Absolutely Positively Not

by David LaRochelle

  “He is very nice,” I said.

  “And he’s a wonderful dancer,” she said.

  “I agree. Totally.”

  “And he’s such a handsome man,” she said.

  I sat up straighter and scanned the road for deer.

  “I didn’t notice,” I said loudly.

  My parents were asleep. A towel was beneath my door to prevent any telltale light from escaping. My wastebasket was leaning against the door to serve as a warning signal in case someone tried to enter. I hadn’t been this secretive since … well, two weeks ago, when I was poring over the underwear catalogs.

  I switched on my flashlight and pulled Trent Beachum’s guide out from under my mattress.

  Most boys slip into deviant sexual behavior simply because they lack the proper male role models. This situation can be easily remedied, and should be done so at the first opportunity. Enroll your son in a sports program. Enlist him in Boy Scouts. Encourage him to spend time with masculine young men whose behavior you would like him to emulate.

  This was not good.

  I hated sports. Not that I hadn’t given organized athletics a fair try. In fact, when I was six I had been an active participant in a peewee hockey league for, oh, about twelve minutes. Bundled in my protective gear and strapped into my skates, I had wobbled two steps onto the ice and fallen on my face. I cried. Someone helped me back onto my feet. I fell on my butt. I cried. Someone helped me back onto my feet again. My helmet fell off, I fell on my face, I got a bloody nose. I cried. This time they didn’t even bother helping me back onto my feet, they just carried me off the ice.

  I never went back. The only reason I had wanted to join in the first place was because Rachel was on the team. When she learned that I had quit, Rachel quit too. We started a stuffed animal club together instead.

  As far as Scouting, I had lasted a little longer: two weeks.

  My father had signed me up after my cousin Bernard achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.

  “We’ll show him,” my dad had said.

  At my first Scout meeting I had sat next to Mrs. Dalton, our troop leader, and quietly worked on my craft project while the other boys ran around the Dalton living room throwing couch cushions at their Chihuahua. When I showed Rachel the log cabin coin bank I had made out of Popsicle sticks, she wanted to join the Scouts too. Mrs. Dalton looked rattled when I brought Rachel along to the next meeting. She took the two of us aside and politely explained that if Rachel really wanted to be a Scout, she should join the Girl Scouts. Rachel politely explained to Mrs. Dalton that girls could be anything they wanted, and that she wanted to be a Boy Scout, and if Mrs. Dalton tried to stop her, Rachel would take her to court for sexual discrimination. Rachel was eleven years old at the time.

  Not wanting to see Mrs. Dalton in jail, and not wanting Rachel to spend all of her allowance on lawyers, I decided to quit. Rachel and I started a recycling club together instead.

  Sports were out. Boy Scouts were out. There had to be another way for me to spend quality time in the company of masculine guys my age.

  The opportunity presented itself the next day in the cafeteria.

  The morning had started on an especially good note: Mr. Bowman said nothing about our shared interest in square dancing, and he wore an open-collared shirt that showed off a tiny patch of his chest hair.

  Then, while waiting in the hot-lunch line, I noticed Dwayne, the senior in front of me. Dwayne was the size of a refrigerator, the kind that is wide enough to store an entire cow. He wore black gym shorts pulled over a pair of gray sweats. The red lettering on the back of his T-shirt read, GIVE BLOOD — PLAY HOCKEY.

  This was exactly the kind of guy Trent Beachum wanted me to hang out with. Tough, strong, masculine. I could smell the testosterone reeking from him, or maybe it was just his manly deodorant.

  I watched as he ordered a double lunch, then walked to a table reserved for the hockey team at the far corner of the lunchroom.

  There was one empty seat left at the table.

  I should do it. I should walk right over there, swing my leg over the seat, and plop myself down. It was exactly what Trent Beachum would advise.

  So what was stopping me?

  Fear. Terror. Common sense.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed those feelings aside. What did my emotions matter when my entire future was at stake?

