“I’m kidding. I’m Texan, I was born knowing football. And football is obviously played on a diamond. You’re the tight infielder, right?”
Wes laughed as Justin pretended to toss his hair and smirk. “Football isn’t my thing, but if you’ve ever scored a touchdown, I’m sure my dad loves you.”
Wes chuckled into his beer. The arches of his cheeks were dusted with burgundy. “I’ve scored a few.” He changed the subject, though, suddenly asking Justin about his major and his family. Where he was from.
Justin had been born and raised in a “best places to live” suburb outside Dallas, shuttled to school and camp and Little League by his mom in her SUV. His earliest memories were of hymns sung at church and the Sunday-best shoes that pinched. His childhood was a patchwork quilt of Bible studies, bake sales, and bicycles zooming up and down the block, little kids laughing away the hours under the Texas sun as their moms and dads drank margaritas in their driveways, condensation dripping down the glasses and onto their fingers, so that when one of them checked for bumps and bruises after a spill, their touch was as cold as the bag of frozen peas that would be offered for the boo-boo. He tasted salt and lime in his memories, heard laughter in the background, smelled fresh-baked cookies and cakes and pies. Football played on a TV in the garage. Dads from up and down the block would move from driveway to driveway, peering into car engines and changing tires. Tossing footballs and softballs back and forth. It was a storybook life. Until he turned sixteen.
Until he stopped faking it, stopped pretending he was going to bring home a sweet girl, stopped acting like he was crushing on the cute blonde in the choir loft. He was tired of the questions and the assumptions and, most of all, the pressure, the way his mom and dad looked at him like his life was already planned out, like they already saw him with his Texas bombshell wife and their two-point-five kids. Your future wife is praying to the good lord about you right now, Justin, his mom used to say to him every night. I can’t wait to meet the woman who will make you happy.
His parents always knew he was exceptional. Every finger painting he’d done in kindergarten was put up on the fridge, every macaroni necklace lovingly saved, every glitter ornament for the tree hauled out each year. His Little League photos and school portraits lined the hallway. He was taken to Aspen, Vail, Bermuda, San Diego. Nothing held back.
How were they to know he’d be one of the 10 percent of the population who was gay? He’d always been an overachiever. Exceptional in every way.
One night he sneaked out, took the DART to the gayborhood in downtown Dallas, faked his way into one of the clubs, and made out with every boy he could. He took selfies kissing guys, grinding with them against the dirty club walls and in the bathroom stalls, got an outrageous picture of an older man licking his bare chest as he threw his head back in ecstasy. And he sent them all to his parents.
His father wouldn’t speak to him for three weeks, and his mother burst into tears whenever she saw him. He was grounded for a year—no car, no outings, no going anywhere except school and church—but he didn’t care. He was finally free from their pressure.
His mother almost didn’t let him go to college four hours away. Almost insisted that he live at home and commute to a local campus every day, but he told her he was an adult and he was going, and if she wanted to see him ever again, she would be happy for him. “Of course we’re happy for you,” his mother had said. “We’re proud of you. I’m just so scared.” Scared for his soul, scared for his life. He’d seen the panic pamphlets her pastor had given her: gays and AIDS, the homosexual lifestyle, gays and drugs, gays and disease.
His father, though, surprised him. “You broke her heart when you sent those photos,” he’d said, talking to an engine block in the garage instead of to his son. “Why didn’t you sit her down and look her in the eyes and tell her? She deserved to hear the truth from you like you loved her, not have it thrown in her face like you