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.

September, 2014

Being in middle school was hard. Not because of the work. No, Ethan Wilde was obnoxiously smart according to his older sister. Good at the work. Good at being ahead. Good at being exactly where everyone wanted and needed him to be. 

The problem—that wasn’t actually a bad problem to have she would tell him—was the fact that that’s where he began and ended. He excelled at reading and spelling. Was exceptional at math and science. Had a genuine interest in social studies and every special his class took. 

But that was it. 

Ethan was a student, and that’s where his identity began and ended. He was quiet, or as quiet as a kid who couldn’t sit still or keep his thoughts in his head could be. He was learning to be better at it. 

The situation, not the problem, was this: Daisy had ballet and musical practice every day of the week, and sometimes even on weekends. Which meant that every single day of the week, Ethan came home to the nanny asleep in Mommy’s chair with her stories too loud and the house smelling like cigarettes and nothing to do until dinner except homework, which he finished in approximately twenty five minutes because he was annoyingly good at school, and then nothing.

Just nothing.

He was getting good at nothing. He’d had a lot of practice.

Ethan noticed that when she got home she did a lot of noticing, herself. Usually, she got home around 6:00. He’d do his homework and then sit on the sofa in the living room or sit on his bed and wait. Wait for her to finish ballet and theater practice and walk the twenty five minutes from the theater to their house. 

Maybe that was his thing. Waiting. Daisy had ballet and acting and singing. Ethan had waiting. Waiting and waiting and waiting. For what, he wasn’t sure. But he would keep waiting until the next thing happened and then he would wait some more. 

Daisy noticed on a Tuesday. 

He knew it was a Tuesday because she had both ballet and theater on Tuesdays which meant she didn’t get home until almost seven, which meant he’d been sitting on the sofa in the living room that smelled like cigarettes with the nanny napping in Mommy’s chair with her stories on for almost two hours doing nothing when he heard her key in the lock. 

She came in the way she always did—loudly. Dropping her bags by the door, toeing off her shoes against the wall, calling his name before she’d even fully gotten inside and shut the door. He heard her check the kitchen first, then the living room doorway, where she stopped.

He was on the sofa. He had been on the sofa since approximately 3:45. The television was too loud, but he wasn’t really watching anyway. He wasn’t reading. He wasn’t doing anything at all, actually. Just sitting there with the nanny who was snoring too loud watching a soap opera that, from what he’d gathered over the last two and a half years, had multiple main characters resurrected for added drama and fanfare. 

She set her water bottle down slowly. Tilted her head the way she did when she was thinking. He recognized the expression. He’d learned to either brace himself or prepare to be voluntold for something whenever it appeared.

“How long have you been sitting there?” She asked in the sweetest voice she could muster up.

He shrugged. “A while.”

She lingered for a minute in the doorway, chewing on her bottom lip as her fingers fidgeted with the hem of her Zuzu City Youth Ballet sweatshirt. The nanny continued to snore. The television continued to blare bad, over dramatized acting. And the two siblings stared at each other. 

“We’re finding you something to do,” she finally said.

“I do things!” Ethan argued immediately.

“What things?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it just as quickly. “Homework,” he tried.

“You finish that in twenty five minutes.”

“I—” He paused. “I read.”

“You’ve read every book in your room twice.”

He had, actually. Probably more than twice. Including the last Goosebumps book he’d been saving for them to read together specifically. He’d caved sometime in July and read it by himself twice.

“I’m fine,” he deflected.

“You’re sitting in the dark,” she countered. “On a Tuesday. Doing nothing. Alone.”

“The TV is on! And Miss Gloria is right there!” He gestured towards the sleeping nanny.

“Ethan.”

He slumped further into the sofa cushions. She was already picking her bag back up, moving toward the kitchen with the particular energy of someone who had made a decision and was now simply executing it.

“What kind of something?” He called after her.

“We’re going to figure that out!” She called back.

He stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t need something!” He called out, loud enough to carry.

“Yes you do!” She responded, equally as loud. He groaned loudly.

Still, he stared at the ceiling for another moment as he thought about it. What could he do? Go to the library? It was near the ballet company and the theater. Or maybe he could join theater, to? No, that wasn’t right. He wouldn’t like that. 

Theater was Daisy’s thing. Or one of them, anyway. He didn’t want her thing. He wanted his own thing, whatever that meant. Something that was just his.

