The Understatement of the Year

by Sarina Bowen

  I found enough muscle control to grin against his shirt.

  He set me back down on the pillow. Then I received a single kiss on the lips. It was soft and sweet, and I did my best to return it.

  Then I felt him pull away. His footsteps retreated quietly across my room. A crack of painful hallway light infiltrated my dark cave, and then he was gone.

  * * *

  The next seven days went by very slowly. The Beaumont dean helped Mom rent a discounted hotel room at the college conference center. “I’m not going home until I know you don’t need help,” she said.

  Unfortunately, I really did need help. And I hated that.

  The all-over headaches began to ease up, becoming intermittent instead of constant. But I still got an odd pain across my brow line, as if someone had pulled a cord that cinched my face too tightly. It came on whenever I focused my eyes on a book for longer than ten minutes.

  So Mom did most of the reading. We sat in my room — me on the bed, and her in the desk chair — and she read chapter after chapter to me of developmental psychology and Roman history. She also attended my classes, taking notes for me.

  Until you’ve dragged your mom to three lectures a day, you haven’t lived.

  By dinnertime, we were always exhausted and rather tired of each other. But we ate together anyway, sometimes putting in a little more reading time after dinner. And then she’d retreat to her hotel room, and I’d lie on my bed doing nothing. I couldn’t even surf the web, because staring at the screen made my head hurt. So I listened to playlist after playlist, tossing a tennis ball over my head and catching it again.

  Meanwhile, my hockey team was busy trying to set new records for post-season victories. They beat Providence in the semis, advancing to the conference championship. Rikker had long practices every night. A few times he stopped by afterwards, but I was pretty much useless by nine o’clock. And usually grumpy. Which made him sort of grumpy too.

  It sucked. All of it.

  Coach called me to ask me if I wanted to ride the bus to Colgate with the team. “This is your game too, kid. I’d make room for you at the hotel.”

  “Wow, Coach,” I said, feeling a little choked up. “That is such a nice offer.” I searched for a reason to say no, though. “I have a doctor’s appointment on Friday, and my mom is real eager to see what they say. And she’s been so much help to me that I’d feel bad about blowing it off.”

  “Let me know how that goes, okay? Shoot me an email.”

  “I’ll be watching the game on TV, Coach. Can’t wait.”

  “Hang in there, kid.”

  Could I have gone to that game? Probably. But I just wasn’t ready. It was partly that I still felt like shit all the time. The glare and noise of a jam-packed hockey stadium wouldn’t have been easy on me. But that wasn’t the whole problem. For the first time ever, I was reluctant to face my teammates. If I walked into the room, they’d look at me and remember that the last time they saw me I was screaming Rikker’s name.

  A smarter man would talk this over with Rikker, and ask if there had been any further discussion about me. Rikker would probably remind me that that paranoia is one of the many symptoms of concussion. He’d say that I was being ridiculous. That these were my friends. And by the way — who fucking cares what they think?

  Well, I did, unfortunately. And I was always going to care. When I walked out of the room, I didn’t want them whispering about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and think sick.

  Paranoia was a symptom of being Michael Graham.

  * * *

  The Thursday before Rikker’s big game, my mom decided to take the train to Manhattan to have lunch with my sister. “She can only take an hour and a half for lunch,” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “But she promised not to check her messages every two minutes during the meal.”

  We’d just come back from statistics class, and I dumped my backpack on the dorm room floor. “You raised quite the brood, Mom. You’re keeping company with either your bitchy daughter or your grumpy, dopey son.”

  “I love you both equally, all the time,” she winked at me.

  “Even during statistics class?” We’d gotten ornery at each other a half hour ago, when she’d had trouble keeping up with the formulas the professor had written on the whiteboard.

  Mom tucked her phone into her purse and prepared to leave. “Even then.” She looked at me, her face serious now. “I don’t mind all this, Mikey. I like that I have this extra chance to take care of you for a little while.” She took two steps and hugged me. “You’re still my baby, you know. If my baby needs me to draw the Z and T distributions on graph paper, I’ll do it.”

  Oh, man. Watch the concussion patient get emotional. Again. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could choke out, “Thanks, Mom.”

  She let go of me and went to the door. “I’ll bring you some dinner when I come back. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Then she was gone, and I was alone for the first time in a week.

  I sat down on my bed and pulled out my phone. Rikker answered on the first ring. “Hola, Miguel,” he said. “How’s the head?”

  “Not bad,” I said. “What are you doing right now?”

  “Voy a la clase de Español.”

  “Okay. What about after that?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “Well, Mom went to the city to hang out with Lori,” I said, feeling excited for something for the first time in a week. “Come over. I’ll get us some lunch.”

  “That’s cool. I could pick something up,” Rikker offered.

  “No, I got it. What else am I going to do with the next hour? It’s really boring to be me.” I still couldn’t read, and if I looked at a screen for more than a couple of minutes, I got a headache. I wasn’t even supposed to exercise much. Having a concussion made me into a waste of space.

  “Okay. I’ll be there. I don’t have practice today, either.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Coach gave us the day off. He says he wants us rested for tomorrow night.”

  “I can help with that. All I do is rest.”

