all the houses would turn to ash and fall down in piles of clean black powder like sand, and everything that has ever been done could be undone.”
“God, I love you,” Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it’s wrong.
Reader, I fucked him in his car.
* * *
—
Part of the fallout of my conversation with Aunt Deedee was that I had been relocated to the tiny room that had been a walk-in closet on the first floor, and so I no longer had a window into Bunny’s bedroom. I no longer had a window at all. Jason had our old bedroom to himself, which delighted him. Whenever we encountered each other in the house, he would address me as “faggot.” “Good morning, faggot!” he would say. “Would you like some cereal, faggot? There’s milk left.”
I think Aunt Deedee had hoped that the small victory of kicking me out of his room and forcing me into a literal closet (!) would pacify him, and he did seem happy about it, but he did not seem satisfied. A fire does not stop after consuming a single log. I knew he would keep trying to get me out, but all I had to do was get through senior year. I could outlast him. For me, the situation was also a kind of improvement, since I had a new solitude in my tiny room, where I was free to watch porn or makeup tutorials without censure.
In retrospect, it seems clear that I should have had more of a reaction to being treated so uncivilly in my own home, a space where I was supposed to be, at least in theory, safe. But I had never been safe in my own home. Not even as a child. In fact, I had been much more alarmed when my own father commented that he thought one of the bag boys at the Albertsons might be a “poof.” I had no idea what being a poof meant, but I knew it was dangerous. I didn’t immediately associate it with sexuality, at that age, around six or seven, I associated the word with a makeup poof, something soft and pink. Jason calling me a faggot and thinking it was funny or rebellious or interesting to do so was disgusting, yes, but also pathetic and childish. A bit of the moron doth protest too much, methinks. So I would answer him: “Hey, dudebro, why don’t you go drink some ranch and swim with your shirt on?”
“Go suck a cock, homo,” he would say when he saw me getting home from school.
“Your pussy is way too dry to be riding my dick like this,” I would say as I shouldered past him into my room.
And I think my rage felt as good to me as his rage felt to him.
The only place it was tolerable to exist in my house was in my tiny, windowless room, which was fine for studying or sleeping, especially at first, but as the weeks wore on, I found myself spending more and more time at Bunny Lampert’s house, even though I was still finding Bunny extremely hard to take. For one thing, she had begun wearing her mother’s (very large) sapphire engagement ring on her right hand. This, together with her ridiculous new office wear, made her feel elegant, causing her to use her arms and arch her torso in new, oddly artificial ways. Maybe she wouldn’t even finish high school, she said, languorously stretching. Maybe she would get her GED and go to work for her father. Maybe she would marry Coach Eric, who was still coaching her three times a week. It would be nice, she admitted, to play volleyball for the sheer joy of it. She had gotten so narrow in her thinking, focused on the wrong things. “I mean,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “it’s just a game!”
The Coach Eric business was extremely distressing. He had kissed her at the end of one of their practice sessions on the beach. There were several volleyball courts down at the