The fireflies are out. I’m sitting on our back porch, watching them twinkle and twirl, while I absentmindedly play my guitar. I finger an F chord, which was the hardest one to get right when I was first learning. Now it’s not too bad.
The guitar was my last birthday present from Morgan’s family before Donna died, this and a songbook with tabs for popular nineties rock songs from the McKay’s in Knoxville. They were both from the Gardners collectively, but I know that Donna picked them out. She always said I had long fingers, perfect for playing music, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste. I owe her for seeing that such a thing existed in me—that my hands can do something besides catch a football. It’s also thanks to her that my taste in music isn’t just songs that are about trucks, and that the country I do listen to leans more toward My Morning Jacket and Old Crow Medicine Show than Garth Brooks. I’d be lying, though, if I said I don’t still enjoy the occasional stadium song about a really nice truck.
I play a G minor. Hold it.
B flat major 7 chord.
Strum.
I switch back and forth between the chords, liking the way the strings make my fingers ache. Aching is good. Aching means they’re getting stronger.
A lawn mower buzzes to life and my oldest brother, Isaac, pushes it around the corner into the backyard, sending the fireflies floating off. I watch him work for a little while, setting my guitar aside. Isaac is huge, a carbon copy of Dad when he was in high school. All abs and thick biceps and square jaw, but with Mom’s dark red hair. He’s nineteen now, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on a football scholarship, but he came home for my birthday. I know it was mostly to see his girlfriend, though, since he skipped out on the water park. Isaac stops halfway through the yard, kills the mower, and wipes his forehead. He smiles when he notices me sitting there, watching him.
“Stay there, birthday boy.” He strides across the yard, climbs the porch steps, and heads into the kitchen. Sometimes Isaac’s kind of a jerk, though not in the same way as Peyton. My birthday is the only time Isaac can be counted on to be in Good Brother mode, and most of the time even Peyton doesn’t show his ass. Though Morgan did give Peyton a bloody nose once when we were eight and he was eleven. Peyton kicked a controller out of Morgan’s hand when he’d lost too many times at Tekken and Morgan leapt across the couch and busted his nose with one wild punch. That’s the Morgan I know—the kid who’s gonna dish it back—not the one like today, who shut down and seemed so off.
Isaac comes back out a moment later with two Coronas. “Here.”
“Won’t we get in trouble?” I say. I take the bottle in both hands. It’s ice cold and sweats against my palms.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Isaac says, kicking his feet up on the wicker table and taking a swig of beer. “Besides, it’s your thirteenth birthday. You’re a man now!”
“Am I?” I take a sip of the beer and don’t hate it like I thought I might. It’s mellow and bubbly, like a soda, but savory instead of sweet.
“My voice hasn’t even dropped yet,” I say, taking another, longer sip. By way of example, I put the beer down and finger the opening riff to “Come As You Are,” the first part of the book I ever mastered, and sing the opening lines, intentionally making my voice squeak and crack even more than it normally does.
“Details,” he says, laughing and waving his hand. “So, how’s it feel? Thirteen?”
“It feels … okay,” I say. I run my foot through the grass. “I guess I’m worried everything’s changing and I can’t stop it.”
“Like what?” Isaac says. He waggles his eyebrows. “Girls giving you that special feeling yet?”
I lean back and frown, while he laughs at my expression. “I guess? I don’t know. I’m just worried about Morgan. It feels like we’re growing apart, and…” I take another sip of beer to stop myself from saying anything else.
“Eh, you won’t care so much when high school starts,” Isaac says. “Sure, you need to make time for your boys, but, I don’t know, you talk about him like he’s your girlfriend. Honestly even if he was your girlfriend I’d think you were pretty whipped.”
I try to tell myself Isaac means well, but he sounds too much like Dad and Peyton did in the car, and maybe that’s not surprising. Of my two older brothers, I like Isaac more, but it feels sometimes like he has a hard time thinking of girls as people, or understanding why someone would care about anything other than sports.
“Cool talk,” I say.
He shrugs and rolls his eyes. “You’ll thank me later,” he says, then gets up again to finish mowing the lawn, scaring off the fireflies, probably for good.
I leave my beer half-finished on the porch, figuring everyone will assume it’s Isaac’s, and head inside.
That’s when I notice the half-eaten birthday cake on the counter and get an idea. I fish for some Tupperware and lift the plastic lids, cut off two big pieces of cake, seal them up, and carry them to the living room where I left my backpack.
“Finally!” Peyton says, looking down from the top of the stairs. “Cake time!”
“It’s not for you!” I say with a glare.
Mom and Dad look up from the TV as I make my way to the front door.
“I’m going out,” I say.
“Not this late you’re not,” Dad says.
“I need to see Morgan.” I swallow hard. I can’t think of a time I’ve ever defied my parents. Maybe it’s the beer.
“Morgan’s got a stomach bug,” Mom says. “He needs to be left alone. And besides, you’ll see him at school.”
“No,” I say. I shake my head. “I need to see him now.”
They start to say something else, but I’m out the door and jogging for the garage before they can get a word in. I hear the front door open behind me, but I’m already on my bike, pedaling furiously down the street.
Morgan’s trailer is twenty minutes away by bike, and mostly uphill through neighborhoods Dad calls rough, trashy, and other things I don’t like repeating even in my own head. People wave at me from trailer stoops, and from apartment balconies, and from corners near burned-out buildings. They pass cigarettes back and forth and watch cars pass by.
