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Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. ( Mad Men 2x05)
Simon freezes, unwilling to believe his friend’s question. Surely he misheard, or maybe his brain stumbled over the English. “Uh, what?” He finally stammers.
“Have you ever been caught in the act?” Emilia repeats with a giggle, reading aloud from her phone. After a week of running icebreaker games as a freshman orientation leader, she’d decided to do the same for her friends, this time with a spicier list of questions.
Acid pools in Simon’s stomach as the words sink in, nauseating tendrils of panic tightening. A long-buried reel of pixelated screencaps and anonymous vitriol flashes behind his eyes. But then… he looks up. Reads Emilia’s face. Understands, despite his disbelief. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. None of them do, Simon realizes as he scans the faces awaiting his answer. Even the short time he’s had to get to know these friends has been enough for him to trust, to a certainty, that absolutely none of them would await his answer with such warm smiles and teasing eyes if they had any idea about the video. They’re good people, his friends, and they simply don’t know.
And how would they? That video–its aftermath–its other victim–everything–all that happened to Simon Eriksson, a boy they’ve never met. A name they’ve never heard. All that happened in another life, a life Simon’s hardly breathed a word of on this campus. He’d always wondered if it would catch up to him anyway, if one day he’d be recognized as the boy in that video, the boy that foreign prince came out for. But not yet, it seems.
“There’s clearly a story to tell if it’s taking you this long to answer,” Shae teases, reminding Simon where he is. What he’s been asked.
“No, no story,” he rapidly stutters out. “Sorry–I wasn’t sure what you meant at first. But no, the answer is no.”
And maybe some of his friends might still believe there’s a story, might misinterpret his flushed cheeks and his fluster, but it’s the truth. Simon Martinez has never been caught in the act, never had a private moment stolen and broadcast to the world. It simply never happened.
Emilia moves on, quizzing Ben about skinny dipping and Shae about the wildest lie they’ve ever put in a Tindr profile. Simon can only half-listen, too rattled by the evidence of how successfully he’d wiped his slate after leaving Sweden.
Five years ago, Simon Eriksson had disappeared in a flurry of bureaucratic paperwork. One minute Simon was making plans with Ayub to hang out after his shift–because he had to get out of this room, had to do something this summer other than stare at the ugly gray walls of their new apartment–and the next Linda was summoning him and Sara to the living room. The timing seemed impossibly, suspiciously, convenient. For as long as Simon could remember, his mother’s US visa application had languished in some faraway queue. She’d explained it so many times: how now that abuela had US citizenship, she could sponsor her children to join her. How their scattered family would finally reunite, if only they could be patient. So very patient, because the family visa backlog stretched more than a decade. Abuela’s dream coming to fruition had always been such a remote prospect that Simon had assumed it would never come to pass, or not soon enough for him to follow. So when Linda announced her application had finally been processed… well, Simon had his doubts about the timing. Wondered what calls might have been made, by whom, to expedite a tidy solution to an embarrassing situation. To ensure the breakup stuck and sweep away inconvenient reminders of the royal family’s recent turbulence.
But however their transatlantic move came to pass, Simon can’t say he regrets it. Not when Mama beams every time the family gathers around a table instead of a phone for the holidays. Not when Sarah has made the most of this fresh start. Certainly not when he can just… exist… in peace. A welcome return to anonymity, and all it took was a new country, a new name, and leaving everything else behind. Linda reclaimed her birth name, Martinez, on arrival in the States, and her children followed suit. Simon Eriksson lives on only in his birth certificate and tabloid archives.
Simon hears his name called and realizes it’s his turn again, but this time he doesn’t get a chance to answer: Li and Shae jointly intone Never! as soon as Emilia asks about Simon’s first time getting drunk. Simon grins and laughs out a confirmation. Everyone here knows he doesn’t drink, and most know why. It’s not his whole past he’s kept secret, just a few details. Just a few tiny, life-altering details. Once, he might have said life-ruining, but time has proved him wrong. This life he’s living is far from ruined, it’s just different. Surprisingly better in nearly every aspect, or at least the aspects he’s willing to think about. Simon wonders if he’ll ever share those missing details with his new friends. If he’ll ever tell them any of the things that never happened. He thinks he’d like to, sometimes. Thinks he might be ready to start shedding the comforting cloak of his new identity.
The next time Emilia’s interrogation makes its way to him, he sees an opportunity to test the waters.
“Alright, Simon. First time: fairy tale or fiasco?”
Simon chuckles at the cheesy phrasing. “Ah, both?” An impulsive answer. A dare to himself to trust his new friends with a piece of his first life.
“Care to elaborate?”
Simon weighs his words. He knows he could pass, but he doesn’t want to. It’s his story and he can tell it however he wants.
“It was this guy I’d almost kind of started something with until… well, stuff kept happening. Going wrong.” Not being like that. His brother dying. Queer panic redux, dynastic succession edition. “He’d just broken it off again, but then he calls me drunk and lost in the middle of the night and starts pouring his heart out.” More than drunk. Wasted and high and dangerously alone. “So I go rescue him and he just keeps on babbling all this stuff that would have been great to hear if he weren’t so damn drunk. I haul him home to sleep it off, and I figure in the morning he’ll be back to avoiding me. But… well, I guess he’s an honest drunk.” Honest and weirdly poetic and heartbreakingly beautiful without his mask in place. “He still remembered it all once he was sober, and he didn’t take any of it back. And he asked me to stay. So… I did. And then he asked me to hold him, and I did. And then, well…” Simon can’t help smirking.
“So you’re saying he was the fiasco, and you were the fairy tale knight in shining armor?” Li teases.
“Maybe.” Simon likes this version of the story. It does sound a little like a fairy tale, told this way. The Disaster Prince and The Heroic Pauper. A warm memory untainted by the scabbed wounds of the actual fiasco, of all the parts he carefully edited out. All the things that never happened to Simon Martinez. The video and its viral future. The drugs and their origin. Why the other boy had broken it off before and why Simon would soon be forced to do so himself. Their tumultuous attempts at revolution and its crushing collapse.
Emilia moves on to the next person, and the group loses interest in the game before any further questions come to Simon. He’s almost sorry not to get another turn, another opportunity to reclaim a few details of Simon Eriksson’s life. Maybe not tonight, and maybe not to everyone gathered here. But for the first time in five years, he thinks he might be ready to acknowledge all of himself again. All those things did happen, and they happened to him.