by John Goode
I had never once in my life ever respected any adult. My mother was my daily reminder that behind all of their talk and bluster, adults were just taller assholes who could drive.
Kelly saw me turn toward him and, the second before I swung my fist into his balls, tried to get free of Adler’s grip. I had never thrown a real punch before, but I had been on the receiving end of more than enough blows to know how to hurt someone. Operating on pure instinct, he jumped back, trying to avoid as much of my hand’s impact as he could. Kelly’s legs propelled him back into the assistant principal, who hadn’t even been aware that I had taken a swing. The two of them fell back in a tangle of screams and cursing.
It took everything I had not to jump on Kelly when he was prone and keep whaling on him. My mind refused to recognize what we were doing as a scuffle or even a fight. Kelly wasn’t just another guy who was picking on me; he wasn’t just a homophobic douche who would not let up on me. Kelly had become more than just one person; he was the symbol of everything that was menacing in my life. He was a dragon, and I was done waiting for someone to slay him to protect me.
I’d do it myself.
“Touch me again and I swear to you I’ll kill you,” I snarled as Kelly rocked back and forth on the floor, his hands cupping his aching testicles. I’m not sure if he heard what I was saying, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t saying it for his benefit. “I don’t care who you are; leave me the fuck alone!”
I looked up in time to see someone hold their cell up and snap a picture. The flash made me blink a few times as I tried to clear my eyes. The faces of the people in the office were burnt into my mind in that split second. The look of abject horror and shock on every single one of them stopped me cold in my tracks. I knew that look; I knew it well. I’d seen it too many times in my life, but never once had it been directed at me.
They were looking at me like I was the monster.
Me? I wasn’t the monster, he was. I was the hero; I was the knight who had put this ogre in his place and….
I looked down and saw Kelly still gripping his crotch, his eyes closed in obvious agony. And here I was, standing over him, screaming at him. The same way he had been in the quad.
“But I’m the hero,” I muttered as one of the many adults who had come rushing at the sound of a fight clamped a hand down on my shoulder and led me away. This wasn’t the way the story was supposed to go. I thought the hero was rewarded after he slew the dragon.
I was tossed into an empty office. I think it might have belonged to a guidance counselor. A dilapidated poster of a pissed-off cat hanging onto a rope telling me to Hang In There looked like it might be older than I was.
I always felt sorry for the people who actually trained to do guidance counseling. Trying to inspire a generation of, at best, apathetic teenagers who weren’t able to conceive of life past the end of the current week, much less college, had to be a lot like running full-tilt at a wall and hoping you would somehow pass through it instead of slamming into it. No one cared less about the future than a high school student. The future had no bearing at all on the all-important now. Nothing was more important to us than now, and right now, I was screwed.
The only silver lining of this very, very dark cloud was that between being told I had been late for school and that I had teed off on a guy’s junk while he was being held by the assistant principal, the tardy thing would be a distant second in my mother’s mind. I had no idea what had gone wrong in my life. Exactly one week ago, I had been a faceless nobody wandering the hall; now I was going to be the guy who punched Kelly Aires in the balls.
Shortly after that, I’d be known as the guy who got killed by his mom.
Twenty minutes later, one of the principals walked in. His face showed that this was far too early in the day to be dealing with something as serious as two students fighting. He had a file in his hand, and before addressing me, he had to look down and check my name. “Kyle, can you tell me what happened?”
I said nothing. I was pretty sure of my rights, and though it was highly dubious that I was going to get read my Miranda rights for a high school scuffle, I held my ground nonetheless.
If he had been expecting an answer, he didn’t give any indication as he kept flipping pages. “Kelly is the same boy you had a problem in the quad earlier this week, isn’t he?” Again, the Geneva Convention stated… okay, I had no idea what was in the actual Geneva Convention. For all I knew, Geneva had been the site of a gathering of foreign chocolate tycoons and had nothing to do with actual prisoner rights, but at least I knew that it was a thing. I would have given my name, rank, and serial number if I had possessed them. I was fairly certain that saying “Kyle, complete loser” followed by my school ID would have confused the man. So I sat and said nothing.
“Look, Kyle,” he said, sighing as he closed the file. “You seem like a good kid. Great grades, no tardies or absents; before this week, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in here. When something like this happens, it can be the start of a pattern. Things like fights and arguments out of nowhere are usually cries for help. Is that what is happening here?”
I looked up at him, acknowledging him for the first time since he had entered the room. He paused when he saw my reaction. “Why?” I asked with absolutely no emotion in my voice whatsoever.
“Why what?” he asked, confused by the query.
“Why would you care if it was a cry for help?” I clarified.
His voice gave off a pleasing, concerned tone, and he said, “Because we want to help.”
“Okay,” I said, frankly not caring anymore about anything. “My mother is a drunk, she is rarely home, and when she is, I’m terrified of what I might say or do to set her off. I think I’m gay and may have fallen in love with a guy who can in no possible way love me back. And I’m pretty sure that Kelly and I are on a collision course that is going to end with one of us killing the other. And we both know who is going to win that fight. So please, help me.”
