“Well, I most certainly don’t want to spend another six or eight hours every week with the Jackrabbit.”
Zoey shrugs. “Looks like they’re only available as a pair.”
“And I don’t even know if I’m any good at track. Or field, for that matter.”
Alfonso joins us. “Are you ready? We have to get to class.”
“Ask him,” Zoey says and shrugs again.
“Well?” Alfonso looks at me.
“Oh what the heck,” I say and push past him to sign my name on the School Newspaper list.
“What’s he signing up for?” Zoey asks Alfonso.
“School newspaper.”
“Oh,” Zoey says, and when I look at her I can see the disappointment in her eyes.
* * *
I sit at lunch with Zoey. Alfonso is lagging behind because he had to go to the bathroom before going to suck up to Mr. Estrada who’s in charge of Entrepreneurship.
“So,” she says, “School Newspaper, huh?”
“Yeah. I want to improve my writing. I mean, journalism and fiction writing are two different pairs of shoes, but still.”
“So no Track & Field for you then, I guess?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. I mean, I do like sports, and I enjoy running. But you see …” I lower my voice and look over my shoulder to make sure nobody’s listening in. “Track & Field never ever would have crossed my mind if it weren’t for Chris, and I’m not sure if that’s a sufficient reason. I mean, I don’t even know if he’s gay. What if he isn’t?”
Zoey raises her eyebrows. “What if he is, though?”
“Exactly! Then what am I gonna do?”
“Then you’re gonna hit on him, and then he falls for you, and you’re gonna live happily ever after.”
I snort. “I wish! But it’s not gonna be that simple and straightforward, I’m afraid.”
“Well, that’s love for you.”
“Not the L-word!” I hiss at her and look over my shoulder again. “And keep your voice down!”
“Sorry,” she says, cringing.
“Don’t you dare talk about love! We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here. I don’t even know the guy!”
“Well, that’s what we’re about to change, isn’t it?”
“And then what? I mean, seriously, what am I gonna do?”
Zoey shrugs. “Tell him you’re gay too.”
“I told you to keep your voice down!”
“All right, all right,” she whispers. “Jesus! Can’t we mention the G-word either?”
“Especially not the G-word! Not as long as I’m still in the closet.”
“Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.”
I frown at her. “About what?”
“About your official coming out. How is that coming along?”
My shoulders slump. It’s a sore spot because I know that with coming out to Zoey I started something that I will have to finish somehow, some day. Except I have no idea how.
“Oh I don’t know. Of course I do want to come out, But I don’t want to make a big deal of it.”
Zoey shrugs. “Then don’t. I mean, it’s not the 1990s anymore. Nobody really cares if somebody’s gay anymore, not in this part of the country, not in our generation. And it’s not like we’re evangelical Christians and Mom and Dad will send you off to conversion therapy or something. Nobody who cares about you will think any less of you just because you’re gay.”
With a thud, a lunch tray lands on the table, and Alfonso slumps down in the chair next to me. “Oh,” he says, “are you talking about Chris?”
Zoey looks at me with her eyes wide open. Neither of us saw or heard Alfonso ninja his way to our table. I feel adrenaline tingling my lower back, prompting my body to a fight-or-flight response.
But I can’t run away.
I can’t beat up Alfonso either.
And so, since I don’t know what else to do, I panic.
“What?” I exclaim a lot louder than I should. “No! What?”
Alfonso looks puzzled. “Um … I don’t know, I just heard the word gay, so I assumed you were talking about Chris.”
I don’t even know what Alfonso is saying or how to respond to it, so I’m glad Zoey is jumping in.
“Do you know something we don’t?” she asks him, her eyebrows almost meeting her hairline.
Alfonso looks back and forth between Zoey and me. “Didn’t you guys know? Chris is gay.”
“Get out of here!” Zoey says, casting a side glance at me.
