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gretchensinister · 6 years

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Burgess Wilderness Recreation Area 13/?

And so continues the story I began for the Black as Pitch Halloween event. It’s the kind of story I’m sure you know well. Five college kids, a cabin, and a state park that just doesn’t get many visitors any more… (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7) (Part 8) (Part 9) (Part 10) (Part 11) (Part 12)

“Ready?” Tooth asked.

“Yeah,” Bunny and Sandy said.

“You have your maps?” Bunny asked.

Tooth and Sandy showed him that they did.

“Okay,” Tooth said. “We’re getting out of here. We’re not going back to the cabin, not until we have a car, and probably the cops.”

The others nodded.

“Are you sure you want to bother with that tent?” Sandy asked Bunny. “I mean, I really don’t think we’re going to end up using it.”

“I want to have it. I’d just as soon never come back, and my tent’s the only thing I really want to keep. Not sure when I’d really want to use it again, but it was a gift and I’d never be able to buy a tent this nice on my own.”

“All right. I think it won’t be a big deal, anyway,” said Tooth. “So, are we…are we really going to go now? I want to, I really do…”

“But going outside seems like a really bad idea,” Sandy said. “Yeah. But we also really want to live.” He reached out and took Bunny’s and Tooth’s hands. “Let’s go.”

***

“Jackie was afraid of dark water. Like, specifically,” Tooth said, once they were a few minutes down the trail. “And that’s where it attacked her from. I keep thinking about that.”

“The worst way to go, then,” Bunny said gloomily.

Sandy grimaced. “Well, here’s another awful coincidence: Nick had a pretty bad experience hitting a deer with his car when he was in high school. I bet that’s why he stopped so fast when the monster jumped in front of the car.”

No one said anything for a while.

“So…are we thinking the monster somehow knew that?” Tooth asked.

“I want to say, ‘that’s just movie shit,’ but a monster existing at all is movie shit. So…like…I kind of hate that idea, but I guess I don’t want to completely rule out the possibility,” Bunny said.

“Well, that’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Sandy said. “So, congrats.”

They said nothing more until they reached the wreck of Nick’s van. They gave it as wide a berth as possible, and even once they had passed it, they all kept looking back over their shoulders at it.

“So,” Sandy said, when he happened to catch Bunny’s eyes as they both turned. “What are you most afraid of?”

“Honestly?” Bunny’s eyes darted around to the forest surrounding them. “Before this weekend, I would have said heights. Now, though, I think I’m most afraid of whatever’s out in the woods.” They went on for a few more steps. “And second to that, I’m afraid of having to remember this weekend for the rest of my life, especially if we’re the only ones that end up knowing what really happened. I mean…you said it before we left. We’re going to be pretty fucked up about this. But we can’t guarantee that we’ll always be around for each other. We’re all from different places. We’re all going to go different places after we graduate. And if I need someone to talk to, without having to explain everything, without having to prove I’m not crazy…I’ll be alone.”

“Maybe that would have happened if this situation wasn’t quite so extreme,” Tooth said. “Sandy and I are always going to need someone to talk to, too.”

“So, if we’re forty and we need someone to freak out to over skype or whatever, someone will be there,” Sandy said. “I promise.”

“I promise, too,” Tooth said.

“Besides,” Sandy said, “it’s not like you absolutely couldn’t tell anyone else.”

“Well…no, I really don’t think I could,” Bunny said. “And, hey, aren’t you going to talk about me making it easier for the monster by being afraid of it specifically?”

“We haven’t been able to make anything hard for the monster, yet,” Tooth said.

“Oh. Yeah,” said Bunny. “I guess you’re right.”

***

A monster was impossible. Bunny knew this, just as well as he knew anything. It was impossible, and yet it was. It wasn’t going to get easier for him to accept that as time passed, even if Sandy and Tooth were going to be his lifelong friends. There’d always be someone better than him—smarter, older, just more worthy—who was just more sure about monsters not being real. He couldn’t stand up to that, and he knew because he was kind of a monster, in a way. And no one had believed him when he’d said something.

Sandy had commiserated with him on the difficulty of being a person that no one would believe, but he’d said it in a way that made it seem as though he thought Bunny had never been in that position before. Well, it was all right for Sandy to think that. He’d never wanted to have anyone think otherwise. But that didn’t change the fact that when he was only nine, he’d been given an impossible dilemma. He’d told the truth and been told he was lying.

