Whatever.

by S. J. Goslee

  Lisa arches an eyebrow. “C’mon, Mike.”

  Mike drops his hand onto his lap. “What?”

  She leans in close again, their foreheads almost touching. “Michael,” she says meaningfully. Her eyebrows are pretty much all the way up under her bangs.

  “What?” He’s not gay. You can totally admire another dude’s shoulders or legs or shirt and not be gay. So he thinks Zack’s a good-looking guy. So what?

  “It’s cool to be gay,” Lisa says.

  “It’s not cool to be gay. It’s kind of cool to act gay.” He knows this. Every time Cam gets up in Mike’s space during shows with the band—which, let’s face it, have only happened during house parties in Cam’s massive backyard—all the girls scream. It’d be embarrassing if it wasn’t sort of amazing instead. “Or it’s cool to be gay in theory. Or it’s cool to be bi, in the sense that you date girls, but girls can imagine you making out with other guys if they want.”

  Lisa makes a face.

  “Yeah, see,” Mike says. “Not actually cool.”

  She gives him a skeptical look. “So you’re freaking out.”

  “No! There’s no freaking out here. Nothing to be freaked out about.” He thumbs his chest. “Not gay.”

  She gets a shrewd, mean gleam in her eyes, like maybe she’s about to take down a baby antelope. Mike’s seen this look before, but usually it’s aimed at Cam or Theo Higgins. “Says the dude who made out with Junior Meat King.”

  Mike freezes. Like every molecule in his body just went terrified. He makes a What? sound, but his throat is kind of stuck closed.

  “You and the little sausage man, remember?” She crosses her arms over her chest, smug. “Last month at Cam’s end of the summer blowout. Full-on making out, with tongues, and hands in private places.” Her eyes go hazy and she licks her lips. Gross.

  “No way,” Mike manages. Josh Jacob Scalzetti, son of the Butcher of Morrison? “No fucking way.” Granted, he doesn’t really remember much of that night, but he sure as hell would’ve remembered that, right?

  Lisa eyes him askance, a small smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Are you more upset that you made out with J. J., or that you made out with a boy?”

  Mike ignores her, palming his face in utter shame. J. J. goes to Catholic school across town, thank God, but—“Who else saw this?”

  “Uh, everybody?”

  Which is a lie, because if Meckles or Cam saw that shit, it wouldn’t have taken this long to get back to him. Mike slides his hand down to cover his mouth and stares at her.

  Lisa throws up her arms. “Fine. A bunch of girls from Our Lady, Rook, me, Jason—”

  “Jason?” Mike says. Then, “Wait, Wallace?” Fuck. He pulls the covers up over his head and groans, burrowing back down into his bed. “Kill me.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” she says. “Just saying, you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the bi thing, you know, you looked like you were having fun.”

  Mike rips the covers back, bolts upright again, and says, “J. J.’s an asshole!” J. J.’s a slick, pansy-ass preppy. He wears sweater vests and ties and khakis even when he’s not in school. There are fraternization rules, and Mike broke about fifty of them. Oh god, his tongue had been in J. J.’s mouth.

  “I like what you’re focusing on here,” Lisa says, nodding.

  “Why was he even at Cam’s?”

  Lisa sighs. “It was a party, Michael, I’m pretty sure everyone was there.”

  “And also—also, why are you just telling me this now? That was over three weeks ago.”

  “That’s really not important,” Lisa says, visibly exasperated now. She’s probably annoyed that they’re off topic, but seriously. Seriously.

  “Are you kidding me? Up until last week you were my girlfriend. Oh shit, Lisa, everyone thinks I’m gay, don’t they?” This explains why Wallace has been extra-specially evil since school started. Usually he’s just an asshole to Mike behind everyone’s back—they think he’s so nice and sweet and thoughtful, when really he’s just a giant, back-stabbing poser—but lately he’s been a smirky asshole. No wonder.

  “I told you, it’s not a big deal,” Lisa says.

  Mike pushes back the blankets and swings his legs over the side of the mattress. “I don’t know.” It looks like the end of the world from where Mike’s sitting. If he squints a little.

  “Okay, look. Look,” Lisa says. She slides onto her feet, stands in between his knees and places her hands on his shoulders. “It’s done. Now, Mike—now, you’ve got to own it.”

