Gay Hell

I stand back, admiring my handiwork, the paint of the graffiti still dripping as it dries. Die fagots stands out against the white walls of the school’s common area in thick red paint.

“Graffiti, Zepper?” I hear behind me and spin to see Principal Newman looking up at me. “Isn’t that a bit juvenile, even for you?”

The insult doesn’t faze me.

“Just showing off my art, Mr. N,” I tell him, a sneer playing across my face.

“Art? You call this art?” he asks, gesturing to the words on the wall. “Two words one of them misspelled?”

I glance back at the paint and realize I only put one g in faggots. Oh well.

“Spelling was never a strong suit for me,” I tell him.

He nods. “Neither was math, or history, or science. How you’re graduating, I’ll never know. My office. Now.”

I head to his office, a room I’m all too familiar with as I’ve spent the better part of senior year in it. When we get there, I sit down in what is basically my assigned seat and prop my feet up on the desk. Newman glances at my feet and looks for a moment like he’s about to tell me to take them off his desk, but he doesn’t. Instead, he sighs, rolls his eyes, and gives me a serious look.

“Will,” he says, which gives me pause. He never uses my first name. Something about that makes me drop my feet from the desk and sit up a little straighter. “You’ve been a handful this year and it’s easy to imagine why. Losing a parent—”

“Don’t talk about Dexter!” I interrupt, dripping venom into my father’s name.

“You’ve been lashing out this year. Last year you were a great student. Respectable, fastidious, punctual. Now you’re rude to your teachers, you’re only doing enough work to skate into graduation, and you’re skipping classes. Now, graffiti? I’ve been overlooking your behavior so far, but not this. You’re suspended from school, four days OSS.”

Out of school suspension? I wouldn’t normally care, hell, OSS is just a vacation from school after all, but I was making sure to get enough work done to not be held back. I had a huge project due for Astrological Sciences that basically required having a partner.

“Sir,” I said, and didn’t miss it when Newman’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Mrs. Hillson’s project is due on Monday. If I leave school now, I won’t be able to find a partner. Could my suspension start after today?”

“I’m afraid not. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying and writing…” he seemed to be deciding on whether or not to quote my art, “…what you wrote is not okay. You’ll have plenty of time to work on the project while you’re serving out your suspension. Now let’s get you home. Did you drive today?”

“No. My car is in the shop. I rode with Lucy today.”

“Well, we’ll just have to call your mother then. Let’s go.”

He led me out to the main office where the secretaries worked. The entire room was surrounded by windows. Standing in the principal’s doorway, I could see right through to where I was tagging. No wonder I’d gotten caught.

“Sit here,” he said, indicating the chair outside his office as the bell rang, signaling the end of third period. He then looked at one of the secretaries and said, “Linda, call Ms. Zepper please and inform her of her son’s suspension.”

I looked back at the door and noticed Tony Plasson standing there. I felt my expression harden without my permission as I sneered at him. He looked back at me, unaffected.

Tony Plasson is a faggot. He’s one of the three openly gay kids in our school but unlike the other two, he doesn’t have any friends. As he walks by, I scratch my nose with my middle finger, flipping him off without anyone seeing. Again, he has no reaction.

“Yes, hello Ms. Zepper. I’m calling to inform you that your son, Will, has been suspended from school,” Linda says into her phone. There’s a pause while she listens to my mom talk. “Well, I can’t really say what he wrote over the phone, but he spray painted graffiti onto a wall. Yes. It does start immediately, if you’re able to pick him up. Yes, ma’am. Four days. He can return on Monday. Thank you, Ms. Zepper, we’ll see you soon. Will?” I look at her. “Your mother will be here in about ten minutes. Just sit tight there until she gets here, okay?”

I give her a nod, feeling my stomach tighten. My mom was going to fucking kill me.

“Mr. Zepper,” Newman says behind me, grabbing my attention. I look back to see him leaning out of his office. “Come in here, please.”

Wondering what he could possibly want now, I walk back into his office to find Tony sitting in my seat. Begrudgingly, I sit in the other one and look at Newman expectantly.