  I took one step in that direction. Attaboy, Steven, keep it up. I took another step. The rest of the lunchroom became a blurry hum as I focused on the table filled with the school’s biggest and brawniest. I took the long way, partly to give me time to build up my courage, and partly to avoid the table where Rachel was waiting for me. I’d explain my absence to her later.

  The closer I got, the bigger and louder these guys became. They overflowed their seats. They thundered like elephants. I quivered like a bread crumb in front of a vacuum.

  A few feet short of their table, I stopped. If I invaded their territory, I’d likely be picked up, slammed to the floor, and kicked around a bit before being tossed headfirst into the garbage barrel. Was it worth it?

  The memory of Jake’s threats in the library pushed me forward. A friendly toss in the garbage had to be a lot less painful than a two-by-four up the rear end.

  As I sat down and unfolded my napkin, Dwayne turned on me. He was wearing a Marlboro baseball cap. It was against school policy to wear advertising for tobacco companies, but I wasn’t about to point this out to him.

  “What do you want?” he growled.

  Keep calm, Steven. You handled the Lake Asta militia, you can handle Dwayne.

  “Nothin’, man,” I said. “I’m just hangin’.”

  Dwayne snarled and turned back to his friends.

  A spark of excitement raced down my back. Trent Beachum had been right; only five seconds in their presence and I was already sounding like a good ol’ boy in a beer commercial. Think how rugged I’d sound if I survived the entire lunch!

  Munching my corn dog, I carefully studied how these jocks interacted with each other. Being as observant as I am, I quickly discovered three distinct traits about my tablemates:

  They hit each other a lot.

  They swore a lot.

  They belched a lot.

  Dwayne pushed his hand into the face of the guy sitting across from him and belched, “Asshole!” All three traits in one smooth, unified gesture.

  Boy, did I have my work cut out for me. Even Rachel’s little sister was a better burper than I was.

  After a few minutes, I noticed that the guys had quieted down. Something was happening in the middle of the table. I leaned around Dwayne to see what it was.

  Someone had opened a milk carton, and the crew at the table was cramming scraps of food into it. Rachel sometimes compacted her garbage like this so the trash would take up less space in a landfill, but I doubted whether these guys were so environmentally conscious. Maybe they were constructing a food bomb. I hoped that I wasn’t their intended target.

  “Hey, do you want to get in on this?”

  A burly guy with a shaved head and a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt was looking at me.

  “Sure,” I said. Trent Beachum would have been proud of how eagerly I was embracing the macho lifestyle.

  “Hand over five bucks.”

  Five bucks to become a member of the most elite male society at school seemed like the bargain of a lifetime. I took a five-dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to the Bull, who added it to a pile of crumpled bills already on the table.

  “Now put whatever you want into the milk carton.”

  Fearing it might be a trap, I cautiously asked why.

  The Bull pointed to another hockey player. “Carp is going to drink it.”

  Carp was a shaggy-haired guy with friendly black eyes and a nice-looking wide mouth and —

  I caught myself before I became too observant.

  “But no skagging. Carp doesn’t drink any skags.”

  Even the word “skag” sounded
manly. I vowed to work it into my conversation at least three times by the end of the day.

  “If he drinks it all without hurling, he keeps the money.”

  Someone shoved the milk carton down to my end of the table. It was already brimming with a thick stew of milk, chocolate pudding, vegetables, and bread crusts. A starving pig wouldn’t agree to drink all that.

  “Go on, stick something in,” said the Bull.

  I picked a raisin from my muffin and dropped it into the mixture.

  The Bull snorted, then passed the carton to Dwayne, who folded the top shut, held it over his head, and shook it vigorously. He handed it to Carp, who opened the top, raised it as if making a toast, and brought it to his lips.

  “Chug! Chug! Chug!” chanted the men at my table, pounding their fists and sending my silverware rattling like wind chimes.

  And chug is exactly what Carp did. I watched as he drained the carton, his jaws chewing while his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Without stopping to breathe, he tilted his head farther and farther back. The chanting crescendoed into a roar.

