Liberation 1
It's a new year, so let's post some random things from 2011 that were never intended to be taken seriously, or finished, or widely admired. The best thing going for this stuff is that it's accompanied by illustrations by the amazing negniahn, pretty much the best fan artist I've ever met, and I've met some fan artists in my time.
So, here's the first installment. I don't know how many of these I have total. Two? Three? Whatever, more later. Like, tomorrowish.
Title: but
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Stan/Kyle, incidentally, but other creepy ones, too
Summary: When Stan is 13 he has a horrible teen mom problem and has to go live with his uncle in the woods.
Note: Based on this picture by negniahn. I seriously recommend you take a look at it and give her some props. The picture was drawn from my offhand description of a scenario, and then I wrote this fuller story off the picture.
Warning: Mpreg.
I think I've now posted all the mpreg I've ever written and will ever write.
His parents hadn’t spoken in years - but they were talking now.
“My son isn’t having a baby, Sharon,” Stan’s father shouted over a beer can at the kitchen table. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yes, he is!” his mother shouted back. “I’ve been with him to four doctors! He’s having it whether you like it or not!”
“No son of mine is giving birth!”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Wave a magic wand?”
“I want you to explain to me what the fuck you’re doing letting my son get pregnant! For fuck’s sake!”
“It’s not something I let happen!”
“Then why the fuck is it happening?”
“I don’t know!”
They kept shouting at each other. Stan buried his ears in his wrists on the table. He felt sick again, his head spinning, regretting that he’d ever eaten, wishing he’d never even been born, wishing if they were going to yell they would at least yell at him, and if they were going to yell at him, then that they’d let him go lay down. But, no, it was like he wasn’t even there, an abstract concept.
“Guys,” he tried to say, peering out from the fringe of his hair at them, pointing at each other accusingly. “Dad, you guys-”
“I pay for his clothes!” Stan’s father was screaming. “I pay for his doctors, I pay for his shoes, I pay for his goddamn-”
They were not going to stop. They were not even going to talk to him. Stan wandered from the table, taking his mug of lukewarm tea. He curled into bed on his side, a pillow in his arms and one between his legs. Dozing, he dreamt of fourth grade, of how tight his lungs felt the first time he smoked a cigarette, and of how powerless he was to stop it.
Stan woke to his mother sitting on his bed, stroking his hand.
“I don’t mean to wake you,” she said, quietly.
“I’m okay.” He rubbed his eyes, wiped his mouth. “Is Dad done?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s not here.”
“Oh, okay.” Stan’s father hadn’t said a word to him the whole time he’d been sitting there, throughout the whole argument.
“Sweetie-”
“Yeah?” Stan wondered if he should sit up. He tried, and it made him realize he had a dull headache. He decided she could look down at him, and he was content to look up at her.
His mother’s lips were pressed together, her eyes dark and watery. “You have to go away for a while, honey, okay?”
Stan’s fingers clenched. She grasped them in hers. “Where am I going?
“You’re going to go live with your Uncle Jimbo for a while. After the new year, sweetie. In January.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
“Well, I think-” She swallowed. “I think you’re going to be okay, honey, but you can’t go to school with a - you can’t go to school like this. You can finish this term and then you’re going to take the rest of the year off and spend it with your uncle, okay? You can do some work from there, I’m sure.”
Stan had questions. Why Jimbo? Why January? Why couldn’t he just stay where he was? But he knew he was too weary for any but the most important answer. “What’s gonna happen to my - to the baby?”
For a moment, his mother shut her eyes, didn’t say anything. Then she opened them. “We’re going to find someone to take care of her, okay?”
So it was a her. Stan knew it, somehow, but they hadn’t told him. “Who?”
“Someone good, honey. Someone who wants to be a parent.”
It made Stan want to cry. He didn’t want to be a parent, not at all. It was the furthest thing from what he wanted. But he didn’t want to give her up, not at all. What kind of a person did that? He didn’t think he was that kind of a person. But he was young, a 13-year-old boy. He was mid-way through seventh grade, a decent student, adept at soccer, slowly learning to play the guitar. If he could hold a hollow-bodied guitar, why not an infant?
“I get to meet her, though, right?”
“If you want,” his mother said.
“I want that.” He nodded.
She kissed him on the forehead as she left his room, shutting off the light as she went. His sister would be home soon from her date with Kevin, feeling pretty and special. Stan remembered what that was like, feeling pretty and special. Or not so much pretty, but worth someone’s attention. As he tried to fall back asleep, clutching as his belly, he bit his lip to keep himself from crying. Boys didn’t do that.
~
The only person Stan found it hard to say goodbye to was Kyle. “Where are you going?” he kept asking, seeming frantic. “Why are you leaving me?”
It was an aggressive January day, the sidewalks thawing under the salt laid down by the country government after a heavy storm. The sky had no color in it, not even a bit of blue. Clouds swathed everything, and Stan was sure that in one of those dirty puddles of salt slick and ice melt, he could make out a rainbow. But when he moved closer, it disappeared.
“I’m going to stay with my uncle,” Stan repeated. He was kicking at the puddle. “I’m - I need a vacation.”
“From what?”
“Life, I guess.”
“You never said anything was wrong! You never asked me for help!”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“You can’t just - just leave me here to fend for myself with these people!” Kyle’s these people was everyone, the whole town. “Like something’s wrong and you’re just giving up!”
“You’ll be all right.” Stan offered a wan smile. “I’ll be okay.”
Kyle wasn’t having it. “Why do you have to leave me here? Why are you doing this to me?” It sounded so selfish when Kyle said it, his voice so strained and wet. But Stan knew Kyle was right, that it was absolutely gutting him, the idea of facing each school day like a gaping grave, with no one to hold him back. The one thing Stan had always known he could do to be better than himself was to stand back with Kyle and watch their world convulse. Now they’d both have to do it alone, and it was all Stan’s fault.
“I suck, dude.” Stan kicked at the puddle, wishing it away, but careful not to splash onto Kyle’s jeans. “There’s nothing more to it.”
They had a final sleepover, at Stan’s. Kyle didn’t notice the plastic punch bowl next to Stan’s bed for late-night vomiting. Stan later figured that it was pretty big, so Kyle probably just politely declined to mention it.
“Why do you have to go?” Kyle asked, with the lights down and the covers pulled up to their waists. “I don’t have anything here, you know, I’m going to be stuck spending my time alone. Or, worse, with fat ass.”
“You’re better off alone.”
“I know, right?”
“I’m sorry, dude, I’m really sorry.” Stan wanted to bring Kyle’s hands to his skin and tell him the truth and ask him if he felt her. But of course he wouldn’t, Stan knew, it was very premature and she was imperceptible. Stan wanted to take Kyle’s hands in his and kiss him, maybe, not deeply but just the same, have their lips touch for a while. It wasn’t sexual, exactly, but now that Stan had had sex, he was conscious of it all the time. It hadn’t even been good, but he wanted it with Kyle. They could laugh together about it, maybe: This is the worst part, this is the best part, this is the part where you shake me by the shoulders and yell my sister’s name and tears come to your eyes and they fall onto my face and I ask if you’re crying and you say ‘no’ while you keep crying. Except Stan knew that Kyle wouldn’t say ‘Shelly,’ he would say Stan’s name, and he wouldn’t want to be on the top like that, he’d rather lie down. All this good information Stan was hiding - what a waste. He wanted it to be Kyle’s baby inside of him, or maybe the other way around, because then they’d share the counting down to such a profound moment of loss.
“Can I visit you?” Kyle asked.
Stan blinked. He only wished. “I don’t know, it’s not up to me.”
“Can we talk on the phone?”
“What?” This idea cheered Stan, and least a bit. “Well, yeah, dude, of course. And I’ll write you letters and mail them from the box on the county route that goes by the general store.”
“Can I get your address?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And can you come back for my bar mitzvah?”
“When is it?”
“No sooner than my birthday.”
Stan considered how preposterous that would be, waddling into Kyle’s party and trying to hug him. “I don’t know. It’s not up to me. Probably not.”
“This is absurd! Why do you have to go to somewhere I can’t be?”
“It’s like going to college, maybe,” Stan said, repeating something him mother had told him. “We’ll do that one day and won’t see each other for a bit.”
“I’m going to be abandoned,” Kyle wailed, with his hands over his eyes. “Like a widow.”
Stan wanted to laugh, but he just couldn’t. Kyle was so good at poking fun at himself, but didn’t like having it pointed out. “There’s other types of loss,” Stan said. “Let’s hope we never find out about another one.”
~
Uncle Jimbo lived with an army buddy of his even further up into the Rockies. Stan watched the flat basin of South Park recede behind him on the drive, wondering when he’d see it again. In the backseat lay his dog, a six-year-old mutt named Sparky. Sparky panted and cried for most of the ride, hating to be cooped up like this, pawing at the back of Stan’s seat. Stan could only turn around and say, “I know, boy, I know,” like that was any comfort. His mother had that look of consternation on her face that she got when Stan’s father was being difficult. They didn’t talk much, and Stan was silently thankful that the snow was not falling today. Everything was clear and still and at a standstill.
Jimbo and Ned were happy to see him, at least. Or Jimbo was, rather; Ned was typically shirking behind his electrolarynx. “Yeah, this is how they did it in my day,” he announced, rubbing at Stan’s hair, like a dog. “Your girl gets in trouble, you handle it. None of this TV stuff, letting everyone know about it.”
“Right,” Ned agreed.
Again, Stan wanted to cry, and he had to sit on his bed with his dog at his ankles, pulling at his hair, to keep from bursting into tears. When his mother was leaving, she hugged him and said, “It’s okay if you’re down, Stanley. When I was pregnant with you it was bad, like waterworks. Your body’s changing and sometimes it’s better to let it happen.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Boys don’t cry.”
“Of course they do.”
“No, we don’t.”
She straightened out the collar of his T-shirt. “I’ll be back this weekend, honey, okay? Maybe I’ll bring your sister with me.” Stan sincerely hoped she wouldn’t.
The first package Stan received arrived before he’d even written Kyle his first letter. It was a yellow scarf, with a handwritten note in Kyle's fussy scrawl of D'Nealian:
I really wish you hadn't left me, it started, without even a hello or a Dear Stan.
