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Riz wasn’t surprised that the topic came up at some point, but two weeks was still a surprisingly long time considering the nosy motherfuckers he called his friends.
They were having a sleepover at Mordred, because things had sort of calmed down (as much as they ever could, since middle school) enough to do things together, and everyone had scattered about to get ready for bed, which meant that Riz was alone in a bathroom with Kristen and Fig, which was a frightening combination.
Riz and Kristen stood shoulder to shoulder brushing their teeth while Fig bent over the tub, rinsing the brand-new purple streak out of her bangs.
“So Baron was never real?” Kristen asked, apropos of nothing.
Riz zeroed in on his own solemn face in the mirror, tried not to act like his pulse had just jumped through the fucking roof. “Nope.”
Maybe, if he acted calm enough, they would let it go. They would see that clearly it wasn’t a big deal, not worth pursuing, and they would move on to the next funny thing to fixate on. Anything for that funny thing to not be him.
“Why?” Fig shouted over the roar of the bathtub faucet.
“You’re not really one to judge, Fig,” Riz mumbled around a mouthful of toothpaste.
The water shut off. Riz turned to see Fig unbending, back cracking, hair dripping. She laughed. “Okay, fine. But it’s not like that’s really your MO, making up fake shit for the hell of it.” There was a small trail of purple behind her ear, disappearing down her neck, between her collarbones, and into her oversized pajama shirt. “Maybe I should get mad at you for stealing my move.”
Riz spat into the sink. The foam sat languid in the drain, so ordinary. In the maze of the manor, Fabian’s braying laugh echoed up from a floor below.
“I don’t know. I guess I…”
“S’cool,” Kristen said, attacking her back left molar. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to.”
God, did he want to? On one hand, there was nothing in the world that Riz wanted to do less than divulge his emotions to his friends. On the other, here he was in a spare bathroom, presented with an opportunity to not feel so much… like this. Like a fraud, listening to his best friends talking about everything that plagued them and offering advice like he understood and always stopping short of sharing anything himself.
Fig squeezed her wet hair into the basin of the tub.
“You guys all had people,” he said, with all the mental effort of a root canal. “I guess I didn’t want to be alone.”
Kristen spat her toothpaste with a wet splat, then let the sink wash the foam easily down the drain. Riz watched it swirl, listening to the sound of the running water and trying not to pass out. There was silence in the bathroom, for a moment, as Kristen rinsed her mouth and Fig searched around for a comb.
Maybe this was it. The big honesty moment. He knew it had to come at some point, that either someone else would demand it or he would simply crumble under the weight of carrying the feelings around all the time. And then they would know: why he had invented Baron, why he always nixed the romances at movie nights, why he always looked away so quickly when he was caught staring at the entwined hands of his friends and their lovers, that it wasn’t embarrassment but an awful, sour taste in the back of his mouth.
“Makes sense,” Fig said at long last, in a casual voice that betrayed how little she really understood. “But, like, I get that you have this image in your head of you as the Ball, and you’re not cool, but you’re cool, dude. I’m being so honest when I say that you could get with anybody you wanted.”
“Yeah,” Kristen echoed brightly, wiping a last bead of toothpaste from the corner of her mouth, “objectively speaking, you’re hot.”
Riz watched the water swirl and tried to pretend as though his heart wasn’t falling from its comfortable place behind ribs and into the pit of his stomach. Yeah, of course they didn’t get it. It was stupid to assume that they would.
So instead he said, “thanks, guys,” bundled up his toiletries, and left.
Later that night, curled up on the couch with his favorite throw blanket in the dark among the breathing and shuffling of six people falling asleep, Fig sat up where she was lying below, poked him on the leg, and whispered, “you’re totally cool. We love you, man. G’night.”
“Night,” Riz whispered back, and pulled the blanket up to his ears.
The topic didn’t come up again for a while. Things were busy and complicated, and Riz had avoided talking about his stuff for long enough that he was plenty practiced in dodging the subject.
It just… he wished he didn’t have to dodge it. He wished he didn’t have to think about it. He wished it didn’t hang over him like a sword of damocles.
It just seemed easier for everyone else.