His face had gone pale as the exact toll of everything I had just rattled off sank in.
“Can you get me a new mom? Can you sober her up? Can you make me straight? Can you make him gay? Can you stop Kelly before he kills me?”
He shook his head no slowly; I’m sure he didn’t even know he was doing it consciously.
“See, this is the problem with cries for help. Even if people hear them, they can’t do a damn thing about them.”
We sat there, him stunned into silence as he came to the realization that teenage problems might not be as easy to face and resolve as he had once believed and me lamenting that even with the confession, my life was still in the same, completely shitty place it had been before. “Can I go back to class, or am I suspended?”
He didn’t say anything for several seconds, and then he realized I had asked a question he could answer. “We can’t get ahold of your mother. Do you feel up to finishing the day?”
I grabbed my backpack and leveled him with a look. “No. But when has that changed anything?”
He didn’t stop me as I walked out.
I’m not sure if the word had traveled by some form of telepathy or just insanely rapid texting, but by the time I walked into third period, everyone knew what had gone down. They all stared at me, whispering as if I was Edward Cullen, except not as tall and nowhere near as handsome. Also, I didn't have diamond skin or weird yellow eyes. I realized quickly I didn’t like my newfound celebrity at all. I didn’t want to be stared at, and I certainly didn’t like being talked about. The worst part was that their buzzing was just below my threshold of hearing. I caught my name, Kelly’s, once even Brad’s, but anything else drowned itself out into the repetitious droning that made me think of grown-ups talking in the Peanuts cartoons.
By the time lunch rolled around, I was in an even worse mood than I had been when I had arrived to school. I dreaded stepping foot into the quad. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to see less, Kelly or Brad. I opted to just stay away from people altogethe
r and eat my lunch by the backstops of the baseball field. There was never anyone there outside of gym and practice, and that suited me just fine. Once in a while, I saw a lone straggler make the trek past me to the woods, but no one saw me. That worked for me.
I took a bite of my tasteless sandwich and tried to count how many days I had left before I was out of high school.
“You sure don’t make it easy for a guy to find you,” Brad said, poking his head around the corner of my backstop.
I felt my throat constrict in panic, and I began coughing violently as I tried to swallow. He rushed over to me and began patting me on the back, which never seemed to do anything for anyone but which was the physical action of choice when one was choking. “Hey, come on,” he said, pulling a can of Pepsi out of his jacket pocket. “Here, take a drink,” he said, popping the top open before handing it over.
I took a greedy gulp and felt the lump of food go down and air return to my lungs.
I coughed a few times as I handed the can back to him. “Thanks.”
He shook his head and pulled another out of the opposite pocket. “That one is yours, keep it.”
I tried not to marvel at the fact he had bought an extra one for me and concentrated on the fact that he had left me high and dry this morning. I took another drink as we sat there, staring out across the field in silence. “So you had a day,” he said casually.
I glanced over at him for a second to see if he was making a lame attempt at a joke or if he was actually asking me a question. The way the afternoon light hit his skin and shone on his face was distracting, so I looked away quickly. “One way of putting it.”
“Was the fight about me?” he asked, still not looking over at me.
I sighed, knowing it had been and yet knowing it had nothing to do with him at the same time. “No. Kelly just pissed me off,” I said, taking another bite.
“You pissed at me?”
I looked over at him. “Why shouldn’t I be?” I said so bitterly that he finally stared directly at me. “Do you know how long I waited for you to show up?” I forced the stinging in my eyes away. I wasn’t going to be a whiny little bitch. I refused to collapse into myself under the crushing weight of self-pity. “Do you know how that made me feel?”
He looked down as he saw the raw pain in my eyes. He must have known that most of it had been caused by him. “I know, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding more like a sad child than a teenage jock.
“Where were you?” I implored, wishing I could keep the pain out of my voice.
“Jennifer called and needed a ride and I—and I just—” He put his head between his hands as his words disintegrated into murmuring.
“Look, Brad, I didn’t ask you to pick me up; that was your idea. I didn’t ask you to kiss me; that was you. And I didn’t ask to be put into a situation where you were going to push me to the ground out of sight every time someone walked by. I am not going to sit here and be treated like an embarrassment by you. It was nice knowing you. I hope you find what you’re looking for,” I said as I tossed my bag into the trash and got up to leave.
“And if what I was looking for was you?” he asked.
I paused as I saw the naked emotion on his face and knew it was reflected on my own. But I was done running at that football only to have it pulled away at the last second. “Well, congratulations. You found me,” I said miserably.
He said nothing as I walked away.
I had almost made it to the door nearest my locker when Kelly spotted me from across the quad. He was obviously sick of having to explain his side of the story to every person who walked up and asked him. Punching Kelly was an act of either incredible bravery or plain stupidity. Either way, I had no proper response for people’s questions. From the viewpoint of Kelly’s friends and teammates, him being hit by me was a different story. For that news, there was only one reaction that seemed proper: laughing out loud combined with a huge amount of pointing.