  Wham!

  He slammed the empty carton down and the table cheered.

  “Mouth check!” they called.

  The human garbage disposal stood up and leaned across the table toward me, his black eyes ablaze with delight. Placing his nose only an inch from mine, he let his jaw drop and pressed his cavernous mouth closer for me to inspect. Other than fleshy bits of green and yellow food stuck between his teeth and a fuzzy white coating covering his tongue, his foul-smelling mouth was empty.

  He snapped his mouth shut and raised his hands in triumph.

  I wasn’t so victorious.

  I felt it coming. I tried to stop it. But I couldn’t. I opened my mouth and lost my lunch all over the top of my cafeteria tray.

  “Gross!”

  “Rude!”

  “I’m out of here!”

  By the time I had wiped my mouth with a napkin, everyone had fled, leaving me with a table covered with lunch bags, fruit rinds, and half-eaten sandwiches.

  “You animals have really outdone yourselves today.”

  It was one of the hairnetted lunchroom ladies.

  “Don’t even think about leaving until you’ve cleaned up this mess that you and your buddies have made.”

  She dropped a wet, gray washrag that smelled of sour milk and ammonia in front of me. I picked up the cold rag and began wiping slop into an old plastic ice-cream bucket.

  I couldn’t have been happier.

  In only thirty minutes I had convinced the lunchroom lady that I was a regular guy, just like all these other jocks.

  I missed you at lunch.”

  It was the end of the day and Rachel was leaning against my locker, waiting for me.

  “Uh … I was sitting with some new friends.”

  Rachel slid over so I could work my lock. “I noticed.”

  I twisted the dial right, left, right. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said.

  I gave the lock a hard yank and — shoot. I never got the thing open on the first try.

  “You can sit wherever you want, Steven. Those guys just didn’t seem like your type. Why the sudden interest in hanging around hockey players?”

  I gave the dial on my lock a couple of spins and started over. Right, left, right. Yank.

  Nothing.

  “Maybe I’ve decided to become more athletic,” I said.

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. And I’ve just been elected spokesperson for Burger King.”

  Why was it so hard for her to believe that I could possibly be a jock? Sure, Rachel had helped me burn my gym uniform when I passed my freshman year of mandatory high school P.E., but maybe my tastes were changing. Even though she was my best friend, there were a lot of things about me that Rachel didn’t know.

  On the third try I finally got my locker open. Rachel watched while I organized my books for tomorrow.

  “So, is your stomach any better?”

  She hadn’t missed a thing at lunch.

  “Yeah. I think it was just one of those twenty-five-minute flus.” I cleared my throat a couple of times. “Although I still have the urge to skag now and then.”

  Rachel hiked her books higher on her hip. “Well, I’m glad you’re recovering,” she said. “Give me a call tonight, unless you’re too busy skagging.”

  She walked off to her locker and I shut the door to mine.

  There’s no law saying that you have to tell your best friend everything. True, Rachel was one of the few people who knew about my square dancing, but I was still entitled to a couple of secrets, especially if they concerned sexual realignment.

  I returned to the hockey table the next day, a little worried that the team might react to me with hostility, considering my lack of stomach control. My fears, however, were completely unfounded. Nobody tossed a single negative word my way.

  They simply ignored me.

  Not a problem. I could deal with being ignored. Lack of attention never gave anyone a cracked rib or bloody nose.

  Silent and unnoticed, I continued to eat at their table, carefully observing their behavior and dutifully incorporating it into my own. I taught myself to burp. I swore whenever I remembered to. I even began wearing a baseball cap around school. It was one my grandmother had mailed me from her recent trip to Branson.

  At home I surrounded myself with a harem of female photos. No need to fork out the money for Playboy; these pictures were available everywhere for free. In TV Guide, in travel ads, even on my mother’s box of bran flakes. Soon my Superman posters were buried beneath dozens of women in skimpy bikinis and lacy lingerie. The sexiest of these pictures I taped to the outside of my notebooks so that everyone at school would know I was a typical teenage boy brimming with girl-crazy hormones.

