Don't Let Me Go

by J. H. Trumble

  “If I disgust you, you could at least be a man about it and say so. You owe me that.”

  “Disgust me? Disgust me? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  Maybe I had. I was tottering on the cliff of hysteria, but I couldn’t pull back.

  “You want me to beg? Then I’m begging.” I fumbled for the button on my jeans, but he grabbed my hand.

  “Stop it.”

  I jerked my hand free and got out of the car and slammed the door. Adam was out of the car too. “Nate.” He grabbed my arm as I came around the back, but I broke into a jog. He lunged for me, grabbing me from behind. We stumbled and fell to the ground. I struggled to break free. He was no match for my fury. I got to my feet, but he was there again. I spun around and shoved him. Then I took a step toward him and shoved him again, harder.

  “Stop it, Nate.”

  “You stop it. Stop pretending like nothing’s changed. Everything has changed.” I shoved him again. I wanted him to fight back, to hit me, to do something to stop me from spinning completely out of control.

  He pinned my arms to my sides in a tight embrace. “Don’t,” he whispered in my ear.

  But it wasn’t enough. I twisted and writhed in his grasp until I broke free. Then I swung, my fist connecting with his jaw. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the surprise of it knocked him to the ground.

  I stood over him, breathing hard and sweating profusely.

  He pushed up on one arm and looked at me, stunned.

  And then, as if someone had cut my strings, I slumped to the ground and covered my head with my arms and let go. “I don’t know how to do this,” I cried. “It hurts so bad sometimes.”

  He crawled over to me and wrapped me in his arms.

  I woke sometime during the night fully dressed, my head in Adam’s lap. The bedside lamp was on, and he was asleep, sitting up against my headboard, his head slumped at an angle that was sure to mean a sore neck when he woke up. I felt guilty about that, but I let him sleep. I eased out of bed and made my way quietly to the bathroom and shut the door.

  I peed and then brushed my teeth, avoiding my reflection in the mirror. The shakes started just as I was about to spit and my stomach clenched. I dry heaved into the sink a few times before emptying the remnants of an early dinner from my stomach. When there was nothing left, I rinsed my mouth and the sink, brushed one more time, then slid down the wall and grabbed my knees and held on.

  Some time later—maybe a minute, maybe an hour—Adam knocked softly on the door. “Nate?”

  When I didn’t answer, he opened the door a crack. “Can I come in?”

  I scrambled to my feet and made a show of washing my face. In the mirror, I could see his mussed hair, red eyes, and creased brow. I had no idea what he saw, but he slipped his arms around me from behind and leaned his chin on my shoulder. Our eyes locked in the mirror. He ran his fingers lightly up and down my arms and watched me for a minute.

  “You’re trembling,” he said.

  I shut off the water and scrubbed my face dry with a hand towel.

  “What do you see when you look in the mirror, Nate?” he said. I chewed on my bottom lip but didn’t answer. “Let me tell you what I see.” He squeezed me tighter. “I see a boy who’s been hurt. But that hurt is what happened to him, it’s not who he is. What I see is the same beautiful, loving, outrageously sexy boy that used to sneak looks at me when he thought no one was looking.”

  I wanted to believe him.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said to the me in the mirror.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “You’d have to hit me a lot harder than that.”

  My lips twitched into an almost smile, but it faded quickly.

  He watched me in the mirror, his eyes so intense that I could hold them only a moment. I closed my eyes and focused on the feel of his arms around me. Strong arms.

  “I know you want to pretend like everything’s okay, baby. I know you want to pretend like that night never happened. But it’s not, and it did.”

  I stiffened. Shut up. But he didn’t shut up.

  “You have to face it. Don’t let them do this to you. Don’t let them do this to us. If you do, the creeps win. Please, for us, call Dr. Par—”

  “No.”

  I jerked away from him and left the bathroom. I did not need a shrink. I just needed him. All of him.

