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Late November and Mrs. Munroe has them read Hamlet once again.
Papers rustle, feet shuffle and Mrs. Munroe’s handwriting is big and looping and yet so easy to read. Her red pen squeaks against the plastic of the whiteboard, quick and sharp as she draws a mind map – a constellation of key words and characters in Act V to help them analyze what is going on.
With all the Gravediggers and Ophelia’s corpse.
The soft morning light shining through the window sinks into her skin and flutters through her white hair, almost creating a glare sharp enough to cut retinas and indifference all the same.
Erik squints against the light, too bright in this place.
The seat next to him is still empty.
***
A hand in his, clammy but certain. “Have you ever stargazed?”
“No.”
“Wanna try it?”
“Sure.”
Silence passing in between them – not uncomfortable, but poignant as they climb out the window and onto the roof.
“Do you know any constellations?”
“No.”
“Any stars?”
“The Polaris?”
“See? Maybe Spica too?”
“No. What’s so special about it? Polaris.”
“You don’t know?”
“Don’t patronize me, Charles.”
Fingers squeezing his. “Sorry. I didn’t – well, back in the day sailors used it as we use
compasses now.”
“Finding North?”
“Yes, and finding the way back home.”
He had tightened his hold, twined their fingers as tightly as he dared.
***
Hands, desperate on his sweaty back, scrambling over his shoulders and clinging to his neck for leverage. Thighs were quivering around his hips and permeating the air was a warmth so thick and humid it was impossible to breathe.
July and its never ending blaze brought torture and the pheromones were choking him even as they breathed in sync, carbon dioxide mixing and heating up with every exhale. Twining their fingers together, Erik’s movements stuttered and he couldn’t keep up, the feeling so powerful he could barely breathe, much less think. With toes braced against the footboard, he’d pistoned his hips forward, deeper, panting and lit up like a firework.
A breathy voice in his ear, gasping, “It doesn’t matter – come inside, come inside, come inside, make a baby in me.”
It was nothing but heat talk. He knew it then and he knows it now. It wasn’t something you were supposed to listen to, not ever.
Yet, he’d obeyed. Enthusiastically and with his eyes tightly shut against the feeling Charles awoke in his bones, like a nebula in his marrow had even then been too strong and forceful and so he just couldn’t help it but stay, buried deep with his face hidden in the crook of Charles’ neck as he shuddered through his climax, helpless noises escaping from under his teeth as he clung to Charles like a rock amongst the currents of a tide.
By then, the hands had stroked up his flanks to twine in his hair; holding him up by the roots like reversed anchors in the vacuum of space.
***
Mrs. Munroe asks him to stay behind after class. She promises it won’t take long, yet it feels like he’s walking the green mile up to her desk. The fluorescent lights flicker overhead.
“You’ve been absent lately, Mr. Lehnsherr,” she says.
Her voice is strong. It has always been, ever since he stepped into this room three years ago, rangy and full of rage. It can travel through anything – space and time and ignorance alike.
Erik sticks his hand in his pocket.
“I haven’t skipped class once. I go to tutoring.”
“No, not that.” She shakes her. “I meant mentally.”
He taps his finger at the edge of her desk, meeting her eyes. They are dark and deep. Not like the inevitability of the night sky but rather like a forest lake – blurred rays of light cutting through still, murky water greet you if you dip your head underneath the surface into warm depth of calm.
Floating, there is darkness below but above nothing but the dim blue morning sky shyly scattered with stars.
“Is my grade in danger?”
He doesn’t care. Not really. But it’s the only thing he can say.
“Not yet. However, I want you to read through Act V again and answer these questions,” she hands him a paper, handwritten and filled, “before Tuesday. Just so you’re keeping up.”
The halls outside are filling up with people; boys and girls, omegas, betas and alphas. They are laughing and breathing and screaming with weekend happiness and excitement both.
Erik scratches his arm. He wants to scream.
But it’s all too late for that.
***
Charles.
He doesn’t know why. Only that he does.
A generous red lipped mouth with an accent too smooth for this rocky place. An astronaut on a mission in an alien galaxy so far from home. All of it had set him apart from the beginning – sitting huddled on the bleachers during baseball practice with the blonde bombshell of a beta as his only company.
Shining, shimmering and shunned.
Erik had noticed him, as March turned to April and the sun came closer.
Charles did too. Had come almost too close with his shine and Erik couldn’t help it when it so happened that those light fingertips could read the constellations in braille under his skin, understand the anger lingering there and realize it had to be opened up lest Erik blow up again and again and again, until he went up like a supernova – leaving nothing but darkness in his wake.
So, in the end, it wasn’t too much. It wasn’t a curse, just a prayer sent to forgotten gods and cold deaf stars. A prayer sent to the heavens above them, nothing more and nothing less.
