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Alex is nine years old the first time someone calls him a name.
He is in the playground at the end of the day, waiting for his mama to come pick him up from school – she’s late again – and he is kicking a stray football against a wall to kill time. He isn’t very good at football, he’s trying to get better, but he finds he likes the rhythm of it all, likes that if he focuses really hard he can get the ball to smack against the wall in time, mechanised, over and over. Like a heartbeat of a song. He is kicking and kicking and has finally settled into something that sounds like a rhythm when then he is jostled from the side, and the ball is stolen right from under his foot.
“Hey!” he says, because he had just found the beat. Kick-thump-ping, kick-thump-ping, like a machine. He looks up into the face of a boy two grades older than him, with a mean face and Alex’s ball in his arms.
The boy sneers at him. “Is there a problem?”
“That’s my ball.”
You are a brave boy, Alex, his mama always used to tell him. He feels a bit scared now.
The boy just scoffs. “What are you gonna do about it, fairy?” he says. He is looming over Alex now, big and wide and so, so tall, and Alex can see his mama over the boy’s shoulder, so he just swallows his tears and mumbles, “Nothing.”
The boy nods at him, satisfied, and saunters off in the way he will learn kids do when they feel like they have nothing to fear, tossing his precious ball up and down. Alex runs to his mama and throws himself into her arms, presses his wet eyes into her side, nestles in closer when she feels her arm come around him.
“Alex,” she says, “what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
He sniffles. “That boy was mean to me,” he says. “He stole my ball.”
“Oh, honey,” she says, and cuddles him close. She wipes her fingers under his wet eyes. “How was he mean? Did he say anything?”
Alex pauses. “He—he called me a fairy,” he whispers. He doesn’t know much about fairies other than what he’s seen in books, that they have wings and magic, but the way the boy said it, coming from his mean, twisted face in his mean, twisted voice, it almost sounded like a bad word. Like the words Alex hears on television when his mama and pappa think he’s gone to sleep.
He looks up at his mama’s face, and for some reason she looks troubled: sad and troubled. He frowns, reaches for her long hair.
“Is that bad?” he says.
She shakes her head, like she is coming out of a daydream. “That wasn’t nice of him,” she says. “That’s not a good word, honey. But you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t?”
She smiles at him. “Let’s get ice cream,” she says. “How does that sound?”
The boy is forgotten. Alex feels his eyes go wide. “Before dinner?”
“As a treat.”
“Yes, please!”
“My sweet boy,” she says: gives him one last tight squeeze, before she lets him go and they start to walk. “What flavour do you want, honey?”
“Strawberry!” Pink is his favourite colour. Her face does that sad, troubled thing again, and she strokes a hand over his hair.
“How about chocolate instead?”
He considers this: finds it reasonable, because chocolate is just as yummy as strawberry. Besides, if he’s nice now, he might be able to convince her to let him get sprinkles as well, which she always does when he’s been extra good.
The boy is forgotten almost entirely.
*
Alex is eleven when he has his first panic attack.
It is in the upstairs bathroom, the one that only he and his dad use, and he has his hands either side of the sink and he’s staring down the drain hole and trying to remember how to breathe. For a second, he glances into the mirror and doesn’t recognise his reflection, just sees a red face with wide panicked eyes and sweaty blond hair: then he inhales, so sharp it hurts, and the features all congeal into him, his red face and sweaty blond hair.
He’s not sure what’s happening, only that he thinks he might be dying. He had just come home from school with stripes on his cheeks, because he’d been playing soccer and they’d all needed a way to identify the teams, so he’d chosen pink because it’s his favourite colour.
Only his dad hadn’t seen it that way.
“What is that?” he said, when Alex came in.
Alex paused in the doorway. “What’s what?” he said. Had he trekked in mud again? Shit, Mom was gonna kill him if he did.
