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I.

My Own Private Hillsborough

Twilight – the night before everything changed.

Once again, Andrew Lightfoot could not sleep, and so he sat, curled against the arm of his couch in his living room, staring into the dark half-mirror of his flat screen television.

It was some ungodly hour of the morning, the streetlights outside gauzy and febrile – Andrew had become a ghost, floating in a phantom world, a soft place between waking and dreaming.

His insomnia left him with nothing to do but think, and when he thought too hard, all his life, forward and backward, would stretch before him, and he would feel the need to recount how he got here: how he, a West Virginia boy whose accent faded delibaretly day by day as it was swallowed by the American Standard din of the New South, had gotten here to Florida…how he had ever gotten a boy like Cody Tyree.

It was coming up on a year that he and Cody had first met – at a Circle K, when his Jeep had stalled out from a transmission leak. He'd been frustrated and tired, but he had looked up from his engine…to spot a single boy with tawny-brown shaggy hair spilling near to his neck, looking into the Sun. He was shirtless, skinny jeans, a skateboard in his hand – Andrew had stopped to stare for some seconds before the boy, perhaps noticing someone was looking, turned around, his face framed by the sunset like a seraphim from the hallucination of a dead Christian mystic.

Andrew was rendered speechless – speechless at this sight of heavenly beauty.

That was barely a year ago – only a year.

Four years since he had moved from West Virginia – Tempest, a tiny town no one had ever heard of and would never hear about again – but only a year that he was truly happy, that he did not think that moving to Florida was a mistake.

So it had been a year, but only a year, since he had stopped the hedonist nonsense of being young and handsome and stupid and emerged from the impenetrable haze of alcohol and boys – since he aimed to make himself a better person, and graduate.

Just a year seemed hardly enough time to make up for broken hearts and fleeting friendships, for hiding how bad things were from Facebook and Instagram behind sunglasses, tank tops, #wishyouwerehere.

Looking at him, at this carefully constructed image to which nobody was ever let in to know the truth, one would never know who he really was.

No matter how he dressed, how he acted, he was not, nor could ever be, made for Florida – although year by year he did end up looking the part, and although he could fool everyone, maybe even himself, he could not escape his genetics: entirely Appalachian, and older than that, entirely Virginian.

Through his veins ran the blood of Revolutionary War heroes, of the First Families of Virginia who stamped their diseased European boots on the fair, untainted virgin face of America. Their legacy of conquest and rape and pillage was as forest-dark as the names of the rivers in the wilds of Tidewater…but were America an aristocratic culture, people would bow to him, the memory of worthy white man's burden still fresh on a splashed coat-of-arms next to his name. Untainted through the ages, pumped the blood, out of his fragile heart, of a Virginian noblesse d'épée.

And as theatrical as this may sound – it really wasn't. His family's ancestral sword, Mountaincrier, sat still in its glass case above the mantel, blackened with the years, blackened with sin.

The wraiths of his family's wealth and power still stalked the West Virginia hills – literally, so went the legends, which Andrew, first a boy, and now a man, of science, refused to listen to.

But that old world was fading, Andrew felt, or at least hoped: the days when a last name, any last name, held prestige and sway enough to ask favors and receive tribute were dying, and what was left over was just a bad dream of undeserved importance.

It was a heavy legacy for a boy to have and so Andrew would not have it all, he would let the relentless sunlight of Florida burn away the roots that bound him to the mountains and the forests, the saltwater would cleanse what the rivers and creeks had dirtied.

Since he had been a student at the University of South Florida his politics had liberalized to a deep and self-conscious degree – he worked for the Obama campaign that past November, and there was a picture of him and Kathy Castor shaking hands he had printed out on glossy photo paper and framed. Some of the higher-ups recognized his last name, remembered him as the son of a certain state senator from the opposite party back in West Virginia, and while it mortified him he dodged the questions, the assumptions, the insinuations – he came out of all of it with no time for old money, old ways, old thinking. The thought of him being part of an ancient aristocracy, a self-serving and self-feeding upper class, repulsed him.

When he had turned twenty, he had received a check in the mail from the estate of his dead grandfather. It was an ancient document, so old that the ink was flaking off, and he thought the bank was joking when they agreed to honor it…but when they did, Andrew had tried to pass the money off to charity, to a Beagle rescue outfit to honor his brother's deceased dog. His father had, at the time, chided him for being an Obama canvasser but still seemed, at that time, to love him like a son – it was his father, too, who advised him to keep the money Andrew considered every cent of it to be sin-choked blood money – but if it was really his, and it was really meant for him, then, he decided, he would use it on his own terms.

