“Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story…Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write.”
Alexander Chee, “On Becoming an American Writer”
I was 18 when I got the text.
Do you know Andrew?
I texted back, I’ve talked with him once or twice. Why do you ask?
Then the avalanche.
He’s dead. He drove into a tree.
I felt cold. A wash of snow fell down over me, through me. It was early July and my sister was home from university. The warm contentment I’d felt with her here suffocated under numbness. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t do anything. I stayed stuck in the family office, by the printer. I forgot what I was there for.
But the texts kept coming.
We don’t know if it was accidental or a suicide.
He lived in upstate New York.
He was Mormon. He was in the closet. I wish I could have directed him to you.
You would have helped him.
✺
There is a minute of me. There is a minute of life. There is a minute of staring in the mirror, with the sheet in my hands. There is a minute before I put the sheet on.
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Andrew was one of the people I interacted with on Young Writers Society, a website made for young writers. People like me. I had a group of people who I knew, who I loved, who I admired. Andrew wasn’t one of them. He never reached out personally to me, and neither did I. I considered him an acquaintance, not a friend.
My first friend from Young Writers Society (or YWS, as we affectionately call it) was wisemann210. For months, I had a profile picture on the website where the words Homophobia is gay twinkled. On September 11th, 2009, he sent me a private message:
I was wondering what you do for LGBT. Are you a part of it?
It meaning the community. Was I part of the community? I replied that, yes, I was. And then we were off, talking about coming out, our parents, and Rufus Wainwright.
Wisemann210 wasn’t the only person who reached out to me. There were people like Cypress, people like Achilles’s Rink. There were usernames like Samak and Dr. House that made me light up whenever they posted on the website.
Andrew was Andrew Rice on YWS. I saw his username and disliked it because I disliked rice until I graduated high school. I wasn’t the only one who was surprised when we all found each other on Facebook and his name was the same. We were all used to having aliases, to hiding behind something. I hid behind my deafness, buying into my parents’ lie that being deaf set me apart from the rest. My username was deafwriter93.
Wisemann210 turned out to be named Jon in real life, and he was an Ohio queer with stunning eyes and lines about love. Achilles’s Rink was Kelly, a fantasy writer who had an alcohol tolerance even a giant’s metabolism couldn’t beat. Cypress was June, a New Yorker with a disarming disregard for her family’s religion. June also insisted no one could pronounce her birth name correctly until I gave it a shot, sending her an audio file of me hesitantly speaking it in the middle of an AIM chat. She sent me several rows of exclamation points in return.
Because of people like us, people who were barely adults, YWS was barely a practical place—which is why I loved it so much. The chat room overflowed with typed sentence after sentence about colleges and the Oxford comma. Someone often darted in a dig over how at least no one was writing as bad as Stephenie Meyer. People would pop in with a question about writing, only to be met with an onslaught of opinions that more or less metamorphosed in a general consensus.
Part of the reason why so many of those friendships have continued past our time on the website is because we found our community in each other. We were all misfits, all in love with writing, and to some degree in love with people who loved the same things as us. Even now, I talk to people like Kelly and Jon daily. I send pieces of my own work to them. I make sure to get their approval before anyone else sees it. It’s a community that has broken my heart as many times as it’s healed it.
✺
One of the first novels I attempted to write was a ghost story. At 14, I wrote opening lines about the protagonist living next to an insane asylum. The protagonist’s sister commits a horrific crime at 11 and lives in that place until she kills herself.
Back then, I knew I related more to the characters that knew the inside of that asylum. But I didn’t want to write from that point of view. I didn’t want to go into the shadows, because I wouldn’t know how to come back out.
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I always say my adolescence started with Young Writers Society, with writing. I found the website seven months before I turned thirteen. In early April, a day when spring was still hovering before fruition, I was at the library, flipping through Writer’s Digest. My dad used the library computer 20 steps away from where I, sprawled on the purple couch in the Young Adult section, perused the magazine’s pages. I thought if I read enough issues of Writer’s Digest, I would discover the holy grail of writing—the atom of truth—and my path would be laid out before me. I would be always interrupted in my quest when my dad tapped me on the shoulder and told me it was time to go.
Sometimes I would ask for five more minutes. Sometimes I would give up easily and follow him to the car. But when I discovered Young Writers Society in the magazine’s list of fledgling online groups, I didn’t need another five minutes. I carried something with me, inside me, on the ride home. I burst into the house to tell my mother, and she was less than thrilled.
“It’s online?” she asked, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Why does it have to be online?”
It took hours of pleading to convince her to look over my shoulder and say yes, to take this group seriously. I needed parental permission and she didn’t give it easily. Her blue eyes were fixed, unblinking. After ten or so minutes of clicking and scrolling, stationed near my shoulder, she nodded and said “okay,” her tone full of apprehension. I clapped and made the account right then and there.
