Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  I really had thought I could, hadn’t I? I’d thought that if I put boundaries on it, our relationship could be contained in one sharply defined corner of my life. But it had blasted past all my good intentions.

  I should have pulled away from him, stopped letting him touch me, released him, but I couldn’t. “I’m sorry. If I could….” This was killing me. “You know that if I could….”

  “You can,” he said, desperately. “Tom, you can, if you only—”

  That did it, that gave me the strength to push myself away. “Kevin! Please! I can’t. Get it?”

  I saw him take that in, saw his devastation for a few seconds, and then the resolve returned to his eyes. He wouldn’t have been Kevin if he’d listened. “I get that this isn’t the time to talk about this. I’ll go, but do you think you’ll be all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Kevin grimaced. “Right. I’ve heard you say that before. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep?”

  “Just go, okay?”

  “I’m…. Listen, maybe I should stay, just to make sure you’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “But I want to make sure—”

  “I’ve lived with this for years. I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what you think. It’s… it’s old news.”

  “No, not so old, I don’t think.”

  Of course he was right, but I wouldn’t admit it. “If nothing else,” I dredged up, “the kids need me. Don’t worry, I’ll wake up in the morning and go to school.”

  “I need you,” Kevin said flatly.

  “Kevin, please. I just… I really want to be alone.”

  He gave up then and abruptly turned away. I followed him past my little table, through the front room, and up into the foyer. He put his hand on the doorknob and paused, turning to look at me.

  “Good night, Tom. I….”

  For a moment I thought he was going to try to kiss me. I couldn’t let him; I’d never have the strength to make him leave if he did. His eyes focused on my lips, and he took a little half-step toward me, but then he looked into my eyes and stopped.

  “Good night,” he said.

  The door closed behind him. I turned the deadbolt, and then I sagged back against the door. I had never felt so alone.

  Ten seconds later there was a knock on the door. “Tom, open up,” came his muffled voice. “We shouldn’t leave your bag out here.”

  I unlocked the door and there he was, holding the bag out for me. “Think about it,” Kevin said. “I want to be with you.”

  He did kiss me then, a swift, sweet pressing of his lips to mine that I had no ability to stop and no desire to ward off.

  And then he really was gone.

  Chapter 8

  Reflections

  DAMN YOU, Sean. I’ve done my best to forget you, and yet here you are, raping me all over again.

  I struggled to find sleep that night. I’d resisted these memories for so long, had buried them deep, denied them life because I’d kept silent. But Kevin had yanked them out of the ancient sludge in my mind, and I overflowed with shame, rage, and loss.

  I lay in bed with a blanket pulled up to my chin, kept my eyes closed, and struggled not to relive the worst moments of my life even as they danced brazenly before me: footsteps and dread creeping up my spine, the first blow that had stunned me, the brutality of Sean’s thrusts. What I remembered most, though, was that I’d thought I loved him.

  Anguish had driven me to hide in Gunning. Kevin had gotten it right. I’d been betrayed by the one I’d trusted most.

  Under the sheet I rubbed my arm, trying to ease at least that ache. It was my constant reminder of the assault, which I’d tried to keep hidden from the world. But I hadn’t hidden it from Kevin, had I? He’d cried for me. He’d hated Sean. For me.

  See, Sean? Somebody’s on my side. The best somebody.

  Why was I letting myself think about Kevin? I couldn’t have him. I couldn’t have anybody. By sending him away, I’d lost all rights.

  God, I’d been insane to do that. He could have been right next to me in bed. Not for sex this night, but to have him there, the only other person in the world who knew my whole story. Maybe I wasn’t so weak after all. Knowing I’d regret sending him away for the rest of my life, but doing it anyway—that had to have been strong.

  Even as I thought that, there was another part of me, a wiser, deeper part of Tom, who disagreed. Kevin wanted me. I wanted him. But I couldn’t have him and live my life.

  I closed my eyes, determined to escape into sleep, but I couldn’t help but know I was stuck. Stuck with my aching arm and my house with the tree dying out back and the job where I pretended to be someone I wasn’t, every day.

