Tyler Johnson Was Here(58)

There’s a moment of silence, except for the birds chirping in the trees in the distance.

“Man,” G-mo says interrupting the quiet. “I feel you.”

My eyes meet his and he nods at me.

We play one more game, changing up the teams, and then Faith drives us to get dinner at Tyler’s favorite chicken and ribs joint, and I try not to hurt, even though I probably always will.





? 31 ?


The hateful-hot sun beams down like it’s a UFO that’s claiming me as its newest abductee. And I shield my face as best I can with my hand, but it doesn’t seem to work. In the car, Faith chooses just the right station, landing on Tupac’s “How Do U Want It.” And my mind clears steadily.

And suddenly, all I can think about, all that is running through my mind, is firsts. My first time hearing the sound of a gun, my first time feeling loss, my first time meeting my best friends, my first time without a brother, my first time seeing bigotry, my first time being told I was not good enough, my first time being told that I was—and am—good enough, my first kiss, my first boner, my first love. And in my thoughts, I go over all the other firsts I’ll get to experience with Faith.

We go over to her place for some alone time, and she puts on some music. When she sits down, she kisses me nice and quick on the lips. Her lips are soft—so soft, like touching cotton candy or like falling face-first on a mound of powdery snow. It’s pretty fucking magical.

I kiss her mouth, her eyelids, her eyebrows, her forehead, her neck, her ears, and even her breasts through the fabric of her cheetah-print shirt. We roll down the couch and flip over. I’m on top, then she is on top, and then we flip again, and we are both on our sides, and this couch is so small and is ruining things for me. She darts up, squeezing my hand. “Wanna go to my bedroom? There’s a lot more space in there.”

“Yeah,” I say without hesitation, following her.

We fall into the bed, and she pushes the covers to the side.

“You’re the greatest,” she says between kisses. “I like you so much.”

“And I really, really, really like you back,” I say to her, sucking on her bottom lip.

“Let’s take our clothes off,” she suggests.

And I have a two-second crisis with myself. I’ve never done this before. And I wonder if she knows.

“Sure, we can,” I say, my mouth still so close to hers.

This is going to be awkward. I don’t know what to do, and she’s about to find out. Do I take my own clothes off? Or hers? I think she realizes now that I’m a fucking amateur. And so we end up doing a little bit of both—taking each other’s clothes off, and our own.

In seconds, our skin is touching, bare bodies showing, chests heaving, and heat waving in between us. We’re pressed so close together I damn near need a condom.

Then we are all hands and moans, and everything feels electrically charged, raging at full speed. She doesn’t care where her hands go, and neither do I.

She reaches into a box underneath her bed and comes up with a condom. “Just to be on the safe side,” she says, “put this on.”

I bite open the package and slip it on after reading the back of it for directions.

“Are you sure?” I ask her.

She smiles and nods. “Yeah.”

Everything picks up to full speed.

Our bodies touch and collide.

And we are one.

Feeling each other through and through.

I kiss her on the neck, and she lets out a moan that sends me kissing her. I look at her face and her expression is just fucking… everything, her eyes closed and her teeth making imprints on her bottom lip. And suddenly, I can almost feel all the layers that I have grown over my own purity stripping away. I feel them peel faster, the faster things move, the further things go.





? 32 ?


Two more weeks slide past, and we’re suddenly only days away from the trial. They’re going to have me and other people testify. I just hope that the jury listens and does the right thing.

Mama, still smelling like hard work and cigarette smoke, cleans out Tyler’s room. The pain on her face causes me an intolerable amount of agony, and it takes a herculean effort to blink away the tears when she asks for my help. We take down his posters and put them in a box. We clean out his dresser drawers and nightstand, pulling out old sports magazines, a couple of condoms, a jar of Vaseline, and an application to community college that’s half filled out, and this gets Mama to start crying. We strip the bed down and put the comforter, sheets, and pillowcases in a laundry basket for washing, eventually for slipping into the attic with other lost things.

“It still doesn’t feel real,” Mama says. “It feels like at any moment, he’ll be coming home.”

I blink, piling up all of his sports collection cards from a little stool in the corner of the room. I reach underneath the stool, and hidden there is a piece of paper held up by tape. It takes a few seconds, but I carefully peel back all the tape to see what it is.

“I try to make myself think that he’ll be stumbling through the door asking me to make him a meal any day.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I feel that sometimes, too.” I notice that I can talk about him, finally, without instantly losing my breath, or bursting into tears or flames.