A Very, Very Bad Thing

  To anyone who needs to hear to it:

  You are not alone.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  NOW

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 8:30 a.m.

  NORTH CAROLINA TIMES

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1:45 p.m.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 7:15 p.m.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 8:00 a.m.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 7:45 p.m.

  NOW

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 11:45 p.m.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 10:31 a.m.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 3:32 p.m.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 6:06 p.m.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 7:01 p.m.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 10:31 a.m.

  NOW

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 3:25 p.m.

  NOW

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 3:15 p.m.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 10:45 a.m.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 7:01 p.m.

  NOW

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 7:46 a.m.

  NOW

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 8:01 p.m.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 4:55 p.m.

  NOW

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1:15 a.m.

  THE NORTH CAROLINA JOURNAL

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 10:15 a.m.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7, 5:45 p.m.

  NOW

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 11:35 a.m.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 3:39 p.m.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 11:00 a.m.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 and SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 29

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1

  NOW

  STILL NOW

  THE DAY AFTER NOW

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TEASER FOR DRAG TEEN

  COPYRIGHT

  I AM NOT A BAD person. I’m not a great person either, but not bad. No matter how it might seem, no matter what I did.

  Stupid? Yes.

  Desperate? Yes.

  Completely and totally lost beyond all belief? Abso-damn-lutely.

  But not a bad person.

  I’m someone who wanted to make a difference. I’m a nobody who wanted to be a somebody.

  Up until a few months ago I was just another snarky gay kid from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, watching life through the disconnected Instagram filter of my generation and judging every minute of it. Now I’m in New York City, safely tucked away into yet another dressing room with my name written across the door in bold, joyous letters—the kind of happy letters that should never be associated with the kind of cause we’re here to shed light upon. (Shedding light is something I’ve been asked to do a lot in these past few months, and I’m still not sure what the hell it even means.)

  I can hear the crowd of three hundred or so very rich people cheering. Some D-list pop star whose name I can’t remember and who recently came out of the closet the day his new album dropped (zero coincidence, I’m sure) is singing a song that sounds like a thousand other pop songs I’ve heard before.

  “Love me for who I am … and for who you are … and for who we all are and for who they are,” he sings, including just about everything in his lyrics except a rhyme scheme.

  I try not to judge this pop star, but it’s hard. Judging pop stars is a part of my DNA, like having green eyes or preferring bubble baths over showers.

  There’s a rundown order taped to the door listing all of the evening’s performers and speakers. One more singer, the cast of Broadway’s Wicked, and three more speeches before I have to go out and accept the award. Roughly thirty minutes for me to change my mind, to chicken out and allow this whole charade to continue.

  I should not be here. I know that now and I knew it before, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was so caught up in my anger, in my rage to fix everything. There was too much going on to pay attention until I woke up from the nightmare and realized it was too late. For the first time in my life I’ve been given something to wake up for, something to accomplish, a reason, a something, a purpose. Besides getting the ability to fly or winning a lifetime supply of freshly baked blueberry scones, discovering your purpose in life is one of the greatest things that can happen to a human being. Or so that’s what every teacher, book, movie, television show, motivational speaker, and Bono says.

  In the past few months, I have attended so many events like this one. I am as over it as Britney Spears has been on every award show she’s performed on since 2004. I can’t possibly stand in front of another step and repeat, smiling and claiming that “it gets better.” I mean, does it? Sure, I’ve been flown around the country, getting to rub elbows with the most famous gay people in the world. Sure, everyone calls me a trailblazer. Sure, I saved our house. Sure, I’ve been interviewed by Time and CNN and even got to high-five Kathie Lee Gifford on live television … but none of it has been real or earned or right. I have done something. I have become a somebody, but by doing so I feel more like a nobody than ever before. So … did it get better?

  Maybe for me. Not for Christopher.

  But I can’t think about Christopher.

  Except I always think about Christopher.

  If he asked me, “What are you doing here?” would I even have an answer other than “I have absolutely no freaking clue”?

  Harrison, my manager and media consultant (whatever that means), has gone out to complain to someone about there being no Fiji Water in my dressing room. According to Harrison, this is a very big deal. I couldn’t care less—I’ll drink any water you put in front of me as long as it’s clear and doesn’t have fish swimming in it. Regardless, it’s nice to be alone for a moment. Harrison has left me with the speech I’m to give, accepting my Leading Change Award. Harrison wrote it for me—it’s a good speech, because despite being a genuine mess, Harrison is a good writer. Apparently he used to write speeches for important people like senators and Susan Sarandon. According to Harrison and the New York Times, I am now one of these important people. This is the kind of speech that will be interrupted countless times for applause and cheering—the moments are literally written in. This is the kind of speech that will inevitably go online and be posted within hours on every gay blog and liberal media outlet celebrating how much of a hero I am.

  Hero used to mean very little to me, aside from being a way to describe the hot spandex-clad dudes in comic book movies or Oprah. Nowadays, it’s a word I hear a lot.

