Taking Chances

by John Goode

  “No idea,” I said carefully. “Maybe kids?”

  She sighed heavily and shook her head. “They never learn,” she said, retreating into her house.

  “Have a good night!” I called out to her, feeling like I had just gotten away with murder. She didn’t answer as she slammed her door.

  I closed mine and locked it behind me as I took a deep breath. I decided I’d just call Matt when I was sober.

  Matt

  I SPENT most of the night cleaning up broken glass and trying to assure my mom we were not the victims of a hate crime.

  Some kids threw a rock through the window of what used to be my brother’s old room close to 3:00 a.m. and all hell broke loose. My mom started screaming while my dad came charging out of his room with a shotgun in his slippers.

  And nothing else.

  Recovering from the shock of learning that my dad either slept nude or had gotten lucky that night, I was barely able to keep him from storming out of the house like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Only the threat that the people across the street loved to video everything slowed him down. He revved back up again, and I asked him if he wanted to be on an episode of Grandpas Gone Wild. Snarling threats, he retreated to the bedroom to put on some clothes.

  My mother would only come out of her room after I assured her that, one, there were not armed people in the house and, two, I was going to clean up the broken glass myself.

  Nothing dispels Mom-fears faster than the threat of one of their sons cutting themselves on broken glass.

  She took the broom away from me and began systematically cleaning the glass up faster than I could have ever done. Once my dad put the shotgun away, and put on pants, we got a board from the garage and put it up over the hole. By that time, there was no way any of us were going back to sleep. So my dad made some coffee while my mom made us breakfast. They hovered around the TV, thinking the local news would surely lead with the “Wallace house gets window broken” story and were mildly disappointed when the anchor said nothing.

  Around seven thirty, my dad looked at me and said very seriously, “Do not blame what happened on yourself, son.”

  Which was, to date, the strangest thing ever said to me. I had been blaming the rock, so Dad’s pronouncement caught me off guard.

  “Say what?” I asked after a few seconds of stunned silence.

  “If those people have a problem with your life and feel the need to break our windows, that is not your fault.” He said it so grimly that I almost burst out laughing. I stopped myself before a giggle could escape my mouth. Dad was serious, and so was Mom. The hair on the back of my neck rose a little as I thought through what had really happened, at least as Dad and Mom saw it.

  “Um, okay, Dad. Thank you for being there. I won’t blame myself.” The energy it would take to convince my dad that the broken window was just stupid kids and not a protest against my sexuality was too much for me to scrape together after being jolted awake at the ass-side of the night. I got up and put my plate in the sink. “I’m going to go take a run and see if Mr. Jensen is at Nancy’s having breakfast. If he is, maybe I can convince him to open the hardware store early.”

  “You think it’s safe to run on the street?” my mom asked.

  I bit back the automatic sarcasm a question like that normally generated in my mind and instead gave her the most serious look I could muster. “If we change the way we live, Mom, the terrorists win.”

  She rolled her eyes at me as my dad chuckled a bit. “Okay, smartass, go jog.”

  I walked over and hugged my mom tightly. “It was just some kids, Mom. I’m fine.” She nodded and hugged me back, but I could tell she was still worried. “You do know that John, Billy, and I did much worse than just break a window when we were kids, right?”

  She batted at me as she turned back to the stove. “Don’t tell me that. Let me keep the illusion my three boys were all angels.”

  “Yeah, angels with halos propped up on their horns,” my dad mumbled from behind his paper.

  That made her smile, and I felt marginally better. As I changed in my room, it started to dawn on me how much they must have worried about me being gay if their reaction to a broken window was to automatically blame homophobes. Tyler had told me more about the whole blow-up at Foster High when the baseball player had come out and the drama it had raised before the Christmas break. As I slipped on some sweats, I began to realize how earth-shattering even dealing with an openly gay student, much less an athlete, must be for this town.

  In my time, heads would have exploded. Literally exploded all Scanners-style with blood and brains everywhere.

  The morning sun hung lazily in the distance and the cold air made me gasp in shock. I rationally knew once I began running I would warm up, but it was hard to resist the urge to turn back and dive under my covers. Then the memory of Tyler’s perfectly sculpted abs came to mind, and I could feel my mom’s Christmas dinner expanding my waist to the size of a Hula-Hoop.

  It’s amazing how motivating dating someone better looking than you are can be when it comes to working out.

  I remember loathing this run when I was a teenager. My brothers and I had always been out on the pavement by the time the sun crested the horizon, each of us motivated by different desires. As the oldest, John felt it was his place to set the pace by being our unofficial trainer, making sure we were up and dressed whether we wanted to run or not. Billy, as the next oldest, felt it was his job to keep up with John. I ran because I thought I could make myself more normal by sheer force of will. It was the same reason I had gone into sports, dated girls and even went through a chewing-tobacco phase one summer. My brothers were more than just my siblings; they were my heterosexual camouflage, the people I hid behind even while my growing feelings were threatening to drive me crazy as a teenager.

