“Do we want to do that again?” Rhonda said.
“Last year was pretty awesome, and I’m not saying we have to do something different,” Nat said. “Also, Ottawa Central started a new club, too, so more people could show up this time.”
“Didn’t their guy reach out to us in September?” Lindsey asked.
“Ryan,” Nat said. “Yeah.”
“Well, we can ask them all for feedback, maybe? But we should ask Central to come,” Lindsey said.
I liked the sound of that. For the last three years, our little club had connected with a network of GSAs, PFLAG groups, and rainbow clubs from the high schools in Ottawa, gathering to have a “we made it!” party. Six clubs were pooling our resources—which were pretty scant—but it had been fun. Ottawa Central made seven. Last year, the Kanata group had gotten us a bar for the night. They didn’t serve us, of course, and it had been a private event, but we had music and dancing and it had been pretty cool to have, like, an actual crowd of us. Best thing since Pride, frankly. Also, there was this really hot guy in the Kanata group I so very nearly got up the guts to talk to. Maybe this year, I could think of something clever ahead of time and actually say something to him.
“Don’t forget Kanata,” Grayson said.
Hm. Great minds.
“Will you do the speaking?” Nat asked me.
Aw. I grinned. “Of course. Just let me know what you want to cover.” Nat was our font of knowledge, but if any of us needed to stand up at the front of a crowd and speak, it usually fell to me. Lindsey hated doing it, Nat said it made them want to hurl, no one trusted Grayson not to offend everyone, and neither Alec nor Rhonda had ever even suggested they might want to try it out.
Me? I loved public speaking. Give me a topic, time to plan, and a lectern? I’m your boy.
“Would you maybe do something along the lines of your speech from English?”
“It was epic,” Grayson said. A compliment from Grayson? Man. I knew the speech had been good. I did my independent study unit on non-inherited cultures. It was called “Born to Those Who Aren’t Like You.” To say it was the best thing I think I’ve ever done in school would still be understating it. Mr. Jones made me promise to rework it into an essay submission for some bursaries he knew about. Like, actual cash could come my way from that speech.
“I can do that,” I said. I was pretty sure I was blushing now. “I can drop some of the Deaf stuff, make it even more queer.”
Nat nodded. “It’s a great speech, and it’s a good way to remind everyone to connect with the other clubs. Keep the lines open. It’s a great networking opportunity.”
“Says the machine,” Grayson said. This time it wasn’t so much a compliment. “Some of us just want to have a good time with other fags.”
I winced.
“Sorry,” he said, raising his hands, though it didn’t sound entirely sincere. “Other queers.”
I shook my head to show him I didn’t mind—except, well, I did. I hated that word. After a pretty relentless hounding in grade eight by a couple of Austin’s douchebag friends, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be up to reclaiming the word. That was how Nat always put it: “reclaiming.” And it was funny, because I totally got “queer.” But then again no one had ever shoved me into a wall and called me a queer, so…
The door opened.
I’d like to say we all turned with polite smiles on our faces, ready to welcome whoever was coming a little bit late to the club meeting. That was a huge part of the group’s purpose, after all. We were supposed to make everyone, allies or queer people alike, feel like they were in a safe space and welcome to join us.
In reality? We all pretty much gawked.
Because Malik King was at the door.
“Hi,” Nat said, recovering first, because of course they did.
“Hi,” Malik said. He hesitated.
“Come on in,” Lindsey said. “We don’t bite.”
Grayson opened his mouth, but Nat and Rhonda both elbowed him. They had good instincts.
“Ow,” he said, instead of whatever he’d been about to say.
Malik paused a second longer, then came in and closed the door behind him. He looked good, but he always did. And it was really annoying, if I was being honest. I mean, no one should be able to make a T-shirt and jeans combo work the way he did. It was probably the shoulders. When you had shoulders like Malik King, T-shirts just fit the way they were supposed to.
He also had a great chin, dark eyes you could totally forget the world in, and as far as I could tell, his brown skin had never even considered a zit, which was cosmically unfair. When he took one of the empty seats in our circle of chairs, he nodded at me, and I realized I was staring. I forced myself to look back to Nat.
My face was burning. I wondered exactly how bad my lip looked. It suddenly felt giant and swollen and gross. It probably looked disgusting, too.
Chicks dig scars, Alec had said.
I wondered if Malik did.
“Welcome,” Nat said. “I don’t think you’ve been to one of our meetings before, so let me quickly go over the guidelines. This is a totally safe space. Anything said here stays here. Also, if you don’t know the right words to use, just use whatever you think will get your point across, and we’ll take it in the spirit intended. We’ll help provide the language after, because words matter and part of what we do is help people speak respectfully of other people. We ask you to respect our pronouns and names.” They softened. “But if you get it wrong, just try harder next time. None of us are here to judge or assume, and if you don’t want to say anything, that’s all right, too. We’re just going over planning an end-of-the-year party, and then we’ll open up to new topics.”
Malik nodded. He was super polite. “Okay.”
