by John Goode
“I don’t know, Kyle,” I snapped out of nowhere. “I don’t have any fucking answers.” His face paled in amazement, and I shook my head, trying to calm down. “I’m just not in a good mood. I’m sorry.”
The waitress came back and put our plates on the table in front of us. There had never, in the history of awkward conversations, been a more fortuitous arrival of food, ever. “You boys need anything else?” she asked.
A time machine and a gun?
“We’re good, thanks,” I said, giving her another reassuring smile.
“Holler if y’all need anything,” she said, walking away.
I began to scoop food into my mouth, hoping that the meal would stave off any more verbal missteps on my part. He paused for a long while before he began to eat as well. Skinny or not, he could put some food away, which meant I had bought myself some more time.
Time that was not going to do me any good because I was no closer to figuring out what to do than I had been back at home. My brain was telling me to just end what we’d started, nip it in the bud, crush his spirits in one fell swoop, and try to take back what I had said yesterday. Of course up to this point, the thinking that I’d done had snarled my life into a mess, so what did I know?
A part of me, albeit a small part, knew that standing up next to Kyle was the best thing I’d ever done. The feeling of finally shrugging off this disguise and talking with my own voice for once was refreshing. It was more than refreshing; it was liberating in such a way that it was almost like being drunk. That sounded better to me: I was drunk on emotion, and that was why I’d told the entire school my secret.
Even I didn’t believe that one.
Jennifer had to have done the math as well about where we were heading because she had been talking about the future more and more. What colleges I was thinking about, what scouts might be coming to watch me play, and where their farm teams were located. She never flat out told me that she was already making plans to move when and where I did, but the implication was crystal clear. If baseball was my ticket out of this town, I was Jennifer’s in a big, bad way. Other than complete academic excellence, which Jennifer was never going to pull off, there weren’t many ways for a girl to get out of Foster save fucking a guy and holding on for dear life. Foster and Granada, our rival school, laughed at the concept of women’s sports. I had a better chance of curing cancer than a girl had of getting a sport’s scholarship.
If I fucked up, I wasn’t just consigning myself to a lifetime of getting drunk in the back of a pickup every weekend and working a shitty job in a nowhere town, but I was fucking her future over too.
People thought Jennifer was a bitch, but that was because she was the best-looking girl in town. Once any guy reached the age that he knew what his dick was for, he wanted to get in her pants. Foster is a small town, and girls had it pretty bad because of the double standard as far as sleeping around went. We were good ol’ Texas boys, and people assumed that we’d try to fuck anything that moved. No one ever called us a slut or a whore; they called us healthy boys. But a girl spreads her legs with anyone she hadn’t been dating for a year or was engaged to and she was considered a complete waste of flesh.
I never understood, because who did they think we were supposed to fuck: the cows? For every all-American boy sowing his oats, there was an all-American girl who should have been doing the same; yet one walked away with a pat on the back and a beer and the other was shunned until someone took pity and married her. Jennifer was cold and standoffish, but I couldn’t blame her. After all, in a town full of “delicate Texas roses,” she was considered the best of the best. She had hunted me down as the guy to date when we were both sophomores. I’d like to think it was because I was so damn hot, but I always worried there was a deeper reason she would never guess.
I had almost no interest in trying to fuck her.
I flirted and fooled around because it was expected, but I never felt an overwhelming urge to throw a girl down and screw her to death. Only when I was drunk, and even then it wasn’t the best of experiences, would I find myself horny enough to actually seal the deal. My lack of interest and subdued sex drive were a perfect fit for Jennifer’s needs, and she was the exact thing I had been looking for.
Someone to hide behind.
No one blinked twice when we started to go out. I know it sounds arrogant, but we were the best-looking of our bunch; of course we ended up pairing up. Kelly never said a word, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Even if he’d admitted to sucking my dick, Kelly would have been called a fag and ostracized. Worse, he would have been accused of being a liar, since I was Brad and untouchable. I hated the whole crappy mess so much.
Jennifer and I had never once had to talk about the unspoken rule that said we covered for each other in public. I was always the aloof but faithful boyfriend jock, and she was the pretty and chaste cheerleader. We played our parts. I know at least for me, I hated every second of it. I didn’t hate her, but if I had to choose the kind of person to spend time with, she wouldn’t have been that person. I could never tell if she felt the same way toward me, and every time I thought too hard about it, I got flashes of my mom and dad.
We had finished the bulk of our breakfast and were picking over the carcass trying to extend the silence as long as possible when he sent a shot across my bow.
“We don’t have to do this,” he said softly.
“A little late since I already kissed you in front of everyone?” I asked, pushing my plate away.
From the look on his face, it was the exact wrong thing to say.
“I was talking about today,” he said, all the indecision and doubt evaporating from his voice, revealing the steel underneath.
“Oh,” I said, knowing I had shown my cards too soon.
“Oh?” he said as his voice got louder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means oh,” I fired back. “Sorry, it’s all I got.”
“Really, Brad? ‘Oh’ is all you got?” I shushed him and gestured for him to keep it down.
