Inclination

by Mia Kerick

  “You’ve been left with a fear for your physical safety that you didn’t have before.” Father Joseph restates my answer with eloquence.

  I nod and glance at Rinaldo. He appears to be genuinely wounded by my words.

  “What can you do, Rinaldo, to help restore Anthony’s sense of safety and well being?”

  “Geez, Del Vecchio, I sure am sorry I made you feel that way.” He sobs once, and the agonized sound surprises us all. When he is calm enough, he continues. “Alls I can say is, I’ll meet you before school in the parking lot and we can walk into the building together. I can do the same after school, if you want. And I can stop by your locker during the day to make sure you’re doing okay.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “No, you don’t need a babysitter, but Rinaldo is offering to provide you with a little bit of his strength,” Father Joseph interjects. “Seeing you two together, will also send the message of his regret to the members of Our Way. Now, the second thing you must do, Rinaldo, is go to confession. You have already confessed your guilt to Anthony, but you will also need to receive the sacrament of Penance at church.” Father Joseph stops speaking in order to let the full effect of his words sink in. “And my son, I think you need to take this a step further. Who else can you confess to, so as to let them know that you behaved inappropriately?”

  “I could confess what I did and how wrong I was at an Our Way meeting, Father J. Lots of the kids don’t think I did anything wrong, you know, cuz since Anthony’s gay, they say he had it coming to him.” All of the adults again grimace. “But I know that’s wrong now.”

  “Nobody deserves to be assaulted. Whoever says that is sorely mistaken, Rinaldo. Is it okay with you if he apologizes to the youth group, Anthony?”

  I shrug. Why not? How much worse can things get? “I guess.”

  “And finally,” Father Joseph continues, “is contrition. You need to repent and find your way back to God. You need to seek God’s forgiveness—recognizing forgiveness for the gift that it is—and come back in fullness to Him, to school, to youth group. You told me you’ve missed a great deal of school and all of the youth group meetings since this incident. You need to find your way back—and make up all of the work from your absences, as well.”

  We all stare at Father Joseph, slightly overwhelmed by this model that he has set up for Rinaldo to follow.

  “Anthony, you have expressed that you are feeling better physically, and that you are willing to work with Rinaldo.”

  “I forgive him already, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That is wonderful, Anthony. Forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself, as well as the person who wronged you. Now, as a group,” he glances around at the adults, “we all promise that we will walk with you until you feel that you are fully restored to your old self, or at least as much as you can be. And we will walk with Rinaldo as he seeks to reconcile himself to God and to you. Now, let us pray.”

  We bow our heads and say The Lord’s Prayer together, and then we get up to leave. My mom, however, asks if she can have a word in private with Father Joseph.

  And that was all she wrote, so to speak. Just like that I have forgiven my enemy and left the church of my childhood.

  Out in the hallway, Rinaldo waits while his mother puts on her coat by the hall closet. I make an effort not to look at him as I figure we’ve said what we’d come here to say.

  It seems that Rinaldo feels differently. He walks across the waiting room, awkwardly putting one enormous foot in front of the other, and stops when he’s about five feet from where I’m leaning against the wall, waiting for Mom. And since Dad went to get the car, I’m alone with him. Suddenly I feel stripped naked and vulnerable.

  “I sure did screw up with you, Anthony.” He looks at me more directly than he did in the priest’s office. “Wish I could take it back.”

  Being a guy of few words, I offer him none.

  “Always liked you. You weren’t never one of those loud-mouthed, in-your-face asshole types.”

  Feeling that his compliment, of sorts, requires some type of response, I say, “Thanks.”

  “You being gay—in ain’t no problem for me. Never woulda been if it weren’t for my dad.”

  “Cool.” Another safe response.

  “Wanna hang out sometime?”

  His words shock me. I feel like I’m about to have a head-on collision and I’m not even sitting behind the wheel of my car. I can only gawk at him.

  “Maybe we could catch a movie or go bowling.”