Having Malik in the room seemed to affect everyone differently. If anything, Nat got even more formal, and their discussion of potential party places ended up sounding like we were deciding on our very own second-prom or something. Lindsey, on the other hand, went from her usual upbeat self to something close to a cheerleader, and Rhonda—always the quiet one—didn’t say a word.
Grayson, for his part, was sneaking glances at Malik whenever he could. Which was what I was doing. At one point, we met each other’s eyes, and I could practically hear Grayson’s voice screaming in my own head: Malik King is at the Rainbow Club! I swear he was vibrating down to the roots of his purple streak.
“I wish we could try something different,” Rhonda finally said, breaking her silence. “Don’t get me wrong, I like music, and dancing’s cool, but we’ve done that every time.”
“Maybe we could ask one of the Ottawa Village pubs if they’d let us have a trivia night,” Lindsey said. I could tell she’d much rather stick to the music and dancing, but she was trying to support her girlfriend. It was sweet.
“If they’re licensed, we’d have to figure out a wristband option or something like last year,” Nat said. “Or maybe do it on a night they don’t stay open, if they have one.”
“Have you guys done a group game thing before?” Malik said.
Everyone stared at him, and at best I’m pretty sure we were all skeptical. Grayson especially had an expression that said, “Dude. This isn’t gym class.”
I felt bad for Malik, and I didn’t want Grayson to say something out loud so I said, “What kind of game?” I hoped he didn’t mean we should all go watch a football game or something. Lindsey did gymnastics and I wasn’t the world’s worst skier, but that was about it for athletes among the Rainbow Club.
“Last year, for football, we did glow-in-the-dark bowling.” He shrugged. “It’s more fun than it sounds. And it’s different.”
Nat made a note. “I’ll put it on the list for the other clubs to look at.”
No one had any real suggestions after that.
“Okay, anything else?” Nat said.
“Uh,” Malik said, and once again everyone was looking at him. The guy had guts, that was for damn sure. Pro
bably guts came free with every purchase of gorgeous forget-the-world brown eyes.
“Go ahead,” Nat said.
“I just wondered what you guys were going to do about Cole being locked in his locker.”
Oh shit.
No one was looking at Malik anymore. No, every single person there, Malik included, was staring right at me.
To-Do
Bring home calculus textbook
Exam prep: calculus, biology
Exam prep: English (reread?)
Exam prep: French (practice exam!)
Movie night with Alec this w/e?
X Make lunch for Tuesday, slacker
X “What happened?” joke
Laundry
Slap Malik King
Five
“It’s not…It wasn’t…” I said, desperately trying to figure out a way to head this off before it began, but that’s as far as I got before Grayson was talking over me.
“Who the fuck shut you in your locker?”
“Grayson,” Nat said. “Let him talk.”
I took a deep breath. I really didn’t have the slightest clue what to say. I couldn’t tell the truth. I mean, I could, but then they’d think I was insane.
Frankly, I was still fifty-fifty on whether or not I was insane.
I opened and closed my mouth, rejecting everything I could come up with before I started. I probably looked like a fish, complete with a ripped lip from a freshly removed hook. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
I wished Alec was here.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Rhonda said. I had never been as grateful for her soft voice as I was right that very moment.
I nodded at her.
“Not if someone put him in a locker,” Grayson said. “We need to know.” He was angry. Of all of us, he was the one who’d suffered the most bullying over the years. Heck, for most of us, high school had been awesome. We were riding a wave of zero tolerance, and stuff like getting shoved into lockers just wouldn’t fly here. But Grayson knew how much “zero tolerance” could just turn out loud and obvious into quieter and meaner. “Was it fucking Austin?”
“No,” I said, because it wasn’t. Now what? I stared down at my hands.
“Sorry,” Malik said. I looked back up, and it’s possible I glared at him. Jackass. What the hell did he think he was doing? Saving the gay boy? To his credit, he looked really uncomfortable. He bit his lip. “I thought you would have told them.”
“Apparently not,” Grayson said.
If I was really, really lucky, maybe the earth would open up and swallow me whole.
“I’m really sorry,” Malik said. “I should go.”
He stood up, and his movement finally knocked my brain back into gear.
“No,” I said. “No, don’t. I…” I took another long breath. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.” My stomach twisted. It was the truth, but would they believe me?
“You didn’t see who did it?” Grayson said. His voice had finally lost that angry edge, and he almost sounded gentle.
“Do you want to go to the principal about it?” Nat asked.
What I wanted was for everyone to stop staring at me.
“I—” I said. “It’s just…there’s nothing I could say.” That, at least, was the truth. I felt like crap. I didn’t want to let people think some homophobic asshole in the school had shoved me into a locker. Bad enough Malik thought so, and now the rest of the club. I didn’t want the whole school thinking something had happened when it hadn’t. God, if any teachers caught wind, they’d make some announcement or force people into some sort of discussion. If a split lip was going to resurrect Colenap, the story of me being crammed into a locker would bring it back forever.
The whole group was silent. Grayson was clenching his jaw. Nat was tapping their pen against their notepad.
“I’m not going to put it in the minutes,” they said. “And we go by the club rules. This stays with us. Confidential.” They looked at Malik. “You, too.”
