Tight Quarters (Out of Uniform 6)

“Jamie moved to town right before the start of seventh grade. Their grandmother lived a few trailers over from my folks. We were insta-best friends. And as we grew, we were our own goth clique at school—dyed each other’s hair, ripped our jeans, swapped band T-shirts. We were each other’s first best friend. First love too, but that took some time to come. Still by freshman year, two things had happened: we’d kissed on the top of the water tower at the edge of town and Jamie told me that they weren’t sure where they fit in, that they felt like both a guy and girl inside.”

“What’d you say?” Spencer leaned forward intently.

“I was young, but I knew that I’d never love anyone the way I loved Jamie. So I said that. Said it didn’t matter to me. I was...fuck. So young. Didn’t really think about what it might mean for me. I hadn’t ever heard the term pansexual before, wouldn’t until I was already out here, in the navy, but I just knew that Jamie’s gender didn’t make a difference in how I felt about them.”

“Can’t imagine it was easy being genderfluid or nonbinary in a tiny town.”

“It wasn’t.” Bacon hated this part of the story. “They’d done a bunch of poking around the internet, found people inventing pronouns and experimented with different things and different labels for themself. Our few friends didn’t care, but Jamie’s grandmother cared. Their parents cared when they could be bothered to come around. And the other kids were...vicious. I tried to protect Jamie as best I could, but I couldn’t take on the whole damn school.”

“You were just a kid. Not a superhero.” Spencer’s voice was soothing, but did little to stem the acid churning in Bacon’s stomach.

“Yeah.” Oh, how he wished he could have had superpowers. He’d give anything to have been able to make a safe space for Jamie. “But it didn’t matter what I did. They got more and more depressed. We used to lie on this big rock at the edge of the trailer park and daydream about escaping to New York or California, and I kept telling them to just hang on till graduation. I was always the more practical one—I didn’t want to run away with no way to get jobs, and I was scared about leaving my mom alone with my dad.”

“All valid concerns.”

“Fuck valid. And practical. Jamie killed themself three weeks before graduation.”

“Holy fuck.” Spencer breathed out. His hands were visibly shaking, and he slapped one against his thigh. “I could see that coming and still... Fuck. What a loss.”

It was kind of gratifying seeing Mr. Cool and Composed lose his composure a little because yes, it was a fucking tragedy. A loss to the whole world. “They were a great artist. Talked about learning tattooing. I took the candle in my tattoo from one of their doodles on my biology notebook.”

“How did you get the strength to go on after that? You joined up shortly after that, right? Heck, I think I’d be comatose for three years in your shoes.”

“My mom. She saw how toxic the town was for me, how much risk there was of me being next. She’d had a brother get out of town by joining the navy, put his twenty in before retiring to Florida. Got him to call me.” A decade on and Bacon could still remember every word of that crackly conversation, him sitting at the kitchen table, wobbly chair under him, Mom’s hand on his shoulder the whole call.

“Sounds like a good guy. And a good idea on her part.”

“He was. It wasn’t an ideal fit with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell still on the table and me still figuring myself out, but it was my ticket out of that hellhole. My uncle told me that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell wouldn’t last forever and that I could have a good career. Make a difference. Get enough money to get my mom out of there too. And maybe I couldn’t save Jamie, but I saved my mom—got her away from the town and my dad’s family that was sucking the life out of us both, and that’s something.”

“It’s more than something.” Spencer’s voice was hoarse. “It’s pretty damn amazing. Few people would have that kind of strength.”

Bacon shrugged the praise off. “I’m no hero. I came into boot camp pissed at everything—at Jamie for leaving me behind, at my dad for telling me I’d wash out of boot camp in two days. Pissed at the world for being so fucking awful that Jamie felt they had no choice. But I was absolutely fucking determined not to prove my dad right, not to let Jamie’s memory down. It was years before I stopped using anger as fuel, started thinking beyond my own narrow little tunnel of grief.”