  No one but my best friend, Audrey, knows what’s folded up in my pocket, what I’ve scribbled down on a ripped-out page from my journal. What I stayed up all night last night writing when the guilt got too overwhelming to even consider sleep as an option.

  I stare at myself in the mirror. I look way better than I did before all this happened. I’m in a fancy suit, I’ve got an expensive haircut, and I’m wearing just enough stage makeup to make me look pretty yet still handsome. The baby fat that kept my face in a shape far closer to circular than I’ve ever been happy about is gone. Harrison has forced me to work out with a personal trainer (a legitimate monster of a woman named Kimberly) and kept me away from carbs as if they were some kind of poison.

  I don’t recognize myself at all.

  I haven’t in a very long time.

  There’s a knock on my dressing room door. “Come in,” I say as a stage manager pokes her head in.

  “You’ve got roughly twenty minutes, Marley,” she tells me.

  I thank her as she closes the door. I take a deep breath.

  “You can do this,” I say to myself so quietly that I wonder if it’s inside my head. “It’s going to be okay.”

  I can’t get his face out of my head. Not from that awful night, but from
the day in September when I saw him for the very first time and our story didn’t have an ending yet.

  I’ve never been one to buy into sappy things like “kismet” or “fate,” but for the millisecond when I first laid eyes on Christopher, I did.

  AS FAR AS SCHOOL DAYS go, the first day of school is usually a good day, everything being fresh and brand-new. The air is not yet stale with the distinct odor of teenagers, the hallways are glistening with a new coat of the vomit-colored paint that mysteriously decorates high schools all across America, and everyone carries just-purchased backpacks and binders that have yet to be covered in the doodling one is sure to do while bored in yet another pointless calculus class. A thick cloud of possibility hangs over the entire day until, by three p.m., you’ve found yourself sufficiently settled into the mundane groove of the whole thing and you can’t believe you have to do this BS every day for another nine months.

  My summer had been pretty dull, spent with my parents at a theater and dance festival in Vermont that my mom ran. You would think that a summer with a bunch of artists in the middle of the woods would be rather fun, but really it just ends up being a bunch of entitled people debating Thoreau and blowing smoke up each other’s asses. I’d never been creative and doubted I ever would be. I’d spent the majority of my life yearning to be creative, or to be something, somebody. Despite having two parents who couldn’t be more artistic and focused if they tried, I was born with zero creativity or spark or uniqueness. I’d never had such purpose. Even at a no-name camp in the woods, I was a nobody, plain and simple.

  And I wasn’t just creativity challenged. My grades sucked and always had. I’d never won an award or gotten an A. I’d never known what to say in a “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question scenario. I’d literally never caught a ball in my life, and when it came to making friends I was as popular as the wilted salads they sell at Starbucks. (I ask you, what kind of monster drinks coffee and eats arugula at the same time, anyway?)

  In short, I had no idea who I was, I doubted I ever would, and if there had been an end-of-year high school award for the biggest pessimist, I would’ve won with flying colors.

  I’d made it all the way to junior year with only one real friend. Audrey hated high school with the kind of hyped-up ferocity usually reserved for war or professional sporting events. It was as if she was politically opposed to the idea of education and teenagers in general, referring to our peers as them with a thick air of disdain and suspicion in her voice.

  Despite her short and scrawny seventeen-year-old frame, Audrey maintained the regal demeanor of a middle-aged grande dame of the theater. Her accent had an antique ring to it, with words handpicked from black-and-white movies where women wore gloves to lunch and slapped people without repercussion.

  “Why are they smiling? What is going on with these people?!” Audrey heaved, nervously clutching the strap of the 100 percent Italian leather hatbox she insisted on using in place of a backpack. “What do they know that we don’t?”

  Two giggly freshmen girls walked by us, squealing at the realization that they had homeroom together. Audrey winced like someone with a terrible hangover at a monster truck rally.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Audrey. The harsh reality is that some of these people enjoy this,” I said, examining the mobs darting to and from their lockers. It would’ve been impossible for me to hate school as much as Audrey did, but I was definitely a close second. The one thing Audrey had over me was that she had a dream, which is the first step to a purpose. Whereas I didn’t want to be anything, Audrey wanted to be an actress. She was very into our school drama club—and I mean very. She lived life like a three-act play, yet it was never clear which act she was in. She was dead set on becoming a world-renowned star.

  The only problem was that she wasn’t very good.

  In fact, she was genuinely terrible onstage.

  Still, talent and ability aside, the stage provided Audrey with the vehicle with which to find the version of herself she wanted to be. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the best; she loved it too much to care.

  “Why do I get the feeling this is going to be a particularly long year?” Audrey said as she spun the lock on her locker, then dumped a few textbooks inside with an echoed thud.

