For a while, I didn't even consider that I wasn't like other kids.
When my neighbor, a little girl named Rosemary, kissed my cheek and held my hand and told me she wanted to marry me one day, I thought I didn't feel anything because I was just a kid - ten years old, at the time. When my aunt sat me down and gave me a talk about growing up and liking girls and the dreaded s-e-x, I was just mildly uncomfortable and more than a little bored. I didn't think I was any different from anyone else.
I didn't look at girls like all my friends did. They were nice, yeah. I liked being around them, liked playing their games and being friends and making up stories with them. They were pretty and funny and nice, but I still didn't seem to see their appeal. I still didn't wonder if I was different.
Then I got older.
I wasn't allowed to talk to Rosemary's brother for years - she always kept me away from him, saying he would spoil our fun - until I was about eleven years old and Oliver, the first person I might have called friend, chased that cat into the street and narrowly avoided being killed by that car. Rosemary's brother, who neither of us had heard emerge from her house, pulled him out of the way, then pushed him over once he was safe for kicking Rosemary's tabby. When he walked back into the house, he looked at me like I was dirt.
He was my age. I knew, from Rosemary's jealousy, that his name was Matthew.
When Rosemary invited me over a few days later, I became fed up of playing with her dolls went looking for her brother. I don't know why, other than that I hated the way he had looked at me.
He was in his bedroom, furiously tuning the radio. When I knocked on the door, his expression soured even further.
Without any introduction, I said: "I tried to stop Oliver from chasing the cat."
"And why didn't you try harder?"
"He punched me. Twice."
Matthew raised an eyebrow, which I was immediately impressed by. "You should find better friends."
I nodded, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. He was grinning. After that, I started avoiding Rosemary in favour of her brother. I usually found him in his bedroom, listening to the radio and writing something in a notebook that he never let me read. But when I knocked on the door and came in and sat on the end of his bed, he turned off the radio and put down his journal and listened and talked to me. And I decided, privately, that I had found my better friend.
It was like that for two years. Good, normal friendship.
Then, around the time Oliver and my other friends were sharing around photos of teenage girls that they stole from their fathers, I started watching Matthew. In our shared classes, outdoors, while I was at his house. (I never let him come to mine.) During physical education, I tripped up several times due to how fixated I was on him. In school, I noticed how he would chew on his pencil and not listen to the teacher and somehow know all the answers anyway. He was a genius.
I didn't just watch him. I saw other boys, too. To learn about myself, I said. My body was changing, and it wasn't like my parents were going to explain what was going on to me.
That just wasn't the whole truth. When I saw boys in the changing room, I saw that they were loud and stupid and annoying and immature. And I saw that they had different body types and had slightly soft stomachs and hair on their chests and skin, skin, skin. And I couldn't figure out how they made me feel.
When I passed the other boys in corridors, I didn't see backpacks and ties and uniforms and satchels; I saw green eyes and blue eyes and brown eyes and sweaty foreheads and mussed hair and smiling lips that I wanted to touch.
And it was terrifying, because I was starting to realize that I was different.
And it was wrong - at least, that was how I saw it - because they were all looking at girls while I wasn't.
I watched Matthew the most. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it.
He had straight black hair that refused to lie flat and freckles on his shoulders and brown eyes that were gold when he stood in the sunlight. He breathed heavily when he ran, perpetually out of shape while I lapped him with my footballer's legs. Every time I passed him, he would laugh or swear. Usually both.
He was beautiful. The day I let myself think that was the worst day of my life.
"I feel like there's something wrong with me," I managed to say to him.
I was fifteen when I did, having known him for four years and unable to stop watching him for two of them. We were sat on his bed, the radio playing softly in the background, Rosemary in the other room angrily battering her dolls.
"Why?" Matthew asked. Always why. Always challenging, biting for an answer, questioning everything and everyone. So full of dreams and life and fights.
"I don't..." It was so hard to say, even though I told him nearly everything. "I don't think I can love anyone. Your little sister wants to marry me, but I don't want to. I don't want to marry anyone." It was only a half truth. I knew I did love - I just didn't love in what I thought was the right way. I didn't want to marry any girls.
"What's... what's wrong with me, Matthew?"
"Same thing as me," he said quietly, looking away from me. After that, he wouldn't answer any more of my questions. It was my sixteenth birthday, almost a month after Matthew had his own. We were walking home from school with Oliver and some other boys when he took me aside, asking for me to come with him. I did, bewildered - because I would follow him anywhere - and only stopped when he did, in the middle of a corpse that was a safe distance from my other companions.
"I've been thinking about what you said," Matthew told me, not looking me in the eye. His voice was vulnerable to breaking; he was a late bloomer, despite how mature his head was.
