String Boys, page 18
He drew every day now.
Some days he drew scary things—things he’d done, things he’d seen, in that dank and horrible abandoned store.
Some days he drew his sisters or his mom and dad, or even, on occasion, Seth’s dad. He sent pictures of those drawings to Seth, and Seth had shown him a room full of printed-out drawings—they were all over his walls.
Some days he got out his colors and just drew feelings.
He would listen to Seth’s practice tapes on those days, and try to draw Seth’s music. He wasn’t sure what the results were worth, but those days always made his soul feel bright and shiny. He could do that a lot!
Some days, when his heart hurt too much, he would make Seth take selfies, and he would sketch those.
The day before had been one of those days.
HIS MOTHER had been baking sugar cookies, setting aside frosting for his sisters in Valentine’s Day colors, along with sprinkles, and Kelly had thought, “I’ll have to take a plate down for Seth and his dad.”
And then he’d realized what he’d thought. And he remembered that he and Seth wouldn’t get Soccer Wednesday on Valentine’s Day this year, and that he wouldn’t get to give Seth a birthday blowjob like he had the year before.
And that he and Seth hadn’t done more than kiss in the last few visits, even when his father had been gone. Kelly’s body had been… healing, even though all the cuts and bruises and strains had disappeared long ago.
But he still ached and flinched from touch, except when he was really comfortable.
And Kelly realized—truthfully in his own mind—that he wouldn’t be able to do the same things he’d done the year before with Seth, because he wasn’t the same person inside. The person who’d been so fearless and joyful at what their bodies could do was afraid now. And Seth knew it and wasn’t pushing because Seth just wanted him to be happy.
He’d needed to draw Seth in the worst way.
He had about three sketches done, sitting beside him on the coffee table, when Matty stormed in, his face red from arguing with Dad. Kelly wasn’t sure what they were arguing about now—grades, or Isela, or the beer he’d smelled on Matty’s breath yesterday after school, or how Matty had mouthed off to his coach during soccer and had almost got kicked off the team.
Kelly didn’t really care anymore.
He didn’t have a brother anymore. This foul-mouthed, bitter stranger was part of the reason Kelly didn’t sleep much at night. He kept dreaming Matty would sneak up behind him and strangle him, or slit his throat as he slept, or suffocate him with a pillow.
Terrible, violent dreams left Kelly soaked in sweat, and left him spending the next two or three nights in Seth’s bed, until he could look at his brother again and not imagine Matty’s hands around his throat instead of Castor Durant’s.
So Matty storming in wasn’t anything new, and the way he disrespected Dad wasn’t fun either, but as he swept by Kelly’s stuff on the coffee table, the pictures of Seth swirled off and Matty stopped mid rant.
“Him? You’re drawing pictures of him?”
“Yeah! So?”
“That fucking faggot—”
“Matty, stop!” Dad snarled. “Or the next thing you hear is going to be the door slamming behind you!”
“You don’t know, Dad! All this shit you’re giving me, and you don’t even know you have a faggot living under your roof, where he can get to the girls! You should have seen him and that other fag, kissing on the fucking camping trip, kissing like perverts in the woods—”
Kelly gaped and then pulled himself up and stood. “As opposed to you, assfucking your girlfriend over a log? Because that was fucking classy, Mateo—that was something you should have told Mom and Dad about!”
The back of Matty’s hand caught Kelly’s mouth just right, and he flew backward into the wall.
He lay there, stunned, sliding onto the couch. When he came to, Matty was in a three-point restraint.
Holy God.
His father had his knee in Matty’s back and an elbow between his shoulders as he restrained his son’s wrists behind his back.
“Call Craig,” Dad said to Mom, his voice choked. “I’m going to need his help getting our son to your mother’s house.”
“Daddy!” Matty wailed. “No!”
