Originally, Sullivan Reardon didn’t like day care. Both his parents worked. That was just the way of it. One day his mother dropped him off at the YMCA and he cried and cried in a corner. He thought that if he cried hard enough she would show up.

She did not.

            Mrs. Eden, the old Black woman who cared for them, came to him while he was crying on the mat and said, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” and Sully didn’t know what that meant because—in his four year old estimate—he already had plenty to cry about.

            He just got used to it. He didn’t really enjoy day care. Sully just got used to it. He didn’t think  of it then. He thought of it later, when he was at his desk, in his jeans and a vertically striped short sleeved shirt, typing on his laptop about life, trying to figure shit out. He was trying to figure so much out. Over and over he had scribbled: How do I get pure again? And: Was I ever pure? What the fuck does that mean?

Then he would go back to writing little bits and pieces of life or he would write random things like:

Balliol makes me feel pure.

Tommy makes me feel pure

No… Balliol reminds me that I should be pure?

What is pure?

Do I feel pure with Chris?…

Justin.

Justin Reily.

Secret: the truth. I never tell people… Justin Reily is an experience I would pay money to erase. I don’t know if I’m glad or sad that my friends know about it.

Justin Reily:

            “Do you think God’s going to punish you?”

            “I don’t even believe in God.”

            “Then what’s holding you back? I do believe in God and he’s not holding me back.”

            Sully sighed. his heart was thumping. It was pounding against his rib cage like that first time, and he began to unbuckle his jeans. But Justin said:

            “No,”

            Justin pointed to his crotch. His penis was rising up, thick, bobbing, turgid from the black mass of hair.

            “You never did this,” he said. “Not to me. Why don’t we start here? Why don’t you find out how good chocolate bars taste?”

            “I’m getting undressed anyway,” Sully tells  him, and pulls off his clothing quickly. When he is naked he crawls on his knees a few feet to Justin, who sits on the bed waiting. Sully takes the other boy’s dick in his hands, and then buries his face in Justin Reily’s groin.

Up until Justin, Sullivan Reardon had believed, because that was what he had been taught, that sex and love were part of each other. Later he had learned that this was not true for all people, that, for some defective and degenerate people out there the two were completely divorced. His several weeks affair with Justin, though, had taught Sully something about himself he didn’t much like, something he still pushed to the background and only now, a whole year later, was able to deal with.

            He was one of those defective and degenerate people.

BALLIOL HAD COME TO THE day care at the end of that year. He was small for his age and Sully was drawn to the little caramel skinned boy immediately. Looking back, Sullivan Reardon could say that Balliol was a lot like those paintings of the Christ Child from the Middle Ages—only blacker. He was quiet, but not cowed. Lincoln Balliol was full of self possession.

            Sullivan immediately set his sights on the other boy, and the other boy, for his part, gave Sullivan as cool and calm of a nod as ever a four year old, or for that matter many forty year olds, did. But they did not speak. Sullivan gave Balliol presents: the last pudding, a stolen Jello-pop, a Pop Tart from home. Balliol, with regal grace, accepted.

            Then one day when they were sitting around at play circle and Sully repeated that his father had lost his job, Tommy Riddiger said, “Your dad works for my dad. My dad is the head of Circumnavification and that’s like the owner of the paper. You know what I think, Sully? I think my dad fired your dad.”

            “He did not!” Sully went red and his brow furrowed.

            “I think he did,” Tommy Riddiger continued, pleased. “You don’t know.”

            “I don’t think he did,” Balliol said, quietly.

            They looked at him. It was the first time he’d spoken.

            “I said,” Balliol repeated. “I don’t think he did. And I don’t think Circumnavification is a word. In fact,” the four year old went on, “I’m sure it isn’t.”

            “Who are you!” Tommy Riddiger demanded. “Is your dad the king of Everything?”

            “No,” said Balliol. “But he does own six steel factories.”

            And then Balliol turned to Sully…

            And smiled.

The year they moved onto Jury Street Sullivan Reardon came home from school. He was five years old, already gangly, a long faced, homely child with dirty blond hair.

            “I don’t like the new school,” he said.

            “Saint Pat’s?” his father, who was blond and perfect and perfectly knit together, in blue trousers and white shirt with a blue tie like—Sully thought—a grown up’s school uniform—looked down on him. “What’s there not to like about Saint Pat’s?”

            “They don’t like me,” Sully said, simply.

            “They do like you,” his mother insisted. “They adore you!”

            “How do you know?” Sully’s scowl was fierce. There was something he suspected about his mother. He suspected even then that… she didn’t have the answers. That there was no way she could have the answers.

            “Well, it’s that they don’t know you,” his father picked up the thread of things. “Once they know you they’ll love you. What makes you think they don’t love you now?”

            “Because they laughed at me.”

