Tales from Foster High

by John Goode

  As he walked by, I saw Kyle look back and take a quick peek at it.

  I froze, wondering if I had just imagined what I’d seen Kyle do. Josh asked me what was up and something about the season that I didn’t catch. I watched Kyle walk away, wondering if there was more to this guy than I thought.

  Now I stalked with a purpose.

  It was easy to follow him since he acted like he was practically invisible walking through the halls. It was as if the thought that someone might be watching him was just not a possibility. The sad part was, from what I saw, he was basically right. I watched him like a hawk, and it seemed no one even gave him the time of day as he navigated the halls. He was a good-looking guy; his hair was naturally a bright blond, and it was shaggy in a way that I thought was cute as hell. Yet if anyone else noticed Kyle, I didn’t see it. As the day went on, I became more and more obsessed with him.

  The more I watched the more I became convinced he liked guys too. Don’t get me wrong, he had mad skills at hiding it, but he was so focused on watching people and staying out of their sight that it seemed that it never occurred someone might be watching him. I caught him checking out a couple of guys, and I liked his taste. The more I watched, the less I cared about my grades, and the more I wondered if he’d like me too.

  I realized that I was still chasing after Kyle and wondering, only now I was wondering if I could be the guy he needed me to be. After a shower and some sleep, I got up early the next morning, determined to see him.

  I didn’t have a clue of what I was going to do, but I needed him to know I was in it for the long haul. My mom had convinced me that if I kept trying to bottle up my feelings, I’d end up as bitter and angry as my dad. Before I headed out of the house, I noticed the door to my dad’s den cracked open and a light on inside. Tempting fate, I peeked in for a second to see if he was in there. He was passed out on the couch in the far corner; the den had become pretty much his bedroom recently. Asleep, face smooth, without any lines of anger or disappointment, he looked like himself. I tried to see the person my mom must have glimpsed back before I was born, but I couldn’t. All I saw was a guy that had been in the same position in high school that I was. The difference was that my dad had believed being popular really did make him better than everyone else.

  Even though I had always known my place in the school’s social strata, I never once mistook that as something with any actual worth in the eyes of the world. If anything, the more people looked up to me and idolized me, the worse I felt about myself. I knew I was perpetrating a fraud that had no basis in real life at all. Dad never saw that, believing instead that his position in high school meant something. And no matter how much money he made, how expensive his car was, or even what size house he owned, in the final analysis, my dad was a middle-aged dick still clinging to an illusion and milking it for all it was worth.

  I wasn’t going to go down that road.

  That much I knew for sure.

  I closed the den doors and pulled my shoes on as I hopped out toward my car. I had no delusions about the possibility that there was a clock hovering over my car, and the countdown had begun. A couple of hours sober and the realization that his only child was gay would be more than enough to have Dad yank my sweet ride out from under me. I wondered what it’d be like having to get around on foot, and then remembered I had just come out. Being seen walking was the least of my worries.

  I laughed at the absurdity of the situation and realized that Mr. Parker had been dead on target: sooner or later everything was going to be all right.

  Unlike our neighborhood, the area of town that Kyle lived in didn’t seem to have a lot of early risers. In my neighborhood, a virtual army of husbands and fathers came out to spend a good chunk of the weekend on yard duty, keeping the grass short and the weeds in check, while the entire area around Kyle’s place was a ghost town. As I pulled in front of his place, I wondered if any kids lived around here. I couldn’t imagine not having guys my own age near me as I had grown up. The more I discovered about Kyle, the more I understood how he could have ended up being so reserved. If we had grown up reversed, would he be the popular one and would I end up being the cute guy no one knew about?

  Would he have been the jock? Would I have been the—well, no way in hell I was smart enough to be a nerd, so that was out. I still wondered how different we would have ended up instead.

  I raised my fist to knock, but the door opened before I could. Kyle stood there, this time looking a lot more awake than he had yesterday. He was angry, but I could see he was trying to keep his cool. “What?” he snapped.

  Well, he wasn’t trying all that hard.

  “We need to talk,” I said, hoping he was either going to come outside or invite me in.

  “So talk,” he said, not budging.

  “You really wanna do this out here?” I asked, so not caring if anyone else heard us or not. When he said nothing, I just shrugged and started. “Okay. I’m crazy about you.” The joy of seeing his eyes widen in complete astonishment made up for his stubbornness. “I know I was scared, and I handled that like crap, but I’m here now.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked, almost whispering.

  “Making things right,” I said with no hesitation. “This isn’t going to be easy, and I have no idea what is about to happen, but I know no matter how hard it gets, I’m going to be here for you.” I thought about it for a second. “Scratch that, I’m going to be here with you.”

  He was still speechless, but I could see the emotion creeping up on his face.

  “I want to be with you. You, Kyle,” I said, pointing at him. “And I may screw up, and I may be stupid, but I am never going to let you be alone.” I took a step toward him and grabbed his hands. “I’m here until the day you tell me to go away.” I leaned in and whispered in his ear, “And I’m the one who owes you.” He looked down and opened his hand. Inside were eighty one cents and my class ring. “You forgot your change.”

