We always speak of secrets as if they’re personal possessions. “My” secret. But they’re that only for as long as they remain out of other people’s reach. We can’t almost lose them—just altogether or not at all. As soon as they slip out into the world, they become an earthquake, an avalanche, a tsunami. It may take only a single rash comment, a fleeting thought, or some photographs posted online by someone with a wounded heart, but that sets the stones rolling and the snow loses its grip and the wall of water becomes insurmountable before we realize how it happened, and from then on it’s impossible to hold everything back. Like capturing the scent of July and trying to hold it in your cupped hands. Everyone knows now. Everyone knows what no one was supposed to know.
* * *
Benji is woken up by it.
* * *
BANG! One single bang, but so hard that the walls of the cabin shake. Then silence. The teacher rolls over sleepily in bed, but Benji is already out of the bedroom, crouching down as he heads toward the door. He doesn’t know why, but afterward he will remember that he was already filled with dread. He knew this was idiotic when he first arrived, when they kissed in the doorway.
One day he’ll figure out that it was because he was in love. That’s why he wasn’t more cautious. He opens the door of the cabin, peers out, but whoever is waiting in the darkness doesn’t make him or herself known. He’s on the point of turning and going back inside when he sees where the noise came from.
* * *
Bang.
* * *
Like the sound of a puck hitting a wall or a heart thudding against a rib cage or a knife being embedded in the wood of a cabin door on a campsite. A plain piece of paper; three letters; the one in the middle is “A,” and the triangle at the top of the letter is where the knife has been driven through into the wood.
FAG
* * *
Ana wanders around in the forest as if she were in a fever. The snow is falling fast, early, and deep this year even for this part of the country: an autumn storm is on its way in. It’s so easy to underestimate the power of the cold, how quickly it can kill you. It’s a soft-spoken murderer whispering that you can sit down and rest for a while if you’re tired. Tricking you into thinking you’re sweating, encouraging you to take your clothes off. Snow and freezing temperatures can summon up the same hallucinations as blazing sun in a desert.
Ana knows all that because she’s more at home in the forest than the town. More squirrel than human, as Maya usually teases her. When Ana is among trees, she leaves reality behind, time stops, and what happens here could never affect life in town. That’s what she’s always liked to imagine, and that’s why the full impact of what the hell she’s just done doesn’t hit her until she’s almost home. Only when she reaches the door of her dad’s house does the panic hit her, hard and brutal, and her chest hurts so much that she’s left short of breath. It’s so easy to think that what we post online is like raising your voice in a living room when it’s actually more like shouting from the rooftops. Our fantasy worlds always have consequences for other people’s realities.
Ana pulls out her phone and deletes the pictures of Benji and the teacher, but it’s too late. She’s already spread their secret like ash across the sea, and it can never be taken back.
* * *
Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?
* * *
Peter bangs on the door of the Bearskin early in the morning. Ramona opens a window in the apartment upstairs, wrapped in a dressing gown and a lot of anger.
“You’d better hope the bar’s on fire, lad! Waking decent folk at this time of day!”
But she relents because Peter was a boy, too, once upon a time. She called him so many times to come and take his drunk father home that Peter himself has hardly touched a drop since. His whole life has been shaped by the fact that he tries to mend everything. Make everyone happy. Hide other people’s mistakes. Take responsibility. He confesses, “There’s going to be a press conference, Ramona. The factory’s getting new owners, foreigners, they’re the club’s ‘mysterious sponsor’ that everyone’s been talking about. And I’m going to have to stand there and tell the reporters I’m going to get rid of the standing area and . . . get rid of the hooligans.”
It’s possible that Ramona is shocked, but if she is she doesn’t let it show. She lights a cigarette. “What’s that got to do with me?”
Peter clears his throat. “They’re going to let me handpick one board member. Anyone I like.”
“I’m sure Tails will be excellent,” Ramona snorts.
“Tails would rather it was you. So would I,” Peter replies.
A little puff of smoke emerges from one of Ramona’s nostrils, the only indication that she’s surprised.
“Have you been hit in the head, lad? You know I . . . given what you want to do to Teemu and the boys? They’re my boys! That standing area is—it’s their damn club, too!”
Peter stands there straight-backed, even if his voice gives up. “I’m doing everything I can for the good of the club. But I’ve been told that no one surrenders power voluntarily. So if I’m really going to try to convince myself that I’m doing this for unselfish motives, I need to put someone on the board who won’t always agree with me. Someone who’ll fight me.”
Ramona goes on smoking quietly. “If we both fight for what we believe in, then one of us will be out of a job at the end of it.”
Peter nods. “But if we both fight for the club’s best, the club will win.”
Ramona ties her dressing gown tighter. Thinks for a long time. Then she frowns. “Are you having breakfast?”
“What sort?” Peter asks.
Ramona grunts. “I’ve probably got some coffee somewhere. Or whatever it is you teetotal types drink.”
* * *
That’s how Ramona gets a seat on the board of Beartown Ice Hockey, but the two are interrupted before they have time to finish the discussion. Peter’s phone rings first. It’s Tails, asking “Have you heard about Benjamin?” That’s how Ramona finds out. She will bear the shame of her reaction for the rest of her life, as will Peter, because their very first thought is, “Not this, too!”
* * *
Our spontaneous reaction is often our most stupid.
* * *
Finding out the truth about people is like a fire, destructive and indiscriminate. The truth about Benji burns through Beartown and Hed, and everyone who has ever had the slightest reason to be jealous of him or dislike him can see a crack in his armor now. They stick their knives in as hard as they can, every last one of them.
Few people would have dared to say anything to Benji face-to-face, so they do what people always do: talk about him, not with him. He needs to be dehumanized, turned into an object. There are a thousand ways of doing that, but there’s none simpler than the one we almost always use: taking his name away from him.
So when “the truth” spreads, people don’t write “Benjamin” or “Benji” on their phones or computers. They write “the hockey player.” Or “the school pupil.” Or “the young man.” Or “the queer.”
Some will later claim that they don’t hate homosexuals, they just hate Benji. Many of them will claim that “We were just surprised that he, of all people . . .” Some will suggest that, “If there’d been any sort of . . . sign . . . it might have been handled better.”