He doesn’t remember much about the day; it must have been so ordinary. The only extraordinary part was Jason. Jason was so cool, and that day was the day that Bunny realized he had one of those mysterious things called a crush on him. It was exciting! He felt so grown up! He understood secrets that those who’d never had a crush did not! Now, he knew he wasn’t the only one with a crush on Jason—he wasn’t even the only boy with a crush on Jason. Jason, whose true loyalty was towards anything to do with ancient Egypt, was embroiled in a complex web of sit-next-tos and hands held and teams joined, but thanks to the careful guidance of the teachers and the ages of all involved, no lasting harm had been done to anyone’s feelings. Perhaps the greatest toll was on Jason, who, in an effort not to show favoritism, hadn’t played just one game at recess for years. For everyone else, though, the true game was Jason, and it was fun. Alliances and intrigues flourished on the playground, and deeds done in the name of winning Jason’s affection gave countless opportunities for friendships to be broken and re-formed, with all the drama grade-school children could muster.

Ultimately, though, the game of Jason was not so very serious. Crushes were serious business to the kids, but a crush on Jason, well, that was a little less serious. Everyone had a crush on Jason. And everyone could be fairly confident that Jason wouldn’t reciprocate anyone’s crush, or if he did, he wouldn’t say anything about it. Thus the uncharted territory of an actual romance could be safely avoided if one had a crush on Jason, while one could still enjoy the feeling of maturity that came with the development of a crush.

Another noteworthy feature of crushes on Jason was that they were far less secret than other crushes. It was embarrassing to have a crush on anybody, even Jason, but if you had a crush on Jason, you knew that you had company. You knew that it wasn’t weird to have a crush on Jason.

This was the perspective Bunny was familiar with as he rode the little bus home from school that day. He did not feel any particular anxiety regarding the fact that he and Jason were both boys. At his school, with its one small class for each grade, there had been nice new books in every classroom, written for each particular grade level, showing that men could fall in love with men and women could fall in love with women. His parents had told him this, too. And though he had a mom and a dad, he knew a couple of his classmates had two moms or two dads.

He knew, at age nine, that there were people out there that thought men being in love with men or women being in love with women was wrong, but none of his friends or his friends’ parents felt that way, so he was pretty sure that the only people who thought that were very old and would be long dead by the time he was old enough to have to deal with them. He and his crush were part of the future, and it was going to be way better than the one those mean, old people had imagined.

He was the only one to get off the bus when it stopped at his driveway. Most of the other kids in his subdivision went to a larger school that, according to his parents, didn’t give kids enough time to move, started too early, ended too late, and only served canned goop for lunch. (A nutritionist and a chef planned the meals at Bunny’s school. The chef had formerly worked for a fairly well-known TV actor, and the nutritionist had worked with a list of people that included several gold medalists.) There were certain other differences between the schools that could be easily seen with a class photo, but Bunny had never thought to do a comparison and his parents never talked about it. And if they did, well, surely it was not their individual faults, was it? What were they supposed to do? Make an inferior choice for their only child’s education to make some kind of point? Surely that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Again, though, they didn’t talk about such things in front of Bunny.

What this meant for Bunny on a practical level was that he was all by himself when he got off the bus that day. He was all by himself in the excitement of his crush (he would tell his friends tomorrow, that would be Friday, and an excellent day for a dramatic reveal in the game of Jason). The only person who would be there to talk to at home, however, would doubtless be just as excited to hear the news as he was to tell it. His mom always loved to hear about what he did in school, and usually she was even more enthusiastic about things that weren’t schoolwork, things that she called developmental markers. What could mark development more than a crush? He knew she’d be glad. And, sure, it might be kind of embarrassing, but that was part of the crush experience. He could use that in his grand reveal to his friends tomorrow. Oh, how his enthusiasm had led to his mortification, imagine him telling his mom about his crush! Who else had crushed on Jason so much as to do that?

His mom opened the door for him as the bus pulled away. He practically bounced up the driveway to her, his nearly empty backpack bumping behind him (his school did not believe in homework).

“Guess what!” he said, as soon as he was close enough not to yell. He might have been willing to tell his mom about his crush, but yelling it was another matter, even if the street was otherwise completely empty.

“What, honey?” his mom asked, smiling in reply to his smile.

Now, as they entered the house and closed the door behind them, Bunny became shy. Him, having a crush! But nothing untoward had ever followed him telling his mom anything—at least, nothing worse than a long explanation of why his behavior wasn’t appropriate, and anyway, he had already decided to tell her.

“I have a crush on someone,” he said, trying not to mumble so he wouldn’t have to say it twice.

“A crush?” his mom said. She was still smiling. “Oh, you’re about to enter a whole new world of feelings. Is your crush on someone from your school? What’s her name?”

