daniella and nathan: a short story from nathan's perspective

extra material from my 2019 novel Daniella (tw: extreme abuse) (these events are understood from the beginning of the novel; no need to fear spoilers)

We hid in the garage behind the garbage cans and kissed on the lips. He and I had just finished fourth grade, but we pretended we were parents with a family. I’d cook the meals using my sister’s toy kitchen appliances. He’d come home from work and I’d kiss him on the lips. It was June and we liked to run through the backyard sprinklers in our bathing suits.

We sat in the basement naked one night during a sleeping over looking at each other curiously. I asked him if he knew where babies came from. He said he’d heard that when two people touch butts, one of them gets pregnant. We both laughed. I asked him if he’d ever seen a vagina. He said he had and it was disgusting. It’s sad, I agreed, that girls can’t play with a penis.

“I like to pull the skin up,” he said, “so that the inside part gets covered up by the outside part. It’s like a worm inside of a shell.” He showed me.

“I do the same thing,” I said. I showed him how I did it, too.

We went to a Christian summer camp together that summer. Pretty soon, we were running around in a field with all the other boys trying to smack butts. We shouted with pride each time we had impregnated someone. The counselor, a buff white guy with highlighted hair in his early twenties, screamed at us until we were still. He kept shouting while we quietly giggled.

My friend kept sneaking quick kisses with me in the garage. They were innocent. It was just our way of pretending to be adults by copying what parents do, no different in my mind from what I’d seen my 5th grade brother do with one of the girls in the neighborhood. They were quick kisses. Our lips barely touched for more than a second, just to see what it felt like.

One afternoon my dad caught us behind the garbage cans. He kicked the can full of fresh-cut grass over. It spilled out all over the floor. I think of that moment every time I smell a newly mowed lawn on a summer evening. He shouted that I was a little faggot. It’s the first time I remember hearing the word. He told me that people burn in Hell for kissing boys.

“Didn’t they fucking teach you that at Bible camp, you little shit?” my dad asked me.

My friend cried. I shook in terror. My dad grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me into the air until my head slipped through the collar and my arms fell through, too. My butt smacked hard against the floor and, shirtless, I cried in pain.

My dad walked me and my friend to my friend’s dad, who was in the middle of mowing the lawn. He stopped the mower to hear my dad’s shouts.

“Your fucking faggot little son,” my dad screamed, “was kissing mine. I watched him do it 5 times. Your fucking faggot son was kissing my fucking son!”

My dad was in my friend’s dad’s face before the guy could react. I watched my dad punch him in the nose, then the neck, then the stomach. I saw a bunch of bright red blood. My friend’s dad collapse. My dad kneed him in the face.

“I will fucking shred you into pieces with your faggot dad’s lawn mower,” my dad said to my friend, “you faggot fucking shit.”

I saw my friend’s dad coughing up blood into his lawn. He tried to stand up but collapsed.

My dad reached to grab my friend by the neck. My friend sprinted away.

My friend’s mom was on the porch. She started screaming. My friend ran to her; I never spoke with him again. I don’t even like to say his name.

The police came and arrested my dad. He spat toward our neighbor’s house before being shoved into the police car in handcuffs. “Fucking faggots,” he managed to shout before they shut the door. “I’ll shred your kid into pieces with your fucking lawn mower!”

My mom sat me down in the living room and read Bible passages to me about how gay people are evil and unnatural.

“Mommy… what does it mean to be gay?” I asked her.

She looked at me and started sobbing. “What does it mean to be gay?” she asked.

“What do gay people do that’s so bad?” I asked. “Am I gay?”

I remember I wasn’t even really sure what sex was yet.

She stood up and stormed out of the room. I was alone for the rest of the evening. I made myself a bowl of cereal for dinner. I couldn’t finish it. I felt alone and confused. I knew I’d never be allowed to see my friend again.

I wasn’t allowed to see anyone outside of school for months. My mom kept muttering now and then that he wouldn’t allow me to turn “gay.”