  Mike says, slowly, “Own it.”

  “Yeah. Own your gayness,” she says. “And then run for student council with me.”

  Mike doesn’t know if he can own something he isn’t sure how he got, or if it’s even his. What if J. J. took advantage of a hot-sexy babe hallucination? But at this point he’ll look like a douche trying to deny it. “Can we just … not talk about it ever again?”

  Lisa shrugs. “We could try.”

  Mike falls back and stares up at his bare ceiling. “Fine.”

  * * *

  It isn’t until later that Mike realizes the greater implication. Not that he’s made out with a guy, with J. J., of all douche bags, but that he’d been dating Lisa at the time. He gropes for his cell on his bedside table and calls Lisa and says, “Did you break up with me because I cheated on you?” as soon as she picks up.

  There’s some ominous silence. And then, “Mike?”

  “Shit,” Mike says, because that’s Karin answering Lisa’s phone, and Lisa’s older sister is frightening. She used to be really good at making Mike eat mud. He yelps, “I’m gay!” and hangs up, and Lisa calls him back five minutes later, laughing her ass off.

  She can’t even make coherent conversation. Mike stays on the line for all of it, even when he hears Karin cackling in the background, because this whole mess is his own damn fault. At least neither one of them appears to be gearing up to kick him in the balls. This is a good thing.

  Finally, she says, “I didn’t break up with you because you cheated on me, Mike, geez. We weren’t even dating.”

  Mike doesn’t really see it that way, but whatever. He sighs. “I can’t believe you waited so long to bring this up. You knew I didn’t remember anything.”

  Lisa says, “Mostly.”

  She totally knew he didn’t remember the whole J. J. thing. There is no way she would have respected his boundaries about that.

  “I was waiting to use it on something really good,” Lisa admits.

  “Like blackmail.”

  “Or not,” Lisa says. “I just wanted to savor the look on your face.”

  “Lisa—”

  “Do you not remember flirting with that guy at the Lot? Or the way you stare at Zack’s ass, like, all the time?”

  “You lie, I do not,” Mike says. Zack has a good ass, that’s a totally objective observation. How did this conversation get so out of control?

  Lisa sighs. She says, “Look, Mike,” then pauses, and Mike can picture her rubbing her forehead, her eyes closed. “Look. I’d rather just be your friend, okay? And I really do like Larson. And you have some issues to work out.” She sounds resigned, but not unhappy.

  “Okay,” Mike says, drawn out, still not entirely clear on everything Lisa is and is not saying.

  “You are, however,” Lisa says cheerfully, “running for VP in order to make up for breaking my fragile female heart.”

  Mike says, “Bullshit,” but he’s got little to no conviction in his voice.

  “You’re the best friend a gal can have,” she says.

  Mike’s life is fucked up. He rolls his eyes up to his ceiling and makes a big decision. A huge, important decision, because he figures otherwise he might go crazy.

  “I’m going clean for a while,” Mike says. “I need a clear head to figure this all out.”

  Lisa makes a weird sound.

  “What?” Mike says, defensive. He can be sober. He doesn’t have to get high. Or
listen to Cam.

  Lisa says, “I’m pretty sure that’s the most intelligent thing you’ve ever said.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” Mike says.

  Lisa makes kissy noises and hangs up first.

  * * *

  “I am completely whipped,” Mike says, heaving his messenger bag onto the lab table.

  “By everyone, it’s pathetic,” Omar says absently, pulling out his chemistry book.

  He’d argue that, but it’s so true. Adults, kids, guys, girls, hermit crabs … Mike is a ginormous pushover. He sees this now with crystal clarity. He slumps into his seat next to Omar and sighs.

  Omar looks over at him curiously. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know,” he says.

  Mike blinks at him. “You just called me pathetic.”

  “All right,” Omar smiles, “more like endearing.”

  “Dumb,” Mike says. He stares morosely down at the chipped black tabletop. “So fucking dumb.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Mike jumps a little when Wallace’s hip hits the side of their table. Jesus.

