Cody hardly feels the first blow to the back of his chair. In the seven weeks since he started volunteering for the Parker campaign, his office-mate Carrie Dodson and her boredom kicks have become his closest friends. Sometimes, when the donors aren’t picking up and the office AC dies, she wads up the used call lists and tosses them at the back of his chair, calling out points when she gets him in the head. Today, she works up a good rhythm before he finally pulls out both earbuds and looks back, eyebrows raised.
“Markhausen.” Carrie gestures toward his supervisor’s office door with one manicured thumb, her big blue eyes blinking under a cloud of bleached-blonde hair. “That’s still you, right?”
That’s when Cody hears a voice calling from the other side of the door. For a second, he isn’t sure what to do. For all the regularity of his presence as a campaign peon, he’s spoken maybe five words to the middle-aged dragon lady in charge. To be honest, he’s shocked that Judy knows his name. Judy doesn’t do names.
He stares at the closed door, eyes wide in confusion. “What do I—?”
“I dunno.” Carrie looks as surprised as he feels, but considerably less concerned. She glances at Judy’s office and shrugs. “I guess you go in.”
Cody nods and stands, like a robot in a seventeen-year-old boy’s body. There’s no way he could have gotten in trouble. A trained monkey could enter this data without breaking a sweat.
He pushes the door ajar with the pads of his fingers and steps inside to find his boss, the unstoppable Judy Gould, nearly buried under stacks of printer paper. He assumes the space at her feet is clear, but he can’t see anything except her head over the piles towering on either side of her desk. Until now, she has existed only as a passing blur of angles and three-inch heels, her elbows and fingernails slicing the air like knives, her lipstick the color of congealed blood.
“Cody!” She smiles and waves him in, already scrolling through something on her phone. “I was starting to think that those headphones had done something to your brain. Get yourself in here.”
He leaves the door cracked and hesitates before perching on a stack of folders piled atop a metal folding chair He focuses on balancing his weight, which isn’t easy when his feet barely hit the floor and his hands are slick with summer sweat. Judy, of course, doesn’t notice a thing.
“You’re in high school, yes?” she asks, glancing up from her phone. He nods and she barrels on.
“Here’s the deal. There’s a kid at St. Claire Senior High who’s been pestering me for ages about getting the campaign involved in ‘youth issues,’” she says with violent air quotes, “and I finally told him that we could ‘team up’ for a parade on Friday. He brings bodies, we bring campaign signs and we get him off our backs for one more week. I’ll even throw in the markers for some artistic involvement.”
“So.” She stands, and Cody is reminded of a hawk before it dives in for the kill. “Since he’s a little shit who can’t vote, and you’re a little shit who can’t vote, I thought it was a match made in budgetary heaven. I know.” She grins, reaching for a stack of files in the corner. “Sometimes I outdo myself.” Cody wonders if, for Judy, “little shit” is a term of affection.
Judy pulls a piece of paper from the top file and waves it in his direction. “Apparently, his little club meets tomorrow. Go, be nice, and we’ll see you next week. Go team!” She raises her fists in mock encouragement, and Cody turns to get out of the office before the walls close in like the trash compactor in Star Wars. He has his hand on the doorknob when a chill runs down his back. Judy is laughing. Unless she’s literally taking candy from babies, Judy doesn’t laugh.
“Oh right,” she giggles, and Cody freezes in his tracks. “I hope you like glitter.”
Outside the door, he looks down at the paper and almost forgets to keep standing:
ORGANIZATION: ST. CLAIRE SENIOR HIGH GAY STRAIGHT ALLIANCE (GSA)
CONTACT: ANDREAS FURNEAUX
MEET: JULY 26, ST. CLAIRE SENIOR HIGH, RM 124, 11 AM
EVENT: ST. CLAIRE GAY PRIDE PARADE
No. Cody feels the blood drain from his cheeks. No, no no. Anything but this. He turns to barge back into Judy’s office, but he can’t go back in there. What could he possibly say? Instead, he drops back into his chair and stares a hole into the dirty white wall pocked with thumbtacks of campaigns past.
Just out of Cody’s peripheral vision, Carrie clears her throat. She gives a wave when he turns. She could pretend that she hadn’t heard everything in Judy’s office, but there really isn’t any point.
“I wouldn’t get worked up about a bunch of high school punks, babe. Do you know these kids?” He shakes his head. He doesn’t know them. He knows of them. He’s been avoiding them for years. “Well, don’t worry. Everyone loves a basketball star.”
She turns back to her double-wide computer screen and Cody nods. No. It isn’t like that at all. No one knows him at school. He’s fast, so they let him play, but most of the guys on his team don’t even know his name. The moment he steps off the court he’s just another white boy with blond, wispy hair that won’t stay out of his eyes. He’s invisible. It’s either that or be the runt—the short kid with eyes too big for his face—and given that choice, he’d rather be nothing at all.
Carrie peeks up over her computer to find him still gaping at the wall. “Get a move on, Markhausen. I wouldn’t want you to be tired for your big debut!” She grins, and before he can protest he’s shuffling toward the front door.
Stepping out of the Parker for Senate northern headquarters in St. Claire, Wisconsin, Cody squints at the mayflies buzzing under Monroe Avenue’s only streetlight. Concerned citizens had campaigned for more, but the idea was dismissed as unnecessarily indulgent. The lamp flickers under the pressure of beating wings, and Cody, the proud representative of the Parker campaign, turns to throw up in front of the door.
* * *
The next morning, Cody finds himself walking through the hallways of his empty school. His footsteps echo in long, dull tones. Without air conditioning, the building cooks in its own stale air; the walls sweat like a giant body in the sun and drip condensation into dirty puddles on the floor.
As he walks, Cody rolls a tiny plastic model between his fingers until he can feel the edges cutting into his skin. When he was thirteen, his aunt sent him a model-making kit in a gray box labeled WARMACHINE. He’s sure she had no idea what she was doing; she probably walked into the nearest game store and asked what to give a quiet child. Still, she did well. Four years and a hundred models later, he’s learned to love the details on a monstrous face. He sculpts wings and paints lips for hours, until his warriors emerge from fields of gray.
The models are meant for a two-person tabletop game, but Cody’s never bothered to find someone to play with. Instead he reads about each unearthly face in paperback guidebooks until he knows the characters as well as members of his own family. For years the monsters blurred together, until he found Kaelyssa: Guardian of the Light. In a game full of enthusiastic killers and team players, she is solitary and peaceful. She fights with terrible precision, but her enemies never break her shell. Cody wishes he could pull that peace from the pages of his book and wear it like a winter coat.
Instead, when the world creeps in, he rolls the figure in his hand, or presses it into his leg until he feels the sharp-edged wings against his thigh. On days like today, it hurts just enough to pull him back into his own skin.
Cody hears the meeting before he sees the room. He follows the wordless chatter toward a lit doorway. As he stands, willing the building to fall around his shoulders, a short girl with bushy eyebrows bolts into the classroom. As she enters, the room erupts in greeting. Cody can make out a boy’s voice screaming, “Girl, where have you been? I have been worried.” Maybe if he sneaks in now, everyone will be paying so much attention to her that they won’t notice him come in.
The entire room sees him when he slips inside, but no one seems to care. Cody isn’t half as interesting as whatever Bushy-brows is trying to say, and for that he is infinitely grateful.
He drops into a seat at a long table against the leftmost wall and stares at the crowd. This isn’t what he expected. He doesn’t know what he expected a real group of those people to look like up close, but it wasn’t this. Even with only twelve or thirteen bodies in the room, they’re making enough noise for a mob twice their size. A round boy with short blue hair and domineering hands sits on a table, gesturing to three blonde girls who seem more interested in trading magazines. A boy—or maybe it’s a girl—races to lift Bushy-brows in a rib-rattling hug, and they’re laughing before her feet hit the floor.
