Summer Lessons

by Amy Lane

  “What’re you asking?” He threw himself back on his bed and kicked off his slippers.

  Terry sounded disgruntled. “I’m just… you know. How does your brother seem so normal?”

  Mason grunted and tried to recall his conversation with Skip. “Have you ever pulled an all-nighter?” he asked. One of Dane’s triggers was a stressful week of finals.

  “Yeah, when I was in tech school. I’d get off work and go to school and stay up all night to do my homework—”

  “Exactly. How long did you go without meaningful sleep?”

  Laugh. “About two days.”

  Mason couldn’t laugh. “Dane went about three weeks. He started ripping out walls in his dorm, painting them.” Mason closed his eyes, remembering his mother calling him up, panicked, and how he’d had to clock Dane in the jaw, stun him, to get him in the car to take to the psych ward. How the place was awful, even with health insurance, and how Mason and his parents had taken shifts so Mason’s sweet baby brother wouldn’t be alone in that place, and the painful reconstruction of Dane’s life after that. This had been before Ira, and Mason had been so desperate afterward for calm, for “normal.” Thinking about it now, he realized he’d equated boring with normal.

  “What’s the crash like afterwards?” Terry asked perceptively.

  Mason’s throat swelled. Suicide watch. Dane lying unwashed in bed like a dying fish. Hearing the words “I want to die” coming from his baby brother.

  “Bad,” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s… for full-blown bipolar, it’s bad. So there’s medication and talking and more medication and more talking. He has to keep a journal every day. He has to talk to a doctor every week. And the thing is, when everything is level, he’s Dane. And….” Mason smiled. “You’ve met him. It’s worth it. It’s worth it to find normal, you know?”

  “What’s normal?” Terry asked, sounding raw.

  Mason let out a sigh and wriggled under the covers. He was wearing sweats—he might as well settle in for a convo. “I like to think it’s something that doesn’t hurt.” He remembered Ira. “But that doesn’t bore the shit out of you either.”

  “Doesn’t hurt?”

  Mason thought about it. Thought about all the times he’d opened his mouth and fucked up a relationship—and how badly he wanted someone to see past the dumb things he said and look at the things he actually did. “Yeah. Something that makes you feel good when it’s working. That doesn’t make you afraid it’s going to get yanked away because you say or do the wrong thing once or even twice. It’s a relationship with a do-over clause.”

  “Huh,” Terry said.

  Mason resisted throwing the phone across the room. “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “I just… I know you’re thinking you want to hear what I’ve got in mind for a relationship, but, uh, I’ve never had one, really. I mean, queer guys don’t get a relationship, do they?”

  “Well they do now,” Mason said, trying not to cross his eyes or sound like a condescending shit. “Thirty years ago, not so much. Nobody expected us to have a family. I mean my mother expected me to, and that’s what mattered, but I get it.” And suddenly he remembered his gay history, riots at Stonewall, AIDS activism—all of it. “For a while, close encounters in bathrooms were all we got. But not anymore.”

  “Not according to my mom,” Terry said glumly. Then he let out a sigh—and it turned out to be one of the best sounds ever. “She’s… I mean, I want to say she’s, like, mentally ill, but I don’t think that’s right. Dane can’t help himself. Or, I mean, he can help himself, and, you know, that’s what he does. But she… it’s like her heart died when I was a kid. And the only thing that makes her happy is now it’s my turn to take care of her.”

  “But that’s not fair,” Mason said, so relieved—so damned relieved—to actually say it out loud.

  “But she didn’t have to have me, you know,” Terry told him matter-of-factly. “She could have gotten an abortion. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Mason’s heart stopped. Literally. In the silence that it left behind, he could hear the big whoosh of its last beat roaring through his ears.

  “Your mother told you that?” he asked, not sure where the breath had come from.

  “Yeah. Whenever I was bad.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say,” Mason rasped. “That was her choice—she had no right to inflict it on you.”

  “But, you know. I’m the reason her life was so hard.”

