by John Goode
“No, really.” He pounced on the idea. “I got you into this, so let me fix it, man. You can crash on the couch until you can get back on your feet. No funny business, unless you want to go at it with Bruce again because you’re single….”
“Shut up,” I said, not even wanting to think about that night.
“Just think about it. I’m completely serious. Bro to bro, let me help you.”
I didn’t say anything, just got my stuff and went back… went back to Kyle’s place.
When I got there, he was in a panic.
He was throwing stuff into a duffel bag, and the place looked like a small tornado had hit it. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Fuck, I forgot about you,” he said, pausing.
That made me feel all tingly inside.
“I have to go back home,” he said, tossing a couple of shirts into the bag.
“What? Why?” I asked, knowing this had to be serious if he was talking about setting foot back in Foster.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, cutting off any chance I had of finding out. “I don’t know when I’m going to be back. I’ll call you when I do.”
I nodded, wishing I could help.
“When I call to tell you I’m coming back?” He looked at me, and I nodded. “Don’t be here when I get home.”
He could have punched me in the gut and it would have taken the air from me easier.
“Kyle, what’s going on?” I asked, hating this so much.
“Handle your own shit,” he barked at me. “I can handle this. Leave the keys with Mrs. Phan when you go.” He tossed his toothbrush and his laptop into the bag and looked around.
“Can I give you a ride to the airport, at least?”
He shook his head. “I called a cab.”
“Please let me help you.” I was on the verge of crying again.
“You want to help?” he asked. “Find somewhere else to live.”
A car honked twice outside, and he slipped his bag over his shoulder.
He paused, and we looked at each other for a second. “Well, good-bye, Brad.”
I wanted to reach out and hug him, beg him not to do this… but he stuck out his hand like he wanted to shake. I held mine out in shock and he shook it.
“Have a great life.”
The car honked again and he ran out the door.
I didn’t even care anymore. I just broke down and sobbed at how badly I had fucked things up.
Kyle
SO THERE you have it.
This is why I’m sitting in an airport wondering if I made a huge mistake. I’ve never gone through anything like this before, so I don’t know if what’s going through my mind is normal or not. I mean, you normally go back over every second you were together with the person who hurt you and wonder if you missed a clue somewhere, right? Like suddenly I’m CSI: Heartbreak, going over everything he ever said, looking for any indication that I could have stopped this before it shattered my heart into a million pieces.
Worse—yes, it gets worse—is that next week I have my midterms, and I’m going to miss them because I’ll be in Foster figuring out….
Nope, not going there yet.
So you tell me: should I have forgiven him? Should I have looked past all that and just said no harm, no foul? That’s not even true, because there was a lot of harm, and I feel like I’ve been fouled. Now I’ll admit I don’t know what you do in sports when you’re fouled, but it better involve a lot of Adele and ice cream, because I’ve never felt so depressed in my life.
This wasn’t my fault, so why do I feel like I fucked up?
Yeah, Teddy tried to get me to stay, reminding me that most of the grade in the class was based on actually showing up and if I wasn’t there it would be an F, no questions asked. Which meant I would have to ace the rest of the semester just to keep my grades at the minimum level to keep my scholarship. So one day I had a great boyfriend, a scholarship, and a life, and now I was looking at losing it all because of one stupid twist of fate that I should have seen coming.
We all should have seen it coming.
Why is this happening to me?
Yeah, I think I just broke my keyboard.
That’s my flight they’re calling, so I guess I’m done here.
No boyfriend, no school, and my mom might be dying because she had a car accident and she hasn’t woken up yet.
Aren’t you glad you know the whole story now?
Part Two:
Boomerangs, Karma, and the Past
Name three things that will come back to you no matter how fast you run.
Tyler
“I FUCKING hate this town!” I screamed as I kicked one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room. It went flying across the small space, bouncing once before settling to the floor.
“Tyler,” Matt admonished me. “We’re in a hospital; you can’t throw a fit in here.”
He was right, kicking chairs in the ICU waiting room was not the proper thing to do, but I was too pissed to care. “He kicked me out!” I raged. “Me! Where the hell does he get off kicking anyone out of anywhere?”
“Calm down,” Matt said in a tone that told me he was done feeding my childish outburst. “You want to get tossed out of the hospital altogether? Keep on kicking and screaming. You want to try to fix things, grow up.”
He was right, of course, but it did nothing to make me feel better.
“How am I going to fix things?” I asked him. “How can this be fixed?”
He opened his mouth to answer and then thought about it. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “But I do know that, what you’re doing? It’s the wrong way to go.”
I sighed and sat down on one of the other chairs. “Where the hell is everyone?”
Matt sat down next to me and took my hand. “Look, babe, you did everything you could. That guy is an asshole and we need to wait for people to show up. Kyle hasn’t even left California yet, so you need to relax and calm down.”
Tears stung my eyes as I looked up at him. “She’s going to die.”
He pulled me into a hug. “You don’t know that yet.”
But I did.
