by John Goode
Readers love the Tales from Foster High series by JOHN GOODE
Tales from Foster High
“This story was awesome. You could really get behind the feelings these young men had for each other and their lives in their small Texas community.”
—Mrs. Condit & Friends Read Books
“Brilliant. A truly phenomenal piece that took me right back to the halls of my youth, and made me remember the reality of what it was like.”
—Rainbow Book Reviews
End of the Innocence
“John Goode writes one hell of a book. His way with words is just almost sensual. He weaves not just a story, but threads that seem to wrap around your entire being.”
—Gay Romance Writer
“It is easily one of the most outstanding examples of realistic Young Adult fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.”
—The Novel Approach
“You have to read this novel. Its twist and turns will leave you wanting more.”
—MM Good Book Reviews
151 Days
“This book and this series is important to read to really understand what some kids are going through in high school.”
—Hearts on Fire
By JOHN GOODE
First Time for Everything (anthology)
Going the Distance
LORDS OF ARCADIA
Distant Rumblings
Eye of the Storm
The Unseen Tempest
TALES FROM FOSTER HIGH
Tales from Foster High • To Wish for Impossible Things
End of the Innocence • Dear God
151 Days
Published by HARMONY INK PRESS
http://harmonyinkpress.com
COPYRIGHT
Published by
HARMONY INK PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
[email protected] • http://harmonyinkpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Going the Distance
© 2014 John Goode.
Cover Art
© 2014 Paul Richmond.
www.paulrichmondstudio.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-63216-619-7
Library Edition ISBN: 978-1-63216-620-3
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-621-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949324
First Edition November 2014
Library Edition February 2015
Printed in the United States of America
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
This is dedicated to every single gay athlete who played even though they knew their teammates might not accept them.
CHAPTER ONE:
TIP-OFF
MY NAME is Daniel Devin Monroe, and I’m eighteen years old.
I was born on January 24 in the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton to John and Mary Monroe, who had been married for only six months at the time. My dad was a newly minted PFC fresh out of boot and spent exactly three days with me as an infant before being shipped out. Later that month Mom and I joined him at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii, where we lived until I was five years old and she was killed.
A drunk driver blindsided her on her way back from the store just outside of base. I was being watched by family friends on base and had no idea what had happened until a chaplain came to collect me. My father was deployed when it happened, and it took the brass almost a week to get him back home. Neither of them had any relatives living nearby, so I stayed with a family on base. It was the longest week of my life. I was pretty sure my parents had given me back. I cried, screamed, begged the people watching me to tell Mommy and Daddy that I would do better if they gave me another chance. No one wanted to be the guy who told a kid his mom was dead, so instead they kept trying to reassure me that I hadn’t done anything wrong.
To this day I walk around feeling like I have done something wrong even when I haven’t.
I can vaguely remember my dad standing there in his uniform, sobbing violently as they gave him the details of what had happened. Up to that moment I’d had no clue how bad the situation was. I thought Mommy had gone to Daddy and they were leaving me forever. Seeing him break down was the instant I knew our life as it had been was over. That might seem like a very complex thought for a five-year-old, but little kids see and understand more than a lot of adults think. I knew that Mommy was gone and she wasn’t coming back.
After that I don’t remember much besides an endless stream of covered dishes from the other families on base and the nights lying awake in my bed hearing my dad cry in the next room. I didn’t know it at the time, but my dad’s life was crashing around him also. He was the sole caretaker of a child he barely knew. I never asked him if he had the desire to send me off somewhere else to live. I knew he had a sister he never talked to, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have options. I never asked him because I was always afraid of the answer. I’m sure he was given the chance to get out of the service, but he didn’t take it. He was twenty-three years old, a widower raising a child on his own, and I figure he didn’t want to add “unemployed” to the words that described him.
We moved around a lot after that. The Marines assigned him to mercy billets, which were postings in CONUS—Contiguous United States, meaning the lower forty-eight—he could fill while raising me. We never stayed anywhere more than a year and a half. The only housing I knew was on base. I grew up with a high and tight and an oversized USMC sweatshirt on wherever I went. I was a base brat in a bad way, and it never occurred to me that people lived any differently than I did.
