Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts, page 16
“He told you about Scotland, right?” I ask.
Freddie brightens. “Yeah, his accent is cute.”
“No, like, you know he’s going back there?”
The boy’s smile weakens. “…When?”
I shrug carelessly. “Don’t know. He’s always talking about it. His mom’s back there. He’s just sticking around to help with the Rose Festival, but then…” I throw up my hands, and Freddie’s smile vanishes. “I’m sure for the right guy, he’d take you with him. That could be a fun adventure, right?”
“Right…” he says breathlessly, glancing at his mug.
I don’t think happiness has ever come as easily before I turned villainous. More people should look into this, it’s solid therapy.
Yet when Freddie sips again, his face seems to change. No longer smiling and sweet, he hardens his glare into something hateful. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he whispers.
“What?” His voice is so dark, the room temperature plunges thirty degrees.
“You’re making up stuff about Ben just to get me to break off our date.” Freddie leans closer, his voice lower than ever. “I saw your rose video. I felt bad for you for what happened, even when my friends thought you came off really angry and toxic. But they were right. You’re just…broken, aren’t you?” An invisible dart pierces my chest as the room darkens around my periphery. A nasty sneer comes over the boy. “I bet nothing ever even happened between you and Ben. But you wanted it to, right? This is pathetic jealousy. I see right through you.”
I’ve gone blank, like a robot switched off. Grant Rossi is currently unavailable.
“You don’t know me” is all I can squeak out.
The rage swarming my body gives me strength enough to finally stand. Without another word, I hurry past the other guests reading books by the fire before running into Uncle Paul. “Oh, Grant, you get breakfast yet?” he asks. “We’re closing up the griddles.”
“I’m fine,” I grunt, charging past him, out of the West Wing and into the entryway. I can already feel the storm building in me. I need to get to my room as soon as possible.
But the universe, as always, has horrible plans.
Under the portrait of Mama Bianchi, I collide with Ben, whose work tank top is already stained with grass and sweat. “Sorry there,” he says.
“Your boyfriend is at breakfast,” I snarl.
Ben laughs uneasily, instantly clocking my darkness. “Cool, well, one step at a time on that. I’m gonna snag some waffles.”
My hands shake with rage just looking at him. This boy, constantly living in blissful innocence about the boundless ugliness of this world. My jaw trembles as I growl, “You’re too late. Paul’s closed up the food.”
“Ah, really? I had an early morning, I’m starving.”
“Then STARVE!”
I run before I can see Ben’s reaction—or, more importantly, before he can see my tears—but I know he’s shouting at me to come back. My voice sounded so ugly. I hate my rage. I don’t want to be a villain anymore. I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I’m ugly, I’m jealous, I’m pathetic, I’m a monster, just like everyone’s always said.
The rose isn’t the curse.
Ben isn’t the curse.
I am. It’s me. It was always me.
Those boys left because they sensed something was very wrong with me, and if I don’t push Ben away now, he’ll get swallowed up in my curse next. He deserves anything else but that.
I bound up the East Wing stairs, two at a time, three at a time, more beast than boy, and don’t stop until I reach my room. I throw the door shut with a thunderous slam that rocks the walls of Vero Roseto like the cheap sets of a high school play and then lock myself inside. Unable to catch my breath or stop my reddening hands from shaking, the tears break like a typhoon. Guttural, animal sounds escape my chest as I sob and slide to my knees.
Standing is impossible.
Thinking is impossible.
Everything is pain.
No one is rooting for you, Grant.
“I didn’t do anything,” I moan into the floorboards, writhing in agony.
Knocks come on my door, but my head is filling with so much fluid, I can barely hear who’s calling my name. As if I would answer.
Slowly, I crawl underneath the bed until I’m completely hidden. I want my sleeping bag. I want my life back when I would lie here, side by side with Ben without knowing that was the happiest I’d ever be. I wish I knew then it would never get any better than that era. I would’ve enjoyed it more.
Some villain I turned out to be, crying in a ball under my bed.
I ignore the desperate knocks from outside.