I'm thinking about you up in the woods for a while, with one of your uncle's old hunting caps on your head and a dead buck dripping blood from its slashed neck. I've been hunting, you remember, it's gruesome and can be very boring.
I think you’re supposed to wear orange gear for safety, like the color of that coat I used to wear when I was a kid. But when I went looking for orange yarn in the house we didn’t have any, and when I asked my dad to take me to Michael’s the only oranges they had were so pastelish and I really thought you wouldn’t like that and either way it’s besides the point. So here, this scarf is yellow. It’s a bit scratchy but I think it’ll do, I think of you as very rough anyway.
I think I’m getting okay at this knitting, but of course I did drop some stitches so I’m sorry, I’ll send something better maybe after some more attempts.
I’m now getting yelled at that it’s time to get to dinner. It’s sweet and sour meatballs and butter noodles, and the prospect of eating this is gross but you know I don’t have a choice. Please write back.
Love,
Kyle
The scarf was starchy to the touch, as Kyle had said it would be, stiff in Stan’s hands and he felt the nubby stitches, and the gaping mouths of loose yarn where Kyle had dropped an off-loop. It did sort of smell like Kyle, the antiseptic mouthwash he used and the Glade plug-ins his mother forced into every outlet, always Hawaiian Breeze scent; “something very Long Island about the whole thing,” Kyle used to say, but Stan knew this was something Kyle’s dad said, padding around his own house like he didn’t really belong there, or reading the newspaper while he only pretended to be aware of what Kyle’s mother was bitching about. Stan wrapped this scarf around his neck and curled up in bed with it, wishing he were wish Kyle, back in Kyle’s cozy shitty split-level house with a wide-open den and peeling paint on the walls. Stan felt like such a stranger in his own home, his parents so unestablished, that he barely even missed it.
Stan did write back immediately, but not at great length or in great detail about specifics. I don’t want to be here, he confessed. I’d like to tell you, dude, I would, but this isn’t what I want and you have to just believe I would bring you with me if I could, but there’s not a lot I can do and things are mad right now, just mad. Mad! I wish I could say I was angry at the circumstances but I just don’t have the wherewithal to have things as I’d like them to be. If I’m being vague I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. So so sorry about everything. Please tell me about my sister if you see her, if she’s happy and if she talks to you………no, nevermind, of course she won’t. Also please say hello to Kenny/Butters (def. not youknowwho, fuck him) and ask Kenny if his brother is okay, and generally about him (Kevin, not Kenny) and my sister. I’m very interested in how that plays out. But you’re the only one I miss, really. I could send you something but all we have here to send you is jerky.
It was true that Jimbo’s larders were groaning with jerky, and venison products of all kinds, sausages hanging from the rafters, air drying into hard fingers of salty fat and gristle to gnaw on. The smell of them made Stan uneasy, and the first time his uncle served him a bowl of stew thick with chunks of a buck Ned had shot the morning before, he refused to eat it.
“Jeez, Stanley, you have to eat,” his uncle said, taking it like a personal affront.
“I can’t eat this,” Stan protested. “I’ll vomit.”
"Well, what do you want to eat?"
"Normal things!"
"What's normal?" Ned asked.
"I don’t know! Crackers and - something like grilled cheese.” Stan tried to think of whether there was anything he had an appetite for. “Oh, god, I’m sorry.” He bolted from the table, knowing he couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. He went out the backdoor and fell to his hands and knees by Ned’s old galoshes, vomiting into the mud and pine needles. He returned to the table wiping his mouth and tightening the scarf at his throat. He was grateful he hadn’t puked on it.
“What are we gonna do with you?” Jimbo asked. He and Ned were eating their stew happily, or at least convincingly.
“There’s nothing you can do with me,” Stan said, feeling like if this was going to be his life, he’d prefer to be dead.
Jimbo did go out for provisions, bringing Stan a bushel of old, soft apples and loaves of white bread. Stan sat in bed eating slices of mushy sandwich bread happily, unaware how hungry he’d been.
“If you’re gonna be up here,” Stan’s uncle said carefully while he ate, “you’re gonna have to get used to some things. We kill a lot of our food. I’m not telling you to kill anything, Stanley, but you have to get used to eating things maybe you saw be killed.”
“It’s not the fact you killed it,” Stan said, although it was that, too. “I don’t feel well anymore.”
“Well, you’re a good kid.” Jimbo patted him indulgently on the head, with a smile that said he didn’t think this at all. “I hope you feel better soon. Randy seems to think I can set you right.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Jimbo confessed. “Do find it sort of ironic, though.”
“Why’s that?” Stan asked, a mouthful of Wonderbread in his mouth.
“Something kinda funny about a coupla single guys living out alone in the wood for 30, 35 years.”
Stan swallowed. “Why’s that funny?”
Jimbo smiled at him again. “You’re a good kid, Stanley,” he repeated. “Good boy. My little nephew.” Then he got up and left.
That night, Stan slept with his dog at his side and Kyle’s scarf in his arms, dreaming for the first and the last time of Kevin, of how he’d said Shelly. It was rare that Stan would dream of anything, and he woke cold with his quilt kicked to the floor, Sparky licking his face.
~
Kyle sent a dutiful Valentine, a matching pair of gloves to pair with Stan’s yellow scarf. I did not have a Valentine this year, he wrote, his letters pressed so hard into the paper that Stan could feel them even when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes I imagine I won’t ever. Kenny likes to brag that he’s got four girls all lined up, that he intends to get chocolate from all of them. I asked him what he’s getting them, and he said ‘nothing’ and then just sort of laughed at me like it was stupid to ask. Was it stupid to ask? When I have these conversations I spend more time imagining what you would say if you were here than I do actually talking. Incidentally, Kenny says your sister is over all the time now, that she and Kevin are behind closed doors a lot, that is all I know. Is that what you wanted to know? Anyway, I’m sure you have no Valentine up there and I’m pathetic as well so I’m sending you some gloves and some chocolate. My father asked me why I didn’t ask some girl over to watch cartoons and play videogames. That’s something I only do with you, though, plus, it’s a Wednesday and I have homework. Where does he get these ideas? Does that seem like something I would do? You don’t have to answer that.
Love,
Kyle
Stan decided if ever there was a time to send Kyle some venison jerky, it was now. Uncle Jimbo helped Stan vacuum seal a bouquet of six salami sticks and a handful of jerky, Cajun-spiced with crystallized flecks of salt on the severed tendons. After these things were sealed they no longer made Stan retch, and he wrapped them in old newspapers (Reagan reelected; Clarence Thomas confirmed) and sent his package off at the postal counter in the general store.
In the evenings, Stan read, and Sparky lay at his feet with a deer’s hoof. Jimbo liked to toss him these, and Stan liked to think that if nothing else, he was finally giving his mountain hound a real life, now that Sparky could savage hares in the yard and slobber over the pine needles that crunched under their feet when they went out hunting. Stan didn’t hunt, just stood there slack-jawed, gaping at Colorado and the sheet height of the place - the tips of the conifers invisibly far, the bucks’ antlers towering over the lowest branches, often snapping them.
Ned and Jimbo brought back rabbit sometimes, and more than once they went fishing. Stan felt so ill in the rocking boat that he needed them to row him to shore. Where he sat and moaned with his dog’s head in his lap, growling to soothe Stan’s ills, as if they were a predator his beast of a dog could scare off by baring his fangs.
So far Stan’s only symptom had been nausea, but during the long March treks into the forest he began to feel tight in his clothes and off-balance while he walked. His mother came twice a month, and she brought him a duffel of big sweaters, saying, “Some of these your father had around the house.” It had never occurred to Stan that his father had anything around the house for him, and his father had not come to see him once. “He asks about you,” his mother said, offering this as some kind of comfort. Stan didn’t wonder why his father never came around, and Stan didn’t want him to come, anyway.
“Tell him I’m all right,” was Stan’s reply. “I’m going to be all right.”
Stan didn’t feel as if he were going to be all right, though. Late one night when Stan was wrapping vacuum-sealed salamis in newsprint to ship to Kenny for his birthday, he felt it - he felt her. He realized, suddenly, that maybe this was not even the first time, that things he’d written off to gas or maybe nerves might have been her, pawing at his insides, trying test the boundaries of the only little place she’d ever known. It scared Stan to death, and he dropped the scissors and raced to his room, where Sparky was snoring, taking up the whole bed. Stan dove on, not caring if Sparky barked at him and woke up his uncle and Ned and if Sparky got angry and slunk off to go sleep in the kitchen by the radiator, Stan wouldn’t care. But when Sparky snorted and got up to nestle in with Stan and their bodies fit together on the pallid mattress, Stan was glad his dog was there, because he didn’t want to be alone with her, not for a moment. All that night Stan failed to sleep, worrying his yellow scarf in his hands, afraid of imagining the answers to the questions that his brain was devising: What did she look like? How big was she now? Did she suck her baby thumbs like Stan had, or was she resilient like a McCormick? Stan wondered, for the first time, if there was any chance she might look like Kenny. Stan didn’t know what Kenny had looked like as a baby; in all the crooked pictures on the McCormick family’s walls, he was swaddled within an inch of his life, only his little point of a nose peeking out. Stan lay there until the gray light of the mountain dawn danced across the brass doorknob and the steel hooks on the walls where Stan hung his oversize sweaters. When he felt movement he told himself it was Sparky’s breathing, Sparky fussing. Stan choked his scarf so tightly his knuckle chafed. When Jimbo came to get him up, and Stan peered back with miserable old eyes, his uncle said, “All right, Stanley, you can stay in bed today. But you’re hunting tomorrow, whether you like it or not.”
Stan did not like it. He hated hunting. Jimbo had given up on getting Stan to eat a “man’s lunch” of stew in a thermos and hard bread and now let him take slices of chalky apples, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and potato chips. Stan had no cravings, only aversions. His aversion to hunting was massive. Jimbo’s idea of leniency or compassion was letting Stan hang back if he agreed to take snapshots of the rest of the party with their kills. “Do you like taking pictures? Maybe this could be a thing for you, photography,” he suggested. When Stan didn’t answer, Jimbo repeated, “Do you like taking pictures, Stanley?”
In a hoarse voice, Stan said, “I don’t like anything anymore.” He was surprised at how it cracked. He was six months pregnant, his pants cinched below his belly underneath a shapeless sweater, and finally his voice was beginning to crack. He pulled at the scarf around his neck.