When I was ten, Dad sat me down and explained that we had a chance to transfer to Germany for an actual posting. The Marine Corps had been more than patient with him, and he repaid them with what would become a willing lifetime service commitment. Five years was a long time to not have a steady post, and at ten I was more than old enough to weather an overseas billet. My dad was now an MP, and there was a posting in Stuttgart he could take, providing I was okay with it. I didn’t understand at the time what going overseas meant or why he was asking me for the first time if I wanted to go somewhere. I simply agreed, thinking being in Germany meant another base school I wouldn’t like in a new place I’d never see.
I have never been so wrong about something before or since.
The thing about military bases is that they have a consistency that is comforting to a young child in ways an adult can’t understand. I never learned the difference between Oklahoma and Virginia, since the bases in each state looked exactly the same to me. The same steel gray tones coupled with the overwhelming sense of order made me oblivious to the concept that one place c
ould be different from another. So when I stepped off the plane in Germany and was, for the first time in my ten years of life, confronted with something new and not the same as everything else, I did what any world-wise child would do.
I threw a fit and screamed, begging to go home.
The sad part was, I had no idea where home was. Home was a series of half a dozen names sprinkled across the country. Home was the identical four walls that made up my bedroom in each place. I was a military gypsy and was crying for a place that didn’t exist. I couldn’t verbalize to my father what I wanted. I’m sure he knew he was screwed. He had committed himself to the posting, and there were no other options. The Marines had given him more than enough leeway, and now it was his time to pay them back. The feelings of a ten-year-old had no impact whatsoever in their feelings, and he’d known me long enough by then to deal with me as best he could. In Germany.
On the other hand, I felt my dad was unfair, a jerk, and doing this just to make my life miserable. I hated the base, the school, the other kids who lived there, everything. My level of loathing knew no bounds. As time passed the loathing just increased. The first month sucked, since my dad had an inordinate amount of training and paperwork to complete in order to be brought up to speed with his assignment, which meant the horrible place with nothing on TV was made even worse by the fact I had to suffer it alone.
I hated the people who lived there, and I hated the weird language they spoke. I hated the different uniforms people wore on base, and I hated that we had to learn different things in school. I had gone from being an average student to the slow guy overnight when I found the difference between US-based schools and German schools to be devastating. I didn’t want to learn about Europe or Germany or anything new. I hated it more and more and blamed my dad for landing us in Stuttgart. I became surly, mouthing off to teachers, refusing to do schoolwork, generally being a spoiled fucking brat of the highest order. I say that now, looking back at how impossibly hard it must have been for my dad. He spent a twelve-hour shift in a new place with different regulations and a different culture and then came home to me and my problems. Me not liking the school and hating the language and not having good TV programs must have seemed petty to him.
If anyone knew life was not fair, it was my dad. He had been cheated out of a lifetime with my mother because one idiot asked for another round before leaving the bar that night. He had been forced not only to be a Marine but to be a single parent as well, and there was nothing he could do about it. My father knew very well life was not fair, and hearing the fact proclaimed loudly and often by a child who had no concept of what unfair meant must have been excruciating.
Around then we started fighting.
We had always gotten along before, and this was new territory for us. I had done what he said without complaint, and he had never felt the need to raise his voice at me. In Germany, things changed. I hated him for stranding me there, and he hated me for blaming him. Every night we would end up in a screaming match that more times than not included something getting thrown at a wall or the floor in anger and/or frustration. Things devolved into not talking at all, which didn’t make the feelings subside, of course. I began to wander around the base instead of going home after school, hoping in vain to find some part of this alien world that might seem normal even for a little while.
That was when I met them.
To say they were cool kids would be an insult to people who are truly cool. They were simply other kids. They were older than me, which meant they were automatically better in every way. A few belonged to the civilians who worked on base; others were fellow military brats who hated Stuttgart too. They had longer hair, cursed, and smoked constantly, which was a trifecta of epic to me. They hung out near the bowling alley just outside the base perimeter, their frayed jeans cuffs rolled up while they tried desperately to look apathetic about everything. I was tall for my age; in fact I was a freak for any age. At eleven I was almost six feet tall and looked like an oversized puppy with huge ears and feet I constantly tripped over. I was horribly skinny in a really noncool way. I was all elbows and ribs and no matter how much I ate, I only grew taller and stayed scrawny.
I’m not sure if they knew how young I really was and didn’t care, or if they had mistaken me for their age, but either way they accepted me into their little group. I pretended to smoke by dangling a cigarette out of my mouth and made “fuck” every other word in my sentences to be like them. They seemed to think I was funny as hell. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t. He forbade me to hang out with them, but because he was on duty for half the day, he had no way to keep an eye on me.
