Chapter Text
William Ortega had not been born with his name. Rather, he had chosen it - a mash of people he had once known, a representation of what his life had been. Not that his life had been in past-tense at the time he had chosen the name.
No, Wilie had been born with a different name - a mash of German and Korean and Japanese; a mess to anyone’s ears except his family. He had never loathed his name, necessarily, but neither had he liked it. It was more that it was a representation of all the things he could never be in completion - a mishmash of cultures, his parents pride in their background in the face of adversary creating his fear of schoolyard playgrounds and walking alone down the street.
Maybe it was because his parents didn’t talk about their past that he began to hate it. Willie didn’t know much, himself. They were born in Canada, his mother the child of immigrants and his father a Canadian-German. When the war started they were shuffled off to an internment camp where they met in the face of discrimination and poverty and fell in love.
Or so the story goes.
His parents didn’t leave Ottawa. After the war was finished and they were released, they put down roots by having Willie. And then his brother, and then his sister.
It was possible that Willie’s childhood days were better than he remembered - maybe it was the twist of grief of a short life marked with loss that had tainted what he looked back on, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. It had its moments, of course - saving up for his first skateboard, skating around the streets of downtown Ottawa with his brother in the early eighties, through the courtyard of parliament more often than they ever should have, running from the police and spraypainting buildings because fuck this country that bound them, that made their mother wake in the night screaming, that made their father care more about the pub than his children. It was like shades of grey with flashes of colour, really, but it had all fallen apart some boring afternoon when he was fifteen.
Willie had been pretty sure he liked boys since the fifth grade, when Tara Wilson had told him she wanted to be his girlfriend and he had told her she was too pretty. It hadn’t been one of his finest moments, but it was an important one. Because he was supposed to like girls who were pretty but he couldn’t stop thinking of Bob Johnson who was in the sixth grade and was cool and his parents let him grow his hair long and Willie had seen him one day and thought - that. That’s the kind of pretty that I want .
But it wasn’t until tenth grade when he found himself behind the school, cornered against the wall by the very same Bob Johnson and hidden from the view of the yard by some large dumpsters that he realized, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, that it meant catastrophe.
Bob was leaning in towards him, a hand planted beside Willie’s head on the wall and his hair wasn’t long anymore but Willie still thought he was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. And then he had kissed Willie, just a small brush of the lips and smiled this gentle smile and it was the first time anyone had looked at Willie like that, he thought. And that was terrible, because it was the eighties and Willie was a mixed race kid who lived in the middle of downtown Ottawa which meant, essentially, that he couldn’t be gay.
But Bob kept looking at him like that, in passing glances in the halls, in that spot behind the school, at the skatepark that Willie had begun taking him to. For five months it had felt too good to be true. Apparently, that’s because it was.
The day that Willie came home to see a suitcase on the porch, he was hardly surprised. There was a note from his sister with it, apologizing, saying it was all she could pack for Willie without their parents finding out. But it had his passport and a huge wad of cash that he was pretty sure she had stolen from his dad’s pub stash, so it wasn’t the worst.
He went to Bob first, who else could he ask?
“You can’t stay here,” Bob had said when he answered the door. Willie had expected it - you couldn’t just be gay and fifteen in the eighties and expect your secret boyfriend’s parents to take you in. He wasn’t sad, really, just resigned. But he did take in those last moments - Bob with his rumpled hair, the crinkle at the corner of his eyes when Willie made a joke, his bare feet and his shorts and his Aerosmith shirt. That last look carried Willie away to the Greyhound station where he spent the night.
He wasn’t thinking, really, when he bought his ticket. He had some vague idea that New York was where people like him belonged - the troublemakers, the lost kids, the ones that wanted change because, hell, what else did he have to live for?