  And soon, I knew, I would actually find these pictures appealing. According to Trent Beachum, it was only a matter of time. Hang out with the hockey players, absorb their influence, develop an attraction to girls.

  In the meantime, I thought about Mr. Bowman a lot more often than I’d ever admit.

  It might be today.

  I entered the cafeteria with a sense of expectation.

  My breakthrough might come this very afternoon. The noise issuing from the hockey table was louder than usual, which I hoped was a positive sign. Maybe the team was involved in a previously unobserved male ritual, one that might be influential enough to awaken my sluggish interest in girls.

  I hurried through the line, eager to join my comrades. It had been over a month since I joined their table, and Trent Beachum had promised that repeated exposure to —

  I stopped a few feet short of my spot.

  My reserved seat was no longer vacant.

  Sitting at my place was Solveig Amundson, our school’s petite Norwegian exchange student. The hockey players surrounding her were going off the deep end. They shoved each other onto the floor. They rolled up their sleeves to reveal their biceps. They howled and hooted and made every crude noise imaginable.

  Solveig was fascinated. She covered her face in mock horror when the Bull fell from his seat. She swooned as Dwayne smashed his opponent’s arm to the table in an arm-wrestling match. She giggled at all of their stupid noises.

  To put it mildly, the scene was disgusting.

  I shifted on my feet and waited for her to leave.

  She didn’t.

  Instead, she picked up a Tater Tot from her cafeteria tray and held it out to the team. “How you say …?” she asked.

  When one of the guys told her, she laughed as if it were the punch line to the funniest joke in the world. Dwayne, the Bull, and the rest of the guys around her laughed too.

  I didn’t laugh. I stared at the place where I should have been sitting. A lot was riding on my continued proximity to these men. Specifically, my future happiness.

  For the first time in weeks my presence was noted by one of the team. The Bull spun around and glared at me like I was cow man
ure. “Get the hell out of here, Upchuck. Now!”

  This couldn’t be happening. My lunching companions wouldn’t really abandon me, would they?

  “I said scram, you homo.”

  It was as if he had kicked me in the gut with a boot.

  Couldn’t he see my baseball cap? Hadn’t he noticed the photos plastered to my notebooks? What had I done — or not done — to make him think that I might be gay?

  The Bull turned back to Solveig. I backed away and retreated to a table as far from their cross-cultural merriment as possible.

  “Damn!”

  I said it loudly and with great conviction. Then I let rip the most repulsive belch ever heard in the halls of Beaver Lake High.

  Nobody around me even looked up.

  For the rest of the lunch period I pulverized my Tater Tots with a fork until they had turned to a sticky, inedible mess.

  All afternoon I kept replaying the Bull’s remarks. Big mistake on my part. Instead of reliving my lunchroom Waterloo, I should have been paying attention to where I was walking.

  “Ooof!”

  The door to the Industrial Arts room flew open and nailed me squarely in the face.

  I reached up and touched my nose. It was tender, but still in one piece. Then, above my lip, I felt the wet, sticky trickle of blood.

  Mr. Pangborn, the I.A. teacher whose door had walloped me, stuck his bald head into the hallway. He examined my face and frowned.

  “Great. Another bleeder.”

  Accidents involving blood loss were obviously a frequent occurrence in his class.

  “The nurse’s office is around the corner,” he said. “She’ll handle you. That’s her job.” He closed his door and called from the other side. “And for cripes’ sake, try not to get blood on anything else or that will be another fifty forms I’ll have to fill out.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said through a pinched nose, then tilted my head back and slowly began feeling my way down the hall.

  “Ooof!”

  I walked smack into somebody’s chest.

  Mr. Bowman’s.

  “Steven, what happened?”

  I sniffed a drop of blood back up my nostril. “I was ambushed by a door.”