lex isn’t funny

October, 2018

Ethan was a sensitive boy. Daisy knew that’s how their mother would describe him if she were still here. She would say that there was nothing wrong with that, just that he was sensitive and that’s it. He felt things deeply, even if he pretended not to, and expressed them outwardly, much to his father’s dismay. 

Usually, however, he didn’t let the fact that he was more emotional affect him. He grit his teeth and walked through life like everything was fine. It was fine. Everything was fine. 

He’d been off for a week, maybe longer. Quieter than usual in the particular way that wasn’t his normal quiet. Eating dinner too fast so he could disappear back upstairs. Giving her one word answers when she texted him. Showing up to practice and coming home and going straight to his room without stopping in the kitchen doorway to talk to her while she cooked the way he normally did. Sharing his every thought that he’d had over the day with little room for her response.

She didn’t push. She waited.

She was good at waiting too. At least, she was when she had to be.

He showed up in her doorway at 9:45 on a Wednesday night. In a red hoodie with a faded Lightning McQueen graphic he would never wear outside of the house and plaid pajama pants. His hair was still wet from his post-practice shower, damp clumps curling against his forehead before they had a chance to frizz up. He had the look on his face that she recognized from approximately a thousand different versions of him across fifteen years. The one that meant he had something to say and hadn’t figured out how to say it yet.

“Hey,” she hummed, closing her laptop and pushing her statistics textbook aside to make room for him on the bed. 

He sat down without even looking at her, crossing his legs and pulling his sleeves over his fists. 

He'd almost told her a hundred times.

That was the thing nobody would ever know. How many times he'd stood in doorways with the word right there, right at the front of his mouth, and swallowed it back down. How many times he'd been sitting across from her at the dinner table or at the end of this bed and felt it pressing against his ribs like something trying to get out and just couldn't. He just kept eating. Kept talking about something else. Kept being the version of himself that was easier to be.

He'd almost told her when he was thirteen and they'd watched a movie with a character who loved the wrong person and he'd felt something crack open in his chest that he didn't have a name for yet.

He'd almost told her at fourteen, after the first time, when he'd come home and gone straight to his room and sat on his bed for two hours trying to figure out what had just happened to him and whether it made him something he was afraid of being.

He'd almost told her a hundred times.

Tonight his feet had carried him here before he'd fully decided to let them.

And now he couldn’t look her in the eye. Because he was ashamed. Ashamed of himself and what he was. As if it were something dirty, something that made him lesser than. Because it was, wasn’t it? That’s what every boy in the locker room said in jest. Do something they deemed strange? Take too long in the showers? Not shower with everyone else? Care about your appearance? Be nice to the cheerleaders? Or, Yoba forbid, literally anyone else?

She didn’t push. She waited for him to come to her, just as he’d learned to do for her. She just criss crossed her legs and straightened her shoulders and waited for him to find the words that had been choking him for as long as he could remember. Despite the theatrics embedded deep in her bones, Daisy Mae was the most patient person Ethan would ever know. At least, she was when it came to him. 

She made the space and she waited in it. Patient in the specific way of someone who had learned that some things couldn't be rushed. That some things had to find their own way out, in their own time, through their own door.

So she waited.

He picked at his sleeve. Outside, October chill pressed loudly against the window. The lamp on her nightstand was warm and low and the statistics textbook sat closed on the edge of the bed where she'd pushed it and the room was quiet in the way rooms got quiet when something important was about to happen.

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Took a deep breath in an attempt to contain the thoughts bouncing around his skull at such a velocity it made him nauseous. 

“I just…” He began, eyes focused on his hands. “I’ve just had a weird week…”

“I know,” she whispered. Her hands stayed in her lap, fingers fidgeting with one another in an attempt to keep herself from touching him and scaring him off. 

"I'm just tired," he tried. "Practices have been really intense and Coach Benson has been on everyone's case about the playbook and I think I might be getting sick or something because my throat's been—"

"Ethan."

He stopped.

She wasn't looking at him with impatience. Just with that steady, open expression she always had when it came to him. The patience that gave him the confidence to do things that scared him, even if he wouldn’t admit that. 

He pressed his lips together, eyes focused on his sleeve. The thread was getting longer now. For just a moment, he thought about getting up. Making some excuse about it. Coming back another time, or not coming back at all, or just keeping it in his chest where it had lived for this long already. It was fine there. He was managing. He was always managing.

His feet had carried him here before he'd fully decided to let them.

He took a breath.

"I'm gay."

