by Liane Shaw
“No problem. I’m sure Lucas would weigh in on things if you’re interested in his…unique perspective.”
“You mean the gay perspective? Do you think that would help?”
“I’m not sure if that’s what I mean. I just mean the Lucas perspective. Which might help but might also make you totally confused. My brother is an original.”
“That’s true. Anyway, thanks, Clare. I’ll think about talking to him, and I will definitely talk to you again soon. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“I don’t mind. I actually like it, so contact me anytime. Good luck.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
I close my laptop and sit for a minute staring at the wall. It’s not a very interesting wall. Just green paint with a couple of hockey posters that my dad bought me. I’m not a fan of hockey. I prefer soccer, which I’m actually pretty good at. I’m fast and can dribble better than most guys I’ve played with. My dad thinks soccer is a sissy sport because it’s non-contact. Figures.
I like the color green. But I like all the other colors as well. I’d like to paint this place into an abstract rainbow and accent it with pictures that mean something to me. I love artwork that shows how beautiful the world can be, like Degas’ dancers or Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Although, what I’d really like is a picture of a deer that looks a little like a dog.
seven
“So, is Benjamin walking home with us again?” Ryan asks as we head for the door after school.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when we get outside.” My voice is calm and casual even though all of my insides are starting to vibrate like they’ve done every day for the past two weeks at the thought that he might be standing there waiting for us again.
“Ryan! Shit, man, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” Cody runs up behind us.
“Really? Because I went to my locker and now, I’m going to the door so I can leave, which is what I do every day. Not sure where you were looking.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing today. You are supposed to be at the pool. Remember? Extra practice for the meet this weekend? Coach is going to fry our asses for being late!” He grabs the handles of Ryan’s chair and spins him around. He doesn’t say anything to me. He mostly ignores me unless we’re in the pool, which we don’t do much these days because he’s busy training and doesn’t have time for me. I can swim pretty well now, so it’s probably safer for me to practice on my own anyway.
“Shit. I did forget. I guess you’re on your own, Jack,” Ryan calls over his shoulder as Cody jogs down the hall, using the wheelchair as a battering ram on the way to the community pool, which is connected to the far end of the school.
I keep walking forward, wondering if I should slow down or speed up. Benjamin is used to having the two of us to talk to. How will he feel about me showing up alone? Maybe I should just wait until tomorrow when Ryan will be with me again. I might run out of things to say and then I’ll bore him so much that we won’t even be friends, let alone anything else.
Clare would tell me to calm down, get my ass outside, and just let it happen. Easy for her to say because she’s always calm and never runs out of things to talk about. She’s the queen of conversation.
By the time I finish trying to figure out what to do, I’m already at the door. And my heart feels like it literally stops beating.
He’s just standing there, leaning against the railing. The sun is pouring down on his head, and he’s smiling like a cat does when it’s hanging out on a window sill. His eyes are closed, which is too bad because I imagine that they’d actually manage to shoot sparks in the sunlight today. His hair hangs down to his shoulders, all loose and sexy, because he always removes the elastic the minute he gets out of school. He told us he just uses it because his mom makes him.
He’s wearing a black, knee-length coat, left open to show off his usual brightly colored shirt—purple today with a black collar—tucked into black jeans. Even though he definitely dresses different from the guys around here, every girl who walks by gives him several looks. Apparently, there aren’t too many rumors yet about him being gay even though he doesn’t really seem to be hiding anything, seeing as he already told Ryan and me—and who knows how many other people. Maybe he just hasn’t been here long enough for the rumor mill to begin operating.
I open the door and step outside. He opens his eyes and grins as he sees me.
“Hey,” he says, walking over to me. Now my heart feels like someone put high-voltage jumper cables into my chest and jolted it into an erratic rhythm that I’m sure must somehow show on my face.
“Hey.” Good comeback. Very original.
“No Ryan today?” he asks, looking behind me. Does he look disappointed?
“No. Cody just snagged him for swim practice.” Snagged? What kind of word is that?
“Cody. My mother’s favorite student.” He laughs.
“Yeah, Cody. He likes to drive admin crazy. There’s a rumor that he actually drove St. Clair away.”
“Really? Well, remind me to thank him some time.” He gives me a look that makes everything inside of me start beating so fast that I feel like I might pass out.
“I hope he doesn’t drive your mom too nuts,” I manage to choke out, even though my throat has gone a bit dry. Like the Sahara on a hot day.
“Actually, Mom kind of likes the bad boys. She always says her job would be too easy if everyone behaved themselves. She used to teach a whole class of kids who had been kicked out of the regular school system and she loved it.”
“Why’d she become a VP?”
“Money. Prestige. I don’t know. She likes it well enough, although I think your buddy Cody might be the challenge that makes her go back to the classroom.”
“Cody is no buddy of mine.”
“Oh, no? I thought he and you and Ryan were all besties.” He grins as he emphasizes the word.