  I JOLTED upright in bed, gasping, with victim, victim, victim resounding in my brain.

  Christ! I sagged over my drawn-up knees and in the deep darkness held my head with both hands. I should have guessed the dreams would come back. I trembled, and my mouth hurt as if I’d swayed on my knees in the street two minutes ago instead of years past.

  Kevin had been in my nightmare. He’d been watching it all happen, only he’d been tied to a parking meter. The whole time Sean had been going at me, I’d been impossibly watching Kevin at the same time, not knowing if he wanted to help me or join in hurting me.

  And then the others had disappeared in a flash, and Kevin had revealed himself for who he really was. He’d stroked the hair back from my forehead and murmured, “You don’t have to live like a victim.”

  In sudden, wide-awake anger, I pounded the mattress. “Yes, I do!” I hollered out loud. And then I stilled as I listened to myself. Who would say that? Nobody I knew. Nobody I respected.

  ONLY LONG habit and my shrilling alarm clock got me up at six-fifteen to stagger into the bathroom. I tried not to look at myself as I shaved, but that was an impossible trick. The man staring at me from the mirror looked haggard and wrecked, as if he’d been on a week-long bender, or as if he’d lost the one he loved. Worse. As if he’d turned the one he loved away.

  God. I missed Kevin the way I missed the strength in my arm.

  I sagged against the counter and put the razor down. Wisps of white lather clung to my face here and there and, just out of view, flitting in and out of my imagination, were those five men who’d taken my life away.

  Hello, Sean, I wanted to whisper, but I didn’t. Only crazy people talked to ghosts from the past.

  Happy now? Is this what you wanted for me?

  EVERY MOVE that morning was an effort. I wanted to go back to bed and sleep, the way I’d tried to sleep through my depression those months when I’d been recovering at Grant’s apartment, when he’d instead rousted me out from under the covers and forced me into some sort of activity. I wouldn’t have minded fortifying myself with some whiskey before I left my house, but I’d never gone to school drunk. I was stubborn enough to walk past the booze and get cereal and toast instead.

  The pattern for the day was set as soon as I got to school. I held the door for the chemistry teacher, and she asked me, “What do you think the school board will do?”

  It was a measure of my total self-absorption that her question came as a shock to me. I’d literally forgotten that the play might be canceled. But she reminded me that I needed to be on the watch for Robbie. I cursed under my breath and turned on my heel right in front of her, heading for the far wing of the school where his locker was as quickly as I could without breaking into a run. I imagined the worst, even though I told myself it was ridiculous to suppose that any of the kids would attack him the same way I’d been attacked.

  When I got within sight of his locker I slowed down, because he wasn’t around. But when I went closer, I saw that there were notes tucked into the crack of the locker’s door, and a few books were piled in front too. I should have known. I squatted down to read the titles. One of them was the Bible and one was a paperback: Can Homosexuality Be Healed? I sighed and wondered that so
mebody in town should have that book, ready to be handed out at need.

  But then, with a sort of wonder, I saw that next to the books were several envelopes, the kind that would have a greeting card inside. I picked them up even as kids walked by, immersed in the essential teenage talk for the start of the day, and as lockers around me were opened and then banged shut. One of the envelopes said You go, Robbie! On another was printed YOU ARE SO BRAVE, ROBBIE in block letters. The rest of them only had his name, but it seemed, unbelievably, that they held words of encouragement from castmates and friends.

  “Hi, Mr. Smith,” somebody said to me. I ignored whoever it was and concentrated on not clutching the cards in my hand so hard that I bent them. Maybe Robbie wouldn’t be so alone. Maybe he’d have some support, the kind that was out in the open and couldn’t be ignored, from people who understood who he was and what kind of help he needed. Maybe nothing earth-shattering and life-altering would happen to him, and he wouldn’t be… damaged.

