By Jacob Orlando
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“A warning that this story traces the contours of trauma disrupting a chosen family in modern America, including a character’s withdrawal which may be understood as suicide (though this is not directly depicted or stated), as well as two characters witnessing a mass shooting through a video call with someone at the scene.” -Jacob Orlando
mentions of drug use
Andy went down at drag brunch. That’s to say, he had two too many mimosas, followed a leery salt-and-pepper wolf to the bathroom and never came back. We went after him after a few drinks, but he was long gone. Hung, we figured. Or rich. But why not let us know before bouncing out? No one heard from him for a while. We started to worry. Was he getting the ultimate lay, or was he actually dead? And would he ever send $42.49 for his share of the bill? Then we found out he’d moved to Switzerland. What was that about? A couple weeks later, Matt didn’t show up for drag bingo. Miss Thing was missing him. Matt was her suave, sexy, perfect himbo. Oh well. She found a new whipping boy. Not as bright as Matt, but younger. We thought he might be running late. Must be laid up in traffic. No, he didn’t have a car. So he was really getting railed. Why not catch a ride with one of us? But he was a total no-show. Ghosted us. What did we expect? Turned out, the feds arrested Matt for tax fraud. As if his assets needed inflating, right? They hit us up. We were questioned. We complied. That was all. Then Jude, poor Jude. He went back to Lancaster to bury his brother and stayed to help raise his nieces. We’d try to keep in touch, but we knew he was out. Poor Jude. With Phil, things were different. We liked Phil. We all wanted Phil, or wanted to be Phil. He knew us all better than anyone else. We each had a piece of him. Taking him down like that — it was a betrayal. It was unfair. It was rude. We were at a 24-hour diner after a hot night out. Someone said something, and Phil seemed upset. He said he was going for a cigarette. We all wanted to be the one to go after him. Butter melted a hole through his pancakes. He didn’t come back. When we went looking for him, the parking lot was empty. Phil was nowhere to be found. Later, he called each of us to say goodbye. After that, we wanted to escape. We decided to go to the cabin for a weekend. We needed to grieve. To purge. To cleanse. Why not spend some time together? Really connect, right? Plus there was that festival coming up, wouldn’t that be fun? Tommy never showed. We arrived throughout the afternoon, gathering by the water with that heady clarity from the fresh air. We started running low on booze, and boy were we thirsty, so we went into town. The streets were bumping, and so were we. We felt invincible. Then we lost Jimmy. We caught him flirting with this leafy twink a hole behind us on the mini golf course. No randos. That’s how we lost Andy. Jimmy seemed chastened, but he slipped away while we tallied up. Hound dog couldn’t face his dismal stroke count. When we got back to the cabin, we wanted to see a sock on the door and hear Jimmy hard at work inside, but the place was empty. We waited up late, but there was no sign of him. What if he never came back? Should we call the cops? What if they didn’t find him? What if they did? We worried ourselves to sleep. The next morning, we woke up in a pile on the living room floor. We saw one another clearly in the early light and understood — together, we were safe. Things felt almost normal for a while as we got ready. Prep hard, play hard, Phil would have said. We laughed about that, and let ourselves feel a little giddy, like we were kids again about to do something naughty. Throngs filled the festival streets. We walked, strutted, served. We drank. We stayed close to guard against temptation. For a while, it worked. We were having a great time. Then, midway through an Artpop house mashup, Pete said he had a good plug for pills. We all wanted to go too. It was fine, he insisted. It was just up the street. He’d be right back. He left us there. We tried to dance, but our hearts weren’t in it. When they swapped Gaga for the latest copy-paste pop and Pete still wasn’t back with his pills, we really started to worry. Must have been getting plugged real good. Maybe he was on the way back? Maybe he was lost? We could try to go out looking for him, but what if we crossed paths and missed each other? We knew it wasn’t safe to split up, but we had to do something. We decided to pair off. Johnny and Simon would go up one way. Nathan and Jamie would go down the other. That left you and me. We went another round, perching by the bar to watch the boys come and go. Half an hour. We’d go back to the cabin if we hadn’t regrouped by then. There was silence between us for a while as we waited. You asked if I was thinking about Phil. I nodded. You said we should have done better by him. I nodded again. You told me about way back when Phil waited for you after class to walk down to the cafeteria. We traded more Phil stories. We went back to the cabin. Empty. Seemed like there was nothing to do but sit tight. There were drinks in the fridge. We shared the couch. There was a moment when you caught me looking. I’d never felt that way about you before, but just then the feeling shivered through me. We got a video call from Pete. First, we heard the screaming. He was in and out, breaking up over the connection, but we heard the frantic panic all around him. We asked what was going on, but he wouldn’t answer. We called his name until he looked and asked if we were okay. We were fine. Where was he? What the hell was going on? Then we heard shots, and a fresh wave of terrified screams, and we saw Pete running. More shots cut through the call, loud and clear. By then, of course, we knew. This was the big show, the grand finale we’d all been barrelling toward, and you and I were missing it. We were stuck up in the nosebleeds as the curtain fell, struggling to spot our friends on stage. The call cut out. A siren tore past the cabin toward town. You wanted to go after it. I wanted to get away. Where? Somewhere safe. Nowhere was safe. What could we do? Stick together, right? Together, we were safe, right? Bullshit. Together, we were targets. But what if they were waiting for us? And what if they weren’t? Who even were they? Who were we? There was no more us. I couldn’t talk you out of it. I couldn’t bring myself to chase you down. I let you go. Tearing down a two-lane stretch of blacktop back to the city, I tried not to think about us. There was just me and the road ahead. You were behind me. You were all behind me. My phone rang. Tommy no-show. I grit my teeth and let it go to voicemail. He’d seen the news and wanted me to call him back as soon as possible to let him know we were all good. No, we definitely weren’t all good. We were down too many to ever be all good. Phil’s message came next. “You told me once that I’m the glue holding us all together,” he said, voice worn raw. “It’s not true, you know. There’s no glue. If we choose to let go, there’s nothing else.” Eying an oncoming semi, I rat-tat-tatted at the wheel.
Jacob Orlando is a queer young man of letters from small town Texas. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, he presently works a day job and writes away his free time. His piece “Molten” recently won the 55th Annual New Millennium Writings Award for flash fiction. You can follow him on Tumblr (or Twitter, if you really must).
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