I woke up just before midnight on Saturday to the sound of the front door slamming shut. My first thought was of the Louisville Slugger in my closet. I leapt out of bed, grabbed the bat, and rushed out of my bedroom. As I approached the stairs, a cold fear sprang up and buzzed in my bones, but my heart was pumping fire; I ran downstairs, brandishing the bat above my head, expecting to see some hulking, meth-head invader in the entryway.
Instead, in the darkness, I saw the silhouetted figure of my mother. She was crying.
“Mom?”
“What are you doing, Quinn?”
I lowered my would-be weapon and flipped the light switch on the wall. She was standing there in just her underwear. “Agh!” I exclaimed, and flipped the light back off. “I thought there was a break in, or something.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and when her reply came, it sounded hollow and far away. “Just go back to bed, honey.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Please just go back to bed.”
My heart started beating harder. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“Are you okay?”
She paused. Outside, I heard the wind pick up. “I’m okay,” she said. “Go to bed.”
“Okay.”
***
Tony Harris died in a car wreck on Saturday night after someone ran him off the road.
Both me and my dad were close to him—Tony was the LGBT counselor at my school, and a huge basketball fan, so he was always in the bleachers for every basketball game we played.
After my dad made friends with him a couple of years ago at one of my games, Tony called me to his office and asked if I wanted to help him start a gay-straight alliance program at the school. It was pretty easy—all I had to do was show up to meetings and listen to people tell stories—sometimes they came out to us as practice for coming out to Mom and Dad, or they talked about being bullied, or they just talked about dates they went on, stuff like that. It was mostly a place for them to come and be comfortable.
But I was really uncomfortable the first year. I mean, really, two guys? Like that? Seriously gross.
But Tony told me that being the “S” in the “GSA” would look great on college applications, so I kept showing up. After a while, I found out I liked Tony and got to know the kids in the group, so I started sort of enjoying it. Before long, I was looking after the GSA kids in my classes or in the hallway if they were getting picked on or people were treating them bad. I’m a pretty big guy, and I’m not afraid of anyone at my school, so no one really bullied my friends–at least when I was around.
Tony was a gay guy, too, but he wasn’t, like, flaming or a drag queen or anything like that. He was sort of gay like the guys on Modern Family. You wouldn’t even have known if he didn’t tell you.
Tony and my dad started sitting together at all my basketball games, and eventually, they started doing guys’ night out once a week. Tony used to come over for dinner a lot, which was pretty cool, because he was a funny guy that always seemed to have the right quote for a situation.
He hadn’t been over for a while, though.
***
Anyway, when the police looked in Tony’s phone for an emergency contact, for some reason it was my dad, so they called shortly after they arrived on the crime scene. That’s why he ran out of the house, leaving the barest of explanations for my Mom about where he was going and when he would be back.
Either Dad didn’t come home after identifying Tony’s body that early morning, or he just stopped in briefly while I was asleep, because he was gone until Sunday night.
Mom went to church, which is weird, because she stopped attending even on holidays after Dad and I quit going with her a couple of years ago. When she got home, she started cleaning the house really intently. I didn’t recognize the look on her face—it was somewhere between numbness and agitation. When I tried to talk to her, she mumbled a halfhearted reply.
***
Sunday night, my Dad entered the house as quietly as he’d left it noisily. He hung his jacket on a hook near the door and went straight upstairs, without speaking to me or my Mom. She just watched him.
“Mom,” I said, “what is going on?”
She looked at me like I was a hallucination. Then, in a flat voice, she said, “Tony died.”
A burning sensation exploded in my stomach and spread to my arms and legs. I felt hot tears burst onto my cheeks. “Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
My mom’s face twisted up, but she just looked at me.
“Do you have to say it like that? Just, ‘Tony died,’ that’s fucking it?” I shouted.
She jumped and her eyes widened; she hadn’t expected me to start yelling. But I was filled up with a boiling that I couldn’t contain.
“What the fuck, Mom? What the fuck?” I started sobbing. “He’s not just Dad’s friend! He’s my friend, too! He was my friend, too!” I felt suddenly lost for thoughts. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept saying fuck over and over again.
“Honey…” she started, but her voice cracked and she stopped.
I don’t know why I was so angry at her. It wasn’t her fault. But I was incensed that we had been together the entire day and she hadn’t told me. She hadn’t even talked to me. I don’t know why that upset me so much, but it did.
“Jesus, Mom.” I said. “I’ve only been helping him with the GSA at school for fucking years now! I didn’t deserve to know?”
