“Sandy….”
“Hush, baby doll. Let me speak.”
I nodded, reaching out to hold his hand in mine.
He took a moment before he spoke again, staring off into space. “I remember when I first heard they were gone. Do you remember where we were? It was fifth period. Mr. Cuyar’s AP English class. We were talking about Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find, about all these different angles the story could be inspected at, and all these interpretations, every word meaning something other than what it says on the page. What did it mean when the grandmother said this or what did it mean when the Misfit said that and I remember thinking, why can’t the story just be the story? Why can’t the words just mean what they mean? Why does everything have to mean something else?
“But then the door opened and the principal was standing there, along with the guidance counselor, and I remember them looking around the room, and I knew something was wrong the moment their eyes hit mine. I knew. Once they found me, they didn’t have to look anywhere else.”
I REMEMBERED this, of course. It was a day forever ingrained in my head. I might not have remembered the specifics that he could, but when those people had walked into the room, it had gotten just a tiny bit colder, the expressions on their faces slightly grim, as if they were trying to hold back but it was leaking around the edges. They had whispered quietly to Mr. Cuyar, a small, unassuming man who lived for the written word and little else. His eyes had widened briefly and his hand had come to his mouth, but he hadn’t looked at the class, hadn’t looked out to Sandy. I think if he had, we both would have known right away.
The guidance counselor had beckoned to Sandy quietly, and the whispers started in the class, little snorts and giggles, people already speculating what this fierce little gay boy had done to get pulled from class. Maybe it was the makeup he wore around his eyes; maybe it was the cigarettes he smoked in between classes. Whatever it was, something had happened, and one of the bigger idiots grunted the word “faggot” as Sandy stood up. Several people laughed at the obviously bracing wit of their social leader while I prepared to launch myself at him, to smash my fists into his face until he cried out for me to stop. I knew something was wrong and it was scraping against my skin and I wanted to make someone bleed.
Sandy had seen this (he saw everything, I learned early on) and pressed his hand down on my shoulder as he walked, pausing briefly to apply pressure in a clear message of down boy, stay down. I can handle myself. They’re nothing. They’re nothing to me. His hand trailed down my arm, and I didn’t care then who saw. I didn’t care what names they called me. For that one moment, I didn’t give a fuck. I grabbed his hand and intertwined our fingers together and squeezed. I made him feel me. I made him feel the pressure, the heat of my hand. He flashed his gaze down at me and twitched his jaw, and we knew then, I think. We both knew what was coming, though maybe not how encompassing and complete it would be. He was already struggling to hold himself together because we both knew.
I tried to get up to follow him because I was going to be damned if I was going to let him go through this alone, my raging little diva in skinny jeans, fat sneakers with frazzled laces trailing behind, a white belt slung low on his hips. I thought he was beautiful, and part of me, some secret part that I never let out much, wished I could fall in love with him and only him because it would make things easier. It would mean I wouldn’t have crushes on the jocks who wouldn’t even look at me aside from passing disdain as if I was something they’d found on the bottom of their shoes. I didn’t want to want them, but I did. I wanted to want my best friend, but I didn’t.
But that didn’t mean I wanted to let him go it alone.
So I tried to follow him, but he shot me a look that I wouldn’t recognize until years later as Helena coming forward, that hard-core bitch who didn’t take shit from anyone. That look said to sit my ass down. That look said to stay where I was. That look said he loved me and he would need me soon, but he needed to take these next steps alone.
He looked so small standing at the front of the class. And then the principal put his hand on Sandy’s shoulder and they disappeared through the door.
Twenty minutes later, they came back for me.
“He needs you now,” the guidance counselor whispered to me as I joined them in the hall. “All he wants is you. Your parents are here with him, but he won’t talk to anyone else. He says it has to be you.”
“You should have brought me the first time,” I snapped at her, forgetting, for a moment, that I was a fat, gay sixteen-year-old who didn’t have a chance of survival in these halls. “You should have told me to come with him.”
There was no response.
I heard them before I saw them, my parents and Sandy. I heard my mother’s sweet, quiet whispers. I heard the low, consoling rumble from my father. But most of all, what I heard was him. Sandy.
“Paul,” he said, his voice broken. “Please just get Paul. All I want is Paul.”
“He’ll be here in a moment,” my mother whispered. “Oh, honey. Oh, sweetheart. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that this is happening.”
“Paul,” he said. “Please. Where is Paul?”
“Sandy?” I cried out, scared of what was happening. I didn’t even think of death at that point. The worst thing my mind could come up with was that Sandy was going to be moving away and that I’d be left here behind without him, alone. A shadow of my former self. He’d been by my side for as long as I could remember, and now he was going to leave me? I was going to be trapped here without a single ally?
He snapped his head up, and his gaze was wild and lost as it found mine. For just a split second, it didn’t look like he recognized me or even recognize
d where he was. I’d never seen that look on his face before, and I would never see it again, but for that moment, he didn’t know. It passed though, and he shot up from his seat, tearing out of my parents’ calming hands. It took only a second for him to crash into me, his little body shaking as he huddled in my arms, burying his face in my chest, leaking tears onto my shirt. I didn’t even look up at the adults watching us. As much as they knew more about the situation, and as much as they knew more about the world, they didn’t matter right then. They didn’t exist. I wrapped my arms around him and led him out the office and down the empty halls, classes still full on either side of us.
He didn’t ask where we were going because as much as he was shattering in on himself, he trusted me to take care of him, trusted me to take him away and make sure he could float away. He clutched at me, his hands digging into my sides, and for once, I was glad of my bulk because I was able to shelter him from everything.
I led us out the front doors, the spring heat slapping against us, hot and clean. I half walked, half carried him to my old Honda Accord near the back of the parking lot, trying not to think about the reason why my best friend was like this. I had an inkling, a faint idea, but it seemed so cosmically bigger than the two of us that I couldn’t grasp it, I couldn’t bring its fuzzy edges into sharper focus.
He whimpered when I opened the car door and tried to gently put him in the passenger seat. I didn’t think he was going to let me go. I gentled him down a bit further, saying quietly that I was there, that I was with him, that if he let me go for just a second, I’d get us out of here and we’d go wherever he wanted. It never crossed my mind, not even once, to take him back to his house. Regardless of how much I didn’t know, I knew at least that it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. There was a reason his parents weren’t there. There was a reason why they weren’t the ones holding onto him right now.
He finally loosened his grip as if I’d gotten through to him, and he let me close the door and walk around the front of the car. I could feel his eyes on me the entire way, watching me as if I would disappear should he look away. When I got in the car, he curled his hand in mine tightly, to the point that I had bruises for a week after. I didn’t let him go.
I took him home. To my home, though he was over there enough it might as well have been his too. Enough of his stuff had accumulated in the nooks and crannies of my room and vice versa. I never needed to bring a change of clothes when I stayed over at his house because there was always something of mine there. I didn’t know if that was going to happen anymore, and a little piece of my stoic armor broke off as I helped him out of the car.
I took him to my room and locked the door behind us to keep the world at bay for at least a few hours. I laid him on my bed and was going to spoon him from behind when he turned over, tears on his cheeks, eyes squeezed shut tightly. I gathered him up in my arms and pressed my forehead against his, trying to pull him into me as hard as I could so that he’d feel me there, that he’d feel the pressure, the heat, the sweat, the salt.
“Paul,” he whispered. “Oh, Paul. It’s bad. It’s so bad.”