Raise Your Glass

by John Goode

  “Brad,” he said after a few seconds. His expression was so full of sadness, of grief, that my aching abs clenched again instinctively. “What makes you think they are going to let you play baseball, period?” My grip on him collapsed as what he’d said crashed through my anger and fear. He stood close but didn’t touch me, knowing, I think, that I needed to hear what he’d said. Blindsided, I reached for him, and only then did he reach back. Grabbing his hand was like grabbing an ironwood rod: for those seconds, I didn’t need anyone other than him to be there.

  When he spoke, I heard the same rage that had filled him when he’d seen me in the nurse’s office.

  “What they are doing is wrong,” he snarled. “And if we don’t do something, who will?” I had no answers and he knew it. He shook his head, not angry at me, but sad; then he gently pulled his hand from my grip and walked away.

  Leaving me feeling more lost than ever.

  Kyle

  THE rest of the day was as bad as you’d expect.

  Everyone knew shit had gone down, and apparently they also knew we had come down on the wrong side of said shit. Every adult who saw us watched us like we were wearing black trench coats and just casing the joint, and every student smirked like they had caught us doing something wrong. Brad was quiet, and I couldn’t blame him since I think he was just coming to terms with how fucked we were. I had imagined how horrible it would be if I ever had to come out, but those images were nothing compared to the reality. We sat on the steps of the music room in silence as people walked by, staring at us like we were rare animals on display.

  “And if you look to your right you will see a mated pair of North American homosexuals. Please don’t get too close, they spit.”

  I picked at my sandwich as I watched Brad. He seemed worse than depressed or upset—he looked beaten. He didn’t look up when someone walked by, no matter what they said, and they were saying plenty.

  “Hey, look, it’s the queer couple.”

  “I didn’t know we had a gay bar out here.”

  “Are they filming Queer as Folk?”

  He didn’t even acknowledge their existence until Kelly walked by.

  “Hey, Brad,” he called out, all casual, like he’d just run into him at the mall. “Lemme ask you something.”

  Brad looked up at him with eyes devoid of all life, and I felt myself shiver a little.

  When Brad didn’t say anything back, Kelly just kept talking as if he had. “You don’t mind if I go out with Jennifer, right? ’Cause I’m sure she is dying to know what it feels like with a real man.”

  Brad choked back a groan as his muscles protested, and stood up in a second; if I hadn’t been ready there would have been no way for me to stop him. His chest pressed against mine angrily as I blocked his way. He roared at Kelly, which was bad, since his mouth was right next to my ear. “Come say that to my face!” I was leaning into him with all my strength and he was still moving down the steps toward Kelly. “Walk up here and fucking say that to my face!”

  Kelly took a step back, playing it off like he was pretending, but I had seen his eyes grow wide for a second before he realized I was holding Brad back. “Hey, look!” Kelly called out to the guys around him. “He wants me to go up there and get in his face.” Turning to Brad, he spoke slowly as if speaking to a child. “I’m not like that.” He pointed at his chest. “Me straight, you fag!”

  Both Brad and I went down another step, and I knew I couldn’t keep him back for much longer. I screamed over my shoulder at Kelly, “Get out of here, you asshole!” It just made him and his friends laugh even louder. I looked at Brad and pleaded in a voice only he could hear, “Please, please don’t do this.” No response. “If you hit him, you’re gone, you know that?” Still nothing. “You won’t be able to play baseball.”

  That got his attention.

  His eyes locked with mine, and I could see the green in them was brighter than I’d ever seen before. It took me a second to realize it was from tears. In a pretty accurate imitation of what I had said before, he sarcastically asked me. “What makes you think they’re going to let me play baseball?”

  It felt like he had slapped me across the face.

  My hands dropped, and he pushed past me instantly. I heard him and Kelly start to go at it, but I honestly couldn’t focus on anything but the fact that Brad blamed me for everything. I wasn’t the one who kissed him. Well, I kissed back, but he started it! And I wasn’t the one who asked him to come out in front of everyone! I was the one who was telling him at the time not to do it. But this was my fault?

