A Very, Very Bad Thing Read online

Having listened to his father’s speeches online, I wanted to reach out, squeeze him, bring him home to my mom and dad, and show him what real acceptance was like. But mainly I just wanted to squeeze him. He looked very squeezable.

  “Yeah. I googled him,” I admitted.

  “Pretty intense, huh?” He laughed tragically. “But that was the real clincher for them, the realization that it’d be easier to have a gay kid who didn’t talk about being gay than it would be to explain to the public why their son ran away.”

  “Are they really that terrible?” I asked, maybe a little too forwardly, but it was too late to take it back.

  “They’re not terrible. I know it sounds like they are. Believe me, they’ve said some terrible things to me, but they mean well. They’re just incredibly screwed up.” His empathy was making him increasingly attractive, but that also might have been the way the sunlight was bouncing off the spit guard surrounding the salad bar and hitting his natural highlights.

  “But don’t you want to shake them and make them understand? Make them get that what they believe is wrong? All the crap your dad spews is so—” I cut myself off because I could feel myself getting too fired up.

  “Yes. Of course I hate the crap he spews. And of course I want to shake them and make them understand. But isn’t that what they’ve done to me? How would me doing it to them be any better? Spew is spew, no matter who is saying it.”

  “Because you’re actually right and they’re not.”

  He shrugged again and took a sip of his chocolate milk. A disgusting thing to drink with Italian food of any kind, but he looked so adorable doing it that I let it pass.

  “I just can’t believe how okay you are after something like that. Or at least you seem to be,” I said, weighing how offensive the words might sound as I spoke them. “Is that a weird thing to say?”

  “No. It’s not. And I appreciate that. No one’s ever told me that before.” He smiled at me, the same sweet smile from the grocery store and from the hallway the other day. It was quiet between us, just the murmur of the cafeteria. I wanted to kiss him, but that would’ve, at the very least, required we venture into an alternate universe where I had confidence, and I’d left my passport at home.

  I had so many more things I wanted to learn about him. I didn’t want our conversation to end. I wanted to know every single detail about him. I wanted to sit at this lunch table for the rest of the day, or week, or year, or lifetime, and just learn about him and only him.

  I magically summoned the nerve to take his hand.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been through crap like that,” I told him, my eyes awkwardly darting up at the ceiling and all around the room at everything but his own sparkling set.

  He nodded a thank-you and took an enormous bite of the pasta. Then he said, “Okay, so this might sound totally lame, and if so feel free to say no, but I have to go to my aunt’s fiftieth birthday party tomorrow night. It’s a barbecue and I’m fairly certain it will be completely boring but it’d fun to have someone with me to talk to and roll my eyes with. Plus, it’ll totally piss off my parents to see me bring a date.”

  A date? His words unleashed a flurry of rainbow-colored butterflies in my stomach so hard that I thought they might come flying out of my mouth and descend upon the whole cafeteria. He was so strong and confident, and he wasn’t one of those cheerful robots I’d feared he might be. He was someone with the crap of the world in his eyes, but unlike me, he could also see the beauty. I couldn’t believe what was happening, but he was someone I could see myself really, really liking, and from the way he nervously grinned, awaiting my answer, I could tell he might really, really like me too.

  “Definitely!” I said, as excitedly as a seventeen-year-old boy can sound when agreeing to go to some random woman’s fiftieth birthday party.

  It was a date.

  An actual, genuine date.

  THE SCHOOL DAY HAD MOVED by at whatever is slower than a snail’s pace, and I spent the majority of that time going back and forth between staring at the photos of Christopher sitting behind his dad at church that I’d found online and dreaming about how in Denmark I’ve heard people only have to go to school for three hours a day.

  I had promised Audrey I’d come cheer her on at the callbacks for the fall musical, Into the Woods. So instead of tracking down Christopher, after school I sat in the back of the school auditorium, a cinder-block building that had been there since the seventies and resembled a prison far more than a home for entertainment of any kind. (That said, if you’d been there for the previous spring’s production of Hello, Dolly! you most definitely would’ve considered it a form of capital punishment.)