  “Terry?” Mason said, hoping he wasn’t moaning. He hurt. His entire body hurt.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re awesome. You’re… there is so much more to you than what your mother tells you. You just need to get out of the house more to see it.” Augh! Terry should have been having quickies with a counselor or a psychologist or someone who knew the words—anyone who knew the words. Every second they were on the phone, Mason felt like he walked a tightrope between what he should say and what he wanted to blurt out. What he wanted to blurt out was “Get the hell out of there, move into your own apartment, leave her to rot, then come date me!” Which would have suited all of Mason’s needs perfectly, but Mason was starting to figure out that he’d had a lot of his needs met already, and this wasn’t about him at all.

  “Huh.”

  “I hate that word.”

  Terry laughed. “Sorry—I just don’t have any others. That was… that was a really nice compliment. You know we’re going to have to play together without actually practicing as a team, right?”

  A total non sequitur, but Mason was so damned glad to move away from the hard stuff. “Well, like you said, let me sub for the defenders. I can’t do too much harm there, right?”

  “Mason, we’re gonna get creamed—I told you that. But you can’t feel bad about it. See, when I first started playing, I was afraid Skipper was gonna yell at me for fucking up so badly, because we couldn’t win for shit, right? But Skipper was like, ‘Dude, we’re out here getting exercise, we have a beer after practice, we get to play like little kids—what’s to worry about?’ So I’m telling you, yeah, we’ll lose. But it’s not… wait!” He sounded excited. “It’s exactly like golf. It’s like, ‘Who cares what actually happened in the game, as long as the scorecards say we can play together again!’”

  Mason found himself smiling. God, when he was a kid, he’d imagined it would all be that simple. “That’s excellent,” he said, feeling optimistic in spite of the rain hammering at the roof. “We’ll be like the Bad News Bears.”

  “I’ve seen that movie!” And again he sounded excited. “Although the older one was like… whoa. They let kids smoke in that movie, and you’re like damn, shit was messed up a long time ago.”

  Mason had to laugh. “Yeah—remember, I was born a long time ago.”

  “What’s the thing about the age, anyway?” Impatience tinged his voice. “I said you were hot.”

  “I guess… I just thought my life would be settled by now, you know?” Oh God—Mason’s early midlife crisis was going to bore him, and that would be it.

  “Well, maybe you’re lucky. Maybe if it had settled the way you’d planned earlier, that would have sucked, but if it settles the way it is now, there will be no suck, and you’ll have a better life.”

  The wind gusted and the rain poured—and Mason relaxed, happy. “I can’t argue with you,” he said, his voice an awed whisper. At that moment the lights flickered and went off entirely. Oh hell. “Terry, I’m going to go check on Dane, okay?”

  “Did your lights go out?”

  “Yeah,” Mason soothed, getting out of bed. “Do you get nervous when that happens?”

  “Sounds like a total pussy thing when I say it, doesn’t it?”

  “No. Actually, Dane doesn’t like it either.” He padded to his doorway and the lightning flashed, and he screamed and fell back into his room.

  Dane screamed and started to laugh, anxiety turning it into a cackle. “Mason?”

  “Jesus, Dane, you scare
d me to death!”

  “Well, you know I’m a big baby in the dark!”

  “Yeah, well, so is Terry. C’mon. Crawl in. If I put the phone on the charger before I go to sleep, it should wake us up in the morning.”

  Dane docilely followed him back into the bedroom. “I turned everything off, so it’s not going to all blast on in fifteen minutes.”

  And Terry said, “So you’re just going to let him crawl into bed with you?”

  “Since we were kids, yeah. Mom let him do it until he was sixteen years old.”

  “Which was pretty funny when Dad got up to pee and wasn’t expecting me,” Dane chuckled.

  “You are so warped,” Mason muttered, crawling into his bed, glad it was a king-size, because puppy piles weren’t his thing.

  “So,” Terry said, his voice growing thin with his own fear and something else Mason couldn’t define, “you’d… you wouldn’t laugh at me for crawling into bed with you.”

  Mason’s heart gave a vicious twist in his chest. “No. I come from a family of big scared babies—you’d be part of the crowd.”