We didn’t see my dad much for a while. He went to prison for a year.

We moved to Rochester, Michigan a few months later. My mom had gotten a new job around there at the headquarters of a big company. The houses were bigger. There were no fences, just neverending lawns stretching between the newly-built homes in the subdivisions. It was really dark at night. Sometimes I’d stand at the window of my room just looking out there. I couldn’t see anything beyond the outlines of the trees.

When my dad got out of prison, I was just starting middle school. He started working as a landscaper. He was proud to be a crew leader. At dinner he’d tell us stories about all the Mexicans on his crew. “I’m in charge of the Mexicans,” he liked to say.

He and my mom would get into arguments about “illegals.” She’d tell him he was a bit of a hypocrite for working with so many illegals. He’d tell her they knew damn well he’d report their asses to the police if they ever disrespected him. She would say employers should be punished, too. He would say that the thing is, you can get a desperate Mexican to do all kinds of filthy shit that an American guy won’t do. And for just about no money. They’d repeat the same argument over and over. They were still having it by the time I was in high school.

I didn’t like having friends over. I spent a lot of time in middle school on the family’s desktop chatting online with friends. I chatted a lot with Andrew.

Every time I went to another kid’s house, my dad demanded to meet the parents first. He told me he didn’t want any other faggots seducing me.

I wanted to make friends at school. I was mostly alone. I got nervous around other boys. My parents sent me to a bible camp during the summer before seventh grade. I stayed in a wagon full of other guys. They’d take off their shirts and get into bathing suits. I always kept my shirt on. I tried not to be near them. At night I couldn’t control my erections. I couldn’t help but touch myself. By the end of the week, I’d stained so much of my sleeping bag with my semen. I threw it away before my parents picked me up.

At camp, we’d sit around fires at night and talk about Jesus. Our counselor kept asking people to commit their lives to Jesus. Kids would get up crying and confessing sins and begging Jesus to forgive them. My counselor asked me if I’d like to ask Jesus to come into my heart.

I did it. I stood up at the campfire and told everyone I was committing my life to Jesus. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if my parents found out I had said no. I kept my fingers crossed in my pocket. The whole time, I just kept remembering that day in the yard.

I met Andrew there. Something about how he looked at me told me he felt certain things that I felt. We spent our days bathing in swimming pools, speeding down water slides, playing sports in the fields, completing obstacle courses, riding ziplines. We would sing songs to worship God at the end of every day in a big auditorium.

One night, on a rare moment when Andrew and I were alone at camp, I told him I didn’t really believe any of it. He told me that was scary. I wondered if I’d misread his feelings toward me.

Andrew and I talked a lot on AIM when we got back. I was still afraid to have him over. He told me he was already having sex with tons of girls at school. He said he was even fucking college girls. He told me he was having tons of sex with Lucille, a girl he knew I liked.

We argued a lot about politics. I read a lot of news online. I could tell he wasn’t accurately informed. He hated UNICEF because they supported abortions. He hated the UN because he said it was going to lead to the Antichrist taking over everything. He told me I needed to read Left Behind to see what was going to happen to people who didn’t believe in Jesus.

During the 2000 election in seventh grade, my dad talked about how the liberals were pushing the gay agenda on everybody. He said some of them were talking about reading gay children’s books to kindergarteners. He got my mom to donate money to different national groups defending traditional marriage. He said that once Bush was in power, they’d be pushing for an amendment to the constitution to ban it all together. I hoped that Gore would win.

Sometimes I heard him watching Fox News in the living room. “What a dyke!” he’d suddenly shout at a female politician on the screen. “What a fat lesbo bitch! Honey, she’s a fat lesbo bitch!”

“I know, it’s awful,” my mom would say.

One night we were watching the debates. I don’t remember what they were talking about - maybe climate change, maybe teaching evolution in schools. But Gore declared at some point that “I believe in science.”

