And They Lived...

To every queer person who grew up never seeing themselves in fairy tales but still dreamed of being swept off their feet in a Technicolor love story: this is for you, go find your adventure

To Steve, who swept me off my feet and made me believe I was worthy of being loved: together we lived

Also by Steven Salvatore

Can’t Take That Away

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Once Upon a Time

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29. Five Months Late

Acknowledgments

1

ONCE UPON A TIME

My mother is trying to get me killed.

“So, what do you think?” Mom asks, bouncing on the balls of her feet. I’ve just gotten back to my new dorm room suite with my twelve-year-old sister, Taylor. She couldn’t sit still for the short amount of time it took to unpack my entire life, so I’d taken her on a walking tour of the campus. We were gone for twenty minutes, which apparently was long enough for Mom to put a scrolly decal on the wall just above the head of my extra-long twin bed that says Once Upon a Time. She might as well have gotten one that says Live, Laugh, Love.

“I think I’m going to get the shit kicked out of me before classes start,” I say.

“Chase Arthur, watch your language.” Mom nods toward Taylor, who rolls her eyes.

Taylor looks awkward and innocent—still incubating in the stage between ugly duckling and beautiful swan—but I know better.

“Sorry. But …” I stick out my tongue and gesticulate wildly toward the wall. “Seriously, Mom. Why? You know the rules.” I swipe my phone from the desk and pull up the email about move-in day. “Only adhere things to the walls with tacky stuff.” My fingers pinch the air.

Mom waves her hand dismissively and glances toward the corkboard above my desk at my high school Drama King picture. “Oh, relax, you’re such a drama queen.”

I was not in the drama club or anything like that. I was crowned Most Dramatic, aka Drama King, aka the person most likely to cause a whole scene and then gossip about it later. Which, fair.

The picture is ripped down the middle. Missing in action: Leila Casablanca, my former best friend, voted Drama Queen. We haven’t spoken in months, and I seethe when I think about how I’ll probably run into her because she just had to come to my college. But I love this picture of me, so I keep it. Seriously, I fucking sparkle in a tiara.

“The sign peels right off,” Mom continues, ripping the e at the end of Time, so now it reads Once Upon a Tim.

“You’re gonna get me written up by RA Tim,” I say. RA Tim is so cute I could cry, so, okay, that wouldn’t be the worst thing.

“It’s a sign,” Taylor chimes in, reading my mind, her legs dangling off the edge of my perfectly made bed. “You should make a move.”

My face heats. “Taylor!”

Mom goes silent. Then, “You know to use protection, right?”

My eyes widen. “Ahhhh, whenareyouleaving?”

Taylor erupts in a witchy cackle.

This is why we requested an early move-in. It’s better that we get all this embarrassing crap out of the way now before other people have to witness it. My three other suitemates arrive tomorrow with the rest of the freshman class, but Mom, in her infinite wisdom, knew I’d be an anxious mess and would need to carve out my space first.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” Mom says.

“When ya going?” I won’t admit this out loud, but I will miss her.

Taylor goes quiet. Her face scrunches up the way it does when she’s about to cry. It amazes me how, no matter how old she gets, she never loses the ability to cry on a dime. What sucks is that I’m the reason for her tears now.

“Hey, stop.” I hop onto the bed. Mom sidles up on her other side. “I’m not going to be gone forever. I’ll be back for your birthday and maybe Thanksgiving and definitely Christmas and probably a bunch of weekends in between because, seriously, this place is a hole.”

Which obviously isn’t true because this campus is everything.

But it elicits a mucusy giggle from Tay. I’ll take what I can get.

Mom sucks a long breath through her nose and glances out the window. The sky is streaked with a late-summer hot orange. “We really should get on the road, Taylor-bean.”

With that, all the frustration and exhaustion from packing up my entire existence back home, driving four hours upstate, and unpacking said existence into this tiny room is replaced by an overwhelming sadness that sucks all the air out of the room.

I don’t want them to go.

I’m not ready for this.

The finality of it. That once they walk out of this suite and out of this dorm and get into their car, they’re gone, leaving me behind.

