“You goin’ after that fat nerd, Vandervere?” Henry Ahern, Danny’s wrestling partner and frequent fuck-buddy, fell into step beside him as they made their way out of the locker room.
“He’s not a fat nerd,” Danny defended his prospective conquest, “I think he’s cute.”
“Well, you think I’m cute,” Henry elbowed him in the ribs, “So what does that say about me?”
“You’re cute in a different way,” Danny explained seriously, “He’s like a cherub in a Bavarian church-painting, you’re like a sexy woodland animal.”
“You’re weird,” the other boy laughed as he positioned himself far enough away from Danny that they wouldn’t hit each-other during callisthenics. He was a good deal shorter than Danny, compact and burly, the star wrestler of the varsity team; his short tufty hair and small deep-set eyes were russet-brown, his skin translucent and liberally scattered with russet freckles; his thick and muscular little body was furred with fine russet hair, even on his back and flanks, he was intensely proud of the dense russet bristles on his blunt and muscular face, and sometimes sported creative little beards or goatees that he always shaved off before a match.
And like most of the boys Danny pursued, Henry was enslaved to Danny’s body but found his mind an alien and disquieting territory — his wide-ranging tastes in people, his arcane quotations from books and movies nobody’d ever heard of, the weird classical and jazz and old rock music he played in his car — like their elders, Danny’s classmates loved him but did not think of him as being one of themselves… he was an Other.
But all Danny knew was that people loved him, he never really sensed his separateness, or rather didn’t think of it as something that should or could be different. Nor was he aware that this separateness was what made his sexual conquests so successful: boys could give in to his desires without thinking it changed them or made them gay, they were simply paying due tribute to the dazzling deity who took such unaccountable interest in them.
The plump and bashful Derrick, for example, was flustered and flattered to discover that Danny was stealing peeks at him all through callisthenics, and kept glancing meaningfully at him as he went jogging around the indoor track; the blond boy never once questioned whether or not he would do whatever Danny asked of him - it was a question of when and how, rather than if or why - and it wouldn’t mean coming out or being an outcast, wasn’t the same as pursuing a relationship with a real person.
The Vandervere athletics department was run in an unstructured “holistic” plan where students could choose to take part in any number of athletic activities at the same time: starting with group callisthenics, the students gravitated toward whatever activity most interested them; since Danny was on two different varsity teams (cross-country and fencing) and interested in wrestling and swimming as well, there was always some speculation among the fourth-period class as to which group he might join. There was a sigh of disappointment when it became clear Danny was going to practice track rather than a team sport, as his natural grace and good-natured sportsmanship, and more importantly his example of encouraging poorer players rather than insulting them as jocks usually did, made any game more fun.
By the end of gym class, Danny had run two and a half miles and envisioned a breathtaking array of erotic tableaux with Derrick, and was horny enough to consider inviting the boy to his car for lunch; he decided, however, that Derrick wasn’t ready yet for a gymnastic half-hour in the back of Danny’s huge black two-door Ford Explorer (his sixteenth birthday present from his parents, though he had specifically asked for a small red roadster); he would have to be cajoled a bit, brought out of himself, to overcome the natural shyness and awkwardness that made him a band-geek rather than a popular kid.
There was also Henry, a reliable standby, with his filthy mind and thick knobby little cock always up and ready to go; and a couple of other boys Danny had been playing with over the six weeks since school started. But in the end, he decided to just masturbate quickly in the toilet stall before showering and heading off to the cafeteria to eat.
Vandervere High is a rather posh establishment for a small-town public school. Since the terms of the Vandervere Trust require the Vanderveres themselves to attend public school in Vandervere, the family was interested in keeping the academic and extracurricular standards at a level worthy of their own children; and as a result, Vandervere High was considered the equal to any East-Coast prep-school, and its graduates had their choice of colleges.
