Seeing Red - Chapter 1: Chapter 1

When did you first realize you liked boys?
I'm not talking about trying to figure yourself out. I'm talking actually knowing you liked boys?
Untangling your way out of experimentation. Breaking away the chains of confusion and resting ever so gently into the arms of realization.
That you liked dick.
It was my sixteenth birthday when I first realized that I,  Ash King, emphatically and without question,  liked dick.
Some friends from school decided to hang out at my place since I never did like big birthday celebrations because of my condition.
Picture it: sixteen, talking nonsense with 6-8 other guys in sweat pants and blaring music in the background. Junk food, root beer, dumb jokes.
It was all just fun and games.
But its usually all just fun and games until a group of boys decide to play spin the bottle.
At first, when Kyle suggested it, laughing his way through the sentence, the others boys laughed right along with him calling him a 'fag' and 'suspect'.
It was sixteen year old boy foolishness. Teenage boy garbage. Straight adolescent trash talking.
As they laughed around the couch in front of the tv that played some Lil Wayne track in which he used a lollipop as a sexual metaphor,  I sat there silently, hands in my lap and  trying to force myself to not get too excited about the idea of tonguing it up with one of my friends.
Yes,  I was still trapped inside the clutches of Confusion.
My mind was telling me no,  you don't wanna jam your tongue down Kyle's throat.
But my other parts were saying jam everything  down Kyle's throat.
I pressed my hands harder into my lap. 'stay down, boy' I thought. Ain't nothing worse than looking gay in the front of a bunch of black boys.
But it was just fun and games then, mostly. Straight boys loved nothing more than to test the limits of their straightness. To see how far they could go without crossing that straight line in the rainbow colored sand.
Until the front door opened and my big brother and his best friend trickled in, stopping when they saw us.
"What you cats doing?" Kenneth asked. His eyes sat on me and they seemed to glisten. Kenzie loved nothing more than to terrorize me.  "Did Mom or Dad say you could have these ugly looking fools over?"
The boys did't respond. They were used to the verbal abuse of my older brother by now.
"Yes," I said. "They did. They are upstairs.  Now can you go away?"
Dennis, Dee, laughed from behind him. "Wassup little cat?"
If my hands had went any deeper in my pants it would come out the other side.
Dennis was the personification of gorgeousness. The human embodiment of that chocolate beauty with that milky glow.  Smart, opinionated, a dancer. He was happy to be  light skin before light skin was even cool.
Back then,  at sixteen, he was the dream I dreamt of every single night. And every single dream as wet.
"I'm doing okay." Was all I got out because the next words were going to be 'take me now'.
Kenneth ruined the fantasy though,  like the Hood GodZilla he was.
"You guys playing spin the bottle?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. "Where the broads at?"
When none of us could answer him, his eyes got so narrow, they looked like straight lines.
"That's some suspect behavior right here." He dropped his school bag - only God knows what was in it - and came over.
"We weren't playing spin the bottle," I said, kicking him in the shin when he got close enough.
He winced and tried to grab my hair, but Dennis stopped him.
"Yo, chill," he said. He looked down at me, with those eyes, Lord.
"Ain't nothing wrong with experimenting at a young age," he said and knelt down in front of me. his lips were so pink, so big, kissable.
What am I saying.
I shook myself of the thoughts again. He laughed. "What if I play?"
I gulped. Kenneth verbally went into hysterics behind him.
"You ain't kissing  my little brother, man," he said. "You light skin brothers already have  rep. Listening to Mariah Carey and shit."
"It's just a game, Kenzie," he said,  his eyes never left my face,  never got torn away from my gaze and I was soaking up every bit of it like  sexually charged osmosis.
He reached around and got the empty soda can off of the floor that Kyle was using earlier.
It was so quiet behind me, I'm not sure if the others boys had run off, had dissolved or were just watching silently.
"Kiss me," he said, voice soft yet masculine, a rose with thorns, lightning during a thunderstorm.
Eyes soft and playful, lips just as childishly perky, alive. Which may describe me more than him.
I was soaking in my sweat pants by then.
and when we finally connected our lips,
him for probably the eight hundredth time and me for the first time, ever, I came to the stirring,  the scary,  the calculating conclusion that I liked boys.
And being black and liking boys isn't good for anyone. Just ask any black girl.
But in that moment I was okay with it.
Until.
And there was always an until.
My Dad caught me kissing that boy.
I'm not sure if repeating him would make anything I said more callous or devastating, but in that moment I felt like nothing.
An  amazing high followed almost immediately by a tragic low.
And when he was done yelling and everybody went home, and we had our conversation about what others would think,  things died down.
Which in my household,  meant bad things were about to occur.
"So, you like dick," Kenzie said, rather than asked, sitting across from me in my bed in our shared room. WE shared the bed as well. "Ain't that a bitch."
"Shut up," I said. I wanted to cry, but crying in this household was deadly during these sorts of times.
"I ain't mad at cha," he laughed. "I was sure you enjoyed man meat over chicks the day you bought that Beyonce album and started singing 'to the left to the left' like yo man up and left you for Latonya around the corner."
"Shut up, Kenzie."
He started fake crying. "Like, Jamaaaal, please come back to me, LaTonya can't put it down like I caaan."
I threw the pillow at him. "You're an asshole."
"No, I'm your big brother. If any one steps to you about this, lemme know. I'd cap em."
He wasn't joking. "I'll handle it myself."
I rolled my eyes at Kenzie. "I haven't even lost a color today," I told him. "I thought today was going to be great."
Dad walked into the room. Mom had recently taken off the door after Kenzie had a girl up here. "Stay in here," he said. "Some folks from my job are downstairs and I don't want any of you in it."
"Yes sir," we both said.
I had heard Mom and and Dad talk about him being suspended from his job because he k-oed a manager, but I had thought that was the end of it.
But then the guy came with a police officer to our house.
Kenzie and I were told to stay inside. Even as things got louder outside, Mom said to stay inside.
Even when shots were fired Mom said to stay inside.
I didn't then. Kenzie had vanished and I had check on my moms.
So I ran for the door and it nearly unhinged from the door.
Mom looked a mess standing in the front yard. She was screaming and shouting, tearing at her clothes.
Her  shrieks were so loud it looked like the clouds were feeling from it as they split and headed in different directions.
I felt no wind, no real type of any sensation. My eyes were so concentrated on her that it took my a minute to see the body lying in the street with a red stream flowing from it.
I did not see his face, the officer was bending down in front of him. Another officer had another guy pinned to the ground with the gun not far from him.
Confusion grabbed a hold of me again and grabbed  the people that were now crowding the area.
Gunshots weren't unusual. But gunshots and police lights meant nothing but death.
The sirens of the police car started and a man said something over it's speaker that I didn't catch.
I didn't even feel when Kenzie pushed me out of the way until I found myself on the ground in the grass, mouth filled with soil and eyes blurred by it, stinging and biting.
The last thing I remember seeing were my mother crying, my brother kneeling in the grass next to her and the green of the grass slowly turning gray.