Nine Changes of a Watery Star
—for Blaze
You left home with nothing but a cell phone, left without your wallet, your keys, your glasses, without saying goodbye. Perhaps you forgot them. Perhaps you got a text and rushed outside without stopping to think about what you would need. Perhaps you were feeling flustered, impulsive. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you left your wallet behind because there was nothing to buy where you were going. Perhaps you left your car keys because you wouldn’t need to drive to get there. Perhaps you left your glasses because there was nothing there to see.
The sheriff’s department combed through the hills, starting with the children’s park where you disappeared. Drones searched from the sky, casting unnatural, fast-moving shadows along the switchbacks and fire trails. Then, the Real Housewives of Orange County took to social media, resharing your missing person poster. This was, the reporters, the sheriffs, the reality tv stars, and the privately licensed drone pilots all agreed, “a big mystery,” but it was also a winter’s tale set in Southern California: a place so fundamentally temperate that even slight changes in the weather have the power to cause landslides, flood freeway interchanges, and render the shortest commutes potentially lethal.
On the sixth day of the search, a light rain began to fall, and on the seventh, the rain revealed what the drones, and the K-9 units, and the search brigades could not. Your body was found, buried next to a storm drain.
The newspapers said that the last person to see you alive was a friend. For seven days, I read about how this friend was not a suspect or person of interest. The friend was said to have been taken into police custody with scratches on his hands and dirt under his fingernails. When questioned, the friend claimed to belong to a fight club. The friend was said to have gone to our high school; the friend was said to have been in our grade. For seven days, I tried to force these details into some kind of facial composite, a police sketch pulled from memory, but the identity of the friend remained grainy, as if it had been washed away by the same rainstorm that uncovered your body.
When questioned about his whereabouts on the night of your disappearance, the friend claimed to have gone over to his girlfriend’s. This girlfriend was interesting, not in the sense that she was a person of interest, but in the sense that she was a person at all. She had no last name, no home address. This struck me as an uninspired alibi, a cover story that corroded at the touch, but I misunderstood the point of the story. The point was not that the friend had a place to be other than the site of the murder during the time when the murder took place. Having a girlfriend, real or imaginary, was the point itself.
Remember how our sex ed teacher would talk enthusiastically about lung cancer and sexually transmitted diseases? Looking back, his class was a sentimental attempt to disillusion young artists about the vices that would later consume and destroy our lives, but that was not immediately apparent to us as freshmen—shifting in our seats, chewing on pencils, filling in the blanks on diagrams of the reproductive system. Remember what it was like to sit in the back of that classroom after lunch, drifting away from conversations about morbid obesity and sudden infant death syndrome?
A poster tacked to the wall showed a man and a woman—the man in a tuxedo and the woman in pearls and a sweetheart neckline—filtered through the warm, glossy aesthetics of Big Tobacco advertising. “Mind if I smoke?” the man in the poster asked, debonair, a cigarette already in his mouth.
“Care if I die?” the woman replied, her makeup fresh, her hair set, her facial expression effortless, immortal.
At the end of Health, we were asked to design and market a product that represented us as healthy individuals. You dressed up as a chef. I stole a bowl of wax fruit from my grandmother’s sunken living room and melted the pieces over a candle until the colors ran together like a rainbow. There was a tall, awkward boy in our class named Sam who walked up to the front of the room carrying a bottle of shampoo. He had blacked out the “H” with a Sharpie so that the label read “SAMPOO.” He seemed charmed with his handiwork, but his mood darkened when asked to explain how the shampoo represented him as a person. He talked painfully around the pun on his own name and then returned to his seat. At the time, I thought he was angry that no one had laughed at his joke, but I see it differently now. Here was a boy, who, when asked to look inside and share something about himself, could only think to black something out.
While being booked by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department on suspicion of homicide, Sam put down his occupation, on official jail records, as “Nerf Games.” Perhaps he was trying to make a joke out of his arrest. Perhaps this was an evasive way of admitting he didn’t have a job. Perhaps it was the entitled reaction of a boy from Orange County to the cold, bureaucratic touch of the criminal justice system. And perhaps it was exactly what it appears to be: the kind of answer a psychopath would give.