“Mmmmmmmmm,” my mom groaned disapprovingly. “Yikes.”

“Science - it’s a fucking excuse to raise taxes on whatever they can,” my dad said. “Gasoline, income, business. They’ll take whatever they can. They talk about global warming but they have no fucking proof. Who is that one dyke who’s always talking about it?”

“I forgot her name,” my mom said. “I know who you’re talking about though.”

I started going to Andrew’s more. My dad met his parents and approved.

“They’re good Christians,” he told me.

Me and Andrew had a sleepover one night in 8th grade. In his basement, he asked me to play truth or dare with him. Ten minutes later my dick was in his mouth and my eyes were closed. I wanted to pull his head up to mine and kiss him on the lip. But I was afraid it would be too intimate. I ran my hands through his hair and he swallowed my cum. I wanted him to fuck me, but he couldn’t figure out how to really get it in. Still, the more our bodies touched, the less alone I felt in the world. I’d found a special connection that I couldn’t find at home.

After he finished on my chest, I wanted so badly to kiss him. Instead, he asked me to give him a blowjob. I gave him one and I swallowed, too.

I wondered what it would feel like to have our lips grazing together. I wanted him to be my first kiss, but after he finished the second time, he just put all his clothes back on and moved far away from me.

“No one can ever fucking know about that,” he said. “I’m not gay. I just wanted to see.”

I stared at him surprised. “Me neither,” I said. “I’m not a faggot.” Immediately, I couldn’t fucking believe I had just used that word. Why had I used that word?

“We’re not fucking faggots,” Andrew agreed. “But at least we know what BJ’s feel like!”

Why did I fucking use that word?

We never spoke about it again. I never tried anything with him. Never again did he invite me over for a sleepover. By ninth grade, we hardly saw each other outside of school. He’d look at me in the hallways wearily. He avoided me and ensured our conversations were brief.

Every time I saw him, I regretted again how easily I’d used that word.

My parents asked me often what ever happened to Andrew. I shrugged. Sometimes, I cried alone in my room. I got my first laptop as a birthday gift when I was 15. I spent countless hours watching all kinds of porn in my bed. I liked the porn with lots of different genders the best. Couple swaps were my favorite.

In the middle of 9th grade, my parents started traveling a lot on the weekends to visit friends and other cities. They told me I was old enough now to “hold down the fort” on my own. I spent the weekends naked watching couple swaps and orgies and threesomes. I’d masturbate in the basement and on the first floor and on the second floor, too. I bought weed from a guy at school and smoked it all day on Saturdays and Sundays. Even though it was only a couple years ago, that’s mostly all I remember from freshman year.

I met Daniella at school in my classes in 10th grade. It was by chance that our teachers always seated us by each other. She got into all the arguments about gay rights and abortion rights and multiculturalism. She shot down all the most ridiculous conservative boys in our classes. She shouted at people for using the word “faggot;” it lost her some friends, but she really didn’t seem to care.

“People who talk that don’t belong in my life,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to them, honestly. Sometimes I don’t even care whether they live or die.”

Daniella and I talked on AIM every night while doing homework. Andrew came back into my life then; he was in the chat rooms with us. He kept avoiding private conversations with me. He kept a slight distance from me when we were all together. We hung out in Erica’s basement on the weekends playing video games. I snuck out in the middle of the night to meet Daniella, Erica, Benjamin, and Andrew. Andrew and Daniella bonded over a common conviction that there were supernatural or alien beings living in the forest. Daniella told stories about monsters and demons.

I went to Erica’s New Year’s Eve party. At least a dozen people were there. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend. She was talking about getting together with Andrew, who for some reason wasn’t there. I remember we all shared a rice crispy treat that was the size of half a man’s body. Daniella wore a bright red strapless dress. We cooked homemade macaroni and cheese together with an assortment of vegetables because Daniella and Erica were vegetarians. We played Dance Dance Revolution and Mario Kart in the basement.