Oftentimes, at night when sleep didn’t come, Riz tried to list out all the things he really loved. He loved his friends, true, and he tried to believe that they loved him too. He knew it, but his mind liked to play tricks on him sometimes.
So. His friends. His mom. His angel dad. He loved the rush of solving a mystery, of putting together puzzle pieces, of figuring things out. Even stupid things, like discovering how to turn on Fabian’s stupid induction stovetop, which took no fewer than two switches and three buttons. He rode that high for a week.
He loved logging books on goodreads.
Was that all of it? Did normal people have a longer list than five things? Was it fucked up if sometimes he loved his goodreads account more than his friends, on days when he didn’t think they cared about him all that much?
He thought of all his friends, how they seemed to burst at the seams with love and care, and wondered if maybe they simply had more emotions than him, if maybe all of this just boiled down to some sort of genetic mutation that made him feelings-deficient.
But that couldn’t be true, because otherwise he wouldn’t feel so shitty all the time.
Riz would lay there, listening to the fan in the corner of his room oscillate, and wonder what he could do to alleviate the crushing pressure.
It was like a heavy backpack. You carry it around long enough, you forget it’s there. After a while, your shoulders forget what it’s like to not end a day in pain.
But there was school, and there was the whole mystery, and there was the day to day chaos of keeping up with his thirty clubs and five best-friendships.
And Mazey was only ten minutes late, but Fabian had convinced himself seven minutes ago that he had been stood up and was flitting about his bedroom, babbling nonsensical things to Riz, who was just trying to get to the end of his chapter.
“If you were on a date with a guy,” Fabian said, “a me kind of guy, would you be on time or late? Is this some kind of ‘fashionably late’ thing for dates?”
“On time,” Riz answered, curled up on Fabian’s bed with his textbook propped up on his knees, drumming on the page with his highlighter, “theoretically. But have you considered that maybe she stood you up because you have your friend over while you’re supposed to be on a date?”
“You didn’t have to come,” Fabian retorted. He paused to stoop at his mirror, running a hand through his hair for the fiftieth time.
“And you didn’t have to invite me over,” Riz said, highlighting a passage on the ricocheting properties of metal versus wood. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Fabian hummed absently, picking a book off his shelf, flipping through it for a moment, then putting it back. “If you were on a date with a guy,” he asked once more, “and you came over and he had a friend over, would you think that was strange?”
“Depends on the friend,” Riz said.
“You give bad advice.”
“Actually,” Riz said, “I think I give pretty good advice for someone who’s never been on a date before.”
“Fuck,” Fabian groaned, collapsing onto his bed, jostling Riz. “I should’ve invited Gorgug instead.”
You don’t even know, Riz thought, not for the first time. Because nobody knew, and they never would. Part of him was perversely pleased at his ability to keep a secret, especially about something that seemed to rule the minds of his friends. They talked about sex and romance all the time, seemed to have some sort of sick bloodhound’s nose for crushes and scandal and flings, but there was a massive, glaring blind spot when it came to Riz. Somehow, none of them had figured it out.
His investigator brain was pleased. His Riz brain was not.
But in this moment, to Fabian, he wasn’t Riz-with-a-terrible-secret. He was just Riz, who had never been on a date because he was busy and had been chronically uncool up until last spring, but who would theoretically be amenable to it if the situation arose.
He could live forever in that fictional world.
Riz prodded Fabian’s shoulder with his toe until Fabian lifted his hands off of his face and shot a nasty look that only barely masked his fondness. “Too bad. You want dating advice, you got me.”
Ten hair-checks in the mirror later, Mazey rang the doorbell. Fabian flew down to greet her, giving no thought to Riz, who continued to read. Maybe with Fabian out of the room he could actually get some studying done.
“Hi,” Riz could just make out from downstairs, Fabian’s breathless and pitched voice.
Riz heard some sort of muffled response from Mazey but not the words. He wasn’t paying much attention, anyway. Mostly he just wanted to know if Fabian would point out that Riz was upstairs of his own volition, or if that would just be their secret.
“I’m ready to go if you are,” Fabian said, and the door shut behind them, leaving Riz alone in a big house with a complicated stove.
It was honestly fine. He knew what he was getting into when Fabian invited him over to help him get ready for his date, and he was glad to have a change of scenery to help the reading go by faster.