Looking back, I’m surprised she said yes. I was starting to poke my way into my own body and mind, and it was easy to invite my mother’s disapproval. Both her and my father worried I was on the computer too much, and the writers they knew didn’t join online writing groups.
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Another novel I attempted to write, when I was 16, was about a woman grieving the death of her son after he killed himself. The son was gay, closeted, Catholic. I didn’t know how to show that viewpoint effectively.
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My mother was also less than thrilled when I told her I was gay the summer before I entered high school. I told her in the car, my voice thin. We were on our way to the closest shopping center, a nestle of department stores and restaurants, to get new clothes for school. I felt a millimeter high in the passenger seat. She never outright said she wasn’t happy, but it was in the tension around her eyes, the way her lips remained tight at the corners. She nodded in jerky bobs. She came from small-town Texas and she believed in social etiquette, in there being a time and place for everything. Her sister, my aunt, was a lesbian and a chain-smoking alcoholic. She lived with her “friend,” as my mother called her, a woman who was a salve of calm to my aunt’s jerky anxiety, her restlessness.
After shopping, my mother took me to Chipotle. I felt like the sun was coming out through my mouth. I was sure the sun had burned my mother. When we sat down with our food, she peppered me with questions: How long did I know? Had I told anyone else? She nodded when I told her I’d told my best friend, Rogan. Rogan knew parts of me very few people did. She wheedled her way around “Are you sure?” as I dug into my burrito.
I never fully answered that last question that day. Maybe it was because my mother never directly asked. Maybe it was because I was only 14 that she believed I wasn’t certain, that I could be swayed to keep my mouth shut.
I don’t remember how many weeks or months passed before she tried to persuade me not to talk about that part of myself. She was worried, she said, that I was fitting myself in a box, that I covered myself up with nonsensical junk. She told me I was like an onion, that my identities, what I labeled myself as, were covering up who I was.
“You’re deaf, you’re gay, you’re blond, you’re thin,” she listed off at the kitchen counter, when I was in the middle of eating breakfast. “You’re putting all of those layers upon yourself and you won’t let people see who you are if you do that.”
Her words were an ambush. They were designed to scare me, to make me think twice. It worked. I could see why my mother believed that my decision to come out and be out wasn’t the best idea.
I was the only deaf kid in my school district and it was a lonely existence. People saw my hearing aids before they saw me, and the idea of that getting worse scared me. The last thing I wanted was that loneliness to continue. I was painfully shy, painfully unsure, and weird. Through elementary school, I was largely ignored. Few people wanted to learn sign language, so I spent recesses in the library, reading The Secrets of Droon series and later graduating to science-fiction and horror. When I was in eighth grade, I was in the grips of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. The summer before high school, I was possessed not by a fictional demon, but by an enormous uncertainty. I wanted to shout my truth, shout something I’d struggled to name for a long time, but I didn’t want to drive people away.
✺
There is smother, then settle. I can see myself in the mirror again, eyes barely visible past the white sheet. I am not myself. I am a ghost. I am not the ghost.
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When I found out Andrew had died, that he had gone somewhere and wouldn’t be coming back, it felt personal. I remember the numbness fading. Death lived as shadows in my mind now. I remember crying for days and weeks on end, doors and rooms all blurring together. I glared at the thick wooden cross just outside my father’s office. I remember seeing Andrew’s picture and an eulogy on the YWS website and feeling like I had lost something of myself.
He was pale, blond, and shooting a half-smile over his right shoulder in the picture posted to the website. I remember being struck by a certain similarity between us. We had the same hair, the same thin wire-rimmed glasses, the same full mouth. My eyes are green. His eyes were brown.
When he died, I was 18. He was 20. Our birthdays were ten days apart.
✺
His body is on the table. I haven’t entered the dining room, but I can still see him. I’m still wearing the ghost’s clothes. He doesn’t have any life in him, and I do.
✺
There was a part of me that wrestled with my queerness for almost seven years. My mother’s words were ones that I carried around, salt in the wound, salt that dried up my pride. I went to Pride parades when I was 17, 18, 19, and watched with crossed arms and a closed, straight mouth. I felt like the world was still too dangerous to celebrate progress. I spent too many months hopefully thinking on the notion that I could be bisexual.
Andrew’s death was proof that the world wasn’t safe for people who deviated from the mainstream. This certainty of danger continued to loom throughout my only year at Western Oregon University. My shoulders shot to my ears whenever my sexual orientation was mentioned.
“You know this is a safe space,” my dorm neighbor, a loud-mouthed, loud-handed girl, told me after I visibly squirmed in my seat. Someone else had mentioned that I wouldn’t have much luck getting a boyfriend in central Oregon.
“I know,” I replied. “I just don’t like it being around.” I didn’t like it being known was what I meant. Knowing meant that I was curtained in identity.