I was sitting next to Daniella on the couch when the ball started dropping. We were both holding glasses of fake champagne. The whole side of my body was up against hers. I wanted to kiss her on the lips. Something drove me to grab her hand. When I did that and everyone was cheering at the ball’s midnight landing, she turned and quickly kissed me on the lips. It lasted just a second. She smiled at me. We toasted each other and the others.

We played spin the bottle after midnight. Some other boy made a rule that girls had to kiss girls, but guys didn’t have to kiss guys. Every time the bottle spun, I hoped it would match me with Daniella, but it never did.

Daniella’s mom picked us up and dropped me off. We sat in silence in the back of the car.

For weeks, neither of us brought up the kiss to the other, though Erica often asked both of us separately about it. I didn’t know if I wanted to date Daniella or if she wanted to date me. I knew I felt affection for her like I hadn’t for many others. I knew I found her body very attractive. I knew she was an important friend. So often I’d seen myself with women sexually, but it was hard for me to envision a romantic relationship with someone who wasn’t another guy.

People called me a faggot every day in the hallways at school. It’s never stopped. Daniella kept trying to get me to do something about it, to tell somebody. But I knew it wouldn’t help.

Erica was constantly in turmoil after her many arguments with Andrew. He kept trying to dump her for being an atheist.

“He is such a fucking asshole,” Daniella said one night. It was just the two of us in my kitchen. My parents weren’t home. We were trying shots of different liquors around the island in the kitchen. We had a lot of nights like that in tenth grade - just sitting in a kitchen or a bedroom or a basement drinking together. “She needs to dump him,” Daniella said. “It’s fucked up.”

I thought about what Andrew and I had done together. “I have a secret about him,” I said. I had never told anyone.

“Really?” she asked, smiling excitedly. “What is it? What? Tell me!”

I asked her to pinky swear that she wouldn’t tell anyone. She loved pinky swears. She laughed and we linked pinkies. Before I started, I paused, suddenly realizing I was about to “come out” for the first time. But I looked at her smiling at me. And I thought about how kind she’d always been to me. I knew I could trust her.

“Ugh, tell me!” she cried, shaking my leg.

“Well,” I finally said. I leaned in and whispered. “In 8th grade…. God, this is crazy…. We….”

“What?” she asked.

I sighed. “We, like, experimented together,” I said.

“What?!” she exclaimed. “Like, sex stuff?”

“Yes,” I said. “Not quite sex. Everything but sex, really.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “That’s your secret, too.” She hugged me. “Thanks for trusting me.”

I nodded. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t asking me for further details. I was relieved that she wasn’t; I wouldn’t have wanted to get into the graphics.

“I won’t pry about anything,” she said suddenly, smiling at me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“But, dude,” she said, “Jesus, what a fucking hypocrite! Is he not a fucking hypocrite?”

“He is,” I said.

“Looking down on Erica for not being a Christian,” she said. “He told her she can’t dye her fucking hair! He told her she can’t cut her own fucking hair! And meanwhile he’s like a closet bisexual or something?”

“He is,” I said.

We hung out a lot at Daniella’s house that winter. I told her about how I’d used the word “faggot” after hooking up with Andrew. I told her how I’d regretted it for two years since. She told me it was okay and that she understood.

Daniella then told me she was bisexual. I told her I thought I might be, too.

“I’ve never said that to anyone,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said.

We poured ourselves another round of shots.

Sometimes we hung out at Daniella’s house. We often looked at all of the books in Daniella’s dad’s office. He had books about countries and cultures and languages all over the world. He had literature from seemingly every region of the planet. He had books about all the world religions.

“He studied international affairs,” Daniella explained. “He’s really into international cultures. He speaks Spanish, German, and Russian. He was a diplomat for a while, until I was born.” She showed me a section of his library supposedly about magic. “He’s really into like, witchcraft shit,” she said. There were books about the history of various occultic traditions. There were books about how to cast spells and how to communicate with spirits.

