by John Goode
“There is nothing in that life that is worth not being who you really are,” I told him in quiet words, no longer sure if I was talking about him or me. “Play their game and you will end up a miserable imitation of the man you could really be.” I moved my hand down his cheek in the only actual display of affection I had ever given him. “I’m sorry, Kelly, I shouldn’t have treated you like that.” He pressed his face against his shoulder, trapping my hand for a moment. He looked so miserable it was heartbreaking. I could see his future unfold in front of me instantly.
He was going to graduate, then wander from one meaningless job to the next. Maybe get some girl pregnant, have to marry her and settle down. He’d probably get a job on one of the ranches out here just to pay the bills. He’d be in rest stops and dirty bathrooms on the weekends, blowing strangers in a vain attempt to quell the hunger that was just beneath the surface of his skin. Never able to face who and what he really was, he’d grow up to be a miserably angry man who wondered why life was always against him.
He sounded just like my dad.
I pulled my hand free as a couple of people raced around the corner, eager to see what they were sure was round two. Instead they saw us kneeling there, as if in prayer. I held my hand out to help him up, and I saw his face change in a flash. The change was so fast and final that I swore I could hear the door slam on the prison cell of Kelly’s life. He’d made the decision that quickly, as soon as someone might actually have seen him and me.
He pulled back from me, slapping my hand away. “I said no, you faggot!” he yelled, making sure everyone heard it. “Stop asking me!” He stumbled away from me, making a great show of how disgusted he was by me and my gay advances. Some people nodded, as if that went along with their preconceptions of who I and all gay people were. But I saw more than a few look at him with narrowed eyes, obviously not buying it.
He ran away from me, no doubt ready to spread the news in his own Paul Revere way. I could just hear him: “The gays are coming! The gays are coming!”
I just sighed and stood up, feeling like I was already an old man.
No one said a word to me as I walked past. I couldn’t blame them. If I had been standing where they were, I’d have no clue what to say, either. The bell rang and everyone began to scatter toward their classes. I looked at the path Kyle took and thought about trying to catch up with him but I honestly had no idea what I was going to say.
I opted for going to class instead.
To save time and sanity, let me recap what my last three classes were like:
Walk in. People whisper. Sit alone. Ignore people staring at me. Rush out the door as quickly as I can. Try to figure out what to do between periods since I am basically avoiding everyone. I had never been the first in a classroom before, and let me tell you, I hadn’t been missing a thing.
The only advantage of having no one to talk to was that it gave me time to think. Everything I’d said to Kelly was true, but the words meant nothing when I tried to apply them to me. I’d always had a plan to get out of this town. I was going to play my ass off, get a scholarship to a college on either coast and never look back. Fuck my friends and their two-faced ways. Fuck my parents and their series of civil war reenactments. And fuck this one-horse town and everyone who thought it was the center of the world. I had dreamt of seeing that “Welcome to Foster, Texas” sign that sat on the outskirts of town in my rearview mirror since I could remember.
Kyle was not part of the plan.
That wasn’t fair. Liking guys wasn’t part of the plan, and it should have been. I’d spent so much time running away from what I truly was that I shouldn’t be the least bit shocked at how it turned out. Like any other bimbo in a horror movie, I had actually run toward the horror I had been trying to flee and it was going to cost me. Blaming Kyle was just me doing what I always did, deflecting responsibility to anywhere but me.
I wandered into the locker room and began to change out for practice, my thoughts a million miles away.
“Greymark!” Coach Gunn’s voice echoed through the locker room. I froze in place, my fingers stopped at the third button of my jeans. I looked over and saw him walking toward me with three other guys from the team in tow. “What are you doing?”
I wasn’t sure what exactly he was asking, but I had sinking feeling I wasn’t going to like it. “Changing out for practice?” I offered.
He shook his head as he stepped closer. He started to speak. “You can’t—” And then stopped as he noticed we had an audience. “Don’t you idiots have somewhere else to be? Like running laps?” They scattered pretty quickly. In a lower voice, he started again. “You can’t be in here.” I shook my head in confusion since I had spent most of my high school life in this locker room. He obviously didn’t want to elaborate, but when he saw I wasn’t getting it, he sighed and put a hand on my shoulder. “Brad, you can’t be in here any more than I can let one of those guys change in the girl’s locker room. It isn’t allowed.”
I felt my face grow red with embarrassment. I pulled my shoulder away from him angrily as I heard someone laugh a few lockers back. “What do you think I’m going to do?” I asked him as I pulled on my shirt. “I’ve changed out here since I was a freshman and now I can’t?”
The coach didn’t look like he was enjoying this any more than I was. “Things have changed, Brad, and you know it. People are going to be uncomfortable undressing next to you, and you should have thought of that before you….” I could tell he was trying to find another way of saying “coming out” but nothing was coming to mind. He finally just said, “You should have thought of that before telling everyone your business. I’m sorry, Brad, but you can’t be in here.”
I pulled my sneakers back on. “Then where am I supposed to dress out?”
