Yes, I Am

Chapter Thirty Four.

He was shot on his bicep, right on something called a deltoid muscle. The operating surgeon told me he was lucky that the bullet didn't touch the bone. They found it buried an inch and a half into his arm. His arm movements will be limited for a long time. He was lucky he didn't lose it completely. They must have said 'lucky' about fifty times. I'm not sure they know what the word means. Soccer is his life. If he's not able to play again because of the wound, the bullet essentially did kill off a part of him.

But he is alive. At least he is alive. I haven't lost him. Not yet.

The anesthesia is supposed to wear off in an hour or two. He has lost a lot of blood because of the wound going untreated for hours. The first aid we gave him still retained most of it though. Now we only have to hope that there are no unforeseen complications when he wakes up.

We are not allowed inside unless we are immediate family. I settle on leaning against the wall outside his door and peering through glass. I can see him lying on the hospital bed through the glass doors, curled up on the side of his good arm, limbs folded into a nucleus of a restless haze. He looks so much smaller than he is, so much more vulnerable. His eyes are moving behind his eyelids like he is reliving the horror over and over again.

"He'll be fine," says Blake, leaning beside me.

"Yeah. What about him?" I nod towards Quince who is sitting still as a statue, staring at the wall opposite him like it has secret engravings in an ancient language that only he can see and understand.

"Shutting down is his defense mechanism. He'll come back. He always does," he replies confidently but there's something about the way his lip twitches that tells me he is just as afraid that this time will finally be too much, that we've crossed a line of no return.

"Of course he will," I say with nonchalant confidence.

"What happened with your mother?" he asks.

I raise an eyebrow coolly. "You heard that?"

"Everyone heard that," he shrugs. "It's cool, man. We've all got sob stories. You think our parents gave us a pat on the back when we refused to bring a girl home for Thanksgiving dinner?"

I chuckled dryly. "My mother sees two options- cure me or disown me."

"My parents are rich bitches who truly couldn't care less about anything other than money and reputation. It's not that they were against homosexuality; it's that the rest of the society was. I loved throwing that shit on their faces. That's why I dated Quince; because no one looks more of a gay stereotype than he does," he says.

Quince has snapped out of some of his immobile state and wanders his way back to us. He puts an arm around Blake's waist and nudges his shoulder. "Too bad you still fell in love with me."

Even though Quince still has an unimpeachable impassiveness clouding his face, Blake looks relieved that he is cracking jokes. "It was the best thing I ever did," he says, pressing his lips together.

Austin is on the phone with Haley, talking to her in a very low voice. None of his friends have gone home. They are all peppered throughout the waiting room and hallway, unwilling to leave until they know for sure that Caleb is okay. They have been so relentlessly supporting that when the reporters came to get a scoop out of our misery, they collectively drove them away.

"...I mean, it's not like there aren't nice coming out stories in the world. It's just that I haven't heard any," Blake is saying when I tune back in.

"Caleb had a nice one. His parents already knew. They were waiting for him to tell them," I say.

"Wow," they say together in awe.

"I'm legit jealous," says Quince.

"Yours didn't go well, I'm assuming," I remark.

He proceeds to tell me the story and it was nowhete near good. "My parents hardly stay at home," he says. "They're always traveling to one country or another for the job. I lived most of my life with my grandmother. She was a hardcore catholic nutjob who thought gay people were sins and yadda yadda. For years, she had me convinced that Jesus was trying to kill me. I kid you not, she'd leave, like, a knife on my bedside and shit. She even got me one of those magic candles that don't go out and told me that it's happening because Jesus doesn't want to complete my wishes."

"Jesus has always been the savior. This is the first time I've heard him being a murderer," I say with dry humor.

"I can't fucking believe the lengths someone would go to in order to mindfuck their own family," Blake says gravely.

The rest of what they are saying drowns out in the background when I notice Caleb stirring. He is blinking his eyes groggily, glancing around in his disoriented state. By the time I open the door- despite the nurse's insistence that I'm not allowed to- and make my way to him, he has managed to pull himself into a sitting position with the help of one hand.

"Broken?" he says in a hoarse voice, holding up his wounded arm.

I get him a glass of water and help him drink it, some of it falling down his chin and onto his hospital gown. "You need physical therapy to regain use of it. It will be fine," I say, leaving out the 'probably' part that the doctors stressed upon.

I sit down beside him and clasp his hands tightly in mine. I'm glad the others are giving me a minute alone with him before marching inside. "How are you feeling?" I whisper.

"My throat still feels like sandpaper. Apart from that, I'm completely okay," he says. "How are you?"

I squeeze my eyes shut for a second and open them again. He is awake, he is fine, he doesn't seem to have any sort of apparent post-surgical complications that the doctors were worried about. After everything he's been through, he's cracking jokes. The bullet hasn't broken him.

Hate can win battles not the war.

I run my fingers through his hair and lean in to kiss him softly. A tiny tear trickles down the corner of my eyes that he wipes way with the pad of his thumb.

"I was so scared," I whisper, my voice breaking.

There is a puzzle of Winnie the Pooh that I used to have when I was five years old. It took me weeks to complete it for the first fime because in my head, the picture I was envisioning was that of the honeypot being upright. The reason I couldn't complete it was because the honeypot was actually upside down. I kept trying to correct it, to put the pieces this way and that in order to make the honeypot stand up but I never could. I just couldn't accept that it wasn't the way I wanted it to be.

"I told you I plan to stay," he murmured weakly with a smirk.

And we spend our whole lives trying to fix something that was never broken.