  I ran because I didn’t want people to notice how many times I walked by the Parkers’ house. I ran hoping it would deflect how my eyes lingered in the locker room even though I knew if I was caught, it would mean a fate worse than death. Back then, I was running away from myself and everything I knew I was turning into.

  Now I ran because I wanted to keep myself attractive to the very boy I had stalked.

  There is no way I could convince you there wasn’t a large, supersized amount of pride in my head that I had actually ended up with the object of my teenage desire. I’m not that good a liar. But that pride was tempered with the growing dread that I had already fucked things up. As I came up Elm toward First Street, all the anxieties I had complained to Sophia about last night came back tenfold.

  We weren’t fifteen anymore, and just coming out and saying you wanted to be with someone was the gay equivalent of being a Tourette’s sufferer with a megaphone. Gay men didn’t say that out loud; not to me, at least. Sure, there were the few who seemed to just fall into relationships and didn’t mind, but I was never one of those guys. I was always going out with guys who seemed to think dating was like gay chicken—the first one to admit it lost. And my little “I’ll just move” was the worst reaction I could have had.

  The best I could do at this point was just quietly back away from Tyler and hope we could salvage a friendship out of this. By the time I passed Foster High, I had decided I would make up some excuse about work and say I had to leave early. If he wanted to call me again, he could call; if he didn’t, then that was okay too.

  Well, it wasn’t okay, but it was better than him telling me I was freaking him the fuck out.

  I finished the lap around the school and made my way back home—no, I mentally corrected myself, I made my way back to my parents’ house. Then I could go home.

  Wherever that might be.

  Tyler

  WHILE I slept, a small family of raccoons had burrowed into my brain and made themselves what was, no doubt from all the extra room between my ears, a spacious home for themselves and their children. That was the only explanation for the roaring headache I lay still under, afraid to move and make
the pain worse. I’d had hangovers before, true. Comparing those hangovers to the crushing weight on my temples and nausea in my stomach was like comparing a splinter in your finger to losing an arm. Most of the time, if I lay real still, the agony would be minimized, but from the moment I opened my eyes, there was nothing I could or could not do to escape the torment. No, there was no way to escape this short of killing myself.

  When I was in college, I remember drinking all night, catching a two-hour nap before heading out to my first class, and still having enough energy to make practice that afternoon. As I stood under the hot water splashing from the showerhead, I wondered where exactly that boy with the steel constitution had gone.

  With all the speed of frozen sap, I changed and felt my way down to the kitchen, where I hoped an IV of caffeine might be handy. As a backup, if the caffeine didn’t work, maybe those electrical paddles EMTs use to bring people back to life; either way, I needed help to wake up. As I silently prayed to my coffeemaker to heal me, I shaded my eyes from the rays of the morning sun. What sun worshippers thought of as a warm, light embrace seemed to me to be harsh beams intent on melting my brain with their laser-like intensity. Though I can’t prove it, I swear I could see the bones of my hand exposed like an x-ray, the light was so bright.

  “Fuck this,” I said to myself way too loudly. Wincing and annoyed, I stormed off into the living room.

  Forty-six seconds later and hidden behind the extra-dark polarizing lenses of my sunglasses, I stalked back into the kitchen. The darkness helped dampen the pain in my head from intolerable to just this side of agonizing. I poured myself a cup of liquid salvation and prayed to the gods of caffeine to save me from this hell of my own making. There were mornings I would have drunk straight from the coffeepot if it wouldn’t have scalded me.

  I don’t know if it was the caffeine or the daily ritual, but as I sat there working on my third cup, the pounding faded slightly and the feeling I was going to vomit everything I had eaten since 2003 went away. I turned on the news as I ate a banana, trying to piece together exactly what had happened last night. I remember drinking with Linda, worried about Matt, and then….

  And then there was a knock on my door.

  Slowly I moved toward the sound of jackhammers on the other side of my front door, completely ready to strangle whoever was making so much noise.

  The sun that came blasting as I opened the door blinded me for a moment, and all I could see was the dark outline of a person. Even from that, I could tell it was Matt. “Oh jeez, come in quickly,” I urged as I tried to hide behind the door.

  He entered at what could only be considered a leisurely pace. “I had no idea I was dating Joan Crawford,” he commented on my sunglasses as soon as I closed the door.

  “Really?” I asked. “I don’t get hot vampire? The first place you go to is Joan fucking Crawford?”

  “Vampires don’t clutch their coffee mugs with such zeal unless they have blood in them.” He leaned over and looked in my cup. “Nope, no blood.”

  “Morning,” I grumbled, stalking back to the kitchen for a refill.

  “Good morning to you too,” he replied, way too chipper for the hour.

  “Did I say it was a good morning?” I asked as I filled my mug again and poured one for him. “I was stating a fact. It is morning. And, unless I died last night and this is just some kind of coma-induced hallucination, there is nothing good about it.” I handed him his coffee and saw him staring at me intently, as if waiting for me to say something else. “Except you being here, of course. That is a very good thing,” I added quickly, leaning in for a kiss.

  He kissed me back, but it was a far cry from our usual kisses. Normally, once our mouths got that close to each other, it was a good five to ten minutes before we could pull them apart, and usually that was just to get to a more comfortable place to continue. He walked over and pulled some milk out of the fridge. Trying to focus through the fog in my head, I wondered what had changed.