Still, though. A contrarian part of his brain pointed out that this was exactly his fear; Fabian had found someone, and now Riz was alone.
In the hall, a grandfather clock ticked away. A car roared past on the street below.
Better get used to this, the terrible part of Riz’s brain taunted him. Might as well practice being alone.
He got a B- on his test the next morning. It was a shit grade for the work he put in, but he kept on abandoning his train of thought as his eye was drawn out towards the grassy hill outside the window, where a freshman couple used kisses as punctuation for every sentence.
It was hard to calculate trajectories when his entire body seemed to bubble with jealousy and hurt.
But there were bigger things to focus on, and grades to lift, and Riz found it easy to ignore his own wildly ricocheting emotions.
Some days he would go home from school and cry for half an hour, then get started on his homework. He couldn’t even explain it, necessarily- he wasn’t sad, just… boiling over.
He didn’t look in mirrors anymore.
His friends were perpetually there, which was nice sometimes and bad at others, but they at least they took up so much mental space that there often wasn’t room for extraneous thought. He studied with Gorgug over in their corner of the library, the two armchairs by the big window, on the days when the Owlbears didn’t meet for their full practice, but just ran drills for an hour before sending them away. On those days Riz rushed to the library as soon as the last bell rang, not willing to risk someone else stealing the chairs that everyone wanted, and worked solo until Gorgug joined him, backpack slung casually over one shoulder and hair damp from the shower.
It was a good system, and it let Riz get solid work done, and it helped him check off one of his new year’s resolutions, which was to spend more time with Gorgug.
Today, though, Gorgug was running late; if Riz was anyone else (cough cough Fabian) maybe he would panic about being stood up, but Gorgug had told him just that morning that he was pretty sure Gorthalax was going to push them harder at practice to get ready for the upcoming tournament playoffs. So Riz curled up with his laptop and glared at anyone who made a move for Gorgug’s chair and waited.
At last Gorgug arrived with a quick step and a pleased smile. Throwing his bag down, he sat and leaned over to Riz, forgoing all pleasantries in favor of whispering, “you know Cole Hillbreak?”
“Sure,” Riz said, putting aside his work for the moment. If Gorgug was whispering in the ‘group work’ section of the library, it was because there was some sort of drama; and although Riz would be perfectly happy to live a life without meaningless high school drama, it was always exciting to be told things, to be included in the clandestine ritual of secret-sharing.
“Cole from bloodrush?”
Cole was the kind of guy that lived right on the outside perimeter of Riz’s social circle. He was the kicker, or maybe the runner, or something like that, on the Owlbears, which meant that Riz saw him around when he went to games or hung out at practices. He was a junior and wore his varsity letters proudly around school, but he was nice enough. Sort of artsy and quiet, and there had been a column in the school newspaper at the beginning of the year that he had won some sort of poetry award over the summer.
None of that explained the eager expression on Gorgug’s face, like something big had happened that he truly couldn’t wait to share. Maybe Cole had died.
Riz frowned. “Yeah, I know him. What’s up?”
“I have it on good authority-” so it was drama after all- “that Cole might be thinking of asking you out sometime.”
Oh.
Drama about him.
That took all the fun out of it. Riz turned his attention back to his laptop, where his essay was busy not writing itself. “Does he know that you’re telling me?”
Gorgug shrugged. “He doesn’t mind. I said I could, you know, gauge your reaction.”
Riz hummed and deleted his thesis sentence. It would have to be completely rewritten.
Gorgug coughed.
This happened sometimes. People decided to play wingman, hook Riz up with whatever sensitive boy they had bumped into in the lunch line that day. He didn’t really mind, as long as he could safely navigate them away from the Topic. Secretly, he had begun to think of it as a capital letter sort of issue. He hoped that this wasn’t a bad sign. “What kind of homework do you have?”
“You’re not reacting.”
“Hm?”
Gorgug shifted to settle into his seat, pulling his own books and computer out of his bag. “I told Cole that I could gauge your reaction, and you’re not… reacting.”
“I feel like maybe my lack of reaction says enough,” Riz said, and prayed that it would be enough to kill the conversation.
It was quiet in the library. There weren’t many people in the group work section on a Tuesday so soon after break, but he knew that by midterms it would be packed.
