10
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Joey said.
The breeze blew softly then, making seventy-degree weather feel like sixty-five. Joey and Wyatt Emerson were seventeen then, coming up on their last year of high school. He looked Joey in the eyes, and a solemn understanding passed between the two. It was an ugly thought that neither boy fully wanted to confront. Joey’s white arms were striated in a sequence of scars; his older scars had crusted over with new scabs. There were a thousand pejorative words in those arms that neither boy wanted to hear again.
“Well, you can’t just go,” Wyatt said desperately, knowing nothing else to say.
“Why should I stay!?” he demanded. “This shithole grows torment like a crop.”
The torment could be generalized as the closed-off rural issue of homophobia, but back then it was everywhere, and it was especially awful in small communities. In larger cities, kids could detach; maybe not escape, but they could almost avoid the abuse. Here, being gay was nearly a death sentence with the size of the target it put up on your back. It’s easy to hide away the truth, but certain feelings never stay deep down. Feelings bubble up in a fluttering fury that makes the heart skip beats. No one can hide themselves away forever. And, maybe there was more to it than just homophobia. It might just have been a mean town, the kind of place where no one felt safe. Fish being consumed by larger fish.
No one understood or even tried to understand Joey. When they heard the word gay or homosexual, phallic images flashed before their mind’s eye, and they forgot there was a whole person behind the adjective.
The boys treated you like a human being until they knew who you really were. Hell, they’d act like they loved you until they knew who you really were. Then, the discomfort set in. Then, the other boys needed to console themselves with awful jokes.
“Well, if you’re gay, does that mean you want me to rape you?”
“You want my cock buried in your ass?”
They spoke these words in jest. If they had been said to a straight woman, the other boys might have come together and stood against it.
Or…
They’d come together and stand by the awful words. They’d join in. They would form their entire culture around it. All their discomfort and anxiety masked at the price of moral ruin. These were the boys that the girls swore they loved. The men that wrote and passed laws when they grew old. The boys that date-raped while their closest friend forgot their moral obligation to see justice done.
It’s much easier to stand by. No one wants to be on team opposition. The idle audience knew better, but they feared the loud minority voice. Even Wyatt clenched his fists and stood by as the other boys mocked Joey. One of his best friends stood there in pain, and Wyatt chose to suffer vicariously. Every day since then, vocal minorities haunted Wyatt.
“I’m still here,” Wyatt offered.
“Thank you,” Joey whispered in a choked voice. “But I can’t stay. Not even for you. We all need to move on, and they will once I’m gone. They’ll go about like I was never alive in the first place. And the worst thing is that none of it is physical. It’s not someone beating me up. It’s complete rejection. No one will ever allow me into society just as I am. But that’s whatever. I don’t deserve to exist.”
“Everyone deserves to exist,” Wyatt said.
“Not me. I’m God’s mistake, apparently.”
Wyatt couldn’t find words for how he felt, so he said nothing, like an idiot. Saying nothing is the worst mistake a person could make. It’s always better to speak in half-baked ideas than say nothing at all. The next day, Wyatt learned the consequences of his inaction.
Joey departed from the world, never to be seen alive again. He didn’t leave a note or say goodbye to his folks before killing himself. Wyatt hoped that anyone would care about the sudden tragedy, but hardly anyone at school censored their toxic, psychopathic tendencies. If anything, they spoke worse of Joey now that he was gone, saying it served him right. And for once, their words incensed Wyatt enough for him to tell them to shut up.
“He was a Goddamn person! What right do you have to be alive? Just cause you love different? That’s how you see it. Well, fuck off. If I hear his name come out of one of your mouths one more time, you won’t be able to open your eyes ever again. You all think you’re so fucking big because you talk loud. I’ll show you what cowards you are!”
After the outburst, tangible silence weighed down upon the community. Wyatt was the biggest out of all the boys in the school, and the rest of the boys always gave him hell for being so big. But now, they all knew that if they messed around with him, Wyatt would punch their eyes into swollen blood-sacs. The boys felt small and wrong in Wyatt’s presence. None of them dared mention Joey’s name, and all jokes about him became taboo.
For once, the community understood pain and compassion, that they had spoken more than they should have. Every word against Joey came right back to ring in the ears of his bullies. It always takes one step too far for the world to understand, and the only thing the families could do was keep an eye out for the next Joey. Because there would be more kids just like him.