“How could you go without me, you traitor?” Cody stares as a tiny Asian girl with chubby cheeks suddenly wails in existential pain. “I introduced you to Adam Pascal. That was me,” she says, jabbing her finger up into the face of a tall, dark-skinned girl whose eyes are rapidly filling with tears. “I showed you the brilliance of his soul, and you couldn’t bother to tell me that he would be performing within fifty miles of my body?”
“Maddie—”
“Don’t. Just don’t.” Maddie slams herself into a chair with all the scorn she can muster. “I don’t think I know you anymore.”
“Mads—”
“Maybe I never did—”
“Oh, come on!” The tall girl drops into a crouch and glares into her friend’s face. “It’s been years. Literally. I thought you were over Rent.”
“Over Rent?” The boy on the table turns, aghast, as though she’s just implied that it is possible to be over running water.
“Butt out, Terrence.”
It’s all overwhelming, and Cody feels himself sinking lower and lower in his plastic chair. If he drops under the table and stays there long enough, maybe they’ll forget why they decided to meet in the first place and just go home. He pulls a pile of campaign guidelines from his backpack and starts to set them up around his body like a barricade.
Then he hears a dark chuckle from behind the boy called Terrence.
He jerks to attention, and it stops. He flips a packet on parade etiquette right side up, and there it is again—a low laugh that might be directed at him.
Cody leans all the way back in his seat to peek around Terrence and finds a thin white face looking back at him, emphatically unimpressed. From his awkward angle, Cody can just make out the boy who owns the face: long, thin legs crossed on top of the table, long fingers clasped over a thin chest. He tips back in his chair as if he owns the room; Cody wonders if it might not be true. The boy cocks his head at him, but Cody can’t stop staring. Somehow, the boy seems to take up more space than his wiry frame should allow. As he leans, the loose ends of his jacket and T-shirt drop away from his body in points as sharp as the lines in his face and his dark, cropped hair.
The boy squints at the papers now piled in front of Cody’s face. “I knew it.” He nods, and the corners of his lips twitch in the hint of a grin. Leaning forward, eyes hard as cut diamonds, he whispers, “Watch this.”
Cody watches. He can’t imagine that he has a choice. Slowly, the other boy turns to the group, legs still crossed over the top of the table—and does absolutely nothing. As the seconds tick away, the boy crosses his arms over his chest and cocks his ear toward the group while the noise grows. Cody is suddenly reminded of a chef hovering over a pan, listening for the exact moment when the bacon starts to sizzle.
A minute disappears, and then two, and now Cody can’t tell one conversation from the next; the squealing sounds converge until he can’t bear to sit still. He opens his mouth to tell this kid exactly where he can shove his little demonstration, just in time to watch the boy toe over a stack of textbooks and send them crashing to the floor. The crash cuts through the room, and suddenly the boy has the entire group’s rapt attention. Faces peer from every corner, hands frozen in whatever gesture they’d been making when the pile hit the ground.
Impressive. And from Cody’s angle, it almost looked like an accident.
The other boy unfolds his legs and eases to his feet, impassive under the group’s gaze. As he stands, he crosses his arms delicately over his chest in a precise show of irritation.
“Good morning ladies, gentlemen and everything in between,” he begins. The tall girl tosses a pencil at his head, and he ducks it with ease. “I’m glad to see that you could all join me on this beautiful summer day. We have three days until the glorious crappitude that is the St. Claire Pride Parade, and do we want our presence in the parade to suck, Kaiylee?”
“No,” a voice calls from the back, like clockwork.
“No what?”
“No, André, we don’t want to make the parade suck any more than it already does.”
“That’s right. So, in service of that goal—which is what, Maddie?”
“Not sucking.”
“Right—I’m going to sit over here with the nice ‘man’ the Parker campaign has sent over to help us along.” Cody hears the implied quotation marks and tries not to scowl into his papers. “We’re going to work out the minutiae for the day—”
“The what?” A boy’s thin, white hand shoots up from the middle of the pack and the speaker sighs.
“The bullshit, Andrew. For fuck’s sake, I keep telling you that books open.”
“Fuck you, André.”
“Not in this lifetime,” he snaps and shifts his focus back to the rest of the group. “So while I’m hashing out boring parking permits with this guy, we’re gonna need people figuring out the really important questions. Obviously,” he smiles, “I’m talking about what we’re going to wear.”
“Yes,” a tiny girl in the front whispers reverently. “Yes!”
André stoops to pick up a clipboard covered in color swatches from the floor and hands it to the boy sitting on the table. “Terrence, Maddie, Juliet—you’re on point. We need something coherent, but not too flamboyant for the St. Claire masses. Unless we’re being given campaign T-shirts?” He looks back at Cody and raises an eyebrow at his blank stare. “Let’s assume we aren’t getting T-shirts. Remember, don’t listen to anything Andrew says, and don’t let me down.”
Cody feels as if he’s stepped into some kind of creation ritual without a rulebook. The speech drips sarcasm, and yet no one else seems to notice, or care. Instead, they rush into action as though this André is the second coming of Tim Gunn and they are damn well going to “make it work.”
“We have to match!” Maddie squeals to the tall girl who threw the pencil.
“But not exactly, right?” she replies, her dark eyebrows furrowed. “If we all wear the same thing, half of us are going to look like shit.”
Terrence is already hunched over a three-ring binder, drawing angular shapes as the rest of the group huddles to contribute opinions.
For a second, André watches, arms still wrapped around his body, mouth pulled into a tight, close-lipped smile. Then he turns, and his smile slips into a line of disdain. “There we go,” he says, voice drained, and drops into a chair across the table from Cody. “That should keep them busy for a while. Now, I need to figure out what to do with you.” He lifts a pencil in two fingers and lets it dangle like a cigarette in a long, elegant holder. Cody is fairly sure that André, if he had his druthers, would be blowing smoke rings between Cody’s eyes.
“I—um—” Cody feels his brain stutter and shut off. “I guess we should—” André suddenly focuses his considerable attention on him; his nose is wrinkled as though Cody resembles a particularly unusual insect. “I—I’m Cody and—um—should I call you Andreas?”
“André is fine,” he says in a tone that suggests absolutely nothing is fine.
“Okay.” Cody stares down at his papers and watches the words swim in front of his eyes. “The campaign has provided guidelines in here about how to—um—to register for the parade and there’s something about what we can put on the signs—”
“Are you even old enough to go to this school?” Cody looks up to find André leaning across the table, peering into his face. “Did they send us a middle-schooler?”
“I’m a senior.”
“Seriously? I’m a senior. How are you a senior?” André looks genuinely shocked, as if Cody has just told him that he moonlights with the Harlem Globetrotters.
“Seriously. I don’t know if you have strong feelings about your posters, but I—I have markers and I think the campaign could provide poster board if you—um—I mean if you don’t already have some.” Even with the stammer, Cody knows he can play the part of a competent volunteer if this guy will let him. Still, André won’t budge. If anything, his eyes keep getting wider. “I could meet with your group tomorrow to make the posters if—if you’d like. What did you do last year?”
“Absolutely fuck all.”
Cody feels his expression sour, and André shrugs, continuing: “No, I mean it. We jumped in two days before the event and when we showed up, hardly anyone was there. The entire parade was us, the organizing committee and the drag queens from the Starlight Lounge.” André delivers the line like a joke, but he’s no longer looking Cody in the eye. “The kids were pissed, but it’s not like parades do anything, right? Has any homophobe ever wandered into a shitty little pride parade and suddenly realized the error of his ways? ‘Oh shit, I’ve been wrong all along, these little fairies know how to throw a party.’” André lays his hand over his heart in mock contrition; Cody can’t bring himself to laugh. “Anyway, it didn’t do a lot for team morale. Thanks for asking.”
