The Sidekicks

by Will Kostakis

  ‘Yeah, have a cry, you poof.’

  My zipper catches. It’s like the word activates some kind of fight-or-flight response in me. My heart pumps hard.

  I didn’t know Peanut was gay . . .

  ‘Stop calling me that,’ he says.

  I continue to undress, like I don’t find their exchange interesting in the slightest.

  ‘And if I don’t?’ Dave goads. ‘Gonna hit me? Go on.’

  Dave’s a barrel of knotted muscles, Peanut’s an arrow. He has some strength in him, but it’s not a fight he can win. He clenches a small, trembling fist all the same. He thinks about it. That’s his downfall. Before he takes a swing, Dave shoves him back. He crumbles down on the bench beside his bags. Dave isn’t the sort of guy to think before he acts.

  ‘Thought so. Poof.’ Dave saunters towards the door. On his way past, his eyes meet mine and I worry they’ll betray me. He smiles. ‘Oh, hey, man.’

  He doesn’t think I’m a poof. I’m relieved.

  Peanut hunches over, defeated. He stares at the floor between his feet and this guilt creeps over me. I should have stepped in. I should have called Dave out. I should have had the guts to stop him.

  Peanut erupts. He swings his sports bag against the wall with a frustrated grunt.

  He looks back to the floor and my guilt intensifies.

  I step forwards and stretch out a sympathetic, ‘Heeeeeeey.’

  He doesn’t respond, so I ask how he is.

  ‘It’s bullshit,’ he spits.

  I want to placate him but he’s right. It is bullshit.

  ‘I totally get it,’ I say.

  Peanut squints up at me. ‘What would you know?’

  Of course. I forgot I’m speaking through a closet door. In his eyes, I’m straight. I’ve spent so long keeping hidden, I’ve become an expert liar. In an instant, my mind manufactures a gay cousin, Peanut’s age – someone I can speak through.

  ‘See, I have this . . .’ I stop myself.

  Peanut feels the same way I do. Why am I hiding behind a fabricated cousin? I can speak as myself and make his world a little less dark.

  ‘I’m gay.’ I laugh, a short release of pressure. ‘What would I know? You want to be who you are, but you’ve been taught all the words for it are putdowns. You’ve probably used them yourself. Poof, fag, gay. You want to be honest, but you’re scared that all they’ll think when they see you are the putdowns. So you say nothing, like that’ll solve it. But instead of the bullshit being around you, it seeps inside you. It becomes heavy and it grows, and you can’t hide it from yourself. And it tortures you. I know because it tortures me.’ I exhale.

  Peanut blinks. ‘Dude, I’m not gay.’

  ‘What?’

  He curls his lip. ‘It’s my surname. Caroline. They always give me shit for it.’

  My heart skips a beat.

  ‘You’re a poof?’ he asks.

  My mind blurs, like someone’s spilt its thoughts on a blank canvas and smeared them all together. The more I try to focus, the less I can make out. And then, clarity. My thoughts twist into a face under a mess of ginger hair.

  I need Isaac.

  The computer lab is locked. I lean against the door and take a shallow breath. There’s no guarantee that Miles even comes before school, but I wait anyway.

  As time creeps by, I feel my secret spread. I see Peanut on the rope telling the first guy that stops at the wall, ‘Ryan’s gay.’ I imagine it bouncing from person to person, around the school like it’s an echo in a post-apocalyptic car park. Only inverted. Instead of getting softer with each repetition, it gets louder.

  Miles arrives at half-past seven. He’s surprised to see me. ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘I tried –’ I clear my throat. ‘It’s locked.’

  Miles raises an eyebrow. ‘No, it is not.’ He takes a key from his pocket and twists it in the lock. The door opens. ‘See?’

  ‘Whose –?’

  ‘Do not ask.’

  I follow him inside. He walks to his computer, leans over the keyboard and types his login details. He then points the remote up at the projector and the blue square lights the room.

  I pull up a chair and suddenly fear I’m intruding. ‘You don’t mind me being here, do you?’ I ask.

  Without turning from the screen, Miles says, ‘No.’ He clicks deeper into the folder hierarchy until he gets to a grid of video files. He scrolls through them until one thumbnail catches his eye. ‘Ah!’ He waits for the screen to project on the wall before he selects the clip. ‘You will like this one.’

