“I don’t care if he does.”
T.J. stopped and pulled a blackberry off a bush. “I’m not coming back next year,” he said. “I can apply to St. Christopher’s. My dad went there. I’m sick of this school.”
I didn’t expect to hear this. My heart thumped once very hard. I didn’t say anything more to T.J. I just went into a quiet panic.
The news about T.J. spread, but not like wildfire. Rumors like that made a lot of boys nervous, boys with their own secrets to keep, who couldn’t repeat the story without stammering and flinching. Once Chris stopped talking about it, for most students it remained unconfirmed gossip, which was a commonplace occurrence. Almost everyone at Briarwood was accused of being queer at one time or another.
There was some trouble, of course. I overheard two Third Formers joking that if they struck out at Sarah Waters they’d stop by T. J.’s room. “We better check for gonorrhea on his gums first,” joked one spritely cherub, his ‘dental braces gleaming when he smiled. Third Formers! T. J. told me that when he came into the shower one day, all the boys glared at him and walked out at once, even one still covered with soap.
T.J. and Chris had a reconciliation, of sorts. T.J. told me all about it. Chris said they had to live together, so he would forget about it, but don’t try it again, and the summer share was off.
I didn’t know what to make of Chris Thayer. T.J. was right, he was seductive — in the woods, in the shower, on the train to Pomfret. Was it possible that he was just that sensual, just that friendly and open and free? Did a straight boy have to have hang-ups about his body?
And the cracks about oral sex. It went on all the time, it was a running theme at school. Homosexuality was a ubiquitous joke at Briarwood.
Chris had evaporated for me now, as a person. When I looked at him it was like looking at a ghost. There was nothing real there. Just like Malcolm when he came out of jail. I would have never imagined Chris’s cruelty to T.J. Especially what he had done in their room with Jenny Richards. One day a group of us were sitting around Chris’s room talking. T.J. was sitting at his desk trying to study. “Hey, Chris, who is this Jenny girl?” someone hollered.
“I met her in the Green River Mall,” Chris said.
“You made her in the Green River Mall?” More cackling and giggling.
“So what are you, just mall buddies?”
“He mauled her in the mall.” Snickers and guffaws.
“I’m balling her. I balled her last Saturday night.”
“Where?”
“Right here in my room.”
“Where was T.J.?”
“I don’t know. You went out somewhere, right, T.J.?” said Chris. T.J. didn’t answer, but I could tell from the blackened frown on his face that he’d been right there when Chris and Jenny had sex.
Chris had always ignored the fact that I was attracted to him. Even on the first day I met him, he must have known. He couldn’t help but notice how my eyes lingered on his crotch, how I lost myself in his resin-colored gaze. Once he’d come into the athletic supply room naked except for his baseball stirrups. I froze at the sight, as though I’d been struck in the head. Chris looked ethereally beautiful, his body composed of long curvy waves of flesh, like slow folds of whipped cream. And his dick — it was thick and smudged; it looked nasty to me. It looked lazy and fat, well-fed and self-indulgent, sinful and piggish as it hung slovenly against Chris’s angelic thighs. Chris didn’t seem to mind as I looked then, or at other times. He just understood and ignored it. Perhaps he understood too well. I just couldn’t figure Chris out.
I was walking in from track practice when Chris caught up to me.
“You want to walk?” he said.
“Sure.”
We detoured behind the tennis courts and sat down on a small, grassy slope that fully caught the setting sun. We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just tore up grass blades and ran our fingers through the dirt, looking out at the sunset. I was trying to decide what to say.
“You can usually tell, you know,” I said.
“Tell what?”
“When another boy is looking at you in the shower, or across the dining hall. You know it’s a queer look. It doesn’t mean the guy is queer, it’s just a part of him. Like a little voice inside he doesn’t pay any attention to, but it still slips out every now and then when he isn’t looking.”
Chris didn’t say anything. He frowned and squinted into the sun. I turned towards him and went on.
‘‘You’re going to tell me you never had any idea about T.J.?” I tried to sound skeptical. I didn’t want to accuse Chris of leading T. J. on, but I wanted to drop a strong hint.
