“So this is really about losing weight?” Mom asked me at Sizzler. “Or is there some,” she trailed off for a moment. “Some other thing going on.” She said it as though she knew I was some social deviant, Dr. Laura’s worst gay nightmare. The way she said "thing" implied that the nuisance of any possible secret I might be keeping from her would also disappoint, kill, and then mame her dead, ashamed body—sooner than I could skip around her Happy Holiday Barbie collection and vomit on her fake Jimmy Chu’s.
“Yeah, I’m tired of looking like this and not being able to breathe walking up and down the stairs.”
“I know what you mean,” she started. And I don’t remember what was said after that, except that it must have ended with a conversation about EKG’s, fake boobs, and what song she wanted played at her funeral. Dan Seals, "One Friend."
***
My first morning back home I decided to go to the small, inclined road I loved in Lexington Hills, one of the many planned communities within Folsom, where you could see the whole city. It was my spot. As a sixth grader, my teacher Mr Smith took us to this area and allowed us all to purchase, with our report card grades, a plot of land. I had picked this spot with my fake money grades and had never let it go. I brought Del Taco up here often and sat thinking about how one day I would be so famous and rich that I could be whoever I wanted. Gay, straight, fat, thin it didn’t matter. I would make everyone so proud of my accomplishment that it wouldn’t hurt anyone how I was or who I was, because who I was would be Sean Hetherington, the rich and the famous. I would play Reba CD’s in the car and I would wonder what it’d be like if she were my aunt, or maybe even my mom.
My plot of land that was mine and that I had loved had a house on top of it, and I had to park my car below my spot and walk up to a hill behind it. The walk was steep. My legs started to itch from the inside. My lower back was sweating. I was huffing. I was scared and embarrassed but no one could see me.
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