"About... what?"
"About you being wrong." He played with the end of his school tie. "I think I'm wrong, too, Evan."
"Matthew-"
He stepped forward and cupped my jaw carefully, turning my head up and letting me see every freckle on his nose. Then he kissed me.
I'd seen my parents kiss with the irresolution of two people trying to figure out if they still loved each other. I'd seen older boys and older girls groping at each other like they were trying to break one another apart. I'd seen boys kissing girls and girls kissing boys, but never a boy kissing a boy. But I wanted this, I realized in that moment. I'd wanted it - wanted him - for ages.
I kissed him back gently and softly, with the hesitance of somebody who had fallen in love for the first time.
Then I heard footsteps.
I pushed Matthew away violently, even though I'd only wanted him closer for years. As Oliver and the other boys I grew up with stepped out from between the trees, I wiped the taste of him from my lips and spat the word that everybody crowed at the boys who refused to kiss girls at parties.
"Goddamn Queer "
And with that one word, a future - a future of hiding from those who hated us, sharing a flat as friends and kissing and holding each other behind closed doors, walking to our jobs together and letting our hands brush as we said goodbye - vanished.
Matthew stared at me in disbelief. I hardened my features, refusing to cry.
"What?" Oliver demanded, looking over at the person I cared about more than anyone in the world with that crushing, hungry fire in his eyes. "What happened, Evan?"
I was a coward. Coward sinner evil fighter bully attacker. Evil, evil, evil.
I was alive, then. But every part of me died when I looked Matthew in the eyes and said: "That faggot tried to kiss me."
And Oliver, bright with the same cruelty that motivated him to crush insects and torture pets and people - bright with the same evil that had manifested in me - grabbed onto the collar of Matthew's shirt and punched him in the face.
And I stumbled back and watched as the other started hitting him, too.
And every blow that struck him felt like one on my heart.
And I stood there, an evil, disgusting coward, as every good thing in me died in the bruises they made on his skin. For the next few weeks, I passed a broken boy in the corridors. A boy with bruises around his eyes that never seemed to fade, a boy with freckled shoulders that had gained a permanent hunch, a boy who my friends pushed and punched and jeered at while I watched on and laughed even though my heart was shattering, shattering, shattering.
And this broken boy was Matthew. My Matthew. And everything that had happened to him was my fault.
Four days before it happened, he found me. He was a shell of who he was, of everything that had made me love him. I took away everything that had made him.
He managed to stand tall in front of me, tilting his head down to look me in the eyes. I looked away first, so fucking ashamed and full of self-loathing.
When Matthew spoke, it was barely a whisper. "I'm sorry... I didn't mean..." He cleared his throat, but it barely did a thing. "You have to get them to stop. Please. I can't... I can't..."
I shook my head, unable to go on. I was evil and a coward and I was afraid of what I was, of what it meant in a world and among people who saw anything different from them as wrong.
I turned my back on him, unable to even comprehend that it would be the last time. Four days later, Matthew Finch jumped off the roof of our school. If I'd kissed you back for a second longer, would thing have turned out differently? If I'd taken your hand and hidden with you among the trees; if I'd listened to your final plea instead of hating you and hurting you for being just like me; if I'd taken the punches in your place.
Would you have stood upon that building, alone and scared, where nobody could have stopped you even if they wanted to, and let gravity take you?
There was no chance for ifs. I was a murderer. You were dead because of me.
And they laughed when the school held a memorial for you.
"Right thing for the queer to do," Oliver said, looking over at me like he knew. "I can't believe we changed clothes in front of him."
"Even worse for Evan," someone else said, glancing at me with sympathy. "He's the poor shit who got kissed." There was barely a drop of blood when you died, so I spilled enough of mine for both of us. It took them weeks to wash it off the floor of the boy's changing rooms. I was there, even though I wasn't. I watched them do it.
I tried to make up for what I did to you from the moment I opened my eyes as if it was a different thing. Helping lost, broken kids like you, trying to give back what I had taken. Never succeeding. I wouldn't ever be able to make up for what I did to you. Wherever you are now, Matthew, I hope you're safe and happy and in love and loved, the way you never could be on this earth thanks to me. I tell Theo all of this as the sunset fades to night, having to pause several times to choke down a sob or wipe my eyes. By the end of it all, Theo has buried his face in his knees.
"I'm sorry for kissing you," I manage to say, breaking several minutes of silence. "Without you knowing what I did. It was cruel."
Theo looks up, the tears on his face visible in the gathering moonlight. He shakes his head, then turns away from me.
"I need to think."