The check, and the sum it was marked for, paid for the apartment he was living in, which he had to move into after his last, serious relationship collapsed from the strain of alcoholism and – other, unresolved matters. It meant that he could, if he so desired, live in leisure off of the share of the family fortune…but he refused to do what his father probably expected of him, to be an idle rich nobody who never earned anything, resting instead on what was given to him, what was expected to be given to him, passed down through rotting, skeletal hands that once choked the life out of Vandalian wilderness.

It proved to him that the world his parents wanted he and his younger brother Stephen to inherit was an untenable one. The only solution was to break the cycle, and put down roots somewhere else anew, where the haints, imagined or real, of a centuries-old privilege, could no longer haunt.

For years, Andrew had made it seem like it wasn't just the best decision, but the only decision he could have made…but every status update, every picture, all of it was a charade. Pretending he belonged here was an elaborate lie, lest anyone guess the neuroses of not fitting in and failing to plug the holes in his heart, the hidden places of loss and grief.

He had never been back to Tempest.

It had been only a year with Cody, with sobriety, with not recklessly destroying himself because he couldn't deal with being wrong – so it had been four years since he last saw Bligh Lynch, his…Andrew called him his best friend, but the basic phrase barely covered what they had, that cultic separateness that none save Stephen could only sometimes be included in, something nameless beyond friendship itself, drenched in countless memories from the time they were five. Bligh was his first love, that unadorned hillbilly rawness the exact opposite of being a polished little Lightfoot prince…but he was convinced Bligh was straight, and had long ago put away those quivers of want, for he was too scared – afeared, Bligh would say, Andrew used to say – to speak any of it out loud. He and Bligh were practically brothers, anyhow, because Bligh's grandfather, Gus, who everyone called Pappy, had really been the one, not his parents, who raised him into the man he had become.

He knew that when Bligh said he was happy for him to have gotten into USF and being able to move away that he was, he really was, but that he was also in pain – they lied to each other the same way they would have died for each other. Andrew used to call Bligh, drunk as a monkey, but even drowning in raspberry vodka he was gatekeeper of the indefatigable lie of his Florida life. He was his father's child, with his genetic foreknowledge of the complete sleight-of-hand know-when-to-fold-em-when-to-hold-em – he never, ever told Bligh how he really felt.

His younger brother, Stephen, who had idolized him and Bligh for so many years, probably knew, but, thankfully, kept it to himself – Stephen was a shrewd, devious kid, a stunted genius who was not gifted the athletic body Andrew was blessed with, he was short and asthmatic and weak, with a strange white streak of hair on the back of his head, and all of it, all of it had he been born angry about it, from the time he was small he had been out for revenge. Andrew was his protector and his guardian but since he had left Bligh took over that role, at least from what he gathered – he had always clung to them and his Beagle, Walker, who died near to the time Andrew had gotten accepted at USF.

They hadn't spoken for six months, the drifting-apart of lives without being in the same place…but the last Andrew heard Stephen had gotten accepted to Virginia Tech. There was a very real possibility Andrew would never see him again.

And because Bligh wouldn't move without Pappy, and because Stephen was going to college somewhere else, there was nobody, nobody in Tampa, who could remind Andrew who he was, where he came from. He was, at last, just like everybody else – a sick, weary thought that was privately killing him, but like everything else he would never say it, never admit it, just like the father that he hated he would dazzle the world with bullshit.

So what was left?

Cody was left.

Only because of Cody could Andrew say he left everything behind and regretted nothing…even when he really did, even when his membership in the faceless consumer-mass of urban Florida really did bother him.

There were others before Cody – many others. His freshman year of college, the treasures of the sea – of Tampa Bay – had opened up to pour out to him, a delight and a chaos, of boys.

…lithe, deity-on-Earth Aryans – muscular brunettes with eager faces and earnest, impatient eyes – jocks, skaters, scenekids, hipsters – there were gilded Ganymedes and debauched sex dwarves, there were mighty warriors and feudal kings, worshipped and devoured, everything to him one week and useless refuse the next.

Boys – boys – boys – he remembered their names, echoing like the snap of a finger in the nave of an empty cathedral.

And in the collapsing twilight – quite literally, in the sunset – came Cody. There was that image again – the blazing sky behind him, the skateboard in hand, so helpless and so lost.

