The Chasing of Moons

Frank decided a long time ago that thinking is done best when upside down. His logic may be faulty, but his hearts in the right place.

This is how he finds himself with his head lolling off the side of his bed looking at Brendon whose forehead looks, if it’s possible, larger when you’re upside down than it does right side up.

“You okay?” Brendon asks.

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“Toads.”

“Toads?” Brendon asks, looking confused. “Really?”

“No not really, I just wanted to see your reaction,” Frank says.

“Okay well what are you actually thinking about then?” Pete asks, he’s sitting in Frank’s desk chair, but he’s got it turned around with his notebook resting on his knee, and that officially makes him taller than the other two because Brendon’s sitting on the ground.

“I’m just thinking about how it’s possible to know two people who have the exact same face only one of them is nearly ten years older than the other.”

“Oh no, not this again,” Brendon sighs, shaking his head.

“What? It’s confusing!”

“No, it really isn’t, Frank. You’re delusional, because that Gerard guy was literally just a regular person. He was not some clone or whatever of whoever the hell you think he was. And besides, the guy you say he looked like, the guy from the bar, you got a look at him for what, like three minutes? You really think that you can have that great a picture of someone you barely even knew and barely even talked to? I think your head is just making things up.”

Frank would really like to correct Brendon and say that he definitely got a longer look at ‘the guy from the bar’ and that he knows without a doubt that they had the same face, right down to the same tiny teeth. He would like to say that he knows the man’s name to start with the letter G, because he called himself Gee. He wants to say that the guy was really mysterious about who he was, which even further proves that he was Gerard somehow.

“It was him, I swear it.”

“Yeah, and my goldfish is George Clooney.”

“You don’t even have a goldfish,” Pete retorts.

“Well if I did, he would be as much George Clooney as the guy Frank thinks is one of our classmates.”

“Do you even know that kid?” Pete asks, Frank doesn’t know if he’s asking either of them in particular.

“Not really,” Brendon shakes his head, “I mean I’ve seen the guy around, and I think he’s in my gym class, but I’ve never talked with him much. He seems like a bit of a loser.”

“Don’t say that,” Frank snaps, lifting himself upright to scowl at Brendon. He gets a head rush when he’s right side up and his eyes feel weird for a moment before the world starts to fall back into place, and he finds himself being stared at by the both of them.

“What do you care?”

“Well, I mean, that’s just rude,” Frank says.

“You are going crazy,” Pete shakes his head.

“No I just don’t think it’s very polite to talk behind people’s backs.”

“You don’t even know him, Frank.”

“But it’s still mean.”

“Okay, whatever,” Brendon shakes his head, looking down at his textbook. Brendon starts talking math which is what they are trying to be studying for in the first place, but that’s when Frank starts to tune out.

The best theory he’s come up with is that Gee has to be some sort of makeup enthusiast, or know a makeup enthusiast. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If Frank lived in a TV show, he would say that the obvious solution to this problem is that Gerard is either a shape shifter or a time traveler, but seeing as this is not a science fiction show, he knows that neither of those can be true. If that were real than the time Frank stared at a spoon for three hours when he was ten would have had a much more fruitful result, and he would’ve been able to bend that damn spoon with his mind. Unfortunately, that did not work and his cereal was really soggy at that point.

“Frank!” Brendon says loudly, and by the tone of his voice, Frank knows that he must’ve repeated his name a couple of times, but he was too tuned out to hear.

“What?”

“Are you paying attention at all?”

“Uh, no. So on a scale from one to ten, how feasible do you think time travel is?”

“Oh no,” Pete says, his head falling back like he’s given up all hope.

“Ten being highly possible, and one being not at all?” Brendon asks.

“Yes.”

“Okay then nine,” Brendon says.

“Oh god, don’t entertain him!” Pete says, and that could definitely be directed at either of them, because Brendon is the one who believes in that sort of thing while Frank is just completely out of options as to who the hell Gee is.

“Nine?”

“Well I think it’s possible but I think it’s probably like really hard to ever get that amount of energy, like you’d need a lot of fucking power to do that, and I feel like it’s more likely that we would be able to leap forward rather than back, but I don’t know by how much, because the past feels like it’s in the past already, you know?”

“But the future hasn’t happened yet,” Frank replies.

“Oh god,” Pete says and that’s when he starts hitting himself in the face with his notebook.

“Okay, but we’re time traveling right now, at this very second. We’re traveling a second at a time through time, so like, we are time traveling to the future as we speak, so why should it be impossible to just speed that time up? Like shorten the length between point A and point B.”