“Do you believe in this stuff?” I asked her.

“Sometimes,” she said.

We grabbed a book of spells and we took it to the kitchen. We opened it to a random page about a potion for “alertness.”

The potion was simple to prepare. One cup of coffee, some honey, and cinnamon. I looked at Daniella and raised my eyebrows at her. “Come on,” I said. “This is fucking absurd.”

“This one’s a dud,” she giggled.

“But you don’t really believe in spells?” I asked her. “Like, that’s like, that’s Harry Potter.”

“I don’t know what I believe,” she said. “I believe… I do believe in like, the supernatural.” She told me about a demon she believed she’d seen twice when she was younger. She told me about how she and Erica once tried to catch a demon using pogs. She told me how once they went out into a tent in the backyard and tried to lure a demon to come have sex with them in the wodds. We laughed. “Do you believe in any supernatural stuff?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe anything about any religion. It’s all just to control people.” I told her about the Bible camps I’d gone to. I told her about my parents and how they talked about gay people. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

“Well,” she smiled, “at least we can agree about this book.”

We laughed. We returned the “book of spells” to where it was on her dad’s shelf.

I told her that night, too, about the day my dad caught me kissing my friend in the garage. I’d never talked about it with anybody. She just sat there silently, listening to me, sometimes hugging me and rubbing my back, telling me it was okay, telling me she was there for me. By the end of the story, I was sobbing. We cuddled on the couch. We fell asleep like that, with her arms around me.

One night at the very end of tenth grade, we sat on the couch together in her basement trying to decide what to do with our night. I wondered how we still hadn’t spoken about the kiss. Almost six months had gone by. Every day, the idea of bringing it up seemed even more awkward. Erica’s whole relationship with Andrew, which had started that night, was over now.

“Let’s have some fun,” Daniella said after some silence. Her parents weren’t home that weekend. She went to the fridge behind the basement bar to make us rum and coke. She told me to sit down when I rose to help. She came back to the couch with two drinks; she handed me one. It was cold in my hands and in my throat.

We finished the first round of drinks and she made another.

I’d never had a connection with anyone in my life like the one I had with her. I would trust her with anything. I would tell her anything. I would do anything she asked me. We told each other all our most private stories.

Daniella had big plans for her life. She said that one day, she and Erica were going to go into politics together. She said they were going to fight for “social justice. She said they were going to fight for equal rights for everyone.

That night, I told her about how scared I was that one day my parents would find out I was bisexual. I told her how my mom told me that gay people go to Hell. I told her about all the time my parents spent watching Fox News. “I hate them both,” I said.

She finished her second drink and set it on the coffee table. She nestled her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nathan,” she said. “I really am.”

I turned my face toward hers. We made eye contact and our noses were touching. I set my empty glass down on the cushion of the couch. I closed my eyes and kissed her. We made out for hours. I was naked by the end. She took off her shirt and bra but not her skirt. She gave me a hand job while I fingered her under her skirt. Then we fell asleep cuddling.

We woke up around midnight and put our clothes back on.

“What is going on here between us?” she asked me, sighing.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you want to date me?” she suddenly asked.

I paused. “God,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

“Well,” she said. “Let’s.... Let’s just try not to do this again. I don’t want us getting hurt.”

We agreed to be more platonic in the future. I went home.

In the summer of 2004, between tenth and eleventh grade, I started smoking my brother’s weed while he was back from college. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him beyond that.

I read as many books about science as I could every afternoon. I learned more about climate change and the coming consequences. I read about humanity’s own evolution. I explored how and when language emerged. I borrowed books from Daniella’s dad’s library about sustainability in economic development.