  Terry and Dane laughed at the same time, and Mason rolled over to one side, knowing Dane would roll over to his other. “Sounds… cozy,” Terry said. “Real… cozy.”

  “Well, it will be, until he starts ripping burrito farts under the covers.”

  “Yup,” Dane said, sounding drowsy already. “Saving them for you.”

  “Just lay there and pretend to sleep,” Mason muttered. “I’m trying to be romantic.”

  “That’s what he said,” Dane giggled, and Mason rolled his eyes in the dark.

  “Mason,” Terry said in his ear, claiming his complete attention. “Don’t hang up yet, okay?”

  He was scared. Mason could hear it—same as Dane had been.

  “No,” he said softly. “I won’t. I promise. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Tell me about college,” he said decidedly. “I want to hear what I missed.”

  So Mason launched into the story of Todd Slezcyk and the lost virginity and listened as Terry laughed, more and more quietly each time. He must have fallen asleep finally, the phone next to his ear, because when Mason hit End Call, he could hear a faint snoring on the end of the line.

  He hung up and put the phone on the charger, aware that the electricity had come back on sometime in the last half hour, but all his lights were turned off, so he was still good.

  “Todd Slezcyk was an ass,” Dane mumbled into the dark, startling him awake.

  “Well I know that now,” Mason laughed, so happy the story had done something to ease Terry’s anxiety that he didn’t care if Dane heard or not.

  “You should have known that then. Who picks politics over sex, Mason? I mean, seriously.”

  Mason chuckled tiredly. “Todd did.”

  “Well, I’m glad you and Terry are a thing now. He has more sense.”

  Mason hmmed because he didn’t want to wake Dane up when they both had to be up early in the morning. The truth was, he wanted so badly to talk to someone about Terry, to see if he’d done the right thing, if he was saying the right things, if he was even hoping for the right things, but he’d pretty much exhausted his circle of friends this past week, and he figured he was going to have to deal with it on his own.

  His last comforting thought was that for the first time, talking to someone until they fell asleep seemed like a talent and not a hideous social faux pas.

  The Dangers of Toe-Poking

  TERRY HAD been right and the rain let up the next day. Saturday dawned bright and sunshiny and frosty as hell, the grass coated with ice, even at eleven, when they were all meeting.

  The other team wasn’t there yet, so Skipper made them run drills, the first one being to take turns taking goal kicks at Carpenter, who was apparently their pro tem goalie.

  “Serious, Skipper,” Carpenter panted. “It’s like you want us to lose!”

  “That’s not true,” Skip said, motioning Mason forward to kick the ball. “But we don’t have another goalie, and Mason can sub the defenders. I think it’ll work better if Richie subs all the midfielders and strikers.”

  Well, of course. Richie had enough gas for a jackrabbit army. He could probably sub the other team too.

  Dane, the rat, waved from the sidelines, absolutely determined to be their cheerleader and not to play at all. Dane had taken dance lessons through school—he hadn’t been great, but he claimed it as his athletic skill, and Mason let him. Now he ran on the treadmill and followed yoga tapes in his off times, which was fine, but Mason was going to tell Mom on him if this game went as south as Mason expected when Dane could have helped. Suck it up, buttercup—if Mason had to make an ass of himself on the soccer field, he wasn’t letting Dane escape.

  Mason ran determinedly forward and toe-poked the ball at Carpenter, who caught it neatly and threw it back to the line, where Owens took his turn to dribble it toward the goal.

  “Mason, dammit!” Terry called from his place in line. “Do you remember nothing?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it—the inside of my foot. I get it.”

  “No, because if you got it, you’d do it!”

  Mason scowled at him. “Don’t be mean,” he said shortly. “I feel enough like an idiot as it is.” He trotted to the end of the line and jogged in place to keep warm.

  Terry was a few bodies in front of him, and as Mason watched, his expression turned inward.

  “Yeah—sorry ’bout that,” he said, turning around and catching Mason’s eye. “Channeling Mom for a minute—scares the shit out of me when she just pops out of my mouth like that, you know?”