Alfonso shakes his head. “No, seriously. When he turned fourteen, his parents threw a big birthday party for him. I mean, a really big party, with all his aunts and uncles and grandparents, and some thirty or forty people from Littlefield Junior High. And right in the middle of it, Chris grabbed the microphone and made the big announcement. For his family it was a jaw-dropping moment, apparently, but all his friends broke into spontaneous applause and cheers and everything, and in the end everyone from his family was really supportive as well.”
Zoey looks at him. “And you know all this … how exactly?”
“My cousin Alfredo went to Littlefield with Chris.”
“Wow, so Chris Larsen is gay.” She looks at me. “How about that?”
“No kidding,” is all I can come up with.
“Yep,” Alfonso says, digging into his lunch.
I shake my head. “I really wouldn’t have thought …”
“Why not?” he asks.
“I don’t know. He just doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as flamboyant and fabulous as you’d expect gay people do be, I guess.”
Alfonso shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any gay people. I mean, personally.” He looks at me a little too long for comfort, and I can’t help but wonder if he suspects anything or if I’m just being paranoid.
Zoey shrugs. “Well, they can’t all be Tyler Oakleys, can they?.”
“Who?” Alfonso asks.
“Tyler Oakley.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know who that is.”
“He’s a YouTuber,” Zoey explains. “Pretty popular too. He’s got, like, seven million subscribers or something.”
“Eight million,” I correct her. “And how do you even know Tyler Oakley?”
Zoey shrugs. “I don’t now. How do you know Tyler Oakley, Matt?”
I want to strangle her for asking that question in front of Alfonso, but thanks to my reasonable knowledge of contemporary American literature I can come up with an innocuous answer without stammering. “He’s friends with John Green.”
“Oh, the guy from The Fault in Our Stars?” Sandy asks as she and Jason sit down next to Zoey. “I loved The Fault in Our Stars!”
My heart skips a beat because just like Alfonso earlier, I didn’t see them coming.
“He’s not ‘from’ The Fault in Our Stars,” Zoey says, rolling her eyes at Sandy. “He wrote it.”
Sandy shrugs. “Same difference. So what about him?”
“His friend Tyler is gay,” Alfonso says.
“Aw,” Sandy says. “Poor Tyler!”
“Whoa.” Jason looks at her and frowns. “Why would you even say that?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay or anything,” Sandy explains. “I mean, it’s not a choice, right? You’re born with it.”
“Wow, Sandy,” Zoey says, “way to make it sound like a disease.”
In a rare instance of quick-wittedness, Sandy replies, “Not at all. If I say you were born with brown eyes, does that sound like brown eyes are a disease?”
Stone-faced, Zoey concedes, “Fair point, I guess.”
“So anyway,” Sandy continues, “some people are born gay, and that’s, like, totally fine, but if you had the choice, would you actually choose to be gay? Like, if right before your birth someone came up to you, like God or whoever is in charge of these things, and they asked you if you’d rather be gay or straight, would any of you actually say you’d rather be gay than stra
ight?”
Sandy looks at every single one of us, waiting for replies that aren’t forthcoming. I have to admit, it’s a pretty good question. A question that I’ve never really thought about.
“See?” Sandy says. “I mean, gay marriage is now legal and everything, but there is still so much discrimination going on. So would you really expose yourself to that if you didn’t have to?”
We’re all still speechless, except Zoey who puts her hand on Sandy’s shoulder, and says to her with a smirk, “Good job, Sandy. Way to cheer everyone up,” which, ironically, cheers us all up and makes us chuckle.
“I’m just saying,” Sandy says and shrugs.
I don’t even know what it is, but somehow Sandy’s rant flipped a switch in my head, so I get up and pick up my lunch tray.
Zoey looks at me. “Where are you going?” she asks and starts sucking the straw of her juice box.
“I changed my mind,” I say. “I think I’m going to sign up for Track & Field after all.”
In combination with the orange juice, that information is apparently too much to process for Zoey, and the juice spurts out of her nose. As Alfonso raises an eyebrow at me, Sandy hands Zoey a paper napkin and cheers me on, “That’s awesome! Go Matt!”