But that wasn’t even an honest answer, because there were two things he loved still: his dog, and Kyle’s letters. Maybe his mother, for neither judging him nor forcing him to confront this situation in any significant way. Sparky certainly loved Stan now more than he ever had, overjoyed to ferret out the little creatures of the forest, to run and run until Stan called him back, unleashed and out of the suburbs. More that once he returned to Stan with blood on his muzzle, flesh hanging from his teeth, panting with a big, thankful smile, wagging his affection.
Kyle kept writing: Kenny says thank you for the jerky. I told him to write you, but he said letter-writing’s for fags. I punched him in the mouth, by the way, and when Cartman laughed I punched him, too. This year sucks, dude, it utterly sucks. Speaking of which, my mother’s told me now that since I’m nearing my “adulthood” (only symbolically, not in any way that would actually matter or be fun) it’s time I stop saying “dude” and start taking like an adult. I think this is such bullshit and what’s more, totally absurd, but the absurdity of it’s not even amusing because you’re not here to laugh at it with me. I’m so anxious, Stan, about my bar mitzvah and about other things. You don’t even know. I wish I could tell you, but I guess that’s fair unless you tell me what you’re doing there every day.
It went on like that, and then ended:
Love,
Kyle
~
Stan replied:
Well, dude.
I hunt all day. I hate this. My uncle drags me up at 6 or earlier, makes me pack a “sissy” lunch, and we get in the truck and drive who knows how many miles, over dirt roads, until we are literally in the middle of fucking nowhere. Sometimes a film crew follows us, some channel we don’t watch because there’s no TV in this fucking cabin, and they get shots of my uncle talking about how brutally he’s going to massacre some deer. I sit on a stump or the ground and let Sparky run off and if I wasn’t too groggy in the mornings I have brought a book. The selections in this place are not great but for some reason Ned’s a fan of Norman Mailer?
This prompted Kyle to send a box of books, Pynchon and some very nerdy Star Wars novels he’d flipped through so many times that the corners were frayed and Stan was sure he could make out the greasy grime of Kyle’s fingers in the margins, holding these fat books under the covers at night.
It’s kind of interesting to me, said the note in the box, that we are both so lonesome and miserable.
Stan forced himself to read, because if he did not then he would be left with nothing but dwelling, and he decided that he’d rather occupy himself with published fan fic baloney bullshit than torture himself again and again. As he read he collapsed his weight onto Sparky, or a pile of sweaters, or both, fondly wishing he could breathe on his back or balance on his stomach. When she stirred he slammed Gravity’s Rainbow into his stomach until she stopped, drowning it out, bruising himself in the process. Stan didn’t care anymore. What were some bruises when he was going to be slit open? He learned this on a recent visit to an obstetrician at a hospital in Breckenridge. There was no natural way for her to come out, so they were going to have to cut. Somehow Stan had known this, but he’d preferred to leave it mostly unrealized. Now he knew, though.
In anticipation of Kyle’s bar mitzvah, Stan began to mope. He’d gotten his invitation in the mail, with a squat little RSVP card and pre-stamped envelope, and it had broken Stan’s heart to have to write, Dear Kyle, Mr. and Mrs. Broflovski, and Ike,
Unfortunately I am not able to attend the bar mitzvah the weekend after Kyle’s birthday. Please understand that there are circumstances beyond my control preventing me from going. I am sure it will be a lovely party and I hope I will be able to see pictures later.
Please accept my genuine regrets,
Stanley
Stan consoled himself with thinking he might make up for this injustice by sending Kyle a nice gift, but he had nothing to send and, worse, Kyle had written an unusually curt letter in reply: Well, you won’t be there, of course you won’t be there. I don’t know why I thought you’d try to be there. I don’t know what you’re fucking doing with your goddamn uncle up there but I guess I thought maybe you’d understand how much this means to me and how much this means to my family. To stand up there and look up and see everyone I care about and not see you - of course I should have figured you wouldn’t care how I would feel.
I don’t even know what to do about you anymore.
A feeling so hollow crept over Stan that he did not even notice how hard she was kicking, how his belly kept him from sitting comfortably at the kitchen table while he wrote:
Kyle,
You are my best friend. I love you so unspeakably much that you could turn your back on me and I would just sit and wait forever for you to turn around again. I do not think you understand. I can’t come to your bar mitzvah. [Stan had pressed hard into the paper, letting the ink bleed through to the newspaper underneath.] It is not personal. It is not in my control. You don’t understand. You. Don’t. Understand. I don’t expect you to understand. There are things going on, bad things, things I can’t help. I already feel shitty about not being able to go. You can do the whole thing for me again when I come back. I get why you’re angry. I get why you’re disappointed. But you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. I have never given up on you, not once in my life. I am so sorry this is the one time I cannot be there, the one time. I would like to think that as my best friend who I love more than life itself you would, despite your disappointment, ask yourself if you think it’s fair to accuse me of not caring, or imply that I would rather be in the fucking woods in this fucking cabin with my fucking uncle and his fucking - I don’t even know, what the fuck does Ned even do here? I have been through so much, Kyle, okay, everything is shit right now, all right, and the one thing that would make it okay would be if you for just once tried to show me a little compassion without becoming exasperated! That’s what you can do about me, if you like. You can grow the fuck up. Meanwhile I’ll get up at 6 a.m. and spend my day freezing in the woods trying not to freak out that the one tenuous thing I had in my life, the idea of coming home and seeing you soon, might go to shit because of something I can’t help.
Stan was so bereft, he didn’t even sign the letter. Mere days later, he received his answer:
Dear Stan,
I am under a lot of pressure right now. I am going through things too. This bar mitzvah thing is not easy. I have to get up in front of 1000 people, all of my friends and all the kids from school and the rest of the congregation of every Jew in suburban Denver and my family, to sing, well, chant some stuff in a foreign language that means nothing to me. They are coming from all over to see this, to see me, and not to be too Tweek about it but it’s a lot of pressure. My mother’s high-strung, my brother is acting bratty because he’s used to getting all her attention, and my dad … ugh, forget it. Things are tough for me, too. I’m not that good at it. Things bother me. I’m alone and useless. I have things that I can’t help and no one to talk to and it’s sad but when the only person I can even interact with (by shouting at) is youknowwho then things are down, dude, it sucks and you’re just not here. You’re not here so what do I do with myself? You could tell me, you know, you could talk to me and try to get over it. But, okay, I have to go study Jew shit. Later.
Love,
Kyle
It wasn’t an apology, but Kyle didn’t do contrition. Stan fell asleep with the letter pressed to his chest, his scarf between his legs, Sparky at his back, and a spare pillow folded under his belly.
~
One morning, Stan awoke to wetness between his legs, soaking the mattress, the sheets, and his boxers. For just a moment he was panicked enough to think he’d actually wet the bed, and then he realized, this had been his water breaking. The thought made him nauseated, but he knocked on his uncle’s door anyway.
Jimbo came to the door groggy, in a robe and his hunting cap. Stan wondered if he slept in it, but only until a wave of pain distracted him, and he slouched against the wall.
“What’s wrong?” his uncle asked.
“I think I’m.” Stan bit his lip. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”
“Why, you having that kid?”
“I think so, yeah. Sorry, I have to go sit down.” Stan shuffled to the nearest chair, at the kitchen table. “The bed’s a mess. I’m really sorry.”
Jimbo sat down with him. “It’s okay. Is there anything I should do?”
“Call my mom,” Stan said. “That’s all I want. Call my mom.”
Stan lay on the couch until she got there, Sparky on the floor next to him, trying to paw at Stan’s belly when he curled into the contractions, moaning. They were brief, and far apart, and not generally that painful, but painful enough to make him clench his eyes through them.
Jimbo was polite enough to leave him alone, to keep Ned away, to avoid offering him any jerky or suggesting some bullshit therapy. Just once, he asked, “You okay, son? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, I’m cool.” Stan wished he had some TV to watch, but there was nothing to be done about that.
Stan’s mother arrived by the mid-afternoon, when the contractions were just beginning to intensify to the point where Stan had to stop himself from baying through them. They were close enough together now that he was less relieved by the respite. “How much worse is this going to get?” he asked her, trying to sit up. He’d barely moved all day.
“Well, I guess it depends how soon they want to perform the C-section,” she said. “Come on, Stanley, do you have a bag packed?”
He shook his head.
“Well, let’s throw in some undies and get going, then.”
~
Stan hated hospitals, hated them, hated them. They made him feel queasy, reminded him of all the crises of elementary school. He asked for general anesthesia, but they wouldn’t let him have it. They would, however, let his mother sit in with him during the procedure. Stan was not sure how long it lasted, but it seemed like forever, although he couldn’t see anything. Too drowsy to speak, he silently wished that this would be the absolute worst thing that would ever happen to him. He imaged mothers who wanted their children had all the hope and relief in the world to get them through this. Stan didn’t think he had anything.
They did let him hold the baby, and asked him to fill out the birth certificate. He clutched her while he scribbled in his answers. She was small, much smaller than Sparky had been as a puppy when Stan first got him, but she felt heavy, and he worried he’d lose his grip.
“I can take her, if that’s more comfortable,” his mother kept offering.
“That’s okay.” Stan narrowed his eyes at her in warning. He knew if he let his mother take her away, he’d never get her back. She wailed in his arms, her little fingers clutching at his T-shirt, her face pressed as closely to the warmth of his body and he could get her.
“I can help with the answers maybe, Stanley-”
Stan scoffed. “I’m not putting Kevin’s name on the birth certificate. I’m not stupid.”
He held her all day, fingers in her sparse, dark hair, lying on his side with his lips on her head. When she cried he gave her a finger to suck, and when the nurses came to feed or change her, he waited for her to be returned to his bed, so they could continue to shudder and marvel at each other.
That afternoon a woman came to see Stan; she had a brutal face and a real mess of hair, but her voice was kind and authoritative, not in a forceful way but a reassuring way. “Hello, Stanley,” she said, sitting next to his bed. “I’m a social worker and I represent the state of Colorado.”
He’s known this was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m all right. How are you?”
“Could be better,” Stan said. “But - but I’m okay. Considering.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear.” She scooted closer. “Is this your daughter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “This is Rainbow.”
