What Happens After

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

The Houston Times

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

About the Author

By Dennis Abrams

Visit Harmony Ink Press

Copyright

What Happens After

By Dennis Abrams

Collin and his best friend, Nate, are high school juniors living in a suburb of Houston, where the politically and culturally conservative attitude makes coming out beyond difficult. One night they decide it would be a bit of harmless fun to sneak into a gay club in the city—a chance to dance, check out guys, and meet others like themselves.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

In minutes everything Collin took for granted is destroyed when a shooter’s bullets tear through the club. Collin survives, but that’s only the start of his ordeal. In the aftermath he has to face the loss of his friend, survivor’s guilt, the pain of his wounds, and judgment when he’s outed on a national level. Making it through his last year of school feels impossible when life as he knew it will never be the same.

To those who were there at Pulse that awful night, to those who were killed, and to those who survived to tell their stories to the world.

Acknowledgments

SO MANY people to thank, so many people who helped make this book possible.

Shelley Tanaka for pushing me and pushing me.

Dee Dillman and Jennifer Praeger and Pam Hoodes and Jeanne Badman and Steve Cole and Griffin Shea and Laura Deegan McAdams and Edward Nawotka and Alana Wilcox and Leah von Essen and Charles Brack and Joe Babcock and Paxton Malone and Jason Hoffart, all of whom read the manuscript, sometimes several times, and offered suggestions and advice and encouragement.

Amade, who was there for me.

Ernesto Mestre Reed, who went well beyond the call of duty and friendship.

And finally Anderson Cooper, whose heartbreaking coverage of the shooting at Pulse helped me to see the need to tell Collin’s story.

Chapter One

HERE’S THE thing.

No, the thing is….

No, definitely this is the thing.

So here’s the thing.

My name is Collin Williams.

If the name sounds familiar, there’s good reason for it. For the last few months, my name has been all over the place. Everywhere you looked. On the news. In newspapers. On cable. On the net. You really couldn’t miss me, even if you tried.

This I know for sure, because God knows I did try. But I couldn’t escape me. Or get away from me.

In many ways.

In all ways.

In every way.

You see, I am one of the ones who was there when it happened. When it happened.

I am one of the lucky ones who made it out and survived.

Lucky ones.

Survived.

At least that’s what they keep telling me.

Here’s the thing, though. Sometimes I don’t feel so lucky. I can’t figure out why I made it and others didn’t.

Others.

Nate.

Oh, Nate.

It’s been rough. For me. My family. My friends. Everyone.

It’s the mirror that tells the story. That tells my story. The story of that night.

The face I see looking back at me is not the one I had before it happened.

I look tired.

Still.

Like I just pulled off a month-long all-nighter.

All the way tired. Stressed-out. Worried. Scared. Angry. Thin. Older.

My hair looks pretty awful because I don’t care enough to do anything about it, and my skin looks even worse.

It’s in my eyes that you see it the most, though. They’re eyes that have seen too much. That know too much. That have seen things that nobody should ever see. Ever. Things I wish I’d never seen.

Things I wish I could unsee.

Have you ever seen a war film where they show the soldier after the war ended and he’s back home where he should feel safe, but there’s always a close-up of his eyes looking all sunken and haunted and he seems to be seeing something nobody else sees? Something beyond what everyone else is seeing?

Something that’s not in the frame. Something that’s not there.

Ghosts of the past, maybe?

That’s me. Those are my eyes when I look in the mirror.

A little less now, for sure. It’s getting better. But still.

Mom always tells me that eyes are the windows to the soul. If that’s the case, then I think my soul has been seriously damaged. Messed up. Fucked up. Permanently, maybe.

Mom also tells me that I’m like her: we don’t like to talk about ourselves; we don’t want to talk about the bad things that happen to us with others. We worry, she says, that others won’t understand. Or don’t really want to understand.

Or maybe we worry that they’ll understand all too well.

I know that talking about what happened is supposed to make me feel better. But I seriously doubt that.

