Frankie was alone on the stage, idly strumming his guitar, nitpicking at the tuning, when he heard someone's shoe squeak on the venue floor. The sound reminded him of school, and how he and a friend had loved to do that in the halls between classes just to piss the teachers off.
It was pretty much the only part of high school that hadn't sucked; still Frankie thought that if he'd been asked to pick one thing that had been worse than all others, he'd have chosen the other memory the noise had popping into his head: gym. He'd hated that class with a passion rivaled only by his love of music. He'd sworn long ago that he was never going to look back on that time of his life, but all of sudden he was back in twelfth grade, sitting out gym class at the top of the bleachers.
Senior year had sucked beyond compare, but senior year gym class had been by far the worse. He'd been sick on and off the whole year, and part of that was his fault, because despite having bronchitis, he'd smoked like a fiend. God knew the beat-up piece-of-shit car he'd bought hadn't helped, because there was nothing better for your health than driving through a New Jersey winter with your windows wide open.
Thinking about that year, where he'd been picked on mercilessly for being sick, small, and different, still made him want to curl up in a little ball. There'd only been one good thing about the whole deal, and that had been his best friend, Alison.
He smiled when he remembered how she always rolled her eyes at him, especially when she'd find him warming the top row of the bleachers, hoping the gym teacher wouldn't notice him.
"Talk about hiding in plain sight."
"I have a note." He really did, though the last thing he wanted to do was give it to Mr. Johnson. All that would accomplish would be to draw the attention of the entire class to him, and if he had to hear one more fucking word from the jocks in class about sickly, little Frankie Iero he'd find some way to make that crappy car of his work long enough to run them down. Each and every one.
"You need to quit smoking," Alison told him.
"Find a guy to keep me occupied and I will."
"I'll find one for you, if you find one for me."
"Yeah, like that's going to happen for me in this fucking place."
"You never know, it could." Allie looked down at the gym floor where the teacher had the class running drills. "What about Matt Drew?"
"Please, please tell me that you're joking?"
Allie eyed the skinny blonde. "He's cute."
"He's the biggest geek ever, Al. He gets hassled more than I do."
"Which means that you have something in common." Allie laughed at the complete look of horror Frankie shot her. "What, it could work."
"Not even if he were the last potentially gay man on the planet. No, no, and fuck no."
Allie sighed, "I guess we probably shouldn't be talking about this here anyway. Mr. Johnson would probably try to have us suspended if he heard us."
"We haven't done anything wrong."
"Yeah, try telling that to him. Sarah Nichols told me yesterday that he and his wife grounded their daughter for a month because she went to a Gay/Straight Alliance meeting at Belleville High with a friend of hers. It's supposedly some big sin. And then they told her that if they ever found out she was gay, she'd have to find somewhere else to live."
Frankie could believe it; Johnson was the biggest asshole he'd ever met. "Who was the friend?"
"That kid who used to live on your block, Mike something."
"Nichols?"
"Yeah, that's him." Allie leaned back against the wall. "Sarah told me that Mr. J called his parents, and that they sent him away. To like Nebraska or something to live with his uncle."
"That's…" Frankie remembered Mike's parents; they'd seemed like nice people. "I can't believe that they'd do that."
"Sarah heard that they sent him there because it's in the middle of nowhere."
"What the fuck does that matter?"
"Who knows?" Sarah rolled her eyes. "Half the time I can't figure out my parents and they're mostly normal."
"I'd run." Frankie wrapped his arms tight around his middle. "No fucking way would I let my parents do something like that to me."
Allie tugged Frankie's arm free and linked their fingers together. "Your folks would never. They're not like that."
"I didn't think Mike's parents were like that either and mine aren't that different from them. They make me come here; they make me go to Mass."
"Don't you think that they kind of already know? I guessed, they probably have, too. I mean, you've like, never had a girlfriend really, or anything."
"I think that my mom thinks you are."
Allie's eyes widened. "She's said that?"
"Well, no, but you know how my mom is. She doesn't say much about anything. It's more like how she smiles when you call and she answers the phone. Shit like that."
"Are you going to tell her?"
He'd been planning on it, had for weeks been rehearsing what he was going to say in his head, but now - "Do you think that I should?"
Allie stared at the joined hands for a long time before she finally looked up and replied, "No."
**He hadn't thought about that day in years. He and Allie had lost touch once they'd graduated, and though he was now way past the age where he had to worry about his parents sending him off to some bumfuck town, he was still following her advice: he'd never actually voiced the fact that he was gay.
Did they know? Probably -- as he'd gotten older he'd stopped trying to hide it. Still, he'd felt fear that day in the bleachers, and somehow had gotten it firmly fixed in his head that if he never actually said it, they would never have to decide if it was something that they could live with. It hadn't been a big stretch for him to translate that from just his parents to everyone else.
Even Gerard, who he had been fucking every night for close to a year.
It'd started after a show, when Frankie, tired of the tease they played out nightly on stage, had slammed Gerard into the nearest wall and kissed him until Ray had grabbed him by the hair and said, "Fuck, Frankie, not here, okay?" That night, Gerard had crawled into his bunk, just as he had pretty much every night since.
It seemed pointless this far down the line to think that he actually needed to say, 'Uh, so, I'm gay.' If Gerard didn't get that by this point, Frankie didn't want to know what he thought they'd been doing all this time. Then again, this was Gerard, and Frankie wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find that if he didn't spell it out for him, Gerard might think of this as just a tour thing, and when the tour was over, they'd be done.
Which meant that Frankie would lose what he now realized was something that he'd always wanted, and all because he was an asshole who couldn't open his fucking mouth.
He'd often thought that with his mother, he'd be able to tell her about what'd happened senior year and she'd understand, but if he let it go for too much longer would Gerard? Would he buy an excuse that even to Frankie seemed worn?
**Frankie was sitting on the edge of the stage, his guitar long since packed away when Gerard came searching for him.
He snatched the cigarette from Frankie's hand in way of greeting, and then sat, thumping his feet against the stage and smoking. Frankie knew that he'd never say a word, not even if Frankie got up and left him sitting there alone, unless Frankie gave some sign that he wanted to talk.
"So, uhm, it must be almost time, huh?" Frankie asked, because though he couldn't see them, he could feel the stage crew hovering, anxious to finish setting things up.
Gerard shrugged. "We've got time," he answered, before going back to thumping out the rhythm to some song.
Ten minutes and another cigarette later, Frankie couldn't help but think that Gerard was possibly the most patient fucker he'd ever known.
He couldn't understand why this was so hard, or even what he thought was going to happen if he just opened his mouth and said, I'm gay, but every time he went to do it, his stomach knotted up and he knew that if tried all that was going to come out was what was left of his lunch.
Frankie worried his lip ring until he tasted copper on his tongue, and when he turned to find Gerard watching him steadily he closed his eyes and forced the words out.
"I'm gay."
He immediately went back to studying the cables snaking below as if his life depended on it, until he could no longer stand not knowing what Gerard was thinking and made himself look over.
When he did, Gerard nodded, and then leaned in and flicked his tongue over Frankie's wounded lip. "Which is a fucking good thing, considering what I'm planning on for after the show."