I’m not moving, not for anyone. No one would understand what’s wrong anyway. I’m the only one who knows how easily a bunny can bruise a beast.
Chapter 21
Origin of the Beasts
Laughter from outside won’t stop spilling into my bedroom. It’s ruining my staring at the abyss. What I stare at changes every few hours—the other day, it was the curtains. I saw a hot gardener outside those curtains once, and it ruined me. Yesterday, it was my jacket, slung over a rocking chair in the corner. The jacket is black vegan leather with a hand-stitched pumpkin across the back—its vines are identical to the ones Mama Bianchi carved into the entrance of Vero Roseto. I made that jacket. It got me into my Chicago design program.
It got my ex to notice me on the train when we were just strangers.
Every time I look at it, I don’t see me, I see my squandered promise.
Today, I stare at my grandma’s old Singer sewing machine on the writing desk by the window. She brought design into my life. She guided me, even if she didn’t always choose her words right about my gayness.
I need to get my hands sewing again. I need the tactile.
An odd heaviness, more powerful than gravity, pulls me deeper into my bed. I haven’t left it since that horrible breakfast days ago. After a while, Ro, Paul, and Ben stopped knocking and trying to coax me outside like I was a frightened cat. Now they leave trays of food outside my door like they would for guests, and as of yesterday, I started eating again. I only leave to use the bathroom, and everyone has correctly intuited that they aren’t to use that window of opportunity to corner me. Like Mama Bianchi, I occupy the house, but I am neither present nor corporeal.
I’m not alone, though. I’m here with my sublime terror, a terror which grows more powerful with every second I spend in this room, a terror of knowledge that I came to Vero Roseto to escape my problems, but that I’ve somehow become more lost than ever.
So lost I’m unable to see the road anymore.
Hilariously, this terror has one enemy, one chunk of Kryptonite that keeps it at bay: when I eat a sandwich. Ro’s paninis, stuffed with Grandma’s bread patties and a tangy smack of tomato, and suddenly the road becomes a bit more visible.
Why is a sandwich so powerful?
Either way, I’m grato. Today is better than yesterday. I try not to doom-scroll too much on Instagram. Eshana texted me, and I responded with some pleasant niceties—I’ve scared her enough this year, and she needs to be able to live her life without being on Grant Watch twenty-four seven.
After finishing the panini, I fix my hair, smooth my bedsheets, and open a Zoom link on my phone. The one good thing I did the day everything fell apart was email Dr. Patty. In my darkness, I was shocked she even remembered me. My low point triggers are always invisibility and self-worth. Who am I to be remembered? But in Dr. Patty’s infinite goodness, she welcomed me back without judgment and with (thank GOD) an opening in her schedule.
“Good afternoon, Grant,” Dr. Patty says on the video call. She’s in her seventies, white, with frizzing, wild silver curls. She looks like my grandmother did in her better years. She’s draped in sherbet-colored scarves like some daffy, beloved art teacher. Dr. Patricia Asp (call her Dr. Patty) brings the sunshine crashing into the storm clouds in my brain.
“Good afternoon,” I say back, already wiping a tear. Her presence is just that welcome. In the picture-in-picture window, I see my unshaven reflection and hiss like Dracula in a mirror. “I look awful, sorry.”
Dr. Patty chuckles amiably. “You are beautiful. Now. It sounds like we’ve got some catching up to do.” We spend most of the hour catching up on my summer: Vero Roseto’s problems, the high stakes of the Rose Festival, telling off A. C., and…Ben. At his name, she brightens. “Ben. The Ben? There? How do you feel about that?”
My smile fights against a swell of tears. “I missed him so much. And it’s been so nice, and we were getting better, but then…I don’t know what he wants from me. It’s making me feel so flooded, and I just want to relax around him, but I can’t. Maybe if we’d done this a few years ago, I’d be able to calm down, but it just feels like too much has happened. I can’t trust him. And I don’t know if that’s a him problem or a me problem, or both, but I just know that I can’t.” My lip quivers like a leaf weighted down by a spring rain. I can’t look up at Dr. Patty, who stays quiet. The soft crackle of the Zoom’s silence fills my room. “It doesn’t matter anyway. In a few weeks, the festival is gonna be over, and he’s gonna leave for Scotland. I don’t know where I’m going.”