His dad pointed at his face, and for a second Alex went cross-eyed, as though he could turn himself inward and take a look himself. He had worn the paint for so long that for a long moment he didn’t know what he was looking at – was he angling for a haircut? – and then he remembered the tacky feeling on his cheeks. “I was playing soccer,” he said. His dad likes that he plays soccer, he played it when he was growing up too.
“Did you choose the colour?” his dad said.
“Yeah?”
His dad didn’t even respond, just thrust a towel at him. For the first time since coming in, Alex spotted his mom in the corner, pretending she couldn’t hear anything as she was bent over the stove. “Take it off,” his dad said.
“It’s just face paint.”
“Pink is for girls, Alex. Off.”
Now, in the mirror, he still has one stripe left. It hit him halfway through the first, and he dropped the towel and tried to remember how to breathe. Is that what it’s like to die? he thinks. He at least wants to get the other stripe off. His dad would hate if he were remembered by one lonesome pink stripe on his face.
Mechanically, the hand in the mirror reaches forward to switch on the tap, cup the palms together to collect a pool of water. It hits him in the face, and he realises that they belong to him: takes a long, shuddery breath, that comes a little easier. He splashes himself again, and scrubs at the pink stripe with the heel of his palm until it’s disappeared.
He hadn’t realised it would be such a big issue.
After, his mom thinks it’s asthma, and his dad thinks it was just a moment of emotion. Later, he finds out it is neither: sat between two of them, his knee bobbing up and down, as the nice doctor in front of him says that it might be an anxiety disorder.
“Do you play any instruments, Alex?” the doctor says to him.
“No.”
“Our Alex is more into soccer,” Dad says.
“Well, sports is always good,” the doctor says, with a smile. He has a nice smile. “But I’ve had a lot of patients say learning an instrument helped with anxiety levels, just to focus on one thing. Maybe that would be something you’re interested in, Alex?”
His parents both glance at him. His leg keeps jumping up and down. He remembers how good it felt to kick a football against a wall and feel the rhythm in his whole body.
“I think that would be nice,” he says.
It is the next month he gets his first drumkit: the next month he feels like something has slotted into place when he picks up the sticks for the first time.
*
Alex is fifteen when he realises for the first time that he isn’t quite like other boys.
There’s a new kid in school, Luke Patterson, with swoopy hair and a smile that gives Alex butterflies. He sits next to him in Math, and Alex recognises the bounce of his leg, the tap of his fingers against the desk, as something from himself: this boy is itching to get somewhere, do something. He can hear it in his voice, too, how he introduces himself, so confident: “I’m Luke.”
“Alex.”
Luke’s nailbeds are crusted in blood, peeling in a way that would make Alex’s mom keel over. Luke catches him looking, and grins. “Guitar,” he says, like it’s a secret between the two of them. “I play.”
Alex smiles back. It feels almost like an impulse: he can’t not. “I play the drums,” he says, and Luke beams like he's just told him something fantastic.
“Are you any good?”
Is he any good? Alex doesn’t think he’s ever been asked that before. It is his first instinct to say, I’m okay. But then he thinks about. “I’m really good,” he says confidently. Luke’s smile gets even broader, and he bumps his knuckles against his shoulder.
“I’m gonna tell you a secret, Alex,” he says. “One day, I’m gonna be famous.”
He says it with such conviction that Alex has no choice but to believe him. How can he not? “And you just know that?”
“I’m gonna be in the best band in the world,” Luke says. Then, mischievously: “We’re looking for a drummer, you know.”
Alex raises an eyebrow. “And what makes you think I want to join your band?”
He is only half-joking, because what Luke is promising – a band, a job, music – sounds almost too good to be true, so much so that he feels a need like nothing before clog his throat. He has been playing the drums for a while, and he loves it, but he has never thought it could be something that he could pursue beyond anxiety management. And when it’s coming from someone as magnetic at Luke – well, who could deny that?
Luke just leans in close. “Look,” he says. “If you want in, meet me outside of school today, and we’ll jam together. This is real for me. Is it real for you?”