If you know me, then you know my past, and my past tells me the people I love die. And when they die, I just sit there and watch, unable or unwilling to help because I am Tyler Parker, a worthless human being. Then it was my friend Riley; now it’s my best friend, Linda. I enjoyed the hug the best I could, but I knew it wasn’t going to change the truth. She was going to die.
“Don’t look now, but I think the cavalry has arrived,” he whispered in my ear.
I turned around and saw Robbie walking into the ICU, a worried look on his face when he saw Matt and me. His hair was short, very short, like he’d shaved his head and was recovering from it short, but that wasn’t what got my attention.
It was the hot blond guy following him.
“Is everything okay?” he asked once inside. “It took forever to rent a car and the drive from Dallas is insane, but we got here as fast as we could. How is she?”
I looked away from the model to Robbie. “Who’s this?”
The guy stuck his hand out. “I’m Sebastian, his boyfriend.”
Both Matt and I said at the same time, “Of course you are.”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “Are you serious? Isn’t someone dying or something?”
“I’m Tyler,” I said, shaking his hand. “And this is my boyfriend, Matt.”
“Pleased,” Matt said with a smile.
“Wow, you’re big,” Sebastian said to Matt.
“Okay, honey, we said hello,” Robbie announced, stepping between him and us. “What’s going on?”
“She’s still unconscious and has that thing breathing for her right now,” I explained, trying not to put feelings to the words. “There’s some kind of surgery thing they can do to relieve pressure on something, but they can’t do it without someone saying they can do it.”
Robbie understood instantly. “You mean Kyl
e.”
I made a face and answered, “Well… not exactly.”
“Wait,” he said, looking around. “Why are you even out here? Why aren’t you in there with her?”
“Here we go,” Matt said under his breath. To Sebastian he suggested, “Hey, why don’t we go grab some coffee and stuff and let these guys catch up?”
Sebastian looked confused, but Robbie nodded once and the two of them walked out.
“Okay, so why aren’t you in there?” he asked again.
“That’s a long story,” I said, sitting down and patting the chair next to me. “I should start at the beginning.”
“Tyler, what the hell is going on?” he asked, sitting down warily.
“See, it all started with that letter….”
Tyler
I HATE to admit it, but it was weird being back in an AA meeting.
After I blew my knee out and had to come home, there was a length of time where I went off the rails. I got pulled over a few times for drunk driving, but the old sheriff always let me off with a warning because of who I was. When Sheriff Rogers took office, the first night he pulled me over, he arrested me and threw me in lockup. I didn’t know it at the time, but his wife had been killed by a drunk driver, and he was forced to raise his daughter alone because of idiots like me. He didn’t take kindly to my situation at all.
Which landed me in court, which landed me in AA.
That was a long time ago, and I had convinced myself that I didn’t need AA to get by. Sure, I drank back then, but it wasn’t an all-the-time thing and it wasn’t until I was sloppy drunk, either. But I went, did my time, and never went back. I honestly didn’t think I ever would go back.
But here I am.
I’ve known Linda Stilleno since high school. I’d known of her since we were both in grade school, but it wasn’t until high school that we became friends. I was so deep in the closet that if I sneezed too hard, hangers would come flying out of my mouth, and she seemed to have known it forever. At first I hated that. I had spent a lifetime—well, sixteen years—cultivating a James Bond-like cover about my sexuality. Since I was a jock, there were more than a few girls who were always asking me out, and being a jock, it was completely feasible for me to be a douchebag guy and play the field.
That worked for a while until Linda “Goldfinger” Stilleno figured me out.
I denied it. I tried to lie about it. I ignored her. Then I pleaded with her and begged her not to say a word. In the end she became my best friend and the first person to accept me as I was.
Which explained why I was in an AA meeting on a Saturday afternoon.
The Granada High gym was this group’s meeting spot. Being there brought back a whole mess of memories I thought I’d repressed about being a teenager. The place even smelled the same, which was tripping me out because it seemed impossible I’d even remember that. Well over a decade had passed since I’d sat in the bleachers counting the seconds before school got out, but at times it felt like it was yesterday. Other times it felt like it had been someone else.
Before the meeting started, Linda had elbowed me and nodded to the far wall. I saw a row of glass cases with jerseys inside. Mine was the third one over: PARKER 42.
“See? You’re still a celebrity,” she whispered with a wry smile.
“Yeah, right. You know how many kids look up there and ask, ‘Who the fuck is Parker?’ Trust me, no one remembers those days.”
That sounded a lot more bitter than I had intended, but it was too late to take it back.
“Thank you for coming,” she said after a respectable pause. “Gayle couldn’t get out of the lunch shift, and I hate coming here alone.”
“You do know that these people aren’t judging you, right? They’re in the same boat you are.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please, half of these people are the fucks who wrote me off in high school as the loser party girl, then forgot me completely when I became the pregnant girl.”
That was true. When Linda ended up pregnant after dropping out of high school, no TV show followed her around celebrating her decision to keep the baby and hold on to her pride. Instead there was a town full of hostile people who couldn’t wait to condemn her as the town slut. I remember her parents almost moving back to Foster because they didn’t think she could raise a kid by herself, but she’d refused their help. In fact she’d refused almost everyone’s help.