  Rinaldo is reaching out. It’s time to find out what I’m made of—it’s time to turn the other cheek. “Not bowling, I don’t think. But maybe we could catch a movie on a weekend.”

  If Jesus can forgive the big stuff, I can forgive this.

  Better Than No Attention

  The snow on the courts is still melting, but that doesn’t mean the Wedgewood Boys Tennis Team gets out of doing conditioning drills, because we don’t. Coach Phelps designed an elaborate series of workout stations, or so he calls them, throughout the high school building that we have to endure each day from three until five PM. These workout stations include the “stair climb” (jogging twenty-five times up and down the main stairway in the school entrance), the “hallway hopper challenge” (hopping and jumping and high knee jogging through the Language Arts/Health and Family Living wing), “serve yo’ mama” (serving drills in the cafeteria), “callisthenic counting” (dozens of push-ups, lunges, straight leg lifts, squats, crunches, and calf raises in the hallway by the custodians’ office), and “lapping Wedgewood’s bottom”, (I know, ewwww…it sounds gross, but just involves running laps around the bottom floor of the school from the math wing to the arts loop, through the library, into the cafeteria, and finally sprinting to the gymnasium). Once we get to the gym, we actually do tennis-specific warm-ups.

  And I’m certain it’s not a pretty sight—twenty-two boys hopping gracelessly past the home economics room—but it gets us moving and sweating and that is Coach Phelps’ goal. I’m a little nervous to use the showers with the other guys after practice since the word has spread that I’ve come out as gay, but it doesn’t seem to phase anyone but Laz.

  My former best pal, Lazarus Sinclair, isn’t doing well at all with my new gay identity. I assume that the main reason for this is because he’s not allowed to hang around with me as long as I “choose to act that way”, as his parents say, and I get a distinct feeling Laz believes I cooked up this whole gay story to avoid hanging out with him.

  Which is preposterous, all of my suffering considered.

  But this fact doesn’t stop Laz from treating his former sidekick, Anthony Duck-Young Del Vecchio, like he’s subhuman.

  It’s at the end of the third day of indoor practice, when we all stagger, completely exhausted, to the locker room, strip off our sweaty clothes, grab our towels, and head to the communal showers, when Laz makes his big move.

  “Get your homo eyes off my ass, Duck-Young.”

  Normally, Laz is a rather goofy, distracted, and overly active guy, but when he has it out for someone, he knows how to focus. I’ve seen it a few times before.

  “Huh?” Yes, I know. Brilliant.

  He says it louder. “Eyes off my ass, Duck-Young.” The nickname that has long been used in a fun and playful manner is suddenly a weapon.

  “I wasn’t looking at you.” My voice sounds whiny. I probably should have ignored him.

  “You need to shower in that far corner. And face the wall.” He points to the corner showerhead that nobody ever uses. “How else are we gonna be safe from you checkin’ out our assets?” He chuckles, pleased that he’s made “a funny”, which is what he always calls his goofy jokes. Laz then checks around to see if anybody else is ready to join in, but thankfully, no one contributes to his laughter or his taunting. The other kids on my team simply watch us with wide eyes, waiting to see how this will unfold.

  “I’ll shower where I want.” I
’ve never been a major target of bullying, but being small of stature has taught me a thing or two about not backing down at school. I proceed to clench my jaw tightly and steel my expression, as if this verbal attack perpetrated by my longtime best friend is nothing to so much as sneeze at. Inside, though, I’m cringing and cowering and shivering. I’m hurt and afraid and…and I want to quit the tennis team, here and now, without even finishing my much-needed shower.

  I’ve never been much of a fighter. I always cruise along, flying low under the radar, avoiding trouble like a pro. And Laz, he isn’t as much a fighter as he is a guy who wants attention. In specific, he wants my attention. And he’s always been the center of my world, especially in terms of my social life. But I know Laz will settle for negative attention if he can’t get the good kind, which reminds me a lot of Lulu when she’s having a very naughty day.