  Isaac and I stand in the school courtyard. The wind is whipping at our hair and lashing at the microphone. It bursts from the speakers. Off-camera, Miles shouts, ‘Action!’

  There’s a delay between the, ‘Action!’ and the acting. I become rigid and very unsure of what to do with my hands. After trialling some kind of karate stance, I place them on my waist and leave them there. Seriously, it’s like I’m frozen in a department store menswear catalogue. Isaac’s transformation is more graceful. He assumes his character. Each of his movements is natural, but he’s not moving like he naturally would have. He’s an actor.

  ‘I know what you did,’ I recite. My neck is so straight.

  Isaac’s fluid. ‘Really? What do you –? Oh!’ He breaks and looks behind the camera, a little to the left. ‘Did Ryan tell you about last night?’

  Miles doesn’t sound impressed. ‘Isaac, we do not have much time.’

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ he insists. ‘Ryan went on a date.’

  I sit up straighter. I remember this. It’s the day after Todd and I saw our first movie together. Isaac knows. And I’m thinking he’s about to tell Miles . . .

  ‘What is her name?’ Miles asks.

  Isaac gives me a chance to correct him. When I don’t, he covers for me. ‘Her name’s Dot.’

  ‘Dot?’ Miles asks. ‘That is retro.’

  Isaac’s grinning. He’s so proud of himself for thinking of Todd backwards.

  Miles asks if I am going to see her again, and I’m reluctant to answer. Eventually, I tell him I’m not sure.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Isaac says, before he looks to me. ‘You are.’

  He wants me to give Todd a proper shot. He won’t let me toss it away because we’re both dudes. I nod and restrain a smirk.

  ‘Right. We are wasting battery,’ Miles says. ‘Get in position.’

  I glue my hands to my waist again, and as he relaxes into his character, Isaac winks.

  ‘And, action!’

  Sitting in the lab, I wipe my eyes with two fingers. They’re wet. I look to Miles. I can almost feel Isaac urging me on. ‘Miles?’

  He turns from the wall. ‘Hm?’

  I hesitate. I wonder how long I have left, how long it takes for the Olympic hopeful to turn into the poof who swims. Peanut’s still doing laps. It won’t get out for another hour at least.

  One more hour. I want to savour it.

  ‘I should change before a teacher sees I’m only wearing a tracksuit over togs and flips their shit,’ I say.

  ‘Are you not training this morning?’

  I shrug. ‘Don’t need to.’

  I’m Ryan Patrick Thomson, Olympic hopeful.

  I go to the spot that’s ours. There’s no one sitting there. A little rain and the courtyard’s deserted, save for the footy faithful. They jog in one line, grunting team-talk as they pass the ball.

  I wipe the table sort-of dry with my sleeve and sit up on it, feet on the bench. I exhale.

  I’ve been so careful for so long, and this is how it happens. I open up to someone, thinking it’ll help him, and he’s not even gay. It’s his fucking name. There’s a part of me that knows it’s funny, only, the rest of me isn’t quite ready to laugh about it yet.

  I rest my hands beside me. One lands on a loose flake of green paint. Curious, I pick at it, until there’s enough to pinch and peel back to reveal the timber underneath.

  ‘Jeez, who died?’ someone as
ks.

  I look up. Harley’s standing with one hand in his blazer pocket, the other wrapped around an impossibly large coffee cup. He takes a sip.

  ‘I’m back.’

  The weather’s turned. The sun’s pissed off and the wind’s picked up. That’s my cue. I skol the dregs and drop the empty bottle. It clinks against the others. I sit forwards in the deck chair. ‘Righto, I’m calling it.’

  Zac looks wounded. Well, as wounded as he can look sitting on a bucket in a high-vis vest and boardies. ‘Already?’

  I stand up and have to steady myself. Shouldn’t of had that last one, I reckon.

  ‘Yeah, dinner curfew. Besides, school tomorrow. Better sober up for all that learning.’

  Zac burps. ‘Harley, we’re sober.’ He reaches for the bourbon he taxed from his dad’s cabinet and messily tops up a Mum of the Year mug. ‘I’m sober anyway.’ He starts slurring the alphabet backwards to prove it. ‘Z, Y, X . . .’

