Two Boys Kissing (14 page)

His father comes back empty-handed, says something to the police officer. No way to tell who it was. They ran away on foot. Could have gone in any direction. Mr. Ramirez thinks it was more than one kid. But it was hard to tell in the dark.

Craig feels Harry shivering. He holds Harry closer, feels the egg stain on the back of Harry’s shirt. Craig makes a
C
sign with his hand
—clothes
—and points to Harry. Mr. Bellamy understands and offers Harry a hoodie. Harry is shivering harder now, and Craig has to hold the back of his head, to make sure he doesn’t shiver away from him. Harry holds out his arms so Craig can help him put on the hoodie, one arm at a time. It feels strange to be dressed in this way, but he’s grateful for the warmth.

It’s over
, he tells himself.

But it’s not over. Not yet. Because now there are voices in the dark. Voices getting closer. And pinpoints of light—flashlights. It is 12:23 in the morning, and people are coming to be here, coming to help. They saw what happened, and they can’t stay in their houses. Not just Harry and Craig’s friends. But their friends’ parents, too. Jim from the tech crew has sped over with more lights from his basement. There have to be at least a dozen people. Then more than a dozen. Smita’s mom is here. Two more police officers. And a man Harry’s never seen before walks up and goes straight to Mr. Bellamy, saying, “I’m staying right here with you.” They wear matching rings.

The site becomes a hive of activity. Jim puts up more lights so the lawn can be seen more clearly. And whereas before when people watched, they did so in conversational clumps, now they make a line, a wall, between Harry and Craig and the outside world. Protecting them.

The whole time, the music hasn’t stopped. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is pumping through the air. Harry senses Craig coming alert to something. He looks off to the side and sees the two figures coming closer.

Craig’s mother. His oldest brother, Sam, a senior at the high school.

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.

We would wake in the middle of the night. Sometimes there were tubes down our throats. Sometimes we were attached to machines that seemed more alive than we were. Sometimes the darkness was laced with light. Sometimes we had been dreaming we were home, and that our mother was in the next room. We didn’t know the room we woke into, or we knew it too well. The last stop. Final destination. And there we were, trapped in those endless, unforgiving hours. Unable to sleep. Unable to live. Unable to leave.

The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses.

There are very few lights on in this town at four in the morning. Most of the ones that are on were left on by accident.
There are one or two night readers, one or two night wanderers, one or two night workers to be found. But most everyone else is asleep.

We are the ones who are awake.

Except on the front lawn of the local high school. There, two boys remain kissing. Muscles sore, mouths tired, eyelids weighty, Harry and Craig hold on to each other, hold on to the forces inside them that will keep them awake. At four in the morning, you can be so light-headed that even the stars seem to have a sound. Harry and Craig sway to the sound of those stars—the few that glimmer over their heads—but also to the sound of all of the unseen stars, all the nebulae that are out of reach but still present. At four in the morning, you can imagine the whole universe is looking down at you. Harry and Craig dance for the universe, and also for the friends who have gathered, the ring of people that remains around them. Mr. Ramirez is snoring lightly in his chair. Tariq’s fingers tap out a language on his keyboard as he responds to questions from Rome and Edinburgh and Dubai. Smita’s mom takes orders for coffee. Jim laughs at something another boy from tech crew has said. Mr. Bellamy, our Tom, tells his husband all is well, that he should go home and get some sleep. Harry and Craig dance to these sounds, too. Craig needs to be held, and Harry is holding him. Harry is letting his mind wander—to books he’s read, to movies he’s seen, to things he may want to say to the tens of thousands of people who are watching them. But Craig’s mind doesn’t wander much farther than Harry. With everything that’s happened, Craig is retreating into the closeness of Harry, the familiarity of his body, of him. This is what he missed when it was gone, what his loneliness
calls out for. He knows the reason Harry is kissing him, but he still feels it as a kiss. He can’t help it, because it helps him. He can’t help it, because right now he needs it so much.

He is not wrong to do this. When you need to hold on to something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it.

Harry needs him, too. Even if he’s not concentrating on that need right now, it’s there. He is so safe within it that he hardly realizes it’s present. Like the coolness of the night, like the small sounds that soundtrack the stars.

We know what it’s like to need to hold on. We hold on to you. Which is to say, we hold on to life.

You have music at your fingertips. Any song you want to hear, there it is.

We marvel at that. The infinite jukebox.

If we want to hear a song, we must steal the sound waves that you send into the air. But there are moments that are so palpable, so in sync with a song we once knew, that it plays itself from some long-lost cassette player that even our memory doesn’t seem to control.

Like the moment Ryan wakes up and thinks of Avery, and the moment (forty minutes later) that Avery wakes up and thinks of Ryan. There is only the sound of their breathing as they blink themselves into the day, only the shift in the mattress,
the accidental fall of a pillow to the floor. This should be all that we hear, but there is also the unmistakable sound of Aretha Franklin in our ears, singing “What a Diff’rence a Day Made.” They both wake into happiness instead of uncertainty, into a better version of the world because yesterday was so welcome. There is no way they would articulate it in the same way Aretha does, when she bursts out with
“It’s heaven, heaven, heaven when you / When you find love and romance on the menu.”
Go and listen to it right now—you have it right at your fingertips, for less than the price of a candy bar. The lyrics sound old, but the music is eternal—that joy in discovering that the right person at the right time can open all the windows and unlock all the doors.

The world wakes up around Harry and Craig.

Harry lifts his feet, wiggles his toes, and only feels soreness, bloat. His back feels like sandpaper has been put between each vertebra. His neck is a wire hanger that an elephant is pulling on. His eyes are dry, but his body is damp. He still smells the egg, feels the egg. But maybe that’s just what sweat smells and feels like after twenty hours. Despite the fact that he’s surrounded by electricity, he finds himself wanting it to rain.

Craig wants to brush his teeth. He and Harry experimented with mouthwash when they were practicing, but it never worked—it was impossible to spit and kiss at the same time. Usually Craig’s fantasies of Harry are elaborate—dancing in tuxedos across the floor of Grand Central Terminal, or canoeing
on a lake as the world around them turns instantaneously from summer to fall, all the trees burning into color at once. But now the deepest, clearest fantasy Craig has is of the two of them sitting down. That’s it. Him and Harry, in those two chairs right over there. Sitting down. Not even holding hands. Not kissing. Just sitting there, resting. No one else in the whole world. Just the two of them, sitting down.

We think of ourselves as creatures marked by a particular intelligence. But one of our finest features is the inability of our expectation to truly simulate the experience we are expecting. Our anticipation of joy is never the same as joy. Our anticipation of pain is never the same as pain. Our anticipation of challenge is in no way the same experience as the challenge itself. If we could feel the things we fear ahead of time, we would be traumatized. So instead we venture out thinking we know how things will feel, but knowing nothing of how things will really feel. Already, Craig and Harry are far beyond any expectation, any preparation. They must make up each minute as it comes along, and in doing so, they are creative. Yes, creative. You do not need to be writing or painting or sculpting in order to be creative. You must simply create. And this is what Craig and Harry are doing. They are creating a kiss, and they are also creating their stories, and by creating their stories, they are creating their lives.