I became friends with Gerard Way after I accidentally ran him over with my bike. Never a particularly observant guy, it was any other Wednesday for me. I sped down the street, wind rushing through me, and all of a sudden I wasn't pedaling anymore. I had crashed into something tangible- a person. A shrieking, beyond-irritated human greaseball.
"Jesus!" came the agitated yell, accompanied by a hard thud against the pavement. "Watch where you're fucking going!"
My bike fell out from under me as I scrambled to help pick up the boy I had so cluelessly knocked over. He batted me away as soon as I got near him, snapping, "trust me, Pippy Longstockings, you've done enough!" I reeled back momentarily at the name he had called me, self-consciously reaching up to my short auburn hair. Really, besides the color, the name didn't even make sense.
Gerard, at thirteen, was a spitting image of who he would be at eighteen, except with more pudge and less hair. On the ground in his black on black on black clothing, contrasted dramatically by my brightly striped sweatshirt, he groaned. He had a clunky pair of headphones around his neck, connected to something-a Walkman, probably- in his pocket. He really was making a show of his pain- he told me later that it didn't even hurt too much and that he had hemmed and hawed mostly to make me feel shittier about the accident.
"Please, let me help you up," I pleaded meekly, offering him my hand. He glared at it but, shockingly enough, grabbed it with his own clammy hand. I heaved him up to a standing position and playfully dusted off his shoulder, chuckling. He remained stoic and unamused, but didn't make a move to storm away from me like I thought he would. I took this chance to hastily introduce myself. "I'm Kai."
He just stared at me in response, and I could tell he was trying desperately to figure out what action to take. Punch me as pay back, swallow his pride and tell me his name, or release his hand from mine (because he hadn't let go yet). He ended up deciding to do a winning combination of the three, punching me fairly hard in the face with the hand that had been previously grasping mine. As he threw the blow, he yelled, "And I'm Gerard, asshole!"
After he exacted his revenge on me, Gerard asked me over to his house. "Now that we're even," he had said, grinning at me, "we should be friends." I couldn't refuse. Through his curtain of black hair, his hazel eyes glowed with sincerity. And... I had been kind of scared that he would punch me again if I had said no.
He introduced me to his brother, Mikey, and his grandmother, Elena, both of whom, upon meeting me, glanced at Gerard in two completely different ways. His brother: confused. His grandmother: amused. I saw both, and didn't know what either of them had entailed.
Two years later we entered high school together as polar opposites. He hadn't altered his black wardrobe, and my own colorful closet had only amplified over time. I raised my hand in greeting to every new face, he avoided the new and the old people altogether, with his hands buried deep in his pockets like corpses in grave.
Sometimes I entertained the theory that Gerard only kept me around in order to keep the bullies at bay. When I was there, no one was cruel to him. But he admitted, at first rarely and then in torrential floods, that when I was gone to the bathroom, people would start their hooting and hollering. When I was absent in class, some jerk would take my seat next to him and mess with the stuff on his desk. When I glanced away, people would make faces at him.
I asked "who?" every time but he refused to tell, his fear claiming the reigns in determination to keep him in his miserable state of mind.
More than a couple of times we found ourselves in his basement, him crying and me holding him against my chest, my face in his hair, rocking him back and forth. No amount of reassurance could stop him from continuously hiccuping into my shirt. The only way he could stop was by falling asleep- he just had to peter out into exhaustion. It happened suddenly every time; he would abruptly slump against my body, fizzled out like an old lightbulb.
Now, things are looking up for both of us. Gerard made a complete 180 flip during our junior year, adopting an attitude much like mine while still maintaining certain aspects of his personality, like his dark wardrobe and generally quiet demeanor. Now, he can draw in public without flinching away from any movement around him.
The last day of high school, Gerard seemed full of this overly eager energy. Throughout the day he was giggling, as if planning something incredible in his head. Around lunchtime, I smiled at him and dared to ask, "what are you scheming, exactly?" It was like breaking open a dam that held back an entire ocean.
"Okay- so- there's this convention in California- for artists and stuff- it's kind of like a lowkey ComicCon-super cheap, fucking awesome," he said in one breath, not breaking eye contact with me the entire time. "And I was thinking that- if grandma lets me use the car, that is- but we would find a way anyway-I'm getting ahead of myself sorry... I was thinking that..." he broke his gaze with me and stared at the ground, as if gathering his rapid thoughts. Suddenly, he grabbed me by the shoulders and, beaming at me, shouted, "I was thinking we would drive to California for the convention!"