“You want to come back home?” Xavier Cruz grunted. “You really want to come back home? Then you come back as my son. My son doesn’t just beat his little brother in the face for no reason. My son doesn’t hate his brother for no good reason. My son doesn’t hate his brother’s boyfriend for no other reason than he’s your brother’s boyfriend. You want to know what I wish? I’ll tell you what I wish! I wish you’d been attacked that night. I wish you’d had to learn what being beat up on was like. I wish you’d learned humility and kindness the way your brother seems to always have known. So yes. We’re sending you away. Because it’s easier for us to love you from far away when you’re not being a monster to us here.”
“But, Daddy,” Matty cried, actual tears on his face. “I… I can’t leave. Isela’s pregnant, and I don’t know what I’m going to do!”
“Holy God,” Mom muttered. “You’re still not our son. My son would have taken the condoms I put in his room every month for a year and used them!”
Dad stared at his wife. “You’ve been giving him condoms? Jesus Christ, so have I!” He let go of Matty’s arms and smacked Matty on the head. “What in the fuck, son? Were you selling them?”
Matty pulled painfully to a sitting position, looking at his father with wounded defensiveness.
“She said she was on the pill,” he mumbled. “And then this week, she said she lied. We have to get married right after graduation.”
“Fuck!” Xavier Cruz rocked back on his heels. “Jesus fucking Christ. Mateo, you’re not even fit to parent a dog at this point. I want to take you to your grandmother’s because I’m afraid of having you around your sisters. What in the hell?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Matty said, and Kelly hated him more in that moment than ever, because he sounded sincere. And heartbroken. And confused.
Kelly stood up and headed for his bedroom.
“Wait—Kelly—” his dad called, but fuck it.
“No, no, I get it,” Kelly snapped. “You’ve got to worry about your grandbaby and your number one son. What the hell. I’m just the gay one. I’m gonna be fine—”
His mother was the one who caught up to him as he started throwing clothes in his backpack for school. “Going downstairs?” she asked softly.
“Apparently for the rest of my life,” he replied, hating Matty for that most of all. He’d been happy, listening to his sisters, smelling sugar cookies, enjoying his home.
“No,” she said, stopping his hands as he tried to strangle a pair of socks. “No. Your brother, he’s going to live somewhere else, even if we have to wait for graduation to get rid of him. Your dad’s right. I don’t want that shit in my house.” She squeezed his hands. “You, I still want. And Seth. And the two of you together.”
Kelly grunted. “I… I just wanted to tell you my own way,” he muttered.
She laughed softly. “You did. All last year. Every time you looked at each other. Daddy figured it out camping. He came up to me that night you boys were in the lake and said, ‘If they don’t know they’re in love, they’re dumb as a box of diapers.’”
Kelly had to laugh. “We knew,” he said. “We’ve known for a while.”
She nodded. “He’s been visiting, hasn’t he? Besides Christmas.”
He’d told them about Christmas so they’d understand why he was spending so much time with Seth’s dad and why Craig wasn’t coming upstairs.
“Then it’s good Matty’s going. Seth can come upstairs when Matty’s gone. It’s not the whole neighborhood or the city, but it’s not just Craig’s apartment either. It must be making him crazy not to practice.”
Kelly thought of the longing looks Seth cast at his practice corner, and the way he brought the violin out sometimes and just practiced bow and fretwork without actually running the bow across the strings. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
She gave him a small smile, and he realized how pinched her full mouth had become this last year. “And the girls miss him. Well, we’ll have to get rid of your brother, then.” She sighed. “But right now, yeah. Go ask Seth’s dad if you can stay for a while, okay?”
Oh God.
“Okay.”
Kelly added some more clothes to his backpack. And then some more. And then he took them all out and packed a new one so he could use that backpack for his schoolwork.
His parents were still talking to Matty as Kelly threw a pack over each shoulder and slid out the door.
Seth’s dad had gotten used to him just coming in the front door by now, but he must have heard something going down upstairs, because he looked up… and grimaced. “Dammit, Kelly. Sit down, and I’ll get you some ice.”
He came back with an ice pack and asked Kelly if he wanted to talk about it.
