Boys In Love [Solangelo One-Shots]

Earth Angel

The Solace house is a two-story, white picket affair complete with an immaculate front yard and a tire swing. And it's all for show. I think our whole life is; my mom spends more time worrying about what the neighbors think than anything else.  

She pretends to be friends with all of the other women on the street. They get together once a week for what's meant to be a book club, but I don't think any of them have ever touched a book during the time they set aside. Instead, it's a gossip hour; a space filled with silent competition and insults overlaid with pretty smiles and tittering laughter. My mother always sighs heavily when she closes the door behind them.

I think it must get pretty lonely.

We go to church every Sunday, all eight of us. We sit in a neat row, six kids and a parent on either side, each one of us with our clothes pressed and our hair slicked back, and keep our mouths firmly shut while the minister drawls on about God and the proper family, about commandments. Sometimes it makes me sick.

My father (not my biological one, he ran off a long time ago. I barely remember him) is a businessman. He only ever wears dull colors. Things like beige and white and grey and black. And he smokes a pipe, not because he enjoys it, but because he thinks it makes him look classy. Which might be true, but he's hardly home enough for me to have really decided. And anyway, when he is, he's got his nose so far into a newspaper that I couldn't see even if I really cared to.

Being in that house is suffocating. The air is too thick, filled with synthetic smiles and false pretenses; it makes it hard to breathe. And you're not allowed to touch anything, can barely move for fear of knocking over a vase or putting a ding in the wall. Every single one of us is too scared to death of breaking something to try and have any fun.

I have to get out of there as much as possible.

The best way to do this is picking up as many work hours at the parlor as I can. That, combined with school assures that I spend a minimum amount of time under that roof every week.

In some ways, I'm lucky. If my family wasn't so superficial, they might try and look past my skin. They might not like what they see. Being queer is frowned upon, like leaving dirty dishes in the sink or bringing store-bought brownies to a bake sale.

The word itself says it all. One of the definitions of queer is to spoil or ruin.

I hate that.

I hate that someone slapped that label on me. That they think I'm ruined.

-

I can remember the very first time I heard it, whispered like something dirty, coming from the mouth of a girl in my algebra class. She liked to pop her gum. She smacked it between her bright red lips, narrowed her eyes across the room at him. I hadn't even known his name back then. (Now I do. Nico di Angelo. It's carved into the back of my ribcage. All six syllables of it.)

"He's gay you know," and then she'd snorted disdainfully, "maybe he's not so tough as he'd like us to think."

I'd tuned her out, focused instead on the guy she was sneering at. As if he'd done her the greatest offense by being himself.

He was a greaser, all sleek leather and tough denim. A livid bruise stretched its way across his jaw, the glare on his face was enough to convince anyone that he was dangerous. I'd never met a person who was openly gay before.

A week later, I learned his name from the headlines of one of my dad's newspapers-- the local one, produced in and solely distributed to our town. He'd puffed a cloud of smoke into the air, his lips curling into a snarl in the moments before he spoke. "Damn hooligans. They're going to rip our city apart."