On some level, it did register to Bunny that his mom had immediately assumed that the person he had a crush on was a girl. But this was his mom, and he didn’t have the kind of experience that would have made what she said an overt warning. So he went on. “My crush isn’t on a girl,” he said. “It’s on Jason!” His mom would know who Jason was. Even though Jason wasn’t one of his close friends, his whole class had been invited to Bunny’s last birthday party, and Jason had come to that party.

But his mom’s face went blank when he mentioned Jason’s name, and, then, the expression on her face changed to something like the way it looked when she talked about the other school, or Wal-Mart, or something like that.

Bunny’s thoughts were a jumble. He began to think that he had made a mistake, telling his mom about his crush, but why would that be a mistake? His mom wasn’t a bad grown-up. His mom had told him that it was okay to be gay. And was he gay? He hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought. He just had a crush on Jason, and he’d been excited about it. But now—

His mom’s expression cleared and Bunny wanted to relax, but he couldn’t. What had just happened? It was just a little change in her expression, but it was the opposite of what he’d been expecting. Maybe she’d just thought of something else at that moment?

But he had a weird feeling that wasn’t the case.

And then she spoke again, from her newly kind expression. “Oh, honey,” she said, gently taking his backpack and putting her arm around his shoulder. She guided him toward the kitchen, where a healthy afternoon snack would be waiting for him. “You don’t really have a crush on Jason.”

Bunny looked up at her, bewildered.

“I know you admire Jason,” she said. “Most of your class does. Some of the other moms and I talked about it at your birthday. It’s quite popular to say you have a crush on Jason, isn’t it? But it isn’t as though everyone has to have a crush on him. Oh, I’m sure a few of your classmates have crushes. Jason seems like a very nice boy. But for you, it’s admiration, not a crush.”

“How…how do you know?” Bunny asked.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense, with you being so young,” his mom said. “I know that, as you grow up, you’re going to experience a lot of confusing feelings. It’s not always easy to tell what they are, and that’s what this crush that’s not a crush is. It’s your father’s and my fault, really. We tried to be alert to the effects of toxic masculinity, but we couldn’t protect you from all of it. It’s totally possible for boys and men to admire each other and to have strong platonic feelings about each other. It’s a failure of our society that we deny boys that closeness. It’s a failure of language that all our words to describe powerful, close relationships have the idea of romance caught up in them.”

Bunny chewed on his carrot sticks, which had been his favorite afternoon snack for a long time. Right now, they tasted funny. He didn’t think the things his mom was saying were wrong, not exactly, but they didn’t sound right for him. He might be young, but he was pretty sure that what he felt about Jason was different from anything he felt before. He knew what it felt like to admire someone, even admire someone a lot. He knew what friendship was like.

“But I could be gay,” he said, not scared, not wary, mostly just confused. Why had his mom reacted this way?

The weird expression came back, just for a moment. “Honey, you’re not gay,” she said. “Your dad and I have made a point of watching for signs if you were. When children are raised in an accepting, progressive household, they tend to show signs of their orientation even during their earliest school years. You didn’t show any of the signs. And you’re our first child, first son, and I had a young body age when I was pregnant with you, and the hormone environment in my uterus was ideal. It’s so, so unlikely for you to be gay. The conditions just weren’t right, and since we made sure you grew up in an accepting environment, if you were gay, you would have known and told us sooner.”

“Oh,” Bunny said. He needed to think about all that. He needed to think about that for a long time.

But his mom wasn’t going to let him do that. “Aren’t you relieved that you’re not gay, sweetie? It’s really hard out there in the world for gay people. You’ll be able to help them so much more easily as a straight person rather than a gay person, which I know you’ll want to, because you’re a good boy, and you were willing to think that about yourself, even if no one pushed you into the idea.”

She kept her arm around him, smiling patiently.

Bunny couldn’t figure out what to think or what to do. His mom was being so kind, so patient, so reasonable, just like she always was. So he shouldn’t be feeling angry with her, even though he kind of thought he was. Now, it was okay to be angry—his mom had told him that, too—it was even okay for him to be angry at her. And when he was angry, it was important for him to express that anger, in order for him to not stunt his emotional development. But if he was allowed to express his anger, why was it so terrifying for him to be angry at his mom, now? It was okay, he’d been angry with his mom before, hadn’t he?

But he could only remember the times when he thought he had been angry with her, and she’d explained to him that he really wasn’t angry, he was really scared, or worried, or confused, or defensive, and he needed to learn to feel those emotions, too. So often, media showed men as emotionless, or only experiencing anger. That was a problem, because men and boys and complex, varied emotions, and they needed to express and accept these, even if it didn’t make them feel traditionally masculine. And, well, as his mother always assured him, there was no reason for him to be angry with her. But he could be scared, or worried, or confused, or defensive, because the world was a big, confusing place, and he didn’t have a whole lot of experience being a person. So he could tell her whatever he was worried about and she would do her best to guide him through it, because that was her job—to show him how to make his way in this big, bewildering world.