Kelly grunted around the pack he held to his lip. “My brother knocked up his girlfriend. Apparently that means we all gotta suffer.”
Craig sighed. “I’m sorry. What’re your parents doing?”
“Trying to invent a time machine so they can go back and not have him,” Kelly said. “I think the only thing stopping them is that me and the girls would have to go, and they like us.”
Craig snickered. “Time travel could be very useful in this situation. So you’re here for a little while?”
Kelly sighed. “Yeah. I… I was just starting to like home again too.”
“I’m sorry, kiddo.” He patted Kelly’s shoulder. “I’m doubly sorry that it’s this weekend.”
“You got a date?” Kelly perked up. He’d started to think that Seth’s dad had been alone too long. He wanted to start setting him up with all the divorced women in their neighborhood, but Seth’s dad seemed like too much of a catch for those women. It had to be someone special.
“No, I’ve got overtime.” Craig shrugged. “But Sunday we can catch a movie if you like.”
They did this sometimes. They both liked comic book movies, it turned out, and Kelly was glad to have a friend.
“We’ll see,” Kelly said, his mind wandering. All day tomorrow? God. He couldn’t do it. He needed to get the hell out.
“You have other plans?” Craig cocked his head expectantly, because he was still a parent, and Kelly appreciated that.
“I’ll let you know,” he said. In his head he was making plans already. He had an allowance from watching the girls after school, and with Seth’s dad paying for shit, he’d saved some up.
While Craig went into the kitchen and started to fix dinner—a salad and some hamburger patties, bless his heart—Kelly pulled out his phone and started to plan.
The next morning he left a note—Going to see him. K. He wanted to say when he’d be back, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t help it. He just didn’t ever want to come back.
But the plan was to go spend the rest of his formative years on Seth’s floor, and it didn’t have a contingency plan for his father pulling up next to him in the family minivan, window rolled down.
“Get in.”
Kelly didn’t look up. “No habla English.” Of course the irony was, he didn’t habla Espanol either, because his father didn’t speak it in the house, and he’d taken French in school. All he knew was mijo.
His dad sputtered. “Look, you little dickhead, I’ll pay for your ticket there and back, just get in the damned car!”
Well, shit. On the one hand, it meant he had to come back. On the other, it meant he’d have more money for food if he went with the living-in-Seth’s-dorm option.
“Coffee on the way?” he bargained, and his dad laughed.
“Sure.”
He got in the car, and Dad threw him a hat—something his grandma had knit for… well, anyone in the family who would wear it. It was made with big chunky yarn and had flecks of something pink in it.
“Really?” Kelly asked, eyeing the hat.
“Did you bring one of your own?” Dad asked pointedly.
“No.”
“It’s cold outside. You forget your own hat, I provide. Also, are you insane?”
Kelly grunted. “Seth does it sometimes.”
“Yes. This is true. But Seth didn’t walk out the door one night and almost not come back!”
“He did too,” Kelly said. “He did too, and you know it. And this time, I needed to be somewhere with him where we can walk outside for a change. I….” He let out a little grunt. “It’s not fair.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been looking at JC’s, you know, near Northridge or San Francisco. So we can….” This sounded so grown-up. “So we can live together and go to school.”
“We’d miss you,” his dad said, sighing. “I’m not ready yet. Definitely not ready for Matty to be grown-up. Seriously not ready for you to grow up either. You’re only sixteen.”
“Well….” Kelly looked out the window into the foggy streets. “I’ll be seventeen when I graduate. If we were rich and shit, you’d be sending me away to a college, never to see me again.”
“Screw that,” his dad muttered. “There’s, like, no way!”
Kelly laughed then, with all his heart, because his dad sounded about sixteen himself.
“Well, you know. Bridgford isn’t that far away. Maybe you can visit—isn’t the train station over there?” Because his dad had passed up the old brick building in the pocket behind Old Sacramento and was zooming toward the freeway.
