Two Henrys (This Can't Be Happening collection)

by Kevin Allison

I’d spent my whole little life wondering if I’d ever find a friend who really got me—someone who loved that I was different from the other kids and could wholeheartedly laugh with me, not at me. Did I really, at so young an age, feel like I was so inherently strange that I might never be understood? Yeah, I did. In fact, my very first memory is of feeling that way.

‘gay’ and ‘fag’ really mean, right?” he said. “Obviously, they mean ‘lame’ and ‘gross,’ but they also mean a boy who likes other boys the way a boy is supposed to like girls. So that’s why they mean ‘lame’ and ‘gross.’”

When someone is laughing with you, it means that, in some way at least, they like you. If you can keep them laughing, you can keep them from hating you.

One night I asked, “Henry, do you think God is like a man? With a beard and all that?” “No. I think God is like a spirit,” he said. “Like a cloud or something.”

One night I got down on my knees by my bedside and prayed the way my mom had taught me. “Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who implored thy help, or sought thine intercession, was left unaided,” I whispered. “So please help me start liking girls.”

But he has been taught by all the adults in his life that the act of helping a slave get to freedom is the sort of sin against God that would forever damn your soul to hell. So, when Huck finally makes his momentous decision, he says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” I’d kind of echoed Huck. I felt as though I was in a similar boat. I thought, I might lose all my friends and family for being gay—heck, my church says I might even literally go to hell—but I have to be who I am.