#Rev (GearShark #2)

by Cambria Hebert

  She surrendered hers but said, “It’s actually Wallace.”

  “Mask was my father’s last name,” I explained.

  “Sorry about that,” Drew said.

  My mom smiled politely. “You didn’t know.”

  Drew gave me a look that said, Why didn’t I know?

  Because it wasn’t important. Because I thought it was odd my mother gave me the last name of a man who didn’t even want me instead of her own.

  Maybe she didn’t want you, either.

  Can I get you boys a drink? Iced tea?” she asked. “I was just slicing some apples for a pie I’m taking in to work tomorrow.”

  “What do you do?” Drew asked.

  “I work at the local credit union during the week, and then on the weekends, I work at a local bakery.”

  “Ah, so that’s where Trent gets his love for finance. Must run in the family.”

  It was kind of painful to watch Drew try so hard with her. It wouldn’t matter; she would be indifferent.

  “Oh yes, that is your major.” She glanced at me.

  I didn’t look at Drew. I couldn’t.

  “So how you been, Mom?”

  “Oh, you know me, always busy,” she replied, and I pulled out a chair and sat at the table. Drew followed my lead and sat beside me.

  “School’s almost out for the semester, and I’ll be graduating. I’ve been thinking about what kind of job I might look for,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’ll find something great. You’ve always been a hard worker and a smart boy.”

  We made small talk for a few more minutes while she continued peeling and slicing apples. When the conversation started to wane, I cleared my throat.

  “So I came over because I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Oh?” she asked, not looking up.

  I nodded. “About a magazine that’s interviewing me.”

  “Well, that’s exciting.” She looked up. “Is it for school?”

  “It’s a driving magazine. Drew’s a racecar driver.”

  She glanced up at that. “Really? Well, that sounds exciting.”

  Drew smiled. “It has its moments.”

  “Do you drive a Mustang like Trent?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s an old model.”

  “Mom and Granny helped pay for my car,” I told him. “I saved my money half my life because I wanted a car when I turned sixteen.” I smiled at the memory.

  “Well, we had to get you something so you could get yourself around. With my two jobs, it was hard being everywhere at once.” Mom agreed.

  “Anyway,” I said as I avoided Drew’s stare. “I’m gonna be talking about some stuff with the magazine that I wanted to tell you about first. You know, in case you read the article.”

  She laughed lightly. “You know I barely have time to read.”

  Drew sat up; his feet hit the floor. Beneath the table, I put a hand on his leg, telling him it was okay.

  “Well, you might hear people talk,” I said.

  “About what?” she asked, still cutting apples.

  “About the fact that Drew and I are in a relationship.”

  She said nothing. Nothing at all. She just stood there and kept slicing. I knew she heard, though, because of the way she stiffened and the white-knuckled grip she had on the knife.

  Finally, she turned, her gaze bouncing between Drew and me. “You and him?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re gay?”

  “Yes, Mom. I’m gay.”

  She turned her back and kept cutting. I glanced at Drew. He gave me a wary look, and I shrugged.

  I really thought she’d say more than nothing.

  “Mom?” I asked after a few more minutes of strained silence.

  The sharp thud of the knife going into the cutting board point first was the beginning of more than nothing.

  “You ungrateful child,” she intoned and gripped the edge of the counter. Tension radiated off her shoulders.

  “What?” I asked.

  She spun. “After all the sacrifices I’ve made for you. The years I worked day after day to make sure you had a home and clothes and food. This is how you repay me?”

  “Me being gay has nothing to do with you, Mom,” I said, a little caught off guard.

  “It has everything to do with me!” she shrieked and pushed off the counter. “What I don’t understand is why you would want to hurt me this way.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” I argued.

  “What will people think?” she worried. “What will they say about me? They’ll think something is wrong with me because I raised my son to be gay.”

  She glanced up, anger in her eyes. “You’re ungrateful and selfish.”

  I reared back. I might have expected more than nothing when I told her, but I hadn’t expected this. “You think I’m being selfish,” I repeated.

  I really didn’t know what to think. She was making this all about her. She never even appeared to wonder what it was like for me to come here and tell her. For me to have to come to terms with being gay.

  “I know you are!” she shouted. “You’re only thinking about yourself. I raised you, even after your father left! He didn’t want you!” she cried. “Maybe this is why!”

  That pierced. It pierced the most tender part of my heart.

  Drew stood abruptly, the wooden chair clattering to the floor. “I suggest you think about what you say from here on out before you let it fly out of your mouth,” he said, calm, almost deadly.

  “Don’t you talk to me that way in my home. This isn’t any of your business. This is a family matter.”

  “He is my family,” I said, standing. “He’s been more of a family to me than you’ve ever been.”

  “How dare you?” She gasped and put a hand up to her neck. “Is this why you’re trying to humiliate me? Because you think I’ve been a bad mother?”

  Drew laughed bitterly. “You think you’ve been a good one?”

  “You don’t know anything about our life.” She gave him a disdainful look.

  “I don’t think you’re a bad mother,” I said, weary. “I’m sorry this has upset you.”