“Ryan and I are…friends. But Cody and I barely tolerate each other. We accidentally went on a road trip together, but that’s about it.”
“Accidentally went on a road trip? That sounds like a story.”
“Not much of one. Ryan invited me, and I didn’t know Cody was going until I’d already said yes. I got pissed off at some ignorant comment Cody made when we were there and told him I’m gay, which scared the shit out of me at first but ended up having the positive effect of his mostly ignoring me when other people are around, so I don’t soil his reputation.” I stop talking, surprised at how many words I just managed to string together. We’re having a conversation and Ryan’s not even here to keep it going!
“Oh, one of those.” He nods.
“Yeah, one of many of those in this town.”
“Hey, Jack. How are you doing?” The high-pitched, very obnoxiously flirty voice interrupts us. Sarah Edey is standing in front of me, smiling, which is something she has never done in my direction before. She has a couple of friends with her who have faces I recognize but names I forget.
“Um, fine.” She smiles even more widely, until her face seems split in half by her big mouth. Her eyes shift from me to Benjamin.
“Who’s your friend?” she asks, fluttering her eyelashes as if she got dirt in her eye and is trying to blink it out.
“Benjamin Lee, at your service,” he says, with a bow that makes all of them giggle. I just roll my eyes. They’re playing on the wrong soccer field.
“I’ll just bet you are,” Sarah says in what I assume she thinks is a seductive voice but mostly sounds silly.
“And you are?” he asks. Sarah tilts her head to one side. Maybe she has water in her ear.
“I’m Sarah. These two are Jillian and Samantha.” Jillian and Samantha just wave.
“Nice to meet you, ladies. Hope I’ll see you again sometime,” Benjamin says politely, while at the same time making it clear the conv
ersation is over.
“Oh, you will. Count on it!” says Sarah, sounding more threatening than sexy as her two silent handmaidens nod. The three of them skip off, waving at us—at Benjamin—as they go.
“Does that happen to you a lot?” I ask Benjamin as we start walking again.
“What?”
“Girls flirting.”
“Oh, yeah. Quite often. Does it happen to you a lot?”
“Never. I guess they can’t tell with you.” He looks at me curiously. “That you’re gay, I mean,” I finish, feeling a little self-conscious.
“No, I don’t have it written on my forehead.” He pushes his hair back and shows me. I smile, wondering if his hair feels as silky as it looks.
“Do your friends back home know?” I ask. He looks at me in surprise.
“That I’m gay? Of course, they do! Everyone knows. I don’t hide who I am.” Now I’m the one who’s surprised.
“You’re out? Like, completely?” Just like Caleb and Lucas, but he’s so much younger. I had it in my head that coming out is something you do when you’re older and it’s…safer somehow.
“Pretty much. I mean, I don’t announce it the minute I walk into a room.”
“You told Ryan right away.”
“If it comes up naturally, I don’t hide it. I was asking Ryan what it’s like to be the only guy in a chair, and that got us talking about being different, so it just came out in the conversation. Obviously, most people here haven’t figured it out yet. At least, Sarah and her buddies don’t seem to have.”
“You might want to keep it that way while you’re living here.” He gets that curious look on his face again.
“Really? Why is that?”
“Because Thompson Mills is a few years behind the known universe in its acceptance level. Like about a century or two. I’m safer being the subject of rumors than admitting that at least one of them is actually true. There’s a lot of serious homophobia around here.”
“Serious how?”
“Serious as in I was pinned to a dumpster by a couple of gangbangers one time who wanted to flatten my nose so that I wouldn’t start hitting on the local guys. They would have managed it, too, if Cody hadn’t shown up and smacked them around a little.”
“Your not-friend Cody?”
“Well, Ryan was there with me. Cody was mostly protecting him. Those guys were such asswipes that they would have punched out a guy in a chair. Until the swim team showed up and stopped them.”
“The swim team? On TV it’s always the football team that saves the day.” Benjamin laughs, but I don’t join him.
“I think you might want to reconsider being too open about it here. It’s not like where you come from.” He smiles at me and shakes his head slightly.
“Don’t get me wrong. There are lots of homophobes and asswipes in the city too. It’s definitely not all sunshine and roses. Maybe the difference is that there are also enough decent people floating around to balance things out a bit.”
“Well, there isn’t much balance around here. This town is so small that being different usually means you’re flying solo. Take Ryan. He’s the only guy outside of the nursing home who is in a wheelchair, so the school and the rest of the town aren’t even fully accessible. And up until now, I’m the only gay guy I’ve ever heard of who lives here. I still hide it from everyone except about six people. I mean, I don’t know the whole town, and maybe there are people who would accept me, but I wouldn’t know where to find them. I’m too scared to try anyway.” He nods, unconcerned at my big revelations.
“There are also probably other gay people you just haven’t met yet.”
“That doesn’t help much. I can’t exactly take out an ad looking for gay friends, can I?”