His eyes are imploring. Alex knows achieving fame is like catching lightning in a bottle, but he thinks he would believe anything that came from Luke. “It’s real for me.”
Luke grins. “Four o’clock. I’ll see you there.”
*
Since Alex was young, he has never seemed to really get it about girls. Sure, they were cute, and pretty, and they had soft hair and nice laughs and they were always nice to him, in the ways that other adolescent boys weren’t, but he never looked at them and thought he would like to kiss them. He thinks it would be uncomfortable to taste their lip-gloss, or touch their boobs, or whatever he would do with a girl, but all his friends always speak of girls like they’re the best thing since sliced bread, so maybe he’s just not trying hard enough.
And it’s not like there haven’t been moments where he has almost thought— But they’ve all been insignificant enough that he’s brushed them off as probably nothing. It is normal to think your friends are handsome. You are allowed to wonder what they would taste like if you kissed them.
And then Luke.
There’s just something about him that’s so magnetic, so attractive, like Alex is helpless against his gravitational field. The way he speaks of their band – the band Alex is a part of, Sunset Curve, a real band – the way he speaks of music, his friends, Alex, is so passionate that Alex feels his heart thump a little, in a way it’s never done for a girl. He hears him sing on that first band practice in his bedroom, cross-legged on his bed with a guitar that’s a little out of tune, and it hits him so suddenly he almost feels like he’s going to have another panic attack.
It’s never been this way for a girl: and he’s known that for a while.
Gay. That’s what he is, isn’t it? He lies in bed that night and looks at his ceiling, feel it circle around the room. Gay. He knows about the gays. His father always talks of them like they’re a disappointment to men everywhere. Failed men, is what he calls them. Mom never says anything but she doesn’t disagree with him, either. Alex has always felt a sharp sense of guilt and shame whenever his father talks about it, but for so long he just brushed it off as embarrassment, for having such a close-minded father. Now, as he is slotting everything together, it fits right in the centre of the puzzle.
Oh God. His parents.
Can he ever tell anyone about this? He doesn’t know anyone who is gay. Boys use that word sometimes in school to make fun of people. He’s so gay. They call them fairies, too, other words, that make him flinch, because they’re ugly, ugly words. He doesn’t know if it’s illegal to be gay, and he’s too scared to look it up. He certainly knows he can’t get married.
He remembers the calming techniques the doctor told him about: in for five, out for eight. He breathes in, out, in the quiet of his room, and tries to forget it.
He’s in a band now. Focus on that.
*
Alex is sixteen, and he’s getting somewhere.
He never doubted Luke when he said he was going to make them famous, because he’s sure Luke could do anything. As soon as he heard him sing, saw the songs he wrote, Alex knew that he was going to do something big, and if he was lucky he could hold onto the side of the train as he soared along.
It’s been a few years since that moment in his bedroom. They are two members bigger: Reggie, bass, and Bobby, guitar as well (privately, Alex doesn’t think he’s as good as Luke). And they’re good.
They’re really good.
Luke is getting them booked places. He helped make T-shirts and sometimes they go together and hand them to girls on the streets with their CD, full of songs Alex helped play, songs he has the rhythm in his chest transposed out in. Reggie smiles at waitresses and helps worm them in the last night slot of a bar line-up, at one, when everyone has gone home, but a performance nonetheless. Alex knows his grades are suffering, all of their grades, but none of them have it in them to care.
They’re getting somewhere. They’re making it.
His parents don’t get it. Especially not his dad, who for the longest time refused to believe that the drums were anything other than therapeutic. He’d get twitchy if he were on them too long, would pop his head through the door and ask how soccer was going. Alex would lie through his teeth and say good, like he hadn’t quit the team the second Luke Patterson invited him over to jam. Still, his mom and dad are cautiously supportive, glad he’s doing something that helps with the anxiety.
He is lucky.
Luke leaves home because his parents try and make him quit the band: like they’d be able to pry him away from something like this. He stays at Alex’s place for a while, hops to Bobby’s, and then stays permanently in Reggie’s, who has the biggest room and an en-suite bathroom. They all close ranks around him, try and support him the best way they can.