Cody blanches and looks down at the papers in his hands. “I didn’t mean to—”
“But if you’re a senior, does that mean you’re actually seventeen? You must be one of those wunderkinds who graduate from high school before they hit puberty. Do you already have a contract with NASA?” André asks this last in a low whisper and, when Cody looks up, he gives a smirk that’s at once patronizing and utterly bored. Across the table, André carefully crosses one leg over the other and purses his lips as if to say, Well, dumb-ass? You gonna answer the question?
“Really?” Cody’s mouth drops open and he dumps the papers onto the desk before he can think about what he’s doing. “I’m trying to help you, and you—” He sounds petulant, but he can’t seem to stop. “I didn’t even want to be here, but I got the job and I don’t get why you’re riding me so hard, you—you— ”
Cody glares down at his scattered papers. It takes one whole breath before he realizes what he’s just said. He just—oh my God. He looks up in horror to find André leaning back with a wide, self-satisfied grin. “Oh, honey, really? I never ride anyone until after the first date.”
“You know I wasn’t talking about… that,” Cody mutters.
“About what?” André asks, all innocence, and rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t make you say it. But you should know that it isn’t catching. You can’t go homo just by acknowledging the pink elephant in the room,” he says with a bite. Cody flinches back into his chair. “Now,” André says, with a wicked grin, “if you want to go full-on gay, there might be some riding involved, but I’m not sure I’m your guy. If you want, I could ask Andrew. I can’t promise anything, but he’s pretty desperate. Isn’t that right, Andy?” He calls over his shoulder toward the huddle of students still chattering over T-shirt designs, and something in Cody snaps.
“No,” he whispers, leaning over the table and poking André in the arm until he turns around. “I really don’t get it.” André’s eyes narrow, but Cody keeps pushing. “I’m here. I’m talking with you about posters and parking, while they’re all talking about what? Costumes? I don’t get it. I know you don’t know me from Adam, but I’m here talking about the ‘bullshit,’ as you so kindly put it, so what did I do to get on your shit list?”
Cody jerks his head toward the other students and watches as the humor drains from André’s face one muscle at a time. He was grinning just a second ago, eyes flashing with humor, but now, under Cody’s gaze, André turns to stone. He leans over, elbows pressed into the laminate table, eyes as hard as glass.
“Shit list?” André says in disbelief. “You aren’t on my shit list, because I save my shit list for people that matter.” He points over his shoulder toward the group, his hand shaking in suppressed rage. “Do you see Kaiylee and Terrence? They both got kicked out of their houses last year, shortly before I got kicked out of mine. She’s been sleeping on a blow-up mattress with a friend for the last eight months, and he’s been on more couches than he can count. Do you see Maddie? She will never get kicked out of her house, but she’ll also never be able to leave. Her mom wants her to take over the family store, which means that she gets to go to college, but she probably won’t be able to have an open relationship with another woman until all of her relatives are dead. Some of those kids are depressed, some of them have tried to kill themselves, and even the ones with perfectly wonderful little families are a little fucked up, because it’s almost impossible not to be.”
André takes a deep, shaky breath and Cody leans back, mouth agape.
“Of course they’re talking about clothes and stupid costumes,” André continues with bitter emphasis, “because what the hell else should they be talking about? No really, tell me, because this is the place they come to not talk about all that other shit. This is where they get to be idiots, like every other teenager on the planet, so they talk about clothes and movies, and I don’t get in their way.” He sighs and stares down at his own hand as it taps on the edge of the table. “You are not on any of my lists, because—right now—you are standing in their way. I’m sure that you are a perfectly decent sort of person in any other context, but right now—” He breaks off with a swallow and, when he looks up, his eyes shine under the fluorescent lights. “Do you have any idea how much—I spent three months calling your office. That meant three months listening to that woman’s voicemail in the stupid hope that someone might notice. I get it. I do. Poor kids don’t vote, and the ones without parents might as well be road kill, but fuck it, what else was I supposed to do?”
André pushes himself to his feet, eyes raw, and as much as Cody might want to, he can’t look away.
“Cody, I’m riding you because right now you’re all we’ve got. I spent three months hoping for some real sign that this campaign gave half a shit about queer kids, and instead I got you.”
His words fall like grenades, and Cody sits, helpless to stop them.
André scoops up his backpack from a chair and turns toward the door, his face once again official and distant. “We usually get ready at Warner Park, by the staging area. Be there at five with the poster supplies and I’ll make sure they all show up in time for the parade.” He nods in a sharp jerk and turns without waiting for Cody’s assent.
* * *
Three days later, Cody tromps across the Warner fields in a haze of fog and sweat. He hasn’t been sleeping well, not before the meeting at the school and certainly not after. He keeps wandering into the same memories, reliving them one after another, like a film that won’t move past the penultimate scene. It wouldn’t be so frustrating if the memories weren’t so boring. In every one, he’s on the playground by Foster Creek Elementary, across the street from his house. He practically lived on that sand and cement before he started middle school; he could see the swings from his bedroom window. Now, his brain won’t stop going back to recess and the crowd of little boys playing smear-the-queer on the open field.
He didn’t know what it meant at the time. None of them did. It was just the name for the kid who had to take the ball and run until everyone tackled him and took him down. “The queer” could run anywhere near the school; it was all fair game. But he was always eventually caught, and he always hit the ground coughing and yelling at all the other guys to get off so someone else could take a turn.
Cody was too fast to be the queer. The whole point of the game was the tackle; it wasn’t fun if the queer got away, so the other kids never asked and he never offered. Instead, he chased and felt the ground move under his feet. Most of the boys were bigger, so he had to run at full speed into their sides, head down, to bear the impact.
That’s what he remembers now: barreling into faceless bodies and watching them crash in a cloud of dust. He can’t remember what happened after that. They might have come up laughing. Some might have cried, but he doesn’t know. He can’t get his mind to move past the rush and sudden crash, jarring his bones as if that nine-year-old is still hidden somewhere inside his seventeen-year-old frame.
He runs. He hits. He falls. And then he’s running again, over and over again for days; until last night, when he doused himself with sleeping pills to get a decent night’s sleep. This morning, his mom had to shake him and then shake him again to get him out of bed.
As he walks, a black speck emerges in the distance and grows into André, perched on the top of a picnic table, leaning back on his hands, his brown eyes scraping Cody’s skin.
André Furneaux might be the first person to make Cody genuinely want to pick a fight, to say something dickish and throw a punch. Whenever he’s been able to stop reliving the playground, he’s thought about André’s eyes, and what he might have to do to make them go dark in irritation. The answer is probably nothing. He just needs to exist to piss André off.
“You made it,” André calls, as Cody gets close enough for heckling, “and here it is: only five thirty.” He holds up his phone, as though Cody could read it from ten feet away and clucks like a mother hen. “Did you get lost? You didn’t actually just move here from an air force base in Russia or anything, right?”
“I walked.” Cody dumps his bags on the dry dirt at André’s feet and looks up; the figurine pokes his hip in the pocket of his jeans. “The Saturday bus schedule is weird and I didn’t factor in the—”
“Oh, stop. I know. I just got here five minutes ago.” André snorts and pushes himself off the top of the table, revealing a paper bag filled with streamers and yardsticks. “Are you usually immune to sarcasm?”