  Chapter 17

  August 25

  The first day of school. Senior year. It should have been exciting. It wasn’t. But at least I didn’t have to rip a Go #77 and a silly megaphone cutout off my locker before I opened it this year.

  Juliet leaned against the locker next to mine. I grabbed my English and calculus books and elbowed the door closed.

  “Interesting choice of clothing for the first day of school,” she said, eyeing me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

  I gave her the stink eye and fished my schedule out of my shorts pocket.

  Even Mom had been a little annoyed that I’d chosen to wear the Closets are for brooms, not people T-shirt Adam had given me. If she’d known I was going to wear it today, I doubt she’d have washed it for me yesterday. Maybe annoyed wasn’t the right word. I think she was just scared. “Do you really want to draw that kind of attention to yourself?” she’d said.

  I think that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wasn’t even sure I could explain why. In part, I was still irritated with Adam over the whole roommate thing in New York. And in part, I was just sick of people acting like I wasn’t right somehow. Maybe I was just itching for a confrontation. Or maybe it was just a way of keeping him close. In any event, wearing the shirt had been strictly impulse. It was there. It was clean. It felt right. I wore it.

  I shouldered my backpack, and we headed down the crowded hallway together.

  “Let me see,” Juliet said, grabbing for my schedule. She glanced over it. “Crap,” she said, slapping me in the chest with it. “Not a single class together. We’ve got lunch, though. I’ll save you a seat.” She pattered on about something, then waved a hand in front of my face. “Hey, big boy, are you listening to me?”

  I wasn’t.

  “Attracting attention already, I see,” she said.

  Most of it innocuous, I noted—some giggles, some stares, some whispers here and there. I wasn’t sure if it was my notoriety as a crime victim, the TV interviews I’d done, or just the fact that I was the school gay. Or maybe it was the political statement on my T-shirt. Who knew? But the attention was there. A year ago I would have shrunk away from that kind of scrutiny. A lot can change in a year. A lot had. I drew myself up to my full height and practically dared someone to challenge me.

  We ran into Danial at the base of the main stairwell. When he saw me, his eyebrows shot up and a slow smile crept across his face. He shook his head and kept going.

  Juliet watched him go, stretching around me to keep him in her sights. “So, um, did Danial get you all set up?”

  “Yeah, and then I screwed his brains out.”

  “Nice. Have you posted anything yet?”

  She shifted to look over my shoulder again, presumably to catch a last glimpse before Danial disappeared around a corner.

  “Obvious,” I said.

  “What? I can’t help myself. Damn. Have you seen that cute butt?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Liar.”

  I laughed. “What about Mike?”

  “Mike, Mike, Mike. I like Mike. I don’t know. He’s just so ... so—”

  “—boring, one-dimensional, short—”

  “—not you,” she said and gave me a look that said, “You asked.” “There’s just no passion there. Hey,” she said, changing the subject, “fall rehearsals start today. Why don’t you stop by the auditorium sometime?”

  “Sure,” I said, but I think we both knew I wouldn’t come. Without Adam there, I didn’t see the point.

  At the next intersection I gave Juliet’s hair a playful yank a
nd told her I’d see her at lunch. Then I turned and ran smack dab into another kid who told me to watch where I was going, and just because he wasn’t a big enough asshole, he called me a faggot. I was the wrong guy to be messing with right then. I shoved him and he stumbled into a passing group of freshman girls.

  “Hey. What the hell’s wrong with you?” He sneered, bringing up his fist and moving in toward me. Coach Carr stepped between us before he could throw a punch. I was relieved, though I’d have taken it and given it back.

  “Get to class, gentlemen,” Coach said. He stood there, his arms spanning the distance between us, until the testosterone ebbed and the kid huffed away. Coach took a look at my shirt and shook his head. “Your dad okay with this?”

  “I don’t talk to my dad anymore.”

  He scoffed. “Get going, Schaper.”

  “Damn, Nate,” Juliet said over my shoulder. “Take it easy.”