Gorgug tugged at his ear, sheepish. “Sorry. It’s just- Cole’s nice, and the others had said something about, uh, maybe you felt a little lonely? Sometimes? So I just wanted-”
“Gorgug,” Riz interrupted, his mouth moving faster than his brain. “I don’t want to date anyone.”
And, well, there was that all-too-familiar feeling of fuck, shit, I’ve said too much. His secret, so closely guarded, there out in the world in words and language. God, why would he say that? I don’t want to date anyone? What was he thinking?
Gone would be the days of harmless misunderstandings, of throwaway jokes that harbor innocent untruths, the days of belonging. He would be forever relegated to a life of pathetic games of truth or dare, faced with questions like ‘have you ever thrown up on a rollercoaster’ while his friends, experienced and relatable, got questions like ‘what’s the freakiest thing you’ve done in bed?’
I don’t want to date anyone. Stupid.
“Oh.” Gorgug looked down at his laptop, in the process of booting up, then back to Riz. “I get it. Everything’s kind of crazy right now. I don’t know if I’d want to deal with a new relationship now, either.” He cracked a smile at Riz, so deeply and painfully earnest, and held out a fist. “We’ll just be the single guys, yeah?”
Riz sank down into his chair, a little ashamed of the cool wave of relief that washed over him. At least this way, Gorgug could believe that he ‘got it,’ even though he never would. Riz reached out and tapped his knuckles against Gorgug’s. “Yeah,” he said. Playing the role. “Single guys.”
x
Most times it was easy. It wasn’t like Riz was pretending, all the time, to be gay. It’s just that everyone seemed to assume it, and he wasn’t too motivated to correct them.
But usually it was easy. His jokes were natural, and the lighthearted teasing hit on truth more often than not, and the Topic stayed safely hidden away.
Nobody brought up Baron again. He got the sense that everyone was ready to put that behind them. But beyond that one night in the bathroom, nobody ever asked why Riz had made them up, why they had manifested in the nightmare forest as Riz’s greatest fear, why Riz never did date despite his greatest fear supposedly being not dating. There were a lot of questions that lingered, and frankly nobody wanted to pose them.
Riz was fine with that.
And to his friends, the case was closed. Riz was afraid of being lonely, but he was too busy to date. Or maybe they hadn’t found the right sensitive boy to set him up with.
It was kind of funny, too. All of his friends had somehow adopted the idea that he was foaming at the mouth for poets, or playwrights, or indie-folk guitar players. So sure, all of their doomed matchmaking attempts gave Riz a small heart attack when they came too close to touching the Topic, but it also did give him a good laugh to see what new Bob Dylan ripoff they could pull out of the woodworks.
If anyone asked, it was funny. If anyone asked, he didn’t sometimes have to leave class to cry a little bit in the bathroom before coming back and signing back in on the hall pass time sheet. Riz Gukgak, Monday, 8:12-8:21.
He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t upset. He was just boiling over, and sometimes he had to go and let a little bit of steam out of the pressure cooker so that he didn’t explode. This was normal, this was high school.
There was the campaign, and there were dead gods now living, and there were college applications, and if anyone asked there were far more important things to think about than whether Riz was gay or not.
It wasn’t lying, it was just the path of least resistance.
He found himself taking the easy route a lot. When everything was so hard and fucking crazy, he wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of going out and doing ‘fun’ stuff in the face of the allure of late-night studying over a cup of coffee.
But it was a Friday, and usually on Fridays Gorgug and Fabian picked up dinner from the hot food bar in the grocery store across from the high school and they all ate together in Mordred’s creepy gothic dining room before transitioning to the living room for a movie, or to watch Fig kick Fabian’s ass at Mario Kart. Tonight’s dinner was a bizarre mix of chicken nuggets, brussels sprouts, macaroni and cheese, and sushi rolls. And they were supposed to watch Legally Blonde, but sometime between the end of school and dinnertime everyone had gotten it into their heads to go to the new gay bar in town.
“Have you noticed we’re children?” Riz pointed out, because clearly any argument in favor of the movie would be wasted time.
“That’s never stopped us from getting into a club before,” Adaine said, ever the pragmatist.
Gorgug scratched at his scalp. “Um, would I be allowed in? Isn’t that, like, bad?”