  His face broke into a smile as he hugged me.

  “Get in here,” he said, pulling me inside.

  At that moment I knew I’d follow him anywhere he took me.

  Brad and Kyle Ordinance No. C-3240

  Kyle

  YOU know what I hate?

  Okay, that’s a vague and open-ended question, so before you answer, let me clarify it some. You know what I hate about teenage movies? They never show the next day. I mean, sure, maybe the princess did indeed date the criminal, but how exactly did they make that work? Her friends would never talk to her again once they found out she was actually kissing some lowlife like him. His friends would disgust her with their rude and suggestive talk. Within a week they would be arguing about what to do with their weekend. She would want to go hang out at the mall and maybe see some chick flick, and he’d want to get burned with his friends and maybe play some Xbox. Fighting within two weeks, broken up in a month.

  The movie didn’t show that, did it?

  Or what about Sixteen Candles? So Jake gets her a birthday cake, and they blow the candles out on their rather flimsy-looking glass table. What’s next? Does he think his friends aren’t going to be very vocal in their confusion about who the hell this Samantha chick was in the first place? Even though they didn’t show many, you know she had to have friends too. Do you think any of them would constantly be asking her what he was like? What were they going to do for fun? She would go to two of his friends’ parties before she got fed up with the dirty looks that most of the girls shot her throughout the night. He would insist that she wasn’t giving them a fair chance, and she would argue that they were horrible people.

  They might even stay together until the topic of colleges came up. Obviously, Jake was headed for an Ivy League college and Samantha wasn’t. They’d try a long-distance thing until the freshman mixer during orientation. Jake would be swamped by the first dozen girls who saw him and offered to help him with his homework and anything else he needed help with. When he came home for Chri
stmas, he’d break it to her that they weren’t working out, and she’d spend the rest of her life wondering what she had done wrong.

  Kind of makes the idea of a sequel pretty dismal, doesn’t it?

  In the real world, Harry might have met Sally, but the movie doesn’t cover exactly how they made it work once the camera was off. Opposites may attract (which I do not believe, by the way), but they don’t make for an easy relationship, let me tell you. I may have had the hottest guy in school say he liked me, but I didn’t have any faith we were going to be a “we” for any amount of time. We sidestepped the whole going to school and facing the music problem that Friday by cutting school.

  The fact that we hadn’t even decided to date before we had our first actual fight only seemed to drive home the point that our being together was an incredibly bad idea.

  I walked out on him in the middle of a diner, for God’s sake. I mean, sure, he came back and apologized, and the whole thing with the ring and the 81 cents? Yeah, the boy has game, but now it’s Monday morning, and things are different. I don’t mean my gown turned back into a sack of flour and the carriage ended up as pumpkin soup, but things between us could not, obviously, be the same, because there were other things that remained the same.

  Foster High was still in the middle of nowhere, and the students and their teachers and administration were barely a step above the zombies in a Romero movie. I had images of being chased through the quad by a pack of villagers wielding pitchforks and torches while I stumbled forward in horrible lesbian boots with bolts in my neck.

  It has been said more than once that I have an overactive imagination.

  I paced my small room as I envisioned just about every blood-laden outcome if we were insane enough to show our faces at school again. I was used to being at the bottom of the social ladder. Actually, I was lower than the bottom; I usually hung out in the room next to the place they stored the ladder because people like me weren’t allowed to see it. Brad was a different story altogether. He was used to being so far up that I’m sure there were only clouds when he looked down. I had no idea how people were going to react to him coming out.

  If what he did counted as coming out.

  I mean, he could just say he had been defending me against Kelly, who is a raging asshole. There were ways for him to take back what had happened if he wanted, and that scared me. We had spent the weekend talking about him telling everyone he was gay, about how this wasn’t just a phase for him or a knee-jerk reaction to seeing someone get bullied. He had said he was falling for me. I wanted to believe that, but….

  But. It always comes down to buts, doesn’t it?

  I could be okay with being gay, but I lived in Foster, Texas, which meant me being gay constituted a mortal sin. I could be normal if my mom wasn’t clinically insane, so that was out of the question. And Brad might be falling in love with me, but I didn’t even like myself, so how could he think being in love with me was positive?

  I heard two horn blasts and knew I had run out of time to worry.

  I grabbed my backpack and ran out the front door, hoping the noise didn’t wake up my mother, the sleeping dragon. As I rushed outside, I saw him sitting behind the wheel of his brand-new, yellow Mustang and felt my heart skip a beat in response to the sight. In my world, there are precious few things that can be considered flawless. A weekend where my mother and I missed seeing each other because of our sleeping schedules was perfect. The Notebook is a perfect movie, in my opinion. Seasons two and three of One Tree Hill were perfect television. And Brad behind the wheel of his car was the perfect boy.