  Audrey was up next to sing—something she did with even less skill than her acting. I said a silent prayer as the school choir teacher plunked out the first few notes of Audrey’s song.

  As she began to belt in a key not documented on a music chart of any kind, I felt so proud to call her my best friend. She was effortless, grand, and oddly captivating in that way only super-drunk people on parade floats can be. There was no universe in which she could’ve possibly gotten the role she was auditioning for. All that aside, her peers and I clapped politely when she finished. I never would’ve told her how much I admired her tenacity because she would’ve undoubtedly never shut up about it.

  We texted and arranged to meet outside the building, as there were only so many high school theater auditions I could watch without losing my mind.

  I waited outside as the double doors burst open and Audrey came through them, out of breath and noticeably sweaty. She ripped off the pair of big white sunglasses she was wearing as she exited, an affectation that made zero sense since she was coming from inside to outside—but the grand gesture achieved whatever it was she was hoping for.

  “Tell me the truth, darling! Was I divine or was I divine?” she brayed. (Somehow Audrey had the voice of a decade-long cigarette smoker even though she’d never touched a cigarette in her life.)

  “You sure were something!” I said as convincingly as one could. I had learned a lot about “backstage behavior” after years of seeing Audrey as well as my mother’s bizarre dance concerts. Rule of thumb: It is always better to nod and agree with the insane thing you’ve just witnessed than to actually respond truthfully. No one in entertainment of any kind wants to hear your honest opinion. Ever.

  Audrey thanked me graciously, as if I had just presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award, before diving into a hyperactive rant of weekend plans.

  “So we’re on, right? For tonight, I mean. Charade at the Stevens Center? It’s a new print and everything!”

  Dammit. I had screwed up. I was so accustomed to having no one else to hang out with that I had totally forgotten about our plans when I had agreed to Christopher’s party. And I had zero intention of bailing out on that.

  “Crap,” I said. Audrey’s eyes immediately dissolved into the pissed-off glare she could give like no one else. “You know that guy, right? Christopher?” She nodded, the way you do when you’re waiting for someone to get to the end of their story before you attack them with a salad fork. “He invited me to his aunt’s birthday party and I really want to go. I know I shouldn’t have agreed because I already made plans with you, but look, how often do I cancel on you?”

  This question was the best I could come up with and was, admittedly, pretty weak. But it came from a real place.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re canceling on me outside of my drama club callbacks for the fall musical to go on a date with the gay kid you’re obsessed with? Oh my God—my life is a rerun of Glee, isn’t it?”

  We both laughed, so I knew we were okay. I breathed a sigh of relief as she gripped my wrist and stared directly into my eyes.

  “Just never do it again. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said, terrified and faithful.

  My wrist visibly bruised.

  I CHANGED OUTFITS MORE TIMES than I care to admit. It was like a scene out of a
bad movie where your hapless leading man is getting ready for a first date where hilarious hijinks will ensue. The kind of movie where everything ends perfectly and there’s an obnoxiously cute dog in it that gives a better performance than 90 percent of the cast. In short: I was a nervous, clichéd wreck preparing for not only my first date with Christopher but my first date ever.

  I finally settled on a blue sweater I’d gotten last Christmas that still had the tags on it. I wasn’t much for “dressing up,” but maybe that was because I’d never had an occasion to do so. Or maybe I was just lazy.

  My parents were listening to old records and dancing around the kitchen while they cooked some terrible-smelling meal involving eggplant and pickled seaweed. The fear that had filled my father’s eyes two nights ago was nowhere to be found, and Mom was so lost in the groove of Ella Fitzgerald that a dirty bomb going off in the guest bathroom wouldn’t have fazed her. They didn’t see me come into the room at first, and I stopped, quietly, to watch them. They were so in love and so clearly happy that I wondered for a moment if Dad had been right that lying for the sake of good was the better idea over honesty. At least, until you fixed whatever you’d screwed up.

