by John Goode
“So what’s wrong with Kyle?” I asked her before she even sat down.
She put her purse and books down. “Calm down—you’re going to have an aneurism.”
“I’m going to have worse if you don’t tell me what’s wrong with him.”
She pulled her stuff out, and I could tell she was composing herself as Mr. Powers took roll and began to go over the homework. “The first meeting didn’t go too well,” she whispered cryptically.
“Bad how?” I asked, more worried than ever.
“Well… see, Sammy had this idea…,” she began to say.
Which was the exact moment gunshots echoed out across the school.
We hit the floor instantly, more than a few people screaming in terror.
“What the—?” I began to ask out loud.
“Shhhh,” Mr. Powers said, kneeling on the ground. He was moving toward the door to lock it. “No one say a word.”
I looked over at Jennifer, and I could see she was worried but not panicked. It was easy to forget sometimes she was a sheriff’s daughter. She pulled her cell out of her purse and began texting someone. It was a great idea, and I pulled mine out as well… but had no idea who to text.
She sent one text and began texting someone else. She looked up at me and mouthed the name “Tyler.”
I pulled his name out and began to type as another gunshot came from outside. It didn’t sound close, but it echoed across the quad like crazy. More screams, and I winced. Jennifer didn’t even stop typing. I sent my message.
Shooting @school
Before I could send, alarms began to whine, and a recorded voice over the PA announced we were in lockdown and no one was to leave their rooms.
I finished the text.
In lockdown. Am worried.
I sent it and wished for the millionth time Kyle hadn’t given his phone back to me.
And then it hit me. Kyle was out there alone.
KYLE
DO YOU know what Fate does to really screw your life up?
I mean, when you’ve pissed him/her/it off royally, and it wants to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget? You’d think it would be something obvious like killing someone you care about or destroying something you value, but you’d be wrong. Those are minor-league curses that befall nearly everyone during their lives. I assure you that Fate doesn’t even get out of bed for those kind of afflictions; it has a whole staff to handle the small stuff. No, when Fate has had enough of you and your life, it does the last thing you’d think would be horrible.
It grants your every wish.
I used to wish that people would know who I was, that I would fall in love with a great guy, and that I would eventually get a college scholarship to get out of this fucking town. And here I was able to say that every single one of those things had happened, and my life was worse than ever. People knew who I was, sure, but I guess I forgot to wish that they would like me as well. Outside of Jennifer and Sammy, I had no friends, and since Brad and I broke up, even that had been strained. I met the perfect guy, and against all odds he said he loved me also, but again, I forgot that I wanted to fall in love with a guy I could share my life with instead of what was left of this school year and then nothing. And, yes, I did get a full ride to UC Berkeley at the cost of the previously mentioned perfect guy, making what should have been my golden ticket feel more like a lottery ticket that was one number off from winning the jackpot.
And now I had a gun pointed at my head. That, by the way, I had not wished for.
Your mind does strange things when you realize your life expectancy could be represented with single digits. You’d expect to think things like what you regretted not doing, or maybe you’d watch your whole life flashing before your eyes or whatever. But nope, none of that happened. All that went through my mind as I stared down the barrel of what looked to me like an awfully large caliber gun was the lyrics to “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys.
That song was on one of the many ’80s CDs I had confiscated from my mom’s collection before they got lost or destroyed by her lifestyle. Most of the music was a combination of catchy tunes mixed with cryptic lyrics that had to have been written under the influence of at least one controlled substance. But “West End Girls” was different for me, and I never knew why. There was something dark about it that betrayed the synth-pop sound it was trying to pull off. Like “Pumped Up Kicks” from Foster the People, the music hid a darker undertone that unless you were paying attention you wouldn’t catch.
The lyric that kept doing laps in my brain while I looked at the gun in front of me was this:
“Sometimes you’re better off dead. There’s a gun in your hand, and it’s pointing at your head.”
I mean, it’s about a guy who’s going to kill himself, yet he seems just as confused as the listener is. Thinking these were going to be my last thoughts, I wondered if he was as confused as I was about what he’d started.
It would be easy to say this all came about because of Brad’s and my breakup, but that wouldn’t be fair. If I was being honest—and I mean, if you can’t be completely truthful with a gun to your head, when can you be?—everything that was happening was all my fault. I had laid the seeds for this minute to happen from start to finish. I could look at the events that led to here and, like a greedy little pig, claim them all for myself. I’m sorry if this is making little sense to you. I was a bit stressed at the time. Please forgive my rambling.
I have a feeling it’s about to be cut short anyways.
Brad had spent the next couple of days after our breakup trying his best to make things right between us. Since I had found the one transgression on his part that he couldn’t defend, he thought the breakup was all his fault. Of course, he didn’t know that I was going to Berkeley in a couple of months. Though I knew geography wasn’t his strong point, he would know that College Station, Texas, was nowhere near Berkeley, California. He wanted to play baseball for A&M, and I wasn’t going to let me deter him, even for half a second.
The same way I wasn’t going to let him affect my decision either.