  After a brief and stressful shower, I pull my towel around my waist, walk back to my locker as slowly and seemingly relaxed as I can, and without even drying off, I pull on the clothes I wore to school. Then I spin around and head toward the door to the hallway, and freedom, dreaming of being cloistered inside the safety of my Chevy Malibu, where I can drive a few blocks from this torture chamber and… and freak out. There, I can decide if maybe I should take a year sabbatical from the tennis team and get a part-time job bagging groceries with my new free time after school. But once again, Laz is in my face, standing in front of the doorway, blocking my speedy exit.

  “You want me to disappear off the face of your new queer earth, don’t you, Duck-Young? Well, I’m not gonna do it.” He leans down and speaks in a low tone, directly into my face. “It just doesn’t work that way.” The skin on my arms and my chest break out in patchy goose bumps—a physical result of the thrill of terror his words engender.

  “How does it work then, Lazarus?” I force myself to look at him directly.

  “You change back to how you used to be—meaning, straight. And we go back to how we used to be—meaning best bro’s.”

  It’s my turn to chuckle, although this situation is the polar opposite of funny. “Even if I could ‘change’ my sexuality and ‘go back’ to being straight, which I can’t, mainly because I was never straight to begin with, I wouldn’t go back to being friends with you.”

  Laz tilts his head and his eyes get round as he’s clearly stunned by my statement. His jaw drops, too. Finally, he stutters, “J-jeez, Ant-man, can’t you take a joke?”

  And I’m surprised at the harshness of my words. “Some joke, Sinclair… I hate to quote such a worn out expression, but I will because it fits so well. Ever hear this one? With friends like you, who needs enemies?”

  He nods slowly, catching my drift. “Tony…bro?” Laz has changed his tune from bullying to anxious and regretful, but it’s too late.

  “I’m not your bro or your dude or your man or your buddy, Duck-Young. You can call me Anthony, but I’d really prefer you didn’t call me at all.” I step around him and sparks of emotion—maybe a toxic combination of the fear of getting beaten up again, a buzz from speaking up for the first time in my life, and the predicted abundance of adrenaline that goes with these things—shoots through my veins like a super strong energy drink. I feel the stares of the other guys, who are now starting to get dressed, fasten onto us with a Velcro grip. Not taking the time to assess whether the rest of my teammates are smiling in support of me or gaping my way in horror, I exit the locker room, trot down the hall, run through a patch of new grass instead of along the walkway like I’m supposed to, and sprint across the parking lot to my car.

  By the time I open the driver’s door, I’m sweating more profusely than I did at practice. And I realize that as I sprinted across the parking lot toward my car, I’d noticed a person—a huge guy, olive-skinned and athletic—running parallel to me in the same direction, about two rows of cars away. And it wasn’t Lazarus Sinclair.

  It was Rinaldo Vera.

  The Purpose Behind The Rules

  Once Rinaldo has silently shadowed me to my car, which is admittedly kind of creepy but I know it’s his way of doing his penance, I drive to David’s house.

  We’re usually alone there when I stop by, as David’s dad is rarely home on the weekdays because he travels for business and his mom volunteers most evenings at the local food donation center. We order pad Thai, which is getting to be a habit when I come over, and sit at his kitchen table analyzing all of the reasons that God will or won’t love me the way I am—gay. This after-tennis, Bible study/one-on-one discussion thing is also getting to be a habit.

  As always, I try to help David clean up the remnants of our Thai dinner, and as always, he tells me to keep my butt planted firmly on the kitchen chair—he can take care of it himself. Only when he’s cleaned up our trash and wiped down the one square foot of kitchen table we cleared in order to eat, does he sit down, pull out his pad of paper and red marker, and inform me of what today’s “God loves Gay Christians Pep Talk” will be about.

  “Today, let’s focus on the kind of God that our Father is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s like this: God made rules. But in order to decide what he intended with the rules, we need to decide if our God is an arbitrary God or if He has purpose behind His rules.”