It’s clear Thebes has seen better times, and I know I’m lucky to have a family with money, but I hope I never let any of that distract me from the beauty hiding in everything—the light through the clouds, the shadows on the mountains, and the smiles of people who might not be perfect, who have every reason to be miserable, but still find small ways to be kind to each other every day. Dad says I’m naïve, and when he’s in a bad mood Morgan says I would feel different if I were poor, and maybe both of them are right.
When I finally arrive at Morgan’s trailer park I’m drenched in sweat and condensation from the gathering mist. I lean against the darkened leasing office for a second before making the final climb to Morgan’s lot, where I find him sitting on his stoop in a baggy hoodie, his knees pulled up to his chin, his eyes locked somewhere far off. The crunch of my bike in his gravel driveway draws his attention and for a moment his wide, dark-rimmed eyes pin me to the ground.
“Hey,” he says. His tone is flat and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s sad or because he doesn’t want to see me. It’s so hard to imagine either of us not wanting to see the other, but who knows what’s going on in his head lately?
“Hey,” I say, and suddenly feel stupid. “I brought cake.” I pat my backpack. He leads me inside and I melt into the couch, my T-shirt sticking to my skin. There’s no sign of his dad, so he must have come up with an excuse to be at work.
Morgan just watches me, head tilted. “That’s it?” he asks. Of course, there’s more I want to ask him: How come things have been weird lately? Are you gay? Are we going to be friends forever? Is it weird that I’m worried about all that? But instead, I don’t say anything at all.
I take out the Tupperware containers and drop them on the coffee table. “Let’s feast!” I say.
“You’re so weird,” Morgan finally replies, and it stings, even though I know he doesn’t mean it the way my brothers do. He smiles and shakes his head, then disappears into the small kitchen. He returns with two forks, and sits beside me on the couch.
“I’m weird?” I say through a mouthful of cake. “You should have seen yourself today.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Morgan says. His expression turns blank. But I know him. I know when he’s actually chill and when he’s faking it.
“What was it you tried to tell me earlier?” I say. He shoves cake in his mouth to avoid talking and hunches his shoulders. “You can tell me.”
“It’s nothing,” Morgan says. He wipes frosting from his lips and looks away.
“You can tell me if…” I start, and I want to finish with, “if you’re gay,” but it feels like the wrong thing to say. And as much as I think that’s maybe Morgan’s secret, part of me also thinks that maybe I’m wrong. Honestly, for every girly thing Morgan does, I can think of something gross or rowdy to balance it out. Sometimes he lip syncs to Mariah Carey with a hairbrush as a mic, but sometimes he falls off his bike and barely notices that he’s skinned his whole leg. Sometimes he sits with his legs crossed and flips his hair, but sometimes he farts when I sleep over at his house and laughs so hard about it he can’t breathe. We’ve only talked about girls the one time, and he wasn’t interested, but we spend so much time together I think I would have noticed him looking at guys.
To me, Morgan is just Morgan, like he’s always been, but sadder and more distant every day. If he is gay, then I know it could be really good for him to hear that it’s okay. But if he isn’t, then what if I accidentally offend him? I really just want to tell him it’s going to be fine, whatever it is.
Morgan takes a deep breath, like he’s thinking about something, squares his shoulders, and then deflates again. “I was just stressed about watching this year’s birthday tape,” he says. “It’s just … hard.”
Morgan wipes at his nose and I shut my eyes tight, mad at myself. Of course. I should have known it was his mom.
He rests his forehead in his hands and lets out a long, shaky breath. “Things have been really, really hard lately.” He looks at the ground, and before I know what’s happening, he’s crying. It’s almost a relief. He used to cry all the time, enough that people would tease him, but after the funeral he mostly just … stopped.
I put my arm around his shoulder stiffly, trying not to be as awkward as I feel. He still smells like chlorine from the pool. I feel this weird urge to hug him with both arms. To hold him closer.
A memory springs up of us in the park together last June. Morgan had just fallen out of a tree from the fourth or fifth branch, scarily high. I knelt over him to see if he was breathing, to ask if anything was broken, and he opened his eyes, his huge, dark brown eyes, looked up at me, and maybe I was dizzy from the heat and adrenaline, or maybe it was that his hair was getting long and he was starting to thin out, but he looked like a girl. A really pretty girl.
I shake that thought away.
“I’m sorry, Morgan,” I finally mutter toward the floor.
Morgan pulls away and arches his back, taking in a deep breath. For a second, the distance between our bodies feels wrong, but then I don’t know why I keep thinking that. Faggot, I hear my brothers’ voices say in my head, and I push it away. “No, I’m sorry for being so off,” he says.
“I’m your best friend. I don’t care,” I say. And it’s true, I don’t.
Morgan turns toward me, his eyes red from either the chlorine or tears, I can’t tell. “We’re gonna be best friends forever,” he says, his pupils large. “High school, college, jobs … none of that’ll get in the way.”
As the words come out of his mouth, I wonder if Morgan read my mind, or if maybe I read his. Relief washes over me. We’re both worried about the same things. Maybe because we were born on the same day, we have special powers. Like we’re cosmic twins, or something. But that’s stupid. Lots of people were born that day. Lots of people didn’t spend three days in the same room during a freak storm though. Who knows?
I nod and offer him another slice of cake. “Forever,” I say.
He takes a bite and smiles, his teeth jam-packed with sprinkles. “Good,” he says, and I feel a weight shift off my chest as I tell myself that everything is going to be fine. We’ll always be Eric and Morgan. Nothing is ever going to change that.