America Sucked Until It Didn't

He’s ten years old when he lands in America for the first time. Years later, he’ll remember this because Hey There Delilah was on the radio of the car pulling away from Logan Airport his mother was driving to their new home. He doesn’t remember much about the circumstances surrounding their big move halfway across the world. All he can recall is the sounds of long phone calls and stressed sighs echoing off the walls of the small apartment that he and his mother shared, and then one day she’d hung up the phone and entered their living room and fixed him with a serious look (not that she had the ability to look at him any other way).

“Karol, przeprowadzamy się do Ameryki.”

And that was that. Within the week they’d packed up the things they’d be taking with them and watched from the airplane window as Warsaw disappeared below them.

He didn’t really question it. What was there to question? Nothing had made much sense in his life up to this point, and if he’d ever stopped to question anything, he’d never stop asking questions.

Instead, he embraced the change. He had no anxiety regarding any sort of language barrier. How could he when his University professor mother had brought him up bilingual?

America. The land of opportunity. The land of Hollywood, and New York City and all the music his sister had sent him on burnt CDs from her college dorm room.

He remembers the day she left. Remembers it vividly because it also happened to be the day his father split, leaving their home at the end of a heated screaming match with his mother. Karol Szczepanski is all of five years old when this happens, but had the mental capacity to understand that his life was changing drastically. His father had left him behind and stole his sister away to America with him.

He can’t wait to see his big sister again. Doing the math in his head, he figures she’d be about twenty-one by now, twenty-two in August. They’d kept in touch, sort of, through letters (and her burnt CDs), but nothing ever of any importance, not until the last letter he’d gotten from her, around a year ago, saying that their father had died. His mother couldn’t find it in herself to be upset by the news, and so he figured neither should he. To him, that man had only been the obstacle between him and his sister, and now they could be reunited.

He’d never had a request rejected so quickly in his entire life.

_______

He’s been in America for all of six months when he’s bullied out of the Catholic school his mother had spent a lot on money on. (Even though he spoke the same language as them, those middle school gremlins had torn his accent to shreds.) His mother blames him, tells him he should have thicker skin, but enrolls him in the public school nonetheless.

As if that were a better solution. He’s met with the same treatment there, if not worse. (He wonders if his sister faced the same thing, even though she had been seventeen when she’d started American school.)

He trains himself to speak in a more New England accent. He drops his r’s and starts calling everyone kid and buddy until one day he realizes nobody is picking on him for sounding foreign anymore.

He realizes this only because now he’s left completely alone.

He walks the halls with no friends to banter with and he’s stopped trying to find people to sit with at lunch time.

America sucked as far as he was concerned.

­­­___

America sucked until it didn’t.

The first kid who’d been nice to him in America was a boy called Hunter. Karol had recognized him from his science class, but that was it. They’d never actually interacted until the day Hunter invited him to join the school’s theatre club. Apprehensive, as he still felt he couldn’t trust anyone to actually be nice to him, he timidly agrees to join, but only because the other boy had been so relentlessly insistent.

The first meeting was after school that day, and Hunter practically dragged him down the hallway sprinting to the auditorium after the final bell had rung. The club was accepting of all its new members, and the director ensured them that they’d have a lot of fun here, even though they had “much to do, much to do if this production of Romeo & Juliet is to be perfect”.

Karol couldn’t remember a time in his life that had made this much sense. It was like he belonged, and he had Hunter to thank.

“You know, I thought your accent was pretty cool.” Hunter told him weeks later as they approached dreaded Tech Week. Karol blushed, but smiled at the compliment. “You shouldn’t let them make fun of something that makes you you.”

It was the best he’d felt since moving across the world. (He started dropping his American accent around the boy).

At home, he couldn’t shut up about his new friend and his new love for theatre to his mother, who’d turned up her nose and kept her icy demeanor as she graded stacks and stacks of philosophy papers from her students at the University she’d been hired at. He’d grown used to this, and continued on, too excited to care about her indifference.

It’s only when he brings Hunter over after school one day that she has anything that resembles a real reaction. (Not in front of the poor boy, of course. She’s not a monster).

When Hunter’s mother picks him up, Karol enters the kitchen to see his mother seething with silent rage. He’s only ever seen her like this once, and that was when he was a five-year-old boy in Poland whose father had abandoned him and literally split his family in half.

She doesn’t even bother to yell in Polish, which he would’ve preferred.

“What are you, gay now? After all I’ve sacrificed to give you this life in America? How dare you do this to me? This is a shame, you know that, right?”

And he did. Even at eleven years old, he knew.

“Never bring that boy back here again. I don’t need anyone starting rumors.”

So he didn’t. Even though he couldn’t say he liked Hunter (or anyone) like that, he knew not to test his mother, not wanting her to refuse him the right to see Hunter the way she had done with his own sister.

Even though America sucked less because of his new friend, it still sucked because his mother was just as miserable as she had been in Poland.

