Disclaimer: Jonathan Larson owns; I'm just borrowing the characters to express my teenage angst. Also Teddy Roosevelt and Voltaire belong to history, the places mentioned are mostly real and thus clearly not mine.

WARNING: This chapter contains some derogatory words used to describe homosexuals. I hope no one is offended and I certainly did not use the words to offend or to express my views, but they're realistic, that's why I used them.

COLLINS

On November first, during the five-minute interval between my emergence from my bedroom and my father leaving for work, Dad turned to me and asked, "Thought any on your birthday, Tom?"

"Not really," I said. "I've been busy."

My birthday? Already? Honestly and somewhat pathetically, I was a little surprised. Despite the progression of our classes, despite having the blocking almost perfect in Drama and studying both mammlian/floral reproduction and Theodore Roosevelt, as Roger had so savored, the passage of time had eluded me. I completely ignored my studies, doing the homework and reading but neither paying attention nor needing to, and counted the days as important only when I was with Mark.

I loved being with him. We talked almost entirely about philosophy and history, spent lunch hours poring over books from the great thinkers. Around November we had gotten into Voltaire, and would discuss implications of diction at great length throughout fifth period Library Practice.

"It must be a lot of responsibility," Mark said one day. "I don't know that I could manage."

"What?" I asked.

We were in the back of the room, shelving books. "Translating," Mark explained. "Even if you know a language really well, two languages--which I don't--what do you keep? Can you make the jokes carry over without their sounding clumsy? Is it a disservice to the author to ignore wordplay? And what if you can only keep such cleverness by losing the meaning? And isn't wordplay part of the meaning? I mean, the author is trying to be clever and succeeding, but also saying something." He shrugged.

I was gawking. This was the most I had heard Mark speak at once since meeting him. Even when he was crying, the boy went silent. "Anyway, I was just thinking it," Mark concluded. "I was wondering how it goes in the original: 'All for the best in the best of all possible worlds,'" he said, quoting from Candide.

"I don't know," I admitted. "We did translations in third-year Latin and my Spanish classes back in Los Angeles."

"Oh. How did you do it?"

"Mostly literally," I told him. "But that was for a grade or a test, so that's what they wanted. To see that you understood. I guess you might say that educators discourage keeping in the wordplay, in that sense. APs are ruining education."

On November first, in the kitchen, my father nodded. "Start thinking," he suggested, "and let me know."

"Okay," I promised.

"You need a ride to school?"

I wanted to walk. It was a nice day, cold, as is a novelty for an Angelino. I wanted to dawdle along the sidewalk and watch the leaves float on the back of the wind, a phenomenon I could not aptly describe in my latest letter to Jessie. You have to see it, I wrote. Films don't measure up. They capture the act, but not the spirit of the act. The sound isn't right. It should be wind and nature. And the way the wind bites at your arms, it's so alive. The air is alive. I wish you could be here. I think you'd appreciate it.

It's funny, everyone here has grown up with this, so it's not a phenomenon to them. People tell me, "Yes, Thomas, the seasons change," as though speaking to a child. But the same people marvel when I tell them that one year ago my friends and I went hiking at the beach.

Look, this may be a weird thing to ask like this, but are you doing okay? Socially? Everything-ly?

"Sure." I didn't see my dad much. I saw him--we lived together, knew one another well, but our actual interacts were limited to the occasional dinner conversation and our five-minute interactions in the mornings. "I'd love a ride, it's freezing out." I'd also love to stand in the cold and let it sink thoroughly into my bones, bury the memory deep in the RNA coding.

First period was a test, so Mark and I didn't talk until passing period. "Mark! Listen, you wanna go into the city?" I asked. That's what my parents have always done for my birthday: taken me and a friend to an art exhibit at MOCA or LACMA, or to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum of Natural History.

At first it was me and Steven, a boy from my year at school who happened to live down the street. We were inseparable for years, spent nights together, it reached the point where our parents were willing to scold either of us, as though we belonged to both moms and both dads. Then when I was in third grade I asked Steven if I could kiss him. In my defense, he said yes. We kissed.

Many people believe that Los Angeles, a large city with just about every type of person imaginable, is completely liberal. It's not. Steven told his parents about the kiss. They were extremely upset. Although my parents defended me to them, claiming at our age we didn't know the first thing about sex drives and had probably just seen kissing in a film, they sat me down for a very serious talk about this matter.

