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CHAPTER FOUR

THEY WON'T ANSWER. It's been almost a week since that night and they still won't answer my calls. I need to talk to them. I can't just leave everything unsaid with my two closest friends. I call Brogan—again. Straight to voicemail—again. I call Base—again. Straight to voicemail—again. It's driving me insane—they won't text back—they won't answer my calls—they won't return my voicemails. They won't let me say what I need to say to them. They're not even giving me a chance—I shudder to think that this is how they'd treat me even if I wasn't gay and I just needed to set the record straight—literally. But no, I am gay. I won't deny it anymore. I'm past that—right?

There's a kind of emptiness that now lives inside my chest. What makes it all so much worse is that today is Friday—I've never known that a simple day of the week could hurt so much. That emptiness—the loneliness—hits me so much harder because we've always gone horse-back riding every Friday for almost as long as I've known them—afterwards, we'd always get donuts from our favorite bakery, and then hang out to watch a movie or play video games—our private, friendship ritual, just between the three of us. I can't believe it's all just over now.

I glance at my phone, missing the constant hum of new message alerts that I'm normally accustomed to receiving. Instead, I'm left alone in the silence and in the dark, facing withdrawal like a heroin addict without a drug dealer. Well, I do still have one friend left, Jordan, but he's always busy with work since he has two full-time jobs and occasionally does odd jobs on his days off.

Left with no choice, I find myself on Instagram, because I don't think I have the courage to show up on either Brogan's or Base's doorsteps, unannounced, or at least, not just yet. I feel like some sort of stalker as I check their pages. Surprisingly, I'm still able to see everything—I was half expecting them to have blocked me by now. As I scroll through, oddly, nothing looks different. Nothing seems to have been changed at all, until I realize what's missing—there is no longer a single picture with me in it on either of their pages. How long did that take for them to go through every single photo and delete all the ones that had me in it?

I head over to their Facebook pages. Same story. All gone. I know why they didn't block me—they wanted me to see it. They're sending me a message—that this is what happens when you betray the popular group's trust. They banish you onto the other side of their wall of stone and glass—you can peek in, but they'll always be safe from having to deal with you. They want you to be jealous of the view and of all the cool things going on inside. Make you wish you were there. Make you long to be inside the light, but no, you'll never be allowed inside. Now, your on your own. Now, your out in the mud. Now, you reside within the darkness of nobody-land, where everybody else is forced to live outside the protection of their walls and the comfort of their friendship.

Going through their posts, hoping to find some remnant of my existence, I happen on one from Brogan that flares my fury. It's an older post that clearly says that he proudly supports Pride and the LGBT community, and again, scrolling further, an even older post supporting marriage equality rights. Of all the things that he bothered to delete, it downright irks me that he left these. It's absolute hypocrisy. Supports LGBT? Supports? Where is the support? How does he pretend to support the LGBT community, when he ignores any person whom he knows to be a part of the community? When he doesn't have a single friend who identifies as part of the community? When he throws me, his closest friend, to the curb right after I've been outed? How is that supporting the community? Then it hits me—it's all just a show. It's fake. It's all to maintain the image of being supportive without having to actually give support in real life. It's all for the sake of popularity—it's an insidious manipulation designed to gain and maintain popular support for their group.