“I’m sorry, but this isn’t easy for me,” I explained, realizing how crappy that sounded even as I said it.
“Right, ’cause it’s a cake walk for me,” he countered, and I knew he was right and wrong at the same time.
“I just don’t know how to handle this yet,” I elaborated. “I have a lot of things to consider, and it’s just fucking me up.”
“Fine,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “Because I am just a loser who has nothing to worry about, because who cares if I’m gay, right?”
It wasn’t until that moment I realized he might have a lot on his mind too.
“I didn’t mean that, Kyle.” I paused. “What are you doing?”
“Paying for my breakfast,” he said as he thumbed through the obviously empty wallet.
“I got it,” I said.
He began digging through his pockets. “No, it’s okay, Brad.” His voice was like ice. “I don’t want to end up owing you anything.” He slammed his hand down. There was eighty-one cents. “I’ll get the rest to you tomorrow.” He turned to walk out, and I grabbed his arm.
“Come on, please don’t do this,” I pleaded.
He looked at my hand and then to me. “You better let go. You don’t want anyone to think we’re queer.”
I took my hand away as if burned.
“Good-bye,” he said, sounding more defeated than angry.
I didn’t know what was worse, me making him that mad or the fact that I didn’t chase after him. I chalked them both up as equally shitty and waited for the check in silence.
I left a wad of bills and walked out to First Street. Foster isn’t known for its killer traffic, and before lunch, the street lay almost empty. I saw Mr. Parker out in front of his sporting goods store sweeping the sidewalk, and a couple of ladies walked out of the flower shop next to him. Kyle was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t really expecting to see him. I still wasn’t sure if I’d gotten what I wanted w
hen he’d taken off, or whether I had just lost what I needed. Either way, I was alone.
I saw the front doors open to the Vine and Ms. Garner turn on the marquee. If I thought I was the kind of person God would toss a bone to, I’d take it as a sign from up above. Instead I chalked it up to good timing and crossed the street to buy a ticket. Mr. Parker waved at me. I’d practically grown up around his shop, since I played sports as soon as I could walk. He was old but not that old, like thirty or so. I heard he had scored a scholarship for football when he had gone to Foster but blew his knee out after a couple of years and moved back into town. Being forced to come home had made my dad a bitter, twisted guy, but it hadn’t seemed to affect Mr. Parker in a negative way at all. He was still in great shape and pretty much the most eligible bachelor in town as far as the older ladies were concerned. I waved back, wondering what he’d do if he knew who I really was. Would he be so quick to wave, or would he have scowled and gone back inside, ignoring me?
“By yourself today?” Ms. Garner asked as she took my money.
“For the foreseeable future,” I mumbled, jamming my hands in my pockets as I walked into the theater. As I walked down the aisle, I realized I didn’t even know what was playing. I fell into a seat near the front, not really caring about watching the movie.
I should have gone after Kyle, but what was I supposed to say? I didn’t have any answers and, to be honest, he was better off without me. No one would give him a hard time if he was by himself. He wasn’t worth the time and effort to mock for most people. No one really knew who he was, so at the end of the day there was no profit in tearing him apart. I was the better choice, the one people would get a thrill tearing down. I was the one who had been the most popular jock at Foster, and that meant I had farther to fall than he did. Besides, if he was with me, people would attack him just out of spite. Kyle didn’t deserve that. He hadn’t done anything to these people like I had.
My karma had come around, and he shouldn’t have to pay because I’d been a dick.
The lights went out, and the trailers started. I settled in, wondering if I could catch a nap during the movies, which would be a place to hide until after school let out. I could miss one practice. Everyone would tell the coach I had been absent all day. I’d be golden until Monday. What I’d say Monday, I had no idea. I was barely keeping five minutes ahead of myself, let alone two days.
I needed to stop and think, regroup and figure out what I was going to do. Alone in the darkness of the theater, it was easy to say. I wanted to be with Kyle desperately. I wasn’t sure if that was even possible in Foster, but it was what I wanted. Wanted it enough to be mocked at school—but then the thought of what my dad would say made me sick to my stomach all over again.
When I was little, things seemed simple. I’d fuck up, and he’d hit me. My mom was too emotional to handle discipline, and looking back at it I always thought she never wanted to be the bad guy with me since she needed an ally as she waged her emotional Vietnam against my dad. When I screwed up as a kid, and I screwed up a lot, discipline always fell on him.
It started out as spanking, first over his lap with his hand, and later graduating up to a belt. The humiliation made me cry more than the actual blows. I can’t imagine what being forced to have sex is like, but being held down while my dad hit me with a belt was as close as I ever wanted to get to it. The helplessness of being held motionless and hit by someone else is about as bad as a situation can get without openly bordering on anything sexual.
Spanking and belting didn’t make me a better person.
