Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 3) (2 page)

Sounds like the perfect boyfriend, right? Well, he was, except for one small thing. I came out of the closet at school, and he didn't. Which sounds like a small deal, except it's not. When two guys are dating and only one of them is out of the closet, eventually the in-the-closet one will be forced to choose between the closet and the other guy. In my case, Kevin chose the closet, and he'd been a real jerk about it. In other words, he wasn't so sweet and gentle and cuddly after all. So I had no choice but to dump him. Which isn't to say I didn't miss him, sometimes a lot.

I know this is confusing. The point is, I now had this great new boyfriend, Otto, so the whole thing was moot anyway.

I'd seen Kevin since we broke up, at school and stuff. But he and I ran in different circles—
really
different circles. Basically, he was popular, and I wasn't. Which meant that while I had seen him, I hadn't ever talked to him. But somehow running into him here seemed different than seeing him at school.

"Kevin?" I said. I'm pretty sure I looked happy, in spite of everything.

"Kevin!" Min said. She didn't look or sound happy at all. On the contrary, she seemed annoyed.

He nodded and grinned—the impish smile I mentioned earlier. "Hey, Russel," he said. "Hey, Min." But it was like he was deliberately avoiding looking at her.

"Uh, what are you doing here?" I asked him. I figured he had to have been waiting for someone—a friend, a tutor, maybe even (gulp) a new boyfriend.

"Well, I wanted to be a zombie."

"Is that
right
?" This was actually Min, not me.

"Yeah," Kevin said. "That was pretty cool, what they did, huh?"

"Huh?" I said. "Oh, yeah, it was. So you came here to be a movie extra too?"

"Yeah, I saw that poster in the hallway, and I thought it looked really interesting."

"What a
coincidence
," Min said.

I, meanwhile, was thinking, This is not possible! Kevin was going to be in
Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies
too? Talk about the dead rising up out of the grave.

But now we were both working on the same project. So suddenly Kevin Land was talking to me again. This was the last thing in the world I wanted (more or less).

"Russel," Min insisted. "We should go." Gunnar and Em had somehow already passed us and were probably waiting in the parking lot.

"Yeah," I said. "Sure. Well," I said to Kevin. "See you." Min was pulling me away.

"Hey, Russel?" Kevin said. I turned. "We should get together sometime. Just to talk."

Just to talk? Well, what else would we do? (Get your mind out of the gutter!)

"I mean it!" Min said. "We really have to go."

Before I could give Kevin an answer, Min was literally dragging me away. If I hadn't been so stunned by the whole Kevin-suddenly-reappearing thing, I probably would have wondered what the hell had gotten into her.

*   *   *

So Kevin Land was back in my life. I could
not
believe it. At that point, I couldn't imagine anything that would make my life any more complicated.

Then I got home from zombie practice. I walked past the living room, where my parents were taking down the Halloween decorations.

My mom immediately turned to confront me. She was clutching a white candle in the shape of a skull, something that had been set on the fireplace mantel.

"Russel," she whispered, like just saying the word was this great, terrible burden.

My dad looked over at me too. "Russel, please come in here," he said, also choking out the words. "We need to talk." He was holding a paper coffin against his chest like a security blanket.

"Talk?" I said. This wasn't good, but I couldn't exactly walk away. I pushed my way through the strands of fake spiderwebs that hung, partially unpinned, from the arch that led into the living room.

I had barely gotten two feet when my mom suddenly blurted, "Is it true? Are you gay?"

Un-fricking-believable. The exact same day that Kevin had zombied his way back into my life, my parents had somehow also discovered that I'm gay.

My parents. Oh, God, how do
I
explain my parents?

My dad first, since he's easier.

He's an investment counselor. That means he meets with people and helps them figure out how to invest their money.

That's pretty much it.

I don't mean to be mean. But his job is his life. He is not a complicated person. He just loves his job—stocks and bonds and plastic binders and rubber bands and PowerPoint projections. He's big and friendly and a little goofy-looking. I used to joke he looked like Mr. Clean, except with no earring and slightly more hair.

My mom, meanwhile,
is
a complicated person. She works as the office manager at a dentist's office, but that's just her job. She does a million other things—gourmet cooking, handball, volunteer work with disabled kids, bonsai gardening. As for the rest, she's a bundle of contradictions. She clips fifty-cent coupons, but she'll spend five hundred dollars on a pair of shoes. She never yells, but she's often angry. She looks fantastic—trim and sophisticated—but all she ever eats is dessert.