“Her name is Rainbow?”
“Yes, Rainbow Marsh.” Stan shook his head. “Sorry, I know that’s a dumb name. I figured anyone who wants her will change it-”
“Oh, don’t think like that.” She smiled at him so gratefully when she held her arms out for the baby. “She’ll always be your Rainbow. You might see her again sometime.”
“I hope I don’t,” Stan said. “I don’t want her to know, okay, I don’t.”
“Okay, honey. She doesn’t have to know anything you don’t want her to know.”
The forms were handled and hands were shook, and the social worker left with Rainbow, who was sleeping or at least quiet, leaving Stan to privately wallow. When his mother returned she found him on his side, yellow scarf in his arms, eyes wide open.
“Stanley, honey,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“We can talk, if you like.”
“I’m okay.”
“You know it might not be too late-”
“This is how it is.” He buried his head in his scarf. “When do I have to leave?”
“Well, you had surgery, Stanley, so not for at least another day or so-”
“Okay. I just think I’d like to be alone for a while, Mom, if that’s all right.”
She recoiled at how flat his voice sounded. But she said, “okay” and left him there, wishing he might call her in to talk. He never did, though.
~
It turned out that Kyle had a secret now, too. “While you were gone I learned something,” he said. “I figured out that I’m gay.”
They were sitting in Stan’s room, with the lights off, although it was a rainy and dark June day, the shutters on Stan’s windows clattering. They’d gotten together the night before, for dinner at Kyle’s house. Stan had tried to smile into his knishes, to laugh when Ike purposely put mushy peas in his nose. Kyle laughed, and then his mother said, “Oh, Ike, bubeleh, stop that,” and Ike threw a tiny temper-tantrum for show. Kyle’s brother was 7, kind of a showboat, and Stan knew it was stupid to feel such an immense sense of loss at the dinner table, all because this awkward little Canadian adoptee was so incredibly wanted. After dinner, Kyle had said he needed to talk, but Stan had just wanted go home. Kyle was shifting his weight around, eyes wide, licking his lips.
“I just want to go home,” Although Stan felt more at home with Kyle than he did in his house, Kyle believed him. “I’m kind of tired, dude, all right?”
“Sure.” Kyle sounded hurt when he said it, but now it was a sullen afternoon, and Stan looked at Kyle with an emotion he couldn’t identify - maybe pity, or maybe empathy. “Okay, dude.”
Kyle’s eyebrows arched. “All you have to say is ‘okay?’ ” he gasped.
“Well, what do you want me to say, dude? Not okay?”
“You’re not even shocked!”
“I knew.”
“Bullshit, no you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m not that easy, Stan Marsh! I’m not that obvious.”
Stan rolled his eyes. “To me, you are.”
Kyle gaped at him for a moment before his face fell. “Oh.”
“Yes, well. Oh.”
“How long have you know?”
“About me?” Stan asked. “Or about you?”
“Both of us?” Kyle wrung his hands. “Jesus Christ, I’m so stupid.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve both known for a while,” Stan said. “Like, it made us friends to begin with.”
“I did not make friends with you when I was 3 because I’m gay!” Kyle protested. He told Stan a story about kissing Butters at a Valentine’s Day party. “But he’s not gay, though,” Kyle clarified. “Cartman made us do it. He said, you guys had better get in the laundry room and make out for seven minutes, or you’ll both prove you’re such fags you’re too afraid to do it. We didn’t really make out, though, just kind of - it was nice, I guess. Cartman’s a retard, though, like it didn’t occur to him maybe one of us would get in the laundry room because I wanted to kiss a boy? Anyway.”
“Yes,” said Stan, suddenly finding this very trivial. “That sounds pretty stupid.”
Stan waited until Kyle's uneasy frown softened into a smile. Then he asked. "Do you want to know what I did with my uncle? Out in the woods that whole time?"
"Hunted, I assume," Kyle said. "Like you said in the letters."
"I had a baby."
Kyle blinked. "What?"
"Yeah, I did," said Stan. "A baby girl."
"Jesus Christ. No you didn't."
"I did."
Stan had to lift up his shirt to prove it, had to show Kyle the scar that ran from hip bone to hip bone.
"That's from an appendectomy, I bet," Kyle figured.
"Dude, no, it's a C-section." The wound was still relatively fresh; the stitches were still in, with bits of dried blood clinging to the corners. "Don't you think if I had an appendectomy I'd have wanted you to know?"
"I'd think if you had a baby you'd want me to know!"
Stan became very quiet. "Of course I wanted you to know. My parents, they didn't want you to know."
"I wanted to know!"
"No you didn't." Stan tugged his shirt back down. "You didn't want to know. It was so stupid up there in those mountains. I hated it."
Kyle recoiled. “How could you even fucking do this to me?”
Stan’s brows shot up. “Yes, this is something I did to you.”
Kyle just cried, “I don’t understand!”
“What don’t you understand? I fucked up, okay, I really fucked up.”
“Who - how-?”
“How, the normal way.” Stan smiled at the memory, because it was embarrassing, and his cheeks lit up with heat and he wanted to crawl away. “Who, well. I don’t know, Kyle.”
“You don’t know who knocked you up?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“Oh, god.” Kyle buried his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, holy shit.”
“It’s okay, it’s over.”
“It’s not over! What am I going to do?”
“What, are you dense?” Stan shook his head. “You don’t need to do anything. It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s over, okay, it’s over.”
“You don’t even care!”
“Yes, of course I care,” said Stan. “But it’s like I care so fucking much there’s so much inside of me I can’t even budge.”
Kyle could not believe what he was hearing. “You had sex with someone, you had a baby - do you have a picture?”
“No. I didn’t think I wanted-”
“One of those cards with baby footprints?”
“No, Kyle, that’s for her parents.”
“Don’t you even feel anything?” Kyle buried his face in one of Stan’s pillows, choking ragged sobs. The rain was crashing on the windows, and Sparky was pawing at the bedroom door. Stan could hear him, but he didn’t want to let him in. He would have preferred to open a window.
“I feel a lot of things,” Stan said softly, reaching out to pull at one of Kyle’s strands of wavy brilliantined hair. “The best thing I could do was get rid of her. How would you feel, knowing you were the accident of a 13-year-old fuck-up boy?”
“You’re not a fuck up,” was Kyle’s muffled reply. “You only fucked up when you gave her away.”
“That was the best thing.”
Kyle raised his head, his eyes puffy and his nose red. “It hurts, Stan.”
“Well, then I hope you at least forgive me now for missing your bar mitzvah.” Stan wiped away Kyle’s tears, wishing he could cry, or find some way, some tiny way, to validate all of this sadness. But Stan knew he felt this was beyond sad, beyond demonstrative emoting. Up to the beginning of seventh grade, he’d been okay - a little weary, maybe, but trying to fight off the feeling that nothing he did mattered. So he did something that had mattered. At the time he felt like he was helping Kevin unravel his confusion. Now Stan was sitting on his bed, watching Kyle cry, the worst person alive, all of his misery ossified during the course of his seclusion.
“I wish you would have come to my bar mitzvah anyway,” Kyle rasped. “I would have liked to have danced with you.”
“Slow danced?”
Kyle nodded.
Stan liked the idea, but, “I couldn’t have danced with you, you know, I was-” Stan made an enveloping roundness with his hands, ghosting around a pregnant form. “I had your scarf all the time, though.”
Kyle rubbed at his eye. “What scarf?”
“You knit me one.” Stan slid off the bed, digging through his closet. It was June now, too warm for scarves, and he had Kyle now, anyway. He carried the yellow thing back to the bed, and laid it across Kyle’s thighs.
“Oh.” Kyle peered at it, cruelly. “I’m over knitting. The work on this is really bad, by the way. Look at all the stitches I dropped.”
“I liked it cause you sent it to me,” Stan confessed.
“I sent you a lot of things, remember?”
“But I wore this all the time. I had this little thing of yours with me all the time.”
Kyle’s eyes rolled back, exasperated. He wailed. “What are you trying to tell me? If you’re trying to tell me something, can’t you just say it?”
“I’m saying it. I’m saying it in my way.”
Stan hopped off the bed again, and walked to his dresser. He had a shoebox there full of nail polish, and uncapped one bottle, a pale yellow. “I steal these from my sister when she’s sick of them. Um.” Stan grasped for one of Kyle’s hands, which uncurled in his, Kyle’s fingers slack. “This is what I was doing the day I got pregnant.”
“Painting your nails?”
“Yeah.” The lacquer spread easily over Kyle’s nail from cuticle to tip. “In ten colors.” Stan tightened the cap on the pastel yellow, and reached for a violent acid green.
“Are you mad?”
“No,” said Stan. “Just gay. Kinda bored. You were at a bar mitzvah lesson, and Kevin came by looking for my sister-”
“Kenny’s brother is your baby daddy?”
“Shhh!” Stan nearly dropped the little bottle of polish. “Yes, but if you say anything to anyone-”
“Dude! Fuck you! I’m not stupid!” Kyle yanked his hand away.
“Well, fine, okay, but I am.” Stan twisted the cap back onto the squat bottle of green and reached for a blue.
“How long does this take to dry?”
“About 10 minutes?” Stan shrugged. “They’re all different. Some are quick-drying.”
“Ugh.” Kyle shoved his hand back in Stan’s periphery. “All right.”
Eight nails later, Kyle admired Stan’s handiwork. “I like how this looks, if it is a bit fruity,” he said. “But you know I can’t go out like this. I think technically I’m in the closet.
“You’re just 13,” said Stan. “I don’t think there is a closet until at least high school. That’s two years away for me - I have to redo most of seventh.”
“That sucks. You won’t be in my classes!”
“I know, I keep telling you, everything is really shitty, everything sucks.”
“Oh, stop saying that!”
“Kyle, look.” Stan sighed. “This is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me. To have to choose between keeping her and helping her, I guess it was easy, because I didn’t want her. But I didn’t want her to go either, all right? I hope you never understand. Ever.”
“Part of me wishes I did! I would have helped you.” Kyle took a moment to consider this. “I actually love babies.”
“I’d like to have a big family one day. Just not, you know, before I finish middle school.”
“Well, uh. Maybe - maybe we can make it happen someday?” Kyle leaned in and pecked Stan on the cheek.
