Two Boys Kissing (19 page)

So he directs Avery to Mr. Footer’s, the old relic of a miniature golf course. It’s been closed for years now, but no one’s bought the land, so it sits in its abandoned state, nearly post-apocalyptic in its decay. There’s a lock on the gates, but the gates themselves have worn away in places, making it easy to come and go. At night it’s a breeding ground for stoners and crankheads, but during the day it’s graveyard quiet.

“Where exactly are you taking me?” Avery asks. Ryan has a flash of seeing the site through his eyes, and realizes this might be a mistake. But he doesn’t want to turn back now.

He tells Avery to park in front. “When I was a kid,” he explains, “this place was the best place around. Like, if you were
really good and did all your chores, Mom and Dad would take you here. You’d play all the mini golf you could, and then there’d be ice cream and video games in the hut over there after.”

Avery takes it all in. “So what happened?”

Ryan shrugs. “One day it was here, and then the next day there was a sign saying it was over. It’s sat here ever since, abandoned.”

“And do you come here often?”

“Only with
special
people.”

“Oh, gee. I’m so flattered,” Avery deadpans. But in a way, he
is
flattered. Had Ryan driven over to Marigold, Avery would have been forced to take him to a T.G.I. Friday’s or a movie. This is definitely not that.

“Let’s go,” Ryan says. They leave the car and crawl through a gap in the gate. Inside, everything is broken. Toppled windmills, fetid moats, bottles left smashed and cans left crushed.

“Want to play?” Avery asks.

Ryan looks at the torn-up greens. The holes filled with cigarette butts.

“I’m not sure that will work,” he says. “There aren’t any clubs anymore. Or golf balls.”

“So?”

“So … it’s hard to play mini golf without those things.”

“Use your imagination,” Avery says, walking to the base of the first green and putting down an invisible ball. “This is the most amazing mini-golf course ever created. For example, this hole is patrolled by live alligators. If they swallow your ball, it’s three strokes. If they swallow you, it’s five.”

Avery takes an exaggerated swing with a nonexistent club, then makes a production of watching the ball soar into the air
and drop to the green. “Comeoncomeoncomeon,” he murmurs. Then he sighs. “Not a hole in one, but at least I dodged the gators. Your turn.”

Ryan walks over and puts down his own invisible ball. “I hope you don’t mind that I took the pink one,” he says.

“I don’t mind at all.”

Ryan swings at the ball. They both watch it rise and fall.

“Not bad,” Avery says.

“At least I didn’t hit a gator.”

Ryan thinks Avery will stop then, will want to leave this desolate place. But he heads right over to where his ball is and makes the putt, then steps out of the way for Ryan’s turn. Ryan follows his lead, but misses the shot. He gets the next one in.

Avery makes a gesture of gathering the golf balls, then walks to the next hole.

“Your turn,” he says. “What’s the story?”

The story Ryan tells is that this green is riddled with troughs of chocolate; if your ball falls in, it will taste better, but will also slow you down. And actually, the golf ball is no longer a ball. It’s a golf-ball-size gobstopper.

The story Ryan
feels
is a different matter. The story Ryan feels is the one that’s being written with each minute, this confounding and enjoyable story of the two of them finding a good time in what he now sees is a remarkably dire place. He’s always appreciated how derelict it was, but that was when he was feeling pretty derelict himself. In the past couple of years, there was some catharsis in seeing his childhood so visibly trashed, as if there was some confirmation here about what growing up should feel like.

But with Avery, a little of that old wonder returns. Ryan plays
along, and it’s a relief to be playing. By the fifth hole they’re not even golfing anymore; they’re just describing all the things they don’t really see. Avery erects the Taj Mahal on hole five, and Ryan presents the world’s first antigravity mini golf on hole six. At hole seven, they start walking hand in hand, surveyors of an imaginary landscape. Instead of solemnly holding hands, they swing them back and forth, stretch out and pull back together. The sun isn’t shining, but they don’t notice. If anyone were to ask them later, they’d swear that it was.

It is not as simple as Ryan looking at Avery and feeling they’ve known each other forever. In fact, it doesn’t feel like that at all. Ryan feels like he is just getting to know Avery, and that getting to know Avery isn’t going to be like getting to know anyone else he’s ever gotten to know.