Malik nodded. He was still standing there, awkward and embarrassed. He glanced at me. The look on his face?
Pity.
That was it. The humiliation box had been colored in. I was done.
I grabbed my bag. “I’m going to go. You guys finish without me.” I was moving before they could protest. Both Nat and Grayson said my name with varying levels of frustration. I wanted to be anywhere else but here, especially somewhere Malik King wasn’t looking at me with his super hot brown eyes full of freaking pity. My whole body seemed to pull itself out of the room, like something had anchored itself in my chest and was now reeling me in.
Anywhere but here.
I pushed my way through the door.
And it happened again.
* * *
The tinkle of the bell was familiar, and despite the unreality of it, it only took me a second to realize I was not at school anymore.
I was at Meeples. I’d just come through the front door of my favorite store. Shelves of books lined the far walls, with little chalkboard signs above each one telling you what was where. The store carried mostly fiction. At the front half, tables and the shelves were full of board games. I came here all the time. It was empty right now, which was a little unusual, but any of the kids from school who might be on their way probably wouldn’t have made it this far yet. Meeples was just off Main Street. It was too far a distance to cover.
Y’know, unless they teleported.
“Shit,” I said.
“Cole?”
Candice was standing behind the counter, working her way through a box of books.
I forced myself to smile. My heart was hammering in my chest. Again. I couldn’t believe it had happened again. “Hi.”
“You okay?”
“Uh.” I swallowed. “Yeah. I…Yeah. I’m fine.” Strangely enough, I even meant it a little bit. The more I looked around, the more I came down off the sudden shock of being here. I loved this place. Candice decorated the place with all sorts of nerdy stuff. She had a little Harry Potter closet under the stairs that went up to where she kept the kids’ books and did Sunday readings. X-wings and TIE fighters hung on little strings from the ceiling near the sci-fi section. Touches like that were all through the store, and she’d stenciled quotes on the walls, too.
In fact, I was staring right at “Curiouser and curiouser.” Preach, Alice. Preach.
But if I had to fall through any rabbit holes, Meeples was maybe my favorite place to land. If that made me a huge geek, that was fine. Candice was amazing at finding me books and games I’d like, and I often dragged Alec or Grayson or Lindsey here for coffee and fun, especially after our club meetings. It had become kind of a thing. Lindsey was a Settlers of Catan shark.
“You must have booked it from school,” Candice said. “No one else with you?”
“I left Rainbow Club early,” I said.
I didn’t normally have such an easy time lying. I should probably worry about that.
She paused, looking over her glasses at me. “Everything okay with your friends?”
“Yeah, they’re good.” I really wished another customer had been around. I finally got my feet moving and made my way to the counter. “I just felt like some alone time.”
“I’m honored,” she said, with a little smile. “Onirim?”
It was a solo card game where you played as someone trapped in a kind of endless dream where things made no sense.
So, y’know, I could relate.
“Sure,” I said. “And, uh, I’ll have a hot chocolate.” At least this time I had my phone and my wallet with me. And my bag. Though, really, it was only a twenty-minute walk home. I could have done way worse.
Like, say, the aviation museum.
I sat down. I felt a little off, sort of heavy in my hands and feet, but it was nowhere near as bad as the last time. That was…good? Bad? I had no idea, but at least it wasn’t worse. I felt a little
light-headed, but I didn’t feel any sign of the headspins from a few moments ago, and though I’d pretty much crashed into a coma last time, right now I just felt a bit tired.
Candice brought me the box, and I started shuffling the cards, mostly for something to do and to stop my hands from shaking. I pulled out my phone, putting it on the desk beside me, and dealt myself a starting hand. The goal of the game was to collect keys and find your way to the right doors to get out before you ran out of time and were lost forever. I drew out my starting hand, and I got a door right away. I’d have to shuffle it back in, since the doors were the goals and you couldn’t start with them…
Something clicked when I saw the card.
I turned around and looked at the entrance to Meeples. I’d heard the bell when I got here. The door had closed behind me. I’d been leaving the music room, my hand had been on the door, and I’d ended up here.
I’d been going through a door at school when I’d ended up at the museum.
And when I’d tried to go back into the museum, I’d ended up in my locker.
Doors.
I stared at the card.
It was doors.
My phone buzzed. It was Alec.
Where you at?
Crap. I’d totally bailed on him. I’d told him we’d meet after the meeting. I’d kind of hoped he’d be there, though I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t shown.
Sorry. Left the meeting. Long story. I’m at Meeples. I’m an idiot, sorry.
I can be there in fifteen.
I was so grateful I could have cried. Instead, I just sent him a text: Kisses.
I put my phone down and started the game. I found all the doors I needed before I’d even made it halfway through the deck. That had never happened before.
I decided it was a good sign.
Six
The door opened about fifteen minutes later. A sick surge of anxiety rushed up into my stomach, and I turned to see it wasn’t Alec after all, but a man who was maybe in his thirties. He was staring straight at me and didn’t seem too pleased I was looking right back at him.
Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks Page 4