Four years since Tempest – only a year since the shirtless skater boy had waved at him and kick-pushed his way over to him, chatting idly about how hot it was and how unreliable cars could be until it occurred to Andrew that he was stalling, that he was trying to work up the courage to ask him something.

And that – something – Andrew could recall perfectly: the faint smell of diesel, the searing heat that wafted from the pavement, the sudden liquid look the boy's eyes took on when Andrew asked where he lived.

"Uh – I'm kinda – lost, I guess."

Andrew could see that, anybody could have seen that – Cody was lost. And Andrew's first reaction was to be taken aback by how stunning he was – but the second was worry. Did he live around here?

"Actually, uh, I d-don't – really, um, live anywhere," he said, looking away. And then his head turned, and the swollen inferno of the setting Sun behind the clouds caught the tears that were forming in the corners of his hazel eyes. "You seem – really nice and kinda – cute – i-if you don't mind me saying, and I – if—" And then he spat it out: "Can I go home with you?"

Andrew considered himself a scientific materialist, but it was enough to make him believe in some supreme architecture to an otherwise cold universe – like he was fated to see, to know, to be with Cody, a homeless hustler who never stopped doubting that the world was an okay place despite everything it had done to him.

Cody was a head shorter than Andrew, with luscious tawny shaggy hair, framing a face that made many do a double take – he was serenely beautiful, what Dorian Gray must have looked like at Eton. And he was a Florida native, his late mother had gone into labor and given birth to him in a strawberry field somewhere near Plant City – his first breaths of life smeared with his homeland's soil…Cody was Andrew's renewal, what Ponce de León had been searching for, the fitful hallucinations of the Spanish with their iron armor, iron beards, iron frowns, all those centuries ago.

Even if the Lightfoot name should die with him – and with Stephen – what should it matter, if it ended in the hollow splendor of the Florida sunshine, the warmth that he could physically feel even on the colder days when Cody smiled?

When Andrew allowed himself a more poetic way of thinking about the world, like his hero Carl Sagan, he thought Cody was as the whole spirit of Florida – pure in the promise of fresh verdure and new beginnings – had been incarnated into the mortal form of a friendly skater kid.

Cody was, in a peculiarly abstract way, Florida.

Andrew saw in Cody something transcendently precious as a human being – the most important thing to him, a place that Bligh once held but which Andrew let Cody usurp. It was a dangerous thing to do, to make another person a living symbol, so afflicted as they are with the same fragilities as everyone else – but to Cody, Andrew was symbolic also: a way to be stable, and to be loved, off the streets. And it so was that Cody was imperfect, but it was only as perfect as it needed to be.

Physically they couldn't have been more different, which only added to the appeal. Three years the boy's elder, Andrew was taller, still residually muscular from his days as a football player for his high school, bigger than Cody, so lithe and boyish, his thick shaggy hair another contrast to Andrew's sandy close-cropped near-buzz, which, in the Florida sun, had turned the color of harvest wheat…

…the introspection, the need to gauge where he had been, where he was going, became too much.

Andrew shifted on the couch, stretching to lay end to end, now directing his gaze to the ceiling. He frowned. Where would Cody be without him? Still at that flophouse on Nebraska Avenue?

He had saved Cody – Cody had saved him. Everything hinged on him, and Andrew jealously guarded him because he knew it.

But where was Bligh now? He had a vague idea, they still talked sometimes – but what if Bligh was lonelier than he let on?

What if there were things he thought he knew about his best friend, but really didn't…?

At last the enveloping cloak of drowsiness returned to him and he sighed heavily, arising from the couch to make his way back to the bedroom.

He found the room as he left it – the cramped bookshelf that groaned with too many tomes on too many subjects, the Carl Sagan poster, the limited edition wall-hanging for Skyward Sword that he had bought for Cody, the clothes on the floor…the sweet mingling of their combined life together.

Cody was fumbling around the mattress amongst the sheets, half-asleep and in vain, for the familiar body to be there – Andrew paused to watch him, both bemused and moved, as one does when seeing a dog who is deep in a running dream.

At length, Cody opened his eyes to see Andrew standing there in the darkness.

"H-hey – where were you…?"

"I'm right here," Andrew said softly. He hesitated, remembering the heavy thoughts that had preceded this moment and knowing the full weight of what he was about to say: "I'll always be here."

Andrew slid back into bed, finally finding sleep, with Cody wrapped in his arms.