So when he saw me trying to skulk away, he knew he was being given one chance to change the story once and for all. “Hey!” he screamed as he made a beeline toward me. “Where you running to, fag?” he added.
I stopped and turned to him.
He had brought a crowd, of course. There was no way anyone was going to miss what people sensed was coming next. Normally people paid good money to see a fight like this on pay-per-view. To find it free in your own backyard, well, that was just too tempting.
I should have been scared; I should have been terrified by the attention. Half the school was staring at me, every person waiting for me to get my ass kicked. But I wasn’t—not scared, not terrified. I’d had enough, and to be honest, I wasn’t talking about Kelly or Brad. I’d had enough of running away from my life, of holding my breath waiting for things to get better by themselves.
We are told in fairy tales that evil always loses and good eventually will triumph. That is what makes those stories so desirable to the general population. They want to believe that karma works and the bad guys are always defeated in the end. But in a world where no one thinks they are the bad guy and everyone plays the victim, it is harder and harder to find the black and the white of a situation. We are all the hero, and we are all the monster.
It just depends on which way you look at it.
Kelly started off by pushing me, which, as first moves go, has been a steadfast classic for boys since the second grade. I didn’t go flying back; I didn’t cry out from the impact. I braced myself and pushed him back as hard as I could. His eyes widened as he realized I wasn’t going to beg for mercy in front of everyone.
What Kelly didn’t see was that I was no longer just standing up to him and his actions of the past few days. In my mind, this wasn’t about him and me and what we had done to each other. This was about a life spent in fear. A fear of people finding out who and what I really was. A fear that if I ever exposed who I really was, I would be shunned and hated for it. A fear that my mom would beat me up because she suspected who I was.
But honestly, how was that any different from the way I was already living my life?
I was alone, friendless, and generally considered odd by the few people who even realized I existed, so what did it matter if they found out? I was done running—from being gay, from my mom, from myself.
I was the hero of this story, and it was damn time I started acting like I was.
“So you think you’re a tough guy now?” Kelly sneered, jabbing another finger against my chest to make his point.
I slapped his finger away and took a half step toward him. “I didn’t start this, Kelly,” I said in a calm voice. “But if you think I’m afraid of you, you’re nuts.”
He jumped at me suddenly, and I jerked back, realizing too late he was only trying to get a reaction out of me. He laughed, and everyone echoed him. “You seem pretty scared to me there, fairy.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” I roared back, the words clawing up from deep inside me.
Kelly flinched and brought his fists up to defend his face automatically.
“What did I do to you, Kelly? What have I ever done to you?”
“Queers like you make me sick,” he said, almost spitting.
“Why is that? Why do you care about what I am, Kelly?” I countered.
His eyes narrowed. “You saying you’re queer?” He looked around him. “Did you hear that? He admitted it!”
“So what if I am?” I said, not caring anymore. “How does that affect you?”
His expression froze as he realized I wasn’t going to argue with him about my sexuality. And I understood suddenly that mocking my sexuality was the only club in his bag.
“I mean, seriously, Kelly? Why would you care about what I do or don’t do? Are you so messed up that just having someone different around you is a threat? Are you that scared about catching the gay that your only answer is to start hitting people?”
There were a few chuckles from the crowd as it started to turn on Kelly.
> “I don’t give a damn what you do,” he shot back.
“Then why are you always in my face about it? I mean, come on, Kelly, what have I ever done to you?”
He sputtered as he tried to rattle off something, but I didn’t give him a chance.
“People are different, you douche bag. Every single one of us likes what we like, and no one ever asked you for permission.” There were a couple of shouted “Yeah!”s from the back of the crowd, and I felt emboldened. “I don’t care if you like me or not, Kelly. And I don’t care if you like the way I live my life or not. But I am not going to run scared every time you feel threatened by my sexuality. Real men aren’t scared of things like that.”
“You saying I’m not a real man?” Kelly growled, and I realized I was about to get punched.
“I’m saying you aren’t a real man,” Brad said from the side, grabbing everyone’s attention instantly.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said to him quietly, trying to give him a way out.
“Yes, I do,” he said to me solemnly.
“What is your problem anyways, dude?” Brad asked as he strode toward Kelly. “You think anyone who likes guys is a girly guy? Some kind of fag that you can just beat down whenever you want?”
Kelly laughed. “You calling that a real man?” he said, pointing at me.
Brad looked back at me and smiled. “I think he’s the only real man here right now.” And then he turned back to Kelly. “He is standing here, unafraid, backing up who he is and what he believes in. If that don’t make him a man, I’m not sure what does.”
“Slobbering on some guy’s knob sure doesn’t,” Kelly answered.
“Why, Kelly?” Brad asked, pausing for effect. “When we were in junior high, you slobbered on my knob at football camp pretty well, if I recall.”
There was an explosion of stunned gasps and laughter as Kelly’s face turned dark red. “Bullshit! You can’t prove that!”