Man Up

by Kim Oclon

  “Where’s David?” I heard Mom ask Dad when she and Robert came home.

  I kind of woke up when I heard her voice, like I had fallen asleep with my eyes open or been in some sort of trance from still staring at the White Sox poster.

  “Writing a paper in his room.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Not really.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “Like he was writing a paper.”

  I imagined my mom holding her hair in a ponytail. I was familiar with “the ponytail hold” as if her long hair in her face prevented her from thinking clearly. “He was a wreck when I came home earlier.”

  I rolled my eyes at Mom for exaggerating. I should have gone into my room when I got home.

  “What? What’s going on with him?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me anything. He just went to his room.”

  Heavy footsteps got louder as they made their way from the kitchen to my door. “David?” A firm knock on the door. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing is going on.” I didn’t even sound believable.

  “Can we come in?” Mom asked.

  A third set of feet came down the hallway and stopped in front of the door. It had to be Robert. “I told you Stevie said his dad said something was wrong with David.” Stevie was Kevin’s little brother and somehow, Robert’s best friend.

  The rage that boiled over earlier in the kitchen returned without notice. I sprung up from the floor and flung open the bedroom door. “What did you say?”

  Robert backed up and looked like he was being held up against the wall even though I was still standing in the bedroom with my hand gripping the doorknob. I hadn’t yelled at Robert, really yelled at him, since he called the White Sox a bunch of fags for having a really shitty season last year. “Stevie heard his dad talking.”

  “About what?” I yelled.

  My parents looked at Robert, waiting for his answer, more interested in what Robert had to say than the fact I was shouting at him. Robert just shrugged and looked nervous. “I don’t know. He just heard his dad say something about how you might not be able to play baseball this year. But I told Stevie there was nothing wrong with you and that you’re fine.”

  “You’re not playing?” Dad asked. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Go ask Kevin and his stupid fucking dad.” There had been many close calls, but this was the first f-bomb I ever dropped in front of my parents.

  “David!” My mom’s mouth dropped.

  “You wanna know what’s wrong?” I looked from Mom to Dad. “Coach Kelly wanted to talk to me today.”

  The concern on my parents’ faces was replaced with confusion.

  “Hey, David,’” I said in a bad impersonation of Coach. “Are you a fag? Just asking ‘cuz Kevin’s dad wanted me to, so…”

  I didn’t know what my parents’ faces looked like because I turned and sat on the bed with my back turned to them. My chest hurt like I just did a bunch of wind sprints.

  My mom came in and sat down at the end of the bed. “That happened today?”

  Dad crossed the threshold. “David, you’re going to have to back up a little bit.” He sat down on Robert’s bed, which was parallel to mine so it was impossible not to look at him.

  Robert stayed in the hallway, cowering into the wall.

  Just like I did with Tyler in the library earlier that day, I gave my parents the short version of what Coach said to me. His dad’s knees bounced up and down, the speed increasing as the story progressed. “That prick!” He finally exploded. “That fucking prick!”

  “Greg!” My mom used the same tone she did when telling Robert or me to watch our language. “That is not going to help anything.”

  He stomped out of my room, almost running into Robert. “I am going to call that asshole right now. No, I am going to go to his fucking house.” I heard Dad pacing through the kitchen and family room causing a shelf of trophies to rattle. “You think you don’t want your son to play ball with mine. Well, fuck you buddy. I never wanted my son to play ball with yours.”

  It felt good that Dad was saying all the things I wanted to. Mom must have been thinking the same thing, which is why she stayed on the bed, not trying to calm him down.

  “The thing is, there is something wrong with your son.” The shaking trophies meant Dad was still doing laps around the kitchen and family room. “He’s a goddamn fucking asshole, just like his dad.”

  Mom shook her head before resting it in her hands. “We’ll just let him finish.” She squeezed my shoulder so hard it kind of hurt. I’d seen Dad pissed: when he lost his job, when Robert broke a power tool he needed for a side job that day, when I skipped school because Tyler was home sick. But I’d never seen him completely lose it before.

  The trophies stopped rattling, and we could no longer hear any heavy pacing doing laps through the house. Since Robert was still glued to the hallway wall, my mom looked at him with a question mark in her eyes. He looked to his side and said, “He’s sitting on the couch.”

  “I’ll go talk to him.” She took a couple of deep breaths, like she was giving herself a pep talk.

  I slightly turned my head, looking at Robert out of the corner of my eye. “Are you going to stay out there all night?” I asked, attempting to let him know I wasn’t mad at him. Robert was just a messenger who didn’t know he was carrying a message.

  Robert pushed himself off the wall, but didn’t take a step forward. “I thought Stevie was talking about when you sprained your wrist.”

  “My wrist is fine.”

  Robert slid into the room but still stood by the door. “Stevie’s not like Kevin or his dad.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  CHAPTER 8

  TYLER

  Late practice meant I had to wait for my mom to pick me up. I sat on a parking block hugging my knees wondering what David was doing at this exact moment. I often wondered that, but it was more than usual today. I missed my hand off in the relay and Coach made us do it three more times before he was satisfied.

