26
STEFAN
The weekend is a blur. And here I am on a dead Sunday night seated at a hotel bar.
Again.
Except this time, after ordering the drink, I just stare at it. I don’t take a single sip. No matter how nice it’d feel to be totally numb right now, I can’t help but dwell in all of my twisted, fucked-up emotions first. I need to feel everything. I need to understand what the hell I’m going through.
My strongest emotion is regret, I think. It sings the loudest in my choir of whiny bitches. I’ve spent way too much time over the years wondering what my life would have been like if my best buddy Ryan Caulfield and I hadn’t parted ways senior year, and it leaves me feeling bitter, bitter regret.
If he had used me as a study buddy during college …
If I saw him in the stands during my ball games …
If our phones would’ve blown up every night with a hundred texts about how our days went …
Fuck if that doesn’t sound like heaven.
The day everything went to shit was a Monday when I heard from a fellow teammate in the hall that Ryan had quit the team.
I thought he was fucking with me at first. “Yeah, alright. And I’m quitting the team, too, and I have an A in Advanced Calculus, and also I won the lottery.”
“Seriously,” my teammate insisted. “Caulfield quit. For real.”
You could have driven an eighteen-wheeler down the hallway and I wouldn’t have noticed, my jaw dropped and my stare going right through my friend’s head. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. A million and one reasons went through my head. None of them made enough sense to cling to.
Normally it took me eight whole minutes to get from my class at one end of the school to the cafeteria at the other. That day, it took me three and a half.
“Is it your dad?” I asked right away, coming at Ryan while he sat at our table, all our friends and teammates still there. He stood up right away. “Did he pull you off the team? Or is it your mom? Wait. This is because of the elbow you took to the nose back in May, isn’t it? That’s what it is.”
Ryan had the strangest face, like he wasn’t even there. “Nah,” he grunted, his eyes averted. “That’s not it.”
I stared at him. I still wouldn’t accept that he quit the team voluntarily. There was no possible way he’d do that. Someone made him quit. Something forced him off the team. “So what is it? You fail a class or some shit?”
“I … I just don’t want to play anymore.”
It was some of the worst words he could’ve said, second only to the ones he would say next. “The fuck do you mean? You were born for baseball. It’s our thing!”
“It’s your thing,” he spat back, the world erupting into flames before his eyes. “Believe it or not, some of us can do more than one damned thing. You’re the one who throws perfectly, catches perfectly, bats perfectly. I’m not like you, Stefan. I’m not meant to be just another dumb jock playing games my whole life.”
His words stung me worse than anything anyone had ever said to me before. Maybe it’s because he triggered some deep, subconscious fear—a fear that people would only see me as a one-note jock and nothing more. And the words came from Ryan Caulfield, my best friend.
A chorus of reactions hummed over all the lunch tables that surrounded us. I didn’t realize we’d had the attention of half the cafeteria until that moment. Everyone was watching.
“I’m done with games,” he went on. “I want to do something good with my life. Worthwhile.”
My voice was low, almost a whisper. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.”
Ryan scoffed suddenly, as if annoyed that I could possibly take offense to his harsh words. “You didn’t notice that I was benched half of last season? Too busy soaking up the spotlight, Stefan? Too busy to notice that your ‘best bro’ is, in fact, not out there on that field with you most of the time?”
“I wasn’t soaking up any spotlight.”
“I’m wasting all of my time. I’ve wasted all of my time. I could have been joining science clubs like my sister did, or been doing a sport I’m better at, or taking drama, or anything other than balls and bats and bases. I’m stuck at first base and have been for a long time, if you ever bothered to notice.”
“Fuck you, Caulfield.”
The room hummed again with scandal. I regretted the words, even if it was just a throwaway expletive to shut him up, even if we’d said those words a hundred times before in the context of teasing one another during our video game sleepovers. I hated how everyone reacted to it instantly, as if their murmurs of shock confirmed that our friendship was about to end.
I should have held my tongue. But something drove me that day, something deep and furious and sinister. “That’s all you think I am?” I fought back. “A guy who does ‘one thing’ …? A dumb jock? Is this what you’ve always thought of me?”
“Stefan …”
“Games??” I pressed on, infuriated. I even took a step toward him, and he took a step back. “You know as well as I do, those are more than just games we play out there. Baseball is more than just a thing we do. It’s my life. And it’s yours, too, if you’d quit being such a little bitch, giving up like this.”