“You could stay. My suitemates won’t be here until the morning. There’s—”

Mom grabs my hand and squeezes. “As much as I want to move in here for the rest of the school year—” She pauses, clearly contemplating it. “I think we should get on the road.”

“What’re you gonna do, alone?” Taylor asks.

I know it’s not meant to be a serious gut punch, but … I stammer, “Chill. Me time. Maybe I’ll do some sketching. Get a jump on some animation projects I wanna start this semester.” Be a strong, independent person and all that.

What’ll probably happen is I’ll end up watching a marathon of Disney movies on my laptop and falling asleep in a puddle of tears because there’s nothing to do when the campus is practically empty. The sportsball people have been moved in for a few weeks already, but I can’t honestly imagine me, uncoordinated queer AF Disnerd Chase Arthur, just, like, wandering up to the athletes’ dorm being all, “Hey, wanna party? I got the Moana sing-along on iTunes.” The thought alone makes me break out in a cold sweat.

“Sounds like a great time,” Taylor deadpans. She mashes her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“He’ll call Rae,” Mom says. “Won’t you, sweetheart? She moved into her dorm last weekend, right?”

“I told you this already,” I begin. “Rae and I made a pact that we would not call or see each other until at least the first full week of school is done. You know, so that we give each other time to find ourselves or whatever.”

“In one week, you’re going to find yourselves?” Taylor’s glasses fall to the tip of her nose again. She purses her lips as she turns toward Mom. “He’ll call her the second we leave.”

Rae Ackerman is my actual best friend. She goes to the pristine “little” Ivy League school Laurene University, which is, no joke, two miles away from me at CIA, Cayuga Institute of the Arts. We didn’t design it that way. She didn’t tell anyone, not even me, that she even applied to Laurene, let alone that it was her first choice, because she was so superstitious. She told me it killed her to keep it from me, especially when I told the entire senior class, the janitorial staff, teachers, school board, and the flock of pigeons that posted up outside our high school that CIA was my number one and that if I didn’t get in, my future career as Walt Disney Animation Studios’ head animator was DOA. Rae is my more practical other half. My very tall, very extra other half.

“You don’t know me,” I say with a smirk.

“I packed a surprise for you,” Taylor whispers. “Top drawer, next to your socks.”

My eyes narrow at her. “The fuck?”

Mom slaps me playfully upside my head. She snaps her fingers, a cue for Taylor to get off my bed, get her shoes on, and ready herself for a car ride home filled with tears and an inevitable playlist of Disney musical numbers to remember me by.

As if it’s my funeral.

But they do a great job holding themselves together. At least until our slow march out of the suite. And into the hallway. And down the stairs (because Mom is way too antsy for the elevator). And out the main entrance of the dorm. And into the empty parking lot to her car, where, upon arrival, she looks at me and bursts into tears.

I’m talking Niagara Falls–style bawling.

Her face, hot from the setting sun, is so red I’m worried she’ll pass out, and it’s not like Taylor can take the wheel while they’re driving home.

“I’ll be fine, Mom. I’m good.” I puff out my chest. “Totally. Great, even.”

I learned a long time ago, right around the time Dad dropped off divorce papers to Mom’s job and moved a few towns away and started dating a woman whose government name is Krissy(!), that sometimes it’s best to pretend to be okay around Mom. It makes it easier on her.

“I’m sorry your father flaked.” Mom sounds more upset than I am. “I was sure he’d be here to help and see you off.”

“You’re surprised? Par for the course. Which is probably where he is today: golfing.”

She shakes her head, avoiding Taylor’s disenchanted gaze. “Call me every day?”

“Mom!” Taylor snaps. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Okay, every other day!” Mom cries. “I just want to make sure my firstborn baby is alive.” She grabs my chin. “Every other day?” But it’s not a question.

“Every other day,” I repeat.