  I reached into my bag and took out my phone, scrolling through David and my text conversations. He needed time. I knew that. Sometimes, it was worse when people bothered you with phone calls, texts, or whatever to offer bullshit, regurgitated advice.

  My mom tried that night. She kept asking questions, but not the right ones. The ones that allowed her to linger on the porch for too long.

  I had sat hunched on the stoop, thinking my parents might go to bed soon and I could sneak upstairs and wake up tomorrow, not remembering anything about that day. It was late, but not that late. Too late for a run down the path in the forest preserve.

  “How far did you make it?” she asked when she came outside.

  “Not too far.” I couldn’t look at her. The scrapes on my shins and knees started to burn like someone poured peroxide on them.

  The silence was too long. She had to know something was up by the way she kept asking questions.

  “You can try again some other time, right?”

  “Don’t you think it’s still so hot out?”

  “Are you going to sit out here all night?”

  “Are you okay?” she finally asked after a series of one-word answers.

  “Fine,” I said.

  David didn’t need me to pretend like I had the right words to say and knew the right questions to ask. Not only did I not have anything profound to say, the only thing I had was something I didn’t think David was ready to hear. When we first officially got together I had told him we could take things as slow as he wanted.

  I thought about Stacey at the SAFE meeting, saying she’d die if she couldn’t kiss her boyfriend at lunch. A kiss at lunch was impossible, mainly because David and I didn’t have the same lunch period. But a kiss at my locker in the mornings would be nice.

  Better than nice. Absolutely amazing.

  If anybody did or said anything, at least we would have been to
gether.

  CHAPTER 9

  DAVID

  When my alarm went off the next morning, I felt like I had closed my eyes only a few moments before even though I went to bed early. Robert grunted, as he did every morning. “Turn it off,” he mumbled over the sound of a tornado test siren.

  My hand fished its way out of the mass of blankets and jutted out into the cold hanging in the dark room and slapped the snooze button. It took me a second to remember why I woke up with my stomach feeling like I was in the middle of a rollercoaster ride, one with a series of hills so the feeling kept repeating itself. Coach folding his hands and resting them on his desk. Kevin’s shit-eating grin. My mom coming home. My dad yelling. The toe of Tyler’s shoe touching mine. We only needed each other.

  The tornado siren ripped through the room again. Before Robert could grunt, I switched off the alarm and threw the blankets off, all the way to foot of the bed so it wouldn’t be so easy to scramble to cover myself back up.

  The only reason I even thought about going to school was to see Tyler. The possibility of staying home crossed my mind. My parents would probably let me. Mike would applaud a ditch day after my lame excuse to leave the weight room. But, I was upright, almost shivering in an old umpiring T-shirt and flannel pants. It was the first step.

  I got dressed in the dark, as I did every morning. It was easier than listening to Robert complain. If he didn’t get to sleep in for his extra twenty minutes he grumbled about hating to share a room and how unfair life was. I groped through the clothes hanging in the closet, and sifted through the hangers until I felt what must have been my favorite black hoodie with a White Sox logo that filled the front. It was easy to tell because the stitching was coming undone at one of the cuffs and the frayed ends of the hood strings. Plus, this hood felt thicker than the others. I grabbed the top pair of jeans from a nearby dresser drawer and managed to pull them on as I walked out of the bedroom.

  The smell of coffee hung in the air already. Dad was probably working his way through the pot. He always drank a large mug before leaving the house and filled a huge travel mug for later. Mom preferred tea and the kettle was just starting to whistle as I walked into kitchen.

  It took me a second to notice my parents seated at the kitchen table since the only light came from the barely rising sun and the weak light above the stove. They looked like they spent most of the night sitting across from one another. Dad with his hands wrapped around a mug like he was trying to warm himself by a small fire, and Mom with her hair in a lazy ponytail, hugging a purple robe around her. Their hushed conversation stopped when they saw me. It was pointless to ask what they were talking about so I went to the freezer to dig out a box of frozen waffles. I put two in the toaster and stood in front of it, watching the insides gradually glow orange. It felt like being up to bat in the bottom of the ninth with two outs feeling every eye in the stands staring at the name and number on your back.

  I heard a chair smoothly slide across the floor. My mom poured water into her mug just centimeters from me but didn’t say anything. Then, she knocked on the bedroom door. “Ten more minutes.” Her voice sounded scratchy, like she was coming down with a cold.

  “Twenty.” Robert’s muffled reply.

  The waffles sprang up a perfect golden brown, and the inside wires gradually lost their orange glow and returned to gray. I pinched the edge of the waffles and dropped them on a plate so I could lather them up with super crunchy peanut butter and stick them together to make an extra thick waffle sandwich. Still standing in front of the toaster with my back to the kitchen table, I took a bite and focused on chewing.

  Then Dad stood right behind me, filling his travel mug. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  I looked at him for the first time that morning. My dad dropped his hand from my shoulder like it stung him. “Sorry. Stupid question,” he said, taking a long sip despite the swirls of steam. “Your mom and I were thinking of talking to your coach today.”

  I struggled to quickly chew what was in my mouth and swallow. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I think we do.”