It's the least I can do for him. While he stares at the stars, occasionally wiping his eyes, my body ages, unbidden, by a year. As fifteen years old turns to sixteen, my skin maps out its changes. I run my thumb over the smooth white scar on my left wrist, deep with its purpose; the thin, jagged smile on the right, shallow and made by shaking, dying hands.
We sit there for over an hour, not saying a word. In some awful, painful way, it's a relief to finally say it all. I've been almost denying it over the past few decades, only thinking of Matthew in late, lonely nights where I hadn't seen a soul in months and I was utterly consumed by the memories that had brought me there. I didn't allow myself to remember him in the weeks I've known Theo, unable to stomach letting myself near a boy I was growing to care about with the guilt of what I had done on my mind.
I hate myself for getting close to Theo. He doesn't deserve this.
"Do you regret it?"
I glance over at him, looking a year older than I did a few hours ago. Theo's eyes widen as his gaze passes over the raised white flesh on the inside of my wrists.
"Do you regret it?" he asks again, unable to look away from the scars.
I tuck my arms into my chest, still wanting to hide that part of me from him. He looks into my eyes instead, his expression undiscernible.
"Do I regret it?" I ask. He nods.
"How could I not?" I demand. The tears reappear and I let them fall. "How could I not regret killing someone? How could I not regret driving the one person I cared about more than anyone to his death because he was just like me and I was afraid of who I was? A boy... I loved. A boy who loved me. A boy... who was just like me.
"I regretted it after I died and I regretted it before - that's why I killed myself. I couldn't stand what I'd done."
The words hang between us. Killed myself. The truth, while being freeing, is an agonising weight. "It's good that I'm here," I tell Theo, managing to look him in the eyes. "It's why I'm here, even though I tried not to be. To help people like I refused to help him... and to remember him in the right way. Because with me gone, who will?
"He was amazing," I say, even though it might be almost as painful for Theo as it is for me. Someone needs to know. "He was beautiful and clever and funny and he should've lived forever."
When I look back down at my knees, Theo moves. He stands and sits down again in front of me. Hesitantly, justifiably disgusted, he takes my wrists and holds them up to the endless black sky. He runs his thumbs across the scars and I feel one of his tears fall on my skin. "Do you regret it?" he asks again, quietly.
"Yes."
Why hasn't he left yet? If I were him, if I had found out somebody had what I had done, I would be long gone.
After a few minutes of utter silence, he says:
"Then I forgive you."
"You... what?"
"I forgive you," he says. He gingerly reaches up and wipes my tears away with his thumb. I flinch, even though his hands are gentle, expecting to be struck. "I'm not God or whatever is out there, but I forgive you for what you did." He lets his hand drop, sighing. "You did something awful. To somebody like me. Like us. "
"But... you were a product of your time. You were scared and you did a terrible, terrible thing, but you regret it. You're a good person, Evan. It may not be enough, but you've done everything you can to..." He pauses, searching for the right word. "Repent. So,
I forgive you."
I start crying all over again. He forgives me. He forgives me. Even though I killed Matthew and I'm a coward and disgusting and I took a life because of my own fear, he forgives me.
When my head falls forward, he catches me in his arms and holds me against him. He lies his hand on my spine and strokes my hair and I rest my ear against his chest and listen to his heartbeat.
"I forgive you," he whispers, over and over again. "It's okay. I forgive you." He presses a kiss to my hair, absent of the passion we were filled with over an hour ago. Just seeking to comfort me. "It's okay, Evan."
I raise my head, looking him in the eyes, and in their warmth I see everything living and everything in him. I press my forehead to his, not with the desire to kiss him - just to be close.
"Thank you," I whisper, and my tears fall onto his cheeks. "Theo. Thank you."
And then my skin starts to glitter, even though the moon is behind the clouds.
Every inch of my dead flesh begins to glisten like a star, like every ray of the sun has turned on me at once. And I feel something, a warmth spreading out from my chest and into my whole body.
"Evan," Theo gasps, falling back. He touches his fingers to my cheeks with a hesitance that implies fear of burning. "No, Evan, please. You can't go. I need you. You ca-" His voice cracks and he ducks his head, his fingers sliding down to my lips. "Please. Please don't leave me."
"Theo," I mumble. I reach out and hold him against me. I kiss him on the lips in place of the words I don't have time for. I would cry, but it's like I can't anymore.
"Thank you," I say, pressing him away gently. He doesn't need me, I realize. He has people and a life and a future and he's stronger than he could ever know. "Thank you, Theo."
He just cries. He holds me, trying to keep me here even though it's futile, and sobs.
"Goodbye, Evan"
Then, finally, I manage the three words:
"I love you."
And then I'm gone.
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The end
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