by John Goode
After that, I just said screw it and decided to be their friend.
Which catches us up to the week of Brad’s away game and the SATs.
Watching Brad try to deal with Kyle’s crazy was cute because it was pretty obvious he had no idea why the test was so serious to his boyfriend, but he never hesitated to back Kyle all the way. Kyle was desperate to get out of Foster, and I had to silently admit I knew how he felt. I couldn’t imagine having no prospects after high school and having to live with the knowledge that the rest of your life was going to be spent between First and Main Street. Brad, on the other hand, never once thought about the possibility that he wasn’t going to get out of Foster, as far as I knew.
One of the things that made Brad equally adorable and annoying was his ability to just ignore reality while trying to will things to be the way he wanted them to be.
Here we were on a seven-game winning streak, and it was hard to argue that Brad had not willed it into existence. He had more than stepped up as team captain. He owned the role. There were zero whispers about him not doing a good job or that he was screwing up somehow by being gay. In fact, most of the talk about his sexuality had vanished altogether, which was as surprising as it was a relief. No one much cared that he was gay or straight; he was Brad, and he was dating Kyle, and that was that.
Of course, I wasn’t privy to most gossip anymore, since I had all but abandoned my previous life.
I still showed up to prom committee, because I hadn’t spent the last three years doing every piece of grunt work I needed to become the chairperson to quit. No way would I give up running it because I was sick of mean girls. I refused to resign, which drove the other girls that tiny inch over the edge into crazy. I have to admit, I loved watching them squirm while trying to find a way to ask me things with a smile on their faces. They would have loved me to step down so they could all fight to see who would run prom, but I hadn’t, so they were forced to deal with me. And forced to do it nicely, which was killing them.
Watching them deal with that was the high point of my day, to be honest.
So the day of the Archer away game, Brad came slinking into class looking like death warmed over. He told me that Kyle and he had finally moved into the having-sex stage of their relationship. I really expected to hear complaints from Kyle since I knew how bad Brad could get if he went without too long. But it seemed Mr. Greymark had met his match, if not his better, in sexual appetite from the way he looked. I didn’t say anything to Brad, but it didn’t surprise me that much. Quiet ones like Kyle were the ones with the most surprises. I didn’t mean to laugh. I really tried not to, but I kept leaking snickers, you might say.
Brad took me out of class and tried to explain his problem to me, once I’d controlled my laughter. By the time he’d finished, it was pretty obvious to me that he needed to talk to Kyle before things got out of hand. I’m not sure why I thought that Brad would actually try to do that, since I knew from personal experience that he hated conflict and would do anything to avoid an argument. His standard move had always been to apologize, even if he had no idea what I was pissed about, and hope I would forgive him. After a while I counted that as a win and let the situation die since the apology was the best I was going to get out of him.
Kyle was not me, though. And the better I knew Kyle the more apparent it became.
He would stress and worry about it until he imagined things to be much, much worse than they actually were. The longer Brad waited, the bigger it would get, so he was better off just saying something and cutting it off at the pass. I felt that way until I saw how crazy Kyle was over the SATs, and then I realized, the last thing Kyle needed was one more thing on his plate, he was about to explode. I pulled Brad aside and told him just to do whatever Kyle wanted because the alternative was him ending up on the ten o’clock news being referred to as “victim.”
I honestly thought that was the end of it.
The next day I saw Brad walking Kyle to the SAT, and they looked as happy as ever. I can’t say that seeing them that much in love didn’t hurt a little. I mean, I wasn’t spiteful; there’s just nothing that highlights how alone you are like seeing another couple in complete love.
I couldn’t wait to get out of Foster. I stopped where I was and said that sentence out loud.
I realized I hadn’t felt like that in a long time. Before I got to high school and started dating Brad, getting away was all I thought about when I looked ahead at my life. Getting into a good school or just going somewhere like Dallas or Austin and going to junior college: I had a thousand dreams back in the day. Those dreams all went away when I started playing the popular game. I felt good, to be honest, like I was waking up from some kind of mind-control programming that made me giggle at jokes that weren’t funny and go to the bathroom as part of a group.
“They are disgusting, aren’t they?” a voice commented from behind me.
I spun around, surprised. Josh Walker was standing there looking three different kinds of hot in his letterman jacket. Only problem was that Josh knew how hot he was and used it like a bludgeon to impress anyone around him. I must have looked confused about who was disgusting, because he nodded toward Brad and Kyle.
“Are you calling my friends disgusting?” I said, balling my hands into fists.
His expression did a quick double take as he tried to figure out why I was so pissed. “Yeah, I mean… wait, no!” he said, holding his hands up. “I didn’t mean disgusting like that. I meant how much they are in love. It’s disgusting to see when you don’t have it yourself.”
It was an eerie echo of what I had been thinking, but I didn’t cop to it. “I think expressions of affection are sweet. Not enough people have the guts to show how they feel these days.” That was half-true. I mean, I agreed seeing someone like those two in love when you were single sucked, but having someone who would be willing to make you the center of their universe no matter how many people were watching… that’s hard to find.
