Glades and Playgrounds

“Hey,” Gerard said from where he was sitting on the floor in the hallway outside of my classroom. I let my classmates pass me by and when they were all on their way to their lockers, Gerard got up on his feet and looked at me expectantly. There was a white bandage across the bridge of his nose. “He- Bert said you said-told him that I… that you wanted to talk to me?”

I started walking down the corridor with Gerard silently walking next to me. “How’s the nose?”

“Good,” he smiled lightly, “It was just severe nosebleed.”

“So it’s not broken?”

“No.”

The conversation died but he followed me all the way to my locker where I shoved the books I’d need down my backpack and then headed towards the exit. He didn’t say a word, probably waiting for me to say something but I didn’t know where to start. And what to start.

“Thought your last class ended around two,” I mumbled as we walked across the schoolyard, in lack of anything else to talk about.

“It did.”

“It’s a quarter to three.”

“I know.”

“You could’ve gone home.”

“Could’ve or should’ve, Frank?” he asked with a voice that for the first time that day had been perfectly clear.

I hauled my bag up further, fiddling with the zipper for a moment before mumbling, “Could’ve.”

“You know,” he said after a while, his voice faltering from its previous confidence, “this is why I didn’t tell you.”

“You just had to bring it up, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer for a while; we had almost reached our street before he finally said something.

“I just don’t understand,” he said, “Like… I understand… why you’re mad. Or no, I don’t,” he slowed down to the point where he was standing completely still on the sidewalk, forcing me to stop as well, “I know I’m not your favourite person right now, but I just really don’t fucking understand…”

“You don’t?”

He sighed and started digging around in his pockets, hauling up a tattered box of cigarettes, “Can’t we just talk about it? Freely?”

“You smoke?” It wasn’t like I was avoiding his question, I had just never seen him smoke before. I knew his friends did, but I always thought he was smart enough not to.

He looked down at the cigarette in his hand as if he had never seen it before, then up at me with the same facial expression, “Yeah?”

“Oh,” I grimaced, “Well… do you mind?”

“Mind what?” he said as he started looking for a lighter in his other pocket.

“Smoking. Around me.”

“Oh,” he said blankly, ending his search for the lighter and threw the unlit cigarette on the ground, “Fine. But… are you busy, right now?”

“Not really,” I said truthfully, “Though, you are,” I continued and motioned at his schoolbag which seems looked as if they were going to burst any second.

“Oh, this… I can do this tomorrow.”

“You’re using me as an excuse for not doing your homework?” I asked, “Now, that sounds familiar…”

He laughed lightly, “Yeah well, you’re not exactly the most unpredictable man yourself. Bert started calling you ‘bookworm’ when you weren’t around just after knowing you for a few days.”

I rolled my eyes, not really feeling up for it to joke around with him, but found it rather hard when his personality shone through his words so brightly. “So anyway, you were saying?”

“Right, so, well, since you don’t have anything to do-“

“I have things to do, I just don’t have things I have to do.”

He blinked a few times and tilted his head to the side.

“You’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you?”

“No,” I told him bluntly, “Anyway, again, you were saying.”

“We could talk. Or well, I could talk, explain myself… you could listen.”

“I have a few things to say as well,” I muttered while looking around, it would probably take us five minutes to get home, but I wasn’t so sure about talking to him when mom was around. Or Mikey.

Then he said, like he had read my mind, “We could just… sit down, right here, and talk?”

We were standing on the sidewalk to a nice little suburban street with big trees placed a few metres away from each other, and not much people came around there at 3 PM. Ninety percent of the house owners were important business men who didn’t return to their homes until late at night, so his suggestion wasn’t as stupid as you may’ve thought.

“I guess,” and so we did, leaning our backs against the white fence of a garden. I put my backpack between my legs, then looked at him. Our shoulders touched. He was fiddling with his hands for a moment, then looked up.

“So…” he said, “Wanna go first?”

“Well…” I started, then went silent for a few seconds, “I thought I had a lot to say, but… I just… don’t understand. I don’t get how you… or how Mikey could hang out with me, just like that, I don’t…”

“But we don’t think about it anymore!” he said and dug his hands deep into his pockets, retrieving his cigarettes again, “It’s just… it’s in the past.”

“What do you mean, in the past?” I asked and then slapped his cigarettes out of his hands without another word.

“Come on! I’m nervous here… Look, my hands are shaking!”

“Fine, smoke, but in that case I’m leaving,” I attempted to get off the ground, but Gerard put a hand on my arm to stop me and I sunk down again. “Good. You were saying?”

Gerard sighed and leant his head back against the fence, searching for the right words, “I think that you’re overreacting.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. And I don’t get it when you call it cheating.”

“Really?”

“No. Because I was not dating anyone at the time.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, getting annoyed, “You’ve been dating me for the last six months!”

Gerard looked at me and grimaced, “This didn’t happen during those six months!”

My face literally fell; all my muscles in my face simply quit working and left was a completely blank expression, jaw slightly dropped and eyes looking in disbelief at Gerard.

“What?”

We sat in silent for what must been like half a minute, just looking at each other and thinking about how the other had misunderstood everything completely.

“I was fourteen,” Gerard said meekly.

“Two years ago?”

“Almost three.”

I stared forward, going over the new information in my head, then turned my head to the side and smiled nervously at him. “Oh.”

“So you thought… like… it happened when you and I…”

“Yeah.”

Gerard scooted closer and put an arm around my shoulders, his nervous and antsy behaviour like washed away, “I wouldn’t do that,” he said and rested his head against my own.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I… I thought you knew. I thought Bert told you, but I guess… And, I wanted to talk to you, but I was scared, that you’d tell everyone…”

We fell silent again and as the news had finally sunken in, I started realizing this wasn’t the end. Maybe he hadn’t cheated on me. Incest is incest.