Mostly, she just really, really, really, really cares what other people think about her. Go back to the bonsai tree thing for a second. Bonsai trees look great, but it sure doesn't come easy. They have to be trimmed and wired and kept in tiny pots with bound roots. The trees probably don't like it much, but then again, it's not about the trees. It's all about the way they look, the fact that they're perfect.

My mom is like that with everything. It had something to do with her upbringing. Her father died young, leaving her mom and brother and her very poor. But according to my mom, being poor doesn't mean you can't have dignity. I have no idea what this means exactly, but it has something to do with not having a couch on your front porch.

Anyway, since I was her son, I was a reflection on her. So she really, really, really, really cared what people thought of me. Good grades were nonnegotiable, and fluorescent green shoelaces were an offense against God and nature. Even worse, they were "tacky," which is apparently the worst thing in the world you can be.

In other words, look perfect. Be a bonsai tree.

Needless to say, my parents and I didn't have a lot in common.

A house. Some DNA.

That's about it. Sometimes it was like they lived on one continent and I lived on another. Sure, we talked, but more like it was on the phone and the connection was horrible. Plus the customs and practices on their continent were just so different from the customs and practices on mine. To say anything complicated required so much background information that after a while it just became easier to never say anything real at all.

"Did you brush your teeth?"

"Yes."

"Did you pick up grapes when you were at the store?"

"No, you said not to get them if they were too expensive."

"Okay, love you! Let's be sure and talk again in three months."

Still, this is where things get complicated. Sure, my parents and I didn't have a lot in common, but they were my parents, and I did love them. They had done their best raising me, which was pretty darn good. I mean, they'd never chained me up in a closet (although that's setting the bar kind of low, isn't it?).

In all seriousness, my parents had always looked out for me. I think about all the buckets of vomit my mom had cleaned up when I was sick. How fun was that? Or the time when I was eight and I slammed my finger in the car door, and my dad held me in his arms all the way to the emergency room.

My parents had also taught me how to get by in the world, to look both ways before crossing the street, and not to jam the screwdriver into the wall outlet. They'd taught me the difference between right and wrong—that it wasn't okay to lie and steal, or stare at the man with no nose.

My parents were good, decent people. They gave money to charity, and they voted. They didn't litter. They didn't make fun of the homeless, or laugh at insult humor, or tolerate racial stereotypes. And they loved me—I had never before doubted that.

Which is why I was so surprised by the way they reacted to my being gay.

*   *   *

First I needed to know just what they knew.

Back in the living room with my parents, I asked, "What are you talking about?" This was in response to my mom's question about my being gay. I tried my best to sound confused, yet casual, determined to get to the bottom of this "misunderstanding," but a pit had already opened deep in my stomach.

"A friend of mine said her son said you're a member of the school's gay-straight alliance!" my mom said. She said this pointedly, like she was accusing me of some terrible crime. Which, if you think green shoelaces are an offense against God, I guess it is.

So my mom knew about our gay-straight alliance (technically, a gay-straight -
bisexual
alliance, but I sure wasn't going to correct her). I know it might sound strange that it had taken a whole eight months for word to get around to her, but it really wasn't. It wasn't just my parents and I who lived on different continents. It was
all
teenagers, and
all
adults. And eight months is about how long it takes for gossip to get from one continent to another, at least without the Internet, which my parents hardly ever used.

"I
am
a member of the gay-straight alliance," I said. "Wouldn't you be? It's a question of civil rights. But that doesn't mean I'm
gay
!" Now I tried to sound shocked at the suggestion, but not, of course, offended.

"Then I went looking in your room," my mom said. "And I found this."

She threw the skull onto the love seat and snatched up something from the coffee table. It was a magazine that Otto had sent me. Not a porno one, mind you. Just a gay teen magazine.

It was so incredibly
wrong
of her to be looking in my room without my permission! If she'd had a question about my sexuality, she could have
asked
. True, I might have evaded the question. I was good at that. (For example, I had just finished saying that being a member of the gay-straight alliance didn't necessarily mean
I
was gay… which is technically true!) But I had never lied to my parents before, and I wasn't about to start now.

I took a deep breath. "It's true," I said. "What you said before."

You know how animals look right after the crash of thunder—incredibly alert with the fur on their backs sticking up? That's how I felt. As for my parents' total invasion of my privacy in going through my things, I'd decided to let that go for now.

My parents were momentarily speechless. My mom sank down onto the couch next to a couple of paper gravestones—Halloween decorations still to be put away.

"But Russel!" she said. "Why didn't you
tell
us?"

She was kidding, right?

"You're confused," my dad said, still clutching the paper coffin. "That's it, isn't it? Lots of kids go through a phase like this. I know I did."

This caught me by surprise. My dad went through a "gay" phase? But I didn't even want to take a single step down that avenue of thought.

