2. Headshots

The next morning, I woke up in Ryan’s bed. I scuttled away from him instantly. But then I remember his secret. He liked me. Was that real? Or had my mind concocted that up to comfort me? I pushed my back into the wall away from Ryan’s still sleeping figure. I could hear his neighbors in the next apartment moving around. In full-motion of their day already and I was still in bed. Then again, I always got up later on the weekends. Most teenagers did.

I didn’t want to go home yet. To a bed that was empty, cold and unslept in. Ryan never got farther than the front yard either most days before my parents or Maxine chased him off.

Maxine used to go to school with him, I didn’t know what her problem was with him but my parents issue: He was in college. Wasn’t college supposed to be a good thing? Furthering education and all? It was two years. My parents had more of an age gap than that. I’d had to sneak him in that day to show him my degrading living space.

The grayish carpets, stained. The mattress on the ground without a box spring or frame with one pillow and a fading blanket, the same I used since childhood. He peaked into Alison’s room and saw her framed, box spring single bed covered in stuffed toys and two pillows, with a bright purple butterfly blanket. Then, into Maxine’s room across the hall, full of makeup, mirrors, clothes, and another framed and box springed bed. You’d think I’d lived in a different house with a different family.

He’d taken the guitar and restored it for me and it stared at me now seeming out of place in my dimly lit room. I couldn’t play in this house without someone yelling at me anyway. They’d all complain I was terrible even though I had been playing for half a decade by this point and I knew I was at least decent. Ryan loved when I played guitar and made me wonder if he was being modest.

I decided I didn’t want to find out if Ryan’s secret was a dream or not and slipped out of his bed. I was careful not to wake him. I picked up my bag from the front door where I’d dropped it after Ryan saw that I was panicking. It was still drying from the rain and so were my shoes. I slid my feet into the slightly damp soles and slid the damp bag over my shoulder. I looked back at his kitchen and living room, taking it in, imagining a life with Ryan that would probably never be real. My mind had made it up that his secret was a dream. I picked up the spare house key and opened Ryan’s front door into the hall of the apartment building. I looked back and forth down the hall before attempting to pull the door closed behind me.

Ryan’s hand grabbed the door preventing me from closing it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” I stumbled over.

My face flooded with warmness in embarrassment.

“You don’t have to go yet, it’s only Saturday,” he reasons.

“The longer I’m gone the worse it will be,” I reply holding out the key to him figuring he can lock the door since he’s up.

“You should eat before you go,” he pleads.

“I’m not hungry,” I reply.

“Like hell, you aren’t,” he replied taking hold of my forearm and tugging me back inside.

My shoulder hits his chest and I want to run in the other direction afraid that I was once again, too close for comfort. He pushed the door closed, locked and chained it as if I was going to try and escape. He guided me to his table and I sat down. I was delaying the inevitable but that was okay.

“How about jello?” Ryan questioned.

He knew my stomach could probably handle it and he knew I liked it. I didn’t answer. I stared down at his ruined table, it had names and signs and hearts engraved in it. It looked rustic in the modern décor.

He seemed to accept my silence and pull the jello and fruit out. The jello was orange, and there were peaches embedded inside it. They were suspended as if floating in water. He cut a couple slices and laid the bowl in front of me with the spoon. I didn’t want to eat it because it looked like one of those display meals you saw in menus at restaurants. Perfection, good enough to eat, but eating would mean ruining perfection and I wasn’t up to ruining perfection.

“Nico, please,” he whispered.

I follow the lines of the carvings like a maze across the table. I spotted my name and Ryan’s inside a heart. Probably a harmless joke from one of his football buddies but it screwed any appetite I should have had after almost twelve hours of not eating six ways to Sunday.

Ryan noticed my fixation on our names. He dragged a place mat over it so I couldn’t see it but I could feel it searing a hole through the place mat to the surface.

“Nico, please eat,” he murmured.

I was annoyed by his quietness. Who did he think he was talking to? I used the spoon to push the bowl away. It tipped a bit but settled back with a clang, still holding its perfection. He signed and got up and walked around me. He turned my chair so I was facing him again and knelt in front of me. My eyes fixed on the ground, the ground was safe, or at least here it was. At home, you stared at whoever was talking or rather yelling at you till they were done making their point.

His hands reached up and cupped my face, but I was still looking away.

“Nico,” he plead quietly. “Nico, look at me.”

My eyes moved slightly to his frost-covered ones. They were bright but gentle and sometimes numbing. He leans his forehead against mine. This could still all be a ruse to get me to eat. He could laugh about it with football buddies later, another comical joke about the panic attack high school boy. The gay, panic attack-ridden, high school boy. Just adding to the chronicles. Carving a deeper hole for myself when it finally all came out that it was some large joke, played solely upon me.