“I’ll get you in,” Fig said.
So there was no hope for a nice night in. And Riz wasn’t a wet blanket, no matter what anyone said, but that didn’t mean that he wanted to go out to a place where everyone would be pressuring him to flirt, and everyone would be flirting with him because apparently, according to Kristen and Fig, he was hot. And everyone would be dancing and drinking and having a great time, because they were built for a gay bar. A gay bar was built for them.
Maybe Riz was just built for Legally Blonde.
“I don’t know, guys, it’s been kind of a long week…”
Then there were hands on his shoulders and Kristen was shaking him, already amped up for the club. “Come on! We’ve gotta go!” She clapped a hand on his collarbone and pointed a finger in his face, a twinkle in the eyes of her mock-serious face. “Just think of all the good campaigning I could do.”
“Oh, is that what that’s called?” Riz poked at his mac and cheese, which had been sitting there long enough to congeal unappetizingly. He hadn’t been that hungry. “Look, you guys can go. I just- I’m not in the mood.”
It was a futile cry for attention. Maybe, in another world, they would hear his words for what they were and say, ‘it’s okay, we’ll go another night.’
Maybe then he wouldn’t feel like the person afraid of heights at the amusement park, the teetotaler at the party, the vegetarian at the barbecue. Maybe then, in that beautiful other world, he wouldn’t feel so much like a sore thumb all the time.
He could feel it bubbling, the feelings that encroached on his world, and tried to take some slow breaths. He would not cry at the table. He wouldn’t freak out, he would act like normal and let everything else more important in his life take over.
But Kristen took his head in her hands and flung him back and forth until his eyes hurt, too excited to know her own strength. “Riz, the Ball, dude! We’ve got to get you out there!” Hands in his hair, on his face and ears. The ever-too-familiar knot in his throat. “What cool gay teen doesn’t want to go to a gay bar?”
“I’m not gay!”
Fuck.
Shit.
Fuck.
Kristen pulled a face. “Shit, uh, okay. Are you like, bi, or…”
“I’ve never been gay, I’m not- I’ve never been into guys, and I don’t know why all you guys are insistent on the fact that I am!”
A deeply troubled and awkward silence descended over the room like a fog of poisonous gas. Fig chased a brussels sprout around her plate with a fork. Riz would throw up all over the table if he had eaten anything. “I mean, you do wear wingtips to school,” Gorgug said timidly, immediately looking rather ashamed to have said anything at all.
Riz pushed away his chair with a screech and stood, just to have something to do with his body other than sit there and boil over. His whole head buzzed unpleasantly. “Great.” His voice came out sharp and unpleasant, and he tried not to look at Kristen’s guilty expression. “Cool. I’m not straight, either, if any of you had asked.”
“Yeah, sure,” Fabian cut in, his tone equally sour. “That would have gone well. ‘The Ball, why don’t you sit down and explain all about your sexuality.’ Sure. I hate to break it to you, but you don’t tell us things.”
“What, are you, like, ace?” Fig said. Her posture was casual still, boots up against the tabletop, chair tipped back on two legs, but there was an unhappy and concerned cant to her brow. “I mean, that’s fine. We don’t care.”
Found out, his brain babbled. They’ve found you out, Riz-with-a-secret.
“Fuck!” It was all he could get out, for a moment, amidst the desperate attempts at drawing breath. Everyone was looking at him, expectant, pitying, and all he could do was try not to cry. Or puke. He kicked the leg of his chair, and it only made him feel marginally better to see everyone jump. “Why couldn’t we have all just ignored it?”
And he was out of the room before anyone could come up with a response.
It felt pathetic to run, not face the mess he had made, but from the hallway he could hear the awful silence he had left in the dining room, and he didn’t want to be around for when they inevitably started talking again.
They would all be talking about him, and it was nobody’s fault but his own. The thought of everyone discussing his outburst, worrying over how best to make him feel better, made Riz queasy.
But he had done it, and now he had to find somewhere to go.
For a moment he considered leaving, but it was February and he lived across town, so without a ride he was pretty much trapped. And he didn’t think the Hangman would really be down to give him a ride home without Fabian there to goad him into it.
