Basement

The houses in West Franklin acknowledge each other only politely, like wedding guests who must make the most of a long night at the same table. Their edges look right at each other, separated not by fences but by almost indistinguishable changes in the height of the grass. A tourist, or whatever you might call the people who accidentally drive through West Franklin, would not know to note such minute differences. To them, the suburb would simply coalesce into one colossal green-and-white blur, a screensaver to fill up the car window while they’re on their way away.
         But for the residents of West Franklin, the landscape does almost anything but blur. The divisions are clear, the boundaries precise. This world and its inhabitants know exactly what belongs where and who belongs here. Even if something is never discussed, it’s never forgotten either. Every mistake and misdemeanor, every miscalculation and missed opportunity, is logged eternally and quietly in the secret history of West Franklin. 
         If you celebrate your sixteenth birthday with a few stolen beers and get your newly minted license revoked that very night, expect the story to become legend among parents and classmates alike. If you think you’re in love and above the precautions that other less passionate people must take, and you find yourself at the clinic three towns over in a hospital robe and a two-day-old ponytail, you will not be alone for long. The hushed, insistent voices of West Franklin will find you. 
         Secrets are a luxury afforded to those who have more entertaining events planned for their Friday nights. People downtown at the opera and the tablecloth restaurants. Let them talk about politics and wine and everything else that disappears as soon as it arrives. In West Franklin, we focus on the concrete facts of history. Who got what in the divorce. Whose money bought that nice new sanctuary for the temple on Grove Street. Whose daughter (or occasional son) tied a rope around their bedroom ceiling fan. Certain details, like the ones about ceiling fans, will be broadly respected and kept off the public record. Even the most avid gossips can understand a code of ethics. They will do the correct thing and act as though the girl died of cancer or a car crash. They will not say anything about how the girl’s bones were nearly busting through her skin that whole last year. They will not mention that her hair had started falling out and leaving unsightly fur balls all over her backpack. That is not wedding guest type of talk. Not until very late in the night at least, after enough trips to the blissfully open bar. That’s when voices drop an octave and hands rise to obscure mouths, just in case someone nearby thinks themself a detective and starts reading lips. Behind fingers, they bare soul. If you take the right precautions, if you know the sacred spot for each and every piece of information, you can say just about anything you’d like. 
         The fact is, there is always room for a secret or two. Finding them is more about knowing where to look and how. No tourist, moving too fast to notice who mowed their lawn that morning and who didn’t, would be able to locate those places where the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is being told. The locked bathrooms, for instance, where wives clutch romance novels instead of Bibles, where they dream about men who don’t look like their husbands. And the husbands. The beds where men lay their sins to rest, wash up in the bathroom sink and make it home in time for dinner with their sons. And don’t get me started on the sons. The basements where boys admit their softness for each other, where they do things you’re not allowed to even think of, officially speaking. 
         The basements. Those subterranean, wood-paneled caves of West Franklin. Down the carpeted steps and with only a sliver of daylight from a narrow escape window, the boys are free from aboveground eyes. Salvation awaits them in the basement, on bloated leather couches, in the blue light of a grainy plasma screen so big it rests right on the floor. A dartboard that sits behind two little doors. A plastic gun with missing bullets. Two hunks of computer like a beige ball and chain. All these toys are good pretense for why the boys might like the basement. And so everyone does a fine job of not noticing that they usually go untouched.
                                                                             
All around Jonah, the summer is dying. Buses of children return home from sleepaway camp. Nighttime walks start demanding sweatshirts. Jonah’s mother takes him shopping for new cargo pants. When he tries them on in the store, fabric pools around his ankles and gets caught under his heels. He takes small steps around the dressing room while his mom determines if they’re too big in the correct way. 
         Later, at the sewing machine, so early it’d be impossible for anyone but her to be awake, she’ll tuck three inches of fabric up into the legs and sew a new hem. She won’t cut the excess off. Jonah’s growing fast. Instead she’ll let the fabric down an inch at a time over the year until they’re back in their original form next June. And then she’ll chop them at the knees and christen them shorts, inside which Jonah will get sunburnt and scraped up, beguiled and berated by another round of sacred months in the adolescent sun. A sun that will never again burn in exactly the same way. Even by high school and definitely by college and long long after, the summertime will just be a blurry reminder of these early ones when the imaginable and the possible had still not met. When the boy knew the shape of grief but not its name. 