Strangely, I was more curious than mad at him for it.

“But what really did happen, then?” I said quietly, turning my head so his head was resting against my forehead. I heard him sigh, so I added, “I deserve to know.”

“What do you want to know?”

“A lot, like… why? And what did you do? And… your parents, do they know?”

He sighed again, this time deeper, “Why it happened? Man, you’re gonna hate me.”

“Can’t be that bad.”

“It can.”

“Worse than cheating?”

“… I don’t know.”

I punched his arm, “Tell me!”

He played with the holes in my jeans while thinking, “I… I was on the edge of finding out I was gay. Or well… Ah, it’s hard to explain! Especially without nicotine in my system…”

“Hint taken, you’re still not smoking.”

“I liked you better when you were mad at me,” he groaned playfully, “I… Alright, fine… I should demand some kind of promise from you that you won’t leave me after I’ve told you but… I used him.”

“You used Mikey?”

“Ew, it sounds so bad when you say it like that!” he groaned and hid his face into my shoulder, “Not used him like that, but… I’ve known, for my entire life, that I was gay but when I hit puberty it… changed. I wanted more, you know? So I… I asked Mikey if maybe… If I could kiss him. To be sure.”

“And you did?”

“Yeah, and we both… I don’t know what Mikey liked about it, he’s definitely not gay, but we both… enjoyed it. In some kind of sick way. It was so weird, ‘cuz I’m not attracted to him. He’s my brother, you know, he’s my… my best friend.”

“So you just kissed?”

“Yeah. Or well, there was this time, when we were camping when we took it one step further, but… like, we never… you know, we… I never… never would, and he…”

“I get it,” I assured him, cutting him off as I noticed he was getting too distressed about the subject.

“I’m not attracted to him,” he whispered, breath hot against my skin, and it hit me that he had never been this vulnerable before. “I really am not, you have to believe me.”

“So… I can be sure that you- that you guys aren’t doing stuff when I’m not around?”

He was quiet for a long time and my heart began to speed up, “Gerard?”

“We’re brothers. No more, no less. What we did… It was a long time ago, it only went on about two weeks, never happened again after that. We never think about it, we love each other, but… not like that.”

“Is this why Mikey doesn’t wanna hang out with Bert? Because he knows?”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’ll stop hanging out with me?”

“Absolutely not,” Gerard laughed, “You’re his best friend. He always hated Bert.”

We sat there in silence for a while, me spaced out and Gerard just being Gerard, cracking dumb jokes and humming to himself. I knew that if I gave it some time, I’d be laughing at this but right now I just felt stupid; More stupid than I’ve ever felt in my entire life, and as I watched the million-dollar houses across the street I couldn’t help but think that I owed Gerard an apology. And Mikey. It’s funny how things can turn so quickly. Only a few minutes ago, I was the victim. Now I’m the bad guy.

“You okay?”

As if he had been reading my mind, he added, “You know, in a few weeks, or months, we’ll look back on these weeks that have passed and laugh our asses off.”

“I know, it just feels weird. I’ve been so mad at you, only to find out that it was all my fault from the very beginning.”

“Yeah…” he said slowly, “Yeah, you’re right. It was all your fault… But I forgive you.”

A smile slowly appeared upon my face, “You do?”

“Sure, why not…” he laughed at my grinning face and leaned in to kiss my lips. Just as I was about to close my eyes and kiss back I saw a curtain flicker in the house across the street and a lady peeked her head out to look at us. Must’ve been quite the sight; two punk-rock boys sitting on the cold concrete in the middle of the winter, in one of the finer parts of Jersey.

“What are you laughing about?” Gerard mumbled and kissed the corner of my lips where they lingered long enough for me to stop laughing and kiss him back.

“Nothing,” I smiled against his lips and he groaned.

“Then stop smiling… I wanna kiss your lips, not your teeth.”

So I stopped and we kissed. I was pretty sure the lady in the window was either staring at us or on her way of calling the police, but it was hard to think when my lips were tingling and tongue tasted what I had missed for far too long. Our thick winter-jackets came in the way when I tried to give Gerard a hug but I think he appreciated it nonetheless because he kissed my nose.

“Is Mikey gonna forgive me, too?” I asked and rested my head against his neck. Or what should’ve been his neck if he wouldn’t’ve had his scarf.

“Mmh,” he said, “Of course he is.”

“You know, he told me something the other night about you.”

“What?”

“He told me that you were crying.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. So, were you?”

He put his arm around my shoulders and said, “I might’ve shed a tear or two.”

“I threw a bitch-fit a few days ago,” I admitted, feeling that I owed it to him to humiliate myself a little. “Threw a cup of hot chocolate across my bedroom.”

I had never seen him laugh so hard. He always had a contagious laugh, but this was just ridiculous. He looked so funny with his whole face scrunched up, countless of small wrinkles around his eyes and a hand in front of his mouth to silence himself.

“That’s worse than crying! You’re fucking nuts!” he shrieked.

“Laugh all you want,” I muttered, “I’m gonna check your room for cigarettes later.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, still laughing and wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.

“Because you’re gonna quit smoking, dipshit!”

“You keep thinking that…”

“Hey, I want a boyfriend with white teeth, good hair, nice breath and a fat wallet, not the other way around.”

“Then you’ve picked the wrong fag,” he snorted and got up from the ground. A great cloud slowly shielded us from the warming sun; dead leaves danced around on the street and the wind got a lot colder. Gerard held out his hand for me and I took it and, ungraciously, got up as well. “Come on, you nut-job. Let’s go home.”

The end.