‘‘What are you, an expert on queers?” he said, tossing a pebble down the hill.
I dropped my head between my legs and studied the ants scurrying in the grass. “I made it with T. J., Chris. I made it with him lots of times. Ever since last year.” My breathing quickened. I was still peering at the ants. “I couldn’t let you go on thinking it was just T. J. That would make me such a goddamn hypocrite.”
‘‘You made it with T. J?”
‘‘Yes.”
“Do you want to make it with me?”
I looked up at him. My heart was pounding hard. I looked down and saw the fullness in his crotch. “Yes,” I said. He stood up on the hill. His dick was sticking straight up in his pants, and the tip of the head had pushed out over his belt. “Come on,” he said.
We walked down the hill and into the woods. Chris pushed me against a tree, pinning me roughly against the wood. Chips of bark were scraping my spine. He shoved his pelvis against my stomach and ground so hard up against me it hurt. Tears were in his eyes, and his face was red. He sucked my face, my nose, my lips. He licked up and down my cheeks and in the corners of my eyes. Then suddenly he stepped back. He fumbled with his belt buckle, then dropped his pants down to his ankles. He had on a red, oversized woolen workman’s shirt; his dick stood straight up, and the front of his shirt was draped over his cock like a tent. Chris stepped forward and pressed his face against mine. I fell down on my knees and put my head under his shirt. I’d just gotten in the head and half the shaft when Chris pulled back and it slipped out of my mouth. “No,” he said. “Let’s get behind the tree.” Chris sat down in a crook between the tree roots. I kneeled down in front of him. “These leaves are scraping my ass,” he said, smiling. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t think. My whole brain was focused on getting back to that dick. I felt like a starved wolf; I would have killed Chris right then if he’d tried to keep his cock from me.
I ducked my head back under his shirt. It was warm and moist under there. I could see the red shade on Chris’s smooth belly button. It reminded me of how my brother Tyrone and I used to crawl under my mother’s laundry rack and pretend it was an Indian teepee. It felt good to be in such close quarters, with the sun’s warmth and shaded light filtering through the sheets and towels on the rack.
And I thought of the old-style photographer’s tents in the slapstick cartoons. “Watch the birdy,” the photog always said, and his explosive flash would blow up in his hands. I smiled at the thought, then the musk of Chris’s groin hit my nose, bringing me back to the present.
I ate. I sucked. I made love to Chris’s dick. I sniffed his balls, I chewed on his pubic hair. I burrowed under his nuts to sniff his butt. I tried to lick his ass, but my tongue could only reach the tips of the hairs, that were crusted with bits of dried shit. I licked them off and rubbed the grains of crud against the roof of my mouth. The taste sent my brain into the red zone. I put my arms under Chris’s knees and lifted them over his chest.
“Whoa, calm down!” said Chris. I pulled my head up from under his shirt and looked at him. He pulled me towards him and french-kissed me sweetly. “Keep doin’ what you were doin’ before, okay?” he whispered in my ear.
“Okay.”
“Wait a second,” said Chris. He unbuttoned his shirt and threw the flaps to the side. Now I could see him s
mooth and naked from his collar down to his ankles. I started to feel dizzy.
His dick was half-hard now, lying straight down between his thighs. I cradled it in the crook between my nose and upper lip. It woke up and said hello. I nudged it with my nose. It rolled over and stretched. I tickled the head with my tongue and it pulled away. I looked up at Chris. He was smiling at me, with a keen glint in his eye, trying not to break up laughing. I licked the full, fat length. It swelled and turned to bone, and then relaxed. I sniffed the head, and it stood up on its own, clipping one side of my nose and snapping past it. Now it stood staring me in the face. I lapped it up backwards. It turned to bone again, flexed, and then softened and hooked forwards. I sucked on the head for two seconds and let it go. It fell backwards, rolled around in a circle, and came back straight in front of me. I looked at Chris and he laughed.
“Stop playing with your dinner,” he said.