If anything, the punishments gave me another reason to hate my dad and my life in general. I hated him for hitting me, hated my mom for not stopping him, and hated myself for being such a bad person that Dad was forced to punish me. As I grew older, the spankings became more and more energetic. We moved from belts to hairbrushes to shoes and then finally to fists. The first time my dad punched me was what I imagined getting shot would feel like. No pain at first, way too much shock for anything else to register in my brain. My dad’s not a physically weak man, so I assure you he wasn’t hitting me as hard as he could. At the time, however, that distinction was lost on me as I gingerly touched my face where he had hit me.
“Don’t make me do that again,” he’d warned, neatly turning the moment so that, like everything else in my life, him punching me was entirely my fault, and he was the victim. I was smaller, and there was no way I could physically take him on, so I took my revenge in fucking with the illusion of our perfect little family. I’d go out with a couple of guys, get wasted, and then end up puking in the gutter of First Street at three in the morning. A squad car in front of our house with me in the back in cuffs as everyone peeked through their curtains was as bad if not worse than any punch he could throw my way. Having the cops explain that, since my dad was who he was, they’d let my behavior slide was the social equivalent of kicking him in the balls.
When I had started drinking, the punishments evolved from him swinging at me to us throwing down wherever we happened to be at the time. As I got older and bigger, the fights became worse and more destructive. My mom would stand there screaming at us to stop while we went at it like two rabid dogs fighting for dominance. Most nights he was as sauced as I was, so neither one of us felt any pain as we went at it. No pain but loads and loads of anger.
The last time he tried that was a few months ago during summer vacation. I can’t even remember what I’d done, but I did know I was done with being a punching bag for him.
He had made the mistake of being drunk while I had been completely sober. By the time I’d reached seventeen, the difference between our physical strengths had dwindled past the point where we were almost even. That night we both discovered I had crossed the line and had become stronger than he was. I wish I could say it was a liberating feeling, that at that moment I felt a rush of power and control in my life. Honestly, though, all I had was disgust and pity for the complete loser I’d let wear me down for so many years. Since then we had stayed away from each other. Whatever I did, right or wrong, was handled by my mother, and my dad stayed out of it. Except, of course, my mother handled nothing.
I felt like I’d been in a tailspin since then.
My life no longer had boundaries, and my behavior had no consequences. What I had always thought would be the coolest way to live my life had turned out to be a fast track to nowhere. When school had started in the fall, I cut more than ever. What did I care about any of this? I couldn’t convince the entire group to come with me off campus every time, but every day at least one or two of them would agree, enabling my chaotic and self-destructive tendencies. I was well on my way to completely losing my way when Coach Gunn pulled me aside and informed me I was dangerously close to failing his class, and if I failed, I was off the team.
It was then I realized my life still had a long way to go before it hit rock bottom.
He said I needed to pass the midterm or I was gone. He knew I’d been fucking off for most of the semester, and he was conveying in no uncertain terms that he was done putting up with it. He knew how much I loved baseball, and just the threat of losing it sobered me up instantly. He explained I had a lot of material to cover, and if I didn’t pass with a B, I could turn in my jersey and kiss my spot on the team good-bye. As he packed up his materials, he suggested I find a tutor and find one quick.
“Brad? Brad, honey,” a voice said from my right.
I realized I had nodded off and sat up so fast my head spun. The credits were scrolling up the screen, and the house lights made me squint. Ms. Garner was looking at me, concerned, probably worried I was drunk and sleeping it off. “The first movie is over,” she said pleasantly. “You gonna stay for the second?”
I rubbed my eyes and yawned loudly as I nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry, didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“It’s okay, dear,” she said, smiling. “You want to get a Coke while Barney loads the next movie?”
A C
oke sounded good, and I followed her out to the lobby, blinking harshly at the difference between a darkened theater and the afternoon sun. I bought myself a huge Coke and began to sip it as I waited. I wandered around the lobby, wondering if my mom would even say anything if I came home so early in the day, when Jennifer walked by the window. I froze in midsip. She turned to check herself in the window and instead saw me standing openmouthed in shock at the injustice of it all. Thirty seconds either way and I would have been fine. If I had taken longer to wake up, gone to the bathroom instead, decided not to tell the school I was a queer….
She continued to stare at me, no doubt wondering if I was a mirage or not. Finally she turned and headed into the theater, making a beeline across the lobby toward me. Ms. Garner noticed her arrive and began to step out from behind the concession stand to sell her a ticket. Jennifer stopped in front of me. “Hiding?” she asked.
“Thinking,” I clarified even though she had nailed it in one.
She looked angry. No, that’s not fair to angry people. She looked furious as she began to corral a collection of words in her mind, much like an assassin might arm himself before a kill. “Do you have any idea how horrible today has been?”
I knew how bad it had been for me, but I didn’t think that was what she was hinting at.
“I am the laughingstock of the school. People whispering behind my back, everyone looking away as I pass by. What am I supposed to do now?” she demanded.
“I don’t have any answers,” I answered lamely. It sounded as bad as it had when I told Kyle the same.
“Is it true?” she inquired with her head cocked. I was more than a little shocked, since it was the closest I had ever seen her come to cutting me a break. “Because if you were just sticking up for the lame kid, you can tell people that, and they’d believe you.”