Daniella, Erica, Benjamin, and I hung out nearly every night that summer. Benjamin lived in a house several miles away in an area covered in woods. We drove out there with the windows down and Death Cab’s Passenger Seat softly playing in the night. We scared each other with stories about mothman flying beside the car. We blasted Something Corporate’s I Woke Up in a Car and fantasized about future road trips to New York City. We sang along to certain Bright Eyes songs and we skipped the ones that weren’t aligned with the mood. We listened to Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue; I pretended some of the songs were about me and Daniella: “We were both sixteen and it felt so right / sleeping in all day, staying up all night….”

Just a couple months before, Andrew had told us all that he’d never hang out with us again. He sent Jeremy, Benjamin, Erica, and Daniella messages online about how he couldn’t be “unequally yoked” to us. Only Daniella knew the truth about me and him.

Erica, Jeremy, and Benjamin were determined to wake Andrew up out of his insanity. One night, we went to McDonald’s and decided to bring him an apple pie. We thought we could lure him out of his self-imposed isolation. His mom answered the door and we told her we had a pie for Andrew.

“Tell them to go away!” we heard Andrew shout.

We laughed. We watched his mom walk over to the stairs and throw the pie down at someone, probably Andrew. She came back and told us to try again another time.

We all argued about him a lot. I’d seen the messages he’d sent the others condemning them to Hell, although he didn’t dare speak to me. I’d seen his new screen name, AlwaysInChrist04. Daniella believed he was a lost cause. She said he shouldn’t be forgiven for how he’d treated Erica. But Erica, Jeremy, and Benjamin thought he was just having a temporary “psychosis.”

The school year has started now. Andrew’s fervor has accelerated as the 2004 election draws near. I’m in his government class. I listen to his frequent rants against gay marriage. I see all his Bush Cheney 2004 stickers on all his binders. I hear him calling women who get abortions murderers who should be locked up. Sometimes he accidentally makes eye contact with me. I watch him move his head away in terror. Sometimes he briefly turns toward me when he hears kids calling me a faggot.

I wonder sometimes if Andrew has been telling somebody about me. Maybe not about us, but maybe about me. There’s way more boys at school calling me a faggot now. It happens every day, between every class period. I keep thinking that they know. I keep hating that it matters.

I keep getting so sad, sometimes in the middle of being with all of my friends. I keep getting quiet. I stop talking, I stop engaging, I just want to be alone. I have to hide so much. There’s only one person in the world who knows who I really am. I can’t tell Jeremy. I can’t tell Benjamin. I can’t even tell Erica. I know they probably wouldn’t care, but I wonder if they would. I wonder if I’d lose them. I keep wondering what my life would be like if I could live it more openly, if people would just leave me alone.

I isolate myself some weekends. I sit on my bed in my room at night and I look out the window into the dark. I start to shake and cry. I go to the kitchen and I look at the knives. I hold them and I touch the blades. I look in the medicine cabinets at the sleeping pills and my mom’s prescription painkillers. I look at the alcohol in the fridge. I look at my dad’s guns.

Then the next weekend I’m with my friends again. I’m with Daniella again. I feel okay about everything. I forget that I’m depressed except in sudden moments, when out of nowhere I find myself trapped inside of my mind. In those moments, I forget what people around me are talking about. I wonder why I’ve come. I convince myself I should just go home. Once I am alone, I walk back into the kitchen again. I look at all the weapons I can use.

If I survive this, Daniella is going to be the reason.

The weather is getting colder and darker. I’ve listened for a while to my dad talking in the living room about the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I think about how much I fucking hated him. I want to hurt him.

I went in the living room one day while my Dad was screaming “faggots.” I thought about how Daniella was always going to love me. I thought about how she was the only person who ever had loved me, the only person who ever would love me.

I told my dad that I’m bisexual.

I wanted to say more - “I’ve already sucked a dick,” I fantasized telling him, just to destroy him, just to be able to truly be myself.

But he jumped out of his seat; he shoved me into the wall. He took off his shirt and growled. He punched my in the face. I fell to the ground. He kicked me. I curled up to protect myself.

“I should have ripped you into pieces with that fucking lawn mower,” he said.