“You’re going to be completing your project for Mrs. Hillson with Tony here,” he says.

“What? No way!” I exclaim. “I’m not working with that f—” I stop myself before I say faggot and change direction, “—freak.” I can tell that Newman knew I wasn’t going to say that.

“Mr. Zepper do not call him that or I will add to your suspension. Because you were not in class, there were an uneven number of students and Mr. Plasson here does not have a partner. You do not have a partner. Mr. Plasson has better grades than you do and you would be wise to work with him. He’s agreed to help you as well.”

I glance at Tony to see him just staring at me. I do need to get a good grade on this project to keep my average up.

“Fine,” I say.

“It would be most efficacious if we were to meet at my house after school today. Let’s exchange telephone numbers and we’ll hash out the details via SMS.”

This was the reason nobody was friends with Tony. He spoke like a fucking moron.

“Whatever you would find to be most efficacious,” I mocked, pulling out my phone. We exchanged numbers while Newman sat there with a smug look on his face.

“I would find it agreeable were you to refrain from mockery. I believe it will exacerbate the undeniable predicament in which we find ourselves at present.”

I want to punch him in the face.

“Well boys, why don’t you get going? Tony, you have a class. Will, go wait for your mother by the front door.”

I get up and follow Tony out. We stop in the common area where he’ll need to head deeper into the school and I’ll be waiting by the front door.

“What were the conditions that led to your suspension?”

“Did that fucker tell you about that?!”

“He did not. I happened to witness an order for your suspension lay upon his desk.”

“Dude, why do you talk like a fucking idiot?”

“Perchance it is you who chooses to use a manner of speaking which people of higher learning would find idiotic. I happen to prefer vernacular which highlights my intellect while I engage in social interaction.” After a brief pause, he says, “So are you going to tell me or will I be forced to ask you once again.”

In response, I point to the words on the wall. The janitor is scrubbing at them while throwing me dirty looks, but Die fagots still shows there, obvious as day.

“Oh my,” Tony says, neither sounding or looking worried or surprised. “I think it may be prudent for me to inform you that I am a homosexual.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“If you would deign to do so, I would be quite grateful if you did not call me a faggot while we work together. While I do not relish the idea of us working together on a project and, in particular, on a project that attributes itself to such a high percentage of our grade, us maintaining a modicum of respect toward one another will undoubtedly be to our mutual benefit.”

“Right. Let’s make a deal. I won’t call you a faggot, or queer, or cocksucker, if you agree to talk like a normal person.”

“Well, queer is no longer an offensive word and cocksucker is simply not an insult as I am, indeed, a cocksucker. I shall make an attempt to use simpler language while we are conversing.”

I glare at him in annoyance. “When are you going to start?”

“I already have,” he says, looking offended for the first time.

“William Zacharias Zepper!” A voice rings out behind me, freezing my insides. I turn to see my mother, her face actually red in anger, storming up to me. “You defaced school property?!” she demands, then looks to where the janitor is scrubbing away my art. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she hisses at me quietly, completely ignoring Tony. “Is this because of—”

“Don’t!” I snap, cutting her off. She sighs in exasperation.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Zepper,” Tony says to her. “Will and I are working on a project together and I’m gay. Principal Newman and I hope that he’ll be able to see that gay people are just that: people.”

So he can talk like a normal person. That makes him even more of an asshole.

“Well, that is delightful. When are you starting?”

“Today around 5 o’clock,” Tony tells her. “Will’s coming over to my house.”

I don’t argue. I know I’ll be grounded from everything, even though I’m eighteen and she technically can’t ground me. Not that I’ll say that to her. I like being alive.”

“Car. Now,” she says to me. “It was nice meeting you, Tony.”

When my mom and I got home, we got into a screaming match about my behavior and my grades and my dad. She took away my Xbox and my laptop but let me keep my phone so I can talk to Tony about our project.

I sat in my room, bored as hell, waiting for the time to pass. I scrolled through TikTok, but got bored of it quickly. Eventually, I pulled PornHub up on my phone and watched a few videos and jerked off. That was about fifteen minutes of my time used up. Only two hours to go. I got up from my bed and looked at myself in the mirror.