  “Oh! You startled me. I thought our ghost was back,” Mom said, clutching the glass necklace she’d made at an ashram in Tibet two summers prior. We’d never had a ghost, but for years Mom had insisted the humming sound coming from the refrigerator was the spirit of a Native American chief. After years of arguing that, no, that’s merely what refrigerators sound like, I gave up and let her have her fantasy.

  “Look at you. All cleaned up. What’s the occasion?” Dad asked, big smile and no trace of panic whatsoever.

  “I have a …” I felt my cheeks redden. Mom let out a loud squeal.

  “You have a date, don’t you?!” She clapped her hands excitedly, lowering the volume on the speakers. “Oh my stars! Our sweet boy has a date, Greg!”

  This was exactly what I had feared would happen when I told them my plans for the evening. I had hoped I could slip out without much fuss, but seeing as this was nicest outfit I’d worn since, well, ever … it warranted an explanation.

  “Greg, go get the camera!” Mom said, the beginning of tears forming in her eyes.

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “This does not require a camera, you guys. I’m just telling you where I’m headed.” I took my keys off the counter, inching my way toward the front door, just as Dad returned with this old-school film camera and started snapping away like a paparazzo spotting a movie star eating a corn dog.

  This was the perfect example of their overwhelming support. Supportive? Yes. Overwhelming? Very. It was never “have a nice time”; it was always “savor every minute, come home, write it all down, and turn it into something lyrical!” Life with my parents was like being trapped inside some art major’s senior thesis and never being allowed to leave.

  Mom and Dad forced their way behind me and snapped a photo of all three of us before I could shoo them away and get to the front door.

  “I’ll be home later. Okay?” I said, turning back to see their smiling faces watching me go. Despite their exhausting tendencies, it was impossible not to love those two weirdos.

  I CIRCLED THE BLOCK NINE or ten times because I’d arrived half an hour early. I hated being early, but I was afflicted by the disease of punctuality. This was likely attributed to the fact that for as long as I could remember, my parents had been the sort of people who seemed to make it their mission to be extremely late to everything.

  “We’re artists!” my mother would always say, an excuse she used for most things. No matter what the issue, being an artist seemed to be as good an excuse as any. Dropping me off an hour late to pretty much every day of kindergarten? Artists! Missing eight out of nine innings of my Little League games? Artists! Missing every flight to every city we had ever flown to? That’s right, hand those rascals a paintbrush because they’re artists!

  One of my arguably pathetic forms of rebellion was that from the day I’d gotten my driver’s license (an appointment we were late for because ARTISTS!), I had arrived way too early everywhere I went. The evening in question was no exception. However, this premature arrival could also be blamed on the excitement level of seeing Christopher outside of school in a situation that could potentially be considered a date if you were the type of person to consider that sort of thing a date, which I absolutely was.

  “This is your first date,” I said out loud to myself alone in the car, and quickly hated myself for doing so. “Get a grip,” I then growled.

  The radio repeated the same pop songs over and over, pop songs that were all about the same two things: either falling in love or falling out of love. Normally I might have spent the half hour contemplating why all these millionaire pop stars couldn’t come up with something else to sing about, but that evening I had zero trace of snark or judgment. I seemed to have left my usual mind-set at home. This evening was a whole new me, a big smiling hopeful stupidly excited brand-spanking-new Marley, and as much as I hated to admit it, it felt pretty good.

  Just then, someone blared a car horn behind me, snapping me out of my fog of optimism. When I started to honk back, I saw the adorable driver waving wildly at me through my rearview mirror. He pulled up beside me in a very nice Mercedes. Apparently his father’s infomercials had paid off.

  “Hey! You’re early!” Christopher said, like some overly cheerful waiter, in a way that would’ve normally annoyed me but with him, it warmed my heart.

  “Oh, I just got here. I got a little lost,” I lied, immediately wondering why I had done so but knowing full well it wouldn’t be the last time I used a white lie to seem cool in front of him.

