I'd Give Anything(33)

I am so stupid.

I held his hand like I have a thousand times before, his wide, beautiful hand, and said, “Where should we go? The quarry?”

He shook his head, fast and twitchy, like he was shaking off a punch.

“Not there.”

That’s when I noticed his face. It looked just how it looked the night we’d had sex. Lost and scared and drained of color.

“Hey, baby,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

“Not now,” he said.

He drove and turned into the first really big parking lot we came to and parked in the most faraway spot with no other cars around.

It feels cruel now, that he picked that place. Maybe he didn’t want it to be in one of our special places, like the quarry. But there? In the parking lot of the most beat-down grocery store in town? With the dinged-up shopping carts lying around and the giant red ACME letters glaring down at us? The edge of the lot was littered with garbage that looked like it had been there for decades.

No one should have to be staring at fast-food bags snagged in bushes and empty forty-ounce bottles when her life comes crashing down around her.

He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

He tried to pull his hand away, but I just held on harder. Because that’s what you do when someone you love is sad or afraid. You hold on harder.

Then.

He said.

He said.

How could he?

He said, in this ripped and shredded voice, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. But I’m gay. I’m gay, Zinny.”

For a few long seconds, I literally did not comprehend what he’d said. I heard the sounds his mouth made, but I didn’t know what they meant.

And then his dark, scared eyes looked into mine and, like a thunderbolt, I understood.

I dropped his hand like it had caught fire and backed up against the car door so hard I banged my head and it hurt.

“You can’t mean that,” I said, barely getting the words out. “You’re lying.”

“I wish,” he said, dismally.

And then I was screaming at him.

“You say you love me, like, every single day! We talk about getting married all the time! How could you do this to me? What the hell is wrong with you?”

He didn’t say anything. Just stared out the windshield.

“Was that fun for you?” I screamed. “To lie to me over and over and over, every single day? You’re a liar!”

I couldn’t stop. I went on and on. Frenzied. Blind. Somewhere in there, I told him I hated him. He never spoke or looked at me. Only stared straight ahead with an empty face.

I got out of the car and just started running.

I can’t eat. I feel like throwing up all the time. I feel like little bits of me are dying. My mother thinks I have the flu.

I hate him.

How can I hate him?

I loved him so much.

He let me love him.

I wish I could get away from what happened in that car. Or away from every single day of the past seven months of my life.

I wish I could go to sleep for the rest of senior year.

Or forever.

Even now, I don’t mean that the way it might sound. But my heart hurts so much. I wish I didn’t even have one.





November 5, 1997

Kirsten came to see me today. She knows. CJ knows, too.

I wish I could tell you how it felt to see her face in my house, to see not just someone else who knows this secret that’s been weighing me down like rocks but specifically Kirsten, how just the sight of her broke me open and made me cry in a different way from how I’d been crying for days. But I can’t make pretty things out of language now. Pretty doesn’t have a place here anymore. And anyway, my brain is clumsy and slow and sad. I write this like a three-year-old building something out of blocks. And there’s no happiness in it, not a speck. I just need to write these hard things down. I don’t even know why.

I let her in the back door, and we went up to my room. The second the door closed behind us, she turned toward me, and her eyes searched my face, and I could see her worry at how bad I look (because I am pasty and stringy-haired and gaunt and a hundred years old), but she reached out, took a scraggly clump of my hair, gently tucked it behind my ear, and said (softly and without any sarcasm), “Leave it to you to still look gorgeous as a movie star even now.” And what I realized is that the only thing that had been holding me together for the past three days is that no one had been nice to me. Not my mother because she never is. Not Trevor because I’d been hunkered down in my room, claiming to be sick, and he never had the chance.

She did the hair looping and said that sweet if entirely untrue thing, and my chest started heaving and I burst into croaky sobs so harsh my throat and my whole chest were sore afterward.

Kirsten put her arms around me, and we sat down on my bed, and I cried for what felt like a week.

“I know,” she crooned over and over. “I know, Zin Zin.”

When I was all emptied of crying, I said, “We had this future all planned out. It was beautiful and exciting and now it’s gone. Trashed. Burned. Disappeared.”

“I know how much that must hurt,” Kirsten said.

“I feel just exactly like someone died.”

I heard Kirsten take a deep breath. Then, she said, “But Gray’s still alive.”