Alex tries not to imagine what it would be like to be as brave as Luke: stand up for something he believed with his whole chest.
He knows what it would be, too. Though he doesn’t know if the boys would be so supportive.
*
Alex is sixteen when he comes out. It doesn’t go well.
He says it over dinner, because his mother hates fighting over the table, and he knows as long as he is sat, his father can’t hurt him. Alex is cutting his potatoes into smaller and smaller bits, listening to his father talk about his day at work, feeling himself wind tighter and tighter. There is a knot in his stomach as dense as the core of a star, and he feels like it is pulling him down through his chair. He’s afraid if he puts anything in his mouth he’s going to throw it up.
Then his father says, “And how’s soccer, Alex?”
Alex has been lying to him a long time about soccer. Tonight, he breathes in – one two three four five – and says, “I’m not doing soccer any longer.”
“You’re not?”
“I wanted to focus on the band.”
“Right.” Silence, except the scrape of knives and forks against the plate. “You know, Alex, I don’t know how comfortable I am with the amount of time you’re spending in this band.”
“Leave him be,” his mother says. “He’s enjoying himself.”
“I just think it’s smart if he starts diverting his attention to other things, like his studies. You need to start preparing for your future. I don’t think it’s so smart to stay so focused on such frivolous things.”
“Like soccer?” Alex says.
His father’s mouth purses.
“How are the boys doing?” his mother says.
“Good.”
“Have you written any good songs, recently?”
“A few. I can play them for you.”
Her smile is gently teasing. “Any love songs?”
“Probably.” Reggie is in the stage where his type is extended to anything with a pulse.
She laughs, softly. “You boys. Girls must be all you think about, huh?”
Alex’s hand tightens around his fork. The room goes deathly silent when he says, “Not me.”
He stares at his plate as long as he dares. A beat: another. The silence stretches on uncomfortably long, and he risks a glance up.
His mother is looking down at her own plate. His father is staring right at him.
“What are you saying, Alex?” he says, deadly calm.
Alex has learned to tell when a panic attack is coming on. This isn’t it, the claws will set in later, but it sure as hell feels like it. “I’m—”
“Don’t,” his mother says, softly. She’s still not looking at him.
There is more silence. His father stands up and leaves the room without another further word.
“Mom—” Alex begins.
“No, Alex,” she says.
“But—”
“It was unfair of you to bring it up now,” she says quietly. She hasn’t met his eyes the entire time. Please, he thinks, please. “At dinner. You know how stressed your father is at work. That was selfish of you.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says.
She purses her lips, and looks up at him for the first time. He wishes she hadn’t. Her gaze is freezing. “You do not breathe a word of this,” she says. “You do not tell anyone. You keep this to yourself. You hear?”
His eyes are beginning to prickle. “Mamma—”
She stands sharply. “Wipe your eyes,” she says. “Boys don’t cry.” And then she leaves.
*
That night, so does he.
*
Alex is seventeen when he makes it: seventeen when he dies.
*
Alex knows three things:
One, the girl is called Julie.
Two, they are living in her garage.
Three, he has been dead for twenty-five years.
He’d say that he’s always been pretty good with change: kind of have to be, when you become a ghost. Though even he can admit that he has his limits, and one of them is finding out that he has spent twenty-five years crying in a dark room. The three of them exchange looks when they find out, Alex, Reggie, Luke, and they all know what they are thinking: what has happened in these years? Twenty-five years is a long enough time to turn children to adults with children of their own. All their classmates would have grown up. Bobby would have grown up, fuck.
Alex’s parents, too.
Twenty-five years – he does the Math, they should still be alive. They are all thinking it. He imagines visiting them for the first time in near decades, seeing them old and grey, and then he remembers the hostility, and the cold, and privately he is disappointed that they are not dead.
It’s the most wicked thought he has ever had. He can’t find it in himself to feel sorry.