         Jonah is feeling the urgency of the end. On a suburban Saturday dusk, the rubber tires of a hundred minivans spin over potholed roads, depositing children at the homes of others, duffel and sleeping bags tucked under each arm. Jonah is one such child; his mom is dropping him off at Daniel’s house. When Jonah’s sneakers hit the pavement, the step sends ripples downward, through the soil and crust and magma and right into the basement, where he knows that Daniel is waiting for him. They arranged everything on the phone earlier that day, each stationed at his respective landline, each boy shouting to his mother in the next room asking for permission to spend the night. 
         And now Daniel is waiting in the basement, sleepover approved and imminent. He watches cartoons on the giant TV with unfocused eyes; he thinks about what movie they might put on tonight; he thinks about himself and Jonah zipped up into one sleeping bag; he thinks about ordering a pizza; he thinks about the vacant coolness of Jonah’s lips, the soft flatness of Jonah’s torso. His eyes flick up from his fantasy at the slam of a car door. Or maybe at the reverberations from Jonah’s step, nosediving like a meteor with apocalyptic intentions and zooming toward him. The movie they might watch is not as important as what they might do afterwards, when there are two whole floors between them and anyone else. Sometimes in the middle of it, Daniel remembers his parents swinging in hammocks of sleep two stories high, not noticing. 
         To be fair, there usually isn’t much to notice that late at night in West Franklin. The only creatures awake are the coyotes playing tag in the graveyard across the street. And the boys of course, two sons burning side by side, both wondering if it will happen again. The thing they can’t acknowledge because they can’t articulate it, even down here. Because even the basement, protected a secret as it remains, is still in West Franklin where the words that could save them have been locked inside whispers. 
         Jonah breaks the silence. 
         “You like Sarah, right?”
         “Yeah,” Daniel answers.  
         “Does she like you?"
         “I think so. We kissed at the park on Saturday.”
         “Oh.”
         The nylon sleeping bags make every movement loud. The computer in the corner is turned off, but with its dying breath it hangs a single red dot in the night. Jonah imagines the dot is the laser from a sniper rifle. He imagines someone standing there behind the darkness, pointing a gun at him. He swallows. 
         “Did you like it?” Jonah asks. 
         “Of course,” says Daniel. 
         “Cool.”
         Jonah steals another look into the corner, just to check if there really is a man over there. He decides his glance was too quick to confirm anything, man or no man. 
         “How did you do it?” asks Jonah. 
  .      “Kiss?” Daniel asks back. 
         “Yeah.” 
         “Like always.”
         “Oh,” says Jonah. “Right.” 
         “I could show you,” offers Daniel. 
         The man in the corner cocks his gun. 
         “Okay.” 
         Daniel unzips his sleeping bag, a sound that fluctuates in tone as it moves lengthwise and then around the corner. Daniel army crawls over to Jonah, who is still mummified. With his legs splayed out behind him, propped up on his elbows, Daniel presses his mouth against Jonah’s. A kiss. Like always. 
         “Cool,” says Jonah. 
         Daniel does it again and then again. 
         “Do you like that?” Jonah asks. 
         “Yeah.”
         Daniel does it once more and then stays there, his nose almost touching Jonah’s. 
         In this way, another night in the basement comes to pass. The boys go on and burn themselves down. They expose their true natures. They spill their guts and give them to each other. It is common knowledge that a boy needs something to destroy. The urge swells in him without warning or cause and it must be satiated. This is where the boys combust. It’s a terror both horrifying and curious. It seems forever until it halts abruptly. 
         In the basement, below the foam ceiling and beside the fizzing flatscreen, the boys pretend to be men. Hunters, pioneers, discoverers of a great unknown. And I think the main thing I want to convey to you is that all the while, they know. The boys know where and when the play ends. More specifically, they know it must end at the top of the basement steps when the sun starts spilling through. And they don’t know this because anybody told them. They know it the way they know what a millimeter change in the height of the grass means. 
         In the days to come, Jonah sweeps away the ash and scattered glass and sits in class and if his mother asks, he says he just doesn’t get good sleep at Daniel’s house. He will not even think to mention the guilt in his gut, the strange conviction that he tricked Daniel into something, corrupted his friend and ruined both their lives. He will think only of how uncomfortable the basement floor is and convince himself that’s why he always comes back tired and short-tempered, why he’s prone to crying and silence for days after a sleepover. 
         I told you earlier there is always room for a secret or two. I told you this. You can say anything you want so long as you know where to say it, do anything you like so long as you find the right door to do it behind. But I have not yet found a place for this particular truth. This kind of story. So I guess I shouldn’t be telling it.