I blinked at him, taken aback by his show of excitement. I was somehow still used to the Gerard that punched me in the face when we were thirteen, full of angst, a wall drawn between him and the entire world, except me. That version of him had lasted so long prior to when he finally opened up to the world. Although I was his best friend of five years, I still speculated his great change. More than once I suspected it was because of someone he had met near the same time, a small, hyper guy named Frank, who had gradually become our third appendage over the course of the year.
"I—uh, yeah, dude, of course we can do that!" I responded, laughing. His eyes filled up with light and he lunged at me, enveloping me in a hug. He whispered, "thank you, thank you," over and over into my hair, resting just a beat too long in our embrace. I gently nudged him away and continued laughing to make my action seem casual. "When is it? When are we leaving?"
"Tomorrow!" Gerard was bursting with excitement, throwing his arms out in a grand gesture of happiness. "Frank said he could drive for most of the trip, so you won't have to worry about it 'cause I'll cover the rest," he reassured me, doting on my anxiety.
I blinked incredulously at him for a moment, taking it in. This giant, cross-country trip to go to a smaller version of ComicCon. Tomorrow. "I- I mean, that's pretty... near," I said in an unintentional murmur. Gerard's smile faltered slightly, the sparkle in his eyes dimming. "I'll go!" I immediately continued, in order to keep him from wilting. "It's just a shock, you know? But... damn, we're gonna drive across the country!" I grinned at him and reached out to touch his shoulder. "With Frank!" I added as an afterthought.
I suspected since the moment I ran into him on my bike that I was in love with Gerard. Even when he punched me.
The night he introduced me to his bedroom in the basement, I marveled at his posters boasting our similar interests and the easel in the corner displaying an unfinished, but awesome, painting. My eyes had softened on his bed with its perpetually tangled-up sheets and haphazard placement of pillows. My hands ran across every tattered book on his shelves. The tumultuous state of his space, every balled up piece of paper on the floor and every unclean dinner plate and every half-melted candle, ran though me like a lightning bolt. I had more adoration for the physical mayhem of his life than the organization of anything else in the world.
That night, he caught my looks of wonderment and snorted. "You're weird."
"Yeah," I had said absentmindedly, "I guess I am." I crossed the room like a zombie and sat on the edge of his bed, focusing on my hands in order to sway suspicions. He stared at me from his place in the center of the room for a second before hesitantly joining me. As he sunk into the mattress beside me, his leg rested against mine and I felt it-zing!- a momentary shockwave between us.
"You draw?" I inquired after a moment of silence, gesturing toward his desk, where at least five fat sketchbooks sat stacked upon one another. He nodded, smiling vaguely.
"My grandmother got me into it when I was younger. If she hadn't, I probably would've steered clear of it now." His glance over at me after that was what caused me to shift slightly away from him. He didn't notice because he was still talking- about his favorite comics, his unfinished pieces, the stigma he faced as an artist. But I had been too scared to fully listen.
After a couple months, the overwhelming feelings waned and I was able to build a friendship with Gerard. I routinely went to his house to play videogames with him and Mikey, or to talk art with him in his bedroom. But the first time he came to me sobbing into his hands, the feelings instantly rushed back into me like they had never left in the first place.
It was some day in the middle of August, the summer after our first year of high school. He stood on my porch and knocked feebly on the front door at 11 PM- when I opened it, he fell into me and started trembling. I led him to my bedroom and instructed him to sit on my bed, shutting the door.
"Do you need anything?" I asked first, because using, "what's wrong?" instead would inevitably open the flood gates and lock me there immediately. I wanted to comfort him first, with a cup of water or a snack or something. However, he just shook his head quickly and looked at me with desperate red eyes.
"Please," he whispered, his speech garbled a little by his tears, "please just sit with me."
His display of such vulnerability and humanity broke me. Seeing him like that hurt me, making my chest ache. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulder, pushing his head gently against my neck. Upon my action, he split in two, his sadness growing damp against my shirt.
"What's wrong, G?" I whispered as quietly as I could after a couple minutes of allowing him to cry.
"Everything, everything is shit," he said, in that all-encompassing, angsty teenage way of expressing pain. "Everything is wrong, everyone is wrong." I heard him sniff pitifully against me before pulling his head away, looking into my eyes. My insides burst into flames. "Except you."