She started to cry, then nodded slowly. “You did. You deserved that,” she said.
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. She just stood there and cried. I felt so much anger rise up in me that I bared my gritted teeth, and my thoughts grew circular and illogical. I kept trying to imagine Tony’s face, but I couldn’t. I could remember everything else: his voice, the designer black-rimmed glasses he wore, his wing-tip shoes, even his goddamned cologne; he’d loaned his bottle of Burberry Black to me when he helped me get ready for prom last year. But every time I started to picture him, I just saw my Dad instead.
I felt my heart harden, and I narrowed my eyes. “I guess you’re not making dinner,” I said. She put her head in her hands. I walked past her and went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom.
The door was shut. I thought about knocking, but I didn’t. I just opened it quietly and walked in.
“Jenna, I know.” My dad’s voice was soft and quivering. “I know we need to talk. But I can’t yet.”
I stood in the doorway and waited. He thought I was Mom.
He said, “We didn’t—I didn’t do anything. Not in the last six months. I swear, Jenna. I swear. I haven’t seen him except at Quinn’s GSA things. You were with me both times I saw him.”
I walked a little further into the bedroom and saw my dad lying on top of the covers with his knees up to his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins. He was facing away from me, so I waited for him to say something else while I processed what he said.
Why did my Mom care whether he and Tony saw each other? I tried to think. It had been a while, but was it six months since Tony last came over for dinner? I supposed that was the case… but I had barely noticed that I didn’t see him outside school anymore.
My dad must have heard me breathing and known it wasn’t my Mom, because he said, “Who’s that? Quinn?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. He scrambled to sit upright and quickly wiped his tears away. “Hey. Hey, man,” he said.
My dad had never called me ‘man’ before. I said, “Hey, Dad.”
“You okay?”
I shrugged and looked at his face, but he kept averting his eyes from mine. “No.” I said, “I should ask you the same, though.”
He pursed his lips. He took deep breaths through his nose and nodded, still not looking at me. After a few seconds, he lost his composure, face scrunching up like a mask and tears running down his cheeks.
I said, “I can go, if you want me to.”
He nodded a little harder. As I left the room, I remember thinking that I’d never seen him so upset—not when Grandma or Grandpa died, not even when my aunt Julie overdosed.
***
I cried again the next morning, a whole bunch of times. I cried when I saw Cassie, and I cried when I saw Stefan, and I cried when I saw Jesse and Arthur and Mike and everyone. My on-again-off-again girlfriend, Megan Hendricks, cuddled with me at the tables outside during lunch break, which was nice. She scratched my head with her fingernails, which I’ve always loved, while I laid my head in her lap.
“Quinn?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Who’s gonna do the GSA thing now?”
I thought about it for a moment, but the idea of someone else coming in felt like someone dropped a sharp rock on my heart. “I dunno.” I said, “The school will hire somebody, I guess. I don’t want to talk about it.”
She scratched under my head, then around my temples. I tried hard not to cry in front of her. I’d just lost a friend, yeah. But it wasn’t—I don’t know—manly, I guess. Who the hell sits and cries all over a girl? Especially one who could never decide whether she wanted to be my girlfriend or not?
Megan said, “I think you should run it.”
“I’m not gay,” I said quickly. It wasn’t intentional, but my voice rose a little.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You should call a meeting or something. Talk about it with the others.”
“Jesus, Megan, I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
She disentangled her fingers from my hair and raised them above her head. “Okay, I’ll shut up.”
At that very moment, I was finally able to picture the face of my friend. It was a clear, cold, impossibly sharp memory of Tony’s face, sitting to the right of Dad at the dinner table, with the flannel shirt and the stubble that made him look like a young Ira Glass. He had just told one of his famous jokes; Dad and I were laughing hard, and Mom was laughing, too, but she and Tony were looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes.
I got up and walked away from Megan. She called out after me, but I didn’t turn around. I just started walking, fast, away from her, away from the lunch tables, away from the people who never knew Tony and were still laughing and screaming like they always do at lunch. Away from the fucking grief counselors that had just showed up, away from all of the fucking queer kids at the queer table who were sitting and crying together. Away from the courtyard, away from the fucking school, away across the football field, away, away, away.
I just walked and walked until all of the sudden I was running, and then I ran and ran and ran until I couldn’t run anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Gabe Coeli lives in Portland, Oregon with his daughter, Livia. He spends his days writing, fighting, cooking, reading, loving and adventuring.