            “For what?”

            “At school they were talking about getting married.”

            “The teachers?”

            “No. The kids. And they said that Bobby would marry Suzie and that Dan would marry Joanne and that Ryan would marry Lisa. And then I said that Ryan should marry Billy.”

            “But, Sport… “ his father gave a high, small, worried laugh. “That’s not really possible.”

            “That’s what they said,” Sully told his father. “They said it was stupid and boys didn’t marry boys and I said why not because I was going to marry Bailey when I grew up—”

            “Who’s she?” Sullivan’s mother frowned.

            Sullivan frowned sharply back at her.

            “Bailey’s not a she, Mom. Bailey’s Bailey. My friend Bailey. They said I couldn’t marry him,” Sully went on. “But I’m sure we’d be happy together.”

            “But Sport,” his father went on. “That’s not… It’s not done. It can’t be done.”

            “Why not?” Sully protested. “I’d be happy with him. He’d be happy with me. Why couldn’t we get married?”

            His father’s brow knit. He blew out his cheeks looking rather frustrated and then said, “Sullivan: marriage isn’t about who you’d be happy with.”

            How ironic!    

It was thirteen years before Sullivan Reardon woke up in his divorced mother’s house, a grown man lying next to his sleeping boyfriend and, clenching his hands into fists as he banged the souls of his feet on the mattress in laughter,  remembered this.

When Dan Mitchum was about six years old, someone asked him if his baby sitter was good to him. They were in a grocery store, and Dan hadn’t understood who the woman was talking about. Finally he’d blinked and looked up and said, “That’s my sister.”

            Keisha had been too… embarrassed? To say anything. The woman looked from her to the little fair haired boy with the bright blue eyes and said, “Oh… your half sister.”

            Dan screwed up his face and Keisha explained something that was over his head, and then they kept walking.

            “Keisha,” Dan said. When he spoke back then the first syllable always took a long time so that it came out, “Keeeeeeeeeeee-sha?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What’s a half sister? How can you be a half sister?”

            “A half sister,” Keisha explained to her younger brother, “is when you have the same dad but a different mom, or the same mom but a different dad.”

She was home from college that summer.

            “But we don’t, right?” Dan said. “You’re not my half sister?”

            “No,” Keisha told him. “I’m your sister sister.”

            “Then why did that lady say what she said?”

            Keisha, who Dan thought was very pretty, who had skin the color of peanut butter though she didn’t take it as a compliment when he said that, told him to wait until she’d paid for the groceries and then in the car she would explain it.

            In the car she strapped the skinny little boy into the seat next to her and then she said, “See that little boy. He looks like you.”

            Dan nodded and stroked his chin reflexively.

            “His mother does not look like me. Or like our mother. Not really.”

            “But she looks like our dad.”

            “People are different,” Keisha said. “Daddy is like those people, and mom is more like—”

            Dan got very excited and he clapped his hands when he saw a crowd of women dressed in Sunday finery, coming from Mount Olivet Baptist to do some after church shopping.

            “Mom looks like those people.”

            “But they’re not the same people,” Keisha said.

            “Of course they are.”

            Keisha smiled and cupped her brother’s chin in her hand.

            “For you… maybe. But not in this world. They are Black. Those people are white. Mama is Black, her father was white.”

            “Then she’s half and—”

            “There is no half and half. Not in America,” Keisha told him. “And Mama is Black and Daddy is white, and that is why I look like I do and you look like you do. I look a little more like Mama but you… no one could tell Mama had you.”

            Dan looked at her, his blue eyes wide and frightened. And then he burst into tears.

            “What—?”

            “I don’t want to look like I came from somewhere else. I don’t want to—”

            This was not Keisha Mitchum’s intent. She held her crying brother to her for a long time. The engine was running the windows were down. A white woman came and said, “Is there a problem?”

            Keisha looked up and said, “My baby brother just discovered race.”

When Dan was sent to The Experimental School, they told him he couldn’t play Malcolm X in the school play during Black History Month.

            “Why not?”

            The whole class burst out laughing.

            “That’s enough!” Mrs. Castaneda told them all, and then explained, as gently as possible,” Because, Daniel… you’re not African-American?”

            “What’s that?” Dan sat up interested.

            “Black,” Mrs. Castaneda said, simply. “You’re not Black.”

            “Yes, I am!” Dan insisted.

            It had taken the arrival of his mother and his sister in the principal’s office to keep him from detention. He had repeated it over and over again until Mrs. Castaneda had asked him to leave and the class had laughed in his face. The white kids hated him. The Black kids couldn’t believe he’d try to be one of them, take something away from them. That’s what white folks always had to do! If no one could tell you were Black, then… why the hell try to be Black? Try to take away our month?

            Daniel’s mother enrolled him in a new school.