Page 43 of These Secret Years

“I’d love to.”

My father loves me. He loves my mom and my sister, too. This affliction he suffers from—it’s not addiction so much as it is a deep, deep sense of pain and inadequacy. Life hurts him. The lows and the highs of it. He’ll kill himself one day. Maybe by accident, maybe not. Whenever or however it comes, I want to make sure he knows I loved him, too.

Chapter Ten

KNIGHT

Deep in a Reddit thread about celibacy, I’m lowkey pissed at my parents for not making me more religious. I asked my mom one day why we didn’t go to church, and she said something like “We don’t think you need to go to church to prove you love God.”

But she also never talked about loving or believing in God, and neither did my dad or sisters, so I was left to form my own opinion.

It must be way easier to believe in God when you’re surrounded by other believers one to two days a week and getting regular lessons on it, because out here in the secular world, I have to say, there are a lot more reasons to doubt than there are to have faith. Social media alone makes it damn near impossible to know what the hell to think about anything. There’s so much bullshit out there. So many made up miracles and brushes with divinity. And while all of that’s going on over there, science is over here making so much sense.

I’m not prepared to say I don’t believe in anything, but thinking of my body as some sort of divine vessel for God doesn’t resonate with me.

Some dudes say they feel smarter when they abstain from sex, and some just sound superior about it—like they’ve risen above this mortal coil already, and they deserve all of our admiration for it.

The gay celibacy internet rabbit holes I find all feel like they’re trying to recruit new members. Some guys claim to be so much more at peace when they simply removed the possibility of sex from their lives. Others—the religious ones—say their relationship with God leveled up once they finally stopped giving into temptation. I don’t even know what that means or how a relationship with an invisible deity could get better. Better than what? Nothing? Like the conversations you’re having in your head get deeper? Football is my god anyway. It determines my happiness, my path. Maybe I could deepen my relationship with the game by focusing on it and nothing else. That wouldn’t be so bad.

There are a lot of really strong opinions online about celibacy as a lifestyle—even from some monks who I guess have access to the internet, but I can’t even imagine being at a monastery. Guaranteed I’d find someone else just as hard up as I am, and we’d work something out.

But if I wanted to be a monk, who are supposedly the happiest people in the world, that would solve all kinds of other problems. It would mean I could be gay. It’s out here in the world I want to live in that I can’t.

“Bro—you wanna come play some cricket?”

“It’s not cricket,” I tell Dillon. “It’s croquet.”

“What’s cricket?” he asks.

I sigh. “The thing you knock the ball through is called a wicket. Cricket is a game they play in the UK and Australia that’s kinda like baseball.”

“I wanna learn that,” Derek says from behind him.

Their auburn heads crowd my doorway as I lie on my bed with my phone now flipped screen down on my chest. “I don’t know how to play cricket.”

“You just said you did.”

“I didn’t,” I tell them.

“Wicket then?”

My eyes roll back in my head. “Croquet.”

Dillon, sounding frustrated, says, “I thought croquet was something you did with yarn.”

I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. “That’s crochet.”

“Okay, Einstein. Ass off the bed. Time to go touch grass.” That’s Dillon.

I sit up and am about to set my phone aside when it buzzes in my hand. “That’s not what touching grass means, bro.”

“Hey—school’s out for summer.”

I look down at my phone and see Sullivan’s name.

“You guys go ahead. I have a call I need to take. I’ll be out in a minute. Don’t move the wickets. They’re supposed to be in those spots.” The last time we played, they plucked them all out of the ground, thinking the winner got to rearrange them and design the next round.

They’re like wrecking balls, these two.