I’m tall at 6’3” with lean muscles, brown hair, and blue eyes. My nose is slightly bulbous at the end, but it’s shaped like a heart, so all the ladies love it.

During the time while I waited for Tony to message me, a couple of my friends text me, although I didn’t like what they had to say. Most of them were sick of my “homophobic bullshit” to quote most of them and none of them were happy about what I’d written on the wall.

They just didn’t understand. All this shit started because of that fucking queer, my father. He came out to me and my mom last year, told her that he had a boyfriend, and abandoned us. He’s a good-for-nothing faggot and I hate him and all the other cock sucking queers out there.

As if summoned by my thoughts, my phone chimed with a message from Tony. All it had was his address. As it was half an hour until 5 and it would take nearly twenty minutes to drive across town, I told my mom and we left for his house.

***

When we pull up to Tony’s house, I see his mother descending the steps and I get out of my mom’s car, heading towards her.

“Oh, you must be Will?” she says, looking me up and down. It might have been my imagination, but I felt like she was checking me out. I’m not going to lie, Tony’s mom is a total MILF.

“I am,” I say.

“Thank you so much for partnering with my son. He doesn’t have many friends, unfortunately. It’s so nice to see him finally making one.”

It takes everything in me to resist telling her I’m not friends with her faggot son, so I don’t say anything at all.

“Well, I’m off to work. You two boys have fun.” I didn’t like the twinkle in her eye. Did she think something was happening between me and Tony?

I guess it would be weird for a mother to see him and not wonder why he he’s single. Tony is only a little shorter than me, maybe 6’ even. His sandy blonde hair and emerald-green eyes aren’t an unattractive combination. I’ve even heard some girls say he’s good-looking. If he’d just stop talking like a pretentious asshole, he’d probably find a girlfriend…oh yeah, he’s gay.

I ignore my mom and Tony’s mom talking behind me as I head into the house without knocking. I don’t really care. I just want to get this over with as soon as possible.

“Tony?” I say once I’m in his house. It’s extremely dark, all of the window blinds are closed and so are many of the curtains. There are lamps on within the house, but none are in my sightlines.

“Will?” he called, his voice echoing downstairs. “Come on up.”

I jogged up the stairs and went into the only open room on the top floor. The moment I passed through the doorway into Tony’s room, the temperature dropped ten degrees.

“Dude, it’s really cold in your room,” I say to him before looking around. His room is…weird.

The walls are an off-white color and the floors are hardwood, but that’s where the normalcy stops. Although he has a ceiling light, it’s turned off. The light from the room comes from more than a dozen candles mounted to the walls. There are so many, I have no issue seeing at all. In the center of his room sits a large, circular rug. It's pure white with a blood red pentagram stretched across it, surrounded by symbols I don’t recognize.

“Welcome to my room, William.”

“Yeah, it’s just ‘Will’. Maybe we should go down into the kitchen and get started?” I suggest, not wanting to be in this room any longer than I have to.

“Nonsense,” Tony says. “We’re perfectly fine right here.” Then he reached up behind him and pulls a hood over his head.

I take several steps into his room, stopping at the edge of the carpet.

“What the fuck is this?” I ask him. “Are you trying to scare me or something?”

“I’m going to teach you a lesson. An important one. About treating others with respect.

I take another two steps, closing the distance between us.

“Fuck you, faggot,” I say, then shove him backward off the rug.

I intend for my arms to drop back to my sides, but they don’t. In fact, I can’t move anything. My arms are stuck out, palms splayed toward him, my legs are so stiff, they could be stone. Only my eyes can move, and they lock on Tony’s face.

He’s smiling sadistically.

“You fool,” he says, chuckling softly. “You’ve walked right into my trap.”

Tony claps his hands together and the sound echoes a hundred times in my skull. He starts chanting in what I assume is Latin and the room grows colder. I look down as much as I can to see the edges of the white carpet are turning black. But it’s not as if the carpet is being dyed, it’s as if the carpet is turning into darkness itself. The darkness begins to spread inward toward me until all I can see of the carpet is black. What happens next, I could never be ready for.

