Two Boys Kissing(30)
They head right to Craig, and Craig’s mother asks him if he’s okay.
He nods slightly.
“Sam was watching, and he came to get us.”
Us. Craig hears the us, and at first doesn’t understand it. Then his father and his other brother, Kevin, are there, too.
“Parked the car,” Craig’s father says. “Your mom couldn’t wait.”
It hits Craig fully: He is, right now, kissing Harry right in front of his father. His mind can’t really acclimate to this. At all.
Harry’s dad comes over to introduce himself to Craig’s father and brothers, and also, more subtly, to make sure they don’t end up blocking all of the cameras. Craig can see his father measure Harry’s dad up; for his part, Harry’s dad is trying his hardest to make a good impression.
Kevin, a seventh grader, seems to not understand why he was woken up for this. Sam, though, keeps staring at Craig. Ten minutes ago, if you’d told Craig that Sam had been in the car with the guys yelling “FAGGOTS!”, he wouldn’t have been that surprised. But now he has to accept that his brother’s staring is more complicated than that. It’s not an older-brother death stare. He’s probably just trying to understand the situation as much as Craig is.
“We’re not staying for long,” Craig’s father is saying.
“But we just got here,” Kevin whines.
“It’s late. We wanted to make sure he’s okay, and he’s okay.”
Craig can feel his father keeping his distance—but still, he’s closer than Craig thought he would be. He wonders what his mother said to him, how she explained.
“I’m going to stay,” Sam mumbles.
Craig’s father does not look happy with this.
“It’s well after midnight,” he intones. “You’re coming home.”
Sam smiles mischievously and says, “But Craig gets to stay out.…”
Craig can feel the tremor of Harry’s laugh at this line.
Craig’s father doesn’t think it’s funny, though.
“Don’t push me,” he says. “This is about as far as I can go.”
Craig can see Sam considering it. He tries to use his eyes to implore his brother, Just go. Not that Sam has ever listened to him before.
Craig’s mom steps in. “We can all come back tomorrow,” she says, shepherding Sam back in the direction of the car.
“We’ll be here!” Harry’s dad says, maybe a little too cheerily.
Craig’s mom takes in the wall of supporters that has formed. When she turns back to Craig, it’s hard to read the expression on her face. Or maybe that’s what’s being expressed: a complete lack of definition.
Craig points toward the parking lot, then makes an okay sign. So she knows it’s okay for her to go. Even though nobody’s asked him.
Just as quickly as they appeared, his family heads back home.
The two of them have twenty-three hours to go.
Harry can still smell the egg on his skin.
At two in the morning, Cooper wakes up in the backseat of his own car. His body is sore from trying to fit. The seat belt has been digging into his back. He looks at his watch and feels only disappointment in the hour—he wants it to be five or six or oblivion. He has never slept in his car before, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to do it. If this is his life now, if this is what his life has become, it’s even more pathetic to him than it was before. He should have taken clothes with him. He should have taken food. There aren’t even voices in his head telling him this—it would be much easier if there were voices, because then it could be a conversation. But these are things that he knows, and no voice needs to bother to say them. He could try to distract himself with his phone, but the battery’s low and the car needs to be on to work the charger. He’s sick of the phone, too. Sick of the men and the boys. Sick of everyone wanting so badly to be turned on that they become these one-track minds living from one one-track minute to the next. And where does that track lead? Men and boys all across America getting off, and not a single one cares about Cooper. Yeah, if they read about him in the paper, they’d be sad. But Cooper doesn’t think they’d realize it was him, the boy they were chatting with last night.
Cooper doesn’t believe tomorrow will be better. Or any tomorrow. Not really. We want to tell him in a thousand different ways that he’s wrong. But who are we? Even if we could speak, even if we could knock on that window and get him to roll it down, he would never believe what we have to say, not compared to what he believes about himself, and about the world.
His mind is on fire now, and it will be hours until it cools itself back into the right temperature for sleep. He is angry at his father, angry at his mother, but mostly he’s come to feel that all this was inevitable, that he was born to be a boy who must sleep in his car, that there was no way he was going to make it through high school without being caught. He feels he’s been soured by his own desires, squandered by his own impulses. He despises himself, and that is the flame that sets his mind on fire.
He is too tired to do anything about it. Too tired to turn on the car to charge his phone. Too tired to figure out a better place to be. Too tired to run away somewhere. Too tired to end it all. So he stays in that back seat, contorting himself but never finding comfort. Unable to sleep. Unable to live. Unable to leave.