As Kyle held him, Stan smelled the drying toxins on Kyle’s fingers, the noxious acetone. It made him a bit queasy, and he felt the prick of tears in the corners of his eyes.
So, here's the first installment. I don't know how many of these I have total. Two? Three? Whatever, more later. Like, tomorrowish.
Title: but
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Stan/Kyle, incidentally, but other creepy ones, too
Summary: When Stan is 13 he has a horrible teen mom problem and has to go live with his uncle in the woods.
Note: Based on this picture by negniahn. I seriously recommend you take a look at it and give her some props. The picture was drawn from my offhand description of a scenario, and then I wrote this fuller story off the picture.
Warning: Mpreg.
I think I've now posted all the mpreg I've ever written and will ever write.
His parents hadn’t spoken in years - but they were talking now.
“My son isn’t having a baby, Sharon,” Stan’s father shouted over a beer can at the kitchen table. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yes, he is!” his mother shouted back. “I’ve been with him to four doctors! He’s having it whether you like it or not!”
“No son of mine is giving birth!”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Wave a magic wand?”
“I want you to explain to me what the fuck you’re doing letting my son get pregnant! For fuck’s sake!”
“It’s not something I let happen!”
“Then why the fuck is it happening?”
“I don’t know!”
They kept shouting at each other. Stan buried his ears in his wrists on the table. He felt sick again, his head spinning, regretting that he’d ever eaten, wishing he’d never even been born, wishing if they were going to yell they would at least yell at him, and if they were going to yell at him, then that they’d let him go lay down. But, no, it was like he wasn’t even there, an abstract concept.
“Guys,” he tried to say, peering out from the fringe of his hair at them, pointing at each other accusingly. “Dad, you guys-”
“I pay for his clothes!” Stan’s father was screaming. “I pay for his doctors, I pay for his shoes, I pay for his goddamn-”
They were not going to stop. They were not even going to talk to him. Stan wandered from the table, taking his mug of lukewarm tea. He curled into bed on his side, a pillow in his arms and one between his legs. Dozing, he dreamt of fourth grade, of how tight his lungs felt the first time he smoked a cigarette, and of how powerless he was to stop it.
Stan woke to his mother sitting on his bed, stroking his hand.
“I don’t mean to wake you,” she said, quietly.
“I’m okay.” He rubbed his eyes, wiped his mouth. “Is Dad done?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s not here.”
“Oh, okay.” Stan’s father hadn’t said a word to him the whole time he’d been sitting there, throughout the whole argument.
“Sweetie-”
“Yeah?” Stan wondered if he should sit up. He tried, and it made him realize he had a dull headache. He decided she could look down at him, and he was content to look up at her.
His mother’s lips were pressed together, her eyes dark and watery. “You have to go away for a while, honey, okay?”
Stan’s fingers clenched. She grasped them in hers. “Where am I going?
“You’re going to go live with your Uncle Jimbo for a while. After the new year, sweetie. In January.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
“Well, I think-” She swallowed. “I think you’re going to be okay, honey, but you can’t go to school with a - you can’t go to school like this. You can finish this term and then you’re going to take the rest of the year off and spend it with your uncle, okay? You can do some work from there, I’m sure.”
Stan had questions. Why Jimbo? Why January? Why couldn’t he just stay where he was? But he knew he was too weary for any but the most important answer. “What’s gonna happen to my - to the baby?”
For a moment, his mother shut her eyes, didn’t say anything. Then she opened them. “We’re going to find someone to take care of her, okay?”
So it was a her. Stan knew it, somehow, but they hadn’t told him. “Who?”
“Someone good, honey. Someone who wants to be a parent.”
It made Stan want to cry. He didn’t want to be a parent, not at all. It was the furthest thing from what he wanted. But he didn’t want to give her up, not at all. What kind of a person did that? He didn’t think he was that kind of a person. But he was young, a 13-year-old boy. He was mid-way through seventh grade, a decent student, adept at soccer, slowly learning to play the guitar. If he could hold a hollow-bodied guitar, why not an infant?
“I get to meet her, though, right?”
“If you want,” his mother said.
“I want that.” He nodded.
She kissed him on the forehead as she left his room, shutting off the light as she went. His sister would be home soon from her date with Kevin, feeling pretty and special. Stan remembered what that was like, feeling pretty and special. Or not so much pretty, but worth someone’s attention. As he tried to fall back asleep, clutching as his belly, he bit his lip to keep himself from crying. Boys didn’t do that.
~
The only person Stan found it hard to say goodbye to was Kyle. “Where are you going?” he kept asking, seeming frantic. “Why are you leaving me?”
It was an aggressive January day, the sidewalks thawing under the salt laid down by the country government after a heavy storm. The sky had no color in it, not even a bit of blue. Clouds swathed everything, and Stan was sure that in one of those dirty puddles of salt slick and ice melt, he could make out a rainbow. But when he moved closer, it disappeared.
“I’m going to stay with my uncle,” Stan repeated. He was kicking at the puddle. “I’m - I need a vacation.”
“From what?”
“Life, I guess.”
“You never said anything was wrong! You never asked me for help!”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“You can’t just - just leave me here to fend for myself with these people!” Kyle’s these people was everyone, the whole town. “Like something’s wrong and you’re just giving up!”
“You’ll be all right.” Stan offered a wan smile. “I’ll be okay.”
Kyle wasn’t having it. “Why do you have to leave me here? Why are you doing this to me?” It sounded so selfish when Kyle said it, his voice so strained and wet. But Stan knew Kyle was right, that it was absolutely gutting him, the idea of facing each school day like a gaping grave, with no one to hold him back. The one thing Stan had always known he could do to be better than himself was to stand back with Kyle and watch their world convulse. Now they’d both have to do it alone, and it was all Stan’s fault.
“I suck, dude.” Stan kicked at the puddle, wishing it away, but careful not to splash onto Kyle’s jeans. “There’s nothing more to it.”
They had a final sleepover, at Stan’s. Kyle didn’t notice the plastic punch bowl next to Stan’s bed for late-night vomiting. Stan later figured that it was pretty big, so Kyle probably just politely declined to mention it.
“Why do you have to go?” Kyle asked, with the lights down and the covers pulled up to their waists. “I don’t have anything here, you know, I’m going to be stuck spending my time alone. Or, worse, with fat ass.”
“You’re better off alone.”
“I know, right?”
“I’m sorry, dude, I’m really sorry.” Stan wanted to bring Kyle’s hands to his skin and tell him the truth and ask him if he felt her. But of course he wouldn’t, Stan knew, it was very premature and she was imperceptible. Stan wanted to take Kyle’s hands in his and kiss him, maybe, not deeply but just the same, have their lips touch for a while. It wasn’t sexual, exactly, but now that Stan had had sex, he was conscious of it all the time. It hadn’t even been good, but he wanted it with Kyle. They could laugh together about it, maybe: This is the worst part, this is the best part, this is the part where you shake me by the shoulders and yell my sister’s name and tears come to your eyes and they fall onto my face and I ask if you’re crying and you say ‘no’ while you keep crying. Except Stan knew that Kyle wouldn’t say ‘Shelly,’ he would say Stan’s name, and he wouldn’t want to be on the top like that, he’d rather lie down. All this good information Stan was hiding - what a waste. He wanted it to be Kyle’s baby inside of him, or maybe the other way around, because then they’d share the counting down to such a profound moment of loss.
“Can I visit you?” Kyle asked.
Stan blinked. He only wished. “I don’t know, it’s not up to me.”
“Can we talk on the phone?”
“What?” This idea cheered Stan, and least a bit. “Well, yeah, dude, of course. And I’ll write you letters and mail them from the box on the county route that goes by the general store.”
“Can I get your address?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And can you come back for my bar mitzvah?”
“When is it?”
“No sooner than my birthday.”
Stan considered how preposterous that would be, waddling into Kyle’s party and trying to hug him. “I don’t know. It’s not up to me. Probably not.”
“This is absurd! Why do you have to go to somewhere I can’t be?”
“It’s like going to college, maybe,” Stan said, repeating something him mother had told him. “We’ll do that one day and won’t see each other for a bit.”
“I’m going to be abandoned,” Kyle wailed, with his hands over his eyes. “Like a widow.”
Stan wanted to laugh, but he just couldn’t. Kyle was so good at poking fun at himself, but didn’t like having it pointed out. “There’s other types of loss,” Stan said. “Let’s hope we never find out about another one.”
~
Uncle Jimbo lived with an army buddy of his even further up into the Rockies. Stan watched the flat basin of South Park recede behind him on the drive, wondering when he’d see it again. In the backseat lay his dog, a six-year-old mutt named Sparky. Sparky panted and cried for most of the ride, hating to be cooped up like this, pawing at the back of Stan’s seat. Stan could only turn around and say, “I know, boy, I know,” like that was any comfort. His mother had that look of consternation on her face that she got when Stan’s father was being difficult. They didn’t talk much, and Stan was silently thankful that the snow was not falling today. Everything was clear and still and at a standstill.
Jimbo and Ned were happy to see him, at least. Or Jimbo was, rather; Ned was typically shirking behind his electrolarynx. “Yeah, this is how they did it in my day,” he announced, rubbing at Stan’s hair, like a dog. “Your girl gets in trouble, you handle it. None of this TV stuff, letting everyone know about it.”
“Right,” Ned agreed.
Again, Stan wanted to cry, and he had to sit on his bed with his dog at his ankles, pulling at his hair, to keep from bursting into tears. When his mother was leaving, she hugged him and said, “It’s okay if you’re down, Stanley. When I was pregnant with you it was bad, like waterworks. Your body’s changing and sometimes it’s better to let it happen.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Boys don’t cry.”
“Of course they do.”
“No, we don’t.”
She straightened out the collar of his T-shirt. “I’ll be back this weekend, honey, okay? Maybe I’ll bring your sister with me.” Stan sincerely hoped she wouldn’t.
The first package Stan received arrived before he’d even written Kyle his first letter. It was a yellow scarf, with a handwritten note in Kyle's fussy scrawl of D'Nealian:
I really wish you hadn't left me, it started, without even a hello or a Dear Stan.
I'm thinking about you up in the woods for a while, with one of your uncle's old hunting caps on your head and a dead buck dripping blood from its slashed neck. I've been hunting, you remember, it's gruesome and can be very boring.
