by John Goode
As I turned the corner onto my block, I saw my dad’s car in the driveway and cussed under my breath. I had really been hoping to have some time to myself for once without my parents’ Mortal Kombat reenactments to distract me. I parked next to his car, which was the identical twin of mine, except black. I had to admit the initial joy of receiving a brand new Mustang had been tempered by the fact that giving the car to me was just another way for my dad to remind me that I should be grateful to him. I still took the car and thanked him, because I am no fool.
I did hold his tactics against him in my mind, though.
As I walked into the house, I could hear him in the kitchen talking on the phone. I slipped my shoes off, lest I incur the wrath of Momzilla, and tried to race up to my room. Of course that didn’t happen. “Brad!” he screamed from the other room. “Get in here!”
“Fuck,” I growled under my breath as I turned and marched into the kitchen.
His jacket was off, and his tie was loose, which meant he’d been home for a while. I saw the ever-present tumbler of scotch on the counter next to him and knew he was probably just drunk enough to be dangerous and not drunk enough to eventually pass out. He still had his Blackberry up to his ear as he nodded. “I understand.” Pause. “No I’m sure we can fix this.” Longer pause. “No, I agree completely, coach.”
And that was when the floor seemed to drop out from under me.
“I’ll talk to him,” he said, giving me a harsh glare. “Thank you.” And stabbed the End button. He slammed the phone down and immediately reached for the drink. He and my mom always reminded me of those monkeys that won’t let one thing go until they have a grip on something else. It took a lot to get a glass of booze out of their hands, and damn whatever it was that made them put it down. “Why are you home?” he asked, stating each word distinctly, as if he was a lawyer, and I was on trial.
“Blew off school,” I said as casually as possible.
“Why aren’t you at practice?” he demanded.
There wasn’t an answer that was going to be good enough for him, so I didn’t even try. “I needed a day off.”
“Oh, because you’ve been studying so hard, right?” He was growing angrier as he went on, and I knew we had just begun. “Coach Gunn told me you were failing history as well as a couple of other classes, and now you’re missing practice? What exactly is wrong with you, Brad?”
“I’m working on my grades,” I said, trying to end the conversation while we were still just talking.
“And practice?”
“I missed one practice; the world won’t end.” I could feel my own emotions reacting to his.
“I would have never missed a practice in my day.” Which was his normal complaint about anything I did. He would have never done this; he would have never done that. I was so sick of hearing what he would and would not have done. He’d sung that song one too many times.
“Well I’m not planning on being you, Dad, so it doesn’t matter what you would have done.” I was beginning to lose my cool.
“You’d be lucky to end up as well as I have,” he argued. “The way you’re going, you’ll be a loser the rest of your life.”
“Thirty pounds overweight in a loveless marriage at a nowhere car dealership is exactly what people think of when they think of loser.” And I’d lost it.
“What the fuck did you just say?” he roared.
“I’m not you! I will never be you!” I shouted back.
“So far, you’re doing exactly what I did. Skipping school, getting wasted every weekend with your useless friends. Face it, champ, you’re just one broken condom away from this life!” he said, getting in my face.
“That will never happen!” I yelled at him.
“That’s what I thought!”
“It’s different for me! Trust me!” We were too far gone to back off.
He cocked his head and asked sarcastically. “Oh really, genius? Explain to me how you’re so fucking different?”
“I’m gay!”
And there it was.
His face was pale as he stared at me, his mouth open. “What did you say?”
What did I just say?
It was the only weapon I had, so I decided to wield it as well as I could. “You heard me! I’m gay, Dad. So there is no way I’ll end up getting some bitch I hate pregnant and being trapped in a life I can’t get through without downing half a bottle of scotch a day!” He took a look at the glass in his hand and then back at me as I kept going. “You don’t know me, and you never will. I am nothing like you, old man, and if I end up homeless, begging for change on First Street, I’ll have a better life than yours.”
He swung his hand at me, looked like he was going for a backhand serve, but we weren’t going down this road ever again. I caught his hand and held it there, trying to make it look as effortless as possible. “Next time you swing at me, I’m going to swing back,” I said, my eyes never leaving his. “And trust me. I hit a lot harder than you do.”
He tried to pull his hand back, but I refused to let it go.
“You wanna take my car away? Fine. You wanna throw me out of the house? Great. But you don’t get to hit me anymore.” I twisted his wrist and made him cry out as he turned, trying to ease the pain. “Got it?”
He nodded silently, and I let him go.
“I’ll get my grades up. Don’t worry about it,” I said, turning around and heading to my room.
I expected him to scream at me as I walked away. I fully expected to hear him cursing and threatening me as I took the stairs two at a time. But he said nothing as I closed the door behind me and locked it for good measure. I sat on the edge of my bed and realized I was shaking. Eight hours? It had only been eight hours since I sat here and wondered what I was going to do with myself. And here I was again, wondering the exact same thing.
I fished my phone out of my jeans and pulled up the picture of Kyle I had taken that morning. I had no idea what to do about him, and it made me feel sick. I liked him so much, but I didn’t see any way we could be together and not just be miserable. Every particle of confidence I had felt at Mr. Parker’s was gone, and once again I was sure my life was over.