If I said there had been no incident after that, I would be lying through my teeth. Gerard and I were never really popular in the dating department. I knew I was gay, I was actually out about it, and almost every guy at our school repulsed me. I just wasn't interested. As for Gerard, he just never cared about anything, let alone romance. So one night, under the guise of being curious teenagers who had never done it before, we kissed.
Afterwards, we laughed heartily like two strictly platonic friends, but in reality my heart had thumped incessantly in my throat for two hours after the kiss, until I went home. When we pulled away, he had said, "wow! That was... weird." I nodded eagerly, twisting my hands together in my lap. "Did you...?" he continued quietly, looking right at me as his unfinished sentence hung like a stench in the air.
"What?" I asked at the same hushed decibel, finding myself hopeful for something I didn't fully know I harbored within me.
"Did you, um, feel anything?"
Instantly, I knew what to say. "Oh! Dude, haha, no. No way. You're my best friend!"
Gerard had breathed out in relief, nodding. "Good, me neither."
Now, listen, I wasn't over the moon in love with him for the entirety of our friendship. I make it sound like I couldn't control my feelings, like I couldn't repress them. But I had learned to repress a lot over my lifetime, it became second nature to throw my feelings for him in the closet and lock the door. Certain occurrences would pop up over the years, where the love would seep out from the crack underneath the door, but it never lasted longer than a minute. I learned to build a stone-solid friendship with him, I learned how to watch him flirt with girls, even boys, and be okay with it. I was doing so well with all of it, honestly, until Frank Iero came to our high school as a new student.
I don't like, hate the guy, but when he entered our English class one day in the middle of the year, and Gerard had abruptly stopped in the middle of his sentence and stared at him with his mouth open, and Frank had caught his eye and grinned, raising his hand in 'hello'- I felt such an overwhelming rage.
"Class- allow me to briefly introduce you to Franklin Iero, he's just arrived at Belleville from-" Mr. Brofu paused and looked down at Frank. "-where was it, again, Franklin?"
Frank swallowed and gazed out into the small audience of students. "Uh, Philadelphia, sir."
Mr. Brofu nodded and directed Frank impatiently toward the desks. "Alright, take a seat."
To my distaste and disbelief, he chose the seat closest to Gerard and made a point to wave at him again.
Gerard turned back to me, grinning, and whispered, "dude, he's hot, right?"
"Uh, yeah, if you like guys that are like, two feet tall," I retorted, cringing immediately after I spoke. What a lame, half-assed insult.
"I mean..." Gerard trailed off and glanced over his shoulder. Frank wasn't looking at him anymore- he was now extracting some notebooks, a pencil case, and a baggie full of baby carrots from his battered black backpack. A backpack which, of course, had patches all over it of Gerard's favorite bands. This was like a bad movie full of cliches.
Once the bell rang, Frank immediately turned to us and introduced himself between crunching carrots. I assumed the introduction was supposed to be directed to the both of us, but he only looked at Gerard the entire time he was talking. "I'm Frank," he pronounced this delicately despite his mouthful of food, and I resented it. "Every damn teacher introduces me as Franklin. It doesn't even say that on the role call, I was literally born just Frank." Gerard laughed and Frank smiled at him; meanwhile, I stood next to Gerard with my arms crossed like an agitated bodyguard.
"I'm Kai," I interjected, smiling forcefully. Frank turned to look at me, his grin never faltering, and plucked another carrot from the baggie.
"Cool name! It's nice to meet you guys! Hey," he finished off the last carrot and then let the empty bag drop to the floor. I blinked down at it, then looked back up at him, not understanding. "We should hang out, since I'm new? You can show me around this shithole!"
It's as if Frank's combined cutesy looks and his blatant disrespect for the school system immediately won Gerard over. Gerard was nodding enthusiastically, saying, "sure" and I just stood there, hands clenched at my sides.
Even if I didn't have secret feelings for Gerard, I still would have been intimidated by this new person entering our world. He was more similar to Gerard than I was. Gerard and I were the odd, quirky pair of friends that you wouldn't expect to be hanging out; Frank and Gerard looked like brothers and obviously shared similar interests, in everything from music to clothing. Frank was clearly competition. Not even a real competition, because it was absolutely rigged in his favor.