“You do?” he asked in a stranger tone. “You always seemed a little more low-key.”
Maybe it was the fact that I was acutely aware of how single I was. Maybe it was the fact that I had been pretending to be someone else for so long around here, that no one knew a thing about me, so having someone express how they thought I would act pissed me off. Maybe I was just being a bitch, but I do know his words just hit me the wrong way.
“I always seemed?” I asked him angrily. “Did you learn that from your Sherlock Holmes-like skills of observation? Or from the countless hours we’ve spent not talking to each other? Or is it just the first thing that popped into your head, so of course you said it out loud?”
He was silent for a few seconds and then said, “Um, C?” in a halting voice.
“It’s not a multiple-choice question!” I raged and stalked away from him.
“What did I say?” he asked as I stormed off to class.
If you had asked me, I couldn’t tell you what he’d said that pissed me off so much. I just knew that I didn’t need to be there anymore.
I was in a pissy mood all the way till lunch. It felt like I had pulled a thread loose in my mind. Now my defenses were unraveling against my will, exposing something I didn’t want to face. When I got to the music steps, Sammy and Kyle were already there, deep in conversation. For some reason even that irritated me.
“Hey, I got you a Pepsi,” Sammy said as I sat down.
I mumbled a thanks and drank half of it in one gulp.
“Thirsty much?” Sammy asked under her breath.
I felt my temper start to flare, but I forced myself not to say anything rude to her because I was 99.9 percent sure it was not her I was pissed at. Instead I looked at Kyle and asked, “How was the test?”
He rolled his eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. Between having to going to the bathroom every ten minutes and feeling guilty, I barely noticed the test.”
“Guilty?” I asked intrigued. “Guilty about what?”
; “I am a horrendous boyfriend, and I need to make it up to Brad.”
That gave me pause. Brad had actually said something? Maybe I was wrong; maybe he had grown up some. “Don’t worry about it. He’s more tired than sore. It’s not like he isn’t enjoying it.”
I finished my Pepsi and saw Kyle looking at me oddly. “Enjoying what?”
“The sex,” I answered, confused. “He told me that he was worn out and didn’t know how to bring it up to you. I’m impressed that he did.”
“Brad said what now?”
The tone in his voice brought me to a screeching halt. Time slowed down as I realized that Brad had not said a word to Kyle and that I had just said the absolutely wrong thing. I mentally tried to backtrack, but it was way too late. “I mean… what were you guys arguing about?”
“Brad is enjoying what?” he asked again, his tone growing cold as his face contorted in anger.
“Nothing,” I said lamely. Shit, shit, shit, I thought to myself in a panic. What the hell did I just do? “So how was the test?”
“You already asked that,” Sammy said from behind him.
“What did Brad tell you?” Kyle asked, every syllable sharp enough to cut glass.
I panicked. There was no good answer to that question, and right now all I wanted to do was to get the blame off of me.
“He said he was worn out because you guys have been having sex all the time lately and that with the practice and the stress over the test he was just beat.” My words tripped over themselves as I verbally threw Brad under the bus. “But he said he was enjoying it.”
Silence like I had never heard before surrounded us. Kyle looked right into my soul with those eyes, and Sammy stared at us in shock. “He told you that?” she asked in the gap of silence.
“He’s my friend,” I snapped at her, my emotions exploded over themselves as my lips suffered from some form of emotional diarrhea. “We’ve slept together, for God’s sake! It wasn’t like he’s sharing state secrets.”
“He told you about our sex life?” Kyle asked, drawing my attention back to him. “He complained to you about us having sex?”
Abruptly, I knew what it felt like on the Titanic. The deck is tilting, you know the ship is sinking, and you’re just desperate to grab on to anything and hold on. “He was just talking, Kyle. It’s not the end of the world if your boyfriend wants to talk to someone about their life. It’s just what friends do.”
“Do you like your nipples played with?” he asked out of nowhere.
“What?” I stuttered, dazed. The sudden shift in the conversation made me feel like I’d just hit a brick wall.
“Do you like you nipples played with in bed? How important is foreplay? We’re friends, so it’s no big deal for you to share these things, right? Or it would be okay for Brad to tell me that stuff, right?”
I had heard Kyle rip people to shreds before, but hearing it and having it done to you are two different things. Hearing it, you have a dozen thoughts in your mind, and you’re cheering him on. But when he’s in front of you doing it, your only thought is to run.
“Ask him whatever you want, Kyle. He told me as a friend, and I’m sure he didn’t think he was betraying a trust.” I gathered up my stuff and turned to the both of them. “I have prom committee. Talk to you guys later.”
They said nothing to me as I walked away. I’m not even sure I wanted them to.
EVERYTHING HAD faded into a small buzzing sound.
Not that I paid a ton of attention at these meetings anyway, because usually the first twenty minutes or so are spent gossiping and backstabbing by the Bitches of Eastwick, as Robbie called them. They prattled on about whoever they hated that week, and I sat there wondering why I’d ever opened my mouth. Of course Brad hadn’t said anything to Kyle. Why would I think differently? I hadn’t just made things worse between them; I made things worse for all of us.