  “Good picture of you, though,” Wallace says, holding one of the class election flyers Lisa’s been spreading around. He smiles with half his mouth. It’s Wallace’s charming, self-deprecating smile that always makes Lisa—Lisa, who makes distasteful noises around kittens, because she clearly has the soul of a hardened Viking—sort of all-around melty.

  Mike is immune. He opens his mouth for a snappy, if not exactly witty comeback when it suddenly hits him that Wallace—his archnemesis, Rook motherfucking Wallace—has seen him suck face with J. J. Scalzetti.

  Wallace’s brow furrows. “You okay? You just went—white.”

  Omar jostles his arm. “Mike?”

  Mike weighs the odds of getting sick all over the Bunsen burner if he tries to answer him. Finally, he manages a raspy “Fine.”

  He is so fucked.

  * * *

  “I hope you’re happy,” Mike says to Lisa. They’re in the magazine room of the school library. It’s empty except for them, a stack of flyers, and half a dozen pieces of poster board.

  “Ecstatic,” she says. She’s putting the finishing touches on her election speech, so she isn’t really paying much attention to Mike, who is steadily but surely going insane. “Why am I happy again?”

  “This! This whole—” Mike spreads his arms, flaps them a little, like maybe he can express the exact magnitude of shit his life has dive-bombed into with his meager wingspan.

  “You better not be implying I made you gay,” she says, eyes narrowed.

  “No, apparently the Junior Meat King made me gay,” Mike says.

  Lisa heaves a sigh and closes her laptop in a deliberate, put-upon motion. “Mike. You’re freaking out.”

  Mike reaches up, digs his hands into his hair. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be freaking out?” He hooked up with a dude. Wallace saw him hooking up with a dude, and Wallace may be a nice guy, but Mike isn’t really counting on that lasting—there is absolutely no reason for Wallace to keep this to himself, right? Just because he hasn’t said anything yet, doesn’t mean he’s going to stay quiet about it for forever. Right?

  “I need to get this done,” Lisa says, flicking her pen at him. “Seriously, it’ll be fine. Stop worrying about it.”

  Mike doesn’t see how he can stop worrying about it, because so far all that Mike has realized in his quest for sober findings is that dicks freak him out—not his own, obviously—and that all the gay porn he found is scary. Add to that a smug, smirking Wallace and Mike wants to bury himself in a hole for the rest of the school year. He doesn’t want people staring at him, wondering. He doesn’t want anyone talking about him behind his back.

  “I don’t think I can own this,” Mike says, slumping down in the seat across from Lisa. He’s pretty sure he can’t even borrow it.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’m not going to push you into something you don’t want,” Lisa says.

  Mike glances pointedly at his mug plastered on VP flyers.

  Lisa rolls her eyes. “Not with anything important,” she says. “I think it’d be good for you, to try this, but you don’t have to, nobody’s making you. You can go for Mo Howard instead. She’s got a crush on you the size of a small planet.”

  Mike makes a face at the lacquered wood of the table. Cameron Scott is a giant man-whore is carved into it, blue pen scratched into the grooves, and Mike traces it with his thumbnail. Mo’s cute. She’s small and adorable and has at least five piercings in her face, but Mike isn’t honestly attracted to her outside her ability to rock iambic pentameter and the way she’s always up for using silly voices whenever they have to act out a scene in a play.

  “Whatever,” Mike says. He face-plants onto the table, forehead pillowed by his arms. “I hate my life.”

  six.

  Intramural baseball is basically just six weeks of after-school pickup games on the Little League diamond at the community center, since it’s left empty for the fall.

  On the first day, Meckles panics and accidentally punches Theo Higgins in the stomach and it’s the single funniest thing Mike has ever seen. Meckles spends a half hour hyperventilating into a paper bag, and when Higgins finally picks himself off the ground he kicks Meckles off the playing field, so no real harm done. Meckles hadn’t even hit him that hard, Higgins just had to be a bitch about it.

  As a team captain, Mike picks Cam, Omar—even though Omar, despite his awesomeness at everything else, sucks at baseball—and Mo before Higgins can get his grubby little paws on her, since Mo still plays in a softball summer league and isn’t afraid to get dirty. Mike doesn’t think Higgins knows that, though. She’s Mike’s secret weapon. He also picks Dotty—who’s only there because Mo dragged her—over Weedy Jim, who Mike’s pretty sure has asthma. Turns out, Dotty can run.