He thought about it while she moved around the kitchen making dinner. She always made dinner now. Had been doing it since she got home from the Gotoro Empire, quietly taking over the kitchen the same way she quietly took over most things that needed doing. He heard the tap running, the fridge opening, the particular sound of her pulling out the cutting board.

“What are you good at?” She called out after a few minutes of silence.

“Lots of things!” He called back.

“Besides school.”

He thought about it seriously. Really seriously. The way he approached math worksheets. Laid it all out in front of him like a word problem that needed solving.

He was good at running. He’d always been fast—faster than most kids in gym class, faster than kids who were bigger than him, which at eleven was becoming a shorter and shorter list because he was growing at an alarming rate that his body hadn’t quite figured out how to coordinate yet. All arms and legs and not quite sure what to do with any of them, except when he was moving. When he was moving it felt different. Purposeful.

He was good at reading other people. Knowing what they were going to do before they did it. In gym, during games, he always seemed to know where the ball was going before it got there.

He thought about gym. About last week when they’d played gridball for the first time this year. About the way Mr Reid had stopped the class to point at him specifically and say watch how Wilde reads the field and everyone had looked and he’d felt his face go red hot but also something else he wasn’t sure he had a name for. Something warm underneath the embarrassment of being perceived.

He sat up.

“Daisy?”

“Hm?”

“Do you know if the middle school has a gridball team?”

The kitchen went quiet for a second.

Then: “give me two minutes.”

He heard her put something down. The sound of her jPod being picked up. Typing.

Thirty seconds passed.

“Tryouts are Thursday,” she responded. “After school. Lower field.”

He blinked up at the ceiling. “How do you know that already?”

“Because I looked it up, duh-doi,” she mocked, like this was obvious. “You’re going.”

“I don’t—I’ve never actually played—”

“Ethan.” Her head appeared around the kitchen doorway. The older sister look fully deployed by now, refined over eleven years to be essentially inescapable. Solidified in its existence in the last two and a half years. “You’re going.”

He looked at her, pressing his lips into a thin line.

“What if I’m bad at it?” He asked. Quieter. The real question underneath all the other questions and backtalk.

She looked back at him for a long moment, steady and certain.

“What if you’re not?” 

Thursday came faster than it was supposed to. Ethan had spent the entirety of the time between Tuesday night and Thursday afternoon trying to convince himself that this was a bad idea. Because it was a bad idea, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a gridball player. He was a student. He was good at school and reading and waiting, and none of those things translated to a field. Probably. He was almost certain of it, actually. 

Daisy hadn’t entertained a word of it when he brought it up Tuesday when they were both supposed to be asleep and he snuck into her room to sit at the end of her bed. And definitely not during dinner on Wednesday. 

She walked him to the lower field after school on Thursday the same way she walked him most places—just ahead of him, like she already knew where she was going, talking the whole time about nothing in particular. What she’d had for lunch. Something funny someone had done in second period. Whether or not the leaves were turning faster this year than last. He suspected she was doing it on purpose. Filling the air so his brain couldn’t. That, or she just liked the sound of her own voice. Maybe both.

It was working, mostly.

“You don’t have to stay,” he mumbled when the field came into view and his stomach dropped approximately three floors.

“I know.” She just kept walking.

“Don’t you have rehearsal?” He asked, speeding up to keep up his pace next to her.

“Mmhmm.”

He stopped walking. She stopped a half step after, turning back to look at him with a sheepish look on her face.

“Daisy.”

“Ethan.”

“You skipped rehearsal.”

She tilted her head, trying to look innocent. “Did I?”

“You’re going to get in trouble.”

“Don’t be silly,” Daisy waved him off. “I’ve been in this show before! I’m off book a month and a half before I need to be off book. I could be Ariel in my sleep!” She argued, even though everything in that sentence was irrelevant. She would most definitely get in trouble. 

He stood there for another second, looking at the back of her Zuzu City Youth Ballet sweatshirt—a different one today, grey instead of navy—and felt something complicated move through his chest. Grateful and guilty and something else he didn’t quite have the vocabulary for yet.

He followed her, the words tangled up in his brain. 

