The water is a deep red, stained by the blood spilling from his slit wrists.
He came home to kill himself.
He came home to kill himself before I could bring a boy here.
He came home to kill himself because of me.
All this blood.
All this red makes me black out.
My legs hurt like hell but I don’t stop running through the park. I hop onto a bench and soar off of it, landing hard on my bad leg from when I got jumped, but I keep going. I usually slow down when I’m racing Collin so he doesn’t feel as bad. But not today. These pigeons eating bread from a knocked-over trash can scatter when I charge through them. I keep running, but the memory of my father dead in a bath of red keeps chasing me and it’s impossible to stop until I trip over my shoelaces and tumble into dirt.
Collin catches up to me and falls to his knees, panting heavily. “You . . . okay?”
I’m shaking and ready to pound my fists on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. He places a hand on my knee and I lunge up and hug him so hard I pop his back.
“Ouch! Shit,” he says, breaking free. “Cool it with that.”
I look around to see if anyone else is in the park. We’re alone. But Collin has his own ghosts too because of the last time I did something as simple as bumping his leg with mine; naturally someone would burn us at the stake if they caught us hugging. “I’m sorry.”
It’s only been two days, but I miss his face without the bruises and swollen eye.
Collin stands and I think he’s about to help me up but he just scratches his head. “I gotta go get cleaned up before I meet up with Nicole. She wants to talk.”
“Can you stick around for a little bit longer?” I see a no forming so I quickly say, “Forget it. Go do what you gotta do.”
And he does.
(AGE SIXTEEN—MARCH, FOUR MONTHS AGO)
None of us went to the funeral. There was a closed casket. I’m sure the service was poorly attended. The hated and hateful aren’t exactly a popular crowd. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted me there, which made it a missed opportunity to piss on his grave, but I ended up meeting with Collin instead and that’s poetic enough for me.
I’m sitting on the ground, and Collin is pacing back and forth. He still hasn’t really offered any real condolences or even hugged me, and it’s starting to get to me.
“He did this because of me,” I tell Collin, even though I’ve told him this over and over already. “Because of what we do together.”
“Maybe we should take a break,” Collin says. “Some time apart could be good for you.”
“That’s the last thing I want right now.” I don’t add the obvious, that we just got jumped together and my father killed himself. “We need to talk to the girls soon. I need you, uh . . . I need us to figure this out. I can’t have something else going wrong right now.”
“This is shitty timing, I know, but I actually can’t break up with Nicole, Aaron. Everything between us has been a slip. Look at everything that’s happened to you alone . . . You get why nothing else can go down between us, right?”
This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it’s so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you’re completely abandoned.
“You can’t do this,” I say. “I told my mother about you. My father killed himself because of us. We got jumped on the train because of who we are.”
Collin keeps pacing and refuses to look me in the eye. “We chose to be the wrong people. It just can’t work. Nicole’s pregnant and I was trying to talk her into not keeping the kid before I told you, but she is, so I gotta be a man again.”
Another bad thing but not unexpected, that was always a risk. “So you knocked her up, whatever. That doesn’t make you straight and you’re never going to be—”
“It’s not happening, Aaron.” He walks to the fence. I expect him to come back like he’s still pacing, but he just crouches down and leaves without another word.
Something snaps in my head and I’m fighting back tears.
I slipped too.
Whatever, I have a girlfriend too.