___

When he comes home from school on his twelfth birthday, he hears her before he sees her.

“Cześć Lolek.”

It’s a voice, and a nickname, he hasn’t heard since 2002, since just before his father came home and blew up the entire Szczepanski family. He almost can’t believe his ears.

When he sees her, she’s much older, but he can still see the sister he knew and loved. His eyes fill with tears and he runs to embrace her and they cry at the reunion. Their mother scoffs in the corner of the kitchen and rolls her eyes. (He’s too happy and overwhelmed to wonder how his sister even managed to get the woman to agree to this).

They break the hug and his sister, Aleksandra, opens her bag to retrieve something. Ever observant, he notices a photograph of the girl, hugging another girl he assumes to be the roommate she’d mentioned in one or two of her letters from years before.

"Sto Lat,” she says to him, brandishing a wrapped parcel that he doesn't even have to unwrap to know what it is. "I know you know American music now, but it’s tradition, no?”

It’s the best birthday gift he’s ever gotten.

___

He’s fifteen, and high school is actually better than he could’ve imagined.

America has managed to suck much less than it did when he first got here.

He and Hunter are still as close as ever, but he’s hardly Karol’s only friend anymore. The theatre club is still their thing, but he’s also joined the soccer team while Hunter took to the Debate Club.

Whatever agreement between his mother and his sister was made three years ago, it still stood, and he sees Alex from time to time, though much too infrequently for his liking. When they do see each other, Karol can’t seem to avoid mentioning something stupid Hunter had done or something funny he had said. Alex listens and laughs genuinely, and in turn tells her brother all about Morgan, the girl she’d been friends with since college. (Their mother is still as miserable as ever, but they suppose that some people are just that way, so they don’t talk about her).

It’s 2012, everyone’s terrified of the world ending, and One Direction has cracked America. The biggest band in the world. The modern-day Beatles. Karol, though he’d never admit it to anyone but Alex and maybe Hunter, knows every word to all their songs. He’s always loved music. At first it was to prove he knew English words well enough to string them into a melody, but now it was just because it sounded nice.

So, when Alex mentions she may have tickets to see them in Connecticut, Karol’s eyes light up like he’s a little kid again.

In his excitement, there’s only one person who comes to mind. He sheepishly asks if Hunter could come, and Alex says of course like the two boys are a package deal.

Karol asks Hunter if he would like to go to the concert with him the following Monday at school. Hunter’s too excited to even care that people may have heard the two of them so excited about a boy band. One Direction were popular enough for the student body to become desensitized to the name anyway.

It’s a two-hour drive from their hometown an hour outside of Boston to the concert venue in central Connecticut, but it flies by like they’re driving up the road to get ice cream. Karol and Hunter occupy the backseat, while Alex drives and Morgan rides shotgun. They’re singing at the top of their lungs and the air is light. They’re all happy and their cheeks hurt from smiling. It’s everything that youth is supposed to feel like.

The concert itself, is even better. Despite the horde of screaming fangirls, Karol is aware of only the boys onstage and the one beside him.

It’s been three years since the outburst his mom had at the simple act of Karol bringing Hunter over, and he hasn’t stopped thinking about it since. He’d never been one to question his life that had made such little sense before, but now that things were working themselves out, he couldn’t help but wonder. What was it about the boy that made him feel normal, wanted? At first, it was the fact that someone had actually paid attention and been nice to him. But he was far from the boy bullied for his accent and ostracized by the school, and yet Hunter still made him feel that way.

What are you, gay now?

He heard his mother’s words through over the sound of Louis’ verse on Little Things.

Maybe he was. He’d never felt the way he’d felt when he was with Hunter when he was with any girl. Nobody had made a connection that could even hope to hold a candle to the one Hunter had created.

This is a shame, you know that right?

And he did, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Somewhere in the blur of emotions and singing and jumping and bad dancing, Karol lost himself and in the slow chorus of What Makes You Beautiful, he took Hunter by the arm and looked him in the eyes. The other boy never broke the contact, and in fact never stopped singing along, almost as if he were waiting for this moment all night.

Neither knew who leaned in first, but in the grand scheme of things it didn’t really matter, did it? They were cheesy and childish, but as far as first kisses went, kissing the boy who had been your first friend in a new country at a One Direction concert with your sister and her best friend, well, Karol couldn’t have imagined it any better.

When they broke the kiss, the song had started to wind down and the boys laughed with each other at what they had just done.

Nothing would really change, except now there was a new identity that both of them would have to accept about themselves. Not that they had any issues with that.

The second time they kiss, Karol is certain he initiates it, and doesn’t break it until the lights start to come up, and he hears Alex and Morgan giggling.

He turns to the girls and see them locked in the same position he had just been with Hunter. Alex turns to him and they share a knowing look.

It’s funny how things go, disobeying their mother so blatantly. They know they have to keep this from her, for now at least. No need to make her more miserable.

Neither knows who says it first. It’s simultaneous.

“Can you keep a secret?”