by Kim Oclon
“I really don’t have a say in things like that,” I said.
“Bye.” Will followed Anna out of the room.
When the door latched behind Will, Ms. Larson stopped moving piles of paper around on her desk. “I’m glad you stuck around.”
“I don’t know how to help him,” I said, surprised by the prickly sensation in my eyes. I turned my head and blinked a few times.
“Is your friend in danger?” Ms. Larson asked. She walked around to the front of her desk and leaned against it, half sitting.
“No,” I said.
“Is a student doing something to him?”
Ms. Larson had a way of asking people questions that inevitably led them to share what they needed to share. Despite knowing this, I didn’t move or make up an excuse to leave. “Kind of,” I shrugged.
“Is it in one of your friend’s classes? Does the teacher know?”
“No and kind of.” Another shrug.
“Do you want me to talk to the teacher?”
“No and kind of.” I felt a corner of my mouth smile.
Ms. Larson smiled too and put a hand on my shoulder. “You know where to find me. Or, maybe your friend would like to come to one of our meetings. I know Anna is a bit much sometimes, but maybe it would help him to talk about it and see that there are people in this school who support him.”
I imagined David coming to a SAFE meeting with Anna pouncing on him as he walked through the door and shoving one of her rainbow wristbands up his arm. Would Will be in awe of the varsity baseball player in his presence or care less? Did Stacey and Monika know who he was? What would Allie think of him? Adam had several classes with David over the years but knew nothing about us being together. “That’s probably not going to happen, but thanks for hanging around for a little bit. I know you have to get to your meeting.”
Ms. Larson smiled and walked back behind her desk. “Oh, there’s no meeting. Sometimes I just have to move things along.” She sat down and uncapped the green pen she often used for grading. “Come see us again, Tyler.”
“Thanks, Ms. Larson,” I said as I gathered my book bag and jacket, feeling a little lighter than when I first approached room 1335. But back in the hallway with the door closed behind me, the heaviness instantly returned. Kevin Kaminski sauntered towards me from the far end hallway. Even though he couldn’t see me, I had a feeling he was on his way to the locker room so I fought the urge to throw one of my spikes at him and decided to walk through the library and cafeteria, taking the long way instead and I hated myself for that.
CHAPTER 6
DAVID
One of my elbows locked while the other one gave out as if the bone suddenly disappeared. “Jesus Christ, David.” Mike scrambled to lift the side of the bar that was no longer supported by my arm, but my rib cage. The bar fell back into its slots with a loud clang that echoed in the almost empty weight room. No gymnastics team today. And no Kevin either, yet.
“I’m sorry.” I sat up, rubbing my side. “Maybe I’m sore or something.”
Mike gave me a questioning look from under the brim of his cap. “Let’s move on to free weights. Maybe that will be safer.”
“Sounds good.” I stood up, walking over to the free weights with an extra bounce in my step to prove to Mike I was fine.
“Is that one going to be too heavy?” Mike raised his eyebrows at my fifteen-pound weight.
“Asshole,” I laughed as Mike grabbed a twenty-pound weight. We began doing a regimen that would work out the individual muscles in our arms. I tried to focus on the repetitive motion of my raised arm bending at the elbow and going up and down behind my head, imagining how this would add speed to my throw and snap to my bat.
Up, down, up, down. Exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale.
The sound of the heavy door scraping against the floor caused my stomach to churn and I tasted the remnants of a partially digested turkey sandwich. My shoulders and neck felt like a four-hundred-pound fat kid had just sat on them to play a game of chicken.
Another one of the football regulars strode across the room to join two of his friends who were doing squats. They managed to jam backwards baseball caps on their square heads, and each had on a homemade muscle shirt made from the PE uniform we had two years ago. They cut so much of the shirt off that it looked more like a wrestling singlet. One of the guys positioned himself behind the one that was doing squats. Each time the guy lifting squatted, so would the one behind him and he would do an exaggerated thrusting motion, complete with sound effects.
“Yeah, that’s good. Do it again.” The thrusting guy fed off the laughter of his friends.
“Cut it out, man,” the guy doing the lifts said, trying to give the thruster a look but he had a hard time since the bar was resting on his neck.
Why the fuck did I come today? My arm shook even though I was only halfway through the regimen. Fuck it.
“Where you going?” Mike asked as I picked up my sweatshirt and flung it over my shoulder.
“I gotta go,” I said.
“What?” Mike dropped his weight and followed me to the door. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, I…” A simple lie wouldn’t form as I reached for the weight room door, but it opened before I touched it.
Kevin barged in and stopped when he saw me. He squinted his eyes and pretended to look through a pair of binoculars. “David, is that you? Or am I just seeing things?” He adjusted the imaginary binoculars. “Nope. I think it’s pretty clear.”
“Oh good,” Mike sighed. “You’re here again.”
My legs wanted to run out of the weight room while my fists clenched, ready to punch that stupid smirk off Kevin’s face. Instead, I just stood there.
“Of course I am.” Kevin nodded his head back at Patrick, our catcher, who walked in behind him. “I’m going to try and get Fatty here back in shape.”