Bunny didn’t want to have that conversation right now, and he knew that’s what would happen if he said he was angry. He was pretty sure he was angry. He didn’t want to hear that he wasn’t. Just like he didn’t want to hear that he didn’t really have a crush on Jason.

And so there was the dilemma. If he was honest about being angry, he’d be told that he wasn’t. But he was, he was, he was! And his crush on Jason was real—wasn’t it? His mom had been so nice as she explained. She wouldn’t have said those things because she didn’t want him to be gay. That would be homophobic, and their family did not associate with homophobic people (“If they even deserve to be called people,” his mom had once said).

So why—why?

He couldn’t figure it out, and his mom was still standing there, waiting for him to say something. Respecting his voice. He always got a chance to respond. But what if he didn’t want to respond? Could that be okay, too? No, not right now, it couldn’t. Right now, he had to say something to his mom, who, in the way she talked just now, reminded Bunny of the parents in some of the fun chapter books, scifi and horror, that he wasn’t supposed to read because their reading level was too low for him, and they didn’t have appropriate representation, anyway. But he still read them sometimes. Probably because he wasn’t trying as hard as he should to escape the toxic culture he was born into, even though his parents were trying as hard as they could to free him from it. But they hadn’t been completely useless books, because they showed him how his mom was acting now. She was acting like the parents in those books that asked the kids what was going on, and when the kids, who were mostly good, told the truth, the parents wouldn’t believe them, and they’d explain that the kids hadn’t seen what they thought they’d seen.

It happened so often that Bunny started wondering why the kids didn’t get that that was going to happen. Why didn’t they just say something normal? Why did they try to tell their parents at all?

Now he was pretty sure he knew. They told their parents because they thought their parents would support and help them. They told their parents because they loved and trusted their parents. But it wasn’t enough. And that was horrible. It always made him cringe with embarrassment when the kids would keep trying to make their parents believe them. It never worked. So, that wasn’t going to be him. He’d say the only thing that made sense to those kinds of parents: Just what they wanted to hear.

“Oh,” he said, slowly enough to justify his long pause, as if he had been deeply considering her words, which of course he had, just not the way she would have hoped. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I just wasn’t thinking about it that way.”

“You’re a good boy,” his mom said, and that seemed odd to him, too. She had always called him “kid” before, when she said something like that. “Did you tell anyone else?”

There was that weird thing on her face again. His mom—his mom shouldn’t be asking that question. Not if being gay was no big deal, not if this was just a misunderstanding.

He knew how he was feeling after that question. Mad. Sad. And too afraid to lie, and glad that the truth was probably the right answer this time. “No, mom,” he said. “I wanted to tell you first.”

“You’re a good boy,” she said again.

There was a difference between the right answer and the truth. Even in his world, and even in his home. He knew that was an unspeakable thing to say among the people of his world, so he decided to make sure no one ever knew that he knew. The burden would be his to bear. He never said anything to his friends about what happened, and as time passed, he did all that he could to maintain the right answers. He wasn’t gay. He would show no signs that he was gay, now that he knew how closely his parents watched him.

He still had a crush on Jason, though. And that was the truth.

Knowing the difference between the truth and the right answer, his already high grades became exceptional. But, there had never been any doubt about his going to college, so that didn’t make much of a difference.

He always resented that there was a difference between the truth and the right answer, though, and he was always terrified that someone would find out that he knew.

This didn’t change even in college, even when he became aware of more and more people pointing out some of the same hypocrisies he’d noticed. It was all right for them. Just not for him.

With more time, Bunny would probably have been able to talk to someone about his anxiety that someone in some position of power over him would outright deny his experiences, his anxiety caused by the pressure of maintaining a falsehood, and the feeling that others weren’t interested in the truth at all, but he didn’t have that time. He had, mostly, the oppressive weight of his fear of the monster and his fear of the situation that would haunt him for the rest of his life if he ever got out of these woods: he had seen something impossible, truly impossible, and this time, everyone would be completely justified in disbelieving him.

He wasn’t thinking about how the opportunity to worry for the rest of his life might be better than another all-too-likely possibility.

#blackaspitch #sanderson mansnoozie #toothiana #bunnymund #if you like it consider reblogging #I live and breathe for comments #oh look another flashback what could this mean about the next part?

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