  Officially, Mike’s team is the Blue team, but unofficially he’s calling them the Bobcats, because it sounds cool, and Dotty says she can make them T-shirts.

  He’s calling Higgins’ team the Slugs; he’s hoping it’ll catch on.

  The evening is cool, but Mike ends up a sweaty mess anyway by the time they wrap up. He’s got dirt rash down the outside of his right arm, and there’s a throb in his ankle from a slide toward home, but he’s grinning. He’d forgotten how much he loves this.

  Swinging an arm over Cam’s shoulder, he says, “Good times, Cam. Good times.” Cam and Mike seriously used to rule the diamond, little jocks in training. Mike doesn’t know what happened to them, but he’s glad they didn’t end up super douches like Wallace and Chris Leoni.

  “The Slugs are going down,” Cam says happily, punching his fist into his glove. “Six weeks, twelve games. I don’t even think Jim actually knows how to play. This is gonna be easy, even with the suckage fest that is Omar Hudson on our side.”

  Omar tucks his glove into his backpack. “Thanks, Cam.”

  “We should dress Meckles up like a bobcat,” Cam says. “He can be our mascot.”

  “Good game,” Higgins says with a half sneer as they walk past him. Mike wants to claw at his face, but he also kind of wants to give him a hug. Higgins sneering is like a puppy having a beef with its own tail. His brown hair flops over his forehead and he blows out of the corner of his mouth to get it away from his eyes. It doesn’t work, and he finally just shoves a marginally clean part of his arm up and over his head, sweat slicking it back, and Mike had never really noticed how perfectly proportioned his nose is, and how red his bottom lip is, like he’s been biting at it, and Mike is in so much trouble, Jesus Christ.

  Mike clears his throat and turns to stare pointedly at the nearly deserted parking lot. He hates Lisa. She could’ve just not said anything ever, and maybe then life would’ve been kind enough to leave him with his heterosexual delusions. He could’ve found happiness in a vagina. Hell, he still can, right?

  “C’mon, Mike,” Cam says, jostling him with his el
bow. “We’re gonna hang at Meckles’, maybe get some music done.”

  Mike nods. “Yeah. Sounds good.”

  * * *

  Deanna drapes herself over Cam’s shoulder and says, “So have you written your speech yet, Mike?”

  Mike pauses, spoonful of pudding touching his lips. “Um. What?” He crinkles the plastic of his Snack Pack between his fingers.

  “Your election speech,” Deanna says, grinning like she knows Mike’s panicking inside. Because he is.

  There is no way Mike is giving a speech, especially not in front of their entire class. “Yeah, no.”

  “You’re running against Fitzsimmons and Smith, dude,” Cam says. He’s absently tapping his fingers on the countertop. They’re still waiting for Jason to show up, and Omar and Meckles are doing something loud with Meckles’ drums in the basement. Cam hums a couple different melodies once they really get going. The thump-thump-thumping drifts up the stairs, with Omar’s bass following Meckles’ lead. What they really need is a rhythm guitar, but Cam goes into rants whenever Mike brings it up.

  “Fitzsimmons and Smith always run,” Mike says. They always win, too; they’ve been the ruling party of their class since freshman year. Mike is still not giving a speech.

  “Right.” Deanna bobs her head. “So you’ll need a really kick-ass speech.”

  “Lisa’s giving a speech,” Mike says. “I’m pretty sure that’s enough.” Mike has no idea what he’d say. It’s not even the thought of standing up in front of a crowded auditorium that’s causing him pain here—although that’s also not exactly pleasant—it’s basically that he has no clear reason for running besides Lisa making him, and he doubts that’ll be a point in their favor. And Mike would stab himself in the junk before playing the bi or gay or even the sexually confused card, because Lisa is full of shit.

  By the time Jason shows up, fresh from track practice, Mike has eaten three Snack Packs, half a bag of pretzels, and a cherry-flavored ice pop, which he was tempted to shove down Girl Meckles’ throat.

  Mike loves Deanna, but Deanna lives to torture all her brother’s friends—or aggressively date them, in Cam’s case, solely to torture her brother. Mike thinks it’s a twin thing.