  Mason nodded. “Bet it’s like coughing up a gopher,” he said in total seriousness.

  The three guys between him and Terry disintegrated, and Terry snickered. Skip looked up from where he was directing everybody and shook his head.

  “What in the hell did you say?” he asked Mason helplessly.

  “Gopher!” Cooper howled in front of him. “Oh my God!”

  Mason shook his head and Terry winked, and then it was Terry’s turn. He used the side of his foot, and it was like he drew a lovely hyperbolic line from his foot, around Carpenter, and into the net—and the ball followed that curve.

  Mason could only stare stupidly, impressed as hell, as Terry turned around and trotted back to the end of the line and Carpenter picked himself off the ground to dust off his knees.

  A HALF an hour later, Carpenter wasn’t the only one with grass stains on his knees and ass. As Terry had predicted, they were getting creamed at five goals to one, and Mason and Richie were as exhausted as the rest of the team from cycling on and off the field to give other people a break.

  There was no banter in this kind of play, just a solid, balls-out determination to keep running until you dropped and to give each play your best until you folded. But Mason’s feet were like lead, and he was developing a sore spot in his hip from all the sudden reversals on the grass field, and he had to actively work at turning his foot sideways to kick the damned ball like he was supposed to.

  And sometimes he forgot.

  Like toward the end, when the ball came rolling toward the goal in an obvious save and Mason ran to boot it across the field. He didn’t lift his foot entirely off the ground as he shifted forward to kick it, and his toe poked into a hummock of grass on the uneven field, bent back, and Mason’s momentum sent him sprawling as his ankle turned underneath him.

  For a minute he lay facedown in the mud, waiting for the pain in his ankle to hit and hoping the earth would swallow him.

  Then the pain in his ankle hit, and there was no room for hope.

  “Time!” Skipper shouted, and Mason became aware of the muddle of feet still jostling for the ball near his head. “I said time-out, assholes!” Skipper yelled, as winded as the rest of them. “If you kill my fuckin’ boss I’m gonna fuckin’ destroy you, now move, goddammit, move!”

  “You mean he’s really hurt?”

&
nbsp; Mason pushed himself up on one arm and tried not to whimper. Up, up, over to his ass, and oh mama, yeah, that sucked.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, really hurt.”

  Terry suddenly crouched by his side. “You’re a mess,” he said grimly. “Did you mean to land face-first in a mud puddle?”

  “Yes, of course, I’ve been planning it all day.” He closed his eyes and tried to pretend he wasn’t thinking about throwing up. Terry squeezed the back of his neck, and Mason took a deep breath, and then another, and the pain receded a little. Skipper crouched at his feet, probing his ankle with gentle fingers.

  “It’s swelling like a motherfucker,” Skip said grimly. “Dane, you want to drive the car down here and—”

  “I’ll get him,” Terry said, popping up from Mason’s side. “Here, I’ll go get my car—I’ll be right back!”

  He disappeared like a magic pixie, and Dane gazed at Mason’s ankle in horror. “He’s going to take you to the hospital in his Toyota?”

  “God,” Richie said, watching him grab his keys and phone from the pile by the side of the field before sprinting up the hill, “that thing’s smaller than my car. Skip, Mason can’t ride in that thing, can he?”

  Skip looked at Mason with wide blue eyes. “Uh, boss? Uh, are you sure you don’t want to, you know, go with Dane?”

  Mason took a few deep breaths and tried to find a balance between extreme pain grimace and blissed-out smile. “Did you see that?” he said. “He’s getting his car!”

  “Oh God,” Skipper moaned, smacking his face.

  “I don’t even believe this,” Richie muttered, running a hand through his wild red hair. “Skip, your boss is an idiot—you don’t even like riding in your Toyota, and it’s your car.”

  “Richie, go get me the ice packs in my gym bag, okay?”

  “Yeah—good idea, Skip!” Richie ran off, that boundless energy almost an assault on Mason’s senses. The other team had pretty much gathered to themselves at this point, and Mason wondered if they were laughing at the big clumsy guy who face-planted and now needed the entire world to administer to his boo-boo.