Seeking Solace

A week passes. Said week is filled with extravagant and vague lies, a growing friendship, the destruction of my good grade in math, and the near revelation of a secret.

The thing is, my parents are very uptight when it comes to school. I have to ‘make them proud’ by making the honor roll every year, getting a B is practically like failure, and my life will grow up to be a homeless bum if I mess up on an algebraic fraction test. By now Luke has figured that by having a ‘know-it-all-faggot’ on the ‘team’, he can get away with more. “How many nerds do you know double up as criminals?” he laughs every time it’s brought up. Apparently this is hilarious. I wouldn’t know, considering it was never funny to begin with.

I develop a great skill in lying to pretty much everyone around me; to Luke, I just barely escape suspicion when I say I’m being forced into extra help sessions for math at lunchtime (at which point I start to wonder if my bad grades are so terrible if they save me from a permanently bruised face) ; to my teachers, I suck up enough to stretch deadlines alarming thin to somehow salvage my other grades and avoid more suspicion; and to my mother, I lie about some new club I’ve apparently become interested in, to free up my time after school.

“Japanese anime,” I tell her, when I come home two hours later than usual.

“Since when were you interested in that?” she asks, her voice a horribly distrusting sneer, as she looks up from whatever she’s cooking for dinner.

I shrug. “A kid from school got me interested.” I escape upstairs before she can ask anything else.

In reality, ‘Japanese anime club’ is not so much ‘anime’ as me sneaking off to the eternally almost-empty art room to meet Gerard. And the depressingly well-dressed guy. Who’s name is apparently James.

When I get there, James waves at me- seemingly never finishing his endless Styrofoam cup of coffee- and I take up a stool beside Gerard and watch him draw for a few minutes before he finishes, tucks the book under his arm, and we leave together.
Every day that week, our place is a spot under the same tree in the park.
The first day, he asks a lot of questions. All about me.

“Do you like art, Frank?” he asks, doodling aimlessly in his sketch book. At this point I can’t imagine him without it. I dread to think of the day he ever forgets it.

I bite my lip. “Um. Yeah. Well. I don’t…I don’t know. I mean…isn’t art just pictures and shit? Really awesome paintings by dead artists that everyone squeals over only after the artist has gone through all this shit and like…died? I don’t really…get it I guess…” I realize after I’ve said this how much I really don’t belong in this world of his. I’m not cut out to be here at all.

His pencil pauses and hovers above the paper, in shock at my stupidity no doubt. He turns to me and I look down. I can’t meet his eyes. I wait for his sigh, the rolling eyes, the exasperation.

“You don’t think that though…do you?” he asks, and I can tell from his voice that he’s not judging me, and I relax a little. “I mean…it’s not just, like…paintings and shit.” The smile in his voice makes me look up.

“Well. No. Not really,” I say, starting to wonder where he’s going with this. I’m waiting for him to either laugh at me and call me and idiot. Or for his face to fall, and for him to leave.

He nods once, still watching me with this thoughtful expression. And then he speaks…and his voice is so soft, yet so quietly thrilled, that I can’t help but be immediately pulled in. “You can feel it…right? Like…feel what it’s trying to say to you?”

I think of the hallway with the photographs and the colors, the pencil drawings and the watercolors…and I feel so relieved. That someone else gets it, that I’m not the only one crazy one who can feel artwork. That art is capable of making a person…feel.
He smiles, a beautiful wide smile, and it’s so contagious, it’s already on my face before I can stop it. My hand finds his, and his fingertips gently rest against mine. He dares to let his palm rest flat on mine, and the raw contact of warm flesh against mine shocks me out of the euphoria for a second. This is different. Very different.

People- especially family- touching me just unsettles me. My mother makes a habit of touching my knees if I’m sitting down and she’s lecturing me, because she’s apparently disgusted that I can’t stand her. I get so freaked out when people touch my knees. She tries to make me as small and worthless as possible while she’s yelling at me, only to turn around three hours later and tell me how much she loves me and that she shouldn’t have exploded at me. That she’s sorry for the bruises that I can always hide under long sleeves and excuses that quickly dry up after the first few times. After that I just shut up and she gets away with using the belt or the slipper.

It was all an accident after all. I should be more careful when I walk.