Six months later, the University of California arranged for me to participate in an active shooter training. There were fifty or so of us students, crowded into a small, underground conference room. There was a PowerPoint on crisis management, trivia, prizes, and then a UCPD officer took out a Nerf gun and instructed us to run from one side of the conference hall to the other. There was some logic to this—some survival skill we were meant to simulate—the plastic sound of the trigger, the air rushing through the chamber, the blue Styrofoam bullets flying toward us. The gun was a bright, chemical orange. The cylinder turned six times, one for every month since you died, and then it emptied into all the years to come.
The first Christmas after your death, I went to the mall with some friends from high school. It was a brilliant December night, steam rising through the potted banana trees, a giant Ferris wheel turning over palm fronds strung with lights. The view was incredible: 360 degrees of Orange County rotating like an inverted planetarium. Viewed from above, the valley looked like the night sky—headlights, and streetlamps, and traffic signals pulling together into a cosmos of light pollution. The night sky itself looked like nothing, haze.
We wandered around the mall for hours without buying anything. The longer we spent together, the more we seemed to be aging backward. We walked out of Lush a year younger. We mobbed the food court, shrieking through crowds of desultory holiday shoppers.
As we ran, one of our friends turned around to tell me something—but instead of saying my name, she said yours. Her face was radiant, her mouth already forming the words she wanted to tell you. She sounded so sure that you were standing there, right behind her, that when she looked over her shoulder, I looked over my shoulder, too.
Five years after you died, I decided it was time to try therapy. I found someone expensive, queer affirming. During our first session, the therapist described himself as an “apex predator” in the gay community, which I interpreted to mean “tall.” Every Tuesday, I drove to his office in West Hollywood and talked about how it happened: drones flying up and down the toll roads of Orange County, search dogs on tv, weather reports of the seasonal rain that eventually uncovered your body. The therapist would nod and remind me that safety is a social construct.
One Tuesday, I arrived early and sat down in the waiting room. He came out to offer me sparkling water, magazines, a phone charger.
“And you can steal whatever is in that drawer,” he joked, gesturing toward the coffee table in front of me.
I asked him what was inside.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. The office space was rented. “Let’s find out.”
He walked around the table and reached over me, sliding the drawer open. It was empty. He cocked his head slightly and smiled down at me: “What would you do if there was just like a knife in there?”
A few weeks before the trial started, my friend and his husband dragged me to a high school production of Cabaret. It seemed innocent enough—gorilla suit, feather boas—then all the boys in the theater department came out with pink triangles pinned to their striped pajamas. They took it all very seriously, the pins, the pajamas, but the shade of pink was wrong. It was too loud, a pop, no, a scream, of color.
“Where the fuck is Liza Minnelli?” my friend whispered, squeezing my thigh.
The Nazis stormed on stage, awkwardly marching around in their boots and armbands, acne seething under their stage makeup. The year after we graduated from high school, Sam joined a Nazi cell called the Atomwaffen Division. The details came out in court one by one—the online chat rooms, the Doomsday Hate Camps, the book burnings, the gay-baiting. I could tell you I was surprised, but I wasn’t. It was Orange County—the way I had always known it.
I got you. Those turned out to be your last words—or at least they were the last words Sam remembered hearing before he reached for the knife. The way he told the story in court made the whole night sound like an elaborate trap you set to prove he liked men, liked you. Instead, he panicked, attacked you. Years later, I drove up into the foothills of Orange County to leave a painted stone on the place where you died. I stood there, with a panoramic view of the valley below, and wondered if you had stood on the same spot that night, gazing out across Orange County the way I was gazing across it now.
How did you know the words I wanted to hear more than anything? How I had waited, all throughout high school, for you to pull me into some back stairwell, wrap your arms around me, and whisper: I got you.
I was wearing a Speedo and a string of my mother’s pearls when the verdict came out. I read it right there, with my feet in the pool. Men splashed all around me, screaming, and kissing, and drinking Aperol spritzes out of plastic stemware.
I shaded my eyes with my hand and stared down at the headlines running frantically across the screen of my phone: Life in prison. Murdered due to sexual orientation. I sat down on a pool chair and stared off into space. There were a pair of flags—one rainbow, one stars and stripes—tangling around each other like two snakes trying to mate in the dull summer breeze. I turned off my phone, wrapped it in a towel, and kicked it under the pool chair. I waded out into the sea of inner tubes and inflatable flamingos and closed my eyes. For years, I had wondered what a verdict would feel like, for the last nine years to close over my head like the surface of the water. It was over, but I was still holding my breath.