The words came out rushed before he’d decided they were going to come out at all. Before he’d wrapped his head around the fact that that was the word he was going to use to describe it. A full send into the scariest thing he’d ever admit about himself in the history of forever, out on the quilt between them like it was no big deal. 

Only, it was the biggest deal anything had ever been. 

The tears came before the word gay was even out of his mouth. His voice cracked around the vowel, the sound turning into an uncaught sob just as he finished. His whole face crumpled and his chest heaved and he pressed the palm of his hand hard against his mouth like he could physically stop it but he couldn't. He couldn't. It was already out and it was already happening whether he liked it or not.

"I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm sorry, I’m so sorry, Daisy.”

She didn't speak. Just moved closer on the bed until her knee pressed against his.

"I don't— I'm not trying to make it—" He pressed his palm harder against his mouth, shoulders heaving. "I'm sorry. I know it's—" a broken inhale, "—I know it's a lot, I just. I didn't know who else—"

"Ethan—"

"Please don't tell Dad." The words came out desperate, cracked right down the middle. "Please. You can't tell him. If he finds out he's going to—" he couldn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to. They both knew exactly what David Brighton would do with this information. In no world would the outcome be good. "Please, Daisy. You have to promise me."

"I promise," she said immediately. No hesitation. Not even a breath between his words and hers. "I promise you. Not a word."

He nodded. Kept nodding, like if he stopped he would fall apart entirely, and he was already so close to the edge of it he could feel the drop.

"I'm sorry," he said again. Smaller this time, tears relentlessly trailing down his face. "I'm sorry I'm— I'm not — there's something wrong with me, I've known for a long time that there's something wrong—”

“Stop,” she interrupted with a fierce reverence. 

He looked up at her for the first time since he'd said it. His face was a mess. Eyes red and swollen, cheeks wet, the utterly confusing devastation of someone who has been holding something so heavy for so long that putting it down feels indistinguishable from collapse.

Daisy looked back at him. Her eyes were bright too, doing that thing where they were very full but she wasn't going to let them spill because right now wasn't about her. Right now was entirely, completely his. Yet it still didn’t diminish the fact that her baby brother was telling her the most important thing about him that she hadn’t known, and he was calling it wrong.

“Stop it. There is nothing wrong with you. Do you hear me? Absolutely nothing. Not one single thing,” she insisted. 

His chin wobbled as he tried to hold in the ugly sobs wracking through his entire body. “Daisy—”

“Nothing,” she asserted. “You are not broken. You are not wrong. You are not something to be sorry for."

He broke completely.

She pulled him in before the sob finished leaving his chest. Both of her arms around his shoulders, his face against her shoulder, her hand coming up to the back of his head. He grabbed the fabric of her sweater with both hands and held on like she was the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid and strange, and cried in a way he'd never let himself cry about this. Not once. Not in two years of lying in the dark with it pressing against his ribs, suffocating him with the weight of holding it alone and shamefully.

She didn't say I know.

She didn't say I always knew.

She didn't say anything that made it smaller or took it from him or turned it into something she'd been waiting for instead of something he'd chosen to give.

She just held him.

She held him through every apology he tried to make. Talked quietly over each one until he stopped making them. Held him until the sobs turned to hiccups and the hiccups turned to shaky breaths and the shaky breaths evened out into something that wasn’t quite stillness but was close enough.

Eventually, the shaky breaths evened out into something close enough to stillness. He didn't pull away and she didn't make him. Just stayed there with her arms around him and her hand in his hair and the quiet October chill pressing soft against the window.

"Daisy?" He spoke finally, the words muffled against her shoulder and thick from crying.

Her hand continued its determined path down his spine, "Hm?"

"I'm—"

"If you apologize again I'm going to be so annoyed at you."

A sound came out of him that was almost a laugh. Almost.

She pressed a kiss to the top of his head.

"I love you," she said into his hair, the words firm. "Like, a completely embarrassing amount. You know that, right?"

He didn't say anything. She felt him nod.

"And I'm so proud of you." She meant it the way she meant very few things. Down to the bone marrow, completely unwavering in its meaning no matter what. "For telling me. For even—" she exhaled softly, "—for carrying this and still showing up every single day. That's not nothing, Ethan."

His hands tightened in the fabric of her sweater.

"You're still my favorite person, bubba. Nothing's gonna change that."

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Thank you,” Ethan finally whispered, his arms tightening around his sister.

“No, thank you for trusting me, E,” Daisy corrected.