There’s a wishing well in the middle of the ninth hole. This is not imaginary—it is sitting there, largely intact from its glory days. Avery reaches into his pocket and pulls out a penny.

“No,” Ryan finds himself saying. “Don’t.”

Avery shoots him a quizzical look. “Don’t?”

“I’ve thrown pennies in that well all my life. And not a single wish has ever come true.”

As a kid he wished for money or fame or toys or friends. More recent wishes were for so many other things, all of them synonymous with love or escape.

He worries he’s ruined it now, by suddenly being serious. That’s always been his problem, his inability to live in false worlds for that long.

Avery doesn’t ask him what he wished for. He doesn’t need to.

“Here,” he says. “Maybe you didn’t do it right.”

Avery takes the penny and moves it to Ryan’s lips. Ryan holds there, not really knowing what’s happening. Then Avery leans in and kisses him, kisses him so that they are both kissing the penny. When he pulls back, the penny falls, and he catches it in his palm.

“Now make a wish,” he says.

And Ryan thinks,
I want to be happy
.

“Got it?” Avery asks.

Ryan nods, and Avery tosses the penny into the well. They both listen, but neither hears it land. Then Avery returns to him, comes closer again, and now they are kissing with nothing between them. Lips closed, then lips open. Hands empty, then hands entwined.

A minute or two of this, then Avery pulls back and says, “We’re only half done!”

They walk, fingers still woven together, to the tenth hole.

“It’s a cloud,” Ryan says. “The whole thing is a cloud.”

They become so caught in their discussion of golfing within clouds that they don’t hear the footsteps, don’t hear the laughter coming their way. Then the voices are too loud to ignore.

Ryan turns and sees who’s coming.

“What?” Avery asks.

And Ryan says, “Oh shit.”

Harry is crying. He is in so much pain that he’s started to cry. His legs are seizing up, and his bladder feels like it’s full of rocks,
and he isn’t choosing to cry, but his eyes are crying nonetheless. He’s lost control of them. He’s lost control of everything, except for his lips. All of the control that he has left, he has to put there. Even as his body is shouting
surrender
. Even as his mind is telling him there is no way to last another five hours.

There are four of them. Avery has no idea who they are, and neither do we, but just like us, Avery has some idea of where this is going. It’s the sneering looks, the swagger in the walk, the almost aimless spite in their laughter. It’s a particular brand of asshole, easily found in teenage boys traveling in packs.

“What’s up, Ryan?” one of them taunts. “Who’s your
boyfriend
?”

Ryan lets go of Avery’s hand.

“What do you want, Skylar?” he says.

“We saw a car out front. What are you boys up to?”

Avery sees now that Skylar and one of the other guys are holding golf clubs. Skylar sees him looking and smiles. Then he spots a bottle on the ground and swings the club, knocking the bottle in Ryan and Avery’s direction. Ryan doesn’t flinch, but Avery does.

We don’t need to tell you what Skylar’s like, do we? You must already know. In the big scheme of things, he’s a powerless cog. So he exerts as much power as he can in any situation he can dominate. He tries to build his self-worth on the backs of others, and it works a little, but never enough. It doesn’t make him any smarter. It doesn’t give him more of a future. It gives
him the same instant gratification as sex or drugs. He doesn’t hate Ryan, not really. He just sees in him an opportunity to be in control. Especially with an audience.

Ryan tries to stay away from him—tries to stay away from all of them. Because there are always more of them, and because if he fights them, he’s going to have to fight them every day after that, whereas if he manages to avoid them, ultimately he will disappear altogether. Or that’s what he’s told himself—that’s what we always told ourselves. Do not engage. Do not make it worse. Walk away. Not run away—don’t be a coward, don’t let them see your fear.
Walk
away.

If Avery wasn’t here, that’s what he’d be doing. Tell them to have a fun game, then walk away like he was handing over the course to them. But there’s no getting away with that now. It’s more fun for Skylar to go for the kill with Avery watching.

Skylar lines up another bottle, and this time it smashes on impact, glass flying everywhere. The other guys find this hilarious.

Avery can feel himself shutting down, going into survival mode.

“What the fuck do you guys want?” Ryan spits out.

“So tough!” Skylar mocks. Then he throws his golf club at Ryan’s face.

