Will Lyman — Portfolio

The first time I almost killed a gay boy was on a highway outside White Bear Lake, Minnesota, after I’d driven twenty- five miles to meet and maybe kiss one in real life. We knew each other from the internet and we thought we were in love.

The boy was regular: lanky, thin-lipped, with an ambiguous face that could’ve belonged to anybody. Our compatibility was mostly propelled by that early, giddy sense of confirmation you get when you know attraction is mutual. Every flirtation or promise we shot at each other was mirrored back with greater intensity, until we were envisioning vast futures and planning quiet afternoons, cheeky and entirely serious, too young to know if we meant what we said. For us, the belief was that we’d lived the same lonely life a few towns over from each other, and thus were same person split into different bodies.

We met at a Panera Bread, which was populated overwhelmingly by a girls soccer team celebrating their win at the state qualifiers. The girls giggled: at him, at me, at their sticky flapjacks. He kept harping on their laughter while we drove another few miles to an orthodontist’s’ office and parked along the back wall. The office was closed, so the lot was quiet, and I turned off the engine while he explained to me that he hadn’t ever done anything like this with someone his age. I said Okay.

I’d done a lot of those drives, though always alone. I didn’t spend my money on new clothes or going out since so much of it was eaten by refueling my gas tank. Driving was my favorite thing to do, the thing that made me feel the most American. I’d go for hours without a destination, but enough sense of control to make me believe I was going somewhere.

With the boy in the passenger seat, I did my best to not be annoyed when he fiddled with the air conditioning or the music. He wanted to play Ellie Goulding, for some reason.

When at last we climbed into the trunk, neither of us knew what to do. We kissed sloppily, like dogs, until the windows fogged. I cranked up the air conditioning. Yet as we kept tediously fumbling around, he tried harder to impress me––pornstar moans and breathy whispers right into my ear. He thought I’d like it, but it just made me feel sad for him.

Laying over each other, our bodies drained and newly sexless, he took our newfound proximity to monologue about his life and our future together. His wishes swung wildly from humdrum complaint to grand declarations: his parents divorce, eternal devotion; his sister who smoked too much weed and didn’t do her homework, a child he’d one day surrogate who gets rich and buys him a house in Florida. It struck me during this conversation that though he felt deeply, none of his issues or aspirations were particularly profound. His ordinary loneliness just a symptom of the place. He did not belong to me and I did not love him.

Before long my car flashed a low battery warning: we’d drained it on the dance pop and the ventilation. Seeing it, the boy sat up, panicked, and was overcome with nervousness. He explained that if the battery died we’d be stranded forever in the parking lot. I was seventeen, so I didn’t really know how a car battery worked. I took his word for it.

For an hour we drove on a long, bent neck road with no streetlights while he wheezed beside me. Every half mile he tensed up, gripping the door handle in preparation for the breakdown, all the while begging me not to let him die alone in a roadside ditch; as if I was making this happen, or I was doing this to him. He cussed me out, lamenting that I’d made him lie to everyone he loved for some kissing in a car. That, he worried, was all his life was going to be.

I wanted to feel love or even pity for him, but neither came. They have always been opposite feelings for me. While I drove, I was just angry at how pathetic he’d become, or perhaps had always been. Briefly I considered how easy it would have been, earlier, to press on his ribcage until it caved. Like crushing a pinecone.

The battery didn’t die, nor did he. I dropped the boy back at the Panera Bread. I was relieved to have him gone, though I lingered and watched from the parking lot as he bought tomato soup in a bread bowl and ate it alone in a beige booth near the window.