Never mind the carnal altar. It was a benediction.
Charles always was.
***
A phone call at three am, three months ago:
“I don’t know how! I don’t – it wasn’t even real, we took precautions and it shouldn’t have happened!”
Another kind of desperation this time. A hulking, sobbing kind that had Erik up and out of his bed in a moment; had him racing down the streets on his bike through thick sheets of August rain and climbing up the sharp bark of the aspen tree placed so conveniently before he could even conjure up the will to question why he’d done it all.
A climb, a few cuts and a pebble to a glass pane later, Charles had opened the window, his face pale as milk in contrast to the darkness behind him. His morning sky eyes had been wide like saucers and he’d looked so haunted Erik could see the swirls of unaired gasps in the galaxy of freckles sprayed over his nose.
His hand had shot out, laced around Erik’s wrist like a vise and pulled him forward. Away from Earth and into his world – into the room filled with books by Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, star charts, telescopes and a door locked from the outside.
They’d lied down on Charles ruffled bed, mobile of planets spinning overhead. They’d talked.
About Consequences.
It happened. In some cases the stars aligned, created happy accidents and smiles. This couldn’t have been further from it if it was out of the Milky Way.
***
He couldn’t tell anyone. Not his parents, and God forbid, certainly not Charles’.
He couldn’t write it in the margin of his English journal. Mrs. Munroe wouldn’t have liked that very much. She wasn’t a counselor after all.
Sometimes, now, he wonders if she really would have cared. He didn’t know about the murky warmth then, didn’t think there was anyone who would let him unhinge his jaw and let it all out. What would have happened had he let the words crawl out from under the roots of his teeth; trickle small creeks of letters out of his ears and drip quiet pauses from his lips.
Maybe she could have saved them all. But he hadn’t known, so he hadn’t asked.
Instead, he’d listened to her go through Romeo and Juliet once more, that September afternoon. He had asked her, when the rest of the students had filed out, during tutoring, why they had killed themselves for no reason.
Nobody had dared to ask that. At the end of the day, it was the universal love story and they were star-crossed lovers.
Whatever the hell that meant.
“They killed themselves for love, Erik. That’s a reason. You’ll understand, soon enough.”
He’d thought about it afterwards, lying in bed and tracing the bruise Charles had left around his wrist.
To die for one another. The utter act of self-sacrifice, the utter act of love.
Love. It felt so far away, like it was detached from him and the same time not. Like a concept explained to him from a distance or in a foreign language – he could string the words together like stars, puzzle them together into asterisms of his understanding, but the meaning, the true meaning of the constellation would forever pass him by.
Desire though. That he could grasp.
A feeling so powerful he couldn’t back out, couldn’t stop, just couldn’t help it when the pull of gravity outweighed his body and ripped it from its orbit around some celestial body he hadn’t dared to touch up until that moment it all broke and ended with a breathy, humid whimper against his neck.
Still. Not an excuse.
The maple outside the window lets a leaf fall into the quiet night.
***
Arms around his waist, Charles’ nose pressed into his back. The first hints of April’s warmth ruffled through their hairs as they rushed down the slope towards the for the weekend empty school grounds. Rushed passed the high school and the baseball field, wheels spinning wildly against the still damp asphalt.
Against his spine, Erik felt the heat of Charles cheek through the fabric of his jacket.
The wet sand of the playground crunched under their feet and Charles sat down on one of the deserted swings. Erik leant against one of the support beams, studying Charles’ face. Freckles and stars, morning dew in his eyes and how he looked at Erik like he was light.
All that, and the shy curl of Charles’ split lip.
“I want to kill him,” Erik said, serious as Charles started to swing, childlike glee shining as he swung higher and higher towards the overcast sky shielding the sun.
“I know.”
“Then let me.”
“And lose you?”
He never stopped swinging and the black hole in Erik’s stomach pulled.
“I wouldn’t get caught.”
“But if you were, even further down the road, what would you do?”
“The laws may change.”
“Not about murder – it’s a Christian commandment. They don’t change those.”
Charles swung even higher, the chains snapping and rattling, straining with the force of his swings.
Erik watched him until the smile sunk back into Charles’ face and the cut grew into a chasm. Only then did he reach out his hand.
“Come on.”
Without a beat, Charles let go of his hold of the chains and jumped – flying through the air, defying laws of gravity – before he crashed into the sand, toppling to his side and falling down, laughing. Erik pulled him to his feet and into his arms.
Breathing him in.
“Where will we go?”
“Home.”
***
Another phone call two months ago:
“I know what I said, but I just – I can’t, okay? Anyone else, and I would’ve, I swear. But I – it’s yours, Erik. I just – I know, but – I just can’t.”
“It’s your decision.”