Go me, indeed.
CHAPTER FOUR
As I make my way to the message boards, Alfonso’s raised eyebrow keeps haunting me. He knows me. My prowess in PE has always exceeded my motivation, so my decision to sign up for Track & Field must seem utterly random to him.
When I turn the corner, the hallway in front of the message boards is deserted. I pull a pen out of my backpack and approach the Track & Field sign-up list. Just before my pen hits the paper, I’m having second thoughts.
I know I’m doing this on a whim.
I haven’t thought it entirely through.
Actually, I haven’t thought it through at all, but right now I just want to do something—anything, really— because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single gay boy in possession of good looks must be in want of a boyfriend.
Before I have any more time to change my mind, I sign my name right blow Chris’s, when the sound of a vaguely familiar voice suddenly makes me jump.
“Hey.”
I turn my head, and it’s speak-of-the-devil Chris. He must have been walking down the adjacent hallway—presumably on his way to the cafeteria—when he saw me and stopped. Now he comes walking toward me. His T-shirt reads Just do it, and I’m thinking, Sure. If you let me.
Meanwhile, my knees turn into Jell-O, which is great because I skipped dessert.
“Matt, right?” he asks.
“Right, Matt,” I reply stupidly. “Chris.”
Speaking of dessert, I want to eat his sweet face with a spoon.
That’s a pretty stupid thing to be thinking of someone, but here we are.
“So what did you sign up for?” Chris asks, looking at the lists.
My first impulse is to say School Newspaper, but that list is some six feet to the right, and he’s already spotted my name on the Track & Field list.
“Track & Field! That’s awesome! I’m doing that too!”
“Yeah … I …,” I stammer. “Your name … on the list …”
“So what’s your favorite event?”
“My favorite event? I don’t know … maybe the Olympics?”
Chris laughs. “No, I mean, what are your favorite track and field events? Like, high jump, long jump? The throwing events? Running?”
“Oh!” I say, feeling incredibly stupid. “Running. I like running. Yeah.”
“Awesome, I’m a runner too. Short or long distance?”
I shrug, struggling to make stuff up as I go along. “I don’t know. A little bit of both, I guess.”
“Right,” Chris says with a shadow of a frown on his face. “So what’s your time on the mile?”
I’m so far out of my depth in this conversation, I feel like I’m drowning. I run forty to forty-five minutes every Saturday morning. Now if I knew the exact distance of my regular run, I could probably calculate my average mile run time with a reasonable degree of accuracy, deduct ten percent to account for the fact that I usually run more like six or seven miles and I’d likely be a lot faster if I ran only one and if I were actually running for speed and not just jogging for fitness. Sadly, I lack that knowledge and the mental capacity to perform such calculations on the spot, so in order to give Chris a quick answer, I just make something up.
“Um, I don’t know,” I say, nervously scratching the back of my head. “Six minutes or so?”
“Really?” He raises his eyebrows. “That’s pretty good.”
Oh boy. I hope I didn’t just break the world record for fourteen-year-olds. Maybe I can salvage the situation with a figure that is more firmly based in reality, so I say, “Actually, I do kind of prefer the shorter distances. In PE in junior high I ran the one hundred meters in 12.5 seconds.”
That one is actually true.
Chris nods approvingly. “My personal best is 11.89, but 12.5 is not bad. Not bad at all.”
I’m tempted to try and break his record right here and now by turning around and running away as fast as I can, but I obviously can’t do that, so I just say, “Awesome.”
I have no idea what else to say.
I’m so starstruck, it’s not even pretty.
Definitely nowhere near as pretty as he is with his bright smile and his soft, clean skin and his messy hair.