The facilities were lavish, as well: two gymnasiums with their own swimming-pools so boys and girls wouldn’t be distracted by coed exercise, as well as tennis and squash courts, riding-stables, and a nine-hole golf course; large and well-lit classrooms with expensive audio/video equipment and brand-new books; separate state-of-the-art auditoriums for music and theatre, a library of a half-million volumes, and an elegant full-service cafeteria that rivaled the best restaurants in town.
When Danny came away from the counter with a salad of baby greens with chicken, walnuts, and apples in a raspberry vinaigrette and a large bottle of Italian mineral water, he scanned the vast bright lunchroom for a table to grace with his presence; he thought about settling in with the band geeks, but some instinct told him Derrick would freak if he moved too fast; he then considered joining Henry among the jocks, but was in no mood to have his salad teased by devoted burger-eaters; he’d be seeing the performing-arts crowd later, and the math-and-chess-club clique was already enrapt in a bizarre role-playing card game that Danny had never understood.
After some consideration, he decided on the core group of Populars, which centered on his ex-girlfriend Sandra Bettancourt, a beautiful and curvaceous blonde with a winning personality and a cool manipulative streak that Danny enjoyed watching (so long as he wasn’t the one being manipulated). He’d dated Sandra early the previous year, comfortably unaware that everyone but him was already having sex, and quite ready to believe that Sandra was a virgin and saving herself for marriage; much later, he discovered she was the designated slut of her summer-camp, a secret life she led when she was away from Vandervere.
Despite her feline cruelty at the time of their breakup, Danny still enjoyed her social circle on occasion, loftily amused by their cattiness and backstabbing since it could never touch him — he was a Vandervere, a universally-beloved Vandervere at that, and nobody dared. He sat down at the head of their table in the center of the room, where they could best see and be seen, and responded happily to their fulsome compliments on the color of his shirt and his performance at a recent varsity fencing match.
“Danny, sweetie,” Sandra cooed at him and pressed her huge left breast against his arm, “Have you met my cousin Eric? He just moved here from San Diego.”
“Hi, Eric!” Danny leaned around Sandra and extended his hand to the newcomer, a slim and very pretty sharp-featured blond boy who looked enough like Sandra to be her fraternal twin, “Welcome to Vandervere. How are you liking it so far?”
“It’s OK,” Eric replied with an almost-unnoticed sneer tainting his otherwise pleasant voice, letting his hand lie limply in Danny’s grip, “Very pretty.”
“It must seem awfully small after a big city,” Danny smiled, noting immediately from his sibillant speech and airy gestures that the boy was gay — nobody else in the school was so obviously and typically gay, and Danny was excited to meet someone with whom he wouldn’t have to play coy little word-games about sexual orientations and identities.
“Well, San Diego isn’t all that big,” Eric sneered openly this time, and Danny felt the tiniest shiver of revulsion as he looked into the boy’s pale green eyes, somehow empty and hungry at the same time.
“I hope I’m not being rude, but why did you move in the middle of September?” Danny wondered, pulling away from the boy just a bit and trying to figure out where that shiver came from, “It must be difficult getting into the swim of a new school six weeks into the semester.”
“I’m sure nobody would mind y
ou being rude,” Eric answered somewhat equivocally, leaving Danny in doubt as to whether he’d been rude or not, “But Mumsie thought I was getting into too much trouble with my friends at school, and packed me off to my uncle in the country to keep me pure.”
“How much trouble can you get into before Homecoming?” one of the girls asked, impressed by this glamorous boy and his tantalizing dark past.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Eric drawled feyly and aimed a lewd wink at Danny.
“Eric, you’re terrible!” Sandra giggled and swatted playfully at her cousin, who rolled his eyes eloquently; the subject shifted to the limited but fully enjoyable social outlets for teenagers in “downtown Vandervere” (meaning the four streets that enclose the Town Square, one of which was not surprisingly named Main Street) and Eric put on a mildly interested expression as he took it all in, though he never had his eyes off of Danny for more than a second, regardless of who was speaking.
“It was nice meeting you,” Danny said enthusiastically, though not entirely truthfully, when the bell rang to signal the end of lunch and five minutes’ warning before fifth period.