“You remember the secret?” he asked.

I wasn’t going to be that naïve.

“Which one?” it was a fair question.

He told me quite a few things he considered secrets. Like how Jackie in third was his first kiss rather than Melody in seventh. That the broken arm he sustained in ninth grade was due to a rope swing rather than a fall off a trampoline. That he’d gone on his cousin’s speed boat without actually knowing how to drive it as a dare and driven it out into the middle of the lake and when it broke down there he’d swam back leaving it out in the middle of the lake. Somebody had to drive his uncle out there to retrieve it eventually.

“The one I told you last night,” he replied.

It had all been a dream, right? Was it a dream now, too?

“Say it again,” I replied.

I wanted to be sure.

“I like you,” he repeated it.

“Whose idea, was it?” I asked. “This joke?”

“I’m serious, Nico,” he continued.

“In my dreams, you’re serious,” I hissed.

“Do I have to kiss you again?” he asked.

“So, the joke can be told and you can say we made out, I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Nico, there is no joke. I’m serious. I. Like. You. Okay?” he reasons.

“Now, one of us has gone insane. I’m either delusional or you’re sick because that’s what this is, is insanity,” I continue.

“No, it’s real. Nico, I like you. Please, believe me,” he repeated.

“This is real?” I asked.

“I promise,” he answered.

Ryan’s promises didn’t get broken. I learned that early on, if a rumor spread, it was never him.

“I’m not going to hear this around school on Monday?” I asked.

Something this big would spread fast.

“I would never do that. You know this, Nico. Sure, I’m a jock but you know I’m not like them. If I say something, I mean it. I like you, Nico. Okay?” he muttered quickly.

He wrapped his arms around my small stature, holding me. He leaned close to me and his lips touched mine again. Warm and gentle, Ryan was kissing me. His nose side-by-side with mine. His body close to mine. He pulled away after a few seconds.

“Please eat,” he reasoned.

I looked back at the bowl filled with perfection jello.

“For me?” he continued.

I leaned in and kissed him again, he barely moved. This was real. I’d attracted Ryan. I wondered if it had always been there since that day I passed out in front of him in class.

“Okay,” I mumble pulling away and turning back towards the jello.

I picked up the spoon and scoped up some jello and brought it to my mouth, the same mouth that had just been against Ryan’s. I slowly ate the jello until the bowl only had tiny mounts of orange jello that I couldn’t scope up.

“Good job,” Ryan answered.

He picked up the empty bowl and placed in the sink.

“Are you sure you want to go home? You could stay another day,” he reasoned, almost pleaded.

“No, I need to,” I reply thinking about the punishment waiting for me at home.

The yelling. Where were you? Why did you run out of History class and miss your other two classes?

“Do you want me to drive you?” he asked.

I didn’t have my driver’s license like most sixteen-year-olds. Then again, I had nothing to drive so what would have been the point?

“No, they’ll just chase you off,” I reply quietly.

“I could drop you off down the street,” he continues.

He just doesn’t want me to be alone. When I’m alone I panic more, that’s why I listen to music so I feel I’m not alone. I’m going to panic the closer I get to home, I hate being yelled at and I never yell back because there’s no point, I’m always wrong. There’s no point fighting with someone who isn’t going to change their mind. But staying silent makes them angrier. They tell me to respond, but I’m rendered speechless by my anxiety as well. Eventually, they leave me alone and I cry and fall sleep curled up on my mattress or run away to Ryan’s but I always feel like I’m burdening him with my problems when I show up at his door.

“No, I’ll walk,” I answer.

I stand up from the chair and he nears me again. Takes my hand and kisses me gently on the lips one last time.

“Just remember, I’m always here, okay?” he whispers.

“I know, can you say it one last time? The secret?” I answer quietly.

“I like you, Nico,” he whispers in my ear. “It doesn’t have to be a secret.”

I take a breath in as he says it and my mind echoes it back like the music I listen to.

“They’d hate me, if they knew,” I mumble in reply.

He looks me over sadly. He knows it’s true.

“I should go,” I continue.

He removes his hand from mine and I take a step towards my bag by the door. I unchain and unlock the door and open it.

“Goodbye, Nico,” he calls.

I waved to him and shut the door behind me. I walked down the carpeted halls to the stairs and take them slowly. I try to keep my breathing even as I descend. I make it out into the morning sun, it’s warm on my head and bright. I walk around the side of the building and start walking down the street. When I reach my school, my heart quickens but not my pace, a reminder of what happened yesterday. The rain pelleting down and soaking me. I walk past it and continue up another street around the corner from my house.

