Undeniably In Denial

The rest of the tour’s canceled. There are good reasons behind it, but I feel so bad, because it’s basically my fault. Over a month of shows that were canceled because of me. Well, because I saved Camron’s life and got shot in return. My arm’s in a sling and I won’t be able to play the guitar for three months, because not only did I get shot in the shoulder, but I also broke my arm somehow. Probably when I fell; I did land pretty oddly. Anyways, we were all going to go sightseeing in the places we didn’t get to go to but really wanted to. Jason’s having issues walking long distances though, so we’ve just decided to go back home to New Jersey.

Pulling into Milly’s driveway, I thought about what I was getting ready to tell her. She didn’t know that the tour was canceled, she didn’t know about me getting back in touch with Camron, and she didn’t know about the shooting. Oh, she was going to flip out on me, no doubt.

“You got shot!?” she exclaimed after I told her about it quickly. “Oh my God, Reese! Who shot you?”

“Some homophobe,”

“Why’d he shoot you?”

“Because he’s a homophobe,” I answered, plain and simple.

“But why you?”

“Maybe you’ve never caught on to this, what with all the past boyfriends and stuff, but I like men, Milly,”

“Stop making jokes out of this!” she scolded, sounding a lot like Camron at the airport. “You know what I meant. Why’d he shoot you?”

“Alright, well, he didn’t mean to shoot me,”

“Then who’d he mean to shoot?”

“Camron Dole,”

“Camron Dole?”

“Camron Dole,”

“But…you, him…five years…did you? When did? You were…Europe…what?!”

“He’s a famous European fashion model. He’s friends with Rina, who told me about him. Yes, it’s been five years since we’ve talked but we started talking again about a month ago. He was in Paris the same time we were and he came to our concert. We were at the airport where the shooting happened because we were seeing him off; he was going back to London and then to Minnesota for his fiancé’s funeral. His fiancé got shot because that guy saw Camron and him at a photo shoot promoting gay marriage. That was all the day before our Paris show. It was also a few minutes after Camron called off the engagement because of the fact that the other guy has been HIV positive for three years and never told him. And, well, that’s basically the whole story. At least for the most part,”

“Um, wow,”

“Yea, pretty much,”

“So the guy that shot his fiancé shot at him too?”

“Well, no, it was one of that guys’ friends that shot us; both of them are in jail now, though,” I explained, running my left hand (the functioning one) through my hair.

“Oh my God! You poor things!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around me, squeezing the life out of me.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Arm! Shoulder! Broken! Shot! Oww!”

“Oh, sorry, sorry! I forgot,’

“Yea, we’re only talking about it and you forgot,” I laughed. “It’s okay, I know what you mean.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled again.



Camron called me while I was on my way to my parents’ house and since I could only use one arm properly, I used the other to its best extent to answer the phone and put it on speaker. “Hey man, what goes on?”

“Vikings,”

“Vikings? What?”

“I just about got ran over by Vikings this morning,”

“How’d you almost get run over by Vikings?”

“Well, Jared’s hometown is a little place called Crosby and it’s got this huge tourist trap called the Nordic Inn. It’s this huge Viking themed hotel and every once and a while, the owner of the Inn will ride around on this big wagon type thing shaped as a Viking ship. That thing even blows steam out of its big dragony face! Earlier today, I was walking across the street and heard the Vikings hooting and hollering and – “

“Did you really just say hooting and hollering?”

“Yes, yes I did,”

“Oh my God,” I mumbled, banging my head against the steering wheel a couple times. “Anyways, go on…” he finished telling me his Viking story, but I was still laughing at him for actually saying that.

“Okay, so they were yelling and going ‘rah!’ and ‘argh!’ and whatnot like Vikings do, and I could hear them as they were coming down the road. Well, I figured they’d see me and stop, but I guess I was wrong, because they just kept coming and they almost ran me over,”

I couldn’t say anything to that. I literally had nothing to say. Nothing at all formed in my mind that could follow that little story. Not a thing. Except for laughter. That’s all I could do was laugh.

“It’s really not that funny, you know,”

“Yes it is,” I snorted, “You just don’t know how…how…you it is. The Vikings and getting nearly run over by them is just so you.”

“You know what, Reese?”

“What Camron?” I was still laughing at him at that point.

“I think you need to get off the phone and pay attention to the road before you kill yourself,”

“Okay, first; that is not at all what you were going to say. And second; how’d you know I'm driving?”

“That was what I was going to say and I can hear the cars whizzing by and the echo of speakerphone, so I knew you weren’t just a passenger,”

“Camron, I know you all too well, and I know that what you said was not what you really wanted to say. You’re not a very good liar so I suggest you stop the lies and tell me what you were originally going to say,”

“That is what I was originally going to say,”

“There’s no use, Cam. Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

“Because…because I want to keep hearing you talk,” he muttered so quietly that I could barely hear him.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was going to say something that probably would have made you hang up. I want to keep talking to you right now. I just…I need to hear your voice,” his tone of voice had gone from happy to gloomy to crackly all within a couple sentences. He was really not in good shape, and if he and I were talking face to face, than I would have given him a huge hug and just held tight.

“You just got back from the funeral, didn’t you?”

“Oh my God, Reese, it was horrific. Half of his family didn’t even come because back when he came out, they quote-on-quote ‘disowned him’. And apparently, when he was in school, he didn’t have many friends, so there weren’t a whole lot of people that showed up other than those of us from England. I mean, there were quite a few people there, but it was just so sad that half the people there he only met within the last couple of years,”

“Awe, Camron, I'm so sorry. I wish I could be there with you to help you feel better. When are you coming back home?”

“My flight leaves at ten tomorrow morning so I'll get home around one. My parent’s are meeting me at the airport and then we are going out to lunch afterwards,”

“Well, when you get back from lunch, you should call me and we can get together and do something,”

“Aren’t you still on tour?”

“Nope; the tour got canceled. We’re back home now. I'm on my way from Milly’s to my parents’ house at the moment, actually. So whenever you get back and have time, we should hang out,”

“I have the perfect idea of what to do,” he said, chuckling at whatever he was thinking of.

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to do some redecorating,”



“We need bright colors; blue, green, red, orange, purple, yellow, pink, anything bright you find. The backdrop is going to be black, so really, anything that will stand out good on black,” Camron instructed, pointing at the wall of different paints at the local home improvement store. “One gallon of each and then four gallons of black.”

“What are we doing? Stripes? Dots?”

“Splatters,”

“But where?”

“My attic. I haven’t been up there since I moved, so it’s in need of a new look for sure,”

“Will the door even still open?”

“It’s only been four years, Reese, I'm sure it still opens,” he laughed, grabbing a couple cans of paint and placing them in the shopping cart. “Blue and green down; what do you have?”

“Yellow, orange, and red,” I answered, pulling the three cans off the shelf and putting them next to the others.

We ended up finding all the paint we needed and proceeded to pick out the brushes, rollers, tarps, tape, and paint trays. At one point, Camron squealed like a little girl and ran away for a second, leaving me puzzled beyond belief, before running back with two grill-barbeque-things that are all floppy so you can lather sauce on your ribs or whatever. ‘Perfect splatter tools’ he called them. They reminded me of dreadlocks, really. Thin dreadlocks on a stick.

After the home store, we went across the street to what I call the ‘whatever-the-hell-you-need store’, that basically has anything and everything you’d need, or even wouldn’t. We got a new bedspread, a whole bunch of different designed, colored, and sized pillows and, as per Camron’s demands, we both got a pair of white jeans, a white v-neck tee, and white slip-on shoes. Plain white everything; he wants to wear them while painting so they’ll get all paint splattered too.