After Adam

I think deep down, I always knew I’d go to Adam’s funeral before we were twenty-five. I think Adam knew too. He was dazzling and magical and just so damn cool. But someone like Adam couldn’t last. While the rest of us burned slow and steady like candles, Adam was a road flare: brilliant, enthralling, but temporary.

Lots of girls liked Adam, and Adam liked lots of girls, but I was the one he picked. I was the one he pursued and gave presents to and called just to hear her voice. I was the one he spent the last three years of his life with.

We were sixteen when we met and got together. It’s always been hard for me to believe that he didn’t just spring into being that year. He was all cheekbones and charming smiles and sex, and I couldn’t imagine him ever being any different. But he must’ve been a child once, because a friendship like the one he had with Justin didn’t form overnight.

Justin and him were so different, but when one moved so did the other. Adam was dramatic: he wore eyeliner and silver rings on nearly every finger. He bleached his naturally black hair faintly orange. Everything he did was loud and impressive, and it always felt completely sincere even though it also felt like he was always performing for some unseen audience.

Justin was muscular and sturdy where Adam was slight. He didn’t talk much, except to Adam. He didn’t smile or laugh much, unless it was Adam making the joke. Justin never liked me because my parents were rich. It didn’t matter that they were completely disinterested in my life, because Justin’s parents were also disinterested in his life. Not like mine where they didn’t notice when I came home at two in the morning with a hickey on my neck; disinterested like they’d kicked Justin out at fifteen and he had to work a series of crappy jobs at gas stations and supermarkets just to feed himself. Justin didn’t cry at Adam’s funeral, but I saw how much he ground his teeth.

Adam said he gave me the hickey to mark me as his. He didn’t need to do that. I was his from the moment he sauntered up to me at Platter World and grabbed Everything by the Bangles right out of my hands.

I was never much for playing hard to get, so it wasn’t long before we were making out in his bedroom in his grandma’s house and I was unbuckling his belt. He pulled away from me, laughing like crazy.

“What?” I asked, more than a little hurt.

“Not you,” he said, taking my face in both his hands and planting a kiss on my lips that set off fireworks all through me. “I’m just laughing because I had all these plans for how I’d get you to like me. I was gonna take you to the movies.”

“You can still take me to the movies,” I said, and he grinned and hid his face in his hands for a moment. I went right back to working on his belt.

He did take me to the movies; lots of times. The movie theater parking lot was the first time I saw him get into a fight. I knew he got into fights pretty often, because he always seemed to have a black eye or cut lip or sore ribs, but that was the first time I saw it happen. A couple of guys followed us out and started calling Adam a faggot and shouting lewd things at me. Adam laughed, and said he was sorry but they’d have to find someone else’s cock to suck, and kept right on grinning at them until the first punch was thrown. Adam ducked it. He ducked most of the punches thrown his way, and had all his attackers on the ground in a matter of minutes. It was terrifying, and it was exciting. When I kissed him afterwards I tasted blood, and his right hand was too swollen to unbutton my blouse.

Justin got in fights a lot too, almost always because of Adam. He was stronger than Adam, but he couldn’t dodge hits like him – I don’t think anyone could. Adam seemed to have a natural instinct for it.

It was about a year before I found out why Adam could do that: that his dad was a mean drunk who beat him, who’d beat his mother right up until she died in a car accident when Adam was nine. Adam stayed away from home most nights because his grandma warned him when his dad was in a mood, which was always. He slept at Justin’s crappy little apartment some of the time; other times at my house, which was as easy to sneak into as it was to sneak out of.

Justin was always cold to me, but we still sat together at the funeral and the repast at Adam’s grandma’s house. And I still wound up lying on his bed that night, sobbing my eyes out. When I woke up the next morning, Justin was asleep on the floor. He’d put a blanket over me and left a bottle of water and some Aleve by the bed.

It was a funny kind of friendship we formed. I knew Adam would be happy that Justin and I were finally willing to spend time together. It made me angry that we couldn’t figure out how to do this when Adam was still alive.

Mostly our friendship was quiet. I did my homework at Justin’s kitchen table while he lay on his bed reading. He read a lot more than I’d thought he did. We watched TV together over a dinner of instant noodles. We played each other the voicemails Adam had left on our phones in his last days. Sometimes at night we’d go up on the roof of his building and lay next to each other, looking into the sky.

I found out that Justin had grown up poor like Adam, but that when he was twelve his mom married some banker who hated Justin. None of his family had tried to contact him since his mom and step-dad told him to leave when he was fifteen, but his step-dad had given him a decent lump of cash that he’d been living on ever since. That was how he was able to stay out of foster care and pay his rent and still graduate high school, which I’d never been able to figure out since his jobs paid shit. Adam knew all this, of course. Adam was who he stayed with while he found a place to live.

Six months after Adam died, I was about to turn twenty. About to leave behind my teenage years. My Adam years. Justin and I got drunk together in his little studio apartment, and the drinking led to talking, and the talking led to sloppy kisses, and then I was clinging to him, bumping into his bookshelves, knocking over stacks of CDs. We broke apart and Justin lifted my shirt over my head and I looked up at him and said, “I love him.”

And for a second I could feel what he felt: how everything stopped for a moment, how the lust evaporated as he thought about what I said.

“I know,” he replied, and our lips met again.