  I glared at Coach as I walked away. Those days of taking it easy were long gone. And Coach Carr was just as much to blame as anyone, including me.

  Chapter 18

  Last August 27

  Another first day of school

  Junior year. I navigated the crowded main hallway with schedule and locker number in hand, which quickly proved completely unnecessary. Up and down the hallway, select lockers—football players’ lockers—had been covered in Knight blue paper and foil-covered megaphone cutouts that screamed Go #82, Go #7, Go #53 in sparkly silver lettering. I knew the other guys liked the attention, but I never understood why this school, or any school for that matter, thought that a bunch of egotistical Neanderthals deserved to be singled out for such elite status when other kids busting their butts in academics or the arts or even other sports were virtually ignored. It felt wrong. And if anyone had bothered to ask, I’d have said, “No thanks.”

  I found my locker, and after a quick glance up and down the hallway, ripped the paper off and the obnoxious megaphone with it and stuffed it all inside. A streamer broke free and drifted to the floor. I picked it up and shoved it in too. No paper this year. No megaphones. No sparkly lettering. No streamers. No Go #77. No football.

  I wondered if Coach Carr had checked his updated rosters yet. He didn’t like surprises, and he was about to get a big one. Even if he hadn’t scanned his rosters, he’d know soon enough. I had him for PE—I glanced at my schedule again—fifth period. Right after lunch. Great.

  A commotion down the hallway caught my attention. Andrew Cargill and a couple of his jerky friends—Carlos Cuevas and Butch Evans—were weaving and plowing their way through the crowd, making openings where there were none with sheer momentum and disregard for rules of civility. You moved, or they displaced you. Matthew Shin, a slight Asian kid I’d known since fourth grade, didn’t move. Cargill muscled past him—“Out of the way, homo”—giving him a shove that sent him stumbling into me. I braced myself and grabbed him to keep us both from hitting the ground. He dropped his lunch bag and a banana skittered across the tiled floor. Five or six kids stepped on it and then freaked out at the banana mush on their new shoes before the rush of kids could part around the mess.

  A tall guy with dark hair, earrings, and these long narrow purple and black plaid shorts that hit him just below the knee picked up the brown bag and handed it to Matthew. “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah.” Matthew took the bag, then looked at his ruined banana like he might try to salvage it. He shook his head. “Fuckers.”

  The guy laughed. “You can say that again.” Matthew looked up at him and smiled a little, as if they shared some secret, then he moved off still shaking his head and muttering to himself.

  His savior shouldered his backpack and turned to me, but I didn’t notice immediately because I was focused on the gray Stones T-shirt that hung from his broad shoulders and ended loosely around his hips. He looked like he might have just come from a GQ shoot. “Matthew’s a brilliant kid,” he said, refocusing my attention and causing me to blush. “Someday he’s going to grow up and own those jerks.”

  I cleared my throat and looked down the hallway after Matthew, but he’d already disappeared. “He has to survive high school first.”

  “This is true.”

  At the other end of the hallway, Cargill and his goons were flexing their physical prowess by jumping up and slapping the Welcome Back banner that stretched across the hallway.

  “I think somewhere three villages are looking for their idiots,” I said.

  He laughed. I looked at him and thought that I very much liked the sound of that laugh.

  “Adam!”

  He turned back, so I did too. A pretty redhead hurried toward him.

  “Your girlfriend?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

  He made a hmph sound and smiled. She flung her arms and legs around him, and he staggered slightly against the onslaught, then steadied himself and propped her back on her feet. I busied myself in my locker and tried not to be too obvious about my eavesdropping. She spoke in excited little bursts about who was playing what role and costumes and something about a meeting in the auditorium. Then she grabbed his hand and they moved away. He looked back at me and winked. “I like your shirt. Watch out for the idiots.”

  “I will,” I said, but the girl had already dragged him off down the hallway. Until then, I had barely been aware of what I had put on that morning. I looked down—Bob Marley—and smiled for the first time in days.

