Don't Let Me Go

by J. H. Trumble

  “No.”

  His head snapped up again. He studied me for a moment and then took off his glasses. “No?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Cargill flicked a tweetie at Jake. It pegged him in the back of the head. Jake didn’t flinch. If anything, he hunched over a little more like a pill bug rolling up when it’s molested. He stared at his book, but I doubted he was getting any reading done.

  Cargill was sitting next to Carlos Cuevas now, who was laughing and holding his nose.

  “I don’t want to hold the team back.”

  I knew he wouldn’t believe that. I hadn’t even bothered to fake sincerity when I said it. What was the point? Go through the motions and get it over with.

  Coach Carr leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The angle seemed to defy gravity, and I half expected him to fall over. He didn’t. “You don’t want to hold the team back.” He guffawed and shook his head. “You want to know what I think?”

  Not even a little bit.

  “I don’t think you want to play at all.”

  I didn’t respond. I looked back at the bleachers. Cargill flicked another tweetie, this time hitting Jake in the cheek. Jake angled himself so he was facing more toward the wall. The other kids were watching now. Some were laughing.

  “Is your dad on board with this?”

  When I didn’t answer, he laughed softly and shook his head. “Well, that should make for some interesting dinner conversation tonight.”

  “We don’t eat dinner together.”

  Coach shifted his weight forward and his chair hit the ground with a smack. “Find a seat, Schaper.” As I walked away I heard him mutter, “What a waste.”

  I sat as far away from Jake as I could.

  The Jake Winfield show hadn’t ended there.

  In the locker room the next day, Coach Carr barked out orders as guys stripped down and pulled on gym shorts and T-shirts. I averted my eyes and made my way to my locker to change. I hated locker rooms. I hated the noise. I hated the overwhelming smell of testosterone and underwashed bodies. I hated the sophomoric muscle flexing and penis jokes that always started when the coaches retreated to their offices or moved on to the gym or the practice field.

  Coach finished his orders and disappeared, and the games began. Some cosmic kick-in-the-gut had assigned Jake Winfield a locker in the same bank as Andrew Cargill’s. Cargill had already stripped to his underwear and was intentionally intimidating the other kids with his loud laugh and raunchy displays of his questionable manhood. I suspected all the grandstanding was cover for a tiny dick. He damn sure didn’t have anything I wanted.

  Jake turned into a corner and unbuttoned his shirt, then tried to slip it off and pull on his PE T-shirt in one motion—difficult at the least and awkward at best. No surprise it proved to be too much of a juggling act for Jake. The T-shirt fell to the floor, and before he could cover his narrow, pale chest and pick it up, Cargill kicked it away from him.

  “Did you lose something, pussy?”

  Jake flushed and shrank in on himself as he grappled for the button-down, also on the floor and quickly snatched away from him by some random jerk and tossed across the room. Jake darted toward his T-shirt lying in a heap a few feet away.

  Carlos Cuevas grabbed it off the floor. “Aah, the homo lost his shirt.” Cuevas sniffed the shirt dramatically, then pinched his nose. “Ugh. This stinks. You been jackin’ off on this shirt, homo?”

  “No way.” Cargill laughed. “Winfield doesn’t have a dick. That’s pure pussy.”

  Jake kept one arm firmly wrapped around his bare chest and grabbed for his shirt with the other, but Cuevas yanked it farther out of his reach. He had a good eight or nine inches on the smaller boy.

  Tears sprang from Jake’s eyes. A couple other guys near me laughed. I didn’t know who I hated more at that moment—the jerks tormenting Jake, the cowards watching it happen, or the coward wearing my athletic shoes.

  Cuevas shoved Jake in the chest and tossed the shirt back to Cargill. And Jake played right into their hands. After he got his feet back under him, he rushed Cargill. Cargill held Jake’s shirt just out of his reach with one hand, and with the other grabbed Jake’s right nipple and twisted as hard as he could. I winced. I knew that pain. One of the guys on the team was acting like a shit our freshman year and tried that on me. It hurt like a mother, but I knocked his hand away immediately. I knew the pain, but I had never known this level of degradation and humiliation.

  Jake cried out, but Cargill didn’t release him for another three or four seconds. When he did let go, he laughed and flung Jake’s shirt in his face. Jake was crying openly now, but trying desperately to stop.

  I turned away and left the locker room.

  Someone narc-ed. It hadn’t been me. And I regretted that.

  For the rest of the week, Coach Carr stood guard in the locker room while we changed, but Jake looked only slightly less nervous than usual. The next week, Coach’s appearances became more intermittent. By the third week, he’d quit showing up at all, and the games began anew, but they were more subtle now. There were no more raucous games of keep-away, just a daily nipple twisting that left Jake’s chest a horrid blend of black, blue, purple, and yellow. I didn’t even see it happen most days, and he didn’t cry out anymore, but occasionally I got a glimpse of his chest when he changed, and I knew.