“Yeah, it was a total passive-aggressive slip. I didn’t even know until later that I wanted to say that.”
I looked up at Stacy, the girl who had been talking, with a glare, thinking she had been talking to me. Instead Patricia, the girl she had been talking to, nodded and said, “I know! I always do that when I’m pissed. I don’t mean to say mean stuff, but then it comes out anyways, and later that night I realize I wanted to start shit with that bitch. My mouth just figured it out first.”
They cackled like the hags in Macbeth, and I felt my blood turn to ice water.
Is that what I’d done? Did I say that to Kyle knowing it was going to cause a fight between them? Maybe I had been fooling myself this whole time. Maybe deep down I was nothing more than a shallow bitch who only cared about herself. I had just been commenting that seeing them that much in love reminded me of how lonely I was. Did I really sabotage them on purpose?
“I need to go,” I said, interrupting their talking.
“Um, what about the prom?” Stacy asked, caring more that I had stopped her tirade about Teen Mom than the actual prom.
“What about it? We picked the theme. We have the colors. What else is there to talk about?” I grabbed my purse and headed toward the door. “See you next time.”
If they said anything to me as I left, it fell on deaf ears.
I NEARLY pounced on Kyle as he walked out of his last class.
“We need to talk,” I said as I grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the building. I had no illusions that if he didn’t want to go he couldn’t have stopped me, since I wasn’t gripping him very tight. But he came along, which meant he was at least willing to hear me out.
That was a good thing.
Once we got out toward the quad, I let him go. “Okay, look, I’m going through a lot of crap in my head right now, and it’s possible I might have said what I said because I am incredibly jealous of what Brad and you have. That makes me a raging bitch, and you need to take that into account when being mad at him.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. At first I thought he was thinking about it, but then he let out a huge yawn.
He apologized by covering his mouth. “Sorry, I am completely burnt. I’m not mad at you. I’m just mortified that Brad would tell someone else about our sex life. I don’t know why I expected more from him, but I did, and I am just sad. You didn’t deserve me attacking you. I’m sorry.”
The words lifted a great weight off my shoulders, but I still felt lousy for getting Brad in trouble. “Look, Kyle, you should give him a break. He’s new to this whole thing.”
He looked at me with bloodshot eyes, and I really began to grasp how tired he actually was. “Jennifer, do us both a favor. Don’t try to jump in front of Brad to save him on this. He screwed up, and I don’t want any reason to be angry at you. Okay?”
I understood what he meant. I had been seconds away from never talking to Robbie again because I had thought he’d been trying to justify what Brad had done to me. Even though what Brad had said was no big deal to me, it was to Kyle, which meant it was now a huge deal between the two of them. “Okay, but try to take it easy on him. We both know he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“No, we both know he didn’t think before he said anything.”
He was right, and there was nothing I could say to that. “You want a ride home?” I asked, since he looked like he was about to fall over.
He shook his head. “The walk will do me good.”
It felt like he was blowing me off, but the only thing I could do was give him some space. “Okay, well, call me later. Let me know what happens.” He nodded and tromped off toward home.
I had a sinking feeling this was about to get much worse.
I WENT through several bouts of crying waiting for a phone call from Brad.
The team had gotten home a little bit ago, according to some of the guys’ tweets. Which meant it was a countdown now until Kyle laid into him. My dad was working, which meant I didn’t need to hide behind a closed door pretending I was asleep. I expected Brad to call or to text, but instea
d I got him showing up at my door.
Thank God for both of us my dad wasn’t there.
I swung open the door and just started to ramble before he could start screaming at me. “I’m a horrible bitch and don’t know when to keep my mouth shut and fucked it up for you.” I walked into the house. “If you have anything you want to add to that, come in.”
I didn’t have to wait long. He slammed the door and began screaming. “How could you? How could you even bring it up to him?”
I was done being yelled at today. Maybe tomorrow I could summon up the courage to be a punching bag for one of these guys, but tonight, I was done. I spun around and screamed back. “I was trying to help you. I thought maybe if I eased into it that it would make it easier for you two to talk. I didn’t expect him to get that crazy.”
“He’s crazy,” he said back. “I told you he was crazy. In fact, you told me before I left not to say anything because he was crazy.”
I choked back another round of crying. “I know, and I fucked up.” I wiped my nose. I had to look like a complete wreck. “How bad is it?”
He showed me his ring, and I felt my breath catch in my throat. “The only thing missing was a bucket of Coke dumped over my head.”
It was so much worse than I thought it was. “I can fix this,” I said quickly to him. “We can fix this.”
He finally stopped pacing and fell into one of the chairs and sighed. “I hope you have a plan because minus a time machine, I don’t see how.”
“Look, Kyle loves you. He’s just been crazy the past few weeks because of everything. He has the alliance, the SATs, and college. Trust me, once he gets some sleep and works it out, he’ll be fine.”
