When I Grow Up (Tales from Foster High)

by John Goode

  I looked over at Kyle sitting cross-legged in our empty living room, laptop balanced on his upper legs. And I just paused. The afternoon light coming through the window cast a shadow across him, and I was stunned all over again that this guy had ever decided to shack up with me. He was so perfect, so together…. I held my phone out and took a pic of him deep in study.

  I posted it to Facebook and called it “New Life: Day One.”

  There was no way I would ever love anyone as much as I loved him in that moment.

  “What?” he asked, looking up from his work.

  I closed Facebook and put the phone back into my pocket. “My mom says hi.”

  “Crap!” he exclaimed and pulled his phone out. “Text mine and tell her we made it before she sends out the Marines.” He slid his phone across the floor to me; I unlocked it and sent a quick text to his mom.

  “What did she say?” he asked, not looking up from his laptop.

  “She said we should have had sex in the bathroom and made it a stand-up triple.”

  He whipped his head around to glare at me, and I burst out laughing. “She said to call her when you had a chance.” I handed him back his phone with his mom’s text open to prove it. “You, Mr. Stilleno, are too easy.”

  He closed his laptop. “And you, Mr. Graymark, are sleeping on the floor tonight.”

  “We both are if we don’t hurry,” I said, helping him up.

  “There’s a futon place down the street. It’s probably the best we can do right now because I can’t imagine getting a real bed through that—”

  I kissed him before he got himself worked up about furniture moving.

  “Two rocks and your arms are good enough for me. A futon will be perfect,” I said softly.

  “We need to get moving,” he said. But he wasn’t moving, just leaning into me.

  “I know,” I said, feeling my body react to his.

  “Stand-up triple, huh?” he asked, bumping his hips into mine.

  “Your mom is a smart lady.”

  “Come on and stop talking about my mom,” he ordered, pulling me into the bathroom.

  We both let out a laugh when he began to strip my clothes off me again.

  Kyle

  SEE WHAT I mean?

  What, you didn’t see it? Oh come on! Really? Okay, look at it again. Here we are, new place, new life with a ton of stuff to get done, and what does he want to do? Have sex. Does he want to do the work that needs to get done? Does he want to do the chores we both know have to be done? No, he wants to roll around on the floor and have sex. And even though I liked it and went along with it, I should have known. I should have known this was going to be like two people trying to carry a heavy couch when one of them had no desire to lift his end, leaving the other to manage the whole thing.

  And yeah, I understand taking a couple of minutes to celebrate, but it was the start.

  Don’t look at me that way. Of course I was into it at the time—have you seen Brad? But I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be swayed, and he shouldn’t have been swaying. Sigh. You don’t believe me, fine. Let’s move on.

  Brad

  WE SPENT the weekend getting the apartment up and running and making sure the futon worked.

  A lot.

  I tried to stay out of Kyle’s way because he was wound up pretty tight. The fact he had about a month before classes started didn’t mean a thing to him. He acted like it was tomorrow and he hadn’t studied at all. Once we bought everything we were going to need in the way of pots and pans, we went looking for furniture and ended up at the only place we could afford to furnish a whole place with.

  IKEA.

  They had all this stuff out on display, and most of it looked so cool that we bought a bunch of things. A couch that was a futon as well, a couple of chairs, an entertainment center—we were in gay heaven, just grabbing everything that looked like it would go together. We got home and started to unpack the stuff. Yeah, we knew it was all do-it-yourself, but I had watched people use tools before. I wasn’t so useless that I couldn’t put together a damn entertainment center! I mean, come on, how hard could it be?

  If I ever get my hands on those Swedish-chef-sounding motherfuckers, I’m going to make them assemble their own spleens without instructions.

  First off, there were, like, seven hundred parts for what basically looked like some wood and paint in the store. Two, the instructions, if I can call them that, had no language on them. No, I am not having a stroke; they had no fucking words on them. They were just pictures of parts that looked nothing like what we had, going together with other parts that we also didn’t have, and a couple of really happy people who had an entertainment center. We did not look like those people, because all we had was some wood.

  Of course Kyle, never to be outdone, went online to see if the actual instructions were missing. Nope, those were them. Then he went on some sites trying to see if other people had put some together. They had. Of course they didn’t say how they did it; they just posted pics of their beautiful entertainment center with them standing next to it. Smiling.

  Swedish chef assholes.

  So of course then it came down to we can’t be this stupid and this can’t be this hard so let’s just sit down and work it out. After the second hour, I was ready to swear off TV altogether or maybe just watch it on my phone, ’cause this shit was pissing me off. The worst part was that this was just the entertainment center. I couldn’t even fathom putting the couch together; that had moving parts. After a while I was exhausted and Kyle looked like he was going to cry, so I told him to go to bed and I would figure it out. He wanted to argue with me but he was too tired to vocalize it, so he slouched off to the corner we’d put our futon in and collapsed onto the mattress. When I was sure he was asleep, I did what any full-grown male twenty-first century high school graduate does when he needs to learn a new skill instantly.

  I went to YouTube.

