Home > I Will Be Okay

I Will Be Okay
Author: Bill Elenbark

ONE


EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY send echoing vibrations rattling through the field around Stick and me side by side in the wet tall grass with the heat and the bugs and the sweat, Stick at my side watching the fireworks erupt, one by one then in a sweltering rush with this high and these thick jolting booms crashing through every second with a flash in the distant-splintered darkness like I’m dreaming. Broken dreaming. Fevered images of Stick and me on the grass, sprawled out in the dark, legs splayed gazing up at the lights beaming bright for an instant almost blinding and then fading, flitting fading, disappearing after breaking until I forget that they were there and now they’re gone.

The moon is full. Stick noticed and he mentioned it, but he notices things more than me. We’re lying in the grass near the edge of my development, set back from the road that snakes by his house, the fireworks swelling over shingled roofs beyond the train tracks, and I forget how we got here, why Stick suggested it—but I keep forgetting things, maybe from the glue. They say huffing is worse than other drugs, but I don’t mind, I like the high, and it makes me happy and horny and sleepy at the same time. I close my eyes and find his face inside, his skin against my skin, arms wrapped around mine, this thin, knotted mess of overheated flesh, in my dream fused like freaks until I wake.

A mosquito crawls up my wrist and digs into my hand but it doesn’t move when I slam, it squishes into my thumb, sinking into the blood, and I’m tired but not sleepy it’s like I’m already sleeping or I’m wide awake and dreaming but I don’t remember dreaming and I don’t remember anything with this sticky humidity pressing through me like the blood on my skin and Stick’s skin on my mind, his fingers outstretched in the grass next to mine, and I inch them closer until the tips are touching. Delicate touching.

“You think your parents would mind if I slept over?”

“What? No,” I say but it’s too quick, he’ll think I’m sick. He’s never stayed over my house before.

“It just sucks at home right now, Matt.”

Stick hands me the bag with the glue, but I’ve had enough.

“It’s cool,” I say, as calm as I can manage. “My mom likes you.”

“Really?” He shoots me a wicked grin.

“Not like that!” I slap him and my hand lingers against his chest, soaking up the heat. He lets it linger.

“I hate that I have to work tomorrow,” he says. “Fourth of July.”

He sits up from the grass with the bag and the glue, crinkling the edges and sticking his face into the center, pulling in the next hit long enough and deep enough to force a cough and then he offers me the bag again. I feel the wet of the grass or the sweat on his skin when he touches me. I take it this time.

“How early do you have to go in?”

“Eleven,” he says.

“Oh. You still coming to the party?”

My parents throw a party every Fourth of July—this big blowout barbecue for all our relatives and friends, and since we’re Puerto Rican we’ve got a massive family and it’s a massive party, but this is our first year living in this neighborhood and apparently a bunch of the neighbors have people over, too, so it turns into a monster block celebration every summer, Stick told me.

“Yeah, I should be out in time.”

The lights in the sky are white now, the colors harder to produce someone told me one time, back at my old school before we moved away from all my friends on the baseball team and everything I’d ever known so Dad could be closer to work. I hated him then—I still hate him now—but I wouldn’t have met Stick if we didn’t move, so maybe it’s fate. Like when the Fourth Hokage sacrificed his life to seal the Nine-Tailed Fox into a baby boy, Naruto Uzumaki, the greatest ninja of all time, 412 episodes into an anime series that I watched every day before Stick.

“Maybe I won’t even go in,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been thinking about quitting anyway.”

“You just started a week ago!”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m not beat for the working life.” He smiles and swipes his hair left to right across his forehead, like he always does, the wispy poof at the side near his eye, the sweat matting it down against the skin. “What about you? Is your dad making you get a job?”

“No, not yet. He’s letting it slide for baseball camp.”

His face is clear, a little bright off the moon’s reflection, and I can see the sweat by his ear slipping down his neck, see his lips blotted and chapped or a little charred from the glue. There’s screaming and clapping through the woods by Woodbridge High, and I think about my mother, how we used to watch the fireworks with the teachers from her school and their kids, these blathering girls and smelly boys who didn’t bother with me or I didn’t bother with them, and I think she dragged my brother to the high school tonight, continuing our tradition at a new school without me. Because Stick.

“When does camp start?”

“Next week,” I say. “But I’m trying to get out of it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I told my mom it didn’t make sense to spend all that money on baseball camp when I didn’t even play for JV this year but she said they already put a deposit down and I need to talk to my father about it and he just—I mean, I tried. He wasn’t listening.”

I missed the start of the season after I sprained my ankle and Dad thinks that’s the reason I didn’t play very much, but the athletes here are bigger than me and stronger than me and a different level of competition than I had at my old school. I spent the spring cheering from the bench.

“So no job and no baseball… what are you planning to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “This.”

He glances at me and plays with a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “This is nice.”

I watch his shaggy hair and his eyes, bright blue like the sky—not this sky, with its moonlit grays and clouds so high you can’t see them, not even in the glow of the fireworks, but the afternoon skies with no clouds and no smoke and no buildings, no sounds, just silence through the fields where I played as a kid, all alone but not lonely and lost in the spread of the sky.

“You know, Trevor told me the other day that some jerks from school were asking about us.”

“Asking what?”

“You know, whether we’re like a couple or something, the way we’re always together,” Stick says. “Some people think we’re gay.”

I start to laugh but it doesn’t come out, and I want to sink down and hide but there’s nowhere to hide and all the sounds are obscured and the colors still blurred and this ridiculous heat won’t stop pressing through my skin and it’s beginning again, this sickening feeling that keeps coming up and I can’t stop it, the way it takes hold and it doesn’t let go—these thoughts about Stick—how they keep busting out, like explosions again, high above the trees in a mass of mixing colors, streaming reds and yellows and blues so bright I see Stick in the dark, his face in the light when he looks up at the sky.

“Maybe we don’t tell anyone I’m sleeping over.”

“Okay,” I say.

I pull up the bag and lean forward to take a hit, wrapping the edges around the corners of my mouth and above my nose, a swift rough tug at my throat that surges back like a rusted bolt to my brain, rattling through the crevices and the folds of gray matter at the start of some dream—a seesawing dream soaked in festival sounds, bells and alarms and carnival whistles, loud enough to hear but not quite place the song. Stick shifts forward, sweeping his hair left to right, and the panic queues up like it’s about to attack, crack-crack-crack like a whipsaw chain at my back. I have this saying, whenever I get nervous or afraid, almost like my mantra. I will be okay. Everything.

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