  I’d never thought of Jesus as arbitrary before. In fact referring to Him in that way seems almost blasphemous. “Arbitrary?” I feel my eyebrows lifting in their own accord.

  “You look horrified, dude. Don’t stress, I don’t think He’s arbitrary either.” David chuckles and then continues. “I got a lot of this information from a gay Christian site online. You should check it out.” He scribbles the website address on my daily outline.

  Then David shuffles his papers around and pulls out a stapled packet that suggests a non-traditional Christian view of homosexuality—he hands it to me and as I scan it, I realize we’ve already referred to it many times in the course of our discussions.

  “See, it’s like this: Jesus Christ died on the cross for us—to set us free from the old laws. Up until then, we were total prisoners of those rules.”

  “But that doesn’t mean there are no rules for us anymore, right?”

  “No, of course not. We can’t go around sinning right and left, but we’ve gotta focus on the one big rule that Christ set forth—love your neighbor as yourself. And if we focus everything we do on that, we’ll be doing what Jesus wants of us.” He stops and sips his water, but I can’t miss the glazed-over look in his eyes that reveals his deep commitment to this message. “For example, you can’t exactly murder a dude if you’re loving him as you love yourself, now, can ya?” He straightens his shoulders, confident with his position on this topic.

  I envy his peace of mind. “No, I guess you can’t.”

  “And if you’re loving somebody like you love yourself, you won’t be mad jealous of all the shit he’s got, yeah? Get the picture?”

  “I think I do.” I suck down a quick sip of water, too, and then wait for him to tell me more. I feel like a baby bird waiting to be fed.

  “God’s rules have purposes behind them. And these rules need to be specific to the exact situation. His rules aren’t one size fits all. Jesus even said that God cares more about the principles behind rules than the specific rules themselves.

  “Now, you told me about how Laz acted today in the locker room. And you know it was wrong, because he was not showing compassion—you know, not loving you as he loves himself. And even though, on some level, he thinks he was acting in accordance with God’s law as he understands it—cuz homosexuality is wrong in his perspective—we both know that he was not following the spirit of God’s law. The God I love and believe in would not encourage such behavior—it wouldn’t make sense.” David reaches across the table and grasps my hand. The predictable goose bumps cover the skin of my arm. “God is not arbitrary. He doesn’t make rules for the simple purpose of making us follow them. We’re not his trained ponies that need
to prove something by turning in circles or jumping over orange cones at His whim. There are reasons, you know, purposes, behind his rules.”

  “And, what would be his purpose in forbidding same-sex love if not to see very arbitrarily if certain ones of us can pass the test of denying ourselves something He programmed us to want?” It’s more or less a rhetorical question, but the fact that I ask it shows I’m getting this.

  “He has no purpose in doing that, that I can see. I mean, there are three beings in our God—so He’s into relationships, Tony. And we’re designed to be in relationships, just like He is—with Him and with a lifetime partner.” David’s pale cheeks are now flushed with color, in the way of a person who is touched with passion and conviction. I can tell he truly believes what he is saying by the way he’s clutching my hand, as tightly as I clutch my tennis racket in a match.

  And maybe it’s not a news flash at this point, but I feel things for David Gandy that I’ve never felt for another person before. Profound, intense, intimate feelings of friendship, sure—but I’m honest with myself and I admit there’s also a lot of attraction.

  When David leans over and kisses me—at first just a brushing of his lips against mine, but soon blossoming into a full passionate, and mutual, exploration—for a moment I truly believe that there’s no reason at all God would forbid something so wonderful.

  Magic in Blackhall Theater (Followed By Magic In A Black Truck)

  By kissing David, I’d acted on my homosexual tendencies—given in to my “objective disorder.” I’d slid recklessly down a slippery slope, barreling forward in the direction of intrinsic moral evil. What’s more, I’d enjoyed it very, very much.

  And tonight, it appears that I have a date.