Or at least he makes it look like he’s going to throw the golf club at Ryan’s face. At the last possible moment, he holds on to it. But not before Ryan’s lifted up his arm, cringed from the blow that never comes.

Avery can see Ryan’s humiliation at falling for the fakeout. As the guys are laughing some more, Avery wants to walk over and put a comforting hand on Ryan’s back, wants to tell him it’s
okay. But he can’t do that, because he’s not sure what kind of reaction that will get, and also he’s not sure if it really is okay.

What Avery doesn’t know is that Ryan’s humiliation isn’t just from the moment, but is the accumulation of abuse from Skylar and other guys like Skylar. They’ve trespassed all over his life, spit and stomped and sabotaged any degree of safety or comfort he’d managed to build. This is the true tyranny—not the actual taunts or shoves, but the exhaustion that comes from living with it for so long, so relentlessly.

It killed us, to be picked on, to be ridiculed for being something we weren’t even allowed to be. So many of us first heard the word
gay
as an insult, an abomination. So many of us were called a faggot before we even knew what that meant. Not all of us—some of us hid so deep that no one could find our weakness. Some of us were bullies ourselves in order to cover our tracks, or because we hated what we were so much that we had to attack it in other people. A lot of us had to suffer at the hands of people who were dumber and/or meaner than we were, just because they were bigger, just because they were louder, just because of who their fathers were or what team they were on, or because they had the sheer nerve to kick us around while we didn’t have the defenses to fight back.

There was always a time before we were marked. For Ryan, there’s a time that he played Little League with Skylar. Their mothers even carpooled. But that history means nothing here.

“Did we interrupt you guys making out?” Skylar says with a playful disgust. “Did we miss the show?” He’s close now, too close. He takes the golf club and uses it to push Avery toward Ryan. “Don’t let us stop you. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Avery feels the guys’ eyes on him and has no idea what they see.

“Come on!” one of the guys calls out. “Do it!”

Ryan is coiled with anger, but he can’t uncoil it into action. Not until Skylar starts to poke him with the golf club, making rude kissing noises. It’s too much. Ryan grabs at the club, tries to pull it out of Skylar’s hands. He expects Skylar to pull back, but instead Skylar surprises Ryan by pushing instead. Ryan’s caught off balance and falls back on his ass, knocking into Avery.
Then
Skylar pulls back on the club, easily shifting it out of Ryan’s hand.

Everyone is staring at Ryan on the ground, even Avery. The other guys are loving it, laying on the insults. But Skylar stays quiet. He lets his satisfaction speak for him. No matter what Ryan does now, Skylar’s already won.

“You need to get a new boyfriend,” he tells Avery. “This one’s damaged.”

“Fuck you,” Avery says. It feels lame to say it. Stupid. There has to be something better for him to say, but that’s all he’s got.

“No,” Skylar says. “Fuck
you
.”

Ryan is getting up now. Skylar steps back and putts a piece of glass so it hits Ryan’s sneaker.

“Let’s go,” Avery says.

“What, so soon?” Skylar taunts. “That wasn’t much of a show!”

Avery tries to read the expression in Ryan’s eyes, but he can’t. He has no idea what Ryan is thinking right now, what he’s going to do next. It’s like none of the rest of them are there—it’s just Ryan and Skylar, facing off.

“I want to go,” Avery says. Let them blame him. Let him be the weak one, if that will get them out of here.

“Okay,” Ryan says. It’s directed at Avery, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Skylar. “It was great to see you guys.”

“Yeah, fag, great to see you, too,” Skylar replies.

Ryan and Avery start to walk away. The guys respond by knocking more cans and bottles in their direction. Ryan doesn’t break into a run. He just keeps walking, and Avery keeps pace. Glass and aluminum are hitting them, flying all around them. The guys are whooping with joy. They follow for a short distance, then finally, at the sixth hole, let them go. Ryan despises how thankful he is for this.

As soon as they are out of range, safely crawling back through the opening in the gate, the cork pops on all the words Avery has been keeping inside. “That was scary,” he says. “But we’re fine. We’re totally fine. Those guys are assholes. The important thing is that we’re okay. Let’s just forget about it, because there’s no use in worrying about it now. We’re okay, right?”