  I turned around and found Kelly and Brad chest to chest, each one daring the other to make the first move. I imagined I could smell the testosterone as I approached them. Ignoring Kelly, I stepped between them and glared at Brad. “Are you kidding me?” He took a half step back in shock, but I wasn’t letting him. “You’re pissed at me? Do you think it is my fault they aren't going to let you play?”

  “I didn’t say that!” he answered quickly, making it pretty obvious that was exactly what he had meant.

  “Sure sounded like it,” I answered just as quickly, making it even more obvious I was calling him on his bullshit.

  “Well, I didn’t mean that,” he said in a much lower voice.

  “Then what did you mean?” I held my breath for his answer.

  It was obvious he didn’t know what to say. He opened his mouth and then closed it once he saw how angry I was. I might have let what had happened go, seeing how flustered he was, but that wasn’t going to happen, because Kelly had to open his big mouth.

  “Awww, look,” he said from behind me. “Lovers’ quarrel!”

  I spun on Kelly and slammed the flat of both my palms into his chest. His arms pinwheeled as he fell back into his friends; they caught him before he hit the ground and then pushed him toward me. I raised my fist and part of my mind realized I was about to throw my first punch at another human being in anger.

  And then Brad pulled me out of the way.

  Kelly stumbled past where I was, his fist passing through where I had just been standing. Now it was Brad holding me back as I fought to follow up on Kelly. “Knock it off,” Brad said in my ear. “Five-0!”

  I had no idea what he was saying until I saw Mr. Adler moving through the crowd in the quad like a shark through a school of minnows. I stopped fighting with Brad as he got closer. Kelly got his bearings and looked over at me with a look that resembled an angry bull. “You’re fucking dead, queer!” he screamed as he hurled himself at me.

  “Aimes!” Alder screamed, stopping the jock in midstride. His head whipped around and he stared at the man like he was a mirage for a moment. “What is going on here?”

  Kelly looked to Brad and me and then back to Adler. “He… I mean….”

  Mr. Adler leveled a stare at me. “I thought we’d talked about this?

  I pointed at Kelly. “He just took a swing at me and called me a queer and you’re looking at me?”

  He took a step closer to me and said, “You’re not making this easy on me, Mr. Stilleno.”

  I fought back the urge to laugh. “Am I supposed to be?”

  “He pushed me first!” Kelly fired back, sounding like a five-year-old.

  “Is this true?” Adler asked me.

  I threw my hands up in exasperation. “I give up.” I shrugged Brad’s hands off me and grabbed my backpack.

  “Going somewhere?” Adler asked.

  I looked at Brad, who wouldn’t meet my gaze. I sighed and said to Mr. Adler, “According to you, I’m going to hell if I don’t change my ways.”

  I expected him to brush it off, to just ignore the verbal jab and to push on. Instead he said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Not according to me, according to the Bible.”

  I felt my mouth sag open in disbelief.

  “Perhaps you should go home for today,” he said after the laughter from the quad had died down. “We obviously have things to sort out.”

  I pushed
past him and ignored the leering faces of the people I passed on my way off campus. I knew Brad wasn’t following me, and at this point, I didn’t care.

  I was alone again.

  I know, I know! That line is so emo I should have black eyeliner on while I listen to Paramore on my iPod, but it was how I felt. It wasn’t fair; I had spent my entire life preparing for a life lived in solitary confinement, and though I hated it, I was at least ready. I had stockpiled more than enough emotional supplies to prepare myself for the winter of my discontent.

  Oh God, I think I am emo.

  Anyway, I had a bomb shelter’s worth of self-pity and platitudes stashed in the depths of my consciousness like a paranoid shut-in waiting for the inevitable zombie outbreak to occur. Sad songs and digital copies of The Notebook stockpiled in my own Waco-style…. Okay, I’ll stop with the weird metaphors.