  He kept his hair slightly long. Though it was kept in place with product, it always seemed to be one step away from being disheveled. His eyes sparkled with what might be a dangerous energy; he looked like he was half a second from telling someone the punch line to a joke.

  And though he had several different smiles at his command, the one he flashed when I walked up to his car looked exactly like the others he’d used when we were together. So far those smiles had been the only actual signs of happiness I’d seen from him since we’d met.

  “Well, well, well,” he said as I got into the passenger seat. “If it isn’t Mr. Stilleno?”

  I fastened my seat belt and looked over at him. “Are you feeling okay? ’Cause you sound a little drunk.”

  His laughter filled the interior of the car and surrounded me like a blanket. “If I was drunk, I’d have hell to pay at practice this afternoon.” He leaned over toward me, and I felt his mouth touch mine, and the world stopped spinning for a second. All the air in my lungs escaped me as I leaned in and curled my hand around his head. I ran my fingers through his hair and tried to experience as much happiness as I could in the moment. I was the brave little ant storing food away for the winter. I had no illusions that what came next wasn’t going to suck, but right now he was kissing me. And that was awesome.

  He leaned his forehead against mine as we sat there, with our eyes closed, which was the closest to prayer I got. “You ready?” he asked after a second.

  “I’m scared,” I said in a tiny voice that didn’t sound like me.

  “Me too,” he answered. I opened my eyes when I felt him move back. His eyes stared into mine. “But you know what?” I shook my head. “I know things are going to be okay.”

  I tried not to give him a look of complete shock. “Why do you think that?” He might as well have said that Deep Impact was better than Armageddon or that Lindsay Lohan was better than Hilary Duff. I mean, things were not going to be okay—he had to know that, right?

  Right?

  “Because I got you,” he said with grin number four, the one he used when he was trying to look all Ocean’s Eleven about a situation. It looked good on him, but what we were facing wasn’t something as simple as breaking into a casino vault. We were in high school in Foster freakin’ Texas, and we had just unmasked ourselves as alien invaders.

  “Okay” existed nowhere near where we were.

  But I knew Brad, and I knew what he was doing.

  This was where he tried to assure me that my concerns were valid while actually trying to calm himself down. The voices inside of my head screaming at me that this was a bad idea were echoed in his own. But I was afraid he might not be as adept at dealing with them as I had grown to be. My entire life was a horror movie where I was chased through my head by my doubts and insecurities while that annoying cha cha cha sound played in the background. I was willing to play the victim when I was the only one in danger of being made into kibbles and bits, but I could see the real fear behind that grin, and he wasn’t telling me it was going to be okay as much as he was asking me if it was going to be okay.

  Behind every strong man is a scared little boy wanting people to tell him it’s going to be okay. Remember that, and men will no longer seem as stupid as you think they are.

  I gave him a wide grin and grabbed his hand. “Of course you have me. We do this together.” It seemed to assure him some. He took a deep breath and turned back toward the steering wheel. “You ready?”

  Not even close.

  “Always,” I lied, sounding completely sure.

  He pulled the gearshift, and we headed toward school and our future.

  Brad

  YOU know what I hate?

  Besides the designated hitter and AstroTurf, the thing that most pisses me off is waiting. The only thing worse than being whaled on by your drunken old man is waiting for your old man to beat you. Anticipation is one of the most destructive forces I know of in the universe, and that’s for good and bad things. It’s the feeling when you can’t wait to open your presents on Christmas morning—so bad that by the time everyone has woken up, you are so spazzed that you can’t help but bug the shit out of everyone. Then you realize how much you’re annoying people, and you start to panic because you know it’s just a matter of time before you get smacked by your dad, which only makes the panic worse, so now you’re trying to overcompensate by being supe
r helpful, which is just as, if not more, annoying than you were acting before, and you just end up freezing up with no idea what the right thing to do is.

  Or it’s like when you’re playing the outfield, thinking the game is mostly over. You’re out there counting the seconds before you can get your cup off and take a damn shower. You’re hot, tired, sweaty, and to be honest, ready to go home. Your uniform is too tight; it’s riding up in places that no guy wants to adjust in front of five hundred clapping fans (including your mom!), and you are just done with it. Sure, you’re ahead by one, and there’s a guy on base, but all the pitcher needs to do is strike this jackass out and it’s over. What could possibly go wrong?

  By the way, if you don’t know the quickest way to fuck up your day, night, or whatever time it is, think to yourself, “What could possibly go wrong?” Fate is a total bitch, and she loves to show off.

  And that’s when the batter actually gets behind the ball and pops one up into sky.

  Now, we’ve all seen this play. The ball sails up like it’s on fire and then starts to fall in a short arc. It’s called a rocket because it moves like a jet engine but really goes nowhere but up. So the ball hovers there, looking like it’s a mile above your head, defying gravity while it takes in the whole stadium in all its glory. All you can see is a speck of white way up there. Then it begins to grow larger.

  And here is where anticipation sucks balls.