But the other person. They don’t know that.
And that’s the shittiest part of it all.
As soon as he gets to the hospital for his rotation, an unsettled feeling creeps into Michael Boroff’s gut.
“Are you feeling sad?” he asked his son, knowing the answer already. Aaron thought he was a better actor than he really was.
Michael calls his warrior brother Morris.
“You have a few minutes?” he asks, ducking into a supply closet. “Need to check in on something.”
“Just doing my morning sudoku,” Morris says. “What’s up?”
“I can’t get Aaron to talk. I can’t get him to say anything. He’s freezing me out.”
“I hear that,” Morris says. “What’s the feeling?”
As much as the warrior speak helped him, sometimes it makes him a little homicidal.
“It feels fucking shitty!” he answers testily.
“Good awareness.” Morris remains calm. “Say more about that.”
And Michael allows himself to yell it out. “I have no control! It feels like I’m driving blind and I fucking hate it!”
The two men breathe together for a bit. And soon Michael feels better. Not good, but better. He laughs. Morris laughs, too.
“Yeah,” Morris says. “Thank you. I believe that.”
A calmness overcomes Michael. His heart is open. Thank God for that. For years, the world of finance had closed it. Not feeling things almost killed him. He hadn’t even known. And now. Not easy. Not easy almost ever. But so much better. So much more real.
“Thank you,” Michael says. “And thank you for not giving me advice. Because if you had given me advice, I would have hunted you down and killed you.”
Morris laughs. “Wow. Aggressive.”
The men both laugh.
“Thanks,” Michael says again, his voice much softer now. “Thanks for holding space.”
“No problem, brother.”
In creative writing class, it’s Aaron’s day to be critiqued. On the positive side, that means he didn’t neglect to read someone else’s story last night. On the negative, he hasn’t written anything new. Luckily, he has something ready to go because he’s Aaron and of course he does, so he emails it around so they can follow along and he starts to get that jittery feeling in his throat that comes when he’s about to be the center of attention, because he loves loves loves that and he’ll never ever ever tell a soul just how much he loves it.
While everyone is opening the file, Ms. Hooper smiles at him and strolls over to his front-row desk. She points at him with a wiggle of her finger.
“I really loved that song,” she says. “Wow.”
Aaron feels his face heat up. Mystery solved on one of the two other listeners. “Um, thanks. I know it’s kind of bad.”
“Not at all. It’s the opposite. I love how you emote in your songs. It’s such a good outlet for you.”
Aaron swallows. He knows this isn’t what gets said to future music legends, necessarily, but he’s too tired to focus there, so he smiles again and focuses on the wow.
“Thanks.”
He reads his piece, which is a change-of-pace story for him. Pretty much everything he writes is from his life, thinly veiled versions of things that had happened to him or were on his mind. Like when he wrote about a kid who was scared to come out. It said what he couldn’t, and everybody was really supportive and three girls came up after and gave him a hug and said he should sit with them at lunch. The lunchtime arrangement lasted only a couple days, but he was always grateful for how the kids in the class had rallied by his side. And he came out shortly after, so that was good.
Today’s piece, though, is more funny. He does dialogue straight from his weirdo social-worker-in-training, men’s-group-going dad, and then he gives a pretty random but amusing inner monologue from the subway. A friend makes an offhanded joke that Aaron considers really weird, and he thinks, in response, What are you, autistic?
When the story is done and the critique starts, Staci Raimey raises her hand.
“I just think it’s interesting that Aaron asks for total support and acceptance of his gayness,” she says, twirling her frizzy brown hair around her finger, “but, like, autism is funny to him.”
He isn’t supposed to speak during the workshop, but this catches him off guard.
“What?” he asks. It was a throwaway line. He didn’t mean anything by it. “I—”
Ms. Hooper shushes him. “No talking when it’s your story being critiqued.”
“That was super offensive,” Staci says. “Using autistic like it’s something bad.”
Aaron knows he made a dumb mistake. He’d written it without thinking, and when Kwan talks about how mean people are to his brother, who has Asperger’s, and how words really can hurt people, and that Aaron should know that, a little bit of him dies inside.
He walks to Spanish feeling like the worst person in the world. Which he is. Because he’s been mean, and him being mean indicates that he must have abandoned himself, lost himself somewhere, because nothing about Aaron has ever really been mean, and it isn’t acceptable to him to think of himself as a hurter rather than a hurtee, as someone who lets a girl jump off a bridge instead of someone who jumps himself. Ms. Higuera asks him cómo está, and Aaron says bien, but he’s anything but bien, and he hears almost nothing the rest of class.
He sits alone at lunch, a dark fog settling over him, thoughts reaching low into an abyss that reminds him of the bridge yesterday. How can feelings actually hurt his body? But they do. They push out against his rib cage like an expanding devil bubble, and he finds it’s hard to breathe.
Kwan puts his tray down and says, “Can I sit here?”
Aaron nods and says “sure” softly. It’s all the voice he has at the moment.
Kwan waves, and suddenly Ratiya Song and Ebony McClendon and Josh Porter join them, and dread seeps into Aaron’s chest. He’s not gonna be able to handle whatever’s coming. Not by a long shot.
“So in diversity club,” Ratiya says, “we have this ouch/oops policy.”
“Yeah,” says Ebony. “When you microaggress, a person interrupts and says, ‘Ouch.’ And then they explain why they said it, and then the microaggressor has a chance to say, ‘Oops,’ and make things right.”
“Oops,” Aaron says to the table in front of him, avoiding everyone’s eyes because he’s afraid if he looks at them they’ll see that he’s just about through. With life. With everything. Everything feels tight. They don’t know, and it’s not something you can tell people. That they should be kind to a microaggressor because he almost jumped off a bridge the day before and is feeling kinda jumpy again. It’s not a thing you say, and he doesn’t deserve it anyway.
As his classmates talk him through it, Aaron nods and nods and nods and says sorry, sorry, sorry until they finally go away, which is about a minute after he feels his system failing, like a computer spinning, spinning until you have to just shut it down, and his head is buzzing and things feel out of perspective, like the walls in the hall tilt slightly to the left and his feet feel like they might stumble on the uneven floor beneath him.