“Usually?” Cody asks, mostly to himself. Nothing about this is usual. “Usually, I don’t feel quite so necessary. After all, you’ve only got me.” He digs into the nearest bag for the black Sharpie and feels André stiffen. He hadn’t meant to throw André’s line about being the “only one” back in his face, but now he doesn’t want to take it back. He waits for André to tell him to fuck off, but the words never come.
“Huh.” Cody peeks up to see André biting his lip and smiling ruefully at the sky. “You know,” he says, “I may have overstated that point… for emphasis. I remember saying something about lists.” He shrugs, and Cody has the distinct sense that this is the closest André will come to an apology.
“Emphasis,” Cody echoes in disbelief.
“Let’s go with that. Like you said, you’re here,” André says, and the corner of his lips twitch as he crouches to reach into his own bag. “Plus, you’re not all they have, thank God. There’s me, there’s Terrence, and Maddie’s pretty intense when she wants to be.”
“I noticed.” Cody risks a tight smile, and something tense between them starts to crackle, like frost breaking under the sun. He searches for a peace offering and jumps on the first stupid thing that comes to mind. “Just so you know,” he starts, slowly, “it wasn’t just you. Judy—the woman you called— she’s awful to everyone. I still remember listening to her answering machine message a million times when I was trying to volunteer. I don’t think she ever called back either way. I just showed up at the office and they never made me leave.”
“Well, that’s just beautiful.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Truly, democracy in action. I can see the posters now. Come volunteer for democracy… if you absolutely insist.” André flexes into an imaginary camera like a disgruntled Rosie the Riveter and looks Cody in the eye. Cody feels his stomach give an almost audible flip. He coughs out a laugh, looks down, and dives into a paper bag in search of supplies.
He holds up a Sharpie without looking back; André takes it and retreats to the picnic table with a piece of poster board and a stencil of the letter G. He sits cross-legged on top of the table while Cody spreads the poster board out onto the pavement and eyes the sign-making materials like a pop quiz.
After a long minute sizing up his poster board, Cody senses eyes on his back and turns to find André watching him. He raises an eyebrow, but André waves, unfazed. “Don’t mind me, I’ve just never seen anyone commune with paper. Is it talking back?”
Cody rolls his eyes and goes back to the poster board. “Not yet.”
“You sure? Because I can handle crazy. Some might even call me an expert.”
“I’m sure,” Cody sighs. “I’ll let you know if I start receiving messages from the tree afterlife.”
“Oh, sassy.” André sounds almost proud. He also sounds closer; his voice hovers just above Cody’s shoulder, and his breath skims the back of Cody’s neck. “Not bad for a straight boy.” Cody flinches, but André barrels on. “You should try that line on Kaiylee. At last year’s parade she said she could commune with trees.”
“Was she one of the ones pissed about last year?” Cody’s voice sounds steady, as if he isn’t pushing down on a rising wave of bile. The word “straight” has never felt so overwhelmingly wrong, like putting on a parka for the Fourth of July.
Above his head, André stares thoughtfully toward the parade staging area at the end of the park. “No,” he answers slowly. “To be totally honest, I was the only one who got my panties in a twist, but if you tell any of them that I just used the word ‘panties’ in a sentence, I will end you.”
“Understood.”
“I guess I was just expecting more,” André continues, his voice dropping to little more than a murmur. “I don’t know why. Most of the folks who live here couldn’t spell homosexual with a dictionary in both hands.” He gestures toward the four bars and one lonely Lutheran church visible from the park. Walk a few blocks in any direction, and the view wouldn’t change. They stare down the street as a man in hunter orange props open the door of the Falcon Bar and starts sweeping out the entrance.
André shakes his head down at the table. “I’ve been watching too much Logo. Some piece of my brain wanted a movie parade and thought a horde of spectators would materialize out of the woodwork.” He laughs up at the sky and as he smiles, he lights up like the sun. All of the sharp angles that seemed ready to cut in the classroom are instantly delicate, ringed in a halo of light. Cody has to look away; he can’t imagine that André would want a stranger to see him so vulnerable.
By the time André stops laughing, Cody’s back to his poster board, back turned and eyes carefully trained down.
“Well then,” André says, peeking over Cody’s shoulder at the still-blank canvas, “if this is still a standoff in ten minutes, I’m calling for backup.” He waits for a response, but Cody can’t find one. The emptiness of the poster board feels insurmountable. All the slogans he can think to write on the poster involve labels he can’t attach to himself, and he cannot imagine carrying any of them down the middle of the street.
“Hey,” André pokes him in the shoulder with the covered end of his Sharpie. “You’re thinking too hard. No one’s even going to look at our posters, because we’ve already established that no one is going to be there. Cody—oh, for fuck’s sake. It’s like you’ve never seen a marker in the wild.” In a blink, André climbs down onto the ground, turns the poster board ninety degrees and starts scrawling in broad, red strokes. Cody watches as words emerge, the marker seeping through the fibers like blood in the sand.
“There.” André sits back to study his work and then turns the poster for Cody’s approval. “I got it started for you. It’s inelegant, but nobody gives a shit, and I promise that just looking at the word won’t make you like boys.” He rolls his eyes as he stands and walks back toward the paper bags, and Cody can only stare at the poster.
There it is: G-A-Y in rude red chicken scratch.
It’s just a word, but he thinks he might shake out of his skin. “You don’t get it,” he whispers, before he can stop his mouth. “I already like boys. I’ve always liked boys and—” He sucks in a breath. “And that’s not the problem.”
The words rush out in a wave, and when they hit, André finally turns, squinting, confused. Cody knows the minute they sink in: André’s face goes lax in shock.
He’s never said it out loud. Not in his room, not in the shower, not anywhere outside of his head. It sounds bitter and pathetic. He shouldn’t have said it here—not in a pile of dirt, not in front of this tall, beautiful boy who doesn’t understand. André inches forward, one hand out in front of his body, but Cody’s already gone. As quickly as his mind shut down, it rushes back to life, and he runs.
Cody runs for what seems like hours, feet pushing off of the pavement, then the dirt and finally the long grass beyond the park fields. He used to love it here—not the park, but this hazy space where he runs too fast and breathes too hard to make sentences. It’s what he does: When his dad’s gone quiet or when he can’t figure out a color scheme for his models, he runs. The wind picks up the edges of his shirt, and as he falls into a steady rhythm the world melts under his feet.
When he sits for too long, he can almost hear the mental gears grinding in his skull, but when he runs, he can’t feel himself think. When the gears in the back of his mind threaten to turn, he runs harder, until his lungs burn and his eyes fill with tears. Maybe if he keeps going, the heat in his lungs will expand and he’ll burn away, leaving a smoldering patch on the asphalt to mark his departure. He could just disappear.
He’s never wanted anything more in his entire life.
Finally, he runs out of air. His hands drop to his knees and he hunches over the road, coughing into dirt so dry that his breath kicks it up in puffs. He has to go back. He wants to run until he forgets his own name, and all the names that anyone else might want to lay on his back; maybe then he could wake up on foreign soil and create himself anew. But right now he has to go back.
He stands and stares back over his shoulder at the speck in the distance that was André. André, who’s been planning. André, who’s bringing the whole club to carry signs that Cody couldn’t make. André, who’s already spent one year wondering what happened to his perfect day. André, who probably popped out of the womb knowing who he was and where he was supposed to be. Before this week, Cody can’t remember when he last saw André from any less than a full hallway’s distance away. That’s when he’d catch a yell or a bleat of laugher from the clump of bodies up ahead, and find another way to class. For years, Juliet, Terrence, Maddie and the rest were just that group he didn’t name, like a species too foreign for safe identification But still, even from a hundred feet away, André reeked of confidence. Cody might not have known his name or been able to pick out his face in a lineup, but it was obvious that that boy, with his crowd of loud, bizarre friends, was at home in his own skin.