“Chahmed, Ah’m shewah,” Eric joked with a stagey Southern accent and gave Danny another limp, damp handshake in parting. The newcomer was painfully smitten with Danny, and covered his sudden obsession with a show of snide humor that his old friends in San Diego thought was a scream but which didn’t seem to be going over so well with these mountain yokels.
Danny didn’t give very much more thought to Eric as he hastened to his locker to retrieve his English and chemistry textbooks and his notebooks. The new boy fascinated and repelled him at once, and Danny was put in mind of the slender lime-green snake his brother used to have as a pet, which produced the same contrary reactions in him.
But there were so many other fish to fry, such as a Byronically handsome boy in English class who Danny was zeroing in on with subtle observations about homoerotic undertones in Oliver Twist, the book they were reading at the moment. And then in chemistry class, trying hard to concentrate on Ms. Fenniman’s lecture while remembering her with her dark hair plastered to her narrow elegant face, riding him like a bucking horse and yelling obscenities with an abandon that stood at odds with the prim white blouse and gray skirt she wore in class while speaking of bases and acids in her crisp Bostonian voice.
Since it was Thursday, Danny had Drama Club after class, where he got to giggle and whisper with Jeremy Sinclair, the boy he thought of as his official “boyfriend,” though nobody appeared to know about them and they hadn’t even had sex — like Danny’s girlfriends of the previous year, Jeremy seemed fearful and hesitant to take that step, worried that Danny would no longer take him seriously as a love-interest if they gave in to their base lusts.
And since Danny was by no means sexually frustrated, he accepted Jeremy’s strictures, and contented himself with looking at the boy — he was quite the prettiest boy in school, after Danny himself, with his floppy brown hair and beseeching puppy-brown eyes, his soft pink mouth and flawless peaches-and-cream skin. He was almost as tall as Danny, as slender and graceful as a reed, with a wonderfully expressive way of talking with his hands that Danny could watch for hours without getting bored. He was an actor, and quite a good one, though he was a little too retiring when it came to going after roles, so always ended up playing second lead.
Danny’s second girlfriend of the previous year and the star of the drama club, Felicia Goode, came sailing over to where he sat with Jeremy, bestowing theatrical air-kisses on him while giving Jeremy a sidelong glance of suspicion; Felicia had tried to get Danny to join the club all through Junior year and was mystified when he suddenly turned up at the beginning of Senior year; but Danny had read enough over the summer to realize that drama clubs were the usual refuge of boys who liked boys, and he wanted to find as many such boys as he could.
Felicia wasn’t as beautiful as she was arresting, tall and skinny with a Barrymore profile and great masses of curly chestnut hair (which she secretly treated with henna), but amazingly graceful and commanding in her movements and speech. Danny enjoyed watching her as much as he enjoyed watching Jeremy; in fact, he frequently got the two of them confused in his memory, they were so much alike in their personalities, and used almost identical rationalizations when insisting on keeping their relations with Danny chaste.
“People! People! Please settle down and pay attention,” the drama teacher, Mr. Oland, clapped his hands over his head and bellowed at the assembled teenagers. He was a thick and florid man with a curly fringe of white hair around a massive square face, given to baggy sweaters and floppy scarves and a fake English accent, as gay as a paper hat in the Quentin Crisp manner; Danny was considering pursuing the man, but worried about causing trouble with the teacher’s well-known longtime partner, who also taught at Vandervere High: Mr. Cartwright, the wood-and metal-shop instructor.
The two dozen students drifted toward the front of the theatre and grouped themselves into a loose semicircle around the teacher, the stage-crew types standing idly in the rear while the actors moved to the front displaying practiced looks of avid interest that they didn’t really feel: they all knew that this was the announcement of the Fall Play, and knew that it was going to be Shakespeare this year; they were only mildly curious which play was going to be put on and which roles they would pursue.