“Listen,” he says and puts his hand on my shoulder, and at that point I actually stop listening, because his touch sends electric shock waves through my body that short-circuit my brain. I’m tensing up, causing my shoulders to rise. It’s as if my body is trying to nestle itself into his big, strong hand that feels heavy and warm through my T-shirt. It’s the crudest form of body language that my shoulder is awkwardly trying to speak, and I’m longing for some sort of response, maybe a little squeeze, a tender stroke of his thumb, or anything that would reveal something about him that I will forever be too scared, too embarrassed to ask. But it’s not happening, and then, all of a sudden, it ends as abruptly as it began. He withdraws his hand, and it feels as if someone cut the ropes of my parachute and I’m falling out of the clouds, hurtling towards the hard, unyielding ground of reality. My brain finally gets to processes the information it has stored in the data buffer between my ears and my cerebrum, and I catch up on what Chris was saying to me.
“I’m running late for lunch, so I better be going. I’ll see you later, Matt, okay?”
“Okay, sure, yeah,” I hear myself say. “Cool. See you later. Chris.”
I love saying his name. Even more so when he can actually hear it.
“All right then,” he says. With a smile he turns around and leaves. Before he turns the corner, he looks back at me, still smiling. I raise my hand, but before I let myself get carried away into an awkward wave, I drop it again and just nod and smile back.
When he’s gone, it feels as if I’m finally allowed to breathe again. I turn and lean back against the wall, all the tension leaving my body, and with my heart still pounding heavily in my chest and my hands and knees trembling, I feel a strange and oddly satisfying sense of accomplishment.
* * *
As we leave the school grounds, the closing bell still ringing in our ears, Zoey, Alfonso and I get on our phones to check the emails and text messages we’ve been getting while we were incommunicado. In my case, it’s mostly useless stuff as always. A text message from Mom, letting me know that she’ll be taking Zoey to the mall and that I am to make sure that Greg won’t leave the house or watch TV until he’s done his homework.
As if I have any authority over my little brother when nobody else is home.
Then two spam emails, and one to let me know that Tumblr have updated their Terms of Service, and one from the middle-aged widow of some African dictator who offers me a thirty percent share of the fifteen million dollars she wants me to help her get ou
t of her war-torn country before her corrupt government seizes everything and she has to sell her six young children at the local slave market.
And finally, there’s a notification from Wattpad that 2-b-pretty, my biggest and truest fan, has finally left a comment on Freshmen Love. I don’t even bother opening the Wattpad app to look at it. 2-b-pretty’s comments tend to be on the longer side, and they often make me chuckle. I don’t want to draw any attention toward myself. Neither Zoey nor Alfonso are aware of the true nature of my literary endeavors, because they’re too sexually revealing.
“Oh,” Zoey says, still looking at her phone. “Mom wants to take me to the mall.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “She wants me to babysit Greg while she’s out with you.”
“Wait,” Alfonso says, “I thought we were gonna hang out later.”
“We still can. I just can’t come to your place. Unless you want me to bring Greg.”
“Hell no!”
“See?”
“All right, your place it is then. Should I bring the Xbox?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say and shrug.
“Wanna play Phantom Pain or Fifa 16?”
I snort. “Does it matter? I’m gonna get my ass kicked either way.”
“True,” he says. “Anyway, I’ll just drop off my books at home and grab the Xbox and I’ll be right over, okay?”
“All right.”
He hugs Zoey good-bye, fist-bumps with me and takes off.
“Oh my God, finally!” Zoey says as soon as he’s out of earshot.
“Whoa,” I say. “Rude!”
“Well, excuse you, but it’s not my fault we can’t talk about this in front of your best friend because you’re too chicken to come out to him!”
“I’m not too chicken!” I protest. “I just haven’t found the right moment yet.”
“Well, you better find it soon, because I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Sooner or later I’m going to blab, and it will totally be not my fault!”
“All right, all right. I’ll do it soon.”
“Good! So anyway, tell me already, did you do it?”
We haven’t had time to talk yet, so she doesn’t know, and just for the fun of it, I pretend I have no idea what she’s talking about.
Cupid Painted Blind Page 4