  “Well, here I am to save you. Follow me, we’ll park up the street.”

  He pulled ahead of me and I followed. I didn’t believe it was possible to be saved by anyone, let alone some cute boy I’d only known for barely a week. But as I replayed his sweet little grin when he’d said “here I am to save you,” I could think of only one thing:

  God, I really hope he does.

  Christopher’s aunt Debbie lived in one of those cookie-cutter houses so packed full of stuff that you feel like you’re inside a store with absolutely nothing you would want to buy. The place reeked of cigarettes, cat pee, and the sugary-sweet-smelling candles that were a blatant attempt to mask the two previous smells.

  “Just so you know, Aunt Debbie is sort of the black sheep in our family. By which I mean, you’re going to love her,” Christopher whispered.

  Aunt Debbie, as she insisted on being called by even those of us who weren’t her nephew, was Christopher’s mom’s sister. She’d married some guy she met at a carnival on a whim twenty years ago, bought a house in Winston-Salem, and was promptly left for another woman a year later. As the abundant aroma of cat pee and cinnamon-roll-scented candles might indicate, Debbie had never remarried.

  “Y’all get in there and get yourselves a plate before we run out of food,” she said after we were introduced and I was instructed on what to call her. “Christopher can tell you how much food these folks can put away, can’t you, sugar?” she asked, sucking on a cigarette and dropping ashes all over her filthy carpet without so much as a hint of caring.

  Christopher and I exchanged bemused glances, his eyes seeming to say “we will debrief on Debbie later”—which was something I was very much looking forward to doing. I followed him out into the backyard, a veritable shrine to plastic pink flamingos and garden gnomes. The party was a mix of Debbie’s friends, relatives, and coworkers from the local karaoke bar she managed (called, quite simply, Sing and Drink).

  The crowd was a pretty rowdy group, lots of biker-looking men, and women who looked eerily similar to the biker-looking men, give or take a couple earrings. From the beer keg in the corner and the bottle of Fireball Whisky being passed around like communion wine, I could tell that Aunt Debbie didn’t represent the conservative side of his family. I scanned the crowd, searching fo
r his parents, and it wasn’t long before my eyes fell on the reverend’s toupee. Reverend Jim’s toupee, in person, was truly one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen—and this is coming from a person who watched his mom perform a three-and-a-half-hour solo modern dance about how he was conceived. Standing next to the reverend was his wife, a woman so plucked and pulled by plastic surgeons it was a wonder she could talk.

  “Can you guess which ones are my parents?” Christopher whispered in my ear with a perfectly devilish chuckle. “Oh, wave!”

  He waved toward his parents, who were staring at us from across the lawn so disdainfully that it was as if we had walked into the party completely naked with the words GAY RIGHTS written on our bodies in pink lipstick. I gave them a timid wave as we made our way over to them. They gave me a historically dreadful stare back.

  “Mom and Dad, this is Marley. Marley, these are my parents,” Christopher said, bright and bubbly. Both his mom and dad smiled politely, the way politicians do when they see homeless people. Like, I know I’m supposed to do something about this, but also ew.

  Up close, between the spray tans, Botox, and fake smiles, his parents looked bizarrely similar. Like those creepy twins in The Shining except not as cute and even deader in the eyes. They both seemed to exist in an unseen brittle and joyless bubble, the complete opposite of their free-spirited son. Compared to the rest of Aunt Debbie’s friends, his dad was the most buttoned-up person in the history of buttons. When he looked at you, it wasn’t AT you so much as through you. His smile seemed painted on and his teeth looked like a row of Altoids that had been hot-glued inside his mouth.

  I could only hope his mom’s hair was a wig, the kind of blonde and buoyant shape reserved for drag queens and country singers. She wore an expensive-looking skirt and jacket and smelled as if she’d bathed in perfume. Her makeup was so intense one could have mistaken her for a clown hired to make balloon animals … and she greeted me with all the sincerity of one.