Chapter Text
2007
UPSTATE NEW YORK
He’s decided on the name Peter, but only Ricky knows that. He almost didn’t tell, but Ricky is his best friend, and if he can’t tell Ricky, he can’t tell anyone, and if he can’t tell anyone, then it’s like it isn’t true. And that’s one version of reality Peter refuses to accept. He has to be Peter. He can’t be her anymore, no matter how much his mom and dad wish he could and pretend he is.
If you give Ricky an inch, he’ll run a mile with it, and that’s why when Peter tells Ricky that he’s Peter now, Ricky says, “Can I call you Pete? You seem like a Pete.”
Peter is the name he chose. But Pete is the name Ricky chose for him, and Ricky would know. Peter becomes Pete in the time it takes for Ricky’s rock to splash impotently in the creek.
“Sure,” Pete says.
“Cool,” Ricky says. “Wow, I suck at skipping rocks.”
Pete snorts.
This is their spot — a hidden nook of nature where white oaks and sugar maples obscure the creek from the prying eyes of helicopter parents. Pete’s the one hiding; Ricky is just keeping him company, something he’s been doing, inexplicably but loyally, since they were nine years old. Things were different then — for one thing, Pete wasn’t always stoned and borderline suicidal — but in some ways they haven’t changed a bit. Where Pete goes, Ricky follows. Where Ricky is, there Pete is also.
“Gimme one,” Pete says. Ricky presses a stone into his hand, blunt nails brushing Pete’s palm. It turns Pete’s cheeks pink. Another thing that hasn’t changed: his big, dumb crush on Ricky. It’s bad enough he’s trans. Of course he had to go and be gay on top of that. And of course he’s gay for Ricky, who’s the most objectively and effortlessly beautiful human being to ever walk God’s green Earth. Pete clears his throat. He’s practicing speaking in a lower register, but his voice can only go so deep. “Lemme show you how it’s done.”
“I just have to practice,” Ricky says. “Practice makes perfect.”
“Practice makes permanent.”
A divot forms between Ricky’s brows, working to make sense of it. “Practice makes both?”
“Sure,” Pete says. “It’s all in the wrist. It’s in the wrist, see?”
He flicks his wrist back and forth. Ricky, with his own skipping stone, holds out his arm and tries to copy the movement.
He has a manly wrist. Pete quickly hides his thin, bony wrist at his side. He should’ve brought another joint; he already finished his first one, and now he’s got nothing to do with his hands and mouth and brain besides stew in his inadequacy. Regular Friday.
When he tosses his stone, it skips twice before diving smoothly under the surface. Ricky beams.
“I wish I could do that.”
Pete snorts. “You can do literally everything else.”
“I can’t do algebra,” Ricky says. “I’m terrible at algebra. Did you finish the algebra homework?”
“No,” Pete says. “Didn’t bother.”
“Pete,” Ricky says, and he uses the same tone of voice he used to say Pete’s old name in, but he remembered to use the new name, which almost makes up for the fact that he’s using that tone at all.
Almost.
“Stop it,” Pete says, annoyed. “You’re not my dad, you don’t have to worry about my grades.”
“I’m not worried about your grades. I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t need to do that either.”
“Well, yeah, but I’m your best friend,” Ricky says. “So I do it anyway.”
“Well, you don’t have to,” Pete parrots back, in the same cadence. “So stop.”
There’s a pit inside Pete’s misshapen chest where the warmth of being worried about used to go, but it’s a black hole now. Or Pete is the black hole, and anything good anyone puts into him just gets swallowed up and vanished into the ether.
Ricky sighs. He tries to skip his stone, and once again it splashes, dead, in the water.
“That’s like asking me to stop caring about you,” he says.
Pete grinds his teeth. It makes absolutely no sense that Ricky cares about Pete. It didn’t make sense at age nine, but at least they both had the excuse of being age nine. Every subsequent year it’s made less and less sense. Ricky got hot and popular. Pete got called a faggot at every opportunity. Ricky joined the track team. Pete joined the ranks of students on the verge of going to juvie for truancy. Ricky got a job coaching little league softball. Pete got perma-stoned and started selling his mom’s Xanax to upperclassmen.