  “Let me see your schedule,” Liam said, reaching across the table at lunch.

  Brett was seated next to him, their elbows crowding each other. The two linemen had their own schedules on the table, rumpled in the space between hoagie sandwiches big enough to choke a horse. I didn’t ask to see theirs; I had no interest whatsoever in where they were at any given time of the day. I considered refusing mine, but it was going to happen eventually, so I fished the folded paper out of my pocket and handed it over.

  “You have PE next period? What the fuck? Why aren’t you in athletics?”

  I shrugged.

  He looked at me in disbelief. “You’re not playing football.” It wasn’t a question. More like something he’d seen coming but didn’t think I’d ever get away with doing.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? You just did two weeks of fucking summer camp. In one hundred ten degree heat. You don’t die, you play, man.”

  For about three seconds I considered telling him the truth, just getting it over with. I was so done with lies and pretending and living for everyone else. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me; it couldn’t be half as bad as what I’d been thinking of myself for years. But when I opened my mouth, what came out was one more fantastic retelling of the Schaper-sidelined-with-shoulder-injury crap. Brett wasn’t buying it and argued that I hadn’t even dislocated my shoulder, just separated it.

  “So you’re a doctor now?” I said, unscrewing the lid on a bottle of water and taking a long drink.

  He said he wasn’t, but proceeded to give me a diagnosis anyway, which pretty much added up to a major case of pussy. I stared at him, but inside I was thinking, Not bad, Armstrong. Give that boy an honorary medical degree. Pussy? Oh, yeah. But not for the reasons he thought.

  He glared back at me. “I guess while you’re sitting in the stands nursing your little booboo, that dick Brookstone will be starting receiver.”

  I wouldn’t be in the stands.

  After lunch, I headed to regular PE for the first time since sixth grade. The athletes had athletics and the band kids had marching band. What was left was an odd assortment of thugs, creative types, emo kids, and nerds. And then there was Jake Winfield, too meek and nerdy for even the nerd kids to embrace. I spotted him on the bleachers as soon as I walked in the gym. He hugged the wall, his face half hidden behind the pages of a book.

  “Schaper,” Coach Carr barked. He was seated in a plastic chair facing the boys but not watching them. Instead, he was studying a clipboard. Without looking up, he held out a square of paper
to me—a hall pass. “Take this to the counselor and get your schedule changed. You’re supposed to be in seventh-period athletics.”

  When I didn’t take it, he looked up. “Go.”

  I took the pass, and he went back to his clipboard, but I didn’t go. I almost went. It would have been so much easier just to do what everyone expected me to do, but I couldn’t, not even when Andrew Cargill came strutting into the gym with that smug attitude and the promise of a crappy year trailing behind him like toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Cargill had shown a lot of promise as a tackle in junior high. He wasn’t afraid of anything, including consequences. He got permanently kicked off the team freshman year for being a vicious freak, which was why he was here. He took down anything that got in his way—on and off the field—including his own teammates. My balls still ached when I thought about the kick he’d delivered to my groin in eighth grade when I didn’t complete a pass he’d cleared the way for. Coach Schaper—dear old Dad—sent him to the shower and then berated me in front of the rest of the team for missing the ball. As I held my knees to my chest, I didn’t know what hurt more—the pain in my testicles or his words.

  Coach looked up again, clearly annoyed that I was still there. “Is there a problem?”

  “It wasn’t a mistake,” I said as evenly as I could. “I changed my schedule.” He glared at me, a thin layer of confusion adding to his thick layer of annoyance, so I kept talking. “I asked to be switched out of athletics.”

  “You want to tell me why?”

  Not really. I took a deep breath and hoped this was the last time I’d have to run this lame play. “The shoulder’s still bothering me.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t want to risk injuring it again.”

  “Just because you have to sit out a few games doesn’t mean you ditch athletics. Go get it switched back.” He looked back down at his clipboard, essentially dismissing me, and scribbled a note.