The coach's name was Coach Benson. Ethan knew him from his history class—had him every single day for fourth period right before lunch for a few weeks now. He would’ve thought someone else of his stature was intimidating, genuinely scary. Incredibly tall with broad shoulders and an almost too muscular build. However, sitting in the front row of his history class seemed to prove otherwise. He was a man who had decided that enthusiasm was a personality in and of itself and committed to it entirely.

“Alright!” He clapped his hands together as the kids assembled on the field. There were maybe twenty of them of various sizes and various levels of confidence. Ethan was one of the tallest, which still caught him off guard sometimes. He hadn’t quite figured out what to do with that yet. “Welcome, welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Coach Benson! I teach seventh grade history and I am genuinely thrilled every single year to do this. Tryouts are not about being perfect. They are about showing me what you’ve got and letting me see what we can build. So let’s have some fun, yeah?”

Some of the kids cheered. Some of them looked the way Ethan felt.

He found Daisy in his peripheral vision before he meant to. She’d positioned herself at the edge of the field, not quite in the bleachers, leaning against the chainlink fence with her arms crossed and her expression carefully, deliberately neutral.

He knew that face. That was her I am being very normal about this face.

He looked away before she caught him looking.

He didn’t think about it while it was happening.

That was the thing he would realize later, lying in bed that night with Mr Frog on the pillow next to him and the September dark sparkling with stars outside the window. Every other thing in his life required thinking. Required calculation and carefulness and managing how much space he was taking up and whether he was performing correctly for whoever happened to be watching.

On the field, his brain just stopped.

The first drill was just running. Which felt almost laughably simple until Coach Benson clocked his time and made a note on his clipboard without saying anything, and Ethan felt the back of his neck prickle with something too close to embarrassment. 

He was fast. He hadn’t known how fast until now. Until there was somewhere to be fast to. A reason for all those long legs that had been growing faster than he could figure out what to do with them. He ran and the air came off him cold and clean and he felt something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Maybe ever.

Like he was supposed to be somewhere.

Like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

The second drill was catching. He dropped the first one. His hands were too big for his arms right now, or his arms were too long for his body, or something wasn’t talking to something else the way it was supposed to. He caught the second. The third and fourth landed cleanly in his grasp after adjusting his focus.

The ball felt right in his hands. Heavy and real and exactly the right size. The plays made sense before the coaches finished explaining them, the geometry of it clicking into place the way math did, the way reading did, except this was in his body and not just his head. His legs knew where to go before his brain caught up—cutting left, finding the gap, reading the movement of the other boys the way he read sentences. Like a language he’d always known but never had anywhere to speak.

After, when the drills were done and the kids were milling around waiting to be released, Coach Benson found him.

“Wilde, right?”

“Yes sir.”

He nodded, made another note. “You played before?”

“No sir. Just gym class.”

The coach looked up from his clipboard. Looked at him the way adults sometimes did when they were recalibrating something. “Just gym class?” The coach repeated.

“Yes sir.”

He nodded again, slower this time. “Well,” he clicked his pen, “you’ve got good instincts. Speed we can always use. The hands’ll come.” He said it the way someone says something they’re certain about. Not a consolation. A simple fact. “Results go up Friday morning. Check the board outside the gym.”

“Okay,” Ethan nodded almost too enthusiastically. “Thank you, sir.”

Daisy was waiting at the edge of the field. She had her arms crossed and her expression neutral as she was doing an extremely poor job of acting like she was calm.

“Well?” She asked, perking up the second he was within earshot.

“He said the results go up tomorrow.”

“But how do you think it went?”

He considered lying. Considered being measured and careful and not letting himself want things too loudly in case the wanting made it worse when it didn’t happen.

He looked at the field. At the lines in the grass. At the place where something had shifted in his chest sometime around the third lap running and hadn’t shifted back.

“I think it went okay,” he whispered, as if that would change if he said it too loud.

She looked at him for a long moment. He could see her choosing not to say something. The effort of it was visible on her face.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Good.” She pressed her lips together, eyes casting to the ground before letting the words that had been ruminating out. “I’m proud of you, bubba.”

The next day, his name was first on the list posted outside of the gym.

He stood there for a long time looking at it. At the letters of his own name in someone else’s handwriting, at the top of a list, meaning something.

He thought about Mommy. About how she would’ve come to every single game and cheered louder than anyone else, just like she did during Daisy’s musicals and ballet performances.

He took a picture of it on his jPod to send to Pop.