tonight.” He shut the door behind him without saying anything more.
He didn’t speak to me at all the next day, or the rest of the week, or on the two-hour car ride home, or the first day of school.
In fact, Shane didn’t speak to me for most of the next ten months, and on the first day of baseball season in the spring of our senior year, all I got from my best friend of over ten years was a subtle chin nod.
“Smile, would ya? We made the fucking playoffs.” Reid ruffled my hair and punched my arm, which was so fucking sore from the game. Throwing a two-hitter was not necessarily noteworthy as far as baseball stats were concerned, but it was the best game I had ever thrown and it won us the chance to play for the state championship in the coming weeks. I was damn proud of that and the look on Reid’s face, along with the rest of my team, helped to dull the pain.
As the trainer plastic-wrapped an ice pack to my throwing arm, I saw Dylan walk into the locker room and toss his bag on the bench. A few of the other guys followed behind him, carrying a water cooler over their shoulders. Dylan hit the game winning homerun, securing us the victory. He was the hero of the day, and an hour after the game, I still hadn’t said a word to him.
Fuck, if I’d said five words to him in the last six months that would be saying a lot. Maybe it was time to just fucking open my mouth and congratulate him.