“Yeah, but I think travelling backward should be pretty much as plausible as forward, because, if it were possible, why wouldn’t we be able to go backwards?”

“I don’t know, I suppose it’s possible either way, but my money is on traveling to the future rather than travelling to the past.”

“I think the other problem is that we don’t know the laws of it. There’s no written guide that explains everything in twelve point font. It’s all guesswork. It could go any which way really. So like, what kind of time travel rules are we following, if we can time travel?” Frank says.

“Well yeah, but obviously the timeline we’re going through now is canonical so everything has to happen this way, because you can’t change it. The world is inherently the way it is now. If I were to time travel back to five minutes ago, nothing at all could be any different. I think I’d be setting everything up for it to work out the way that it eventually ends up being,” Brendon replies.

“Yeah, but maybe it’s more Back to the Future style, because like, if you go back in time to change it, maybe it’s flexible, right? So like you go back in time, kill Hitler, and because of the fact that you killed Hitler, by some crazy happenstance of dominoes falling together, your parents never met then, and you cease to exist.”

“No, I think it’s like going back in time to save Buckbeak, because you go back in time, you save him, everything is right with the world, but you didn’t actually change anything, because everything was always set to follow the strict timeline of you having to go back in time to save Buckbeak in the first place.”

“Would you two shut the fuck up?” Pete says. “Time travel is not real. If it were real, why would no one have proved it to us by now? If it were real, someone would have traveled back in time shouted ‘yo time travel is real’ and we would read about it in textbooks!”

“But anyone who tries to claim time travel is real is institutionalized because we’re so trained to believe that it’s not real,” Brendon points out.

“Exactly!” Frank says.

“If you two don’t shut up about time travel, I am going to throw myself out the fucking window,” Pete declares.

“What a party pooper,” Brendon sighs, looking contemptuously back at the textbook in his lap.

“Pete, maybe it is real-”

“Literally a week ago, you and I both agreed that it wasn’t,” Pete says. “Science fiction. Fiction Frank, we talked about this! It is fictional!”

“Maybe I’m starting to change my mind,” Frank shrugs.

“No! No changing your mind. Time travel is not real, and Back to the Future is not a documentary.”

“I never claimed it was, this is all just theory,” Frank says.

“Okay, Frank, I will spell this out for you. The guy you saw at the bar was a completely different person than Gerard. Absolutely no time travel at all was involved,” Pete says, talking slowly like Frank is a child.

“Yeah, you say that now, but if you’d seen them, like if they were side by side-”

“Maybe they did look similar, maybe I would say ‘huh, those two guys look alike’ but even if that were the case, you would not be able to convince me that they were the same person.”

Frank’s trying to remember, remember anything at all distinguishable about Gee that no one else would have, like a scar or a mole or something. He’s having a hard time remembering anything that stuck out more than his teeth. Frank would probably be able to tell you if they had the same body if he were to see Gerard without clothes, but that’s a little creepy to think about.

Then Frank starts to think really deeply about all the things he said. A lot of it seems to support the far off idea that somehow, Gerard or Gee or whoever the hell he is time traveled. Frank scoffs to himself internally because even he doesn’t think the sound of it is real, but he also feels like that’s the only option. Every minute he thinks about it, the makeup thing seems even more implausible, how on earth would Gee have been able to lose weight and grow his hair out, and how would you be able to hide that? Makeup can’t do that. A wig probably could, but the weight thing is a different issue altogether.

Frank’s only realistic theory isn’t even realistic. His only impossible theory is the only one that makes any sense. Time travel can’t be real though, and Frank knows that. He feels like he’s going insane just thinking about all of this.

“He’s spacing out again,” Brendon sighs, and he slams his textbook against the floor to get Franks attention. He jumps, frowns, and flips off Brendon.

“We need to do math problems, Frank. We don’t have time for your Gerard theories, okay?”

“You know he hates me,” Frank says sadly.

“Who does?”

“Gerard.”

“When did you talk to... please tell me you did not talk to him after the thing at lunch,” Pete says.

“I did,” Frank nods, “and he hates me. He made that pretty damn clear. It was so, just, ugh. I didn’t know that he hated me like that. I just wanted to talk to him, and try to clear things up, and maybe, I don’t know.”

“Why does it matter?” Brendon asks, “What’s so important about him anyway? Even if the guy at the bar was the time traveling version of Gerard, and I’m not saying I believe that, but even if he was, why would you care? How would that effect you?”

“It’s just... it would, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“But you have no connection to him. Like, at all.”