No more fooling around. I gripped as much as I could between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and rubbed my tongue backwards and forwards. “Do that until I come, okay?” Chris whispered. It took a little while. Chris pulled his legs back and bent his knees to get some leverage, then started pumping up with his hips. Five or six violent bounces into the lips, “Oh Pete, oh Pete!” He knocked me backwards. Then a foghorn in the distance … two short gasps, one long, straight stream in my face. What a mess! It was all over my shirt collar and probably behind my ear.
“Nice work, fellas.” I looked up in time to see Dean Press lift his camera. The flash in my eyes blinding me. This can’t be happening…
I fell out of bed and woke up. “Oh my god,” I said aloud. I turned on the lights and looked at myself in the mirror. “I’m never going up to that attic with Kelly again.”
13
So now I was having wet nightmares. I didn’t need a psychiatrist to analyze that dream. I was feeling guilty. If I had half of T.J.’s nerve, I would have tried to make Chris, and now I would be the one getting the heat. But I didn’t have to take that chance, because I knew T. J. would. And I let him. I encouraged him.
And Chris still thought I was straight — or at least his confused, ridiculous idea of straight. Confiding in me, expecting me to side with him against my own boyfriend. The whole business made me sick. It was just like T.J. to plunge me into an emotional mess by taking some impulsive, boneheaded action, totally outside of rationality. T.J. would have followed his dick into the Grand Canyon.
If I wasn’t going to come out to Chris, at the least I had to stand by T.J. If I overheard anyone making fag jokes about him, I cursed them out or told them to shut up. “Why do you care about another guy’s sex life? Maybe you’re the one who’s queer, since you’re so interested in it.” This was my standard, Machiavellian rejoinder, hypocritical, I know, but it worked.
I had to stay loyal to him, but to tell the truth I could have kicked T.J. He was making a mess of my social life. The four of us — Chris, Moonshot, T.J., and I — couldn’t be friends together anymore.
And the Brothers and I were getting along worse than ever. Keith Hanson stopped asking me to help him with planning for the BSU. John Shepherd called me a bourgeois nigger, which was just short of being an Uncle Tom. I thought they were being unreasonable and they were full of shit, anyway. Talking as if they were the Black Panthers in prep school. The Green River Connecticut Liberation Army. I sat in T.J.’s room bitching and fuming and moaning about it.
“They’re right,” said T. J. “You’re an Uncle Tom. I read all about it.”
“T.J., I’m going to kick your ass if you don’t shut up.”
“Your friends are right, Peter. Gusto was right. Even Ashley Downer was right. Remember how you used to hate rock music? Now look at you. You’re developing identity confusion.”
“It’s not really about race. It’s about sex. I think they know I’m sleeping with you.”
“You are a pretty obvious queer.” I was an obvious queer? I could have hit T.J. in the head with a chair, but he was looking at me with a twisted, nervous smile. I remembered how much pressure he was under and I calmed down.
“Things like the weekends,” I said. “They think it’s weird. None of the Brothers like you, T.J. You’re too prepped out.”
“Maybe we should cool it.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
T.J. tucked his foot behind my ankle. “I don’t think so either.”
Keith and John Shepherd came and sat with me at lunch the next day.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” asked John.
“Don’t bother me, I’m eating.”
“I heard you were taking up tennis lessons.”
“This isn’t Nazi Germany, John. I can talk to whomever I want.”
“Fair enough, Peter,” said Keith. “No one is taking away your freedom of choice.”
“Good.”
“But you can’t just ignore us, either. T. J. has a reputation. This homo stuff — that’s whitey’s thing. Black people aren’t about that. You didn’t come here to get your head turned.”
“I think you better try minding your business.”
“It’s all the same thing,” Keith said, looking at John. “Homosexuality, individuality. It’s not how you feel inside that matters. It’s how you’re supposed to act on the outside.”
“Boy, you sure seem to know a lot about it.”
“That white boy can afford to do what he wants,” said John. “We can’t afford it. A brother with your education has to marry a sister and raise a family.”
“Thanks, Malcolm Luther Muhammad.”
“Now you’re wrong, Peter,” said Keith.