Honestly, I’m not sure if anything’s going to make me better. Or if I ever will be. Completely anyway.

I’m not even sure I should be.

I’m no longer Collin. I’m no longer the guy just about to start his senior year in high school and worried about college. I’m no longer the guy I thought I was before it happened. I’m him. The guy. That guy. The kid that people point at. And whisper about. And feel sorry for. Or don’t feel sorry for, as the case may be.

But since everyone wants to know about it.

Here it is.

The story of that night. Of what happened a little over two months ago.

And then… what happens after.

Chapter Two

HERE’S THE thing. Before it all happened, I was a totally normal teen. Totally.

At least kind of, I suppose.

Or at least that’s how I saw myself.

Not too tall, not too short. Three years on the soccer team at Eisenhower High School kept me in pretty decent shape. I’m not the kind of guy you’d avoid looking at if you passed me in the hall, but probably not the kind of guy you’d look at a second time either.

I was kind of there and not there, if you know what I mean. I’m not, or wasn’t, really a jock, I wasn’t exactly a brain (my grades are good but nothing amazing), I wasn’t labeled a geek, or arty, not much of anything you can put your finger on. I was just that guy you’d see in your class or during lunch or around town (in my case Piney Oaks, Texas) after school somewhere and who you wouldn’t ever think twice about.

Until the moment I opened fire in a crowded classroom or something.

Sorry, bad joke.

But that worked for me; that was the way I wanted it, or thought I wanted it. I kept my head low and kept myself to myself. Breakfast at home with the parents. School. Soccer. Homework. Work at Freezie Treats three afternoons a week after school and Saturday afternoons. Mess around online. Bed.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

It’s not like I didn’t have friends. I did. Well, kind of, anyway. I had a couple of buds on the soccer team, and some other guys I knew well enough to hang out with at lunch, but I guess that was really about it.

No one who counted as a real friend, the kind you could tell anything to. The kind you shared your life with.

But at the start of my junior year, my guidance counselor told me I needed to join an afternoon school club of some kind to bump up my chances of getting into a decent college. Something artistic would be good, he said. Something to balance out the soccer. And since drama club seemed to be the easiest one to get through, I signed up.

That’s where I met Nate.

Nate Jonson, to be precise. Not Nate Hamilton, who played football and most definitely was not my Nate.

Like me, my Nate is, or, um, was, average beyond any reasonable doubt. Failed to make the soccer team, but crushed it in debate. Good-looking but not so much you’d be afraid to talk to him. Boy Next Door, I guess you’d call him. A too-skinny blond with blue eyes that sparkled and seemed to see everything and know even more while all the while appearing to be amused by it all.

Our friendship was immediate. We were sitting next to each other while some science nerd was trying and failing miserably to get through a short monologue. We rolled our eyes at each other at the same moment. I whispered, Can you believe this guy?

He whispered back, Not for a moment, that’s the problem, and we both did our best not to laugh out loud.

Throughout the rest of the meeting, we kept grinning at each other, daring each other not to laugh at the failed attempts at passion, comedy, and everything else onstage, as well as everyone else around us.

When it ended, I introduced myself; he did the same.

And we started talking. Not just talking but talking really fast. Like it had been building up for years and we’d each finally found the right person to share it with.

It didn’t seem to matter what we talked about….

The time has come, the Walrus said/To talk of many things/Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—/Of cabbages—and kings….

And we never really stopped.

Not about that of course, at least not at first. We didn’t need to talk about it. We just knew at once there was that we had in common.

Two regular kids in a public high school in a conservative Texas suburb who knew at once that they shared a secret they weren’t ready to let everybody in the world know.

We were totally average and normal teens who both happened to like boys.

Chapter Three

HERE’S THE thing.

It wasn’t anything we really needed to talk about. Or even really wanted to talk about, at least not at first. I didn’t need to tell him I was gay. He didn’t need to tell me that he was. And if I’m being totally honest here, and I might as well be, I couldn’t even begin to tell you precisely how we knew. We both just knew.