I fell back on my bed and mashed my pillow down over my face before I screamed into it as loudly as possible, cursing just about everything in the world I could think of. If my anger had been a solid object, my scream would have blown through the pillow and smashed a hole through our roof before shooting out into space. I screamed some more, trying to expel as much of my rage as I could, knowing that bottling it up inside would serve no purpose except to make my day worse and worse.
I thought about my last words to my dad and remembered that getting my grades up was what had led me to Kyle in the first place. After Coach Gunn had laid down the law to me about history and what failing it could cost me, I knew I needed to learn history, and learn it fast.
My first thought was to find one of the bottom feeders that hovered around our group. Bottom feeders were people who weren’t as popular as the rest of us but lingered around us, waiting for one of us to drop them a crumb of recognition. Most of them were girls who weren’t ugly at all but who weren’t blessed with the genetic gifts that Jennifer and the rest of her harpies possessed. Jennifer and her clones treated those girls like crap, but I never said anything about it, since the quasi-jocks who vied for my attention weren’t any better.
There is something just unappealing about desperation that clings to people no matter how hard they try to conceal it. I never had anything personal against individual wannabes, but anyone who wanted to be around me simply because they wanted to be more popular made me sick. Surviving the endlessly circling pool of social sharks eyeing each other for an opening to take first blood meant that using one of the hoverers was out. There would be questions, and the truth about my grades and the possibility of me being off the team would come out. I’d be a target none of the others could ignore.
I looked around as casually as possibl
e for anyone who knew anything about history, which meant someone who actually paid attention in Coach Gunn’s class while trying to listen to what we were going over to see how bad it was. My hunt revealed two things to me. One, that I had no fucking idea what they were talking about. And two, there was a cute-ass blond guy who seemed to know everything. I was shocked I hadn’t noticed him before around school. Though I never actually put any real time into wondering what my type of guy might be, I knew right away that my type would look a lot like him.
That day I shadowed him as best I could.
He was like a damn ninja walking through the halls between classes. He moved through crowds of people like he was a ghost rather than flesh and blood. I saw him that afternoon sitting on the steps of the band hall near our table and wondered how long he’d been there and I had never even noticed. I asked everyone if they knew who he was, but like me, they acted as if they were seeing him in school for the first time.
I was intrigued.
The next day I asked about him in the office. The girl who did work study there had a crush on me and would have given me locker combinations if I smiled at her long enough. She explained he was in two honors classes but not in any extracurricular clubs. She knew of him but didn’t know him. That seemed to be a reoccurring theme the more I asked around about him.
It was Coach Gunn who knew the most about him.
“You mean Kyle? Smartest kid in any of my classes,” he said before class. “Quiet one, but he seems like a good kid.” He gave me a grin. “You could do a lot worse if you were looking for a tutor. He’s pulling down a 4.2 average.”
“It goes higher than 4.0?” I asked, shocked.
“It does for people like him.”
After that I knew I had my tutor. I had to find a time I could approach him without an entourage. I didn’t want to draw attention to me failing a class, and I couldn’t imagine having a group of popular people approaching you just to talk to you would bring out Kyle’s confidence. It would have seemed too much like a scene from Bring It On, and no one wanted that.
At some point during my memory walk toward Kyle, I fell asleep. Almost two hours had passed before my mom knocked on my door, waking me up. “Bradley,” she called, “are you in there?”
She knew I was in my room unless I had crawled out my window and somehow found a way to get down from the second story without breaking my legs. If I had been able to do that, I would have exited stage right already. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, looking over at the clock on my night table. “Yeah, hold on,” I said, getting up and unlocking the door.
She had that same perpetually worried look that I associated with small, yippy dogs, the ones that always looked worried, as if someone might step on them. Sure, my mom looked harmless to the unsuspecting eye, but I knew she was a grand master of passive aggressive warfare.
While my dad was overt, aggressive, and loud, my mom was syrupy sweet, always smiling, right up to the lower lids of her eyes. I’m not sure if it was her medication or a defense mechanism, but she never lost her cool. I figured she kept her temper because losing it would mean that whatever my dad had said or done had caused her to react, and that she would not do. “Are you hungry?” she asked, worried. We both knew her being in my room wasn’t about dinner, but asking if I was hungry was the excuse she needed to knock on my door.
“No, I’m good,” I said, sitting back down on my bed. There was no way in the world my dad hadn’t told her what I’d said to him earlier. I mean, in the world of their own private duel to the death, there couldn’t be any higher caliber bullet than “You know you made your son gay, don’t you?” Mom had come to me seeking not only confirmation that what he had said was true or denial if it wasn’t, but also for useful ammunition for a return barrage. Of that I was sure.
She took two steps and stopped just inside my room. I’m not sure that she’d ever been in it. We had a maid who did our laundry and made our beds every day, so I couldn’t imagine why Mom would have needed to. “Your dad said you guys got into a fight.” Which was like saying that Voldemort and Harry Potter had strong words with each other. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I answered honestly.