  “Everything okay?” I asked as he started adding sugar to his cup.

  “Just a long night.” He sighed, not looking at me. “Some kids threw a rock and broke a window, which of course woke my parents up and it was drama and my dad thinks it was a hate crime and it was just stupid and I am going back to San Francisco,” he finished, looking at me.

  I had caught every other word he had said, and even then it didn’t make much sense. The only thing that registered was he was leaving. “Wait. What?” I asked after a few seconds.

  He leaned against the counter and sipped at his drink. “I need to get back to work,” he said, still not making eye contact, which was Matt for “I am not telling the entire story.”

  “I thought you took some time off,” I replied, which came out a whole lot more aggressive than I meant it to.

  “I did,” he answered in a clipped tone. “And now I’m going back.”

  If I thought I felt bad from the hangover, that was nothing compared to the way Matt’s words made me feel. My eyes stung as if I had been struck on the nose and there was an ache in my chest, I mean an honest-to-God pain in my chest where my heart was. Several hundred retorts flashed in my mind. A few dozen “Please don’t go” followed by “But I was just getting used to this” a couple of different ways. That impulse was followed by a deep hurt which begged me to ask “What did I do wrong?” and then settled on an arrogant “I didn’t do anything wrong” which shifted into an angry “Well then, go.” All of this was compressed in my brain and filtered through my common sense and came out my mouth as a surprised

  “Oh. Well… okay.” I had no idea what else to say, and the silence was moving from awkward to downright violent.

  His eyes locked with mine, and we stayed silent for what felt like a long-ass time.

  “Okay,” he echoed, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere else. Like there was another Matt behind him somewhere doing a pretty crappy ventriloquist act. “Well, just wanted to let you know.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not trusting myself to say anything more because I was moving from shocked to pretty fucking pissed faster than I was comfortable with.

  When it was obvious I wasn’t going to say anything else, he put the coffee mug down. “Great.” He looked around the kitchen for a few seconds like he was looking for something and then back to me. “Okay, then. Well… I’ll see you around, Tyler.”

  And then he swung his fist at me, hitting me squarely in the gut, taking my breath away. Completely shocked, I fell to my knees as his knee came up and connected with my chin. My head flew back as I was thrown onto the tile floor, and my vision blurred as he glared down at me. I tried to say something, but he started kicking me in the side as hard as he could. All I saw were flashes of red when I closed my eyes and tried to block them.

  Actually, he held out his hand as if to shake mine good-bye, but the punching and kicking were what I felt.

  I shook it numbly. “Have a nice flight, Matt” was all I could mumble.

  He might have said something after that, but I honestly couldn’t tell you. It took me a few seconds to realize I was alone in the kitchen and he had walked out. Suddenly the hangover was the farthest thing from my mind. I roared angrily and threw the coffee mug against the far wall.

  Then I sank to the floor and cried for a while… you know what? No offense, but I don’t feel like talking anymore. Can you come back later?

  Matt

  DON’T talk to me right now.

  THERE will be a brief intermission while we find someone to narrate the story from here.

  Linda Stilleno

  WHEN I woke up, it was almost noon.

  From the silence that came from the other side of my bedroom door, it was obvious Kyle was already up and gone, which meant I had let him down again. I two-thirds fell, one-third rolled out of bed and grabbed my pack of cigarettes and lighter when my fingers accidentally touched them. Mostly vertical, I squinted until I could spot the bedroom door. I stumbled over my shoes, b
ut never dropped the cigarette or the lighter, even managed to light the cigarette without burning my fingers to a crisp. Still fogged mentally, I staggered through last night’s crime scene. Because that was what the living room was as far as I was concerned.

  I had been so good, coming home early—well, early for me, at least—and had been dead set on seeing my son and spending some time with him during actual daylight hours at least one time before the end of his senior year in high school.

  That was the plan until Brandon and his friends came by after the bars had closed. And then the plan went to shit.

  The smoke almost immediately calmed me down, but I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the nicotine and more to do with the routine. I had smoked since before I was Kyle’s age, and by this time it was the ritual—shaking the cigarette out, tamping the end down on the package, clamping my lips around the filter and lighting up, the sound of the butane igniting as clear as a bell, then the snap of the top of the lighter accompanied by my first deep drag—rather than the actual drug that calmed me down. Brandon had brought a bottle of something and his friend, Dan I think, had some weed, which only made everything worse. I vaguely remembered we might have done something stronger than weed, but I couldn’t remember what. I know we had talked before I ushered them out the door just as the morning news signaled the start of the day.

  I needed a shower and some food before I was even close to being able to face how bad I had screwed up last night. Kyle had taped a note on my door telling me he was with Brad and would be back later. That was Kyle’s way of telling me he was hurt about my behavior but not the least bit surprised.

  I was on my way to the shower when the phone rang. As always, I prayed nothing had happened to Kyle.

  “Hello?” I answered, trying to sound as awake as possible. My eyes complained when I forced them wide open, but at least I felt more alert.