Chapter Fifteen
Paper Stars
It was like some part of Hilary had become a monk, mindful of everything, his awareness catching on the little things.
The sound of Trenton brushing his teeth in the next room, his father humming the DuckTales theme song as he baked cookies for ‘Santa,’ his mother’s inventive curses as she tried to input a receipt into QuickBooks.
It wasn’t that he was hoarding the moments, or even consciously aware that he was noticing them, but it was affecting him anyway.
When Hilary woke on Christmas morning, he just lay there for a minute, his mind empty.
Not blank, but also not running right into thoughts as it usually did.
He smiled to see Trenton already awake and looking at him.
“How long have you been staring, you freak?”
“Long enough to almost nudge you awake.”
Hilary smiled. “You should have. I wanted to be with you.”
“You were with me already.”
“But I miss you even when I’m sleeping.”
There was a groan from the doorway. “You two get worse by the day.”
Annette was holding The Bag. The one all Hilary’s presents had come in since he was six years old.
The first year it had just been recycling, but then it had become a Christmas tradition as strong as any other.
Albert kicked open the door the rest of the way.
In his hands was a tray of French toast so buried under cinnamon sugar it was hard to see the bread beneath—exactly the way they all liked it.
Sensing the urgency, Hilary took hold of Trenton and said, before anyone else could beat him to it, “Merry Christmas.”
Trenton laughed at his panic. “You told me last night.”
Hilary took a bite of the toast, just enough to freshen his mouth, gave a quick hug to each of his parents, and yelled at them not to open any presents or do anything interesting until he could finish peeing—a lie.
As soon as he was out in the hall, he turned left instead of right and thumped down to the basement where his secret stash was hidden.
He’d been careful this year. Albert had a special sixth sense for things he wasn’t supposed to find, and that usually meant comically bad fake-surprise every time it came time to open presents.
But this time Hilary was sure he’d maintained the secret.
He’d hidden his things in the dustiest box he could find, and if it had been disturbed there would have been evidence in the form of fingerprints—and there were none.
A minute later he was back in the room, still having to pee, and adorned with multiple cobwebs. “Open mine first.”
For his mom, they’d gotten a letter blanket.
He and Trenton had written the letter together, and Annette cried a little on the spread-out blanket, reading it.
“Thank you, boys,” she said, pulling them into a hug at the same time.
For Albert, they’d gotten a cutting board with the man’s not-so-secret marinade recipe (considered by him to be his life’s crowning achievement) carved into the wood.
“Does this mean you’re hankering for a barbecue?
” the man demanded, “Because I can have the grill out of the shed and fired up in less time than it takes your mom to gear up to yell at me for it properly.”
Hilary thought the presents were from them both, so he was more surprised than the parents when Trenton pulled out a box from under the bed that was professionally wrapped in green and silver paper.
In it was a digital photo frame with over a thousand images—all that the pair had uploaded to the computer’s hard drive and been “meaning to get around to printing” for years.
Some of the pictures went as far back as Hilary’s infancy.
He could only imagine how long it had taken to filter out the blurry and stupid photos and upload them all into the new frame.
When Trenton had done it, he had no idea, though it had to have been either after everyone had gone to sleep, or before everyone had woken up.
Either way, it had obviously been quite a sacrifice, though Trenton didn’t think so.
“I’m just glad I got the bigger SD card or there might not have been enough space.”
The boy had printed a magnet photo as well to go on the fridge. It was a picture of all four of them taken on Thanksgiving. Why Trenton had used that specific picture of him lying on the couch like a bloated carcass after eating too much, Hilary had no idea. The boy had strange tastes.
“Alright, get out,” he told his parents after they’d given him three million cheek pinches and a lecture about properly cherishing Trenton.
“What’s so private you can’t have a couple of witnesses?” Albert asked. “Is it that kind of present?”
There was nothing to feel guilty about, but Hilary felt himself flushing simply from the implication. “None of your business!”
“I can’t believe you raised such a rude son,” was Albert’s complaint to Annette.
“Me? You’re the one who was home more.”
They did finally leave, and Hilary made sure to shut the door as soon as they were out. “Shit.”
Trenton was enjoying the reaction. “Is it that kind of present?”
Hilary tossed the envelope at the boy’s head. “DON’T read it out loud.”
He didn’t know why he gave over the letter first. Maybe to get it over with.
As much as he’d improved at embarrassing shit, things like love letters were still way out of his league.
There was really nothing romantic in it.
Mostly embarrassed rambling with a couple of stilted confessions thrown in.
Trenton seemed to like it though, or maybe he was just misty-eyed from thinking about his future with a barely literate buffoon.
“Come here,” Trenton said.
But there was still the rest to be gotten over with first.
Hilary shoved the bag his way. “I don’t know how to do wrapping, sorry.”
In the end, he’d never found the ‘perfect’ present.
And because he couldn’t make up his mind, he’d ended up with a conglomeration of everything.
For the event, he went with a concert, like Annette had suggested, but a classical concert they were giving the next week over at the city.
When Trenton saw it, he laughed and whipped out a small envelope with tickets to The Nutcracker—at the same theater, one day apart.
Hilary could only stare, and then he was laughing too.
He’d seen those tickets during the booking and had been debating between them and the classical concert for hours.
He gave Trenton a kiss and set the tickets aside.
“I have something else, but it’s not as nice as the other one was. ”
They were sweaters—a matching set. The green was a little different from the boutique one, more Hunter than Emerald, but just as nice, really.