“You’re not going to design school?” Dr. Patty asks, concerned but very gentle. “I know that was in your plan.”
I sniff loudly. “Yeah. Still is. I just…lost track of time.”
Stuck in the past is more like it.
“If it still is your plan,” she says, “I think sending some applications in would be a good way to take your mind off this Ben thing, don’t you? Maybe it’ll help you calm down enough to see him with more clarity. Two birds, one stone?”
Dr. Patty understands everything.
Brightness rushes into my chest at the possibility that I can organize myself out of this mess. It’s what I do best. Well, it’s what I did best, but I can get back there.
We set a time to talk again later in the week (there’s still so much more Ben to cover), and she renews my script for Lexapro. Brightened, but not repaired, I continue to camp out in the room. However, it stops becoming a prison and is more like a safe cocoon. I can’t open that door again until I’m sure I’m strong enough to fly out of here like a gorgeous monarch butterfly.
Two days pass. In that time, I stumble on a few design schools abroad, mainly to check how late I could submit a portfolio. Milan. Paris. London. All of them feel so…far. Not physical distance, but in the way they extend my grasp. I melted down in Chicago, am I really gonna go be a designer in Milan without self-destructing? Ro’s paninis won’t be able to find me there.
After sending off a few emails, I give up the hunt and return to my abyss staring.
The laughter and splashing from the pool outside reminds me I want to stay right where I am for a while. I’ve heard laughter and splashing in this room before—it’s a nostalgic sound—but I know it’s not my siblings and cousins outside. They’ve grown up. Those times are gone.
Everyone has moved on but me.
Not anymore.
I peel off my baggy gray shirt and let my chest breathe. In the floor-length mirror, the reflection of my chest confirms my brain is a liar: I’m still hot shit.
The Singer turns on with a startling rattle, and it rumbles against the old writing desk like knuckles. With two swift snips, I shear off my shirt’s stanky sleeves, and another few snip-snips removes the collar and most of the chest. Gradually, I feed thread and cloth into the Singer.
Rattle-rattle-rattle.
My grody shirt disappears inside its gears, but my hands remember exactly how to do this. I don’t think about Ben, or my exes, or how much I think I belong in the deepest, darkest dumpster forever; in fact, I don’t think at all. My hands do.
My eyes sharpen.
The room comes into full clarity.
And after a few minutes, the shirt exits the Singer as a fresh tank top with the biggest Italian Tits McGee plunging neckline I could manage. A smile slowly returns. Whatever I am, at least I’ll look hot.
The moment I shut off the Singer, a knock shakes my door. A thundering cop knock.
A spike of fear drives through my chest. Oh my God. Aunt Ro called doctors. I withdrew too much, scared her too badly, and she’s called people to help. Scrambling to the door in nothing but my pajama bottoms, I pull on my new tank and start pacing in place.
What if I just grabbed my stuff and ran? I can go back to my studio in Chicago and be a bummer there. I won’t get meals, but at least people will leave me alone.
“Grant, can you hear me?” Ben’s voice comes gently through the door.
My anxious pacing stops. “I’m fine, Ben.”
“Not what I asked. Can you hear me?”
“Obviously!”
“Grant, I don’t want to have this conversation through a door, but if you’re not gonna let me in, that’s what I’m gonna do, and everyone downstairs is gonna hear it.”
“Jesus Christ,” I grunt, yanking open the door. My agitation leaves me when I see how handsome Ben looks: no gardener work clothes, freshly showered, ruddy hair styled in a slick little bounce, and a hunter-green coat with a wool collar. And I look like a drowned rat with visible nips.
“Hey,” I say, not meeting his eyes. “You look like you’re going on a date.”
“Well, I’m not,” he says with a hint of anger. “Let me in?”