“Yeah, but those people didn’t give birth to Kyle, so you know they’re jealous as fuck,” I whispered back, making her smile.
“Kyle isn’t here anymore, so they’ve gone back to shunning me. I’m glad someone is here.” She squeezed my hand, and I suddenly felt like shit for not wanting to be there. She needed someone, and there were very few someones left in her life. Her parents had passed away a few years ago, and the only real friends she had made were party friends, which were as dependable as gypsies when it came to support. You had some weed and drink? They were all there. Decided to go sober? Crickets and tumbleweeds.
“I’m always here for you,” I said, squeezing her hand back. “And if things get bad, I can always ask Matt to introduce you to his old friend Sophia.”
Linda pulled her hand free of mine and slapped my shoulder. “Fuck that bitch—every time he tells a story about her, I want to hop a plane to California and smack her in the mouth.”
Truer words were never spoken. Matt’s former friend was a despicable person, and he relished telling us horror stories of hanging out with her to pass the time. I had only met her once, and let me tell you, I think he was being nice when he spoke about the things she’d done to him.
“So, you hear from Kyle?” I asked her as the last of the stragglers shuffled into the gym.
She shook her head. “I left a message, but he’s so busy getting moved in he hasn’t called back yet. You know how it is.”
I did know how it was, and it wasn’t in any way right.
Kyle and Linda had gone through some pretty rough times over the years. She hadn’t been the most responsible of parents, and he wasn’t known for his forgiving ways. It wasn’t until Kyle had come out and the whole town came crashing down on him that she’d decided to clean her act up and come to her son’s aid. But in the end, it was too little, too late, and I’m pretty sure Kyle ran out of town as fast as he could and wasn’t planning on coming back.
But it didn’t mean he couldn’t call his mother.
Father Mulligan took the podium, and everyone quieted down as I pulled out my cell phone.
Tyler: You better tell your man to call his mom.
I tried to look like I was paying attention to what Mulligan was saying while I waited for Brad to answer.
Brad: Have you ever tried to make Kyle do anything? Not going to happen unless he wants to.
I smiled at that. From what I knew of Kyle, he seemed like the stubborn type.
Tyler: Bribe him. He needs to call his mom.
Brad: Are you telling me to offer sex to my boyfriend to get him to call his mom?
I stifled a laugh as I responded.
Tyler: I didn’t say a word about sex, but I see where your mind is.
Brad: So how much sex are you and Matt not having?
That got a small bark of laughter from me that was like a gunshot in the quiet gym. I looked up and realized I was now the center of attention. “Hi, I’m Tyler and I’m putting my phone away now.”
Father Mulligan smiled at me. “Hi, Tyler, and thank you.”
Linda whispered next to me, “Busted.”
Yep, just like it used to be in high school.
The meeting lasted for a little over an hour. An hour of my life I was never going to get back, but then again, you did things like this for friends. As the group broke up, I looked over to Linda and asked, “Is it bad I have impure thoughts about Father Mulligan?”
She laughed. “No, but it would be bad if I told Matt about them.”
“Please,” I said as we got into my car. “We have a
list. Before this they were just celebrities, but I think I could add a priest and still be within my rights.”
“You have a list?”
I nodded. “Yeah, a list of people that if we met and were offered sex, we could sleep with and it not mean anything.” She stared at me like I was insane. “Straight people don’t do that?”
“We pretend we do, but it isn’t real.”
“Oh. Well, I’m just saying if I meet Chris Hemsworth and he wants to show me his hammer, I’m not saying no.”
“You are so bad,” she commented as we drove out of the parking lot.
“Have you seen Thor? That man could get anyone in his bed.”
We laughed and talked as we pulled up to her house. A normal Saturday all around, right? Except for the guy leaning on his car in front of her apartment.
“Who is that?” I asked as I turned off the engine. He was well dressed, but the car was a rental, which meant he wasn’t from around here. Why a stranger would be waiting in her parking lot didn’t make any sense.
Linda didn’t say a word as she got out and walked toward him.
“Linda Stilleno?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I have something here about Kyle,” he said, opening his briefcase.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, the dread in her voice like nails on a chalkboard.
He handed her a letter and the moment she took it, he said, “You’ve been served.”
She stared at the letter as the guy got into his car and drove off.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
She stuffed the letter into her purse so fast I thought there was going to be a sonic boom. “Nothing. Thanks for coming, Tyler. You’re the best.”
“Really?” I asked. “You’re really not going to tell me what that is?”
She kissed me on the cheek and walked toward her apartment. “Say hi to Matt for me.” And she walked inside.
“What the fuck?” I asked no one, standing in the parking lot alone and clueless.
Matt
WE GRABBED a cup of brown water the hospital called coffee and took a seat in the back of the cafeteria. It was pretty much empty, which was good, because I really didn’t want an audience for what I was about to do next.