  “Then stop it,” she said, disregarding Drew. “You can stop this before it’s too late.”

  Stop being gay?

  I wanted to laugh. She acted like it was something I worked at. Something I tried to be. I could no more stop being gay than the sun could stop rising.

  I could no more stop loving Drew than the ocean could stop moving.

  “I can’t. It’s who I am.”

  “I’ll call Granny!” she threatened. “I’ll call and tell her what you’re doing. She’ll disown you. She’ll never speak to you again!”

  “She wouldn’t,” I argued, a sick, clammy feeling coming over me. Granny wouldn’t disown me. She loved me. She’d always loved me.

  Before she knew the real you.

  “Don’t listen to her, T,” Drew said softly right beside my ear. He knew I was spiraling inward, he knew I was starting to cave in.

  “All these years,” she said, almost like she was suddenly disillusioned and trying to work it out in her own mind. “All these years, I did what was expected of me, and for what?”

  “Mom,” I said and stepped forward.

  She stepped back. “Get out.”

  I stopped and stared. “You want me to leave?”

  She nodded. “I’ve done my job. I got you to adulthood. There’s no reason for us to have to see each other again.”

  Wow.

  I always knew my mom was… distant. But I never thought she was mean.

  Until today.

  I glanced around the house I grew up in, the house I spent so much time in alone. I looked at the mother who quite possibly never loved me, and I tucked all those feelings right beside all the others that used to hurt.

  I walked to the front door and didn’t look back.

  My hand was wrapped around the handle when I heard Dr
ew’s voice carry through the house.

  “I feel sorry for you,” he said. “I feel sorry that for all these years, you’ve had someone as amazing as Trent right here and you never even knew it. You were right when you said I don’t know anything about your life. I have no idea what could make you so cold and unfeeling to a child who did nothing but wish you were there more. He’s not the selfish one. You are. And what I do know is someday you’re going to regret this, but by then, it’s going to be too late.”

  My eyes were misty when I heard him on the stairs and felt his hand on the small of my back. I watched through slightly blurry vision when his fingers closed over mine and turned the handle to open the door.

  Out on the porch, the sound of the door closing rang with a finality I never thought I’d hear. I just needed a minute. A minute to process what just happened in there.

  “Look at me.” Drew’s voice called me out of my own head.

  My eyes focused on him and the blue of his irises. He grabbed my face between his palms and shook me gently. “You’re better than this place. So much better.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “For what you said in there.”

  Still holding my face, his lips pressed against mine. He kissed me hard and fast before pulling away completely and taking my hands.

  “We’re leaving,” he announced. “I hate to tell you this, T, but your mom’s a bitch.”

  I laughed. Like a real laugh that brought everything around us crashing back in color. But just because life was back in color didn’t mean it was pretty.

  Even the most beautiful colors could sometimes look dirty.

  “She’s probably on the phone with Granny right now.” I think out of everything my mother said, it was her threat to ruin my relationship with my grandmother that hurt the most.

  Not only did she not want me in her life, but in my Granny’s life either.

  She didn’t care if I was alone.

  She never had.

  She never would.

  “What do you want to do?” Drew asked, staring out the windshield, the engine idling. I appreciated he didn’t tell me what he thought I should do. I knew he was upset by what happened, by everything he learned about the way I grew up.

  I knew he wanted to drive home and for me to never think of this again.

  I knew because that’s the things I wanted for him when we left his parents’ house. He knew, just like I did, that even if we did that, it wouldn’t erase our past or what happened here today.

  That’s why he was asking me where I wanted to go from here.

  “I want to go to Granny’s,” I said, decisive. “If my mom has turned her against me, I want to know.”

  It was like a Band-Aid stuck to a hairy leg. I wanted to rip it off fast and get the sting over with all at once.

  Drew

  It was wrong to hate.

  I hated Trent’s mom anyway.

  She did indeed make good on her threat to call T’s granny and spill the beans.

  Granny was waiting at the door when we walked up.

  Trent was pale and shaken from what happened with his mom. But he was still strong. He still held his head high.

  Granny invited us inside, and two things happened:

  1.) She told Trent he had good taste in men and offered me a cookie.

  and

  2.) She informed Trent his Scottish accent wasn’t very convincing and she always knew it was him who called, but he could call her anytime and talk in a bad accent because she loved him.

  Granny was my new favorite person.

  Trent

  I was relieved.

  Feeling relieved made me wonder if I was fucked up in the head.

  What kind of son is relieved when his own mother throws a hissy fit about his life choices, calls him ungrateful, and then tells him to get out?

  Me.

  Maybe she wasn’t the only one that forced a relationship out of obligation instead of desire. When I thought about it—really thought about it—I would realize I stopped being hurt by her a long time ago. Even if I still lived kind of cautiously, like her ability to hurt me was still there.

  When I was a kid, I used to wonder why she wasn’t like the other moms. Why she didn’t read me bedtime stories, take me to the movies, or yell at me for playing too many video games. It used to cut deep when I would look around at school for her face in the crowd or in the stands at my high school football games and she wasn’t there.