  I really wanted to open those cards and see who’d left them, but I didn’t. Instead I put them back where I’d found them and rose to check out the notes stuck halfway in his locker. Officially, the school should step in to deal with anything obscene or threatening, and I was a representative of the school.

  More indications of acceptance: one girl had tied a pink ribbon around an artificial rose and wedged it into the crack. Somebody unnamed had gone to a lot of trouble printing out a beautiful photo of a rainbow over a lake. But there were also vicious words that made me wince at their crudity and virulence—words that last night I’d remembered being hurled at me, and that echoed in my ears. The drawings were worse. Three of them were definitely obscene; I crushed them in my hand and stuffed them into my pocket.

  Young men could be cruel—and I had no doubt at all that these were done by fellow classmates who were male. Sean and the others had taught me about cruelty firsthand. There was a certain reflex that seemed to take over, especially in adolescents and especially in groups, when developing male sexuality was confronted with any other possibility but the preferred, dominant, hyper-masculine mode. Seek and destroy, denigrate and downgrade, threaten and attack.

  I spent a moment wondering if it would do more harm than good to remove all of what I saw, and not only these few, when someone spoke to me. “Hi, Mr. Smith,” Angela Salazar said as she pulled a sweater from her nearby locker. “It’s a real shame about Robbie, isn’t it?”

  I frowned, not knowing exactly what she meant. Had something happened to him? “What do you mean?” I asked sharply.

  She shrugged. “Weren’t you at the meeting last night? I thought you would be. Shannon told me he told the whole place that he was gay.”

  “Oh, that. Yes.”

  I left the books, the cards, and the rest of the notes where they were, the good and the bad. Even though I wanted to, it would be impossible for me to protect Robbie from the fallout from his announcement.

  The rest of the day was more of the same: chatter from everybody about what the board would do or chatter about Robbie. I let everybody else talk and mostly kept silent, even in the workroom or the lounge where teachers ate lunch. Teachers gossiped more than the students, I’d sometimes thought, and that lunchtime everybody was proclaiming when they’d first concluded Robbie was gay.

  “From the beginning,” said the assistant principal, Neil Summers.

  “That’s right, I knew it the moment he stepped into my algebra class,” said the math chair. “He was a real swish.”

  “Oh, no,” Dottie Lansing submitted. “I thought he was, you know, one of the more sensitive types. Then I began to wonder when he took that role in the play, you know, the fairy one.”

  I barely heard them. It was next to impossible to pull my thoughts from the dark hole they’d been in all day. I ate the disgusting enchiladas I’d gotten from the cafeteria line because I’d forgotten to bring a lunch and wondered why I’d gone to that bar in Austin. Why couldn’t I have done something, anything else? It was a well-worn groove in my mind—why this, why that—that I hadn’t revisited in years.

  Why Sean? Why Austin? Why me?

  Why Kevin?

  I wanted to rip my thoughts away from the filth, but it seemed inevitable I’d have to live with my Sean memories now that they’d resurfaced. Kevin and I had barely made enough to count.

  IT WAS good that the day wasn’t a test day for any of my classes. I had to teach. My mind had to be engaged with the material and the students, with no choice to wander off into feel-mostly-dead land. If the kids didn’t get the most amazing lectures from me that day, well, that at least I was able to forgive myself.

  Halfway through the last class of the day, I roused enough to look ahead. Once the final bell rang I was going straight home, where I’d lock the door behind me. With any luck at all, I’d return to the pre-Kevin kind of weekend that I used to have. I wouldn’t see anybody.

  The loudspeaker crackled as I was giving out homework assignments. “Your attention, please,” came Hiram’s voice. “There is a meeting for all cast and crew members of the play in the Little Theater immediately after dismissal. Thank you.”

  Every single student looked at me. “Guess that takes care of that,” Reuben Estaban said.

  I abandoned hope of a quick getaway, of shelter and solace in a whiskey glass.

  The Little Theater was crowded when I got there, with about thirty kids sitting on the floor, subdued, with a lot of slumped shoulders. Even the air in the room was heavy; discouragement was palpable. George, who I hadn’t seen all day, was standing in front of them.

