My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt - a short sleeved white tee shirt with a picture of a feather on it; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a columbia ski jacket.
In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on the inconsequential town more than any other place in the United States of America.
It was from this town and its gloomy, omnipresent shade that my mother escaped with me when I was only a few months old. It was in this town that I'd been compelled to spend a month every summer until I was fourteen. That was the year I came out to my parents, and everything had changed; these past three summers, my dad, Charlie, vacationed with me in California for two weeks instead.
It was to Forks that I now exiled myself - an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks. I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city.
"Bee," my mom said to me - the last of a thousand times - before I got on the place. "You don't have to do this."
Everyone says my mom looks a lot like me, except female and with more laugh lines. I felt a spasm of panic as I stared at her wide, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic, hare-brained mother to fend for herself? Of course she had Phil now, so she'd be protected, have food, gas, and someone to talk to, but still...
"I want to go," I lied. I'd always been a bad liar, but I'd been saying this lie so frequently lately that it sounded almost convincing now.
"Tell Charlie I said hi."
"I will."
"I'll see you soon," She insisted. "You can come home whenever you want - I'll come right back as soon as you need me." I could see the sacrifice in her eyes behind the promise.
"Don't worry about me," I urged. "I'm almost a man now. It'll be great. I love you, Mom."
She hugged me tightly for a minute, and then I got on the plane, and she was gone. It's a four-hour flight from Phoenix to Seattle, another hour in a small plane up to Port Angeles, and then an hour drive back down to Forks. Luckily flying doesn't bother me; the hour in the car with Charlie, though, I was worried about.
Charlie had really been fairly nice about the whole coming out thing three years ago. It had genuinely shocked him that his only son turned out to be gay, but he seemed genuinely please that I was coming to live with him for the first time with any degree of permanence. He's already gotten me registered for high school and was going to help me get a car.
But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn't know what there was to say regardless. I knew he was a little confused by me and my decision - like my mother before me, I hadn't made a secret of my distaste for Forks.
When I landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. I didn't see it as an omen - just unavoidable. I'd already said my goodbyes to the sun.
Charlie was waiting for me with the cruiser. This I was expecting, too. Charlie is Police Chief Swan to the good people of Forks. My primary motivation behind buying a car, despite the scarcity of my funds, was that I refused to be driven around town in a car with red and blue lights on top. Nothing slows down traffic like a cop.
Charlie gave me an awkward, one-armed hug when I stumbled my way off the plane.
"It's good to see you, Bee," he said. "You haven't changed much. How's Renee?"
"Mom's fine. It's good to see you, too, Dad." I wasn't allowed to call him Charlie to his face until I turned eighteen.
I only had my suitcase and messenger bag, which I think surprised my Dad. Most of my clothes weren't really suitable for cold weather, so I had my mom keep or donate them, and took what I could with me. My mom and I had pooled our resources to supplement my winter clothes, but it still wasn't much. Luckily, I wasn't a clothes horse.
"I found a good car for you, really cheap," Charlie announced when we were buckled in.
"What kind of car?" I was suspicious of the way he said "good care for you" as opposed to just "good car."
"Well, it's a truck actually, a Chevy."
"Where did you find it?"
"Do you remember Billy Black down as La Push?" La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast.
"No."
"He used to go fishing with us during the summer," Charlie prompted. That would explain why I didn't remember. My dad forced me to do all sorts of 'manly' things before I came out to him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.
"He's in a wheelchair now," Charlie continues when I didn't respond, "so he can't drive anymore, and he offered to sell me his truck cheap."
"What year is it?" I could see from his change of expression that this was the question he was neither hoping or expecting me to ask.
"Well, Billy's done a lot of work on the engine - it's only a few years old, really."
I hoped he didn't think so little of my masculinity as to believe I would give up that easily.
"When did he buy it?"
"He bought it in 1984, I think. "
"Did he buy it new?"
"Well, no. I think it was new in the early sixties - or late fifties at the earliest," he admitted sheepishly.
"Ch-Dad. I don't really know anything about cars. I wouldn't be able to fix it if anything went wrongs, and I couldn't afford a mechanic..."
"Really, Beall, the thing runs great. They don't build them like that anymore."
The thing, I thought to myself... It had possibilities - as a nickname as the very least.
"How cheap is cheap?" After all, that was the part I couldn't compromise on.
"Well, son, I kind of already bought it for you. As a homecoming gift." Charlie peeked sideways at me with a hopeful expression. Wow. Free.
"You didn't need to do that, Dad. I was going to buy myself a car."
"I don't mind. It's a father to son kind of thing. Plus, I want you to be happy here."
He was looking ahead at the road when he said this. Charlie wasn't comfortable with expressing his emotions out loud. I inherited that from him. So i was looking straight ahead as I responded.
"That's really nice, Dad. Thanks. I really appreciate it." No need to add that my being happy in Forks is an impossibility. He didn't need to suffer along with me. And I never looked a gift truck in the mouth - or engine.
"Well, now, you're welcome," he mumbled, embarrassed by my thanks. We exchanged a few more comments on the weather, which was wet, and that was pretty much it for conversation. We stared out the windows in silence.
It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves. It was beautiful, but too green - an alien planet.
Eventually we made it to Charlie's. He still lived in the small, two-bedroom house that he'd bought with my mother in the early days of their marriage. Those were the only kind of days their marriage had - the early ones.
There, parked on the street in front of the house that never changed, was my new - well, new to me - truck. It was a faded red color, with bug, rounded fenders and bulbous cab. To my intense surprise, I actually liked it. I didn't know if it would run, but my fears that it was a manly redneck truck unsuited for my sexuality vanished.
"Wow, Dad, great pick. I love it. Thank you." Now my horrific day tomorrow would be just that much less dreaful. I wouldn't be faced with the choice of either walking to miles int he rain to school or accepting a ride in the Chief's cruiser.
"Glad you like it." Charlie said gruffly, embarrassed again.
It took only one trip to get my few bags upstairs. I got the west bedroom that faced out over the front yard. The room was familiar; it had belonged to me since I was born. The wooden floor, the blue walls, the peaked ceiling, the indigo curtains around the window - these were all apart of my childhood. The only changes Charlie had ever made were switching the crib for bed, adding a desk, and allowing me to put up posters of hollywood males as my tastes changed.
The desk now held a second-hand computer, with the phone line for the modem stapled along the floor to the nearest phone jack. This was a stipulation from my mother, so that we could stay in touch easily. I also noticed with slight distain that my Johnny Depp poster was hanging askew and that the rocking chair from my baby days was still in the corner.
One of the best things about Charlie is he doesn't hover. He left me alone to unpack and get settled, a feat that would have been altogether impossible for my mother.
It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to state dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape. I wasn't in the mood to go on a real crying jag, a rather female habit that had presented itself in my character the last few years. I would save that for later, when the thoughts of the next morning became too horrible.
Forks High School had a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven - now fifty-eight - students; there were more than seven hundred people in my junior class alone back home. All of the kids here had grown up together - their grandparents had been toddlers together. I would be the new kid from the big city, a curiosity, a freak.
Maybe, if I looked like a normal guy from Phoenix should, i could work this to my advantage. But physically, I'd never fit in anywhere. I should be tan, muscled, popular - a football player or wrestler, perhaps - all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.
Instead, I was pall, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been skinny and bony, obviously not an athlete; I didn't have the necessary hand-eye coordination or testosterone to play sports without humiliating myself.
Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through mye yes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain. But the cause didn't matter. All that mattered was the effect.
And tomorrow would be just the beginning.