  Just as I began to agree, a mound of very curly blond hair appeared in the crowd. As people passed and the crowd cleared, I was struck by this face, this weirdly adorable face. It was like no other face I’d seen before. Sparkly eyes, one greener than the other. A slightly crooked nose. Freckled cheeks. Lips that looked drawn on. A jawline that could’ve gotten a job cutting stained-glass windows. The kind of perfectly broad shoulders you can only be born with, in the kind of fitted T-shirt you can only get away with if you were born that way.

  As of that particular moment I had never even kissed a boy, so my being gay was as theoretical as it was irrevocable. My gaydar had never been all that dependable. Regardless, something about this kid was alerting my internal radar of a deep, proximate homosexuality. This, of course, could have been another glitch in the system of desperation. But I was instantaneously hoping it wasn’t.

  Needless to say, I was staring.

  “Hello? Marley? Hello?” Audrey was tapping my shoulder, bringing me back to earth. “What just happened? Are you having a stroke? If you die and I have to go through this entire school year without you, I will dig up your body and kill you all over again, so help me God.”

  “Sorry. What?” I asked, like someone attempting to have a conversation while constructing a model airplane in under three minutes.

  “That kid’s dad is famous.” Audrey watched the curly-haired boy as he stopped, staring down at his map of the school like a tourist lost in Times Square.

  “Which boy?” I asked, my voice cracking in a way it hadn’t since the early stages of puberty.

  “The one you’re staring at like he’s bacon.” She sneered as she slammed her locker, the loud clang jolting me out of my stupor. “His dad is that preacher on TV. The one with those infomercials that air in the middle of the night where he and his wife shout scripture at you and sell DVDs. Can you believe they still have infomercials?”

  “Forget infomercials. I can’t believe they still sell DVDs.”

  “Come on, you’ve seen Reverend Jim. He’s everywhere. He’s like Dr. Phil, but instead of screaming at people to lose weight and deal with their daddy issues, he tells them to buy his products so they can get into heaven.”

  Like pretty much everyone else in America, I had seen Reverend Jim on TV. He was usually on one of those talking head “news” shows, blaming hurricanes on gay people or terrorist attacks on transgender people who used the “wrong” bathrooms. Reverend Jim was the antithesis of the world as I saw it and it panged me to discover that this insanely cute new kid was his spawn.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, ignore it,” Audrey growled.

  But I was already looking back down the hall, to see if I could spot him one more time. But it was too late—he was gone. He had long since disappeared into the sea of basic bitches that is high school. Isn’t that the way the world always works? Things are never as good as they first seem. You see someone special, someone you find super cute, you get excited, then you realize they’re the son of one of the country’s most celebrated bigots.

  Or something like that.

  “You know, Audrey.” I sighed, zipping up my backpack. “I’m afraid you might be right about this being a long year.”

  But I had no idea.

  No idea at all.

  AUGUST 1

  Famed televangelist Reverend Jim Anderson is relocating his religious empire from Branson, Missouri, to here in North Carolina. According to a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Good Word, the move is due to the substantially higher tax incentives offered to film crews in North Carolina. His wife, Angela, was born and raised in Winston-Salem, so the move is, according to the spokesperson, “a homecoming of sorts.”<
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  Reverend Jim has been a television staple for many years, known for his syndicated infomercials, on which he sells his numerous books and DVDs. Over the years, he has made headlines for opposing abortion rights and gay marriage, as well as being a strong defender of the controversial “pray-the-gay-away” movement and a proponent of prayer in schools.

  Reverend Jim’s followers are so numerous that over the past ten years he’s estimated to have grossed over thirty million dollars from the sale of his products and speaking engagements. He is known online as the “Super Preacher,” where he maintains a very popular blog among the fundamentalist Christian community.

  He’ll be making his first North Carolina speaking engagement this Sunday at the Greensboro Convention Center. Tickets are available on his website.

  WHOEVER HAD THE IDEA TO schedule biology lab right after lunch must have had a really disgusting sense of humor. The mere words biology and lab make my stomach turn. Then add to it the reality that this is a class where one is expected to dissect actual frogs and owl pellets (aka owl poop), and you’ve got yourself a full-blown hour of comically extreme nausea. Especially when you’ve just eaten the food in our school’s cafeteria, a level of gross so high it should’ve counted as its own science credit.

  The teacher, Mrs. Spitz, a bony, long-haired old woman with such an eerie resemblance to a mop you would’ve thought she had been left there by the school janitor, was writing her name on the board.

  “That’s Spitz. Like what you do when extracting saliva,” she explained with the enthusiasm of someone who would rather lick a car battery than have to do what she was doing. “Please open your textbooks to page one.”

  The entire class let out a mild groan, accompanied by the thud of textbooks hitting desks. I was just beginning to count the number of weeks until Christmas break when the door flew open and the entire contents of a backpack came spilling across the floor. Right after, I spied that same mound of curly blond hair from the morning crawling across the linoleum, apologizing with every step.