"I'm not confused," I said, trying to keep my voice even, confident. "I've known for a long time. Maybe forever."

This was true. Being gay was never that big a deal for me. Maybe it was because I always felt so unbelievably different from other kids in so many other ways anyway—this was just one more thing. What
had
been a big deal was figuring out how I was going to live my whole life without anyone ever finding out. I hadn't counted on the fact that not telling people would make me feel so dishonest, so schizophrenic, and so incredibly lonely. So that previous spring, I had finally decided that maybe I could both be gay
and
tell people about it.

"But you
can't
know!" my mom was saying. "Russel, you're only sixteen years old!"

"Almost seventeen," I said. My birthday was in a month.

I thought about trying to explain—that I
did
know I was gay. That I wasn't going through some phase, that I wasn't "questioning my sexuality." For me, being gay was just finally finding the word to describe the way I'd always felt. And the word
did
fit, perfectly. I knew I was gay exactly the way I knew I was a boy, or had red hair (more auburn, really).

But I also knew, just as certainly, that my parents couldn't hear this. Not now, anyway.

"Why don't we talk about this later?" I said.

"Russel," my dad said. "I think you really need to think about this."

And then my mom said, "But, Russel! Homosexuality is
disgusting
!"

I need to stop here for a second. I know I've been making jokes about this whole little episode. Looking back, it's funny to think how my parents reacted. Ha, ha. But it didn't feel funny at the time. People like to say that we gay people don't know what it's like to experience "real" discrimination—that we were never slaves, that we never had our land stolen from us, that we were never put in concentration camps (wait, yes, we were—okay, bad example). But let me say here and now that being rejected by your own parents just for being yourself is really, really tough. Sure, other minorities have had it bad (like it's some contest!), but at least they grew up in families surrounded by people just like themselves. No matter how bad they had it, no matter how bad the discrimination is or was, at least most of them had one another.

Meanwhile, most of us gay people grow up surrounded by people who we know don't understand us and who, if they knew the truth, might very well completely reject us. Then when they finally do learn the truth, most of our parents
do
reject us, at least for a little while. And there is nothing—and I mean
nothing
—like being rejected by your own parents, even if you don't have anything in common with them. These are still the people who raised you, who are supposed to love you unconditionally.

Just something to think about, okay?

Anyway, there I was, and my mom had just said to me, "But, Russel! Homosexuality is
disgusting
!"

In other words,
I
was disgusting.

I just stared at my parents. It was like I suddenly didn't know them. It was like they had both ripped off rubber masks, and I could see their real faces for the first time—faces that were terrifying and evil and lifeless, just like, well, zombies.

*   *   *

I desperately needed to talk to someone. I was all set to IM Min or Gunnar when I noticed an e-mail in my in-box.

An e-mail from Kevin.

I meant what I said. I really need to talk to you, okay
?

He needed to talk to me, and I needed to talk to a friend. Kevin was a friend, right? So before I could stop myself, I found myself IMing Kevin and asking if he wanted to meet me at the park between our houses.

*   *   *

We met at this picnic gazebo. It had been built at the edge of a swamp that bordered the park, but since the swamp stank of methane, the picnic gazebo did too. This was the place where we used to meet when we'd been boyfriends, so even though it stunk to high heaven, it was still a romantic place to me. In the months since our ill-fated affair, I'd gotten, um, aroused every time I smelled sulfur.

By this point I was already 90 percent certain that my IMing Kevin had been a mistake. Meeting at the stinky picnic gazebo, with all its history, was just compounding the mistake. But I'd said I was coming, so it would have been rude to just not show up.

He was waiting for me underneath the gazebo.

"Russel!" he said, too loudly. "Thanks for coming!"

"Yeah, well, something just happened. I needed to talk to someone."

"Yeah?"

"My parents just found out I'm gay. They found a magazine."

Now this was very strange. Notice how I didn't tell him who the magazine was from? It was almost like I didn't want him knowing I had a boyfriend. What was
that
about?

"Oh, man," Kevin said. "What'd they do?"

I told Kevin the whole horrible encounter.

"Gosh, Russel, I'm so sorry." He sort of shuffled nervously, and I could tell he was thinking about hugging me. But in the end he didn't move any closer, which made me feel relieved and disappointed at the same time. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," I said. "I guess so. I mean, I think so. My parents can't stay mad forever, right?" I
did
feel better. Talking to Kevin, just saying everything out loud, had helped. "Hey, what did you want to talk to me about anyway?"

"Huh? Oh, you mean my e-mail. Well, it's funny, because it's a little like you. I'm coming out. Well, not to my parents, but to my friends. At school, I mean."