  “You’re hired. See you in an hour.”

  I bought meatball subs for lunch, because I remembered that Rikker had always loved those back in Michigan. (In Connecticut, though, subs are called “grinders” for some reason.)

  Rikker came through the door whistling at a quarter past twelve. We clobbered our lunch while Rikker caught me up on the hockey gossip. Coach had Trevi playing defense. And Pepé the French kid? We all knew that his surname name was Gerault, because it said so on his jersey. “The revelation this week? His real first name is actually Pepé.”

  “No shit!” I laughed. “I thought it was just a joke.”

  “I know, right?” Rikker wadded up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into my trash bin.

  “Two points,” I said automatically. Then I yawned.

  “Do you need to sleep?” Rikker asked.

  “Not necessarily,” I said, because I didn’t want him to go. Though I’d already complained to him how weird it was that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon without a nap.

  “You look beat,” he said. “Lie down, G. I could use a nap too.”

  I didn’t know if that was true. But if I didn’t close my eyes for a little while, I’d only get a headache. So I set the alarm on my phone for three o’clock, just in case. The train ride back from New York took an hour and forty-five minutes. My mom couldn’t possibly walk through the door before three or three-thirty.

  Then I lay down on my bed, and Rikker kicked off his shoes. We’d never napped together. In fact, he’d never been to my room like this, in the middle of the day. This was all brand new territory.

  Rikker stretched out beside me, and then opened his arms. I went willingly, resting my head on his shoulder, wrapping an arm around his waist. He kissed the top of my head. And then, as if one just wasn’t enough, he did it again. And that
made me irrationally happy. I’d had one of the shittiest weeks of my life. But with Rikker pressed warm and solid against me, none of it mattered.

  And here was another first — I’d never lain beside Rikker before without turning into an instant horn dog. But today I fell right to sleep.

  Two hours later, I awoke in a panic to the sound of my room door opening. Startled, I sat up fast, spasming into damage-control mode. Even asleep, I was worried about being busted napping with Rikker.

  But it was Rikker himself who came through the door. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “It’s just me.” He carried two paper coffee cups, one stacked on top of the other, balanced with his chin.

  Taking a slow breath, I willed by heart rate back into the normal range. “Did you sleep?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

  “Sure did. Just not as long as you. I brought you a double cappuccino. Hope you like it.”

  “Thanks.” I took the cup from him, cracked the little sipping window and tasted it. “Wow.” It was milky and fantastic. So I removed the lid entirely and took a big gulp. “I guess the Italians know a thing or two about coffee.”

  Rikker eyed me over the top of his own cup. “You never order these?”

  I shook my head, struck by two things. In the first place, it was depressing that my own boyfriend didn’t know how I drank my coffee. When you only see someone in the dark of night, these are the little details that go missing. We had the relationship of a pair of vampires.

  Even worse, I’d made it to age twenty-one without ordering a cappuccino. Because at some point during my ignorant youth, I’d heard somebody say that it was a girly drink. And I’d crossed cappuccinos off the list without a second thought. That’s how I’d always done it. There were a thousand little decisions I made in service to hiding something big. All my clothes were blue or gray or black. (Except my hockey jacket. And there could hardly be a manlier piece of clothing.) My backpack was a plain color. My bedspread was regulation navy blue. I lived by a weird, self-imposed aesthetic, focused on never appearing gay.

  The result? Not only did Rikker not know my taste in coffee, I didn’t either.

  Rikker made himself comfortable on my beanbag chair, and sipped his coffee. “How are you feeling?”

  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Today I feel a little better. Finally.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said, kicking off his shoes. “What were you supposed to read next? I’ll take a shift, if you want.”

  I swirled my excellent coffee, so that none of the foam would be left behind in the cup. “My mom would be pumped if you read a couple chapters of Roman history. She hates that book.”

  “Pass it over,” he said.

  With his feet propped up into my lap, he read to me for over an hour. Listening to the rough, warm sound of his voice, I felt happier than I’d been in a week. I’d needed this — a few casual hours with him. Just having Rikker in the room with me was like medicine.

  Unfortunately for him, Mom was right — Rikker was reading from the least interesting book on earth. Eventually he let it fall into his lap. “Fuck, G. Aren’t there any naughty bits in here?” He’d just read another stifling paragraph about Roman wall painting. “Can we skip to the part about the orgies?”

  “I wish.”

  “I’m pretty sure the Romans liked to get it on. What chapter is that?”

  Pulling one of his feet into my hands, I gave the arch a squeeze.

  He closed his eyes. “Do that again,” he demanded. Rikker was kind of a sensualist. He liked to be touched, even if it wasn’t sexual.

  Maybe I’d be a sensualist too, if I weren’t so goddamn uptight.

  I massaged both of his feet. And after a time, he picked the book up again and kept reading. I did a decent job of paying attention, closing my eyes to try to picture the ancient buildings that Rikker described. I didn’t think anything of it when he removed his feet from my lap mid-paragraph. He kept reading, though, as my room door opened and my mother walked in.

  “…in contrast to the three-dimensional Second Style. Yada yada yada,” he finished. “Hi, Mrs. G!”