I think you’re supposed to wear orange gear for safety, like the color of that coat I used to wear when I was a kid. But when I went looking for orange yarn in the house we didn’t have any, and when I asked my dad to take me to Michael’s the only oranges they had were so pastelish and I really thought you wouldn’t like that and either way it’s besides the point. So here, this scarf is yellow. It’s a bit scratchy but I think it’ll do, I think of you as very rough anyway.
I think I’m getting okay at this knitting, but of course I did drop some stitches so I’m sorry, I’ll send something better maybe after some more attempts.
I’m now getting yelled at that it’s time to get to dinner. It’s sweet and sour meatballs and butter noodles, and the prospect of eating this is gross but you know I don’t have a choice. Please write back.
Love,
Kyle
The scarf was starchy to the touch, as Kyle had said it would be, stiff in Stan’s hands and he felt the nubby stitches, and the gaping mouths of loose yarn where Kyle had dropped an off-loop. It did sort of smell like Kyle, the antiseptic mouthwash he used and the Glade plug-ins his mother forced into every outlet, always Hawaiian Breeze scent; “something very Long Island about the whole thing,” Kyle used to say, but Stan knew this was something Kyle’s dad said, padding around his own house like he didn’t really belong there, or reading the newspaper while he only pretended to be aware of what Kyle’s mother was bitching about. Stan wrapped this scarf around his neck and curled up in bed with it, wishing he were wish Kyle, back in Kyle’s cozy shitty split-level house with a wide-open den and peeling paint on the walls. Stan felt like such a stranger in his own home, his parents so unestablished, that he barely even missed it.
Stan did write back immediately, but not at great length or in great detail about specifics. I don’t want to be here, he confessed. I’d like to tell you, dude, I would, but this isn’t what I want and you have to just believe I would bring you with me if I could, but there’s not a lot I can do and things are mad right now, just mad. Mad! I wish I could say I was angry at the circumstances but I just don’t have the wherewithal to have things as I’d like them to be. If I’m being vague I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. So so sorry about everything. Please tell me about my sister if you see her, if she’s happy and if she talks to you………no, nevermind, of course she won’t. Also please say hello to Kenny/Butters (def. not youknowwho, fuck him) and ask Kenny if his brother is okay, and generally about him (Kevin, not Kenny) and my sister. I’m very interested in how that plays out. But you’re the only one I miss, really. I could send you something but all we have here to send you is jerky.
It was true that Jimbo’s larders were groaning with jerky, and venison products of all kinds, sausages hanging from the rafters, air drying into hard fingers of salty fat and gristle to gnaw on. The smell of them made Stan uneasy, and the first time his uncle served him a bowl of stew thick with chunks of a buck Ned had shot the morning before, he refused to eat it.
“Jeez, Stanley, you have to eat,” his uncle said, taking it like a personal affront.
“I can’t eat this,” Stan protested. “I’ll vomit.”
"Well, what do you want to eat?"
"Normal things!"
"What's normal?" Ned asked.
"I don’t know! Crackers and - something like grilled cheese.” Stan tried to think of whether there was anything he had an appetite for. “Oh, god, I’m sorry.” He bolted from the table, knowing he couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. He went out the backdoor and fell to his hands and knees by Ned’s old galoshes, vomiting into the mud and pine needles. He returned to the table wiping his mouth and tightening the scarf at his throat. He was grateful he hadn’t puked on it.
“What are we gonna do with you?” Jimbo asked. He and Ned were eating their stew happily, or at least convincingly.
“There’s nothing you can do with me,” Stan said, feeling like if this was going to be his life, he’d prefer to be dead.
Jimbo did go out for provisions, bringing Stan a bushel of old, soft apples and loaves of white bread. Stan sat in bed eating slices of mushy sandwich bread happily, unaware how hungry he’d been.
“If you’re gonna be up here,” Stan’s uncle said carefully while he ate, “you’re gonna have to get used to some things. We kill a lot of our food. I’m not telling you to kill anything, Stanley, but you have to get used to eating things maybe you saw be killed.”
“It’s not the fact you killed it,” Stan said, although it was that, too. “I don’t feel well anymore.”
“Well, you’re a good kid.” Jimbo patted him indulgently on the head, with a smile that said he didn’t think this at all. “I hope you feel better soon. Randy seems to think I can set you right.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Jimbo confessed. “Do find it sort of ironic, though.”
“Why’s that?” Stan asked, a mouthful of Wonderbread in his mouth.
“Something kinda funny about a coupla single guys living out alone in the wood for 30, 35 years.”
Stan swallowed. “Why’s that funny?”
Jimbo smiled at him again. “You’re a good kid, Stanley,” he repeated. “Good boy. My little nephew.” Then he got up and left.
That night, Stan slept with his dog at his side and Kyle’s scarf in his arms, dreaming for the first and the last time of Kevin, of how he’d said Shelly. It was rare that Stan would dream of anything, and he woke cold with his quilt kicked to the floor, Sparky licking his face.
~
Kyle sent a dutiful Valentine, a matching pair of gloves to pair with Stan’s yellow scarf. I did not have a Valentine this year, he wrote, his letters pressed so hard into the paper that Stan could feel them even when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes I imagine I won’t ever. Kenny likes to brag that he’s got four girls all lined up, that he intends to get chocolate from all of them. I asked him what he’s getting them, and he said ‘nothing’ and then just sort of laughed at me like it was stupid to ask. Was it stupid to ask? When I have these conversations I spend more time imagining what you would say if you were here than I do actually talking. Incidentally, Kenny says your sister is over all the time now, that she and Kevin are behind closed doors a lot, that is all I know. Is that what you wanted to know? Anyway, I’m sure you have no Valentine up there and I’m pathetic as well so I’m sending you some gloves and some chocolate. My father asked me why I didn’t ask some girl over to watch cartoons and play videogames. That’s something I only do with you, though, plus, it’s a Wednesday and I have homework. Where does he get these ideas? Does that seem like something I would do? You don’t have to answer that.
Love,
Kyle
Stan decided if ever there was a time to send Kyle some venison jerky, it was now. Uncle Jimbo helped Stan vacuum seal a bouquet of six salami sticks and a handful of jerky, Cajun-spiced with crystallized flecks of salt on the severed tendons. After these things were sealed they no longer made Stan retch, and he wrapped them in old newspapers (Reagan reelected; Clarence Thomas confirmed) and sent his package off at the postal counter in the general store.
In the evenings, Stan read, and Sparky lay at his feet with a deer’s hoof. Jimbo liked to toss him these, and Stan liked to think that if nothing else, he was finally giving his mountain hound a real life, now that Sparky could savage hares in the yard and slobber over the pine needles that crunched under their feet when they went out hunting. Stan didn’t hunt, just stood there slack-jawed, gaping at Colorado and the sheet height of the place - the tips of the conifers invisibly far, the bucks’ antlers towering over the lowest branches, often snapping them.
Ned and Jimbo brought back rabbit sometimes, and more than once they went fishing. Stan felt so ill in the rocking boat that he needed them to row him to shore. Where he sat and moaned with his dog’s head in his lap, growling to soothe Stan’s ills, as if they were a predator his beast of a dog could scare off by baring his fangs.
So far Stan’s only symptom had been nausea, but during the long March treks into the forest he began to feel tight in his clothes and off-balance while he walked. His mother came twice a month, and she brought him a duffel of big sweaters, saying, “Some of these your father had around the house.” It had never occurred to Stan that his father had anything around the house for him, and his father had not come to see him once. “He asks about you,” his mother said, offering this as some kind of comfort. Stan didn’t wonder why his father never came around, and Stan didn’t want him to come, anyway.
“Tell him I’m all right,” was Stan’s reply. “I’m going to be all right.”
Stan didn’t feel as if he were going to be all right, though. Late one night when Stan was wrapping vacuum-sealed salamis in newsprint to ship to Kenny for his birthday, he felt it - he felt her. He realized, suddenly, that maybe this was not even the first time, that things he’d written off to gas or maybe nerves might have been her, pawing at his insides, trying test the boundaries of the only little place she’d ever known. It scared Stan to death, and he dropped the scissors and raced to his room, where Sparky was snoring, taking up the whole bed. Stan dove on, not caring if Sparky barked at him and woke up his uncle and Ned and if Sparky got angry and slunk off to go sleep in the kitchen by the radiator, Stan wouldn’t care. But when Sparky snorted and got up to nestle in with Stan and their bodies fit together on the pallid mattress, Stan was glad his dog was there, because he didn’t want to be alone with her, not for a moment. All that night Stan failed to sleep, worrying his yellow scarf in his hands, afraid of imagining the answers to the questions that his brain was devising: What did she look like? How big was she now? Did she suck her baby thumbs like Stan had, or was she resilient like a McCormick? Stan wondered, for the first time, if there was any chance she might look like Kenny. Stan didn’t know what Kenny had looked like as a baby; in all the crooked pictures on the McCormick family’s walls, he was swaddled within an inch of his life, only his little point of a nose peeking out. Stan lay there until the gray light of the mountain dawn danced across the brass doorknob and the steel hooks on the walls where Stan hung his oversize sweaters. When he felt movement he told himself it was Sparky’s breathing, Sparky fussing. Stan choked his scarf so tightly his knuckle chafed. When Jimbo came to get him up, and Stan peered back with miserable old eyes, his uncle said, “All right, Stanley, you can stay in bed today. But you’re hunting tomorrow, whether you like it or not.”
Stan did not like it. He hated hunting. Jimbo had given up on getting Stan to eat a “man’s lunch” of stew in a thermos and hard bread and now let him take slices of chalky apples, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and potato chips. Stan had no cravings, only aversions. His aversion to hunting was massive. Jimbo’s idea of leniency or compassion was letting Stan hang back if he agreed to take snapshots of the rest of the party with their kills. “Do you like taking pictures? Maybe this could be a thing for you, photography,” he suggested. When Stan didn’t answer, Jimbo repeated, “Do you like taking pictures, Stanley?”
In a hoarse voice, Stan said, “I don’t like anything anymore.” He was surprised at how it cracked. He was six months pregnant, his pants cinched below his belly underneath a shapeless sweater, and finally his voice was beginning to crack. He pulled at the scarf around his neck.