“My dears,” Mr. Oland orated grandly, “It is time to announce the decision of the Performing Arts Council, which as you know consists of myself, Mrs. Greenwood the orchestral music teacher, Mr. Stockman the president of the PTA, and Mrs. Vandervere the president of the School Board, regarding the Fall Play. This year, we will be putting on the classic and crowd-pleasing Romeo and Juliet. Mrs. Vandervere was particularly insistent that we do this year’s Shakespeare in the historical manner, agreeing to pay for the authentic Elizabethan costumes herself.”
This caused a susurration of excitement: when Mrs. Charles Vandervere (née Claudia Bremerhaven of the Philadelphia Bremerhavens), wife of the president of Royal Vandervere Mills and Danny’s aunt, interested herself in the school play, the production values were high and the costumes fabulous, bankrolled by the Vandervere fortune… there would be a token fundraising drive by the students, most likely a chocolate sale, to pay for the sets and programs, but Claudia Vandervere would spend thousands on tailor-made wardrobe that the student actors would be allowed to keep if they pleased her sufficiently with their performance.
The students broke into groups after this, the actors wondering which roles they should try for and the crew wondering if the scrims would be painted or built. Danny didn’t really care one way or the other, knowing that the only reason Aunt Claudia was interesting herself was because there was a Vandervere in the drama club; though she had no interest whatever in Danny, she was very interested in the Vandervere name appearing in the best possible setting.
“Danny? A word?” Mr. Oland approached Danny and gestured for him to move away from the other students for a private chat, “I know that when you joined our little club this year, it was with the understanding that you would be studying the backstage aspects of the drama.”
“I’m very interested in set-design,” Danny agreed.
“And you will be very good at it, I’m sure,” the older man assured him, “But I wonder if you would indulge me and apply your talents on the stage as well as behind it?”
“What do you mean?” Danny asked suspiciously, not liking where this was going, “You know I’m an execrable actor, Mr. Oland.”
“Oh, not execrable! Perhaps you are rather unskilled in portraying emotions that you don’t feel, and your reading could use some polish, but you have many talents that I believe would be a valuable contribution to our little play.”
“Such as?” Danny eyed the man askance.
“I was thinking particularly of your fencing skills: you are an accomplished swordsman, one of our varsity team’s best fencers? And we mustn’t discount your looks, yo
u have a grace and elegance that would be an ornament to the stage.”
“But Mr. Oland, I have absolutely no desire to act, and certainly not in something as challenging as Romeo and Juliet. I particularly wanted not to act when I joined the Drama Club.”
“Oh, dear,” the teacher sighed, sagging like a deflated balloon, “I didn’t want to say this to you directly, but your aunt intimated to me that I would be foolish not to cast you in our production. She was somewhat insistent on that point.”
“And Aunt Claudia will pull the funding for the costumes if I refuse,” Danny said sadly, knowing that he was going to lose this battle: he would happily defy his aunt, but he couldn’t let her snatch the expensive production from his classmates.
“She didn’t say so, dear boy,” the man tried to soothe Danny’s obviously hurt feelings, though he didn’t understand why it hurt him to have his aunt in his corner to such an extent — didn’t understand that it was the Vandervere name, rather than Danny himself, she was boosting.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” Danny squared his shoulders like Sydney Carton at the tumbril.
“I was thinking the role of Tybalt,” Mr. Oland pitched the idea with enthusiasm, “Not a lot of lines, and not a lot of emotional range, but lots and lots of swordplay. You can coach our Mercutio and Romeo in the art better than anyone else in the production.”
“Of course, I will, Mr. Oland,” Danny relented with a rueful smile, thinking the role of Tybalt wouldn’t be too bad: he was supposed to be arrogant and rather wooden, which Danny could do fairly easily, and spent most of his time onstage just standing around grandly. He could simply memorize Michael York in the Zeffirelli film, “But I must insist on being allowed to audition for the role. I would prefer to avoid any appearance of favoritism because of my name.”
“Of course, dear boy, of course!” the teacher was immensely relieved, “Though I doubt you’ll have much competition; most of the boys go for Romeo or Mercutio, the romantic and the comedic, one usually has to stick an also-ran into the Tybalt role. Thank you, Danny.”
The Math Teacher Is Dead Page 2