Chapter 11 #2
“Yep. He’s with Fade, coloring in his new canvas.”
“Who’s Fade?”
“His best friend. This big guy who rides a bike and has been hanging around Erez’s shop for the past several years, though he hasn’t had a tattoo until recently.
I think he was working himself up to it.
Erez is loving the dark canvas that is Fade’s skin.
He says that tattoos on him are hypnotic and he’s loving marking Fade up with art. ”
“Your brother does tattoos?” Matty asks.
“Yep. Erez is a tattoo artist. He’s done all my ink. He’s tattooed all our parents and our brother now, too.”
He sighs. “That’s cool.”
“Mmm,” Zephyr agrees.
“What about you? You have any siblings?” I ask Matty. “You get along with your parents?”
“Yep. Three.” Matty pauses. “We were close until I disappeared here. My parents? I have a mom and dad and dad’s cabana-boy boyfriend.”
Zephyr laughs. “There’s a story there, huh?”
I can practically feel his smile. “My sister is a couple years older than me, and she’s always been my protector.
We’ve always been close. In a way, I think we were best friends.
I came out to her first, and when I was fifteen, I told our parents.
Mom freaked out. Somehow, this was a reflection on her parenting or some shit.
I don’t know. This has a happy ending, just FYI. ”
“Good. I’d hate to have to bury her,” Zephyr says. Although I think he says it as a tease, I also have a feeling he’s serious.
“Yeah, no. It’s all good. But for a while there, my mom freaked out.
Her hysterics ran the gambit of her needing to pray my sin out of me and how would she face her friends and all kinds of disgusting shit.
After me nearly sobbing, my sister lost her shit and screamed at my mother, telling her she’s a piece of shit and the only way she’s failed as a parent is by this reaction.
She asked if she’d prefer a funeral to a gay son because statistics show that forty-six percent of LGBTQIA+ youth who don’t receive love and support from their families kill themselves.
Is that what she wanted? My mother stared, horrified, and then promptly burst into tears. My sister took me from the room.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Is that a true statistic?” Zephyr asks.
“Dunno. I do believe the number is something staggering and heartbreaking, but sources differ on the actual number.”
“What about your dad?”
“Dad was weirdly silent. Like, not a damn word,” Matty says.
“Except he was smiling. Strangely, even in hindsight, but at the time, I kept getting the impression that he was proud. Relieved. Impressed. Like… all reactions I was not expecting. Though, to be honest, I didn’t expect my mother to lose her mind either.
It took my mom a bit to come around, but she did.
She apologized a lot in the following months, and I forgave her.
She’s supported me loudly since. She’s a very vocal ally, especially when she’s at rallies and shit, vocalizing against things like lifting the ban on conversion therapy and revisiting taking away LGBTQIA+ rights that constantly pop up in politics every new election.
She focuses on exactly what my sister presented her with—do parents prefer to witness their kid’s funeral over having a queer child?
Over having a daughter or a son, which differs from what’s on their birth certificate? My mom is pretty cool.”
“I’m glad that’s a happy story, but I’m still waiting with bated breath about how your dad ended up with a cabana boy,” Zephyr says.
Matty laughs. “Their marriage began deteriorating rapidly when my mother freaked out about my coming out. At first, I thought we all thought it was because of how she spoke to me or about me. But it continued to fall apart almost more quickly once my mom and I reconciled. A year after I came out, almost to the day, my dad announced he wanted a divorce. He said that it was my bravery in coming out with my identity that gave him the courage to admit what he’s hidden about himself. He’s gay.”
“Wow,” I repeat.
“Yep. It turns out that he’s actually bisexual, but his attraction has always been largely toward men over women.
He comes from a very conservative family and knew that it’d never be accepted.
So he did what he did to keep his family.
My proudly claiming my identity is what encouraged him to come clean with his own.
He told us he was gay because he knew my mother would cling to bisexuality as a means not to get divorced.
To save face. She is very heavily influenced by what others think of her, even as she loudly supports the queer community. ”
“And your dad fell in love with a cabana boy,” Zephyr muses.
“Fell in love… flavor of the year… potato, potahto.”
We laugh as Matty snuggles his face into Zephyr’s chest.
“Do you still talk to them?” I ask.
He sighs, and I can hear the sadness in that simple sound. “Yeah. They think I ran away because I didn’t get the support I should have. I try to tell them that’s not the case, but when I don’t go home to visit, and I don’t tell them where I am… I understand why they think that.”
I reach around Zephyr to try to hug him a little tighter. Yep, definitely working on graduating from dislike and resentment to disdain toward Liam. Little bitch. At the absolute very least, he should live his life in exile with the lover he forced here.