Cody sucks in a ragged breath and starts running back toward the picnic table and all the art supplies he couldn’t bring himself to use. It’s too late for the posters, at least for the ones that didn’t come from the campaign, but he’ll ‘fess up and apologize to everyone until he runs out of ways to say that this year’s mess was all his fault. I’m sorry I was too weak. I’m sorry I had a meltdown over poster board. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. André won’t make it easy on him. Whatever uneasy truce they formed back there will be gone, but Cody can’t say that he deserves anything less.
As soon as he can see the picnic table, Cody knows that he’s been running too long. The empty clearing now holds at least ten teenagers, all dressed in the campaign’s white and blue. Terrence hands out rainbow handkerchiefs from a white trash bag, while André’s sparring partner, Andrew, shoves new arrivals in André’s direction. At the picnic table, Maddie and Juliet, the girls who’d been arguing about Adam Pascal back in the classroom, have mended fences; at least he thinks they have. But he doesn’t remember Juliet, the tall black girl, being quite so bald. Maddie, the little raging one, sits on the picnic table bench, while Juliet sits on the table itself, leaning over and doing something serious with her friend’s hair. They haven’t seen him yet. He could still turn around and disappear into the park. For a second, he entertains the thought of just leaving all of them to celebrate the parade in peace, but then the huddle shifts and Cody finds himself looking directly into André’s upturned gaze.
He can’t make out André’s expression, but it can’t be good. There he is; André Furneaux, self-appointed champion of gay misfits, and Cody can’t even deal with markers. As he gets within shouting distance, André starts walking toward him; when he gets within a few feet he holds up one hand. Cody stops in his tracks and feels his stomach jump into his throat. No. André doesn’t even want him to come back. He’d been prepared for anger, but the rejection aches like an open wound. He turns to walk back into the park, his hand twisting the figurine in his pocket, when he hears André quietly say his name.
“Cody? Are you—?” André squints, eyebrows furrowed, and Cody’s jaw drops in shock. André wants to know if he’s okay. He’s worried about whether or not the wimp who ran out on him is okay. Cody almost laughs. He’d never considered that André might care.
“I—” He starts and then realizes that he has no idea how he’s doing. Still, he nods and André slowly lowers his hand to twitch at his side.
“Well,” André says slowly, “I didn’t think you were coming back.”
“Yeah, neither did I.” Cody shrugs and stares down at André’s feet. “Surprise?” he tries, waving his splayed hands near his waist.
André doesn’t smile. If anything, his face falls. His eyes drop to the ground. “You know,” he says, “I’ve got plenty of idiots here to wave signs and be publicly stupid if you want to sit it out. I know you didn’t really choose all of this.” He waves back toward the students getting ready for the parade and finally catches Cody’s eye. “You don’t have to—”
“No.” Cody replies, louder and more quickly than either of them expected. He shoves his hands in his pockets, but doesn’t look away. “I mean, I’m—I want to be here. Besides,” he raises an eyebrow and tries to smile, “if I go, you guys are probably gonna walk the wrong way on the parade route.”
For a second, André just stares, squinting into Cody’s face as if unsure whether to laugh. He cocks his head and Cody does his best to look certain. Something in his face must pass muster, because André breaks into a smile tinged with pride and beckons Cody to follow him into the crowd.
As he turns toward the group, André mutters Cody’s line under his breath in disbelief. “The wrong way on the parade route… Jesus, I wouldn’t let that happen, and if I did you wouldn’t be the one to stop it,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Who then?” Cody scoffs, right behind him. “Terrence?”
“Please. It would be Maddie, if anyone.” André turns to face Cody and walks backward toward the tables. “Terrence and Andrew would walk us all into Lake Superior if someone didn’t tell them to turn at the shore. We’d be knee-deep in water and—”
“Hi, Terrence.” Cody raises a hand at the blue-haired boy physically blocking their path, and André turns with a guilty smirk.
“Glad to see you could join the party,” Terrence deadpans, pressing a rainbow bandana into André’s hand. André grabs a second bandana out of the bag, stuffs one in each of his back pockets and then goes in for a third.
“Cody was checking out the parade route,” André replies, in a smooth lie. “It turns out we’re still walking six blocks through absolutely nothing and then calling it a day.” Terrence laughs, and, as he turns away, André presses a handkerchief into Cody’s hand. “Use it wisely,” he whispers into Cody’s ear. “You’re one of us now.”
One of us. He’s never been part of an “us.” Cody stares down at the lines on the handkerchief and then at the two patches of color on the back of André’s jeans as he walks toward the arriving cars.
Cody expects panic, but it doesn’t come. Maybe he isn’t ready to be Gay with a capital G, but if “us” can mean being one of these idiots, then maybe he’s ready to have people of his own. As he watches the sharp sway of André’s hips, the heat rising up his neck doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like… clarity, as though the run put everything in perspective, and now he can’t stop seeing André in crisp, dazzling color.
Someone presses a sign into his hand and guides him toward the parade staging area with the rest of the crew. Once again, he can’t hear himself think over the din, but it’s different now. At the meeting, and for years before that in the hallways, he felt like an invader locked out by a wall of sound, and now he’s somehow wandered inside.
In their parade spot, next to a sad little flag stuck in the ground, parade-master Maddie tries yelling for quiet. She jumps up and down, waving her arms, but the noise grows, magnified by the echo between the pavement and the brick of the bar walls. She stamps her foot and Terrence takes it as a sign and stoops to let the tiny girl clamber onto his back. By the time she manages to get her head above the crowd, they’re all watching.
“Thank you, Terrence,” she calls. “I’ve never felt so dignified.” The group giggles, and she glares from her dizzying height. “To the rest of you idiots, I want to see enthusiasm out there. Smile your asses off. Chant like you’ve never chanted before, because there might only be three people, but we are gonna give them a show! There’s always the news crews, and we make a fabulous report!” A cheer rises from the little group, and Maddie’s jaw twitches as she tries not to smile.
“Unfurl the banner!” she bellows, and out it comes, a plastic screen-printed monstrosity, long enough to require four carriers. “Banner holders to the front, everyone else to your stations. Signs in hand!” They hustle into place, and she smiles like a general at a military tattoo. “At the moment, you don’t make me want to throw up. Well done. Let’s move out!”
“Sir, yes sir!” Juliet calls back, and they’re on the move, a crowd of weirdos putting one foot in front of the other.
They might be one of ten groups in a parade for almost no one, but from Cody’s spot in the middle of the chaos, it’s hard to care. For one thing, people, actual people, dot the sidewalks and smile as the parade walks by. When he tosses Tootsie Rolls into the street, children race out to scoop them up before dashing back to their parents on the curb. They look giddy, less because of the candy, Cody guesses, and more because they get to run into the road without looking both ways. No cars, no stop signs, just candy. One boy darts out and hurries back as though the magic that’s turned the world upside down might dissipate at any second, and Cody knows how he feels. He’s standing in the middle of the street, screaming at the top of his lungs, and so far no one’s telling him to stop. In fact, Maddie keeps telling him to use his diaphragm.
She marches backward in front of the banner, calling out chants at will. Juliet laughs after every chant, and for the first time Cody recognizes the call and response that once sent him scrambling for another path to class. Heeeey, he’d hear from down the hall, We’re lookin’ too good for Calc II. Am I right? Of course I’m right. Then Juliet would laugh, and he’d run the other way. Out here, it’s just Maddie and Juliet doing what they do, and Cody finds himself laughing along.
“I say sexy, you say bitches. Sexy!”
“Bitches!”
“SEXY!”
“BITCHES!”