As we approached the end of our first year in Stuttgart, I had learned to inhale properly and knew every word you could never say on television plus a few that wouldn’t even make it into movies. We were a pack of rabid dogs thinking we were wolves wandering the base at dusk. We had no money, no vehicle, and no idea what to do.
I don’t know if you know the formula for figuring how stupid a group of teenage boys is, so let me share it with you. Take the average IQ, which is going to be abnormally low because of hormones, and then begin to divide that by each additional boy present. So basically the more boys in a group, the dumber we become, and let me tell you, we were pretty stupid to begin with. The leader was Joshua, and I thought he was the shit. He had this rat tail that screamed rebellion, along with a set of prepubescent biceps that to an eleven-year-old looked like massive guns. I followed him around like I had a crush on him. And, I was beginning to realize, that wasn’t too far off the mark.
Nothing was more sacred on a Marine base than a girl, a Marine’s daughter doubly so. If you want to see how dangerous a Marine can be, just look at his daughter. I mean it. Don’t flirt or even talk—just glance over at her. I assure you it will be the last thing you ever see before he kills you, most likely with his thumbs. So I never had a chance to interact with the opposite sex, and to be honest I never felt the need to. I grew up around men and liked their company. It wasn’t until that summer that I realized how much I liked it. Joshua was my first clue. In my eyes, he could do no wrong. The others laughed off the way I followed him around and called it hero worship, but I think he knew better. He was always grabbing my head and giving me noogies that lasted too long and never seemed to hurt like the ones the other guys gave me did. We spent a lot of time at his parents’ place playing video games, sharing a chair that barely fit the two of us.
It was cramped, but we never complained; in fact, we seemed to relish the contact.
My father, realizing that nothing short of sending me stateside would get me away from the guys, gave up trying to convince me to stay away and instead kept as careful a watch as he could on us. That is to say he wasn’t able to watch us at all. When my dad was on duty, Joshua and I would go to my place, and we’d sit in front of the television and watch the weird TV shows as long as we could until boredom kicked in. Eventually he’d launch a sneak attack that I had spent all afternoon waiting for and wrestle me to the ground. There was no point in struggling, since he was obviously stronger than I was, but it never seemed to be about who would win but about the contact.
We both spent more time grinding against each other than trying to get free, and on some level we both knew it. At first he spent a long time watching to see if I would protest or say something about it later. When I didn’t, the pretense that we were wrestling went away. He’d hold me down as he lay over me, pushing his jeans against mine. I didn’t understand what we were doing, but it felt good, and that was enough for me. I guess you can say I fell in love with Joshua that summer, even though I didn’t have words for it. He was everything I wanted to be. But what I was feeling was more than that, and it confused the hell out of me. Again I assumed everyone felt this way, but Joshua didn’t talk about what we did and pretty much treated me like he always had when we were with the other boys; I figured that was the way older kids handled the subject.
When I spent the n
ight, I would make up a bed on the floor and wait until the lights were out and his parents had forgotten about us before climbing into his bed. Things were different at night under the covers in just our boxers. What was a physical struggle became something else as we held each other, feeling the heat come off our bodies. I had never felt like this, and for the first time since we moved there, I began to find something to like about it. He would whisper to me in the night, secret things that no one else knew, and I loved it. About how much he liked me and was glad we were friends. He seemed to marvel at the fact I was taller than him, and in fact almost as tall as his dad, yet younger then he was. He was also the first person to inform me that everything about my body was larger than normal.
Since my dad and I rarely talked about anything personal, I had never even thought that anything on my body might be above normal. I cursed my height, since it did nothing to benefit me and only served to make my life worse than it was. I couldn’t run without tripping, I was always noticed by strangers passing by, and buying clothes was embarrassing, since I could never shop in the kids’ section. But there, in the safety of the night, Joshua told me my size was not only good but, when it came to my dick, incredible. It was impossible to hide anything in my boxers normally; when I was hard, I might as well have been naked. He seemed to get great pleasure from rubbing me through the sheer material, and I know I loved it.
I wonder what my life would be like if his dad had never walked in on us that night. Would I have learned to like Germany? Would I have calmed down some and begun to forgive my dad? Would I have realized the crush I had on Joshua wasn’t normal and that, therefore, I wasn’t normal? Would I have known to keep that information from my dad as long as possible, therefore avoiding the eventual blowup for a while longer?
It didn’t matter, because when Joshua’s dad walked in on us, my world came crashing down around me again.