Now he looked like he’d swallowed a bug. “Brad, you can’t be in here.”
“I got that, so where do I dress out for practice then?”
And then the other shoe dropped.
“You’re kicking me off the team?” I practically screamed at him. When he didn’t say anything back, I lost it. “I gave you four years! Four fucking years of blood, sweat, and tears, and you’re kicking me off the team? I got you to state last year!”
“You weren’t gay last year,” he responded without expression.
“Yes, I was,” I blurted out. “The only difference was that you didn’t know.”
“No, the only difference was you didn’t feel the need to stand in front of the school and announce it.” He didn’t sound nasty saying it, but it hurt nonetheless. “This is out of my hands, Brad. You can’t be here.”
I looked past him and saw the rest of the team staring at me. Some were flashing me shit-eating grins, others looked shocked. One or two actually looked upset. No one said anything in my defense.
Fine.
With what little pride I had left, I grabbed my stuff and walked out of the gym for the second time today. This time, though, it felt like it was for the last time.
I threw my duffel bag into the backseat and burned rubber out of the parking lot. I was so pissed I couldn’t even see straight. As the Mustang screamed past the school, I saw the banners hanging on the back fence proclaiming it the proud home of the Foster Cowboys. I resisted the urge to stop and pull the damn banners down and light them on fire. I just kept driving. I turned on my stereo and blasted it as loud as I could, driving toward nowhere in particular.
Which, if I thought about it, was a pretty good metaphor for my life.
I had been heading toward this point for so long I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t, sacrificing everything along the way just to get me once inch closer to the goal of getting out of this town forever. It didn’t matter if I dated Jennifer and never told her I liked guys, because the longer people thought I was straight the better my chances were of getting away. Who cared if I pretty much treated people around me like crap? Once I left for college, I’d never see them again, so what did it matter? And so
what if my parents were one bad night away from reenacting some of the better parts of Fight Club? They had gotten as much mileage out of using me as a bargaining chip as they could; I didn’t owe them a damn thing. And who cared if I wasn’t happy?
Certainly not me.
Though I didn’t mean to, I ended up at the lake, at the same spot I had taken Kyle when we skipped school. Before, it had been my old stomping grounds, a place where I had practically grown up. Now it felt like an alien planet. All of its previous luster and appeal were gone, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what I had ever seen in it. I tried to remember the nights and the parties and all the fun I was supposed to have had here, but nothing came to mind. Instead, it looked like a crappy lake in a crappy town that I was never going to be free of.
It looked like a goddamned prison, a prison of my own making.
Kyle
I CAN’T think of many things that people would consider universal.
As human beings we spend so much energy arguing over every little thing it’s easy to forget sometimes that deep down we are all the same creature. White, black, straight, gay, liberal, conservative, all those labels do is point out how different we seem, when the truth is almost everybody feels the same way about the important stuff.
For example, when you see someone in pain, you want to help, and when you are in pain, you want help.
If you had asked me a week, a day, hell, even an hour ago if I would think these words, I’d have thought you were completely freaking insane, but as I knelt there and sobbed, I only had one desire running through my bones:
I wanted my mom.
It sounded so stupid and trite that I was embarrassed for even feeling it, but when she knelt down with me and put her arms around me, all the walls I had erected over the years to keep the sorrow and the pain away from my life shattered. I was overwhelmed. The more she comforted me the more I ached, as a lifetime of emotional venom began to seep out of my heart. I told her the story the best I could between huge, earth-shattering heaves. I have no idea how she understood me but I had just to assume moms speak Crying Children. She didn’t interrupt me or ask any questions, she just sat there and absorbed the tale without any indication of judgment.
When I was done, I felt exhausted and drained and more than a little bit embarrassed. I dried my eyes and got up slowly. “So, yeah,” I said, sniffling. “So basically my life sucks.” She didn’t smile; she didn’t so much as chuckle. “So, say something,” I said after agonizing seconds of silence.
“They can’t do this,” she said, a clarity in her eyes that I couldn’t ever recall seeing before.
I scoffed. “I beg to differ since they are doing it.”
“No,” she said, standing up. “You don’t understand. They can’t do this.”
That was when my spider sense started to tingle.
“They can’t discriminate against you because of that,” she said with more force. “It’s against the federal law.”
“Don’t,” I said, trying to cut her off at the pass.
“Kyle, you can’t let them do this to you,” she implored me. “You have to stand up for yourself.”
“No, no, I do not,” I countered with emphasis on the “no.” “I just need to get through the rest of this year and graduate. Nothing is gained by making them even more pissed at me.”
She gave me a stern look. “That’s the old Kyle talking.”
“No, that’s the me Kyle talking. See? This is me talking, and I am saying no.”
She shook her head and held her tongue, but I knew this was far from over. “It’s not fair,” she said as she was walking out of my room. She paused at the doorway. “And I know life is not fair, that doesn’t mean you just accept it.”
She closed my door and was gone.
