Release(5)

Adam turned down the path that ran along a stretch of lakefront, across a side bay from where Enzo’s party would be tonight. He had only been planning to run six miles, especially with the chrysanthemum delay, but felt like he needed to make it eight, needed to push that little bit further. He had reached the point, that rare point that sometimes happened in a run, where he felt aware of his youth, aware of his strength, aware of the temporary immortality granted in these moments of fullest physical exertion. He could run these last four miles forever. He would run them forever.

He heard the car horn honking before he was a hundred feet along the path but assumed it couldn’t possibly be for him.

His parents had never really liked Enzo but couldn’t bring themselves to say so outright. Enzo – Lorenzo Emiliano Garcia – was from Spain. He’d been born there, though he had no memory of it, his parents having found their way to America shortly after his birth and then to the nearly rural commuter town of Frome just before the eighth grade. He had no accent but had a European passport. Actually, having a passport even without the adjective was impressively strange on its own. But it wasn’t that he was moving back to Spain after tonight. His mother, an endocrinologist, had taken a job all the way across the country, in Atlanta. Adam’s parents were really only letting him go to the get-together out of relief at Enzo vanishing as an influence in their son’s life.

The hilarious thing was that it had nothing to do with all the physical stuff they’d shared, all the sex and love (Could Adam call it that? Did Enzo? Did he, though?), the intimacy and closeness. If his parents had genuinely suspected any of that, he would have been packed off to ex-gay camp faster than a mosquito’s blink.

No, they objected because Enzo was Catholic.

He laughed to himself again as he ran. The endorphins were really cooking now.

“Have you been a witness to this boy?” his father would ask. “It’s what the Lord wants of us. What He demands of us.”

“They go to church every Sunday, Dad. I think they’ve probably got a Lord of their own.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

“How is that–”

“You can talk him away from the lie of the papacy.”

“That’s probably what I should start with, huh?”

“Dang it, Adam! All this, this, this charisma you have. All this drive–”

“You think I have charisma?” Adam was genuinely astonished.

“You’re not like Martin.” It sounded like a painful admission. It almost certainly was. “Your brother … has different blessings, but he’s never going to be as effective with words as you.” His dad shook his head. “I prayed for a preacher as a son, and God, in His infinite humour, gave me one with all of the faith but none of the talent and another with all of the talent but none of the faith.”

“That’s a little hard on Marty, don’t you–”

“Just be a witness to this boy, son.” Adam was astonished (again) to see what seemed to be tears in his father’s eyes. “You could be so effective. So, so effective.”

Well, Adam had thought to himself, I’ve had my mouth on his bare skin. That seemed to be effective.

He didn’t say that, though.

Mostly, he was confused by the conversation. Not his dad’s evangelizing, of course, but that it was the first time in a long time, too long, that his dad had expressed any hope in him. They’d seemed to decide he was the Prodigal Son in waiting and were happy to let that story play out.

Even the endorphins as he crossed mile five weren’t enough to make this feel joyous. He pushed himself, ran harder.

He had loved Enzo. Loved him. And who cared if it was the love of a fifteen-and then a sixteen-year-old. Why did that make it any less? They were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet. Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young.

He had loved Enzo.

And then Enzo, for reasons Adam could – still – not quite understand, had stopped loving Adam. They became “friends”, though how that was supposed to work, Adam also still didn’t know. He’d witnessed to Enzo with his love. If he was as charismatically effective as his father seemed to believe, why hadn’t that been enough to make Enzo love him back?

“Shit,” he said, stopping on the lake path, putting his hands on his knees and just panting–





“Shit,” she hears, as she continues through the trees away from the lake, and there it is again, the same pricking on her heart.

A part of her wants to move towards the sound, feels the pull of something, perhaps as simple as the warmth of another human, and so she goes, three, four, five steps deeper into the trees–

But the warmth is moving again, away from her.

She’s not worried. If it’s who she is looking for, she will find him.

Of this – and maybe this alone – she is certain.





–the sweat quickly dripping from his nose in three, four, five black circles on the path’s pavement. It had been months since it ended with Enzo, months spent happily with Linus, how ridiculously lucky was that, approaching the twelfth grade of a public high school in the sub-sub-suburbs? And they were good months, months full of laughter and tenderness.