Inside Out & Backwards

Inside Out & Backwards

            Sometimes when you look really, really hard for something, you never find it. Or it just takes a while longer than you’d like-sometimes a lot longer.

Ronan Avrilly was looking for something, though he wasn’t entirely sure what it was. When your heart was as messed up as his, not knowing what you really wanted was a struggle no longer unknown. For a long time he pretended he wanted girls; any girl he could get his callused hands on. For an even longer time he pushed away what he really wanted, what truly made his heart pound.

Not girls. Never girls.

Guys. Men.

Something he could never have in his prejudiced little suburbia, where girls like boys and boys like girls. There was nothing else to it.

How long had Ronan known he was different?

Queer?

Faerie?

Fag homo freak of nature abnormal tilted wrong?

As long as you know the colour of your skin, the smell of popsicles melting in the hot summer sun; the harsh tone of your mother’s voice. He’d knows as long as someone knows their own name, or that dirt isn’t supposed to go into your mouth but sometimes it just happens.

As long as girls started wearing bikinis and your friends drool and admire their straight little hearts out while you sneak glances at the ripple of their abdomen as they laugh, lies pouring from your lips. Like poison dripping from the apple, painting a mask that will never fit.

Middle school had been bearable-barely. High school had been hell. It took a lot of energy to pretend to be something you weren’t, especially when the thought of even kissing a girl makes you want to gag. Or take a knee in the groin. Or both.

But they lying had been what really ate Ronan up. Lying about liking how the girls rolled the skirts of their uniforms up, when what really got your blood pumping was the way boys’ arms flexed beneath their white collared shirt. How the sweat trickled down their necks and into their gym shirts-

Ronan shook his head slightly, letting the tortured memory slip back into the place he kept them, in a dark corner behind a door with a dozen dead bolts. He rarely went behind that door, only when his mind was tired, slowly tuning into the station bustle surrounding him. It was something Ronan had to control, or he would start floating away anywhere-somewhere more dangerous than Union Station.

Blinking, Ronan waited for his eyes to adjust to the bright lights of the station; the nose trickled back slowly, suddenly louder than his pounding heart. He didn’t know why-he was in a safe place, where no one knew what his heart sought-but whenever he opened that door…plucked a memory delicately between his finger and thumb….it all came back…the darkness, how their eyes shone in the shadows…

“Let’s set this queer straight, eh boys?” Jenks asked, sneering at the trembling ninth grader, his eyes wide like the moon that had not shown up to guide their way.

“Please…” the boy begged, backing up against a tree “Please don’t, I swear…I swear I’m not gay…please…”

The first hit was swung. Ronan wanted to be sick.

Then another. And another.

Again. Again. Again.

“Come on Avrilly!” Anderson said, his eyes questioning; questioning Ronan’s loyalty, his manhood.