Blue Star Eyed Weakness

Program(s): Krita

Brush(es):

d) Ink-4 Pen Rough

b) Basic-6 Details

Probably self-explanatory, but I wrote something to go with it anyways:

The reason we need pride (The day before the drawing)

He doesn't say it for a long time after.

The thing about the locker room is that it has good acoustics, and Perry has always had an ear for that. For the way a word carries, for the half-second of silence that tells you a room has turned. He hears the silence before he hears the word. He is seventeen and he has spent three years learning exactly how to occupy that room so that the silence never turns toward him, and the system has worked, the system has been airtight, right up until the afternoon it isn't.

Somebody saw something. It doesn't matter what. It matters that by the time he's got his cleats off there are four of them between him and the door and the silence has already done the thing he spent three years making sure it never did.

He's good with his mouth. That's the part nobody tells you isn't enough. He says the sharp thing, the deflecting thing, the thing that would have landed any other day, and it lands today too, he can see it land, he sees the one nearest him flinch at being read that fast; and then it doesn't matter that he won the sentence, because the sentence was never the contest. He understands that with a clarity that arrives a beat too late. Being right and being smart and being faster than all four of them put together buys him nothing here. There is no version of clever that gets him to the door.

So they hit him. That's all it is. There's no elegance to write into it and he won't, later, give it any. Four boys he's showered next to and blocked for and carried on a field hit a kid until the kid stops talking, because the kid stopped being a teammate the second the silence turned, and a thing that isn't a teammate is easier to put your hands on. He covers his head because some animal part of him knows to. He does not cry, which he'll be obscurely proud of and then ashamed of being proud of, because what kind of thing is that to keep.

They leave him on the tile. He lies there and does the math on his own face with his fingers, the way you'd inventory anything that was yours and got broken, and he thinks, with the cold part of his brain that's already older than the rest of him: fine. Noted. Lesson received.

Home is worse, and home is quieter, and that's the part that teaches him the rest of it.

His father takes one look. His father is a man with a military background and a particular relationship to the word correct, a man who has spent Perry's whole childhood communicating in a code that never once spelled out anything you could hold him to. He doesn't ask who. He doesn't need who. He looks at his son's face and understands, the way fathers like him understand, that the face is evidence. Evidence of what was done to the boy, yes, but also... evidence of what the boy is, finally surfaced where the neighbors might see it.

He says it's a disgrace. He says a few other things. And then he does the thing he does, which is hands, belts, which is the language he was always going to fall back on, except this time it isn't discipline dressed as love, this time there's nothing dressed as anything, and Perry stands there and takes it because there is no door here either. There was never going to be a door. He's known since he was thirteen that if the thing inside him ever got out he'd lose the house, and now it's out, and the losing is happening in real time, slow and methodical and without the man ever once raising his voice or saying the actual words.

That's the joke, later. Years later, in a hospital hallway, when a man he half-likes asks him whether his father loved him.

Well, he used to beat me in Morse code, so it's possible. But he never actually said the words.

It gets a laugh. It's built to. He spent a long time building it, sanding it down, timing the pause, getting the delivery so clean that the thing underneath it never shows unless you already know to look. The wit was the only thing that came out of that locker room and that house intact. It didn't save him then. It couldn't. But he keeps it sharp the way other people keep a faith, because it's the one thing those four boys and that man couldn't take off him, and so he made it the thing he is.

The drawing you just looked at is the kid before the joke exists. Before he's figured out how to make it survivable by making it snappy. Just a boy with a face that's evidence, learning the lesson the hard way that being the smartest person in the room doesn't matter at all when the room decides what you are is worse than what you can do.

That's the lesson. That's why he ends up Gay Perry, loud and shameless and out before anyone can use it against him, naming the thing about himself first so no one ever gets to name it for him again. People think that's confidence. It is, by the time you meet him. But it started here, on the tile, with a kid who found out what coming out cost in a place and a time that charged the full price.