  The one bright spot in my day came sixth period, right after PE. If a cosmic kick-in-the-gut had put Jake’s locker in the same bank as Cargill’s, perhaps it was some cosmic gift that had placed me in government with Adam and Juliet. By the fifth week of school, Adam and I knew there was more between us than just a spunky redhead. But knowing hadn’t translated into action. “She’s my best friend,” he’d said to me, standing next to his car, the toads mating in the ditch next to us with raucous abandon. “I don’t know what to do.”

  That Tuesday, Jake was absent. Same thing Wednesday. In the early morning hours on Thursday, Jake hung himself from the banister in his own house. The wood splintered, and he crashed to the floor. His mom found him lying there, unconscious, an extension cord still wound around his neck.

  Word traveled fast. The subsequent joking and laughing in the locker room sickened me. I had done nothing to help Jake, but that afternoon, in my fury, I stuck out a foot and tripped Cargill as he dribbled a basketball down the court, sending him sprawling to the floor.

  He got up and landed a punch in my jaw that snapped my head back. It smarted and tears sprang to my eyes despite my efforts to hold them back.

  There was something about that moment, something about the fear and the cowardice that had brought us to that moment, that steeled my resolved.

  I spent the next hour sitting in the nurse’s office with an ice pack on my jaw, a chip on my shoulder, and a fire burning in my soul.

  I caught up with Adam in the hallway just as Chloe was about to throw an arm around him. I ran interference without explanation. Adam looked amused and told her he’d see her later, but the smile disappeared when he looked at me.

  “Where were you? What happened to your face?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Alone.”

  He looked down the hallway, then at his feet, then back at me. “You want to get together this weekend?”

  “No. Today.”

  “Today. Okay. I’ll, uh, stop by after rehearsal.”

  I nodded and turned to walk away.

  “Nate?”

  I turned back.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  I glanced around at the crowd flowing around the island that had become us. Familiar faces, unfamiliar faces, happy, not happy, indifferent. We’d been tap dancing around the issue of us for over two weeks now, and I was sick of it.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why don’t you know what to do?” I demanded.

  He winced slightly as he closed the car door. Then he grabbed my chin. His thumb pressed lightly but p
ainfully on the bruise on my jaw. “What happened?”

  “Andrew Cargill happened. He hit me because I tripped him in basketball because he’s a fucking asshole and I’ve been too much of a fucking coward to stand up to him or anybody else and I’m fucking sick of it. I might as well have wound that extension cord around Jake Winfield’s neck myself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He tried to kill himself, Adam, Jake Winfield, this kid in my PE class. He tried to kill himself because he couldn’t take it anymore, because I never did anything to stop them. They tormented him every day, every fucking day. And I’m as much to blame as they are because I let it happen. Just like I let my dad fuck with me for so many years.”

  He pressed his lips together and didn’t try to tell me it wasn’t my fault.

  I slammed my fist into the side of his car and blinked back the stupid tears that were screwing up my vision. I sniffed.

  “This isn’t really about Jake or your dad is it?”

  “Do you want me or not? And if you say not, I am going to fucking lose it because I haven’t been able to think about anything but you for weeks and I can’t even look at you anymore without wanting to touch you and I’m so afraid I’m going to do it and you’re just going to walk away.”

  He studied me for a moment. “I won’t walk away.”

  “Somebody here has to know what the fuck to do.” I was on the verge of really letting loose the tears and I didn’t give a damn.

  Adam took a step closer. “Nate, I won’t walk away.”

  Chapter 19

  August 25

  And he hadn’t. Not then, not in those terrible months following my assault, and not now. I just had to keep reminding myself of that. And despite all the resentment I felt over his new life, I wanted to make him proud of me.

  Maybe that’s why I was wearing the T-shirt.

  Dress code violations had to be pretty blatant before anyone was called out. I think in part that’s because the line between acceptable and unacceptable had become so fuzzy that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Ms. Clark in Calculus hardly looked at us first period. Second period, Mr. Lambert, Music Theory, actually grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. Judging from his appearance, I guessed we were kindred spirits. Not that he looked gay. He just looked like some Woodstock throwback, someone who might march on Washington, DC, carrying a protest sign, or walk in a Gay Pride parade wearing a loin cloth just because he could. Ms. Waxley, third-period English—not so much.

  She stopped me before I’d gotten both feet in the door. “Mr... . ?”

  “Schaper,” I supplied.

  “Mr. Schaper,” she said, “go to the restroom and turn that shirt inside out, please.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s inappropriate for school.”

  “What’s inappropriate about it?”

  She dipped her chin and looked at me with equal parts boredom and irritation. I didn’t budge as other kids jostled past me. “Look,” she continued, a hard edge in her voice now, “I don’t have time to argue with you. I have a class to get started. You can either do this on your own, or I can write an office referral and you can take this up with an assistant principal.”

  “Let me know when you have that referral ready,” I said and took a seat.

  Mr. Wolf slumped back in his chair. He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, tapping a pencil lightly against the arm of his chair. He studied my shirt and my defiant posture. His eyes paused on the tattoo on my forearm. We had faced each other across his desk before, and I could tell from his hesitation that my history gave him reason to be more flexible with me than he might have been with another student.

  “I saw some of your interviews this summer,” he said finally.

  I nodded.

  “I thought you handled yourself well. Your mom is really proud of you.”