If I had run a marathon fully clothed in the desert I wouldn’t have felt this drained. It felt good to unload, but it didn’t change that I was still in the same situation I was before I lost it. I slipped my shoes off and lay back on my bed, feeling like I was a thousand years old. She was right, what they were doing wasn’t fair, but what the hell could I do about it? They held all the cards, and even if the school was somehow on my side, the other students would still treat me like trash no matter what.
And then there was Brad.
It felt like the bed was pulling me into it as I began to nod off. Every impulse I had was to try to help him, but I didn’t know how. Even if I distanced myself from him now, he’d still be outed and just as shunned as I was. We were both fucked, but the difference was he had so much more to lose than I did. I was just a loser that turned out to be gay, the only difference now was that people openly shunned me instead of doing it unconsciously. If Brad lost baseball, I didn’t know what he’d do….
That was the last thought I remember having.
A jumbled series of images made up my dreams. I saw Brad shirtless, tied to a pole like a scarecrow, bloodied and beaten, held up only by the ropes. He was surrounded by the school, students and staff, all of them screaming at him like an angry mob of villagers attacking a monster. Kelly was holding a baseball bat and brandishing it at Brad’s head like he was about to try for a stand-up triple. I would have been more concerned if part of my brain hadn’t realized that most of this imagery was pulled from the pilot of Smallville so I kinda knew it was a dream.
When I woke up it was dark out and I was drenched in sweat.
I sat up, trying to remember what I could from the dream before it faded away into wisps of nothing but all I could focus on was that Brad had been in danger. I got up and checked the living room for signs of life and possibly food. I wasn’t too surprised to find my mom gone. It wasn’t 2:00 a.m. yet, which was the time most alcoholics turned into pumpkins. I should have known that her moment of clarity was another mirage created by years of wandering this desert by myself. I grabbed a banana and headed back to my room, wondering how many times I was going to run at that football of hope, knowing she was going to pull it away eventually.
I thought about taking a shower but decided I was just going to stink myself up all over again, so I just pulled off my clothes and went back to sleep.
Brad
A TAPPING sound on my car window woke me up instantly.
I jerked away in a blur and ended up slamming my knee into the steering wheel. “Motherfucker!” I called out as a light blinded me from my left. I held up my hand as images of alien abductions flashed though my head.
“Brad? Bradley Greymark?” a voice asked on the other side of my window.
The aliens knew my name?
More rapping on the window. “Son, are you Bradley Greymark?”
My eyes began to adjust, and what I had been so sure just seconds before was a nasty green alien with a taste for brains began to look more and more like a policeman.
“Son, I need you to roll down this window.”
The words started to make sense as I fully woke up. I rolled down the window and was greeted by a gust of freezing air. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, my teeth starting to chatter.
“Are you Bradley Greymark?” the policeman asked me again. I nodded as I turned on the heater. “Bradley Greymark the baseball player?”
Not so much.
“Yeah,” I snapped, willing at this point to say anything to roll that damn window up. “That’s me, why?”
He frowned slightly at the attitude, and I realized that snark might not be the best tack to take with the cop. “Because your parents are going nuts and half the force is out looking for you.”
I stopped myself from commenting that half the force was three guys and probably a mule and instead dug my phone out of my pocket. I tried to turn it on, but the screen just stayed black. I hit the button again, and sure enough, nothing. The cop pointed at it and said, “It helps if you charge them, I’ve heard.”
Obviously snark was okay when he thought of it.
“What time is it?” I asked, realizing it was pitch black beyond my wi
ndshield.
“Going on 4:00 a.m.,” he answered without checking. “You been drinking?”
I shook my head. “Just cut school and fell asleep.”
He considered my answer for a moment and then took a step away from the door. “Why don’t you get out of the car.” I looked at him and bit back the “Are you kidding me?” that was right on my lips. Instead I sighed and climbed out into the cold night. He shone his flashlight into my car, no doubt looking for empties littering the backseat or something as incriminating. When it was obvious I didn’t have Jimmy Hoffa on ice in my backseat, he turned his attention to me.
“So, bad day, huh?” he asked casually. I nodded, wrapping my arms around myself, trying to keep warm. “Yeah, I can’t imagine letting your freak flag fly is the least stressful way to spend a day.” I looked over at him in a daze, but before I could say anything, he grabbed my shoulder and spun me toward the car. “Hands on the roof, legs apart.” I was too shocked to protest as he began to pat me down. “Yeah, the whole town knows about you. That kind of news spreads quick,” he said as he began to move his hands over my chest and then lower, toward my waist.
“I’m—” I said, trying to form actual words in my head. “I’m sorry…” was all I could manage. The whole town? Oh God, how was I going to live this down?
“Why?” he said, almost whispering in my ear. “I mean, you wanted everyone to know, right?” he said as his hands moved from my waist to the front of my pants. I began to move, but he was pressed up against me. “Do not move,” he growled. “I know how you queers like this,” he leered, his hands unbuttoning my jeans.