The saddest look spread across his face. He was in anguish, and I had no idea why. Just a day ago, we were playing catch after our classes in the field by the natatorium. Now, he was acting like he didn’t even know me. All of that closeness and trust between us that I had always taken for granted evaporated like it was never there. We were two strangers to each other that day.
“I’m not giving up,” he finally said, then looked up to meet my eyes. All I saw in those eyes was coldness. “I’m moving on.”
Then he turned and walked away. Just like that.
I wouldn’t have it. “Caulfield,” I called out, my fingers curling into fists as I fumed within. “Caulfield,” I tried again, pained. Still, he didn’t stop walking away. “RYAN!” I belted out. “If you walk away from me—from this—our friendship is over!”
He didn’t come back. All around us, students went back to eating mashed potatoes and fried chicken and dried-out bread rolls. Trays started clacking together again and voices rose as conversations broke out or resumed wherever they had left off before our big, dramatic confrontation.
And I remained standing there staring after my best friend, wondering what the hell I had done wrong.
And here I am now, sitting at a hotel bar staring at a drink I ordered and haven’t touched, wondering what the hell I’ve done wrong.
Are we always doomed to just self-destruct, the pair of us?
I guess it isn’t so farfetched an idea. Our friendship began with a fight in the boy’s bathroom, after all. I’d like to say that means we have a lot of passion between us.
Or unspoken animosity.
Aggression.
Rivalry.
I don’t even know anymore.
If that really is passion we have, then it’s the sort that can burn down a house. And that shit’s scary.
I pull out my phone and set it next to my glass. No calls or texts from him all weekend. Nothing.
This reminds me too much of when I got home after that fight in the cafeteria and stared at my phone, wondering if Ryan would call me. I was certain he would. Surely he couldn’t just throw away our friendship like that. It meant more to both of us, I knew it.
But he never called then. And hasn’t called now.
Worse, I never called him either. I could have manned up and did the reaching out. Wasn’t I the one he always looked up to? Wasn’t I who he looked to for answers, for guidance, and for confidence? Maybe all I was ever successful in doing was letting him down.
And it hasn’t changed.
I’ve let him down all over again.
I grip my glass and stare at the murky golden-brown liquid, waiting for my strength to find me.
Listening to all the angry words and echoes of regrets flitting around the furious flame of my brain like moths, I’m left with a simple choice: drink, or don’t drink.
Gay, or not gay.
Love, or …
“The worst part is …” Ryan’s words haunt me. “I think I’m in love with you.”
My eyes clench shut. You had to go and say that, didn’t you? You just had to go and say that.
I see his smile. I feel his hands on my skin and his mouth by my neck, breathing, content.
A boy curling up next to me in my childhood bedroom, too scared to admit his feelings, too naïve to know what they even are.
“I think I’m in love with you, Stefan.”
My eyes clench shut even tighter. Shut up.
“The worst part …”
The worst part is that I know I’ve fallen for him, too. And I know I’ve loved him since the day I pinned him to the floor of a bathroom and stared down into his terrified eyes. Neither of us knew what it meant, the connection we had. And it didn’t matter.
What am I so fucking scared of?
Let the world put us in a cute little box it can understand. Gay. Straight. Black. White. Something grayish and scary and who-knows-what in between.
Let the world decide what it wants to see when it looks at me and Ryan, and it sees the way we gaze into each other’s eyes, and it thinks it knows what’s going on in our hearts.
Let it think it knows me. Let it be wrong.
Let all of them sneer and say we’re just another pair of homos in the world. Just another straight guy in denial. Just another self-hating embarrassment to gaykind. I don’t care. They’ll never know what I am, and they won’t have to.
Ryan and I always had a special something. I’ve had it with no other man or woman in my life. It is one of a kind. Truly unique.
Like this glass still sitting, undrunk, in front of me.
Drink, or don’t drink?
“I love you, too, Caulfield, you fuckin’ bastard,” I murmur to the glass, then lift it to my lips.
My phone buzzes right then, stopping me.
The glass goes right back down as I lift the phone to my face. On its screen is a message.
It’s a message from my dad.
I throw a twenty on the counter and bolt out of the hotel the next instant, abandoning my glass, still undrunk.