Julie begrudgingly lets them stay in her garage, and Alex absently skitters a fingernail across one of the cymbals of a drum kit. His drum kit – he has missed this thing. It has been a while since he has held drumsticks, and he remembers how they felt like an extension of his arm. He is itching to get back, get back on stage, perform.
It’s not until an older man, her father, comes in that he realises he is invisible.
It is a lonely thought, to only be seen by your two best friends and a strange girl you’re certain hates you, but there is something oddly liberating in it. Alex finds a bag of hand-me-downs in the loft and as they are digging through them for a new change of clothes, a change of clothes no one will see except three, he produces a pink shirt.
It is like being struck with lightning. He remembers this shirt: he wore it a lot as a fuck you to his parents once he left home. It is not a shirt he associates with nice things, because for the longest time his only feelings about this shirt were anger and a weird sense of payback. He didn’t wear it to feel good, he wore it to prove to parents who no longer cared that he didn’t, either.
He doesn’t know what possesses him, but he pulls it over his head.
It feels a little like vengeance; a lot like relief.
*
It’s almost funny how easy it is to forget twenty-five years have passed. There are some days that Alex almost forgets he’s technically dead, like when he’s going at the drums with Reggie and Luke on their guitars and Julie, who has one of the most beautiful voices he's ever heard, on the piano. Sometimes if he just closes his eyes, he can almost trick himself into thinking he’s alive again, just a regular seventeen-year-old at band practice.
And then there are some days where he feels it like the starkest of reminders.
For example: Willie.
If Alex thought he liked Luke, it is nothing compared to what he feels for Willie. He has never been so attracted to another boy before, so much so that he feels it like a heart attack, and it almost debilitates him: knowing that this is something so close, so precious, that he can never act on. That will just have to remain inside him, forever.
But Willie does not act like he’s afraid. He takes Alex’s hand, takes him to museums and listens when he tells him about his anxiety. Alex has seen it on all of them, this carefulness with how they move, because they have seen death before, but Willie does not move like he’s scared. He skates with a fervour like he’s still got life enough in him, is so fearless with how he acts. Alex doesn’t dare to hope that he likes him back, though as they spend more and more time together, he doesn’t think he’s making up the way Willie always has an excuse to hold his hand, stand close to him.
But he can’t. It’s wrong – isn’t it?
*
“Julie?”
“Mm?”
“Can I ask you something?”
Julie squints up from her homework. She’s lying on her tummy on the floor, her textbooks spread around her like an explosion. She always works likes she lives in a hurricane. It’s a lot more endearing than Alex cares to admit. “Is it about Math?” she says. “Because I’m algebra-ed out.”
“Not about Math,” he says. “About something else.”
“Sure.”
He isn’t sure how to approach this: because in a short time, he has grown to care about Julie. He doesn’t think he could handle it if she reacted like his parents. “What would you say if I... liked a boy?”
He scans her gaze. He is afraid of what he will find.
But she simply says, “I’d say good for you.”
He blinks at her. “That’s all?”
“Did you want confetti?”
“You don’t think it’s... wrong?”
She gives him a look. “It’s 2020, Alex,” she says. “Things have moved on from the 1800s.”
She uses that joke a lot. “1990s, actually.”
“Same thing.”
“Not really.” His mind is spinning. “It’s... really okay?”
Her face softens, a little. “Yeah, Alex. It’s okay. Gay marriage is legal now. You can even adopt, I’m pretty sure.”
He can’t get over how effortlessly she says it: gay marriage. Like it’s so simple. Like it’s not a word that plagued him at night until he couldn’t sleep, a word that was thrown around like it was bad or perverse. Not a word his father would only use at the dinner table to describe people he didn’t approve of.
Alex thinks of Willie, how easily he reaches for him. Like it’s that simple.
And he realises, maybe it is.
*
Alex is seventeen, and he knows three things:
One: he is dead.
Two: he is a little bit in love with another boy.
Three: and that’s okay.