"Tommy, most boys don't kiss boys. Most boys kiss girls. Now, what happened between you and Steven is not wrong." They emphasized the word to tell me it was not, but wrong is what stuck in my mind. "No one is angry, we just want you to understand why… um… why Steven's parents were so frightened. It's not normal behavior, and that scares some people."

"Girls are gross."

"Well, you think that now, but give it a few years--"

"So I'll kiss girls in a few years! But right now I want to kiss boys." This made perfectly good sense to me. Unfortunately, neither my parents nor the school administrators saw it this way, nor did the kid who wrote Tommy Collins is a faggot in magic marker in the hallway.

I ended up in the principal's office with Samuel Durggin after that. "Samuel has something to say to you, Thomas."

"Sorry," Samuel spat. I said I forgave him. Neither of us meant it: I hadn't been angry, only hurt, so I felt I had nothing to forgive him for. Samuel hissed, "Fag!" whenever he passed me in the halls. And that really hurt. I was just a kid, I didn't know how to take that. I also didn't know what it meant.

I didn't want my parents to know, so I looked up the word in the dictionary. My mother heard me muttering the definition to myself. "What word is that?" she asked me. This was during the two-day suspension period the school gave me after Samuel wrote that on the walls. He wasn't suspended, just had to wash a wall. I was suspended. To this day, I do not know why.

"Um…" I knew it wasn't a word a person ought to say, but my mother had asked a question and it would also be rude not to answer her. Besides this, I didn't understand how being called a piece of wood was an insult. "What's faggot?" I blurted.

"It's a very bad word," she said, "one I had better not catch you saying again."

"Okay, but what is it?"

"It's… it's someone who… leads a different kind of life."

"That's bad?"

Needless to say, throughout most of third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade I was very much alone. When I reached middle school, my parents found a program in the San Fernando Valley designed for students like me: highly gifted students, or advanced learners. What that meant was freaks. We were offered our first taste of an Advanced Placement, a college-level course, in the eighth grade. Naturally we erred towards eccentric.

That was great, for me. It was perfect. Higher courses and the chance to use the word "cummerbund" in a sentence, thanks to my exuberant rendition of "You Can't Always Get What You Want". I can just imagine what Roger would think of that word. Luckily, from that perspective, Scarsdale offered little in the way of choir unless I wanted to sing for the Seventh Day Adventist church, which was fifteen miles away.

And it was this program that brought me to my best friends, beginning with the Hispanic girl who raised her hand in history class after the teacher explained that the Romans tried to absorb conquered peoples into their culture. "Yes?"

This skinny little kid with dreadlocks and henna tattoos from Venice Beach said, "Well that doesn't make it right." and I knew, immediately, that I wanted to be her friend.

"Mark," I prodded, as we hurried to English. "Well?"

"I… don't get it," he admitted.

"It's my birthday," I elaborated, "in two weeks. Big day. I'll be sixteen. My parents are taking me into the city-- well, my dad is, anyway-- to do something, like go to a museum or something. Would you like to come?"

"Yeah, I'd love to, um, if my parents will let me."

Mark's parents wanted to meet my parents, and wanted my father to assure them that we would be safe and chaperoned the entire time. They needed to know that Mark would call them periodically, and at what time he would arrive home. But finally, after much deliberation and assurances that my father absolutely would not let us out of his sight, Mark's parents agreed to let him come.

The first thing my dad said on the train was, "Okay, I'll leave you two alone for a while. I'll be back before we get to the station, and Thomas, do not hurt the train."

I blushed and laughed. "Come on, Dad, I haven't done that since I was ten."

"What did you do?" Mark wondered once we were alone.

I shrugged. "I took the train apart a little bit," I said. "I'd always done it with my toy trains. So I saw this piece that was screwed on and I took it off to see what was inside."

We chatted for a while about general nothingness, then Mark said, "Thank you so much for inviting me." He had already said this at least six times, but seemed to need to repeat it, as though there was some piece he had left out. At last he said it: "I just hope… well… that I can help make the day really special."

"Mark…" It's tough to say the right thing to something like that. "You're my friend," I managed at last. Did he truly mean, as he seemed to, that he hoped his friendship was enough?

"Well… I'm sure that you've had other birthdays with… better friends and… I'm sorry about my… issues, I just can't… leave them at home…"

"Mark, seriously. You're my friend. I just want to hang out with you, that's why I invited you."