I reached the house and Alison was outside with one of her friends, Victoria, maybe? She had so many friends it was hard to keep track. Alison stood up and put her hands on her hips a miniature version of our mother. With her long blond hair and blue eyes. My hair was brown and my eyes muddy.

“And where have you been?” she asked in mom fashion.

I ignored her and walked right past her and her friend.

“Did you chicken out again?” she continued.

I ignored her again. I opened the door and slammed it behind me and locked it so she couldn’t follow.

“And where have you been?” my mom asked hands on her hips, blond hair in a ponytail and blue eyes furious.

I remove my damp soles and make sure they’re out of the way so she can’t complain.

“You were with the college boy, weren’t you? Did you get drunk? Do you have a hangover?” she accused.

She wasn’t asking because she was concerned, she was asking because she was rushing off to work and she couldn’t have some drunk teenager watching over her precious Alison. My father emerged from the kitchen, I thought he’d already be at work but I guess not. He was holding his morning coffee and he looked tired in his suit.

“Where were you?” he questioned harshly.

“You know where,” is what I reply with.

And it’s true they did. I’d been with the college boy. His name is Ryan by the way for the hundredth time. Should I mention he likes me? Or would that be too much for this Christian household? Oh, wait we’re not Christian, you just dislike gay people.

My father raises a fist and clocks me in the eye socket. It’ll be a shiner tomorrow and when I go to school on Monday.

“Don’t be a smartass,” he hisses still reeling from last night’s drinking probably.

“You’re not supposed to be hanging out with that college boy, he’s a bad influence,” my mother reasoned.

And they were good influences? Hitting me and yelling at me? They were toxic.

“Why can’t you hang out with kids your own age?” my mother asked.

Ryan was my age. He was a teenager, why did that change when he went to college?

“Why can’t you be like Maxine?” she continued.

Maxine and Alison flourished in this environment. Why couldn’t I? Because they weren’t flourishing where it counted. Sure, they got good grades and they had social lives but they were like every other popular kid in the films. Thought they deserved the world, the boys, the newest styles, all of it. I flourished in being nice, quiet, and listening and trying.

I got up and pushed past my mother and went up the stairs to my room.

“Mister, you get back down here. We’re not done talking to you,” she called after me.

I went into my room and locked the door. I tossed my bag on the floor and slid to the carpet. I sat there trying to breathe but I could hear my parents on the stairs, yelling soon they were at the door, pounding on it.

“Open the door, Nico,” my mother called.

I didn’t comply. They were a heard of wilder beasts waiting to stampede over me and leave me crumbled in the dust as prey for the lions to eat. I crawled across the floor to my bag and opened it. I found my headphones and put them on and hit play. Their screeching melted away and I hummed along to the tune that was playing. Slowing my breathing. Soon the door stopped shaking, they both must have left for work. I look out my window and see the cars gone, Alison and Victoria are still in the yard playing picnic. Everything looked so perfect from the outside, you would never know a teenage boy was suffering inside this nice suburban home.

I took my headphones off and listened to the silence. I got up and unlocked the door and went to the bathroom to look at my eye. It wasn’t changing colors, yet but it hurt and I could barely open it. Another headshot. I wasn’t surprised. I’d been getting them since I was twelve when I first started passing out and the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me physically.

I crept down to the kitchen and got a bag of ice to help the swelling. I went back upstairs and locked myself back in my bedroom. It was my only form of protection here. I curled up on the mattress and fought with my mind to go to sleep. For my heart to slow and not worry about what would happen when I woke. It took a while, almost two hours, but I finally fell into a fitful sleep by repeating Ryan’s secret to myself.

I like you, Nico.

I imagined him kissing my lips and that I was in his bed safe, instead of my own.

Headshots

I’ve taken headshots all my life,

When you take a headshot, your chances are low.

So, if I keep taking them and getting back up,

Where will I end up?

I’m tired of fighting when I barely want to be here.

When I barely want to live.

Headshots, headshots.

I take them one by one,

Bullet, bat, fist.

Nose, face, temple.

Do I have to blow my head off to get a little peace?

How have I not gone deaf and blind?

From all the fighting,

From all the violence,

From all the abuse,

Headshots, headshots.

How many more will I have to take?

I am broken from taking headshots.

I need therapy,

And all I want is to run,

But I can’t even do that.

I have no options because I can’t afford it,

I just want to step off the ledge.

Where’s the end of the pain?

Cause I can’t seem to find it.

How did I get lost in this maze?

Headshots, headshots.

I take them one by one.

Bullet, bat, fist.

Nose, face, temple.

Do I have to blow my head off to get a little peace?

How have I not gone deaf and blind?

From all the fighting,

From all the violence,

From all the abuse,

Headshots, headshots.