Mush has been planning this for weeks. He has planned out every word to say, and even how to take any punch his best friend might throw at him. He has tried to comfort himself with the fact that he takes bigger risks than this all the time with the boys he approaches late at night every month or so after walking to the bawdy house with the rest of the newsies, then leaving through the back door. But he realizes that it doesn't matter; when he sees Kid Blink walking towards him from the stairway in the lodging house bedroom, his stomach cramps.
Kid Blink is completely oblivious. He walks towards his best friend with his mind in other places, thinking about his extraordinary success selling papers today and what to spend his extra ten pennies on. He is thinking about all of the extra food he could buy—he could even take Mush with him to Tibby's and treat him to something. Mush, in Blink's opinion, had seemed on edge for the past few weeks. It would be a friendly gesture.
But now Kid Blink is reaching Mush, and Mush knows he won't ever say it if he doesn't say it now. So he does.
"Kid, I need to talk to you about something." His voice sounds a little tighter than usual, and he can feel his heart trying to beat down the walls of his chest and run.
Kid Blink isn't walking anywhere anymore, just standing in front of his friend and watching him potentially destroy the closest thing he's had to a relationship. He says, "Okay." He is carrying an apple that he bought nearly an hour ago and hasn't eaten yet, so he polishes it on the front of his shirt and bites in.
"I'm a—I like… I don't like girls the way you do." Those aren't the words Mush had planned to use, but they seem so much easier, so much more agreeable. I don't like girls is a lot easier to swallow than I like boys. He looks at Kid Blink, who has screwed up his eye a little bit and is still chewing the first bite he took from the apple, even though it is probably nothing but mush by now.
"So the girls you tell me about," Blink finally said. "Are they… fake?"
Mush folds his arms around himself, clutching his sides and trying to breathe at a regular pace. "No, they're not fake." Kid Blink will like you either way. He's a good boy. But Mush can't know that for sure. It isn't a normal thing, what he is. Mush knows that. He isn't normal. He knows that. "They're boys."
Kid Blink swallows his apple and thinks about that a little, slowly making connections that should have been obvious but seem very foreign to him. Mush is sweating, and the world seems to slow down as Blink opens his mouth to speak again. That sentence takes so long to reach Mush's ears that he thinks he might expire. "So you, uh, screw them?"
"Yeah."
Kid Blink takes another bite of his apple. He doesn't really know what to think about this—in fact, he doesn't really know much about boys being, you know, together. No boy has ever told him he was a sodomite before. He knows all about fairies and punks and things like that, but he had never met one. He doesn't know anything about it except in an abstract sense.
Mush braces himself now, mentally and physically. It has to happen. For all that Mush is ready to tell his closest friend his secret, and as much as he trusts him—more than trusts him, even—he doesn't think anyone would take that news well. It wasn't that long ago that it was illegal, Mush knows. But, then, he and Blink are only sixteen years old. It hadn't been that recently. In the probably short pause before Blink's reaction, Mush feels a sudden glimmer of hope that maybe Blink doesn't even know about the stigma against this strange perversion of his.
Then, altogether too late and too soon, the moment is there. Mush sees it all in slow motion, and feels all of the air leave New York.
Kid Blink is moving towards him, at first slowly, and suddenly very quickly. Is the sky falling? His hand is coming towards Mush's face, and it doesn't look like he's going in for a punch. Mush sees Blink's jaw twitching, and he sees a severely focused eye. He closes his own eyes, because sometimes injuries didn't hurt until he saw them. Before he can turn his face away, though, Mush feels Blink's fingers rubbing against his neck. They're rough, hot, and a little bit sticky, and Mush doesn't expect the touch to sear him, so his eyes jolt open. To his surprise, he sees lips in front of his face, not a fist, and he realizes he can feel his friend's breath on his nose.
Mush can't deny that he almost expects a kiss at this point, and he parts his lips a little, watching Blink's tongue nip out for a moment to wet his lower lip. But now he realizes that Blink's fingers weren't stopping, and he is tripping over himself to run backwards as Blink pushes his neck a few feet across the room and into the wall. The edge of a beam crunches into the back of Mush's neck and he can't feel his arm for a moment. He grunts as his body collapses against the wall, too, and he goes a little limp, pinned to the wall by Blink's hand around his neck. His breath rasps quietly.
"I'm not friends with a fairy," Blink says. His voice is deep and quiet, but he speaks steadily and clearly. Mush looks at the ceiling. "I'm not friends with a fucking sodomite." There is a sock in a rafter above Skittery's bed, Mush notices. He tries not to listen to Blink's tense voice. After all, he had known it was coming. "The guy I'm friends with is just another newsie. He's not a freak. He's normal. He doesn't try to… be with boys." The ceiling is getting blurry, but Mush knows that normal boys don't cry, so he shuts his eyes and tries to clear his mind. But Blink's words still pound in his head: "If you can find that guy in you again, then I'm your friend. If not—if you're the way you say you are… well, I don't think I'm okay with that."
He pauses, and Mush takes this moment to ask, "You're not going to punch me?"
"If the normal Mush is still in there, I don't want to hurt him," Blink says, loosening the hand on Mush's throat a little. He seems about to back off, but suddenly his hand is several inches lower, pushing against Mush's sternum and ramming him back against the wall. "But if you get a hard-on next time you see me naked, I will hurt you."
"Don't tell any of the boys, Kid. I don't even want to think about what Jack would do to me."
Blink gives a short laugh and removed his hand entirely. Mush almost instinctively reaches out to bring the hand back, because he suddenly doesn't want to stand up on his own. "It's not Jack I'd worry about. He wouldn't care. You have to watch out for—"
"Don't bother. I'm not going to tell anybody. Do you know… is anybody else like me?
This isn't a line of conversation Kid Blink wants to follow. The thought of two boys together makes him uncomfortable and makes his brain feel like it's overheating. He just doesn't want anything to do with it. So he twitches his shoulders in what should have been a shrug and says, "I'm pretty sure Bumlets has had some men. But I don't want to talk about this. And I don't want to talk to you unless you can bring back the Mush I was friends with. And I never want to hear about these girls you meet again."
There's nothing for Mush to say to that, so he looks back at the ceiling for a moment, back at that sock by Skittery's bed—that fucking sock! He wants it to disappear—and continues standing against the wall as Kid Blink walks away. And when he reaches the doorway he had walked in only a few minutes ago, Blink finds himself stopped short by a sick curiosity.
"Mush?"
"Yeah?" Mush is pretty sure that, whatever it was Blink is about to say, he doesn't want to hear it. It will probably hurt. But he looks straight at Blink's face, certain he will never see it unguarded again.
"Where does it go?"
Oh, god. "You don't want to know, Kid."
"But I think I do. And I feel like everyone else already knows this, and once I leave this room I'm never bringing this up again, so I have to ask now. Tell me." Blink's eye stares hard at Mush, so he tries to shove away lingering feelings of desperate secrecy and he tries not to blush as he answers.
"In the ass."
Kid Blink's eye rolls to the ceiling and he says, "Ahh. You're right. I did not want to know that." And he leaves.
As his best friend leaves the room, Mush is standing against the far wall of the lodging house bedroom. But it's only a few seconds until he's lying on the floor, and it's only a few seconds until Blink is standing in the street with no best friend and a pocketful of extra pennies, and neither of them knows what to do now.