He muttered, "As Roger says, I have baggage."

That shocked me. Roger Davis, smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, Roger Davis who believed our fish was being murdered in science class, Roger Davis who appears with mysterious bruises and slugs kids for less than nothing, said that Mark had baggage?

When I expressed my disbelief, Mark said, "No, no, that's what he says. He says that he has baggage. I was saying that I do. Not too clearly, I guess."

At least that made more sense. There was something I had wanted to tell him for some time but was afraid to mention, one of the many social ills I kept stuffed beneath the mattress. I knew it would help Mark to know, but felt like a traitor saying it and was afraid of what he would think. At the same time, I knew that I didn't care what he thought. I did care. "When I turned thirteen," I blurted, "my best friend had just been released from an institution."

Mark knew what I meant, but seemed unable to believe it. "A… like a private school?" he asked.

"No, a mental hospital," I said.

"Oh. I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "Don't be. She's not."

"So… it helped her?"

I shook my head. "No, Mark, she hated it. She hated it. And when she came out, she was in worse shape than when she went in. All the hospital helped with was giving her the belief that she could manage for herself. She told me it taught her what it was like to have no control, to be deemed unfit."

Mark needed that story. I think, despite his trembling and shock murmurs throughout the rest of the train ride, he needed to hear about Jessie. The truth is that I was terrified of losing Mark. I hadn't been enough for her. I wouldn't be enough for him. I was playing my wild card, playing a card I had no right to play. I wanted to ask her. I had done it subtly enough, writing, I have a friend who is worried he's going mad. She never gave me permission to speak of her, but never denied it.

I was taking a leap of faith that she would permit it. I think she would. Jessie wanted to tell everyone, make sure everyone knew that sanitariums are bad places. That alienated everyone but me, and I still haven't forgiven myself for not being enough to keep her out. "Tom," she would say, "don't. I think I had to. It made me strong."

But she fought, that's the difference. She was a scrappy little bitch from the first moment I met her. Mark wasn't. "I'm telling you this so you know, man," I told him.

"I can't help it…" he whispered.

"Yeah, you can. You gotta. I'll do whatever it takes, Mark, but just… I don't want you thinking you're crazy. You're not crazy, okay? You're just really stressed out."

"Okay," Mark agreed meekly, and that was when I realized: Mark needed Roger. Mark needed this protector who would stand by him through everything. I always thought, watching them, that it was wrong of Roger to dominate Mark as he did. But he didn't. Roger never told Mark what to do. He didn't dominate, he protected. He dominated others, but never Mark.

I resolved in that moment to apologize. Despite believing, still, that Roger was abused by his father, I knew I had hurt him. And part of me wanted to help Mark by keeping Roger angry. If Roger stayed away, Mark might grow a backbone. Then again, maybe he wouldn't. Mark was young and his quiet strength a fragile thing, far too fragile to live by. It's a funny thing, he let himself get pushed around all the time, yet the one time I had seen him fight he fought against me. It had happened shortly after Roger began avoiding us:

"What happened?" Mark asked me. "Maybe I can talk to him…"

"I wanted to know where he gets those bruises. Even someone who starts as many fights as him--"

"Don't call him a bully."

"I didn't."

"You implied it."

"I didn't--"

"You did!"

"Okay, Roger isn't a bully."

"Okay. Thank you. You were saying?"

Mark could be strong when he needed to. He just didn't care enough about himself to be strong for that reason.

Maybe, I thought, that's why Mark made films. Maybe he needed to record the injustices of the world, for the days when someone would see them and care.

We had an amazing day, mostly by ourselves: cloudspotting in Sheep's Meadow, pulling faces as we ate kosher hot dogs in Central Park. The cultural event was a musical, an off-Broadway workshop, and although it had no prestigious name, Mark and I both thought it was brilliant. We sang ourselves giddy on the train ride home.

It was a great birthday.

Happy sixteenth, Thomas Collins. (My mother used my full name for anything serious, whether happy or displeased.) Make a wish.

College.

TO BE CONTINUED

Okay, you know the drill. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, would love to hear from you (about what you liked, didn't, if, why, what you want to happen next, whatever) but I'm not going to threaten not to update if you don't review. I'll probably update soon, assumingI do well on my music lessons!Ihope you all are enjoying my story!