  Mom? “You’ve been talking to my mom?”

  “I’ve kept in touch.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I knew that Mr. Wolf had given a statement to the police after my assault. And he’d been in the courtroom for the trial. Just how much had they talked?

  “That took a lot of guts to get out there and tell your story like that.”

  I shrugged.

  He sighed audibly and sat up. “We could have worked with this, Nate, if you hadn’t gone and pissed off Ms. Waxley.” He held up the referral. Waxley’s anger showed in the little tears on the triplicate form where her pen and her anger had gotten the better of the thin paper. It was a written and visual complaint, I thought. Poetic. Kind of like a concrete poem, but where meaning was added not with shape but with indentations and gouges and tears. I was actually starting to admire Ms. Waxley.

  “There’s nothing inappropriate about my shirt,” I said, coming back to the issue. “Saying there’s something wrong with it is like saying there’s something wrong with me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He slipped a sheet of paper from a vertical file on his desk and cleared his throat. “The following are some of the highlights of the dress code,” he read in a weary voice. “ ‘Any form of dress or hairstyle that the principal or his designee deems to be disruptive to the educational process, a health or safety hazard, or inappropriate in any way will not be allowed.’ ”

  “So which is it? Is my shirt disrupting the educational process?” I raised my eyebrows. “Or maybe it’s a safety hazard. It that it?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because if I don’t, who will?”

  “Don’t make a big deal out of this, Nate. Turn it inside out. Go enjoy your senior year.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I cite you for defiance and you spend the day in ISS.”

  “Ooooooo.” I knew I was walking a thin line now. In-school Suspension? On the first day of school? He’d thrown down the gauntlet, so to speak. I considered it for a moment, then yanked my shirt over my head, pulling it inside out as I did, and slipped it back on.

  “Am I safe for school now?” I smiled sarcastically.

  He laughed. “I don’t know if this school is ever going to be safe as long as you’re a student here.” He studied me for a moment, then took another deep breath and let it out before continuing. “But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.” He stood up and leaned over his desk. “Let me see the arm.”

  He read the tattoo out loud. “Fear is temporary. Regret is forever.” He mused over it for a moment, then asked, “When did you get it?”

  “Friday. It was a birthday present from Adam.”

  “Keeping it clean? Keeping lotion on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Looks like it’s healing nicely.” He dropped back into his chair and sighed again, then tipped his chin toward the door. “Get back to class.”

  “You’re not going to make me cover it up?”

  “Just don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?”

  He stopped me again as I was leaving. “Nate.”

  I looked back.

  “This isn’t over, is it?”

  I smiled and left. I’d come too far to back down now.

  On Wednesday I found a brown lunch bag secured to my locker with piece of masking tape. I peeled it off.

  “What’s that?” Juliet asked.

  I shrugged, stuck my hand in, and pulled out a soft, gray T-shirt. I shook out the shirt to read the slogan. I grinned as I turned it around for Juliet to see.

  “ ‘I can’t even think straight,’ ” she read. She looked up at me, her mouth agape. “Who put that there?”

  I looked inside the bag and all around it for some clue, but there was none. “I have no idea.”

  I handed Juliet the shirt and let my backpack slip to the floor.

  “Nooo.” She laughed as I tugged my T-shirt over my head to a few wolf whistles and shoved it in my locker. Juliet stared. “Damn, Nate. That’s better than a triple-shot latte for getting the old heart started in the morning.”


  I grinned and pulled the gray T-shirt over my head.

  “You are a troublemaker, Nate Schaper.”

  By lunch I was back to wearing my T-shirt inside out. After that, more T-shirts started showing up anonymously on my doorstep, in the mail, again on my locker, under the wiper on my windshield. They said things like Your gaydar should be going off right about now and Yes, I am and Ask. Tell. One of my favorites was I see gay people. I wore a different shirt to school each day, except for the one that read The rumor’s right. But, unless I’m fucking you, it’s none of your business. I thought that might be pushing Mr. Wolf too far.

  It became a game. I’d usually get through second period before someone (Waxley) sent me to Mr. Wolf’s office to turn it inside out. I could have gone to the boys’ room, but I liked seeing Mr. Wolf fight back the smiles. After the first week, Ms. Waxley didn’t even bother with the office referral. I just checked in with her then headed to the administrators’ area. The day we had a substitute third period, I got to wear my HOMO shirt (the O’s were actually pink hearts) all the way through lunch before some overzealous teacher caught me in the hallway.

  The next week, a few kids showed up at school with their shirts turned inside out.

  September 12

  Friday afternoon I leaned back in my chair, laptop balanced on my lap, and stared at the screen. It had been almost three weeks since Danial had helped me set up the blog, and still I had no idea what I wanted to write about. A pop-up in the lower right corner of the screen alerted me that Adam had just logged on to his computer. Things were better between us. I liked to think it was because things had changed in the apartment, that Adam had given his roommates (Justin) the what for. But the idea that he was just more careful stilled nagged at the back of my mind. I shook it off. I was eager to talk to him, to hear his voice, to see his face. I Skyped him and smiled as his image appeared on the screen. The apartment behind him was quiet.