“You didn’t get me here,” Patrick shook his head. “We just walked in at the same time.” He always insisted he was “husky” not fat, and that the extra girth allowed him to block more of the plate. “Besides, I think a couple more pizzas would really give us an advantage. The super-supreme kind. Think of how much of the plate I could block with this.” He turned to the side and puffed out his gut as much as possible so that it looked like his baby might be due shortly after Coach Kelly’s.
Mike laughed while I couldn’t force a smile on my face. My brain told my legs to move but they wouldn’t.
“If you get too fat, Sinni’s not going to want you anymore,” Kevin smirked. “And I don’t know where you go after a community college turns you down.”
“Shut up, Mr. Illini,” Patrick said. “We all can’t be as awesome as you.” He picked up a medicine ball and began to do a twisting exercise with it. “Gotta work the core for all the homeruns I’m gonna hit.”
As Kevin turned to me, I finally got my legs moving somehow. “David, maybe you’d like to help Patrick with those balls.”
“He seems to be doing fine on his own,” I said, shoving my way past him.
When I got home, I realized I was alone and hoped no one else would be home for a while. My dad started doing some basement remodel so that should keep him busy for a while. This was the last job that Dad had lined up and he was hoping it would turn into a referral to do another basement. Everyone in our family always knew when Dad was working, when he wasn’t, and when he was waiting for something to come along.
I guessed my mom was at work. She was a caregiver at a nearby nursing home and had been picking up any hours she could.
My brother, Robert, had his first travel ball practice today. From the way he talked about this team, anyone would have thought Robert was the one just awarded a much-needed scholarship instead of getting the honor of paying hundreds of dollars to play for a team. My parents said Robert could only play for a travel team if he somehow paid for it himself so he sold a ridiculous number of chocolate bars to my friends and Mom’s coworkers and mowed anyone’s lawn who would pay him to
do it.
Even though I hadn’t eaten anything except half of the turkey sandwich at lunch, I felt full. Like I had made a meal out of all of the nerves and they were sitting in my stomach like old pizza for breakfast.
The muffled opening notes of “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC came from my backpack and I had to dig it out of the small pocket where I kept extra pens, pencils, and a protractor I hadn’t used since geometry my sophomore year. It was a text from Mike.
What happened 2 u?
I fell into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Had 2 go. Sry.
More notes from “Thunderstruck.” Y? You left me alone with Kevin!
It was amazing what kind of debate you could have in your mind in the nanosecond it should take to answer a friend’s question. If we were actually on the phone there would have been a weird silence but I couldn’t ignore the question for long. I felt like I was in one of those old cartoons when a character has a devil and an angel on each shoulder, only I had Ballsy David and Cowardly David. Ballsy David sat with a stern look and folded arms, wanting me to spill everything about Kevin and his dad to Mike. To not be afraid of what might happen if he did and just do it already. Cowardly David sat at the edge of my shoulder, sheepishly looking at me in quick backward glances. He thought it would be best to pretend my phone ran out of battery so I could put off Mike’s question for a few hours, at least. Ballsy David demanded I text, “I’m gay god dammit!” Cowardly David suggested throwing my phone in the garbage.
Another buzz from AC/DC. He went on and on about baseball camp at U of I. Sounds gay, right?
That stung more than it usually did. I picked up my phone. Lots of hw. Essay due 2morrow. A lame excuse, I know, but it was all I had.
Hw?!?! We’re seniors!
I was a senior who had no idea what his future looked like when I got up in the morning and now the picture was looking even more blurry. No colleges pounding on my door. Still gotta study.
Adding weight next time 2 make up 4 your lame ass. U gonna make it?
Might have an extra credit physics lab.
Mike responded with an emoji that looked like it was throwing up.
It was funny. I even smiled for a second.
I sat with the phone in my hands, dwelling on the workout in the weight room I cut short. It wasn’t like I’d be able to leave practice if Kevin continued to be even more of an ass than he already was.
He wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut for an entire season and just let this go away because I didn’t give Coach a straight answer to his question. Literally. Kevin’s under-the-breath comments would first come out of the corner of his mouth, when only I was in earshot. Then, he would be packing up his equipment with Patrick, notice me doing the same outside the dugout and comment on how the team they just played were a bunch of fags. “Let’s ask David what he thinks. He’s an expert.”
A drop of water fell on the kitchen table and I looked up at the ceiling to see if there was a leak somewhere but there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. A typical white ceiling. No signs of water damage, leaks, or cracks. Another drop fell on the table and started to merge with the other one, looking like a diagram from biology class for the stages of mitosis. When I inhaled through my nose, it sounded like I had a cold and that was when I realized I was crying. Seriously, I was crying? I had held it together with Coach, with Mike in the cafeteria, with Tyler in the library, even with that dickface Kevin.
Scraping the chair back, I swiped the tears off the table and pawed at my face, trying to prevent more from coming. I stomped around the kitchen, opening cabinets only to slam them shut. My dad made them so they were definitely strong enough to survive. I kicked the wall with a socked foot and immediately felt my big toe pulsate with pain. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I drew my leg back, getting reading to kick the wall again, leading with my throbbing big toe, not caring what kind of damage I did.
