15. Gerard
Gerard
PRESENT DAY
Upon waking, Gerard assumed he had dreamed Emory Griffin, the scientist who turned himself invisible.
The story was too unbelievable to be true.
But when he opened his crust-spackled eyes after having fallen asleep upright in the comfortable rocking chair, across from him, the cushions of the craggy love seat were dimpled with the weight of an undetected body.
The armrest compressed under an unseen skull.
The story was unbelievable, but clearly not impossible.
Impossible. A word Emory seemed to despise.
Fear should’ve spiked into Gerard’s sternum, but peace surprised him instead. Watching the gentle rise and fall of Emory’s satiny green robe was as soothing as watching the waves roll in on an untouched beach.
After so many press junkets and late-night shows, Gerard could’ve gone forever without being asked another question about himself, but Emory Griffin told his story as if he’d never once been asked a personal question.
He spoke directly and frantically, like all this information had been piling up for some time and it created a landslide of words out his open mouth. A mouth Gerard couldn’t even see.
The previous night returned to him in full then.
The hours had ticked by, and darkness tiptoed into the room as Emory monologued, neither of them reaching for the nearby lamp to brighten the room.
What would’ve been the point? After spending far too long trying to imagine what Emory’s face looked like, Gerard closed his eyes, for he had no expressions to dissect, which was an utter relief.
It had been like curling up with a favorite podcast, letting the story wash over him.
At some point, they must’ve both dozed off. Emory had rolled over on the love seat and curled up into a ball, his back to Gerard, which made what Gerard could see of him look like a turtle tucked inside a shell.
Muscles yearning for movement, Gerard pushed himself to standing, which caused the chair to bolt back and the floor to squeak. Emory shot out of his slumber in a whirl of fabric. “Who’s there?” Judging from the hang of the robe sleeves, Emory took some sort of karate-style, self-defense stance.
“It’s only me,” Gerard said. Though was that reassuring?
Despite the previous night, they still barely knew each other.
He had cornered Emory into sharing his story, and even then, Emory seemed very conscientious about where he began, so much so that Gerard sensed in his voice an original hurt somewhere further back that spurred this obsession with invisibility.
He knew he had no right to pry, even if he was curious. “We must’ve fallen asleep.”
“It’s morning?” Emory asked, flopping back into a seated position. A light flicked on. How disorienting to not see the hand turn the switch on the lamp, but hear the click, shy away from the glare. “I can’t believe I slept. I’ve been nocturnal since you arrived.”
“You must’ve needed the rest.” Wasn’t that exactly why Gerard was on Iping Island? Their joint weariness wove through the room as Gerard went to the kitchen and struggled with the ancient coffee pot. “Do you drink coffee?”
“Black,” Emory said, putting his glasses back on.
Neither of them spoke as the water burbled and the coffee brewed.
The silence felt almost companionable, as if their wrestling match the night before hadn’t happened and they’d done this a dozen times together.
Except, when Gerard eventually brought the steaming mug to Emory, they fumbled the pass.
Hot coffee splashed a bit onto the floor.
“Hold still,” Emory commanded in a sharp voice. Gerard froze and Emory retrieved the cup. His tone softened when he added, “Thank you.” Those two words sounded deeply unpracticed and a hair too aggressive for his liking.
For several minutes, their sips, some birds outside, and the bay beyond the beach were the only sounds as they woke up.
“Have I paid the toll?” Emory asked. His voice made Gerard jump. It was going to take a while for him to get used to spontaneous sound. “Or did I bore you so much that I put you to sleep?”
“I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.”
Emory was the first person he’d met in a while who had not been born into money and then tried to spin ordinary money into gold when money proved not to be enough. On top of that, not once did thoughts of We the Wells break in as Emory was speaking, which was a major win.
“Please. I can’t be that interesting compared to the life of a pop star,” Emory said. “More than one of my classmates in college had a poster of you and your brothers in their dorm rooms.”