Another sob through the receiver. “Would you want me to?”
No, oh God no. It was so selfish, but it was, ultimately, the truth.
He’d thought about morning eyes and laughter, empathy and galaxies and smiles warm enough to melt through the ice of Europa. Thought about his own anger, judging and uncompromising, the black hole in his stomach.
Thought about the middle ground.
“It’s your decision. I’ll stand by you either way, you know that.”
Silence. “Will you come over?”
Another poste-haste ride through the rain – no stars in the sky, but he felt their chill in his lungs nonetheless.
***
He hadn’t known what to do. What to say. What to hide, what to show and what not to do.
In the end, he’d done nothing. Just kept everything shut as tightly as he could. Barricaded the door with lies and evasions, said nothing until they couldn’t keep it inside any longer. Until the winds broke through and the hurricane swept in, swept them off of the floor and left every piece of their shelter in ruins like an upturned snow globe.
Debris and gossip littered the street under the cold star-scattered sky.
He’d stayed in the carcass, hiding while Charles was ripped from his hands, dragged out by the scruff of his neck.
Shouting at him to stay quiet, hidden, lest he’d be killed.
Erik wished, more than ever, that he’d screamed then.
***
Mrs. Munroe shuffles the papers on her desk into a pile before she looks up at him again. Her mouth is soft, down turned slightly. Erik swallows.
“Mr. Lehnsherr, were you close to Charles?” she says, slow, and her eyes stray from his white-knuckled fists to the empty seat beside him.
Erik wonders if he should lie. Let it slip away, and dig the words even deeper down in the soft, bloody flesh under his teeth. But he also knows that the looks they shared during class maybe weren’t so subtle, and realizes that he can’t.
“Yeah.”
Her murky warm eyes rivet on him and he knows, in that instant, that she can see it all, maybe has all along. Can see through his skin to the universe underneath – see the traces of the whorls of Charles’ fingerprints all over his body, all the small sparks they left in their wake, the pending plosion that has yet to decide if it’s ex or im.
“Was it you, Erik?”
He’s trembling. The knotholes in the wood of her desk looks like galaxy swirls.
“Yes. It was.”
***
Preeclampsia, they’d said.
God no, he’d thought.
He’d held Charles’ hand too tight, Jupiter storm raging outside and within. The fingers in his had been so cold and small and white against his even in November tanned skin – baseball camp in the blaze of July had made sure of that.
Erik had stayed and watched as day turned to night. The black hole trying to suck away all the light. Charles body had looked too brittle in the white gown, under the harsh lights, in the sterile bed with his closed eyes, skin bruised black under them.
Those broken blood vessels had been the only darkness in the whole room and it hadn’t been near enough to let Charles shine.
Not even the slightest shimmer.
***
Fall is dying. Maples and aspens are still, but barely, shimmering on the other side of the baseball field. They filter light through their nearly bare branches, leaves it red, brown and gold.
No white in sight.
The gravel underfoot smells of preparation and sleep, but above it, the air is sharp and clear like crystal. Some might say it’s a shame to pollute it with smoke. Erik figures his lungs are already blackened, so it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter to coach Logan either. Serial smoker as he is, he lets Erik keep his almost burnt out cigarette butt between his teeth for all of practice. It’s the end of the season, anyways, and as the pre-winter chill nags at his teeth, Erik lazily swings the bat at the balls hurled towards him. He hits them often enough and the thuds of the hits match his heartbeats.
Sometimes, like every player, he misses. Those times, when the net behind him catches the ball and the impact makes the metal shake, Erik swears he can feel it in his bones, like a tremor in the marrow, a needle’s scratch on a vinyl in the emptiness of space.
Vibrations of discomfort so great, they could be mistaken for desire.
He misses the next shot because he lets the bat fall to the ground, lifeless. The bleachers are empty.
Above him, the sky is clear, but the sun is further away than it has ever been.
***
Erik had stayed until they told him to leave. Only family after hours.
So he’d slept in one of the waiting room chairs that night. The light had been so unforgiving and he’d missed the night, but he’ll never forget it. He got permanent damage on the nerves in his neck after slumping in the chair.
His mother still has troubles working the knots out, whenever he lets her touch. Every time he lets her, he relives it all.
Not that he will ever forget that night.
Or the morning. Or the nurse nudging him awake.
Telling him it was all for nothing.
***
For as long as he lives, there will never be nothing but ever ending darkness, cold and vacuum in space and sound can’t travel, but still Erik believes that it does. Because even now, the constellations are a scratch under his skin that he can’t quite reach, like a caged shout of pain in the weird form of pleasure and if he were to let it out, it would be so loud, it’d reach right through the void of night and the void of light.
If he were to let it out, it would scratch its way all the way to Spica.