She walked across the room and sat next to me, her hands in her lap. “I don’t blame you,” she said, nodding.
I wasn’t sure if she was waiting for me to say something, but it was very uncomfortable sitting there saying nothing. I wished she would just get to her point and then leave, but we just sat there and continued to say nothing. Waiting.
Finally she asked, “Did I ever tell you what happened when I found out I was pregnant with you?”
I looked over at her, my eyes wide. I wasn’t sure what new tactic this was, but there was no way I was going to fall for it. “Mom, did you want something?”
She stared out my window, smiling the whole time as if I hadn’t said anything. “Your grandma took me to Dr. Henry.” She looked over at me. “He used to be the town doctor when I was your age. He passed away years ago, but he was a nice man.” I looked at her, confused, not sure if she had a point or was just rambling. “So your grandma took me to see him after I was—” And she paused as she tried to frame her words properly. “After it was clear something was different with me.”
“You were late?” I asked. “Or morning sickness?” That caught her off guard. She looked as if my head had spun a full 360 degrees or as if I had spit green pea soup instead of asking her a normal feminine hygiene question.
“How do you know about that?” she asked as if I had just revealed I knew where that box Indiana Jones was looking for had been buried.
“Mom, I’m seventeen. I do know how babies are made.”
The light wasn’t great in my room, but I was pretty sure she blushed. After a few seconds, she went on. “Anyway, we went to see him. Back then those home tests were not a sure thing. He took blood that day, and then we waited a few days for the results to come back. So I sat at home for three days. Three days where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to my life. Your father already had his scholarship, so I knew he wasn’t going to be any help. I was not even a year older than you are now, and I was a little pissed.”
I half smiled as my proper and reserved mom said the word “pissed.”
“I mean, I had plans. I wanted to go to college. I planned on traveling. I didn’t know what exactly being pregnant would mean. But if I was, I did know everything would have to change.”
I frowned a little and interrupted. “If this is supposed to cheer me up….”
“Hush,” she said curtly. “So he called back and told me he had my results, and that I needed to be at his office in the morning.” She paused for a moment, and I thought she was going to cry. “And I knew what that meant, so I thanked him and hung up the phone and just stood there.”
“Because your life was ruined,” I said to fill the gaping silence.
She turned to me, and there were tears in her eyes. “No. Because I realized my life was just starting. We all grow up thinking we are going to be one thing or another, and we clutch those dreams to our chests like they are the most important things in the world. But life… life has its own plans for us, and it could care less what our plans are because life is always more important than what people think they want. There are a lot of people in this world who refuse to open their eyes to what life wants of us. They don’t understand that life is more important than adolescent dreams. They hold on to those dreams as long as possible, doing everything they can to avoid losing them, no matter what the cost to everyone around them.” She put her hand on my cheek, and I felt myself starting to choke up. “I never once regretted having you because I knew in my heart that you would grow up from a fantastic boy to an incredible man. And if I can be even a little part of that, then that is the most important thing I could ever do.”
Now I felt myself starting to cry.
“The complications your father and I face haven’t been fair to you, but you have to
know the way we are has nothing to do with you. The only thing I ever wanted was for you to be happy. And nothing else matters.” Tears were falling down her cheeks now, her makeup smearing.
“I want to be happy,” I said, the sheer tonnage of today’s events finally crashing down over me. I felt myself too tired to keep moving. “I don’t know what to do to be happy.” I finally cracked. She pulled me into a hug, and I finally just began to sob as she rocked me.
“Stop living our expectations,” she said as she comforted me. “And start living your own life.” She smoothed my hair absently. “Just be yourself, Bradley; you can never go wrong with that.” She pulled back and picked up my phone. Kyle’s shocked stare from this morning brought a little smile to her eyes. “This is the boy?”
I nodded.
“He likes you?”
I nodded again.
“You like him too?”
I smiled and looked away as I gave a quiet, “Yeah.”
“Then do something about it,” she said, handing me my phone. “If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering how things would have been different if you had.”
I couldn’t say anything as I took what solace I could from my mother’s permission.
After almost a second she added, “Honey, you need to start washing your hair more. It feels like a rat’s nest right now.”
I laughed for the first time since Kyle left me at Nancy’s.
KYLE had been tough to pin down as my history tutor. I remembered trying to get his attention during class with no success. He was either ignoring me or just unaware that anyone might want to talk to him at all. I paused at the classroom door so he’d have to pass me. As he got to me, I raised a hand and opened my mouth to say something, but he just walked past me, never looking up. I don’t think that had ever happened to me before.
It was kind of cool.
I couldn’t find him the next two periods. He could have disappeared for all I knew. I was just starting to understand why I had never noticed him before. I finally caught a glimpse of him from the back heading down a hallway, and I followed him from a distance. I felt like I was in a spy movie hanging back and tailing him, unnoticed. I saw Josh Walker coming down toward us, and I knew I was screwed. He was on the baseball team, too, and he was, in my opinion, better-looking than I was. He was something like six four with a well-built frame that he poured every day into a pair of Wranglers that should have been illegal. There was nothing nicer than watching Josh walking away from you because his ass was a work of art that required extended appreciation.