Frank opens his mouth, ready to say something when he finds it impossible. He knows that this would be a great time to just go for it. He could just say it. He could just say that he’s gay and he could confess what happened and he could stop lying, but his mouth argues with him.

Suddenly it feels like the sides of his mouth are being zipped together to block off everything. The moisture in his mouth disappears leaving in its place this acidic stinging feel. His throat closes in, and he thinks that this what an asthma attack would feel like, because he can’t fucking breathe from the weight on his chest like an elephant deciding to take a seat on his lungs.

And everything in him is telling him to just say it. To just get it out. He wants to come clean, tell them who he is, and he trusts that they’ll accept him, he really does, but he can’t get it to leave his mouth already. The stinging in his mouth turns to burning and it’s all he can bear to not just vomit off the side of the bed, because that’s what it feels like he needs, but at the same time, it feels like he’s never eaten anything before because his stomach and insides feel empty.

But Brendon is the rebellious kid who’s all but given up religion completely, and Pete talks about people he would ‘totally tap if I were gay, hot damn, what an ass.’ Frank knows that he could trust these guys, he knows it, but he can’t get the words to come out.

When Frank’s brain finally gives in, tells him that he can’t do it, can’t say it, everything seems to loosen up, and he’s able to unstick his sealed lips for the first time in what feels like weeks. Frank wants to say it, he wants to admit everything, come out to two of the most important people in his life, but he can’t. It’s not that he doesn’t want to and it’s not that he’s not trying, he simply can’t do it. The words don’t form. They get stuck on the tip of his tongue and then they melt away before ever making it further than that.

“Dude, you okay? You look kind of sick,” Pete says, eyebrows furrowed together in concern, and Frank hates himself, because he knows that these two are good people, but he still can’t say the words that he most direly wishes he could say. He just can’t. He wants to, wants to be unashamed, but he’s not capable of it. Not now at least.

That’s what makes Frank remember Gee the clearest. He felt so safe. That’s the best word for it. He knew the guy for less than three days. He knew nothing about him other than what Gee told him, but he felt so safe and warm and comfortable. There was no hiding, there was no pretending, it was just Frank being himself. He was the most vulnerable he’d ever been, probably in his entire life. If Frank had been strapped to a dead seal and stuck in the middle of a shark tank, he wouldn’t have been any more vulnerable than he had been with Gee.

With Gee, for one thing he had been technically very rarely clothed so that was one thing, but that wasn’t the thing that made him the most vulnerable. It was the fact that he’d never told anyone. Never said a peep to anyone. He’s never hinted at it, not even to his mother. For all intense and purposes, Frank is straighter than anyone else in the entire school. But then he was stripped of that guise with Gee, and he was completely out there, trusting Gee not to take that information and ruin Frank’s life with it. He was just completely laid out for Gee, and it was freeing.

But Gee’s gone now, and Frank has this hope, this undying, unbearable hope right in the middle of his chest that Gee is still there. Maybe Gee really is Gerard, and maybe that safety Frank had felt with him, he can still have. Maybe Gerard is Gee, and he was the whole time, and that hope is agonizing. Frank wants that so much that it’s beginning to eat him up just thinking about how close and yet so far it is from being real. He wants to have Gee again so much, that maybe he is delusional and seeing him in Gerard, or maybe he’s hyperaware and that’s why it was so easy to spot Gee and Gerard for one and the same.

Frank just wants to feel safe again. He wants to stop feeling like someone’s stifling him in this fake personality that he puts on, and he just wants to talk to someone who knows who he is.

He wants to have Gee back. Really, that’s all he wants. He shouldn’t feel the way he does about the guy considering how little he knew him, but that doesn’t change the way he feels. He knows how he should feel, but he also knows how he does feel, and the fact that they don’t lineup is not something that he can change.

Frank wants Gee, and Gee, somehow, he’s got to be Gerard. By extension he wants Gerard. He really wants him. He doesn’t just want to fuck him or anything, he wants to know Gerard inside and out. Wants to know every last one of his thoughts and every single inch of him. He wants to feel safe even when he’s vulnerable.

But what he has now is two friends looking at him like he’s just grown a second head. He doesn’t want that, but that’s the nature of the world that he has no choice but to deal with.

Frank frowns, looks out the window where he can just barely see the roofing where he sat a day ago with Gee. It feels like much longer, it doesn’t feel like it’s only been a day since he left. It feels like years. He can’t believe he confronted Gerard only a few hours ago. That feels like an ancient memory, one written in a book that he didn’t experience, only read about.

“I’m fine,” Frank lies, “let’s get back to those equations.”