  To sum up, I had been ready for a life lived with Healthy Choice meals and cats until Brad crashed into me like Paris Hilton after a long night of appletinis and cosmos. Dammit, okay, last metaphor, promise. I walked into my house and froze because there was something deadly wrong with the living room.

  It was clean.

  Well, maybe not clean to you, but for our place, this was clean. The drapes were open, which meant the room was exposed to actual sunlight, a rarity unto itself. The beer and weed table, what normal people called the coffee table, was clear of all debris, and it looked like it had been wiped down recently. All those signs could mean only one thing.

  She was sober.

  “Kyle?” she asked, coming around the corner, a bottle of glass cleaner in her hand. When she saw me standing at the door, she said, “What are you doing home?”

  Great, just great.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, making a beeline to my room, not even close to being ready to deal with a cognizant mom.

  “What about school?” she asked to my back as I slammed the door. “Kyle!”

  I threw my backpack down and tried not to notice the comparison between my behavior and a kid that needs a nap. My mom went through phases like this every few months, and it drove me crazy. She’d get this new zest for life, swear off drinking and getting high, become obsessive-compulsive about getting her life back on track, fail at it badly, go out at the first sign of failure to commiserate with her old friends, get wasted, go on a binge.

  Lather, rinse, repeat, puke.

  During those times, though brief, she became aware of how distant we were and she’d try to compensate by being a cross between Donna Reed and a serial killer. She’d want to know how I was feeling and how school was and even if I had homework or not. It was nauseating to me on many levels, the main one being that over the years I had grown used to rationalizing her behavior as if she was clinically insane. As long as she continued to act insane, I was okay with it. But when she came at me all normal-like and sounding like a mom, it just reminded me that she wasn’t crazy, she just didn’t care whose life she ruined with her antics.

  That was normally when I got really pissed.

  Before I could get a good head of steam under me, she threw open my door and walked in. “I can let a lot of crap slide because normally you are more than capable of taking care of yourself, but when you walk in the door in the middle of a school day and don’t even bother with an excuse, that’s when I know something is wrong.” She crossed her arms across her chest. “So what’s happened?”

  “What do you care?” I shouted, unable to handle the frustration that was quickly fermenting into rage inside of me. “Since when do you care about anything around here but yourself?”

  I don’t know if I was surprised or disappointed that she didn’t look hurt or even slightly uncomfortable. She just kept staring at me. “Since now. What is wrong?”

  “Go away,” I said, sitting on my bed. “Just leave me alone.”

  I could feel her just standing there, not moving, not talking, just staring at me. I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I didn’t want to cry in front of anyone, if we are bringing the topic up, but life always seemed to have other plans. Finally she began to turn and then stopped. “You know, Kyle, you say I’m never there and all I care about is myself, and I understand why you’d say that. But later, when you are busy hating me in your mind and you tell yourself I never tried, I want you to think about this, right now. I am here, trying, and you are the one telling me to leave.” Her voice sounded tired and sad. “And we both know this isn’t the first time.”

  She was right. She had tried before, and I always pushed her away. I didn’t want to get used to her being there or start to depend on her. I never wanted to get used to being able to count on someone besides myself because I knew sooner or later they would just screw it up and I’d be where I started in the first place. Alone. At least this way, I was ready to be alone and was never disappointed.

  She began to close the door, and my mouth moved before my brain could stop it. “I’m gay!”

  She paused before turning slowly to come back into the room. My heart was pounding so loud it felt like it was going to burst out of my chest all Indiana Jones-style. There was a buzzing in my ears that made everything muffled as I waited for her next words. I thought she might take some more time to consider it, but instead she just responded with a simple “Okay.”

  I blinked a few times, not sure now if I’d heard her.

  “Okay?” I asked back.

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  I stood up. “Just okay? Seriously? I tell you I’m gay and all you can say is ‘okay’?”

  She cocked her head. “Are you upset because I’m not reacting?” She laughed shakily to herself. “Did you want me to be upset at you?”

  I didn’t know what I wanted. Did I want her to be mad? Did I want her to freak out and throw me out of the house? I was so fucking confused.