Mostly, they all shout to themselves until the second block, when drag performers in sequins and peach lipstick fill the sidewalk outside the Starlight Lounge and start chanting back.
Cody’s head spins in the heat, and sweat trickles down the back of his shirt under the late afternoon sun. He can’t wrap his mind around everything—not the sound, not the jostling bodies, and definitely not the hand at his elbow when he almost falls over his own feet. It’s too much at once, and so he marches along in choppy patches of sensation and light.
Terrence spins Andrew East Coast Swing-style as they turn the corner onto Quentin Avenue, whirling to the beat of the band two blocks away.
They trail behind an all-female motorcycle gang, and one of the ladies invites Maddie to jump on the back of her bike; Maddie spends the rest of the parade grinning, dangling from the back of a 1997 Honda Valkyrie.
When they run out of children to feed, they unwrap the candy and throw it at each other. What doesn’t drop gets eaten, and they ride the sugar high like toddlers.
The sun reflects from the stop signs like fragments of broken glass—
And then there’s André.
He’s everywhere: signaling to Terrence, passing instructions up the line, ordering Maddie to get her ass off the motorcycle. He’s constantly at the edge of Cody’s vision, but never looks him in the eye until the parade ends and Juliet pulls lipstick out of her bag. In the reflection of a car window, she writes “Parker for Senate” on her forehead and suddenly they’re all writing on each other’s faces in “Impatient Pink” and “Burgundy Wine.” Cody turns from watching Andrew’s steady hand to find André leaning against the hood of the car, one eyebrow raised and a lipstick tube in the palm of his hand.
“I don’t know if it’s your color. Would you like to find out?” he smiles.
Cody nods, but he doesn’t consider how close someone must be to paint words on his skin. André’s face hovers inches from his cheek; his eyes are focused in concentration, and when his breath skims Cody’s ear, goose bumps roll down Cody’s neck in waves. He tries to stare at the ground and stay calm, but then André carefully places his thumb and forefinger on Cody’s cheek to hold him in place, and he forgets how to breathe until André steps back to examine his work.
“You’re passable,” he shrugs, tossing the lipstick on to Kaiylee, “and I resisted drawing a penis.”
Cody frowns as the lipstick disappears into the crowd. “Don’t you want a turn?” It’s not that he wants a chance to steady André’s face; it only seems fair.
“Absolutely not.” André taps his shoulder and points toward a cluster of microphones and blazers down the street. “See those cameras? They’re headed this way, and I’d be willing to bet that at some point they are going to want a statement from the leader of these hooligans. While you look super enthusiastic, I don’t want to go on local television wearing lipstick that isn’t on my lips.”
“Lips are still an option,” Cody shoots back, and stops himself before he can think about rubbing a smear of color into André’s bottom lip.
“Of course they are,” André snorts, crossing his arms over his chest. “And so is streaking through the parade route, but my pants are staying on.”
“The lipstick might play better on the local news.” Cody shrugs and holds onto the car for dear life. Now the André in his mind isn’t wearing pants. He is, however, still wearing lipstick and a smirk that looks suspiciously like the one creeping across André’s face in real life.
“Now that you mention it, maybe my interview could use a little spice.” André glances down at his own body, and Cody feels himself flush a vibrant red. “I might be a stick with legs, but I’d like to think I’d be memorable.”
“Right up until you got arrested for indecent exposure.” Cody swallows.
“It might be worth it.” André squints up at the sky and his smirk bursts into a grin. “We didn’t get campaign press for the parade, so a little nudity might do the trick. I can see tomorrow’s headline: ‘Local Boy Bares All for Queer-Loving Candidate.’” He trails his splayed hands through the air in a high arc, as if he could make the words appear in lights. “See? Memorable.”
He glances over at Cody, and that’s his cue, but Cody can’t think of his line. He can only think about the hint of collarbone visible over the dip of André’s shirt collar and how both lines must continue under the fabric, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he kicks the gravel at his feet and tries not to imagine the soft skin at André’s waist or how the sharp points of his hips might feel under the tips of Cody’s fingers.
André would be horrified if he knew what was going through Cody’s mind. He’d either be sick or die of laughter, but Cody thinks either one might be better than the sudden silence. He looks up, when he trusts himself, just in time to watch André’s face fall.
“Huh. I just killed that dead.” He’s still smiling, but the light doesn’t touch his eyes. “My apologies for making you uncomfortable.” In the heavy quiet, the last hints of his smile fade into a hard, brittle line. “Maybe we should schedule a trip to an art museum so that you can see an ass in a controlled environment, hmm? Is that what you need to keep your brain from exploding at the very suggestion of naked men? Or maybe it’s just me.” He takes a deep breath as his eyes turn to glass. “Maybe you’d be fine talking about someone else’s ass, but the thought that I have a body under here somewhere gives you hives.” He wraps his arms tighter around himself and breathes a humorless laugh. “It’s okay, you wouldn’t be the first. Is the idea of me streaking making you throw up in your mouth?”
In his head, Cody can’t stop protesting. No. That isn’t it. That isn’t what he means at all—but none of the words make it to his mouth. He can’t even make his body move, until André turns to go and he chokes out a strangled, “Wait.”
“Oh, it speaks.” André retorts, but he turns, arms still crossed over his chest.
“It speaks,” Cody murmurs. “It doesn’t speak very well, but let me say three things before you tell me to fuck off.” He waits for André’s shrug and rambles on, eyes trained on the ground. “First, you don’t need to be naked or wearing lipstick to be memorable. You just are. I don’t think you could help it if you tried. Second, that headline would end the campaign instantly, and third,” he looks up into André’s eyes and slips into a shaky smile, “if you were naked, I would be okay as long as you weren’t running in the other direction.”
André takes a sudden step back. At first Cody thinks he’s running away, but then he sees the shaking hands: André’s stunned. He opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again without saying a word. Cody desperately wants to stare back at the ground, to make sure that gravel is right where he left it, but he forces himself to look up into André’s dumbfounded gaze. He fights through the blood pumping in his ears, as André’s eyes grow wide.
“I—I don’t—” André tries, one hand reaching to rub at the back of his neck. Just as his eyes start to melt into something warm, a loud bleat of a laugh echoes at Cody’s back. They both turn to find the sound, and Cody remembers that they aren’t alone.
In the last five minutes, Barbara Ryans, a petite blonde reporter with an equally blond cameraman, has set up shop by their group. In front of the camera, Maddie and Juliet are having the time of their lives, apparently working out a comedy routine on local television.
Ryans looks overwhelmed. “Ladies,” she trills in an anxious flutter, “you said that you planned outfits for the group? How did you decide on this look?” She gestures toward Juliet’s midsection as if conjuring an army of coordinated torsos, and Maddie takes the opportunity to steal the mic.
“Barbara, I was in charge of the ‘look,’ so to speak, but I am not responsible for that,” she says, pointing at Juliet’s head.
“My hair?”
“Your lack of hair,” Maddie snorts, poking at Juliet’s skull. “I still can’t believe your parents let you shave your head the night before a gay pride parade.”
“Let me?” Juliet giggles and strikes a pose for the camera. “My mom shaved my head herself, and now she’s waiting to take pictures of me with the drag queens. She thinks I look cute—like a young Grace Jones.”
“Are you kidding me?” Maddie says, deadpan. “What’s wrong with your family that they think Grace Jones is cute?” She pivots as if to make the reporter answer the question, and André waves to catch Cody’s attention.
“I—I should probably save Barbara,” he stutters, still ragged around the edges. He hesitates, but Cody waves him on.
“Go,” Cody says, jerking his head toward the reporter. “I’m right behind you.”