“I have a sister, and I’m helping her raise her family,” I almost screamed.
I was angry and confused after lunch. I knew I shouldn’t have said those things to John, but he made me so angry. At track practice I couldn’t concentrate. I tripped going over a high hurdle and skinned my knee. In the shower after practice I saw Chris Thayer, not my favorite person by now. I turned away from him, remembering my dream, but he came to the sprocket next to me.
“Did you hear what happened to T. J.?” he said.
“What?”
‘‘He got into a fight downtown. I heard he collapsed and he had to go home.”
“What do you mean he got into a fight? Whose T. J. gonna fight?”
“Hanson and John Shepherd.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“They’re in big trouble. They were with Press all afternoon. I think they’re getting expelled.”
I got dressed and ran over to the infirmary. The nurse told me T. J. had an asthma attack when Keith Hanson shoved him to the ground. T. J.’s parents had come and taken him home to see their family doctor. There was nothing I could do. The nurse assured me T. J. was okay.
That evening at dinner I didn’t speak to anyone. I just glared at Keith two tables across from me. I wanted him to know how angry I was. I couldn’t stop thinking of T. J. down on the tennis court our freshman year, his eyes tearing, his face scrunched and red. Crawling on his knees. I hated to think of him so humbled.
After dinner I took a walk out to the north end of the campus, the shortcut down the hill, and then walked back up through the woods. I needed the air and I thought the exertion might burn off my nervousness. I came up from the woods behind the chapel. There was a narrow strip of road there for cars to drive around. A pine log fence bordered the road at the top of the hill; just beyond was a steep drop-off into the dense woods. I sat on the chapel’s back porch and tried to make myself cry.
I was almost able to. I wanted T.J. with me right then. I remembered how it was. I could feel him playing inside of me, awkward as a pony, jerking, free and happy. His arms locked under my armpits, or his hands grasping my shoulders, then squeezing tight, his breath in my ear when he came.
As the sun set, I walked back to my room. I spent the next several days in the sourest of moods, angry at Keith. And angrier at Chris. Now his lies and cra
ziness were touching me directly.
T.J. was away from school for a week. When he came back, I went over to his room to see him. He was furious.
“Shepherd and Hanson run into me downtown and they say they want to talk to me, white boy. I told them to get lost, ’cause they’re fucking racists. Then they say I should leave you alone, that I’m trying to turn you, or corrupt your brother, or some shit like that.”
“Corrupt their brother.”
“What?”
“Corrupt their brother. Not corrupt my brother.”
T.J. stared at me so hard I flinched. “Jesus, Pete, what did you say to those guys?”
“I didn’t say anything. They were making insinuations, and I just goofed it off, made it a joke. I didn’t actually deny it.”
“They better get kicked out or I’m gonna sue their families. They’ll be living on nickels and dimes for the rest of their lives.”
“Sue them, not their families.”
“Damn it!”
“How are you, T. J.?”
“I’m all right. Fucking asthma complications. I forgot to take my medication. Keith pushed me down and I lost my breath. It hit real suddenly, it felt funny. Not like my normal attacks. I really couldn’t breathe, Pete.”
“They must have scared you. And all this stuff with Chris. It must have made you nervous.”
“It was a good thing Moonshot was there. He called the ambulance.”
“Moonshot was with you?”
“That’s what set them off. First you, then Moonshot, like keep my hands off the black race or something. God, they are crazy.”
“You should try to keep calm, T.J.”
“Yeah. Thanks for coming by, Pete. Why don’t you split, I’m gonna try and sleep now.”
“Go ahead and sleep. I’ll stay here and read.”
T.J. slept for two hours. I tried to read from his Shakespeare book, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thoughts of Moonshot and Chris and Gusto were running around my head and I couldn’t concentrate. I stopped reading to watch T.J. sleep. I listened to his slow, quiet breathing. For a second, I wanted to hit him with the heavy Shakespeare book. But my twinge of anger passed. T.J. woke up coughing and went into the bathroom for a glass of water. I waited until I knew he was feeling better before I asked him.
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