  ‘I was kidding. I legit don’t care.’

  ‘Z, Y, X,’ he repeats forcefully. I let him carry on. There’s a rough patch from O to H, but he gets to A in the end. Chuffed, he tilts the bottle at me.

  I shake my head. ‘Seriously, dude, I gotta –’

  ‘For the road,’ he insists.

  ‘Already called it.’

  ‘Heads!’ It isn’t much of a warning. The footy smacks the deckchair and bounces towards the fence. ‘Sorry,’ Omar adds.

  ‘Oi.’ Zac turns on the bucket, which is difficult to do. ‘I do not condone that.’ There’s spillage when he waves his mug.

  Omar’s uneasy. ‘Almost hitting Harley?’ he asks.

  ‘Sport,’ Zac spits.

  Marty found the footy behind the shed, Ex suggested they play, and Omar told them to give him a sec to finish his drink. That was hours ago. They’ve tossed the ball around Zac’s yard since.

  ‘Dude, you’re burnt as fuck,’ Marty says.

  ‘Can’t be.’ Zac points at the yellow streaked across his cheeks. ‘I’m wearing sunscreen.’

  He watches them until Ex says he doesn’t see the harm in one more. They head to the esky.

  ‘That’s right,’ Zac mumbles into his mug. The back of his neck is bright red.

  ‘You are pretty burnt,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  I laugh. It’s all I can do sometimes. ‘You’re good for tomorrow, yeah?’

  Zac racks his brain. When it comes up blank, he squints at me. ‘Remind me . . .’

  ‘Coffee with Jacs.’

  ‘Ah.’ He watches the others nurse their brews. ‘Should be fine. Don’t see tonight lasting much longer.’

  The boarding house backs onto Woods Lane. There’s a couple of bins, a car without a bumper bar and shit all else. No one has any real reason to be here, unless they’ve missed curfew. I wheel a recycling bin to the brick fence, climb up and over. I drop into the courtyard and hiccup. Tastes like spew.

  ‘Sexy,’ I mutter.

  Everyone’s in the mess hall for spag bol night. I sneak into a seat at the Year Eleven table. ‘Pass me the jug of water, will you?’

  ‘Where’d you come from?’ Hughes asks.

  ‘What? Nowhere. Been here the whole time.’ He hands over the jug and I down three glasses. I scope out the room. Guys are lining up at the bain-marie for seconds. I need a plate. Hughes clears the last bit of bolognaise from his. ‘You done with that?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘Pretty much.’

  I scoff my dinner and take the water jug to bed with me.

  I hop out of the shower, towel gripped around my waist. Water’s running full blast in the five other stalls. I walk around the bend.

  ‘That’s halfway!’ The door’s open just enough for Collins’s voice to carry through from the corridor. ‘This is the time to start using soap if you haven’t already.’

  Guys rag on about the six-minute limit, but it’s easy to cover the essentials in two. I use the remaining time for selfies. I aim my phone at the huge mirror and twist to show off the design down my right side. I have to draw my tatts till I’m old enough to get one for real, or I can afford the flight to wherever they won’t give a shit about my age. This one’s starting to fade already. I take two photos, apply a filter to the best one and send it to Jacs.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Collins calls.

  ‘Already?’ Fuzz asks from his stall.

  ‘Yes. You’re not that dirty.’

  ‘Oh, he’s pretty brown, sir,’ Hughes adds. The other blokes laugh.

  ‘That’s scullery for a week, Mark.’

  Hughes protests. ‘But –’

  ‘I can count to two.’

  ‘It wasn’t racist, sir. He even jokes about it.’

  ‘Would you rather three weeks on scullery duty?’

  Hughes goes quiet. ‘No, sir,’ he says.

  ‘Great. One minute.’

  I start to dress. The tatt disappears behind my white shirt.

  I met Jacs my second night in Sydney. The boarding house has these dinners with Barton’s sister school, Our Sacred Something of the Holy Whatever. Jacs boards there. Good mates need to like the same movies and hate the same people. Jacs quoted Quentin Tarantino and seemed to hate most people. So, yeah, it worked.

  Breakfast, the line at the coffee shop, the walk to Hyde Park. To fit in coffee, the rest of my morning has to happen at the speed of light.