Maddie takes his usurpation in stride, handing over the microphone and stepping back to allow their “fearless leader” to answer the next question for the camera. André still seems off, but Cody can’t imagine anyone else would notice.
Nor would they notice how the sun sets behind the bars on Quentin Avenue, casting a ring of light around buildings that have no business looking so beautiful. They wouldn’t notice the faint dusting of confetti on the grass, or the echoes of the lone trumpet he hears now that the rest of the band has gone home. They wouldn’t be able to see anything that matters. Most of all, he just told a boy—a stunning, confusing boy—that he would quite like to see him naked, and the world hasn’t come tumbling down.
Cody doesn’t realize how far he’s drifted from the interview until he feels André stiffen at his side.
“Could you repeat the question?” André asks, in a monotone.
Barbara smiles, showing off every one of her tiny white teeth. “Of course! Since we got to learn all about that young lady’s parents, could you tell us about your family? Are they here today?”
She tips the microphone back into André’s face with careless ease, as though she’s just asked about his favorite color. Perhaps, in her mind, she did; but André looks quietly terrified. As he blinks into the camera, Cody can see him mentally flipping past all the ways in which he cannot answer her question. Before Cody’s brain has time to talk to his body, he lays his hand lightly on André’s elbow and steps forward into the light.
An hour later, the day slowly fades into twilight. From where they sit, on the front steps of Foster Creek Elementary, Cody can just find the moon peeking out over his house across the street. It reflects from the metal jungle gym and the trees, casting striped lines of light across the dark grass and the black pool of pavement between the school and the deserted road. In the wind, the lines ripple with the trees until he can almost imagine the parking lot as an immense lake of murky water standing between his seat and his bedroom across the way. While they’ve been sitting on this stoop, the concrete has grown cold under his legs and the palms of his hands, but he isn’t ready to go inside. His parents are in there, wondering where he’s gone and waiting for the news to start at exactly nine thirty-five.
No one watches the local news anymore. It’s become a joke, all weather reports and puff pieces. No one watches the local news—except his parents, and his aunts and his cousins in Minocqua. They’ll be hanging on every word, and it would be just his luck if they all had their ancient DVRs at the ready.
At the time, the words hadn’t really seemed meaningful. When he started speaking into the microphone, it was just one more riff in the symphony of sensation on Quentin Avenue. André was frozen and someone needed to say something, so Cody spoke.
He’d pivoted from the family question. “Of course,” he explained, as the campaign representative, “the Parker campaign is immensely grateful for families like Juliet’s and for volunteers like those in the St. Claire GSA for giving their time and their energy to a candidate who will stand up for their rights. It’s very inspiring.” He nodded and Barbara nodded back, as if they’d all become friends.
“So inspiring! And from young people too,” she cooed. “So, Mr. Markhausen, do you have any personal investment in the parade today, or is it just another day at the office?”
Cody felt a weight land on his arm and turned to see André’s eyes focused on him. André was ready to jump back into the interview to save Cody from an idiotic question, but for reasons Cody couldn’t fathom, he didn’t let himself be saved. He imagined stepping back. He imagined saying, No, these are not my people, and in that fraction of a second he realized that he didn’t have a choice.
“I am here, first and foremost, to represent the campaign.” He smiled tightly. “But personally, it’s nice knowing that there are organizations in St. Claire that support people like me.” He didn’t elaborate and Barbara didn’t ask. In seconds, she switched to the next interviewee, and Cody stood frozen as the rest of the world moved on without him.
Cody can’t remember what happened from one moment to the next, after that. At some point, everyone else must have gone home. He must have said goodbye and walked all the way to the school, but he can’t remember anything after “people like me.” It’s all a blur of numb movement… or, numb movement and André. When he found himself sitting on the steps, staring out at the blacktop, André was there too, sitting one step up on Cody’s right and staring out into the same empty space.
Cody’s home is right there, but he can’t go inside. He isn’t ready. Reality is in there, in the form of his parents, and he isn’t ready to face them and whatever new version of his life just emerged on camera. He’s so scared he can’t see straight and he can’t put his reasons into words. When he looks at André’s face, his own pathetic terror turns his stomach.
“Where are you sleeping?” he asks, and watches André jump at the sound. He’d jump too; he has no idea how long they’ve been sitting here, staring across the street at his front door.
André cocks his head and stares. “At the moment?”
“No,” Cody shakes his head. Words are hard. “Where are you sleeping tonight? Once you finally get rid of me, where are you going?”
“Oh. That.” André hunches over his own knees and fiddles with an errant thread on his hem. “My aunt’s couch, probably. I’ve been there for the last month. What does that have to do with—?”
“Nothing.” Cody cuts him off and looks away, at the ground, at the playground, anywhere but at the face of a boy who has no business comforting him. “It’s just—” he starts. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Your parents literally kicked you out of the house. You’re couch-surfing before you’re old enough to vote, like a living, breathing, after school special, and I don’t know why I can’t just stand up and go home. You know what’s going to happen in my house tomorrow morning? My mom’s going to make me a Pop-Tart. No matter how much they want me to be someone else, I know that I won’t have to go sleep on somebody’s couch.”
“Pop-Tarts are crap. You know that, right?” André nudges Cody’s shoulder with his bent knee, and when Cody looks back, he finds a smile at the corners of André’s lips.
Cody scoops up a handful of gravel and scowls as he tosses it out into the darkness. “Yeah, but she makes them because she thinks I like them. That’s the whole point.” He resists telling André to stop laughing at his righteous sulk.
“I thought the whole point was to eat food that isn’t made of plastic.”
“André.” He sounds like a whiny child, even in his own head, but it’s only because he can’t get his thoughts to sit still. He sighs and feels André’s knee back against his side. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe that’s the point. I—I don’t think they’re going to get mad, but—”
He thinks back over seventeen years of mornings, afternoons and nights—seventeen years when his parents just knew that someday he’d get married, or at least take some poor girl to prom. That was never in question. His mom’s still going to want to know about the usual shit, but there’s going to be this entirely new thing in the mix. It feels as if he’s just thrown a bomb into his bedroom window, and now he has to wait and see if it’s packed with phosgene or laughing gas.
“They might be disappointed, but—but I think this thing is going to be bigger than that. It’s going to be everywhere.”
André sighs behind his back. “It really is.”
Cody cracks a smile. “You could have lied to me.”
“Have we met?” André replies, smirking at Cody’s halfhearted glare. “Unless your folks secretly love the gays, it’s gonna be weird for a while. My aunt tries, when she has time, but then she remembers why I’m on her couch in the first place and it’s awkward as hell.”
“Ugh, God.” Cody drops his head into his hands with a groan. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—of course you have to deal with that shit too.” He keeps making it worse. Someone needs to tape his mouth shut before he completely alienates the only person who—
“Hey,” André scoots down a step, and they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on the cold concrete. “You wanna just run away?”
“What?”
André shrugs. “Go. Leave. We could say screw it to the awkward. Screw the couch and the Pop-Tarts and just go.”
“Screw the Pop-Tarts?” Cody echoes.
“Why not?” André waves his hand into the darkness. “Let’s go to Chicago right now. Your folks wouldn’t be able to find you for a while. And, let’s be honest, my aunt wouldn’t even try. I don’t have anything to put in an apartment, but we could probably get one. I’m persuasive.”
“I think you mean annoying.” Cody laughs. “Do you have a couple hundred dollars hidden in those pants?” Poverty wouldn’t stop Cody from going, but André doesn’t need to know that.
André pats his pockets. “Sadly no, but come on,” he prods, poking Cody in the shoulder. “It’ll be an adventure. If we’re going to run away from home, we might as well start robbing banks and forging artwork in our spare time. Voilà, rent money.”