I know I sound like a dick, and on several levels I am one, but let me explain.
Brad and I have had the same dream for as long as we could remember: get the fuck out of Foster. He took to baseball and became the best he could be so some school, hopefully A&M, would pay the ridiculous cost of a college education as long as he hit a ball better than most other guys his age. I, on the other hand, decided that if I got the best grades I possibly could, that I could get one of the thousands of colleges out there to pay for my education based my SAT scores. I know I had succeeded, and I know if I had told Brad it would have made him think about changing his mind.
And that wasn’t fair to either of us.
I knew Brad and the type of person he was. As many issues as I had with self-worth—and trust me, there were several—they were nothing compared to the litany of problems Brad suffered from when he looked in a mirror. He would think it was his duty or job or whatever to make the sacrifice and move to California with me. Which on paper sounds incredibly romantic and all that. But sooner or later it would start to affect him. He would see himself going nowhere while I got a college education. He would see me pursuing my dream while he worked a dead-end job so we could make bills, and then he would see me graduate and know for the rest of our lives that it would fall on me to be the breadwinner.
He’d start to resent me. And that would lead to him hating me.
He’d wake up at twenty-two, with no chance to regain the time he’d lost, and realize he’d flushed his dream down the toilet because he wanted to do the “right thing” when it came to me. So, instead of putting us both through the whole wasted years I saw for him, I ignored his attempts to get back together and did my level best to not see him at all. I even had Sammy deliver the phone he gave me for Christmas back to him. I made sure to send myself all the pictures that were on it and kept them in my e-mail, because I knew someday I wa
s going to want to look back at this and cry like a bitch. And then I erased everything that was in the phone.
Pushing the erase key hurt like I was carving my heart out with a spoon.
So instead of thinking about how much of a mistake I was making, I threw myself into the gay-straight alliance. I worked with Mrs. Axeworthy to come up with a place that was inviting and welcoming to all. We set up topics like tolerance and civil rights, and drew up talking points for both sides and then practiced them on each other. For an adult, Mrs. Axeworthy was pretty cool. She owned a giant black cat that she called Little Eddie, hence her fascination with all things black cat, and he didn’t like me at first. She explained that she hadn’t had many visitors since her husband passed away and that Eddie had grown used to being the only man in the house.
The next time I went over, I brought tuna. After that, the cat loved me, and I had to admit, for a cat he was pretty cool as well.
Jennifer and Sammy took turns trying to convince me to talk to Brad. I knew they were just trying to be friends, but they were driving me crazy. I had to work nonstop to keep my own traitorous mind in check, but them coming up with perfectly rational reasons to forgive him was not helping. The more they pushed, the more I retreated. The more impassioned their pleas, the harder my resolve became, until finally it became too much.
The Friday before the first meeting, I was nervous as hell.
Not for the meeting, but because I was sure no one was going to show up. I had passed out fliers and put up a few on the bulletin boards, but none of them lasted more than a day before they were torn down. I found one of them shoved in my locker, across it was written: Fags Meeting This Monday!! Whoever it was had horrible penmanship. The only thing that would have been worse than no one showing up was a lot of assholes showing up and causing a scene. It was hard enough to get people to admit that being gay wasn’t a federal offense, but if I had Tony Wright and his douche bag friends heckling us, it was going to be over before we began.
So at lunch I found myself picking at my food and reevaluating the choices I had made in my life.
“So, heard from Brad?” Jennifer asked coyly, knowing damn well I hadn’t.
“Yeah, I called him last night, and we made up. He asked me to marry him, so that’s a thing now.” I hate to admit it, but I kind of liked the way she choked on her Pepsi as she looked over at me in shock. “I wish you’d stop bringing him up,” I said, trying to sound as nice as I could.
“He’s miserable,” she exclaimed as passionately as any defense attorney trying to save their client from the death penalty. “You do know this is killing him, right?”
The fact that it was killing me too obviously hadn’t registered with her yet, because it was the third time this week she had brought it up.
“Yes, I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the state championships.” My stomach had soured, and I tossed my untouched sandwich into my paper bag. “I made up my mind, Jennifer. I wish you’d just let it go.”
She looked sad as she finished her drink. “I just think you need to talk with him,” she said softly.
“I said everything I needed to when we broke up. Going back and picking at the wound isn’t going to help anything.” I looked over at Sammy. “Please tell her to stop.”
She looked over at Jennifer and then back to me. “Actually, I’ve been wanting to ask you about the meeting and who can come.”
That was the last straw. “Seriously?” I snapped at her. “You too? Look, we went out, we broke up, and it’s over. Completely over. So I don’t want to talk to him, call him, see him, and I certainly don’t want him showing up at that meeting. This is not a chance for us to be in the same room and then suddenly make up, and if either of you two bring him, I will lose my shit.” I paused to make sure my words had sunk in. “You got it? Shit. Lost.”
Sammy scowled at me and tossed her lunch onto her tray. “You know what, Kyle? I don’t know if it’s the heartbreak or you needing to get laid, but you’ve become a raging asshole.” She stood up and glared down at me. “Not everything is about you.”