  Okay. Time to act like a teacher and an assistant director, although it was difficult to square my shoulders and drag my thoughts from my personal hell. I went up to him and murmured, “Have you heard—” but he cut me off.

  “Just wait, okay?” he said. “Is everybody here?” he asked the students.

  “Johnny’s not here yet. Neither is Mario or Layne.”

  Neither was Robbie, I saw, and that at least was enough to ring some internal alarm loud enough for me to hear. I stepped out into the hallway, looking, and then I trudged to the darkened auditorium, but nobody was singing or dancing there this day. Or getting beaten up. I suppressed the urge to go to his locker or look anywhere else for him and went back to where the rest of the cast and crew were waiting.

  George retreated to his office, where we could see him through the glass wall typing something on his laptop. The kids besieged me with questions, but I couldn’t tell them what I didn’t know myself. I shrugged, found a chair in the corner, and waited. Then the students knew enough to leave me alone.

  Finally George came back out. Like a dutiful assistant I got up to stand behind him in support. “I guess everybody’s here who’s interested in coming. So, could I have your attention please. I’m sorry to say that….”

  He drew a deep breath but never got the next sentence out. Channing interrupted him by calling out: “Robbie! Steven! What happened to you?”

  I turned to look at where Robbie and Steven had just walked in. My stomach flip-flopped. I took a few hurried, instinctive steps toward them, but the time for help was long since past. I should have gone in search of Robbie after all.

  Robbie was a mess, with Steven only a little better. There was a killer bruise on Robbie’s chin, and one eye was swollen and red, sure to turn into a monster black eye. The sleeve of Steven’s denim jacket was hanging on by a thread, and his lip was split with blood spotting his flannel shirt.

  But then I noticed: both boys were smiling. I stopped where I was, halfway to the door, perplexed.

  “Hi, Mr. Keating,” Robbie said, but really he was talking to everyone. “Sorry we’re late.”

  “Yeah,” Steven said, and a peacock could not have been prouder than he was. “There was a little something we needed to take care of first.”

  “Boys,” George began. “You know fighting is against the—”

  “We didn’t start anything,”
Steven assured him. “But a couple a-holes were saying a few things about Rob, so—”

  “And the play too,” Robbie put in.

  “Yeah, and the play. So we took care of them. We did it off school property, Mr. Keating, so you don’t need to worry about that. You should’ve seen Rob here take them down.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Sure you did, bro!” Steven tapped him with a fist on the shoulder, and Robbie’s grin could have powered a small city. “You did great. Especially when Norman tried to get into it too.”

  “My mom made me take self-defense years ago,” Robbie said. “But I was never much good at it.”

  “Sure you are. Anyway, you should see those other guys,” Steven told the whole room with relish. “They’re sorry they ever mouthed off about Rent. We laid them out.”

  Kids crowded around them, wanting to hear every detail, and the boys weren’t hesitant to provide them. George made a move to wade in and break it up, but when he walked past me, I put a hand on his elbow and stopped him.

  “No,” I said softly. “Let them get this out of their systems. I think it’s important.”

  Everybody knew that George had bad news, and so what Robbie and Steven had done achieved significance. The boys had fought for the honor of Rent and everybody in it, and they’d won. In some small, strange way, they’d vindicated everybody involved in the play by standing up against the abuse.

  “Take that!” one of the boys from the chorus exulted as he pantomimed a right uppercut.

  “Shows them what we’re made of,” a girl from costumes said, and a boy from scenery agreed.

  “You can put us down, but you can’t keep us down,” Johnny shouted. The kids exchanged a series of high fives that could have been a choreographed dance, except it wasn’t. It was genuine and so good for everybody there.

  It was a wonder to me and an eye-opener. Nobody in the room seemed to care that Robbie had declared he was gay the night before; actually, the fact that he was gay tied him more closely to the play, the project that everybody had poured their hearts and souls into for months. Robbie had fought for them when he’d fought for himself.