No questions asked.

And it felt like such a huge relief to know that I wasn’t alone. I mean, I knew in theory that I wasn’t the only gay guy at Eisenhower. I did. It wasn’t even statistically possible. (I’d done the research.) And Nate knew he wasn’t the only one either. (He’d done the research as well.) But it wasn’t until we met in that stupid drama club (it only took three meetings before we stopped going regularly and just left school to go hang out somewhere) that I knew for sure that I’d found another one like me.

And it was such a relief to find him; it was like I could suddenly breathe. And relax, at least for a little bit. With Nate, I could be myself. With Nate, I didn’t have to keep my guard up or pretend to have a girlfriend or pretend that I liked a girl or something, always worrying if someone would somehow figure me out. He knew and had figured me out.

And it was okay.

It was the same with Nate.

You get me, he told me once. I can be me and you get it. I’ve always felt so alone and separate from everyone. Like I was in a cloak of invisibility or something. But now you see me.

Oh, Nate.

I did. I swear to you I did.

I do want to say, though, for the record and once and for all and despite whatever you may have read or heard, we weren’t boyfriends. It wasn’t like that, not even close to anything like that. What we did do was talk. About the music we liked but couldn’t admit to in public (for me old-school Madonna, for him the soundtrack for every Disney animated film ever made). We talked about guys we thought were hot. We talked about guys we didn’t think were hot. We talked about who at school we would go to a dance with if we could. Who we’d date if we dared. Who we’d mess around with if we could. Who we thought might be gay. Who we hoped might be gay. All the things we imagined straight boys talked about with their friends when talking about girls. But we were talking about other boys.

We eventually talked about what we’d actually done so far. I’d kind of messed around with a guy at soccer camp the previous summer but nothing beyond making out and maybe a little bit more; Nate hadn’t even gone that far. We talked about when we knew we were gay—it turned out that we both knew for sure when Kurt and Blaine kissed on Glee, a coincidence we both found ridiculous as well as a clear and obvious sign from the universe that we were destined to be best friends.

But it was just talk between us. Fantasies. We knew we’d never hold hands with another guy or go to a dance and dance with another guy at school. Not at this school, anyway. We knew we’d never be brave enough to take a chance and ask another guy for a date. We knew we’d never have the nerve to tell anyone at school or even our parents that we were gay.

Not as long as we lived in Piney Oaks, anyway.

Because here’s the thing.

Close to six years ago, something happened here. Something bad.

Something really, really bad.

A twelve-year-old kid, Phillip Moller, who neither of us knew because he went to a different school and lived in a different part of town, took a gun to his head and blew his brains out because he’d been bullied so much and so badly by kids a year older than him who thought he was gay.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine what it must have been like for him, every single day, every morning the moment when he woke up, knowing and dreading what was going to happen to him at school? Can you imagine being so scared and lonely and helpless and hopeless that the only thing you can think of to do is take your dad’s gun out of his nightstand and shoot yourself just because you can’t bring yourself to face another day?

I couldn’t then. Not fully. Not completely. But I can now.

All too easily, to be honest.

And even though I know things have changed a lot and people in a lot of places, maybe even most places, maybe even here in Piney Oaks, are totally all right with the whole gay thing, a small voice in my head kept telling me to lay low. Keep it to yourself. You’ll probably be okay, but maybe not.

Why take a chance?

I knew all that and so did Nate.

Of course, neither of us had told our parents. Each for our own reasons.

Nate was just afraid to, afraid of what they’d say. His dad, James, had served in the military and his mom, Susan, was kind of religious. Okay, more than kind of religious. She went to one of the big megachurches in town every Sunday morning, and believed every word.

Nate had told me that he thought his parents worried he might be gay. Both seemed uneasy with his interest in theater and his lack of interest in sports or dating. And apparently they thought that maybe Nate and I were BFs, although they were both too scared that we were to come out and ask.

It was weird. On the days we hung out at Nate’s, his mom, while polite and all, always looked at