But they weren’t cashmere—not even regular wool, which would have been too scratchy, but some cheap mix of cotton and polyester that wasn’t classy at all, but the sweaters were soft, and he hoped that was okay.
Trenton was so excited he put it on with the tags still on. “Yours too. Quick.”
Hilary didn’t know why it was such an emergency, but he let Trenton shove the sweater over his head, and once his arms were in, Trenton sat back, beaming and looking as satisfied as he’d ever seen him. “We match.”
Hilary had anticipated this result after seeing the way Trenton genuinely seemed to enjoy their fag-bags, but matching things seemed to be one of great joys of his life. “You’re like a five-year-old,” he told the boy, trying not to suffocate from how much he loved him.
“Can I give you mine now?”
Hilary nearly said yes because the last gift was so embarrassing he didn’t know how he was going to hand it over, so he just shoved it at him, nearly getting Trenton in the eye because he wasn’t looking properly. “You can just throw it out if you don’t want it.”
Coupon books were always tacky, especially when they were made from shitty cardstock from the drawer under the printer.
Even his handwriting was horrible, so it really wasn’t presentable.
Trenton took it with wide eyes that grew even wider as he flipped it open.
Hilary had put in several kinds. In order, the batches came in: Shitty home-cooked dinner, I concede the argument, Make me wear whatever you want, and five that just said Dance.
He hadn’t known how to write that last one in any way that didn’t make himself sound like a conceited dimwit.
The whole concept of coupon books had really tanked after he’d thought about them for a bit.
He didn’t want anything in their relationship to be transactional.
As if Trenton were ‘buying’ him when he knew he never would.
So he’d gone back and forth on whether to make one.
What had decided him in the end was thinking of what Trenton would think, and Trenton was a sucker for stupid shit—and even more of a sucker than he thought.
He blanched when he realized the boy’s eyes were wet.
“It was stupid! Obviously, you don’t need to use coupons. You can just ask me to—”
“Can I use one now? But I don’t really want to rip it out.”
It was one of the dance ones, obviously. Hilary had been expecting it, so he was prepared to head to the studio, but Trenton took out another package from under the bed—one wrapped to look like the night sky.
“Seriously, how did you get so good at wrapping? And what if I’d looked under the bed?”
Trenton dismissed that. “You never notice anything.”
“I noticed you, didn’t I?”
Trenton grinned, “I’m hard to miss.”
Hilary really did adore that grin. If only it didn’t turn him into such a love-struck buffoon.
And then he got even stupider. “What’s this?”
But Hilary knew what it was. It was a big glass jar full of origami paper stars.
They were perfect and folded in the prettiest colors, even nicer than the wrapping had been, and there were so many!
He dumped them out into his lap, just admiring the shape and feel of them, all the patterns and textures and feeling like a dragon with its hoard.
That was when Trenton did something horrific.
He pulled the end of the paper tab out of a star and unfolded it, collapsing it back into ordinary paper—an offense worthy of the death penalty.
It was a note. On one side of the paper—the part that had been folded in—Trenton had written: So close that your hand upon my chest is mine / so close that your eyes close with my dreams – Pablo Neruda.
“I made one for each day until next Christmas,” the boy said, completely oblivious. “Oh, and two for your birthday. They’re not all poetry, though. Some are just words that made me think of you.”
Almost, Hilary couldn’t breathe. What had already seemed like a mountain of work—all that perfectly precise folding and that beautiful paper—became a behemoth. “How long did it take you…?”
“Oh, not that long. About six weeks.”
Six weeks. Six weeks.
“I didn’t originally mean for it to be a present. You know the notebook I keep?”
The one Trenton kept open beside him while he read (and that had been the inspiration for his own notebook).
The boy had been keeping one since he was six, all of which were stacked up neatly on the dresser—his top priority to rescue when he’d been stuffing the garbage bags full back at that awful house.
Trenton used them to copy down quotes he liked, and they could really be anything.
Some were profound, resonating with meaning, but they were just as often silly, or nothing at all—some quirk of Trenton’s brain enjoying the flow of the syllables.
“It took me some time to realize, but after we met, I noticed that almost everything I wrote down reminded me of you,” Trenton continued.
“And the stars—I used to make them for the store, an alternative to the cookies if people couldn’t or didn’t want to eat them.
But then the night after the Halloween party I went home and I couldn’t sleep, so I started making them, but I was still thinking of you, so I started copying the words down on the paper first in the hopes that getting it out would help me sleep.
And it felt good, so I kept doing it, and it became a habit.
And then around Thanksgiving I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to give you for Christmas, and I realized that you would probably like the stars, but maybe more than that, I wanted you to have them, like I was giving you my thoughts and all the countless times of me loving you. ”
Hilary tried to get up but began crying before he made it to the bathroom.
Trenton caught him up, already apologizing even though he didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and Hilary loved the boy, he loved him, and knew that if he ever had to go a day without him, he’d go mad.
It wasn’t a good realization. He’d never considered himself unstable.
Actually, he’d always thought of himself as pretty practical for a kid his age.
But being with Trenton was biting from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
There was no going back. He’d fight God himself if he threatened to make him go back.
“It’s just paper,” Trenton said, helpless to the tears as he always was. “They aren’t even my words. I can’t write poetry the way you do. I only copy others.”
“No, you don’t.” Hilary could only press himself there against Trenton, who was big enough to have become his whole world. “You don’t copy anyone. You’re exactly yourself.”