“And please eat, b-but …” Her words teeter on the edge of her tongue. She struggles to hold it back, her eyelids twitching. We’re so close I can practically hear her thoughts: “But please don’t overeat, and if you feel the urge to, don’t. Call me. Or seek out a therapist on campus. You’re gonna do that, right?” Last week, I overheard her talking to Taylor, saying, “Chase needs to make sure to watch for the freshman fifteen. It’s real. It was on 20/20. I saw what it did to Marcy’s son Jamie, and let’s just say I think she’s mispronouncing fifty.” As great as Mom is, she’s often the proverbial verbal bull in a china shop when it comes to saying the absolute worst things without realizing they can cause me utter devastation. She means well, and I always forgive her because she knows not what she does. Thankfully, she’s exercising some restraint today.

Mom shakes it off, then leans in close so Taylor can’t hear. “Please make sure you wear protection when you have sex. I left a box of condoms under your pillow—I didn’t know your size, so I guessed a sensible average—and I also got you some lubricant because they told me at Planned Parenthood that for, you know, it’s not naturally …” She motions with her hands and finally says, “Wet.”

Ohmygod, how do I make it stop?

My shoulders tense, my mouth slacks, my entire body goes into multisystem organ failure. Within seconds, I am deceased—new record for Mom.

She plants a big kiss on my cheek that smacks. “I love you. Be safe. Call your sister.”

“She’s right there.” I point to Taylor, who doesn’t hesitate to run back over and fling her arms around me.

“I’ll miss you,” she says. “But only because you’re the only person who still plays Barbies with me.”

Right. All her friends are way too cool for that “baby shit.” But honestly, there’s nothing more therapeutic than a good old-fashioned hair-styling sesh followed by a fashion show set to a super gay mash-up of Dua Lipa’s “New Rules” and “Prince Ali” from Aladdin that I made on GarageBand.

I’ve done a few stop-motion films with our combined dolls. My favorite is the one where my Prince Naveen doll from The Princess and the Frog and Kristoff from Frozen get glammed in subtle frosty make-up and play husbands whose lives come apart when they both fall for the same gender-ambiguous Ken doll. Until they become a throuple. It was avant-garde. High fashion. Art. And very, very gay. It was kind of major when it went viral. I included it in my portfolio alongside another viral short, and I think it elevated my college application. Who said you can’t make your obsessions work for you?

I wonder if Taylor will still put on Barbie fashion shows without me.

“You’ll come home for my birthday, right?” she asks.

“Wouldn’t miss it.” I have no idea if Mom will be able to afford a bus ticket home in October, so close to Thanksgiving break, but I’ll walk if I have to. I’ll just have to convince Rae, who has her car at Laurene, to come with me. Taylor is obsessed with her, and Rae has always thought of Taylor as a little sister, so it should be an easy ask. I kiss the top of her forehead. “Love you, sis.”

Taylor whispers, “Go find your adventure.”

Adventure is our code name for love. Because I’m that desperate that we had to find a way to talk about my love life all the time without me seeming like an obsessive mess. It might be super weak and cliché and cheesy, but all I want is to fall in love. Have an adventure. But I’m me, which means I’ll probably graduate a loveless virgin.

Taylor knows I daydream about falling in love, and she’s never judged me for it. Probably because she witnessed the dissolution of our parents’ marriage, too, so to us, nothing is more far-fetched and magical than finding actual love, the kind that doesn’t up and leave at the first sign of trouble, but instead holds your hand on the battlefield. It’s an adventure we know nothing about.

“Don’t become an asshole,” she says, peeling herself off me and slumping to the car.

“Don’t become a mean girl,” I say back.

“Boo, you whore,” she says in her best Regina George.

Mom clenches her jaw. “Language! My god, you kids!”

“What?” I say, “You showed us that movie.”

Mom opens the car door and leans on top of it, clearly not wanting to get in. Then she looks at Taylor and says, “Get in, loser, we’re going home.”

“Oh, burn,” I say. Mom always did love a good movie reference.

This is a good moment to walk away. End it on a funny, happy Mean Girls line. I blow an air kiss, suck in a breath, and make my way back toward the dorm.

I don’t turn back, nor do I stop walking, until I’m barreling down the hallway toward my suite. I can’t. If I stop, I’ll go back, and they’ll be gone.