Invisible Boys

by Holden Sheppard

Everyone needs a way to release the pressure, and I’m no different. The brighter you shine on the outside, the darker you burn within.

It is a universal truth acknowledged by no-one that if you leave your teenage son at home alone, he’ll be wanking by the time your car leaves the driveway.

I’ve never seen anything like what I see in his eyes in that instant. It’s not that he’s been crying. It’s not the swearing. It’s the pain. His eyes are looking right at mine but they’re totally empty, like everything that gave them strength has drained down the plughole.

After a while I start rolling the gnocchi really hard into the cold steel, imagining I can hear their little doughy screams as the impressions of the fork are burned into their skin and they are metamorphosed, against their will, into food.

‘Oi, fuck-knuckle,’ Doug says. ‘Don’t tell Mum I’m still smoking, or I’ll break your legs.’

My bones seem to know intrinsically that I’m gay: it’s locked up in my marrow. But my blood seems to rile and boil at the thought; it begs to flood my skin and wash all the badness out of me.

‘Charlie, it’s just high school. No matter how scared you are, it won’t physically kill you.’

Tell that to an American

Matt stirs and rubs his nose. ‘Your elbow,’ he groans, eyes shut. ‘It’s sticking into my ribs.’ ‘Your whole body is literally crushing me,’ I reply.

‘It makes you look mental. You look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.’ ‘Maybe I should do that. Rock up to Brother Murphy’s door and hack through it with an axe. Heeeeere’s Charlie!’

It’s like the old Zeke burned down and this new one crawled out of the rubble – charred black, stained with charcoal, but reborn.

The night of the Summer Dance, there were four of us on the primary school’s roof: four gay boys, invisible to the rest of the world, but we saw each other. And seven days later, one of us was dead. One of us had locked himself in the closet. And one of us was leaving forever. I’m the last man standing, and I have to stand alone.