“David!”
My mom dropped the bag of groceries in her arms. The only sound came from the short hiccups of breath that made my chest hurt. Her eyes looked so sad. Cowardly David and Ballsy David went at it again. “Tell her you got a bad grade on a test,” Cowardly David advised. “You’re going to go crazy if you try to keep this up,” Ballsy David warned, trying to swat Cowardly David off my shoulder. “You already are.”
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” My mom sounded like she was about to cry.
“Nothing,” I hiccupped. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s not true,” Mom said as she walked towards me like she was afraid I was going to break into a billion pieces right in front of her.
I backed into the countertop on the opposite side of the small kitchen and put my weight on the foot without the throbbing toe. Little rings of color faded in and out of my vision as I rubbed my eyes.
“Please talk to me, David.” My mom sat down in her usual seat at the dinner table. Worry deepened the slight creases on her forehead.
I limped past her and out of the kitchen. “I’m just mad, that’s all.” I grumbled like I had just gotten called out on a close play because of a blind umpire.
“What are you mad about?” Mom called but she didn’t follow me.
“Just some stuff.” My voice was louder and angrier than I intended as I closed the bedroom door and slumped next to the stack of college materials I began piling on the floor between my and Robert’s bed. The first arrived in the middle of my junior year.
I heard footsteps shuffle through the thick carpeting in the hallway. “I have to go pick up Robert.”
I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t making any noise, but I could tell Mom still stood on the other side of the door. “We’ll talk when I get back,” she said. It was more of a question than a statement. Her voice went up at the end of the sentence.
A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and close followed by the slamming of the van door. I balled up my fists and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. Maybe if I rubbed hard enough, I wouldn’t think about how I couldn’t stay in my room forever and that Ballsy David was shaking his head at Cowardly David who seemed very pleased with himself.
CHAPTER 7
DAVID
The letter I received the other day from Sinni seemed to be making fun of me, with its crinkled corner of plain paper standing out among the glossy brochures. That was all I needed in addition to all the other shit that happened today was for my mom or dad to somehow find that letter and declare it was what we’ve been waiting for. It was probably sent to every athlete. Even though the letter actually had my name at the top instead of “Dear Student,” it wasn’t anything special. It simply asked if I had ever considered becoming a CNEI Bobcat and if I was aware that they offered athletic scholarships in addition to academic ones.
No, I wasn’t aware. And no, I never considered becoming a Bobcat.
I turned my head to the left and settled in on the poster of the 2005 White Sox team that hung on the wall between the two beds. It was taken on the field after they had won the World Series and everyone looked like this was the happiest moment of their entire lives. My baseball days hadn’t even begun at that time but my dad loved to remind me how he and I watched every game together. Whenever a game went into extra innings, he’d remind my mom how he had to beg her to let me stay up to watch one of the World Series games that went into extra innings. I didn’t make it past the top of the tenth.
With the throbbing in my toe subsiding but the image of my mom’s sad and confused face fresh in my mind, I imagined a different sort of press conference taking place after the locker room was hosed down with champagne. Would that season have been any less incredible if one of the guys on that team were gay? Would the fans say it didn’t matter that they went 11-1 in the postseason because it was a gay guy who made a diving catch or scored a game-changing run?
It would be on the front page of the sports section for a few days and a topic of conversation on ESPN’s various shows, but no one was goin
g to take away a World Series ring or say the team didn’t deserve it, right? When an NFL player came out after he had left the game, it was all anyone could talk about. Commentators expressed concern about the future of the league and the game itself if a gay guy was the one doing the tackling or putting his arms around a teammate in a huddle. Somehow, groups of fans still gathered around the television every Sunday during the fall and winter for a marathon day of games. Apparently, a few years ago a top draft pick came out and coaches did say his sexuality would have nothing to do with them picking him for a team or not.
But I wasn’t a top prospect in the NFL draft and I didn’t have a World Series ring, and definitely never would. I’d never have to worry about major league locker rooms, but there were still high school ones, and hopefully college ones, to navigate.
I heard the front door open and my dad exhale a groan as he dragged his steel-toed booted feet through the door. Two grunts and two thuds followed, one for each boot being pulled off and dropped on the floor.
“David?” Dad called.
For a second, I thought my dad might think I wasn’t home from school yet if I sat very still and held my breath. But then I remembered my car was parked on the driveway.
Dad’s sweaty feet streaked across the kitchen floor and stopped in front of my closed bedroom door. “David?”
“I’m writing a paper, Dad.” My voice sounded like I had just woken up.
“Good job.” A few moments later, the shower turned on. In a few minutes, I knew Dad would emerge in his post-work uniform: a pair of sweats and a White Sox T-shirt, probably one commemorating the 2005 season. They were faded and stretched out but he still wore them.
The usual sounds of an evening in my house sounded different from behind a closed door. The stove clicking on. Pots being taken out of the cabinet. Water coming from the sink. It had been about ten hours since Coach called me to his office. About eight hours since I talked to Tyler and about forty-five minutes since I lost it in front of my mom.