  I slipped on my earbuds and watched a guy, who cussed as much as I did, put together the monstrosity called an entertainment unit. When I lost track, I paused the video to catch up. I have no idea how people back in the day learned how to build log cabins and shit without YouTube. Not only does it seem like it would be way harder, but there was also no Sylvester the Talking Cat to make me laugh during breaks.

  I spent an hour putting the beast together. That broke down to twenty minutes of actual work, thirty minutes of pausing the fucking video to watch the guy do it again, and ten minutes of burying my head in a pillow and screaming at the top of my lungs that I was going to kill the first Swedish person I met. But an hour later, the pieces of wood and screws had come together to make a thing that was kind of like the thing we saw in the store but a little lopsided, and there were three screws and a bolt left over, but fuck it. It stood up and was in one piece.

  I threw the extra crap away.

  Feeling like a real man, I shucked off my pants and changed into some shorts, grabbed a Pepsi from the fridge, and found a video about the couch. There was no way I was letting a bunch of evil Swedish guys get me.

  By the time the sun was coming up, we had an entertainment center, a couch, and a chair-like thing that was more a collection of cushions and a frame than anything else. Still, it was better than the damn floor, so screw it. I put together the end table and placed the stylish yet oddly modern lamp we had bought on it. I convinced myself I’d sat down on the couch, not just fallen backward and hoped the couch was there. My eyelids kept trying to shut, but I kept them open long enough to realize I had made us furniture.

  I closed my eyes for a second, and sleep took over.

  Kyle

  WHEN I woke up, I could hear Brad snoring in the other room.

  Well, not an actual other room, in the… you get it.

  I got up and saw that he had put everything else together somehow. He was passed out on the couch and the entertainment center was upright, though I wasn’t sure if it was ready to support an actual TV yet, and I thought
those cushions might be the chair. He looked so peaceful lying there, mouth open, drooling out of one side. I looked around and found his phone on the floor. I aimed it at his face and snapped a pic of him in all his glory and then made it his wallpaper.

  After putting the phone down, I grabbed a blanket off the bed and curled up next to him on the couch. He moved a little in his sleep and his arm went around me automatically, pulling me close like he always did. I loved that motion; even in sleep he held me, like it was what he was there for.

  The morning sun was coming over the building across the alley, so some light made it into the place, and for a moment the world was still. I still couldn’t believe I was there. No, that’s not true. I could believe I was there; I couldn’t believe we were.

  I was living with my green-eyed boy. We’d made it out of Foster intact. It was so much more than anything I had ever dreamed of when I was growing up that my mind was still struggling to accept it. Brad had always been this perfect guy to me in junior high and high school, but now he was my boyfriend, my lover, my partner.

  This was our place.

  I turned over to face him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He didn’t stir so I did it again, and again, and again. His eye twitched and I saw the side of his mouth crook up in a grin. “Best. Alarm. Clock. Ever,” he said, not opening his eyes.

  “I love you,” I said, the feeling too much to contain a second longer.

  He opened his eyes and looked into mine, and I felt my heart skip a beat. He began to open his mouth and I held my breath as I waited for him to say he loved me back.

  “I know.”

  “Oh no you didn’t,” I said in mock outrage. “You did not just Solo me!”

  He began to laugh as I started to tickle him. He cried out for mercy as I hit every single one of his vulnerable spots. Months of dating had tipped me off to where he had no defenses, so he knew how much trouble he was in. To stop me he wrapped his arms around me, and we went tumbling to the floor. He lay on top of me, and I could tell he was as aroused as I was.

  “You know…,” he said with a sly tone in his voice, “…the couch is a virgin.”

  “Not for long,” I said, pulling his T-shirt off over his head.

  Yeah, come back after lunch, we might be busy.

  Brad

  I NEED to build furniture more often.

  Kyle

  THE WEEKS leading up to school were the worst.

  I had nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it. I had already mapped out my route to class—the Phans lived less than five minutes from the campus, which meant walking every day, instead of trying to drive and find a parking place, was an option. That, coupled with the fact Brad’s car might have been his real boyfriend all along and I had been something on the side this whole time, made me very happy I could walk.

  The funny thing was, we really didn’t need his car for much.

  Everything we could need was within walking distance, a fact the other people who lived around us seemed to take pride in. A grocery store was, like, two blocks away and, once we bought a couple of reusable shopping bags, it was kind of fun to walk there and back with our food haul. Brad, of course, wanted to drive everywhere, which was just silly considering how expensive gas was. I don’t even want to go into how much it had cost to get us to California; suffice it to say that without Robbie’s help, we would have been living in a cardboard box instead of an apartment.

  My thought was to walk as much as possible because gas cost money, and gas in California cost triple that.

  Brad’s thought was, what was the point of having a badass car if you couldn’t drive it?

  That was just one of the many things that began to bug me in that month before class started. Brad seemed obsessed with finding us some kind of entertainment for the evening. We hadn’t bought a TV yet—we were planning to, but it was kind of low on the priority scale, so we did without. So to Brad that meant finding something else for us to do.