  “Johnny Rikker!” she said, walking over to kiss him on the cheek, before doing the same to me. She was holding a bag from the Chinese restaurant. “Have you eaten dinner?”

  “Actually, I’m on my way to the dining hall,” he said, standing up to stuff his feet into his shoes. “My Spanish class has a language table once a week. And thanks to hockey, I’m usually a no-show.”

  I hoped to God that Rikker was telling the truth about his dinner plans. Because I suspected that he ate alone a lot of the time. Apart from his peculiar relationship with me, and the rest of his somewhat-friendly teammates, he didn’t have a social life.

  Rikker pulled on his jacket. He’d just spent five hours with me, and I still had to stop myself from begging him not to go.

  “Thanks for taking a shift with the history book,” Mom called after him as he went the door. “The psych class has been fun, but that one is killing me.”

  “Yeah? I’m going to borrow that book next time I can’t fall asleep.”

  Laughing, Mom wished him a good night. After the door closed on Rikker, she opened the bag of Chinese food on the desk. “What a good friend he is to you,” she said, pulling out a white cardboard container.

  That was the moment when I was supposed to say, “yeah,” and then change the subject, like I always did. But just then, my head gave a lurch of pain. Because it just felt so wrong. Every time I ducked the truth, it was like betraying Rikker all over again. Not to be dramatic, but I kept thinking about Peter’s denial of Jesus. Except I was worse than Peter. Instead of denying Rikker three times, I denied him every fricking day.

  I put my hands to my temples.

  “Michael?” my mother asked. “What’s wrong?”

  I was too caught up in my own misery to answer her.

  Worried, Mom abandoned the take-out order to come over to me. She sat beside me on the bed and cupped two hands under my chin. “What is it?”

  I’d finally reached the point where I didn’t want to lie anymore. But I wasn’t capable of speaking the truth, either. So I was just stuck there, the words choking me.

  “Sweetie, please. You’re scaring me.”

  “He’s not…” My voice cracked.

  She held me a little tighter. “He’s not what, Sweetie?”

  I wasn’t making any sense, and I knew it. It’s just that I wasn’t sure I could do any better. Not with the hot, crackling ball of fear lodged in my throat. “He’s not…” I gasped the last part out, “just my friend.”

  For a second, nothing happened. I waited for my world to cleave in two, like the San Andreas fault. I’d spent my entire life trying to choke it all back. But I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d had enough. But that didn’t mean I was ready to face the consequences.

  My mother didn’t breathe for a long time. And when she finally did, it was in one great gust. “Michael,” she gasped. Her eyes began to fill with tears. “How long have you held that in?”

  “So damn long,” I said immediately.

  “Oh, Sweetie,” she said, pulling me to her. “My poor boy. So hard on yourself.”

  And then I just couldn’t hang on anymore. I leaned into her shoulder, and a giant sob came heaving out of my chest.

  “Shh,” she said, rocking me. “Shh.”

  But I’d kept it bottled up for so long that I couldn’t stop. Another sob followed the first one, and then another after that. There was just no containing that flood. I cried until I couldn’t breathe, just like a kindergartner.

  I think Mom cried too. And when I finally began to calm down, my head balanced in my own hands, my breath stuttering, she got up to find tissues for both of us. I felt her sit down beside me again. “You are all the son I’ve ever wanted,” she said in a shaking voice. “Please don’t think you could disappoint me with this.”

  “Dad,” I choked out. It was just a single word, but it was a big one
.

  “He may not be as surprised as you think,” she said quietly.

  I raised my eyes to her red ones. But I couldn’t even make myself ask why. I wasn’t any good at this.

  “When John moved away, you barely came out of your room for months,” she said. “And that’s what heartbreak looks like. We were both worried about you. At the time, we wondered.”

  Holy shit. I never saw that coming.

  “Your father loves you,” she said. But then there was a pause. “I’m not saying that he won’t struggle. He’s going to have to adjust his… vision for your future.”

  I could feel how much effort it took her to avoid using the word “expectations” in that sentence. And that’s just what I’d always feared — becoming second best in everyone’s eyes.

  “…But your father loves you. So much, Sweetie. He will always be proud of you. Always.”

  “I don’t want to tell him,” I said.

  Mom studied me. “But how does not telling him feel?”

  “Awful.”

  She gave me a watery smile. “Rock, meet hard place.”

  “We are already acquainted.”

  At that, my mother actually laughed. “Oh, Mikey. Just breathe. It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

  It wasn’t, actually. But telling her hadn’t killed me. At least I had that. I still didn’t want to be… that way. I didn’t want people to see me as a stereotype. Faggot. Queen. Fairy. I didn’t feel like any of those things, and I didn’t want to be called those names. I just wanted to be Michael Graham. It’s just that Michael Graham was attracted to men. And always had been.

  By then, I’d had just about as much drama tonight as I could take. “Can we eat Chinese food now?” I was completely wrung out. Eating would be better than more talking.

  Mom looked at the food on the desk as if she’d never seen it before. “I guess we can.” She fixed the plates, and I turned on the evening news. Though I’m pretty sure neither of us heard a single word of it. We were both lost inside our own heads.