Release(6)

So why did it still ache?

“You okay, son?” The old man on the home-made bicycle had caught up to him.

Adam popped out an earbud. “Just a broken heart.”

“My advice?” The old man didn’t stop, just kept slowly pedalling by. “Whiskey. And lots of it.”

Adam laughed in a single syllable, shaking his head as he took off running again.

He was at the point – he checked his phone – just over thirty-five minutes in, where nothing hurt. His legs were in rhythm, his feet hitting their strike at the right cadence, his arms swinging their counterweight.

I feel strong, he thought, almost consciously. I feel strong. He ran a little faster.

Still, his parents loved him. They must. In their own way. But that way seemed to depend on an unspoken set of rules Adam was expected to know and abide by; and to be fair, he probably did know them. It was abidance that was a problem.

He had loved, though. And been loved himself. That he was sure of, even if it was Angela. Plus, she was the one who told him he was in love with Enzo (and, in fact, was the one who told Enzo that, too). He’d given his feelings for boys a name not long before then, had even already somehow lost his virginity (though that was another story), so it certainly wasn’t just being oblivious, though Angela had proved strangely vehement about naming anything.

“Let’s say I want to kiss Shelley Morgan,” she’d said.

Adam had looked over from the throw pillows they were sharing on the floor of her family’s TV room. “You do?”

“Well, kind of. I mean, who doesn’t? She’s part-vampire, part-baby marmot.”

“And that does it for you?”

“It does it for most people who aren’t you. Now, shut up, I’m making a point: I’d also be interested in kissing Kurt Miller.”

“Ugh, you already have, though. And all that peach fuzz.”

“Really? I find it endearing. But say I want to kiss both Shelley and Kurt and I want to do this on the same day. What would that make me?”

“Hungry?”

“No, you’re supposed to say ‘bi’ and I’m supposed to yell at you. Or you were supposed to say ‘slut’ and I’d really yell at you.”

They waited a moment while a handsome-but-stupid-and-very-waxed frat jock got flayed by the hillbilly zombie in the movie they’d downloaded. One of the many things Adam and Angela bonded over was a shared hatred of drippy teen movies. Horror all the way.

“Sick,” Angela said, eating a Dorito.

“But wouldn’t that make you bi, though?”

“Oh, my God, no, you label fascist!”

“There it is.”

“My point: why do you have to call yourself anything? Because, if you don’t, freedom. Because, self-actualization. Because, fluidity and not calcifying into what that label will make you.”

“How about, because having an identity can be just as powerful as actualizing my fluidity?”

“But are you sure you only like boys? Why not keep your options open?”

“Because my entire upbringing has told me there was only one way to be. That any other way is wrong. A deviation from their certainty.”

“All the more reason to–”

“I’m not finished. When I realized how things were, when I said to myself that I am not this thing I’ve been told I have to be, that I am this other thing instead, then Jesus, Ange, the label didn’t feel like a prison, it felt like a whole new freaking map, one that was my own, and now I can take any journey I want to take and it’s possible I might even find a home there. It’s not a reduction. It’s a key.”

Angela ate another Dorito, thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “I can see that.”

“And if I felt anything like that for a girl, don’t you think it would only ever be you?”

“Oh, fuck off, Disney Channel, you’re way too tall for me.” But she scooted across the Darlingtons’ shag carpet and put her head on his shoulder. She stared at the screen for a minute while a topless blonde was beheaded. “I think I want to kiss Shelley more than Kurt, though.”

“Whatever, I promise never to call you anything until you tell me to.”

“And I promise not to care about your small-minded label because you insist it’s liberating.”

“Good.” He kissed the top of her head.

“Now, when are you going to get into Enzo Garcia’s pants already?”

“Enzo?” He’d been genuinely surprised. And then, suddenly, not. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”

And that was how, not three weeks later, at Angela’s sixteenth birthday party (she was four months older and surprisingly gracious about not lording it over him), the only other guests besides Adam were a pleasantly surprised Enzo and a slightly baffled but really quite sweet Shelley Morgan.

“Here’s how it is,” Angela said in a low voice to Adam and Enzo after her parents had dropped them off at the bowling alley. “I’m going to spend this whole evening seeing how well worth getting to know better Shelley is, and you two need to leave us to it. Fortunately, Enzo, Adam is totally in love with you, so you’ll have lots to talk about.”

She’d left them to their stunned silence, Adam realizing too late that he should have been laughing it off immediately.