“The way I figure, I’ll get you there in about two hours,” his dad said. “Look around—nobody out. We can stop for coffee in Vacaville.”
Kelly swallowed. “Don’t you got things to do today? Matty and—” He tried so hard not to say “skanky whoring bitch.” “—Isela?”
It was his dad’s turn to laugh, and he didn’t slow down. “Tell me how you really feel, Kelly.”
“He’s stupid,” Kelly muttered. “I mean, I’m not gonna argue he’s stupid. And he’s mean. And he’s an asshole. But… but trapping him? That wasn’t right. He was just dumb, being led around by his peter that way.”
“Yeah.” Dad took a deep breath. “I can’t argue. Not today. And I’m pissed at him. He doesn’t deserve my time like you do. But we’re having a good conversation. Even if all we do the rest of the way down is argue over music and sports, I’d rather spend my morning driving you to Bridgford and coming home than dealing with your brother’s bullshit.”
Kelly smiled, a thing that had gone cold in his chest the night before warming again. “I mean, she’s gonna be pregnant until what? August?”
“That’s the plan so far,” his dad said.
“Yeah, well, they can frickin’ wait. I’ll even let you pick the music.”
“How about you pick the music. I know Seth sends you practice videos. Let’s hear what he’s doing.”
Kelly’s chest got tight. He remembered when Seth said just talking about Kelly to his roommate made him feel better. This was his dad’s way of making up for the fact that nobody talked about Seth in his house anymore. Everybody was too afraid of Matty or Isela, of somebody telling Seth’s terrible secret and getting him into trouble.
Kelly never got to talk about one of the things he was a complete expert on, and Dad was giving him a chance to do that.
He wasn’t going to squander it.
“Okay, so this is one of those violin concertos that people do all the time when they want to sound super good at something. It’s like the violin is the center of the entire orchestra, and Seth is going to perform it at the end of this year. And it’s a big deal. Because he’s not even college level yet. It’s like his first thing—the thing he did during his summer break at the college where he was supposed to have a buddy telling him how to be a college student when he was still in high school.”
His dad nodded, like maybe he was used to not talking when Kelly was on a roll.
“He totally pissed off his buddy because he was way better than she was, and she went and told the professor that he needed more work because he was going too fast, and suddenly he had to learn all this shit, while everybody else was running around the school and going places and stuff. I mean, I guess he got to do some sightseeing, but he was a little depressed. So anyway, he hasn’t gotten any worse, and this is him practicing.”
He found the file on his phone and hit Play, and then sat, breathless, as Seth’s first chords drifted over the sound system.
His dad listened, mouth open, as they changed freeways to 80-West, and then kept going. About the time they hit West Sac and found a gas station area that had coffee, both of them were a little choked up and misty-eyed.
“He’s really good,” his dad said, pulling off the freeway.
“Wait ’til you hear the special mash-up that’s all my favorite stuff,” Kelly told him proudly.
“He did that for you?”
“Yeah. We… uh… you know. Talk every day.”
His dad took a deep breath and pulled the minivan up to a pump. “I guess he really is your boyfriend, isn’t he?”
Kelly nodded. That was the word he used at school. He’d been asked out a couple of times—Jimmy Durreson and Tevin Crane knew all the gay people, and they didn’t seem to believe that Kelly wasn’t single.
“Yeah, Daddy. I’m gay. I’ve got a boyfriend.” And that was Seth, who was still dreamy and out there, but who would probably come down from outer space for him.
“Your mom and I mean it, son. It’s not that you’re gay. We worry about you because the world is hard. And because you’re young. But not because you’re gay.”
Kelly grinned. “That’s good. It’s not going away.”
His dad laughed, and they both got out to use the bathroom and get some coffee. In spite of the cold, Kelly liked his iced and sweet, and while he was waiting for the in-store barista to get her shit together, he pulled out his phone.
You gonna be around today?
Yeah. Amara and I are going shopping in ten, but we should be back in a couple hours. Why?