“Why not?” He grins a little.
“Because I’d get my ass kicked.”
“Then obviously it’s time for things to change.”
“It’s been time for a change as long as I’ve been living here, but it takes more than one person to change a whole town.” I sound like a bumper sticker.
“You just said it’s a very small town.”
“Not small enough for me to make any difference.”
“Nothing ever changes unless people are willing to try.”
“You sound like you’re on one of those after school specials my mother used to make me watch when I was little.” I laugh at him and he smiles.
“Yeah, well those shows had to come from somewhere. Just because they’re all hokey doesn’t mean they aren’t based on some kind of reality. I know I’m not willing to change myself for this or any other town. I worked hard to get to where and who I am. People will just have to deal with it.”
I feel a quick stab of fear at the thought of what could happen if he goes around telling people he’s gay. Then just as quickly, I get a pang of envy at the thought that he wants to go around telling people he’s gay. The pangs and stabs give me a mess of mixed emotions that leave me speechless.
“So, I’m guessing you guys don’t have a Pride parade here,” he says after several seconds of silence. I look at him as if he just pointed out a unicorn walking down the street.
“You are kidding right?” I ask incredulously. The closest thing this town has had to a Pride parade was the time Lucas and Caleb came to visit me and walked down Main Street. And Lucas was in reverse drag, as he calls it, complete with jeans and a plaid shirt that he thought would make him fit in. Everyone still stared because they were strangers.
“I guess a little. But maybe that’s what we should do.”
‘What?”
“Organize a Pride parade. I helped do the float from our school last year. It was cool.”
“You think we should have a Pride parade in Thompson Mills? That would be exciting. You and me walking down Main Street while people throw things at us.” Like sticks and stones, not to mention a few names that will probably hurt me.
“I think we could do better than that. I’m sure you have friends who would come. I have friends who would come from home. I bet Ryan would help. It would be amazing.”
“It would be something. Not sure amazing is the right word for it.”
“Well, I think we should talk about it some more. Not right now because I have to get home and study for that art history test that you could probably pass with your eyes closed.”
He’s right about the art history test. I read those books for fun. He is not right about Thompson Mills having a parade. My mother has come a long way from the day I came out to her, but I don’t know if she’d ever come far enough to see me headlining a Pride parade. She would probably spend the rest of her life in church praying for my soul if I did anything that public. Just thinking about it makes my palms sweat—and not in a good way.
“See you later, Jackson. Go home and dream about rainbow flags and artistic parade floats!” Benjamin calls to me as he takes off toward home, probably looking to see if he can find any unicorns along the way.
eight
On that day last year when I finally got the guts to tell my mother who I am, everything completely blew apart, breaking me into so many pieces that I didn’t think I could find them all and put myself back together.
I still have nightmares about standing in the living room trying to tell her what was going on in my life. Ryan was sitting there with me, trying to be supportive but probably wishing the floor would open up and swallow him while I tried to tell my mother how unhappy and confused I’d been feeling basically forever. I just about lost my courage when her eyes filled up with tears as I tried to explain how I ended up in the water that day. How I had felt so desperately tired of being afraid that I wanted to escape from everything, including myself. Especially myself.
That I was so terrified of hurting her, I didn’t know what to do.
When I first started talking, Mo
m nodded sympathetically, as if she knew what I was going to say, and I had this flash of hope that maybe she did. That maybe she was going to tell me she’d known all along, like on that TV show Glee, where the gay kid comes out to his dad, and his dad says, “I’ve known since you were three,” and they hug and everything is okay.
But our conversation was nothing like that.
It took about thirty seconds for me to realize that she thought I was upset because of the divorce. Like, somehow I’d been battered and bruised by her finding the courage to kick out the man who had made both our lives miserable. She thought I felt responsible for the breakup and that my guilt drove me into the river.
I wish I had been responsible for it. That would be something to be proud of.
Mom was trying so hard to be sympathetic and understanding that it made my head start to hurt like it was caught in a vise. I could feel the blood throbbing, pounding in my brain. I knew I had to get it over with before she said anything else. I had to just tell her before she came up with six other reasons to explain my messed up life.
My throat closed up every time I imagined saying it out loud. Two little syllables that choked me every time I tried to shake them loose.
Two little syllables that would change everything.
I’m gay.
I don’t know how I finally managed to get the words out, but the second I did, I wanted to reach out and grab them so I could shove them back down my throat. I was shaking so badly that the room vibrated and, at first, I couldn’t focus on my mother’s face. I was so afraid of what I was going to see written on it that I thought I was going to pass out before I got the shaking under control enough to actually see her.
I closed my eyes, trying to calm myself down. After a few seconds, I managed to risk opening them.
My mother was just sitting there, still and silent like a petrified version of herself, staring at me with no expression at all on her face. I understood in that moment what Ryan meant when he said that my eyes looked like black holes the first time he met me. My mother’s eyes seemed dark and empty, reaching back to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