So this feeling of being so close to someone is so alien to me, my first immediate reaction is to snatch my hand back…but then I realize that I want it so badly, I can bring myself to.

This contact is one of the best developments of that week.

The second day, he brings pictures.

He hands me page after page of print-outs, telling me the name of the artist who painted, drew or sculpted whatever he throws at me. With every picture, he promises to explain, but until them, I’m lost in a whirl of colors and shapes and details that my eye can’t settle on, because it’s gone too fast for me to see.

I ask him what the fuck the point is in all this if I can’t even see the damn pictures. He insists that I should wait and continues excitedly handing me about a million more pictures. I start to wonder if how deep that bag of his really is.

Finally, the Niagara of print-outs ends, only he pulls out this honest-to-God brick of a book, and the first thing to come out of my mouth is;

“Gerard, what the actual fuck?”

He just smiles at me, and I expect him to drop the book in my lap and start flipped through that too. I don’t how fast he thinks I can read, but fucking Christ, he’s just impossible to keep up with.

Instead he keeps the book in the tiny gap between us- almost non-existent by this point, as we’re sitting closer to each other than usual- and leans back on the tree. I stare at him, waiting for him to explain what the hell he expects me to do now.

I wait for him to say something. He doesn't.

“Gerard-”

He cuts me off with a wave of his hand, and I stop, realizing he's thinking. He stares at the ground for a minute, biting his bottom lip. I wait, even though every second that passes makes me anxious as to what he'll say next.

“You know,” he says cheerfully, looking up again and smiling at me, “I should plan these things out.” He pats the book. “I forgot I was meant to show you this first.

I roll my eyes. “See, if you hadn't turned into such a fan-girl with the pictures...”

He laughs. “Here,” he says, taking the pictures from my lap and shuffling through them, “I'll just show you my favorite ones.”

As he picks out a few of the hundreds he first gave me- still-life paintings that look so real I have to touch the page first to make sure it's not just the light, paintings of women, children, oil paintings and watercolors- he speaks, his voice soft like a dream, leaving a weak ache in my chest that I try to push away, an ache that reminds me that no matter how long I want this moment to last, this one moment where I feel truly calm, it'll all end eventually.

“You know, Frank,” he says, frowning at one of the pages and flipping it around before his face brightens again and he hands it to me, “I should warn you that a lot of this stuff kind of bores me.”

I stare at him, stunned, and he grins, still looking through the pile. If there was a prize for the most unpredictable people...

“Then why-?”

“I'm not going to force you to like what I do,” he explains, “I mean, not all classical art is for old farts. But...it feels very restricted to me.” He turns to face me now, unsmiling, but intense, taking me up in his train of thought as he does so well, even as his eyes flit away from my face to stare into the distance at random moments. “There is
some...some that is very interesting. You sort of have to start from the beginning to see where we got today. It's not what I like but...I just wanted to try and see what you liked. Based on you. Not...not based on me.”

So considerate.

I don't deserve him. At all.

I drop my gaze the pictures, suddenly feeling very unworthy. As if just by sitting here, I'm wasting his time. This is how I feel around people like Gerard; people that impress me, that I admire, always seem so hard to reach. It feels like everyone else can talk to them, and they'll accept them, but as soon as I show up, they'll turn their back on me, because obviously I'm too insignificant to be paid attention to. My questions, my words, even my compliments would just be useless. I am nothing. Nobody. Just...nobody.

“Is...is that okay?” he says, starting to sound worried. “I don't...” he trails off, and I can almost here him swallow uncomfortably. “If you want me to stop, I can,” he says, his
voice almost a whisper.

My eyes snap to his. “No! I mean...this is fine.” I smile down at the pictures again, remembering his excitement at wanting to show it all to me, wanting to share this, even if he didn't like it much, “It's...I'm just glad that someone cares, you know?”

His hand comes to hover over mine, until I flip my hand over and his palm rests on mine, his small gesture of appreciation, affection I've craved for so long that it's almost painful to get it now. But slowly, I'm getting used to it, getting used to this intimacy that I never thought that I could used to. Gerard is practically a stranger. It shouldn't feel this way.

But it does. I can't bring myself to regret it.

And I can't bring myself to regret how the ache slowly grows, eventually making me think and want things that I never should...