As André gestures over the blacktop, Cody can’t help but see the apartment, like a movie projected into the darkness. It’s a dump. They can’t afford anything better than a hole in a crappy wall. Their imaginary sofa is covered in mystery stains, and André has his feet up on some excuse for a table—but it is beautiful. In his fantasy, a beam of light casts shadows across their floor, and even the empty pizza box feels like home.
“I can paint,” he offers quietly, and André’s smirk stretches into a grin.
“Of course you can!” André pops up and strides into the open darkness. “You can be the artist who makes replicas of the Mona Lisa, and I’ll be the clever man who sells your creations to idiots and thieves. Yes! Not to brag, but I think this may be my birthright. It was meant to be.” He turns with a flourish, eyes lit with possibility, and Cody, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, looks up into the fantasy flickering in André’s eyes. Right now, with the stars at his back, André could convince him to buy the moon and a case to put it in.
“You’re not really going to get me out of here, are you?” Cody asks after a pause.
André ducks his head in silent laughter. “Not a chance in hell. I have work tomorrow, and I’m not tanking my record for any handsome face.” Cody’s ears heat up. Handsome, he said, as though the adjective made sense. Not cute, but handsome.
“I was this close, though. You almost had me,” Cody says lightly, and André’s gaze shifts up in surprise.
“Did I?” he asks. Even though André’s smile says he’s kidding, his eyes actually want to know. He stares at Cody’s face, and for a second the question hangs in the air like an open invitation. Cody’s not sure who turns away first, but he finally breaks the silence as he looks toward his own bedroom window.
“I’m sure that if you ever decided to run off to Chicago, you’d have plenty of boys ready to drop everything for your life of crime.” Cody’s voice is intentionally glib, but he’s surprised when André laughs—and keeps laughing.
“Oh, you’re serious!” he grins. “Where do you think I’d find all these boys who date boys, under the floorboards? St. Claire doesn’t have community theater, all of the clubs are twenty-one plus, and I’ve known everyone in the GSA since we were five.” André walks out into the concrete waters until Cody can’t find his face in the darkness. “I’d ask where you were hiding, but I think it’s known as the closet.” His tone lands like a gentle poke, and Cody feels the heat rise under his collar.
“So you’ve never—?” The thought that André, with his legs and his smile, hasn’t been with anyone, feels as foreign as their fantasy apartment.
“Nope,” André shakes his head. “I’d ask about you, but it seems unnecessary— not because you couldn’t,” he clarifies at Cody’s flinch. “You just haven’t gotten there yet.”
And now it’s Cody’s turn to laugh. Hasn’t gotten there yet? He’s a mess. In the last week he’s thrown up outside a campaign office, had a panic attack over a poster and accidentally come out on broadcast television—in front of a McDonald’s. Cody says this last bit out loud, and André rolls his eyes.
“There are less dramatic ways to make an entrance.” André nods, making his way back to the stoop and settling onto a lower step, so that he has to look up, just slightly, to see Cody’s eyes. “You know what happened when I came out? I spent weeks talking to myself before bed. I didn’t know who the fuck I was, so I just kept talking until I started to make sense. It turns out I was still basically the same asshole I was before I came out, but it took a lot of words before I could be sure.”
Cody bites his lip, but doesn’t look away. “Talking, huh?”
André shrugs. “Yup, I still do it sometimes, when the world refuses to listen to my infinite wisdom.” He raises his fingers to dangle his imaginary cigarette holder and props his elbow on his knee. “That’s the world’s loss and my pillow’s gain.”
“I think I can do you one better,” Cody responds, and starts digging in his pocket. This is a really bad idea, but as soon as he imagines André alone on his aunt’s couch, talking to a pillow, he knows he doesn’t have a choice. “I told you that I can paint, but I didn’t say what.” André cocks his head as Cody fishes his figurine out of his pocket and holds her in the palm of his hand. “I paint models—for fun. They’re supposed to be for a game with other people, but I don’t really play. I just paint. This one—her name’s Kaelyssa and she’s supposed to be a warrior, but I think she might also be a pretty good listener.”
Cody bites his lip as André stares in open-mouthed confusion at the model in Cody’s hand. For a long, silent minute, Cody’s sure that he’s gone way too far. He’s never shown his models to anyone. And now, he’s just given this boy a homemade doll with plastic boobs. He wants to sink into the concrete, until André abruptly stands and offers his hand.
“Can I see it under the light?” He gestures toward the streetlamp burning by the playground, and Cody lets himself be pulled to his feet. Under the lamp, the light falls around their bodies like a glowing shield. André cups his hands under Cody’s and carefully raises the figurine into the light. “There she is,” he smiles and leans in until Cody’s staring at the top of his head. “Did you really make her on your own?”
“Yeah,” Cody breathes, but he can’t focus on a toy, not with André’s warm hands around his, not with the tips of André’s thumbs drawing circles along his fingers. André might not know that he’s doing it, but right now that tiny motion feels more important than any painting Cody’s ever done.
“I can’t keep her,” André says, “but if I could borrow her, I… her eyes do look nurturing, in a psychotic sort of way.”
Cody laughs. “She grows on you.” He needs his hands back if he’s going to hand her over or remember how to breathe, but André isn’t pulling away.
“If I’m going to borrow her, though, I will need to give her back sometime.”
Cody’s brow furrows. “That is the definition, but if you want to hold onto her—”
“No,” André cuts in. “I mean—” He licks his lips, and the question in his eyes looks almost like fear. “Is there a time when you might want me to come over… here, and give her back?” He finishes breathlessly.
“Yes,” Cody squeaks and then, more quietly, “tomorrow’s fine… if you want.”
André takes an unsteady breath, and a grin slowly spreads across his face. “Tomorrow, huh?” He raises an eyebrow, and Cody ducks his head.
“She might miss me,” he mutters, scowling down at their hands. André laughs low in his throat, as if he’s sharing a secret, and Cody finally understands why people think laughter is so gut-wrenchingly sexy. He would do anything to make André keep laughing, just like that, forever.
“And what if I need her again, some other night? What if her therapy services are required?”
“Then,” Cody answers, “we’ll need to set up some kind of shared custody.”
“Because she might miss you?”
“Exactly.” Cody nods, and sucks in a breath as André leans until his jaw grazes the side of Cody’s cheek.
“She might not be the only one,” André whispers and slowly presses his lips to the taut skin at Cody’s temple. Heat blossoms from the spot in waves, spiraling through Cody’s body and pooling deep in his stomach.
As André’s lips leave his skin, Cody lets out a soft gasp. It echoes in the silence, and no part of him cares. His face is red and his ankles are feeding mosquitoes, but this lamplight is just short of heaven. “I should really go,” he says, biting his lip. “Are you—tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” André steps back and nods, one hand rubbing at the flush creeping up his neck. He delicately plucks the model out of Cody’s open hand and turns her over between his fingers, using her little armored hand to wave goodbye. “I’ll see you,” he smiles, and as he walks away, disappearing between the streetlights, Cody knows that he will. André is going to show up at his door, and Cody’s going to be there to let him in.
As Cody walks toward his front door, he thinks about Kaelyssa and how solitude isn’t the end of her story. In the guidebooks, she has three lives sparked by three great moments of change and, in her last incarnation, she joins a team. She finds warriors whose powers rival her own, and together they take on the demons at the gate. He’d never paid much attention to that last piece, but now he feels it pushing him up the steps and past the broken screen door. He doesn’t enter alone; he has an army at his back and they’re painted in “Burgundy Wine.” His army might be loud and small, but they’re his and he’s theirs. He walks toward the light still shining in the kitchen, his shoes echoing against the tile, and for the first time all night, he’s breathing fine.