“You suck at skipping rocks,” he says.
Ricky’s shoulders fall a little. Pete can’t stop making his bullshit into every else’s problem. Trust him to ruin the one good thing he has left.
He throws himself to the dusty dirt and yellowing grass. It rained yesterday, and then the sun came out today and dried everything to death, but he can still smell it in the air, that whiff of sediment and silt. He hates upstate New York, but it has a few redeeming factors. The creek is one. The redolent post-rain air is another. And Ricky, of course. The prettiest thing Pete can never have.
Ricky, with significantly less drama, also sits.
“Sorry,” Pete mutters.
Ricky shrugs. “It’s cool. I do suck.”
“At skipping rocks, yes. As a friend, no.”
“I guess if I’m picking one to be better at,” Ricky says consideringly, “I’d rather be a good friend.”
He nudges Pete with his shoulder. Like flint on steel, a spark sizzles and dies at the touch.
Pete hasn’t told Ricky about liking guys. That secret felt too close to another, like if Ricky found out, he’d make the logical leap. Ricky isn’t exactly known for making logical leaps, but better not to risk it. Of course, if Ricky knew Pete was a fag, he probably wouldn’t be so laissez-faire about touching him all the time.
Things would be so much easier if he could have just stayed a girl. He could have a normal, heterosexual crush on Ricky, and maybe Ricky could even like him back. But Bible camp failed to fix him, and praying every day for weeks only provided him with a certainty that no one was listening. So now he’s a raging queer in a deep closet, and it’s all God’s fault.
“Listen, I don’t care if you did the algebra homework,” Ricky says kinda quietly. He has such defined calves, it’s unfair. “I just don’t want you to be…”
“What, a fuckup?”
“No, I don’t care if you’re a fuckup. I just, I’m sorta generally worried about you, and I know you don’t like that, but… I dunno. You smoke a lot, which is really bad for you.”
“There’s worse drugs.”
“Okay, I mean. Yeah, no drugs would be better, though,” Ricky says. “Your brain would really thank you.”
“Too late,” Pete says, and wishes, again, for the joint he left under his mattress.
Ricky sighs. It’s such a well-trodden disagreement that he doesn’t even bother acting out the rest of it, just moves on. “Do you wanna come over for dinner?”
Yes, badly. “Can’t,” Pete says. “Sorry. My dad already doesn’t trust me as it is, and I am not dragging you into the middle of our shit.”
“Your dad should suck it,” Ricky says matter-of-factly.
A startled laugh escapes Pete, humiliatingly high-pitched. He claps a hand over his mouth.
“Damn, okay,” he giggles. “Tell me how you really feel.”
“That’s how I really feel.” A determined look etches its way onto Ricky’s face. “I feel like your dad should suck it.”
“He should.” On this, at least, they can agree. “But he won’t.”
“Maybe he will one day. We don’t know what the future holds.”
Pete’s not sure his future holds much of anything. He’s pretty sure his future holds fewer months than fingers on his hands. He’s pretty sure he’s not making it out of upstate New York alive.
If not for Ricky, he’d have killed himself already. That’s a truth buried deep in Pete’s core: that Ricky is the only stumbling block between Pete and overdosing on his mom’s stash of Valium. Because every week or two, a day like this one rolls around, and Pete and Ricky can escape to the creek and just exist without scrutiny, and Pete can be Pete out loud and know that Ricky sees him for who he is and chooses, routinely, to stick by his side. And then it doesn’t matter that Pete spends the rest of his time drowning. He has a lifeline named Ricky Matsui.
“I guess,” he mumbles, tired of being the crab in the bucket, dragging Ricky down to his level.
Ricky scooches closer and leans heavily into Pete, his hair bristling under Pete's chin. “That's the spirit.”
Pete has no response. He doesn't want to talk anymore. He just wants to sit here, on the banks of the creek, with Ricky and an elephantine secret weighing down his shoulders, and live in the brevity of the moment where he can't tell which one is more real.