Before I could answer, she turned around and marched off, obviously pissed about something.
I looked over at Jennifer, who held her hands up in defense. “Okay, okay. I won’t bring Brad. You’ve changed my mind.”
I think you’re mad, too unstable.
Right. Still a gun at my head. Getting there.
So that weekend I spent getting my ducks in a row. Not that I possessed a lot of ducks; in fact, my duck population had dwindled considerably since I’d been single. Nonetheless, there were ducks to get straightened out. I spent most of Saturday going over my talking points in detail in case there was something I had missed the forty-three times I’d reviewed them before. Sunday I went over to Mrs. Axeworthy’s house, because I had pretty much convinced myself that everything I had planned on bringing up at the first meeting was crap, and we needed to call a bomb threat in or something to make sure it wasn’t going to happen.
She found my panic absolutely delightful, which is one of those things grown-ups do that piss kids off something fierce. Instead of responding to my self-made emergency like a proper teenager would, she instead put out a plate of cookies and a pitcher of juice and told me to eat something. It is chemically impossible to be mad at someone when you’re eating a cookie. Don’t believe me? Try it.
“You need to calm down about this,” she chided as I finished my third cookie and wondered if we were splitting the plateful or if they were all mine. “You’ve done everything you can to prepare. Now you have to let the chips fall where they may.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked, throwing caution to the wind and grabbing a fourth. “I mean, I get it’s a casino reference, but don’t you roll dice? I never got that.”
“It’s not a casino reference,” she said, leaning back with her drink. “It’s about woodcutting.” Confused, I looked at her and less confused, back at the last cookie. She smiled and nodded as she began to explain. “It’s about obsessing over the small stuff when you have more important things to worry about. If you are carving something, you shouldn’t worry where the wood chips are going to fall—you should focus on the job at hand. There is always time to sweep up the little stuff later.”
I stared at her, kind of stunned that she knew that off the top of her head.
“I know this alliance is important to you, Kyle, but I can’t help but feel it isn’t the task you should be concentrating on.” I looked away from her penetrating gaze and began to study the worn patch on my jeans. “I haven’t seen Brad since you two stopped by my office that day. Everything okay?”
My jeans got a thousand times more interesting.
“You guys get in a fight or something?” Her voice was kind and inviting, which made me clam up even faster. “Okay, I don’t want to pry, but let me give you some advice.” I looked up at her, and she seemed to know exactly what was wrong. “Liking someone is a fleeting emotion. It can be like being hot or cold—it happens and then it fades away. But when you meet someone you fall in love with, that is a whole different kind of creature.” I found myself leaning forward as she elaborated. “Love is something you can’t get over, even if you want to. Once a connection is made, a real connection, it’s usually forever. And you can try to do a lot of things to get rid of it. You can run, you lie, you can even try to pretend that it’s for the best, but in the end, real love will find a way.”
I just sat there staring at her, wondering if I was so obvious that someone who didn’t really know me at all could see so much so easily. “How do you know when it’s real love?” I asked.
“When you close your eyes and all you can see is that person? That’s real love. When you wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream, and he’s the first person you want to talk to you? That’s real love. And when your life flashes before your eyes and you think this might be the end, the one person you wished you could talk to one more time—that’s real love
.”
I did everything I could not to think of Brad.
In fact, I was doing everything I could right then not to think of him, but damn, the only thing I could think of, besides Pet Shop Boys, was that I really, really wanted to talk to Brad one more time. The funny thing was, I didn’t even want to talk to him about anything real. I didn’t want him to apologize or to take him back. I just wanted to tell him about my day and how shitty fourth period was now, knowing I wasn’t going to see him at lunch. I wanted to ask him if he’d seen the new season of Teen Wolf or if he was ready for the playoffs. I didn’t even care what it was about. I just wanted to talk to him one more time.
The sound of a gun’s hammer being pulled back shouldn’t have been as loud as what I just heard.
I was explaining how I got to the point where a gun and I were staring at each other, and I got sidetracked. I’d spent a lot of time on the weekends at Robbie’s, trying my best to just stay away from Brad until graduation. Robbie had made no pretense about how he felt about Brad, so I thought his store would be a safe place where I wouldn’t have to listen to someone encouraging me to patch things up. I could fold clothes peacefully and stay out of sight.
Of course, that wasn’t what happened at all.
Robbie was dealing with his own drama that week as well, which probably saved me from his version of an encouraging lecture. It had something to do with the creepy woman who walked into his shop and gave him a letter from his dead boyfriend, something that was just a bit too wild to be believed. Then he’d passed out.
It turns out when someone actually faints it is nowhere as funny as it seems on TV.
For one, on TV they put their hand on their forehead and just wilt away, their knees slowly buckling as they drift back onto the ground. They’re performing more of a dance move than an actual loss of consciousness. If they do that thing with their eyelashes that makes them look like they’re having a seizure, I laugh every time.