But that wasn’t even an honest answer, because there were two things he loved still: his dog, and Kyle’s letters. Maybe his mother, for neither judging him nor forcing him to confront this situation in any significant way. Sparky certainly loved Stan now more than he ever had, overjoyed to ferret out the little creatures of the forest, to run and run until Stan called him back, unleashed and out of the suburbs. More that once he returned to Stan with blood on his muzzle, flesh hanging from his teeth, panting with a big, thankful smile, wagging his affection.
Kyle kept writing: Kenny says thank you for the jerky. I told him to write you, but he said letter-writing’s for fags. I punched him in the mouth, by the way, and when Cartman laughed I punched him, too. This year sucks, dude, it utterly sucks. Speaking of which, my mother’s told me now that since I’m nearing my “adulthood” (only symbolically, not in any way that would actually matter or be fun) it’s time I stop saying “dude” and start taking like an adult. I think this is such bullshit and what’s more, totally absurd, but the absurdity of it’s not even amusing because you’re not here to laugh at it with me. I’m so anxious, Stan, about my bar mitzvah and about other things. You don’t even know. I wish I could tell you, but I guess that’s fair unless you tell me what you’re doing there every day.
It went on like that, and then ended:
Love,
Kyle
~
Stan replied:
Well, dude.
I hunt all day. I hate this. My uncle drags me up at 6 or earlier, makes me pack a “sissy” lunch, and we get in the truck and drive who knows how many miles, over dirt roads, until we are literally in the middle of fucking nowhere. Sometimes a film crew follows us, some channel we don’t watch because there’s no TV in this fucking cabin, and they get shots of my uncle talking about how brutally he’s going to massacre some deer. I sit on a stump or the ground and let Sparky run off and if I wasn’t too groggy in the mornings I have brought a book. The selections in this place are not great but for some reason Ned’s a fan of Norman Mailer?
This prompted Kyle to send a box of books, Pynchon and some very nerdy Star Wars novels he’d flipped through so many times that the corners were frayed and Stan was sure he could make out the greasy grime of Kyle’s fingers in the margins, holding these fat books under the covers at night.
It’s kind of interesting to me, said the note in the box, that we are both so lonesome and miserable.
Stan forced himself to read, because if he did not then he would be left with nothing but dwelling, and he decided that he’d rather occupy himself with published fan fic baloney bullshit than torture himself again and again. As he read he collapsed his weight onto Sparky, or a pile of sweaters, or both, fondly wishing he could breathe on his back or balance on his stomach. When she stirred he slammed Gravity’s Rainbow into his stomach until she stopped, drowning it out, bruising himself in the process. Stan didn’t care anymore. What were some bruises when he was going to be slit open? He learned this on a recent visit to an obstetrician at a hospital in Breckenridge. There was no natural way for her to come out, so they were going to have to cut. Somehow Stan had known this, but he’d preferred to leave it mostly unrealized. Now he knew, though.
In anticipation of Kyle’s bar mitzvah, Stan began to mope. He’d gotten his invitation in the mail, with a squat little RSVP card and pre-stamped envelope, and it had broken Stan’s heart to have to write, Dear Kyle, Mr. and Mrs. Broflovski, and Ike,
Unfortunately I am not able to attend the bar mitzvah the weekend after Kyle’s birthday. Please understand that there are circumstances beyond my control preventing me from going. I am sure it will be a lovely party and I hope I will be able to see pictures later.
Please accept my genuine regrets,
Stanley
Stan consoled himself with thinking he might make up for this injustice by sending Kyle a nice gift, but he had nothing to send and, worse, Kyle had written an unusually curt letter in reply: Well, you won’t be there, of course you won’t be there. I don’t know why I thought you’d try to be there. I don’t know what you’re fucking doing with your goddamn uncle up there but I guess I thought maybe you’d understand how much this means to me and how much this means to my family. To stand up there and look up and see everyone I care about and not see you - of course I should have figured you wouldn’t care how I would feel.
I don’t even know what to do about you anymore.
A feeling so hollow crept over Stan that he did not even notice how hard she was kicking, how his belly kept him from sitting comfortably at the kitchen table while he wrote:
Kyle,
You are my best friend. I love you so unspeakably much that you could turn your back on me and I would just sit and wait forever for you to turn around again. I do not think you understand. I can’t come to your bar mitzvah. [Stan had pressed hard into the paper, letting the ink bleed through to the newspaper underneath.] It is not personal. It is not in my control. You don’t understand. You. Don’t. Understand. I don’t expect you to understand. There are things going on, bad things, things I can’t help. I already feel shitty about not being able to go. You can do the whole thing for me again when I come back. I get why you’re angry. I get why you’re disappointed. But you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. I have never given up on you, not once in my life. I am so sorry this is the one time I cannot be there, the one time. I would like to think that as my best friend who I love more than life itself you would, despite your disappointment, ask yourself if you think it’s fair to accuse me of not caring, or imply that I would rather be in the fucking woods in this fucking cabin with my fucking uncle and his fucking - I don’t even know, what the fuck does Ned even do here? I have been through so much, Kyle, okay, everything is shit right now, all right, and the one thing that would make it okay would be if you for just once tried to show me a little compassion without becoming exasperated! That’s what you can do about me, if you like. You can grow the fuck up. Meanwhile I’ll get up at 6 a.m. and spend my day freezing in the woods trying not to freak out that the one tenuous thing I had in my life, the idea of coming home and seeing you soon, might go to shit because of something I can’t help.
Stan was so bereft, he didn’t even sign the letter. Mere days later, he received his answer:
Dear Stan,
I am under a lot of pressure right now. I am going through things too. This bar mitzvah thing is not easy. I have to get up in front of 1000 people, all of my friends and all the kids from school and the rest of the congregation of every Jew in suburban Denver and my family, to sing, well, chant some stuff in a foreign language that means nothing to me. They are coming from all over to see this, to see me, and not to be too Tweek about it but it’s a lot of pressure. My mother’s high-strung, my brother is acting bratty because he’s used to getting all her attention, and my dad … ugh, forget it. Things are tough for me, too. I’m not that good at it. Things bother me. I’m alone and useless. I have things that I can’t help and no one to talk to and it’s sad but when the only person I can even interact with (by shouting at) is youknowwho then things are down, dude, it sucks and you’re just not here. You’re not here so what do I do with myself? You could tell me, you know, you could talk to me and try to get over it. But, okay, I have to go study Jew shit. Later.
Love,
Kyle
It wasn’t an apology, but Kyle didn’t do contrition. Stan fell asleep with the letter pressed to his chest, his scarf between his legs, Sparky at his back, and a spare pillow folded under his belly.
~
One morning, Stan awoke to wetness between his legs, soaking the mattress, the sheets, and his boxers. For just a moment he was panicked enough to think he’d actually wet the bed, and then he realized, this had been his water breaking. The thought made him nauseated, but he knocked on his uncle’s door anyway.
Jimbo came to the door groggy, in a robe and his hunting cap. Stan wondered if he slept in it, but only until a wave of pain distracted him, and he slouched against the wall.
“What’s wrong?” his uncle asked.
“I think I’m.” Stan bit his lip. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”
“Why, you having that kid?”
“I think so, yeah. Sorry, I have to go sit down.” Stan shuffled to the nearest chair, at the kitchen table. “The bed’s a mess. I’m really sorry.”
Jimbo sat down with him. “It’s okay. Is there anything I should do?”
“Call my mom,” Stan said. “That’s all I want. Call my mom.”
Stan lay on the couch until she got there, Sparky on the floor next to him, trying to paw at Stan’s belly when he curled into the contractions, moaning. They were brief, and far apart, and not generally that painful, but painful enough to make him clench his eyes through them.
Jimbo was polite enough to leave him alone, to keep Ned away, to avoid offering him any jerky or suggesting some bullshit therapy. Just once, he asked, “You okay, son? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, I’m cool.” Stan wished he had some TV to watch, but there was nothing to be done about that.
Stan’s mother arrived by the mid-afternoon, when the contractions were just beginning to intensify to the point where Stan had to stop himself from baying through them. They were close enough together now that he was less relieved by the respite. “How much worse is this going to get?” he asked her, trying to sit up. He’d barely moved all day.
“Well, I guess it depends how soon they want to perform the C-section,” she said. “Come on, Stanley, do you have a bag packed?”
He shook his head.
“Well, let’s throw in some undies and get going, then.”
~
Stan hated hospitals, hated them, hated them. They made him feel queasy, reminded him of all the crises of elementary school. He asked for general anesthesia, but they wouldn’t let him have it. They would, however, let his mother sit in with him during the procedure. Stan was not sure how long it lasted, but it seemed like forever, although he couldn’t see anything. Too drowsy to speak, he silently wished that this would be the absolute worst thing that would ever happen to him. He imaged mothers who wanted their children had all the hope and relief in the world to get them through this. Stan didn’t think he had anything.
They did let him hold the baby, and asked him to fill out the birth certificate. He clutched her while he scribbled in his answers. She was small, much smaller than Sparky had been as a puppy when Stan first got him, but she felt heavy, and he worried he’d lose his grip.
“I can take her, if that’s more comfortable,” his mother kept offering.
“That’s okay.” Stan narrowed his eyes at her in warning. He knew if he let his mother take her away, he’d never get her back. She wailed in his arms, her little fingers clutching at his T-shirt, her face pressed as closely to the warmth of his body and he could get her.
“I can help with the answers maybe, Stanley-”
Stan scoffed. “I’m not putting Kevin’s name on the birth certificate. I’m not stupid.”
He held her all day, fingers in her sparse, dark hair, lying on his side with his lips on her head. When she cried he gave her a finger to suck, and when the nurses came to feed or change her, he waited for her to be returned to his bed, so they could continue to shudder and marvel at each other.
That afternoon a woman came to see Stan; she had a brutal face and a real mess of hair, but her voice was kind and authoritative, not in a forceful way but a reassuring way. “Hello, Stanley,” she said, sitting next to his bed. “I’m a social worker and I represent the state of Colorado.”
He’s known this was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m all right. How are you?”
“Could be better,” Stan said. “But - but I’m okay. Considering.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear.” She scooted closer. “Is this your daughter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “This is Rainbow.”
“Her name is Rainbow?”