As soon as he’s inside, I lock the door. He stands stiffly, not taking a seat. I approach slowly, my back hunched in shame, and defensiveness comes pouring out: “Look, I’m really okay. Every once in a while, I get like this, and I just need to be alone for a few days and then I’m fine.” When he doesn’t respond, I confess, “I’m so sorry I yelled at you. There’s no excuse.”
He sighs, as if he wants to be angry but can’t. “How are you feeling now?”
“I’m fine, I told you.”
“You slammed this door so loudly, paintings fell down. Ro and I heard you through the door for hours. Talking to yourself. Crying.” Ben’s hard eyes soften, and he touches my elbow. The gentleness makes me flinch so hard my body spasms. “You’re saying this happens a lot? When you’re in the city…and alone?”
Humiliation burns my neck, cheeks, and ears. It’s everywhere. I can’t believe I let myself be seen like that, especially by Ro and Ben, who care about me but who—for different reasons—I don’t want knowing how intense I can get.
“I take care of myself okay,” I say, puffing my barely concealed chest.
Ben doesn’t blink. “I don’t think you do. You don’t have to feel this way.”
I nod, unable to look at him. “I called Dr. Patty, and she wrote a new script for Lexi.”
“Lexi?”
“Pro. Lexapro.” I roll my eyes. “Gay.”
“GAY.” He snorts. “Okay, great, I’m proud of you. When’s it ready for pickup?”
I pick at my nails. “Yesterday…”
“Then it’s ready!” Ben doesn’t drop his energy for a beat before tapping my shoulder—not affectionately, but to make sure he’s got my attention. “I know what that twink said to you. It’s over. It was never really on, but just know…” He makes a cutting motion across his throat. “I’m sorry that happened. You know I never would’ve allowed that if I was there, right?”
“I know. You’re a good guy, Ben. And I’m…not.” I wince back a stabbing pain in my chest. Guilt. “I brought it on. I said shit, lies, to make him not interested in going on your date.” I can’t stop shaking my head. “Movie villain behavior.”
Ben nods, restrained as ever. “I heard about that, too. Want to tell me what that was about?”
Scoffing, I throw up my arms. “You don’t know?”
He smirks. “I know, but I want to hear you say it. I think I’ve earned that.”
Looking into Ben’s eyes, while he looks this perfect and I look this goblin-esque, I mutter, “I was jealous, and I wanted to date you.”
Victorious, Ben thrusts both arms to the sky. “FINALLY, YOU ADMIT IT.”
“Don’t get smug!”
“How long have we known each other?”
“Ten years.”
“I have waited ten years to hear you admit this shit.”
I roll my eyes. “You have not been clocking my crush since we were eight.”
Chuckling, Ben grips his head. “Your problem is you think you suffer in silence, when in reality, every day with you—from back then to now—has been one big Italian opera. You have many talents, but hiding what you’re feeling isn’t one of them.”
I jab his chest. “Did you come up here to make me feel worse?”
“No.” He snatches my finger and holds it. He steps closer, until we’re inches away. “I have the day off, and I want you to come with me into town to meet someone for coffee. Not a date, an old friend. You owe me. I should be kicking your ass more about your snake behavior, but I think Demon Twink punished you more than enough. Shower up those tiddies.”
Ben flicks one of my highly visible nips, and it wakes me up.
All right, so he still wants to hang out with me. Good enough for now.
* * *
An hour later, I’ve scalded off my depression skin with a hot shower, dressed in Uncle Paul’s all-black server outfit (Ben insisted I’d want to look as good as possible), and driven into Valle with Ben to pick up my prescription and meet his old friend. The quaint village lies in the hollow between two massive forests. Everything is tailor-made for tourists and staycationers: bookshops, antique stores, fishing gear shops, and cafés. Everything you’d need to while away your hours in your rented cabins before it was time to return to the lake.
Ben parks outside Smalley’s Bistro, a cozy spot with exposed brick and even more exposed ductwork. Before exiting, he turns to me, anxiety tattooed on his face—a rarity for Ben.