A hand, red as blood, with five fingers ending in long, sharp, black claws, comes out of the darkness and reaches up toward me. The arm it’s attached to is impossibly long. So much so that I don’t see the point where it’s connected to its body. The hand wraps around my neck, squeezing as it starts to pull. I can feel my body sinking into the darkness below me, pulling me in.

I want to scream.

I want to flail.

I want my mom.

I get none of those things. As the darkness passes over my nose, I see Tony flip me off before I’m pulled into the darkness.

***

When I awake, I’m in a small room. The floor, the walls, the ceiling all made of cobblestone. I can see no outline of a door or any possible escape. A moment later, I realize I can see perfectly although there are no sources of light.

Time passes. How much time, I can’t say. It could have been two hours, it could have been a week. I spent the time trying to find a way out, trying to pull the stones apart. I screamed and cried and called for help, but nobody answered. My phone, wallet, and keys were gone. Eventually, I just slumped against the wall, waiting. I didn’t get hungry or thirsty. I never needed to use the bathroom.

After what felt like the combined years of my life up to this point, a section of the wall just vanished. If I hadn’t been pulled into what I now assumed was some kind of portal, I would have been alarmed.

In the doorway stands…well, I don’t really know what to call it. It was man-shaped, but it definitely wasn’t a man. Imagine taking a fully grown man and removing his face, body hair, nipples, genitalia, or discernable muscles, and that’s what’s standing before me. It beckons to me, waving for me to follow it.

“Where are you taking me?”

He beckons more insistently.

Not seeing the point in refusing, I get up and follow him. On the other side of my cell, as I can only assume this is a prison, the hallways are made of more cobblestone. I follow the creature through winding paths. I don’t bother trying to memorize the path we take. In some parts, it touches the wall and it vanishes, opening to more hallways. I doubt my touch would do the same.

After some time, we pass from a cobblestone hallway into what looks like the lobby of a hotel. It’s jarring, going from dungeon aesthetic to five-star hotel, but it makes me slightly more comfortable.

The creature leads me up to a gorgeous woman standing behind a desk. She’s thin, wearing a silver dress. Her blonde hair is dangling over her shoulders and she looks at me with purple eyes. No, seriously, her eyes are a bright purple color.

"Name?” she asks.

“Uh…Will?”

She scribbles something onto a parchment.

“I see you’ve been sentenced to the Homophobia ward?”

“Uh…”

“Remove your clothes, please,” she says, not waiting for me to answer and sounding bored.

“My clothes?” I balk. “I’m not taking my clothes off!”

“Very well.” She snaps her fingers. A column of fire erupts over me. It burns and I can’t help but scream. The sounds coming out of my mouth are pitiful. I’m hoping I’m going to die, but I realize my skin, though painful, is unharmed. After a few moments that feel like hours, the fire vanishes and I’m standing before her completely naked.

“Follow the walker, and he’ll lead you to your first room,” she says, motioning to the skin-man beside me. Some subconscious need to stay covered takes over me and I cross my hands over one another and place them on my junk, hiding it from view.

The walker starts walking toward a door and I follow. It places a hand on the door before opening it, then waves for me to go inside.

It’s a hotel room. It has a large bed against the far wall that looks very comfortable. When I look around, I see a sex swing, dildos ranging in sizes from four inches to four feet, whips, chains, candles and—oh my fucking god, no!

I turn to run out the door, but it closes before I can get to it. I try the handle, but it doesn’t budge. I punch at it, throw a chair at it, but nothing happens. Nothing until I feel myself lifted from my feet and thrown through the air to land on the bed.

The door opens, but I’m too far away to get to it and a man is walking in anyway. At least, he looks more like a man than the walker.

He has jet-black hair and sharp facial features. The bright purple of his exposed torso is rippling with muscles. He wears nothing but a pair of what seem to be pajama pants.

“Who the fuck are you?” I ask.

“My name is Jafar. I’m here to fuck the homophobia out of you. Get ready because it’s going to hurt.”

He smiles greedily and a thick, ten-inch, slimy tongue slithers from his mouth.