  She never was.

  She was the kind of parent who did her duty. She made sure we had a place to live, food to eat, and clothes to wear. She made sure I did my homework and paid all the fees when I wanted to play football in high school.

  I couldn’t say she was a bad mom, because she wasn’t. She did right by me. She raised me even, after my father walked away. She wasn’t mean, she didn’t beat me, and she didn’t bring a dozen men in and out of our lives. In fact, she didn’t date at all.

  She was just distant. Absent.

  She kept everyone at arm’s length, including her own child. Maybe she never bonded with me when I was born. Maybe she never tried.

  Or maybe when my father left her because of me, it cut so deep whenever she looked at me, that’s all she saw.

  I learned at an early age to be self-sufficient. Instead of acting out, I internalized it all. I learned how to tuck my deepest pain and my darkest loneliness so deep no one would ever see it. I was a friend to everyone. I listened when people talked, and I kept things laidback and easy.

  Why? Because that’s what I always wanted for myself.

  I joined the football team (and later the fraternity) for that sense of family. I was good at it, and people liked me. So I kept playing. I was the one everyone liked, and I never had to be alone.

  But I was.

  I grew more alone, and the place I hid my real feelings got overfull.

  I met Romeo and Braeden freshman year when we all started playing for the Wolves. We were friends; I was friends with everyone. But no one ever really knew me. Sometimes I wondered if I really knew me.

  It’s easy to lose yourself when you have no idea who you are to begin with.

  I used to wonder why she didn’t love me. Why my father didn’t want us. The only person who ever really showed me love was Granny. She came to my games, and we played checkers on rainy days. She used to tell me my mother loved me in her own way, the best she could.

  I supposed that was true.

  But it wasn’t good enough.

  As I got older and started Alpha U, I would sometimes wonder if I was like her. If my mother’s inability to love was somehow my affliction, too.

  Then Drew sat beside me at Screamerz.

  He was the best friend I ever had. Someone I felt more myself with than anyone. Our friendship healed something in me, or maybe it just gave me the confidence to be who I really was.

  I felt like he was the first person who really looked deep enough to see past the mask I always wore.

  And I fell in love with him.

  I fell in love with the least likely person I ever could. But in a way, he was the most obvious choice.

  I wasn’t unable to love; I just needed the right person to give it to.

  Maybe it was okay to be relieved. It was okay to move on and let some of the old hurt go. I had a family now, the kind I always wanted.

  The kind who wanted me.

  They all knew who I really was now, and they loved me anyway.

  I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking it would always be easy for me. I would probably always still have days when I was a little more pulled in close. Days it would be easier to tuck my feelings deep and not let anyone see. There might always be that whisper deep in my head saying I wasn’t good enough.

  Everyone had their demons. These were mine.

  But as Tennessee Williams once wrote: If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels, too.

  “What’s going on in there?” Drew asked, leaning across the seat
s and tapping my head with his finger.

  I grabbed his hand and pulled it down, pressing it against my chest. “Nothing going on up there. It’s all happening in here.”

  “You doing okay, frat boy?” he asked softly, rubbing his palm against my chest.

  He worried about me, and I loved him for it. He didn’t have to worry, though, because I was more at peace than I’d ever been.

  “I really am.”

  “I love you more than French fries.”

  I laughed even as my heart swelled. I was so ready for this interview today, so ready to tell the entire world (or maybe just the subscribers of GearShark) he was mine. After today, everyone would know, and I’d never have to worry about the way I looked at him in public ever again.

  I wouldn’t be ashamed, even though some people thought I should. I spent too much of my life without the touch of love to ever tarnish the love I had now with something as ugly as shame.

  “Gate’s open.” I gestured to the opening that led into the airport.

  Drew nudged the Fastback forward, and I looked around. It was kind of really epic that Arrow lived at an airport and he and Lorhaven kept their cars in hangars.

  When Emily Metcalf said she wanted to come to us for the interview, I knew it had to be somewhere other than the Chesapeake Speedway. Been there, done that. We needed something new, somewhere as unique as the new racing division.

  Drew mentioned the airstrip, and everything was set up.

  Lorhaven and Arrow jumped at the chance because they knew they’d get another behind-the-scenes look at GearShark. Not to mention the last time Lorhaven got a half-page article about his driving and ended up with a sponsorship for the division. We’d definitely be seeing a lot of him at the preliminary races now.

  Plus, this was good for Arrow. We’d sort of taken the kid under our wing, and that sort of meant I had a truce with Lorhaven.

  He still wasn’t my favorite person; he never would be.

  We clashed in the most basic way. Maybe I was pissed because the second I met him, he was a lot of things I always wanted to be. Confident, unapologetic, and had a whole turf in town where everyone respected him.

  He’d caught Drew’s attention, and that was an automatic dislike. Part of me always worried the deeper Drew got into racing, he would pull away from me. I never told him that. I always supported his racing and I always would. My insecurities were mine to bear, and besides, I knew it was partly those demons I mentioned trying to tell me I just wasn’t good enough and eventually Drew would realize.