“Yes, Rainbow Marsh.” Stan shook his head. “Sorry, I know that’s a dumb name. I figured anyone who wants her will change it-”
“Oh, don’t think like that.” She smiled at him so gratefully when she held her arms out for the baby. “She’ll always be your Rainbow. You might see her again sometime.”
“I hope I don’t,” Stan said. “I don’t want her to know, okay, I don’t.”
“Okay, honey. She doesn’t have to know anything you don’t want her to know.”
The forms were handled and hands were shook, and the social worker left with Rainbow, who was sleeping or at least quiet, leaving Stan to privately wallow. When his mother returned she found him on his side, yellow scarf in his arms, eyes wide open.
“Stanley, honey,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“We can talk, if you like.”
“I’m okay.”
“You know it might not be too late-”
“This is how it is.” He buried his head in his scarf. “When do I have to leave?”
“Well, you had surgery, Stanley, so not for at least another day or so-”
“Okay. I just think I’d like to be alone for a while, Mom, if that’s all right.”
She recoiled at how flat his voice sounded. But she said, “okay” and left him there, wishing he might call her in to talk. He never did, though.
~
It turned out that Kyle had a secret now, too. “While you were gone I learned something,” he said. “I figured out that I’m gay.”
They were sitting in Stan’s room, with the lights off, although it was a rainy and dark June day, the shutters on Stan’s windows clattering. They’d gotten together the night before, for dinner at Kyle’s house. Stan had tried to smile into his knishes, to laugh when Ike purposely put mushy peas in his nose. Kyle laughed, and then his mother said, “Oh, Ike, bubeleh, stop that,” and Ike threw a tiny temper-tantrum for show. Kyle’s brother was 7, kind of a showboat, and Stan knew it was stupid to feel such an immense sense of loss at the dinner table, all because this awkward little Canadian adoptee was so incredibly wanted. After dinner, Kyle had said he needed to talk, but Stan had just wanted go home. Kyle was shifting his weight around, eyes wide, licking his lips.
“I just want to go home,” Although Stan felt more at home with Kyle than he did in his house, Kyle believed him. “I’m kind of tired, dude, all right?”
“Sure.” Kyle sounded hurt when he said it, but now it was a sullen afternoon, and Stan looked at Kyle with an emotion he couldn’t identify - maybe pity, or maybe empathy. “Okay, dude.”
Kyle’s eyebrows arched. “All you have to say is ‘okay?’ ” he gasped.
“Well, what do you want me to say, dude? Not okay?”
“You’re not even shocked!”
“I knew.”
“Bullshit, no you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m not that easy, Stan Marsh! I’m not that obvious.”
Stan rolled his eyes. “To me, you are.”
Kyle gaped at him for a moment before his face fell. “Oh.”
“Yes, well. Oh.”
“How long have you know?”
“About me?” Stan asked. “Or about you?”
“Both of us?” Kyle wrung his hands. “Jesus Christ, I’m so stupid.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve both known for a while,” Stan said. “Like, it made us friends to begin with.”
“I did not make friends with you when I was 3 because I’m gay!” Kyle protested. He told Stan a story about kissing Butters at a Valentine’s Day party. “But he’s not gay, though,” Kyle clarified. “Cartman made us do it. He said, you guys had better get in the laundry room and make out for seven minutes, or you’ll both prove you’re such fags you’re too afraid to do it. We didn’t really make out, though, just kind of - it was nice, I guess. Cartman’s a retard, though, like it didn’t occur to him maybe one of us would get in the laundry room because I wanted to kiss a boy? Anyway.”
“Yes,” said Stan, suddenly finding this very trivial. “That sounds pretty stupid.”
Stan waited until Kyle's uneasy frown softened into a smile. Then he asked. "Do you want to know what I did with my uncle? Out in the woods that whole time?"
"Hunted, I assume," Kyle said. "Like you said in the letters."
"I had a baby."
Kyle blinked. "What?"
"Yeah, I did," said Stan. "A baby girl."
"Jesus Christ. No you didn't."
"I did."
Stan had to lift up his shirt to prove it, had to show Kyle the scar that ran from hip bone to hip bone.
"That's from an appendectomy, I bet," Kyle figured.
"Dude, no, it's a C-section." The wound was still relatively fresh; the stitches were still in, with bits of dried blood clinging to the corners. "Don't you think if I had an appendectomy I'd have wanted you to know?"
"I'd think if you had a baby you'd want me to know!"
Stan became very quiet. "Of course I wanted you to know. My parents, they didn't want you to know."
"I wanted to know!"
"No you didn't." Stan tugged his shirt back down. "You didn't want to know. It was so stupid up there in those mountains. I hated it."
Kyle recoiled. “How could you even fucking do this to me?”
Stan’s brows shot up. “Yes, this is something I did to you.”
Kyle just cried, “I don’t understand!”
“What don’t you understand? I fucked up, okay, I really fucked up.”
“Who - how-?”
“How, the normal way.” Stan smiled at the memory, because it was embarrassing, and his cheeks lit up with heat and he wanted to crawl away. “Who, well. I don’t know, Kyle.”
“You don’t know who knocked you up?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“Oh, god.” Kyle buried his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, holy shit.”
“It’s okay, it’s over.”
“It’s not over! What am I going to do?”
“What, are you dense?” Stan shook his head. “You don’t need to do anything. It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s over, okay, it’s over.”
“You don’t even care!”
“Yes, of course I care,” said Stan. “But it’s like I care so fucking much there’s so much inside of me I can’t even budge.”
Kyle could not believe what he was hearing. “You had sex with someone, you had a baby - do you have a picture?”
“No. I didn’t think I wanted-”
“One of those cards with baby footprints?”
“No, Kyle, that’s for her parents.”
“Don’t you even feel anything?” Kyle buried his face in one of Stan’s pillows, choking ragged sobs. The rain was crashing on the windows, and Sparky was pawing at the bedroom door. Stan could hear him, but he didn’t want to let him in. He would have preferred to open a window.
“I feel a lot of things,” Stan said softly, reaching out to pull at one of Kyle’s strands of wavy brilliantined hair. “The best thing I could do was get rid of her. How would you feel, knowing you were the accident of a 13-year-old fuck-up boy?”
“You’re not a fuck up,” was Kyle’s muffled reply. “You only fucked up when you gave her away.”
“That was the best thing.”
Kyle raised his head, his eyes puffy and his nose red. “It hurts, Stan.”
“Well, then I hope you at least forgive me now for missing your bar mitzvah.” Stan wiped away Kyle’s tears, wishing he could cry, or find some way, some tiny way, to validate all of this sadness. But Stan knew he felt this was beyond sad, beyond demonstrative emoting. Up to the beginning of seventh grade, he’d been okay - a little weary, maybe, but trying to fight off the feeling that nothing he did mattered. So he did something that had mattered. At the time he felt like he was helping Kevin unravel his confusion. Now Stan was sitting on his bed, watching Kyle cry, the worst person alive, all of his misery ossified during the course of his seclusion.
“I wish you would have come to my bar mitzvah anyway,” Kyle rasped. “I would have liked to have danced with you.”
“Slow danced?”
Kyle nodded.
Stan liked the idea, but, “I couldn’t have danced with you, you know, I was-” Stan made an enveloping roundness with his hands, ghosting around a pregnant form. “I had your scarf all the time, though.”
Kyle rubbed at his eye. “What scarf?”
“You knit me one.” Stan slid off the bed, digging through his closet. It was June now, too warm for scarves, and he had Kyle now, anyway. He carried the yellow thing back to the bed, and laid it across Kyle’s thighs.
“Oh.” Kyle peered at it, cruelly. “I’m over knitting. The work on this is really bad, by the way. Look at all the stitches I dropped.”
“I liked it cause you sent it to me,” Stan confessed.
“I sent you a lot of things, remember?”
“But I wore this all the time. I had this little thing of yours with me all the time.”
Kyle’s eyes rolled back, exasperated. He wailed. “What are you trying to tell me? If you’re trying to tell me something, can’t you just say it?”
“I’m saying it. I’m saying it in my way.”
Stan hopped off the bed again, and walked to his dresser. He had a shoebox there full of nail polish, and uncapped one bottle, a pale yellow. “I steal these from my sister when she’s sick of them. Um.” Stan grasped for one of Kyle’s hands, which uncurled in his, Kyle’s fingers slack. “This is what I was doing the day I got pregnant.”
“Painting your nails?”
“Yeah.” The lacquer spread easily over Kyle’s nail from cuticle to tip. “In ten colors.” Stan tightened the cap on the pastel yellow, and reached for a violent acid green.
“Are you mad?”
“No,” said Stan. “Just gay. Kinda bored. You were at a bar mitzvah lesson, and Kevin came by looking for my sister-”
“Kenny’s brother is your baby daddy?”
“Shhh!” Stan nearly dropped the little bottle of polish. “Yes, but if you say anything to anyone-”
“Dude! Fuck you! I’m not stupid!” Kyle yanked his hand away.
“Well, fine, okay, but I am.” Stan twisted the cap back onto the squat bottle of green and reached for a blue.
“How long does this take to dry?”
“About 10 minutes?” Stan shrugged. “They’re all different. Some are quick-drying.”
“Ugh.” Kyle shoved his hand back in Stan’s periphery. “All right.”
Eight nails later, Kyle admired Stan’s handiwork. “I like how this looks, if it is a bit fruity,” he said. “But you know I can’t go out like this. I think technically I’m in the closet.
“You’re just 13,” said Stan. “I don’t think there is a closet until at least high school. That’s two years away for me - I have to redo most of seventh.”
“That sucks. You won’t be in my classes!”
“I know, I keep telling you, everything is really shitty, everything sucks.”
“Oh, stop saying that!”
“Kyle, look.” Stan sighed. “This is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me. To have to choose between keeping her and helping her, I guess it was easy, because I didn’t want her. But I didn’t want her to go either, all right? I hope you never understand. Ever.”
“Part of me wishes I did! I would have helped you.” Kyle took a moment to consider this. “I actually love babies.”
“I’d like to have a big family one day. Just not, you know, before I finish middle school.”
“Well, uh. Maybe - maybe we can make it happen someday?” Kyle leaned in and pecked Stan on the cheek.
As Kyle held him, Stan smelled the drying toxins on Kyle’s fingers, the noxious acetone. It made him a bit queasy, and he felt the prick of tears in the corners of his eyes.