She didn’t get it. She rolled her eyes and told me to relax. My ears got hot. I wanted to lash out, to say that she didn’t know what she was talking about. For a moment, all I could think of was crumpled windshields and overly sturdy trees. I stayed quiet, and soon the topic disappeared beneath the ever-shifting tide of conversation.
✺
There are things I don’t know about Andrew, things that I may have mixed up or misunderstood. I thought he was from New York, but his blog said he was from an oil town in Oklahoma. He went to Hawaii Pacific University—until when, I don’t know. I don’t know if he graduated. I don’t know if he pursued an English degree or something else.
But there are his words, still on the Young Writers Society website for anyone to see. His words came from him, and to me, his words are him. His words were beautiful, his words made me feel something. I can only imagine the writer he would be right now.
✺
His eyes are closed. His arms are by his side. I bend down close to his face and inspect. He could have been me.
Months and years after Andrew’s death, he kept on whispering around my thoughts. I had dreams of him. I had vivid dreams of myself staring at Andrew’s body on the dining table in my childhood home. I don’t do anything except stare. I am not myself.
I am not myself, and yet myself, because I am alive.
✺
One of the novels I got the furthest on was autobiographical. I wrote the last words of it when I was 18. A deaf queer boy struggles to assimilate in his Pacific Northwest small town. He suffers from night terrors and manic depression. He shakes whenever he gets in a car.
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Before I moved to Portland to pursue creative writing, I dated a guy named Colin who lived in North Seattle. He was twenty-nine to my twenty-three, red haired, boisterous. He was a goofy giant, towering over me at six-foot-two. He was also the prouder of the two of us. He wanted me to kiss him in public. He wanted to hold my hand.
I wasn’t used to that. I was open, but I wasn’t that open. My first public kisses to Colin were pecks, but I would draw away and still his lips puckered up. A silent request for more. I always rolled my eyes and gave him another quick peck, a second longer.
I was living with my parents at the time, and my mother wondered if it was a safe relationship; both of us feared different kinds of violence. The first date between Colin and I had been cut short from texts from her. I had promised her I would be home by 8 pm, expecting a bad date. It hadn’t been a bad date: we had been making out in his bedroom when my phone lit up.
When I told her that I would be staying the night on the second date, my mother’s response was lukewarm. “I know I’m old-fashioned but that seems a little fast,” she said. “I’m worried about your heart.”
I rolled my eyes—my heart was mine—but I took strides to appease my folks. There would be updates. There wouldn’t be penetrative sex. I drew the line at having Colin meet my mother. I was moving to Portland. This relationship wouldn’t last forever.
Then one day, I turned a corner. It was midsummer and Colin and I were walking back to his workplace, the Pacific Science Center. We would collect his bike and backpack before going to his house, where I often slept over. We were holding hands, even in the smothering heat. My palms got wet quickly and he still held on. Suddenly I tensed. A picketer was standing on the street corner, the last one before we got to the Pacific Science Center, and he was holding a sign above his head, calling to the sky.
God Hates Fags. Repent
“We should probably detour,” I muttered to Colin. My steps became smaller. We were on the sidewalk; we could just cross to the other side. I knew what that kind of vitriol from the picketer could do. I didn’t want to invite it.
Colin kept pressing on, moving forward. “We can just ignore it.”
Nerves jangled in my stomach, under my skin; every yelled syllable from the picketer stripping away the nerves piece by piece. I hid behind Colin’s frame. I could hear the picketer hollering. I didn’t know if it was directed to us or the sky, and I didn’t want to find out. But then he was behind us. My palms wept and I wiped them on my shorts. Something inside of me had snapped, and I looked over my shoulder. The picketer had already moved on.
After that, I loved Colin’s mouth for the time I had left, kissing him in front of restaurants and at bus stops and holding him tight.
✺
The first time I wrote an unapologetically queer story was in 2017. It was about a gay man in Idaho. The Democratic candidate of a presidential election calls him to ask about a deceased friend, who struggled with coming out. The deceased drove himself into a tree. The candidate wanted to interview the protagonist about the deceased.
Previously, I had written gay characters, most often in the context of a love story, but they always felt like I had swapped a female character for a male character. I wasn’t a woman, so they felt unknowable, nothing but a shroud. They could be nothing but my mother’s worries, about how queer people could be nothing but queer. They felt flat, aloof, out of reach.
I put my guilt toward Andrew in the story’s protagonist. He came to life: he shivers and stares at floors and can’t see anything beyond his own tears. He’s pathetic and self-conscious. But there’s this moment in the story where the protagonist says yes and goes along with the interview even when he doesn’t want to, because he knows the dead can’t talk.
Ross Showalter’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, F(r)iction, Black Warrior Review, Hobart, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He lives near Seattle, Washington with his family.