  I can feel Olive and Jo watching me from the kitchen as I shovel scrambled eggs into a serviette. They’re paid to feed us, the motherly disapproval comes free of charge.

  ‘I’m having it to go,’ I explain.

  Jo wishes me luck. I don’t think I need it. I leave. I manage to have two bites before the serviette sags forwards and the egg tumbles onto the pavement.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Order for Harley?’ the barista calls.

  I look up. There’s a tray of three drinks by the coffee machine.

  Irish-Dutch-Lithuanian-German-Inuit . . . With that many hyphens, you come out looking some kind of Spanish.

  My folks didn’t name me. I was hours old when they wrote options on a whole bunch of Post-its, covered my body with them and waited for me to name myself. I touched Scott first and they went with that. People just call me Harley, unless they’re Jacs. She calls me whatever she wants.

  Jacs is waiting on the edge of the Archibald Fountain. She looks up from her phone.

  ‘Heyo.’ I hold out the tray.

  She takes her latte. ‘Your fly’s undone.’

  ‘It’s not.’ I check my zipper. It’s all the way up.

  Jacs chews on a smile. ‘Never gets old,’ she says.

  ‘Any sign of Zac?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  I shoot him a text. We sip our drinks. I slouch forwards. She taps her feet. We sip our drinks.

  ‘We probably shouldn’t send, like, a hundred texts right before we catch up,’ Jacs says.

  ‘True.’

  She exhales and sits back. She pulls on the elastic band around her wrist, and her eyes drift to the drink with Zac written on the lid. ‘What did he order?’ she asks. She grabs it and takes a sip. ‘Oh, gross.’ That doesn’t stop her sipping some more.

  I check my phone. Zac hasn’t texted. He’s probably asleep. Trust him to chuck a sickie and not tell anyone.

  ‘It was a pretty big session yesterday,’ I explain.

  ‘Mm.’ Jacs hops up.

  ‘Where you going?’

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘School. You know, that thing we do every day?’

  ‘He could still show.’

  Jacs sighs. ‘But then he’d know I waited.’ She walks backwards and two suits split up to dodge her. She points at me. ‘Make better friends, Scott Harley.’

  At Barton, they’re always banging on about learning opportunities. Evans pulls me out of class to talk about them.

  We have a special relationship, the two of us. She hauls me in every February, tells me it’s my year. Then I get results back
that aren’t too crash-hot, or I grow my hair out past what’s acceptable, or I laugh at something legit hilarious like a kid tripping down the stairs, and I’m back and she’s all like, ‘Scott, I thought we said this was your year . . .’

  Thing is, when she hauls me in, I usually know why. Coz I write an acrostic poem instead of an essay in an English exam, coz I refuse to get a haircut on religious grounds, coz four students and a staff member say they saw me push a Twelvie down the stairs.

  It hasn’t exactly been the Year of Harley so far, but I’m doing all right. I don’t write sarcastic poems when I don’t know the answer, I don’t insist I’m Rastafarian, and I don’t elbow younger kids who give me the shits.

  So I’m buggered if I know why I’m here.

  Or why he’s here.

  Miles sits bolt upright at the other end of the waiting room. He’s reading the cookbook Barton published. Three hundred glossy, full-colour pages celebrating the school’s proud traditions, mixing inspiring stories with delicious recipes from students, their families and staff. Basically, someone in marketing wanted Barton to seem more up its own arse.

  ‘Oi.’

  Miles doesn’t look up.

  ‘Oi.’

  He looks up. His lips are all attitude like he’s annoyed I’ve interrupted a scone recipe.

  ‘What are you in for? Here to ask Evans for a Time-Turner?’

  His mouth drops open. ‘Wow, you can read?’

  ‘Nah, saw the movie.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘Of course, you did.’

  ‘For real though, why are you here?’ I ask.

  ‘Mrs Evans sent for me.’

  ‘You’re busted.’

  His face whitens, and he was practically albino to start with.

  ‘I am not . . . busted.’

  I nod. ‘You’re busted.’

  Thommo comes in from the corridor. ‘Yeah, you’re a goner,’ he adds. He sinks into a seat near me.

  ‘You too?’ I ask.

  ‘Apparently. What have we done?’ Thommo asks.

  ‘You and me? No clue. He’s just after a Time-Turner.’