So upstairs it was, through the winding hallways of Mordred Manor, trying not to think about things too much. It wasn’t working.
He ended up wedged in the linen closet, on a shelf by the spare sheets and towels, knees tucked up to his chest. It was dusty and dry, the only light coming from the sliver beneath the door. Here, finally alone, he cried.
He didn’t want to. He never wanted to cry. It sucked, it made him feel like a kid, and it hurt his throat to try and stay quiet. But he was here sitting next to the vacuum cleaner and he couldn’t stop, no matter how many deep breaths he took.
Everyone knew now. Everyone knew, which meant that nobody could pretend, which meant that Riz couldn’t enjoy the easy peace of lying by omission. Everything was going to change and it was all his fault.
Fucking hell. So much effort to keep in the secret, and now it was just… out there.
It was out there which meant that nobody could pretend, which meant that he couldn’t pretend, which meant that he had to actually own up to the reality of his situation.
This thing, this Topic, was real. It was real and it wasn’t going away. He wasn’t ever going to be like the rest of them, with crushes and summer flings and marriage and kids. He would live alone and talk to his goldfish for company like a crazy person, and they all would move on without him.
The gravity of that realization, long time coming, threatened to crush him alive.
What was he going to do with this feeling? The jealousy, the displaced anger, the deep well of self-loathing? What was he going to do now that everyone knew?
“Riz?”
It wasn’t any of his friends, but the gruff, gentle voice of Jawbone.
Fuck, yeah, probably not the best idea to have a breakdown in his guidance counselor’s house.
He hadn’t been found yet, though, so he stayed still and silent.
“Riz, if that’s you in there I’d love it if you said something. Otherwise I’ve got a racoon in my hall closet.”
Shit. Fuck. “It’s me,” he mumbled.
“Okay,” Jawbone said through the door. “I’m not gonna come in, because it seems like you want some privacy, but I just gotta make sure you’re all good in there. You get it.”
“I know,” Riz said, burying his face in the welcome of his hands. “I’m all good.”
There was an awkward moment of quiet shuffling on the other side of the door. “You, uh, you sure? Because thirty seconds ago it sounded a little bit like you weren’t totally breathing.”
Riz laughed into his palms, a little delirious. “It’s fine. Just, you know, accidentally told everyone the worst secret of my life.”
“Damn,” Jawbone said. “You told everyone that you stole an endangered lizard to impress a married woman who lived on the other side of a river patrolled by armed guards, but all the cocaine strapped to you made you float while you swam across, and the guards saw you and tried to kill you and the lizard got shot in the firefight, so you got out of the water all covered in blood and wet cocaine and the woman saw the dead lizard in your hands and was so heartbroken that she left her husband forever and became a monk dedicated to the destruction of the Solesian way of life and all government officials?”
“No?”
“Then everything’s probably gonna be fine, kid.”
And Riz had been doing okay, had mostly gathered himself, but something about the soft rumble of Jawbone’s voice, his stupid endearing anecdotes, made everything come back up again. “Fuck,” he blubbered, unabashedly using a pillowcase to wipe away his snot. He would wash it for them later. “I just- I don’t want to be like this. Everything seems so- everything- it’s all so easy for everyone else. I don’t know why I drew the- fucking- short straw.”
“Look, Riz-”
“I don’t want to feel like this forever, I don’t- fuck, I don’t want to be alone. Jawbone, I don’t want to be alone forever.”
There was too little air in the stupid hall closet, or maybe too little air in the whole world. Riz couldn’t stop taking in those unbearable, gasping breaths.
“Look,” Jawbone said, at long last. “You’re a smart one, Riz. I don’t want you to ever forget that. You’ve really got something special up in that fuckin’ head of yours. But kid… you don’t know everything.”
“I just-”
“No,” he said. “Until you come around and you say, hey, Jawbone, I’ve added ‘divination wizard’ to my roster of skills, I don’t want to hear you saying any sort of shit about ‘forever.’ Three years ago, I thought I would spend my life on the run from various governments. Now look at me, a goddamn model citizen. You have no idea where life is gonna take you. So you just enjoy the ride, and you accept the things you can’t change, and you talk to your friends about it. You know, there’s a crew down there that would die for you if you let them.” There was a short beat of silence. “Shit, where did I hear that thing about accepting things you can’t change? Eh, it’ll come to me.”