  “Kyle, what happened at school?” she asked with real concern in her voice. I felt the walls in my head starting to break as all the emotions I had been holding back began to spill out. One sob slipped out of my mouth, and I began to crumble. “Kyle, why are you home?” she asked, taking a step closer.

  I felt my resolve give out from underneath me as I began to cry and cry and cry.

  And I didn’t know if I would ever stop.

  Brad

  I WATCHED Kyle walk away and felt my heart tear in half.

  Half of me wanted to run up to him and just hug him until graduation. The other half wanted things to back to the way they were and for all of this to have been a bad dream. Life without Kyle? Life without baseball? Stuck in this town for the rest of my life? Dead-end job, being considered a freak by the people who used to be my friends?

  “Screw it,” I said as I started to run after him.

  I felt a hand grab my arm and spin me around. Kelly looked me right in the face, no malice, no sneer, just an intense look of concern. “Dude, what is wrong with you?”

  I pulled my arm away angrily. “Get out my way, Kelly,” I snarled.

  “Are we going to have another problem?” Mr. Adler said once it was clear Kyle was not coming back.

  “No problem, sir,” Kelly answered quickly. “Just trying to talk some sense into him.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but then I saw the old man nod in agreement and say, “Well someone needs to. Carry on.”

  Kelly pulled me aside as the crowd dispersed, obviously disappointed that there had been no bloodshed. I let him pull me around the corner to the alley between the music building and the gym. I watched as he made sure we were alone before he hissed in a fake whisper at me, “Have you lost your fucking mind?” This wasn’t normal Kelly, and it would have been obvious to anyone who had grown up with him. He wasn’t being mean or sarcastic; in fact it looked like he was actually worried about me. “Do you have any idea how bad you’ve fucked up?”

  My knee-jerk reaction was to argue, but I stopped myself. “How?” I asked, wondering where he was going with this.

  He c
hecked again for anyone listening. “Look, dude, you had everything and you’re blowing it over”—he looked like he was about to spit, the way his face scrunched up—“over fag shit?”

  “Don’t call it that,” I warned him.

  He held up his hands in apology. “Fine, gay shit, whatever. You really want to throw your life away over something that stupid?” I didn’t have an answer for that. “Your popularity, your chance for a scholarship? Bro, what are you thinking?”

  I hated that he was making sense. It was as if my inner fears and anxieties had been given voice through Kelly, of all people. I just shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  He took a third look around and took a step toward me. “Look, man, if it’s about getting off, we can deal with that.” He put his hand over my crotch and leaned in to kiss me. I was so shocked his lips actually touched mine that I couldn’t even process it. I felt his tongue press against my closed mouth, and that was it.

  I grabbed his hand and took it away from my dick. I squeezed it hard, causing him to jerk back from me as he screamed in pain. I twisted his wrist slightly, and he went down to one knee almost instantly, trying to move so the pain was less crippling. “Let me see if I get this straight,” I said, putting the slightest amount of force into the hold. “I can like guys as long as it’s you?” He shook his head but I ignored it. “I get to keep my friends and my life as long as it’s you who sucks my cock? Really, Kelly? Was that how you saw us ending up?” It was right, then, that I realized Kelly might have taken more away from us fooling around at football camp than I thought. As with most things in my life, I had been so busy worrying about myself, I completely forgot there were two of us in that bed. Some random kid turned the corner and saw us and ran off instantly. I was running out of time.

  I let go of his hand, and he sat there rubbing it for a moment. I knelt down to make eye contact with him. “Was that the plan, Kelly? You and me, we get wives, have kids, but then go off up to the lake to fish every weekend? Some random hotel now and then?” I could see him fighting back tears as he dropped his gaze, and it wasn’t because of the pain. “Is it worth it? Is all this worth never having what you really want?” I wasn’t angry at him anymore. All of that rage and fury had turned to pity as I began to feel like I was just kicking a three-legged dog. I grabbed his chin and made him look me in the eyes.