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He gets his words early. Earlier than all the other kids he knows.
He notices them in the bathroom mirror one day. Curving words pale, curling into the dips and divots of his body, like scars against his sun-kissed skin.
Billy knows his words belong to a boy as soon as he sees them. He knows because the handwriting is neat but boyish, because most girls don’t talk like that but, mostly, he knows because the conviction is burning through him just as the dread is filling his lungs like water, making a hole in his heart as he feels like he’s drowning.
Billy likes boys.
Always liked boys. If you’d ask him when he knew, he wouldn’t be able to say.
Billy also likes girls. So.
It’s easy, you know, to ignore his dad’s remarks and sneers. To push this other, undesirable side of himself away, tuck it into a box in the corner, taped up and hidden, to never see the light of day. It’s easy to hide in the half-truths and the silences, and pretend like everything is fine, dad, really. But the words… Billy feels like they are so, so obvious.
So, he hides them, too. Hides his ribs under t-shirts and tank-tops, the curving words still pale but already unforgiving, heavy like a brand under all the fabric. It’s easy. His dad is too busy for the beach. Billy is too old for anything that might ever require his dad to see him shirtless.
His mom, he tells. She says, oh, baby, rakes her fingers through his hair, kisses his forehead and he feels the tears stinging in his eyes even if he doesn’t understand what she means. He doesn’t let them fall.
His dad doesn’t ask. Their relationship is marked by a begrudging companionship steeped in silence, punctuated by rare moments of violence. Sometimes, they fish on the banks, or watch baseball in the den, or work in the garage. They rarely talk, brief moments of contact – a pat on the shoulder, a ruffle of hair – all that binds them.
But Billy is still young and, some days, he is careless. So, it’s not too long before his dad spots them, turns Billy around in a sharp tug of a shoulder. Billy feels his dad’s eyes burn through him, catch on every pale curve and curl. The man’s blue eyes turn to shards of ice as they narrow, his lips curve into a sneer. He says nothing but Billy knows, feels it with every inch of his skin, understands on a level that must be cosmic that his dad is realizing the same thing Billy himself realized when his eyes first landed on that simple phrase in the bathroom mirror.
Things change between them after that. Everything changes after that. And those rare moments of violence… they replace everything. The fishing and the baseball, the rare moments of contact, everything.
The silence grows, the chasm deepens.
By the time they move to Indiana, they’re strangers. Forced together by a last name, by his father’s misguided wish for apparent propriety, they’re nothing more than two people surviving under one roof. Because that’s what happens: Billy’s life shrinks to survival, a weathering of a storm that lasts for years and this survival hinges on his resolve to never act on his destiny.
His father says, the universe makes mistakes. He says, just look at me and your mother. He says, my son will not be a faggot. And Billy believes it, shapes his mind into a vessel to hold these words in, carry them with him like a vise grip around his heart.
And then he sees Steve Harrington in the halls of Hawkins High and he’s lost.
The world falls away, shrinks down to this one person, this boy who, Billy is certain, will one day become the man he will want to wake up next to and fall asleep with, every single day; who – in his imperfections – will always seem perfect in Billy’s eyes. It shrinks down to this person who will never be his. As soon as Steve Harrington catches his eyes, Billy knows he will never be happy again.
When their words colour, Billy goes home. In the darkness of his room, stifled by his pillow, he cries over the words that will forever mar Steve’s body, carved out in his jagged handwriting, forever dripping venom onto Steve’s skin.
He closes his eyes and sees Steve’s, in his mind’s eye, just as their words were said, round and open. He sees Steve stepping towards him, reaching. The hope there, so crisp and clean, is obvious, palpable. He knows Steve will forgive him anything if Billy were to apologize, knows he’s lost nothing, yet, though he is bound to.
Because living in this town, with his father around the corner, and being with Steve is an impossibility. Because he promised himself, he wouldn’t. Because he can’t. His father’s words rattle in his head, echo in a reminder that the universe makes mistakes. That his destiny is wrong and so is he for wanting it.
His mouth shapes around his words of rejection on its own. He says, I could never want you, and in the night air, under the hazy light of the streetlamps, it sounds like the truth. He doesn’t know how, but he is sure that that will be enough. That Steve will believe his words, believe that he is unwanted and unloved. Billy lets himself cry over that, as well, cry for the boy he can’t help but already love and for how he believed Billy so easily; less an are you sure, and more of a yeah, that makes sense.
He never cries again after that. Nothing ever breaks his heart more.
But living in a town with Steve where he cannot have him is unbearable, grief burning like fire in his veins, chipping away at his resolve. Billy applies to colleges in California and leaves as soon as he can. In his spare time from classes and work, he searches for his mother.
When he finally finds her, she has no place in her life for him.
He lives out years with his breath held in his lungs, unable to let it out. Accumulates a small group of people around him who refuse to leave him even though he gives them reasons to. So many reasons. They dismantle the vessel of his mind, a brick at a time, with their openness and kindness.
He graduates, finds work, builds a life.
The weakening resolve makes him put pen to paper, buy stamps, send letters to Nancy Wheeler who, against all odds, writes back. It’s comforting, to know, that there is someone in the world who loves Steve almost as much as he does, who’s a better person than he is, who will always be there for him. And Nancy, like his other friends, refuses to back away from their slowly, painstakingly built friendship. Though it is fragile at first, she sticks it out, until it’s solid and real, until he feels as close to her as to any other member of his tiny made-up family.
One question burns in his mind, still. The vision of his mother, happy in her new life that has no place for him, sticks in his mind like glue, catches him in his most mundane tasks: when he brushes his teeth or sits down at his computer to write, or buys groceries at the market. How can she be so happy, with her soulmate so far away, their connection in ruins?
This question, like embers stoked into a fire by the wind of passing years, grows within him until he feels he has no other choice, feels compelled to find her, one last time. She seems happy to see him. Sits him at the kitchen table and pours him a cup of ice tea. And when he asks, she seems surprised, then stricken.
I’m sorry, she says, I’m so sorry, Billy. There are tears in her eyes. She says, it never occurred to me that you didn’t know.
What she tells him changes him forever.
The vessel dismantled, the vise grip falling away from his heart, his mind is clear for the first time in years: the universe makes no mistakes. That’s what she says, and he knows immediately what that means: that in his life, the mistakes were all his.
He comes home that night, sits at his desk, and writes to Nancy until the letters blur in his vision. When the tears clear, he finishes it, sends it out.
Nancy has been telling him for years that he should start working on fixing this. He feels like he might soon be ready to begin even though it feels like the most hopeless endeavour known to man, even though it feels insurmountable. Billy knows he has to try.
He just needs a bit more time to learn how to stand still.