“Do you…” Riz scrubbed at his eyes and put the gross pillowcase out of sight. “How long am I going to feel like this?”
“Dunno. Maybe always, it’s not like I can read the future either. You’ve just got to figure out a way to live your life with it.”
“S’not fair,” Riz said, petulantly.
“Yeah, life’s not fair. You figure it out or you join a church.” There was another long silence, stillness on either side of the door. “I’m gonna go downstairs and tell the folks you’re alive. Take as long as you need.”
“You’re a good guidance counselor, Jawbone.”
“You know it.” And as his feet padded slowly down the hall, he called back, “and don’t worry about whatever it is you’re blowing your nose into. You don’t want to know the kind of shit our washer’s gotten out.”
Then there was quiet, nothing but the winter wind in the drafty eaves.
Riz hugged his knees to his chest and tried to take stock of his situation. He was humiliated, and his great secret had been revealed, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He would feel like this for the rest of his life, and he had to figure out a way to work it out. Fantastic.
What were they talking about down there? Were they still talking about him? Maybe. Nothing he could do about that but worry.
He couldn’t stay up here in the hall closet all night. At some point he had to gather himself and go down, even if his throat kept seizing up.
When the outside-facing wall became too cold against his back, Riz blotted his face against a purple bath towel and ventured out into the great unknown.
When he finally reemerged downstairs, the living room had been transformed into a cozy little sleeping area, the carpet between the couches piled high with blankets and pillows. Riz’s friends lay scattered about, scrolling on their crystals and absently chattering like they were waiting for something.
Waiting for Riz.
“Hey!” Gorgug greeted, the first to see Riz from his perch on the easy chair. “We’re about to watch Legally Blonde.”
“Jawbone said we could have a sleepover,” Adaine said, sprawled out on her stomach on the floor, where she had been showing Fig something on her crystal. “And Mrs. Barkrock said she’d make pancakes tomorrow.”
God. There was so much he could say to clear the air, to fix whatever weird rift had been opened beneath the dangling topic of his sexuality. But they were the Bad Kids, and they perpetually bounced back, and none of them seemed to hold it against him that he had cried and kicked a chair two hours ago.
“Do I get the couch?”
“Of course,” Fabian scoffed, fond. “You get bitey in your sleep.”
So they weren’t going to mention it. He could tell, from the forced-casual posturing of their sleepover plans, that they weren’t going to be the ones to bring up Baron or Cole Hillbreak or the fact that Riz wasn’t gay or straight by his own admission, but rather in some ambiguous nothing-zone.
In the dying half-light of the evening, the hot pink menu screen played and played. Gorgug had the remote in his lap, but made no moves to use it.
“Sorry,” Riz said, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
“We won’t speak of it anymore,” Kristen exclaimed in a foppish affectation, hands splayed out in front of her. But she looked up at Riz with a shy little smile and said, “I’m sorry for being a jerk.”
Riz shrugged. “All good.”
For a few moments, it seemed as though nobody really knew what to say. On the street outside a car flew past, casting white, harsh light across the faces of his friends, shadows stretching and morphing behind them.
They loved him, he knew this. And while he was hiding they all had come to an agreement to let him take the lead, to not push the Topic if he didn’t instigate it. He was grateful for that.
“Are we going to watch the movie?” Fabian complained, and Gorgug wordlessly picked up the remote, filling the room with oversaturation and color.
Riz took his spot on the couch. Nobody was looking at him, nobody except Adaine, who averted her eyes as soon as he spotted her. Hopefully they would all sleep it off, this awkwardness, and in the morning nobody would treat him like an unstable explosive.
Things would be fine. Riz would continue as usual, hauling his burden and everyone else’s, and he would figure out a way to kill the ever-encroaching feeling.
It wasn’t going away, he knew that. It never would.
But his friends would be there to watch movies and try their hand at making chocolate chip cookies, and his stomach would hurt from laughing at the cookies melting together in the oven to create one hideous, bubbling sheet of dough. They would all still eat it, even Fabian.
They would never understand, and Riz didn’t know if he could ever tell them the extent of it, but tomorrow morning they would have pancakes.
So everything was fine.