Gerard masked his embarrassment. “Of course they did. I never wanted to be on posters. I hate photo shoots. I hate big crowds. All I want to do is take walks and write songs and disappear,” he said in an unexpected display of vulnerability. “Sorry; is that insensitive, given your … condition?”
Emory laughed, and this time there was nothing sinister in it.
The sound made Gerard’s toes tingle. All the fear from the previous night had been forgotten.
“No more insensitive than me reading your journal. When you walked in the door that first day, I swore I recognized you. It was driving me wild. I couldn’t remember the band name from those posters or any of the song lyrics.
I opened the journal, and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. ”
Gerard registered remorse in Emory’s words, but Emory made no verbal apology, which struck him as odd. “I suppose I should try to be less riveting,” Gerard joked.
“Me, too,” Emory said. Could this really be the same person with the ire in his voice and danger in his stance when Gerard caught him making tea?
“Did you read all of the journal?” Gerard’s stomach roiled from the question.
“I did,” Emory said.
“So you know that I’m…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.
“Gay?” Emory asked as if the word were as buoyant as a beach ball.
“And?” Gerard’s throat went desert dry.
“Autistic.”
Bingo. Gerard shivered. The only person on God’s green earth that knew these two things about him was his therapist, someone so bound by legality and ethics that none of it would ever leak to the press if his therapist wanted to keep his license and make his whopping $375-a-session fee.
Gerard was not ashamed. He was who he was. God made no mistakes. That’s what the church had imprinted on him when he was young, and he took that with him when he left instead of the branded passive hate that seemed to permeate many sermons.
The trouble was that the music industry could be a lot like the church sometimes. While it claimed to welcome diversity, as soon as someone declared an identity outside center, everyone’s faces went pale and eyes went dead behind their manufactured smiles.
The Hollywood machine did not know how to chew up gay and autistic and regurgitate it into marketing and record-breaking streaming numbers and spectacular ticket sales.
These traits did not fit neatly into spreadsheets nor quarterly earnings calls.
We the Wells were six years into their career, and if any of the stuff his dad had spouted backstage at Madison Square Garden was true, if they won a Nomey, they were guaranteed at least six more years of sky-high success, even if their next album was garbage.
Adding new variables to the formula would be like knowing you aced a test and then erasing some of your right answers before you turned it in to be graded.
If he came out as gay and neurodivergent, he’d jeopardize not only his work, but the work of his brothers.
Gavin wanted to grow a family. Garret wanted to branch into solo music and acting.
He did not want to be the reason they tanked.
He loved them as brothers, even if he’d never exactly loved them as bandmates.
On top of that, he did not want to be the reason their publicists and producers and assistants and tour crew and stylists all had to find other gigs. As their manager, his father made sure everyone was well taken care of. Everyone except his overworked kids, that was.
While Gerard knew in his head that he was old enough to make his own decisions regardless of the fallout or his father’s wishes, his heart felt frozen at twenty, the age he’d been when We the Wells took shape.
Fame had a way of making life move fast but maturity move slow.
At twenty-six, with so much owed to his father and the fans, Gerard never knew how much of his life was actually his to direct, if he was allowed to be himself.
Would people still love him if he tried?
Emboldened by how honest Emory had been with him, he said, “You’d never know it from our Wikipedia page, but my brothers and I never planned to be a band.
For years, we were all striking out on our own.
Gavin wanted to compose film scores but couldn’t find an in.
Garret was constantly auditioning for pilots for teen drama shows filming in New York and getting nowhere.
I had a publishing deal for a bit, but nobody ever wanted to record my songs despite getting close a few times with big names.
Eventually, one year, my mom was going through old family videos around the holidays, and she found one of us playing pretend as kids.
I’d hauled all the pots and pans out of the kitchen cabinets and was banging on them with spatulas like they were the drum set I wanted for Christmas.
Gavin was playing the air guitar on a broom, and Garret was singing some song we’d made up together into a whisk.
We called ourselves ‘The Wells.’ It was the most ridiculous thing, and then Garret said something even more ridiculous: ‘Why don’t we do that? ’