The Unbroken Circle

Chapter 7

Chapter 7“If my parents could have been anymore mortifying, I would’ve taken my plate and eaten in my bedroom,” I told Rocco an hour after the table was cleared and everyone wandered to different parts of the house, Rocco and I passing on my mother’s pear Clafouti.

We sat on the front porch with our sodas.

“No worries,” Rocco said. “Your parents are tame compared to mine. Your mom and dad are like the Leave it to Beaver family.”

I laughed. “Maybe on crack,” I said, adding, “I think your parents are more normal than mine.”

“Define normal.” He was defiant.

“As you know, my folks are a cross between Texas Chainsaw m******e and Modern Family. Quirky with a really twisted dark side.”

“I like your parents. They’re cool.”

“My father is humiliating.”

“Nah. He’s harmless.”

“Live with them for a day.” I shook my head and guzzled my soda.

Rocco burped. “Do you think I made a bad impression?”

I dismissed him with a wave. “If anyone made a bad impression tonight, it was my parents, especially my father measuring your muscle mass.”

“I’m not talking about tonight.”

I turned to him in the weak porch light. He had a hard stare, pinched mouth, creased forehead, as if he wanted to keep talking.

My neighbor’s beagle, Booboo, barked a few houses down from us.

“Rocco, what’s up?” I asked.

He sighed and shifted on the steps, drawing his knees up to his chest. “We both come from different places.”

“What do you mean?”

“After I kissed you, I didn’t know what would happen between us.”

“We’re still alive,” I joked. “The world didn’t blow up.”

He slugged down his soda, finished it, and crushed the can in his meaty hands. “My parents would f*****g kill me if they knew I kissed you. If I kissed any guy.” He exhaled, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was on the verge of tears.

I placed my hand on his arm. He recoiled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, noticing the small spot where the bruise had been.

“It’s fine. I’m a little on edge tonight.”

We let our body language do the talking. Rocco unclasped his arms and leaned into me, lowering his head on my shoulder, his warm body curiously comforting.

A minivan circled the cul-de-sac in front of my house twice, the face of the Matheson family staring out the left side of the windows at us: dad in the driver’s seat and his two sons in the backseat. They watched us as if we were wild animals locked behind bars at a zoo.

I ignored them and turned to Rocco.

When the minivan’s red taillights disappeared around the bend, Rocco asked, “Why does life have to be so goddamn complicated? Why do I have to pretend to be someone I don’t want to be? Just for the sake of my parents? For society?” He grunted, frustrated by the reality of being a youth. His next words floored me. “I don’t want to live this way.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” I said.

Rocco sneered. “I double dare you to tell that to my parents.”

I waited until we were quiet. “What are your plans after high school?”

I could tell from his sagged shoulders and slow, steady breathing that he was much calmer and placid in his choice of words. He answered me with a question of his own, instead. “What am I going to do without you?” He paused then added, “The first week away from you will be difficult.”

“We’ll get through it.”

“I feel like I’m walking around in a fog.”

I didn’t know how to ease Rocco’s fears. I knew I would miss him terribly too, but reminding him whenever we’d see each other in the school halls or talking on the phone at night didn’t help either of us. It was going to happen one way or another, regrettably, but it was a decision on many levels. I had to do it.

“It’ll get better,” I told him. “With time.”

He was unresponsive, but our handholding was a step forward. So I thought.

Time passed, and we sat in stillness, listening to traffic on Main Street.

When the time felt right, I asked Rocco again, “Any plans after high school?”

He shrugged, raising an arm over me and pulling me into him. He smelled of citrus and cinnamon and I detected broken fragments of loneliness when he spoke. “Maybe I’ll travel. Get the hell out of this empty town.”

“What about college?”

“Nah. Not now, anyway.”

“There’s still time to figure things out, Roc.”

“My parents will do that for me.”

I felt his shoulders fall under the weight of me; he loosened his grip around me, and I sat up.

“I can’t tell you how to live your life,” I said.

“Especially not now that you’re leaving.” It was a firm jab to the gut.

I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I don’t want to fight.”

“This isn’t a fight.”

“It feels like it.”

“There’s nothing I can say that’ll change your mind to stay here in Milton? Get your Associates degree at the community college? Give us time to be together.”

Two years longer together, the thought sounded divine. I knew Rocco was thinking it too. Then he said, “You could transfer to Lennox after community college.” He saw me staring at him and looked away, into the empty street.

Rocco reached for my hand in the dark and curled it in his, squeezing and interlocking our different sized fingers, his palms dry and calloused.

“Just so you know, you didn’t make a bad impression tonight,” I said, changing the subject.

“I’m leading a double life, Jay. To please my folks, I’m straight in public. For you—for one-night hook ups—I’m gay in private. I don’t want to live like that.”

“So, don’t.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I get kicked out of the house, and my parents disown me.”

“You can come live with me.”

When he smiled, his forehead crumpled and he looked older than his eighteen years. The area around his eyes was darker, as if he hadn’t slept in days, or even weeks.

I hugged him. “If you need to talk to someone, call me.”

“We have two months left to make that happen,” he said, as if he was counting down the weeks and days and hours left on the mental calendar, running through the lost landscape of his desolate thoughts.