  “No, Dad, you don’t,” I insisted. “If Coach does find some stupid reason to keep me from playing you can do whatever you want to him. I think he’s just never met someone who’s gay before. You should have seen the look on his face.” I recalled how Coach wriggled in his chair, completely taken by surprise.

  “What about Asshole and Asshole Junior?”

  “You think the whole school knows, Dad?” I asked, ignoring Dad’s question and imagining walking into school with everyone really looking at me instead of me just thinking their eyes were pointed in my direction. “I’m not ready for the whole school to know.” I’d already told the people I wanted to and started to get pissed all over again that Kevin thought it was something he could blab about to his dad. I didn’t tell the whole school when Mike told me he started going out with Carrie.

  “No, David,” Dad said. “I don’t think the whole school knows.”

  He sounded so certain, I couldn’t help but believe him.

  Tyler’s locker was in the middle of the sophomore hallway because he came to Lincoln High School in the middle of freshmen year and whoever registered him stuck him in the wrong hallway by mistake. Last year, he was embarrassed, being a junior in the freshmen hallway. This year he didn’t care because it meant I could drop by his locker almost whenever I wanted to. None of the sophomores would notice two people who never spoke to one another in the two and a half years they had been in high school together were suddenly spending many passing periods at one another’s side.

  I kept my gaze focused on the figure at the end of the hallway that wore a pair of gray jeans and black and red striped sweater. Tyler pulled the knit hat with the puffball off his head, and some strands of golden hair stayed standing up even after he put the hat in his locker. “Hi,” I said.

  “David.” He looked me over as if my clothes would somehow indicate how I was doing but it was the same thing I wore almost every day. “Are you okay?”

  I shrugged because I honestly didn’t know if I was okay or not.

  Tyler reached out to me but quickly balled his fist and put it stiffly at his side. “I really want to hug you right now.” The fist at his side tightened. “I want you to know how much I’m here for you.”

  “I know you are.” I wanted to hug Tyler too, and if we were in my car or in Tyler’s bedroom I’d have no problem, but I already felt like there was a spotlight on me.

  I looked around at the hallway traffic of sophomores lugging full backpacks, unwrapping scarves, taking off hats, stuffing coats into lockers. No one paid any attention to the misplaced senior boy and the other boy at his locker. We looked at each other for so long that all the hallway traffic seemed to disappear. I tried to telepathically tell Tyler how much I appreciated him and all he had done for me.

  “Do you have practice after school?” I asked.

  Tyler nodded. “Just a light workout since we’re in between the indoor and outdoor season.”

  I nodded. “I forgot. You told me that already.”

  “Are you going to open gym?”

  I shook my head. “The weight room isn’t open today.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  “That’s okay.” I wanted to hit myself in the back of the head. It felt like the conversations we would have through the chain-link fence that surrounded the track before Tyler finally asked me for a ride home one day and our arms touched when we both rested them on the center console.

  A bell rang, informing everyone that we had five minutes before first period started. I hadn’t been to my locker yet and still wore my heavy coat and carried a bag full of books I didn’t open the night before. “I’ll see you second period.”

  “I like to call it ‘our place,’” Tyler said, hinting at a smile.

  “Our place,” I said to myself, feeling a smile in my chest. “I thought you just liked looking at all the
pictures.”

  “Pieces. They’re pieces of art,” Tyler mimicked our teacher. “I mostly try to look at you.”

  I gave Tyler a mental hug, hoping he could feel it. Despite the second hand ticking around the clock, I didn’t make a move toward my locker.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, David, but it always seems messy at first.” Tyler closed his locker and slid a bag over his shoulder. “Well I don’t know if it is always messy but from personal experience and from what I’ve heard, messy is the norm.”

  “I’ve never liked messes,” I said. “Ask Robert about how I nag him about his side of the room.”

  True, the words in front of me were written in a foreign language, but I’d been taking Spanish for five years now and the dialogue for a fake travel show really should have been easier to memorize. All I had to do was recite the lines, listen to everyone else recite theirs, and then loiter at the side of the gym while everyone else in my class took the annual PE Dodge Ball Tournament very seriously. It would be the easiest part of my day, pretending like I was about to throw someone out when, dammit, I got hit in the leg with a ball and would have to wait on the sidelines until a teammate caught a ball, giving me permission to rejoin the game. Hopefully there’d be lots of butterfingers today.

  Everything else about this day had been hard.

  I was able to avoid Mike during lunch because I really did have to work on that essay for 1984 since I didn’t do anything for it the night before. I got my usual turkey sandwich and stopped at the table to tell Mike I was going to the library.

  Mike had been intently punching buttons on his graphing calculator. “I decided that I’m not going to do trig homework at home anymore. I’m going to get done what I can at lunch and if I finish, I finish.” He put the calculator down to write something down. “If I don’t, I don’t. I really don’t think I am ever going to use this stuff anyway.” He managed to gnaw on a pizza crust while working on a problem.

  “I was going to the library anyway,” I said, balancing my sandwich and a drink in addition to his books. “I’m stuck on this paper.”