  We hadn’t broached the subject of a gym membership, something I was pretty sure he was going to want, so he was finding free ways to keep in shape.

  Running was the first thing he decided on.

  “Come on,” he urged, unaware that the distracting pair of shorts and tank top made him look like he was getting ready to shoot an infomercial for a Soloflex or something. “After a few miles the endorphins kick in and you’ll love it!”

  I had on a worn pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and looked like I was nine. “I hate running,” I reminded him as I tied my shoes.

  “You hated running in school,” he corrected me. “It’s different when you do it on your own.”

  “No it’s not. Still one foot in front of the other, sweating, tripping, panting… that all still happens.”

  His smile dropped for a second. “You really don’t want to go with me?”

  I sighed and stood up. “I’m dressed, aren’t I? Just don’t think I’m going to like it.”

  His face lit up as he smiled. “Awesome! This will change your life.”

  If you’re curious, it did not change my life.

  Running reminded me that I was nowhere near as healthy as Brad was. A fact I tried to ignore, since all it did was remind me that he could get a dozen guys better-looking than me in a heartbeat. Trailing after him, watching the perfect ass bounce farther and farther away, was not helping me adjust to the fact we were so different. Seeing people do a double take as he jogged by was not making me feel more confident that he wouldn’t wake up and realize I was just a normal guy. And the way I had to stop after, like, twenty minutes to catch my breath was only pointing out to him that I was not the guy he thought I was.

  “You okay?” he asked after going another half a block before realizing I wasn’t behind him, turning around, and jogging back to where I was sagging against a streetlight.

  I tried to answer, but I had no air to speak. The fact he stood there and jogged in place while he waited for me to recover made me madder than it should have. I wasn’t mad at him; I was mad at me, at life for making me so soft. Brad hadn’t done anything wrong but been born with perfect genes. I nodded since there was no way I was going to form words.

  “If you stop moving, your body cools off,” he said, trying to sound helpful and failing badly. “Once you stop it’s harder to start again.”

  “I didn’t”—huge gulp of air—“want to”—another gulp—“start in the first”—last word—“place!”

  Since I was trying not to throw up, I didn’t see the hurt look on his face, but I knew it was there nonetheless.

  “You might end up liking it,” he said, finally stopping.

  “Do I look like I’m liking it?” I managed, now more embarrassed than tired. I wasn’t athletic; everyone knew that. Round up every single person I ever met and ask them to describe me and I can guarantee athletic will not make one list. Ever. “I’m going to go back to the apartment. Just finish your run,” I said, turning back in the direction we’d come.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said, taking a step toward me.

  “Brad,” I replied, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible. “Please go run. I’ll see you when you get home.”

  He said nothing for a few seconds, which made me feel like I had kicked a puppy. “Did I make you mad?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Honestly. I’m just mad, okay?”

  “At me?”

  Sigh.

  “No, just… we can talk about this later,” I announced. My legs started to cramp up as I walked back toward our place. I didn’t look over my shoulder at him, because I knew I had just been a complete asshole and he had done nothing to provoke it. But I couldn’t turn off the way I felt that quickly. I needed to be away from Brad so he didn’t get hit by my stray drama.

  It was everything I’d felt about myself in high school only worse because I was living Real Life, which meant feeling inferior and weak should not be common experiences. I never could run fast or throw a ball to save m
y life or any of that crap, and I was fine with that. I stayed away from the gym, and they stayed away from my books.

  It seemed like a fair trade.

  But I couldn’t be Brad’s workout partner or jogging buddy or whatever. And even if I could have done it, it wouldn’t have mattered, ’cause I didn’t want to any more than he wanted to be my study partner in calculus. He wanted to do this so we could have some form of entertainment, but this was not entertaining. Well, not to me; maybe to the guy with the cell phone who put “Geek loses shit on street” up on YouTube.

  I got home, threw off my clothes, rinsed myself off, and then headed to my laptop. Three clicks later a TV was being sent to our place via the magic of the almighty Amazon. When Brad got back, he had that healthy glow about him that turned me on as much as it made me sick because I would never have it. He opened his mouth to apologize, and I just pointed to the bathroom.

  “Shower first, talk after.”

  He sulked off to the shower, head down, sighing.

  I waited two minutes before joining him and apologizing for my freak-out.

  The TV arrived the next day, and things got better.

  Brad

  THE WEEKS leading up to Kyle going to school were like magic.

  We’d wake up with nowhere to go and all day to get there. We’d spend the morning waking each other up and then take a shower and wake each other up again. Then we’d go find breakfast, occasionally, but most times lunch at the Phans’, who served us huge portions of their food and never charged. Then I would try to find something for us to do during the afternoon to see if I could keep Kyle in a good mood.

  I tried to take him running, but that didn’t work, so we bought a TV. I hooked up my PS3 and got him to try God of War, which he was okay with; Call of Duty, which he hated; and then DC Online, which finally sold him. He ended up rolling up a Green Lantern, and we started spending our afternoons fighting Lex Luthor and The Joker. We’d take turns playing, one of us pushing buttons while the other called out tactics.