Changing Jamie

by Dakota Chase

  “Sure. I just unlocked ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ but I haven’t beaten it yet.” He smiled widely, showing twin dimples in his cheeks. “That’s why I was up so late that night and blew the test.”

  I snorted—a thoroughly unattractive sound, but I couldn’t help myself. “Cool. Maybe next time we could meet at my house and play a few riffs. You know,” I hastily added, “to pass the time. So it looks like I’m actually tutoring you.”

  “Yeah, that’d work. I know tomorrow’s Saturday, but are you busy?”

  Tomorrow? Me? Spending time with Dylan two days in a row? I swear to God, if I wake up and this is all a dream, I’m going to be really pissed. “Yeah, tomorrow would be good.”

  “Great. I’ve got practice until one, but I can come to your place after I’m done.”

  Being a member of the team, I already knew his practice schedule, but I didn’t remind him of that. The field team practiced on Saturdays—javelin, shot put, discus, and hammer. “Okay.” I took the pen, wrote my address on a piece of paper and slid it back across the table. “Bring your guitar. I have to warn you: I’m pretty good at it.”

  “Sure. Thanks, man.”

  “No problem.”

  I WENT home Friday night to beef sludge and another drunken lecture from Doug on how I didn’t pull my weight, and how I ought to go out and get a job after school instead of wasting my time running in circles around a track, and how he couldn’t wait until I was eighteen and he could boot my faggoty ass out of the house.

  All in all, it wasn’t as bad as I would have thought. He must have started drinking earlier than usual, because by the time I’d plopped a serving of sludge into a bowl, poured a glass of milk, and carried both to my room, he’d already run out of steam.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about Doug being around when Dylan came over the next day. Doug went bowling on Saturday afternoons, then to the bar with his buddies afterward. He wouldn’t stumble home until midnight or so. Sometimes, if I was extraordinarily lucky, he wouldn’t come home until Sunday morning. I never stopped hoping one day he wouldn’t come back again, ever.

  I’d just set my bowl of sludge on my desk and booted up my computer when my phone rang.

  “How’d it go with Dylan?” Billy rarely indulged in niceties like hellos or good-byes. He cut right to the chase and just started talking. Usually, I could count on getting a word or two in when he ran out of air and stopped to take a breath.

  “Uh… it went fine.” Truthfully, I was little disoriented because he’d started off with a question about me instead of himself. That wasn’t normal for Billy. Maybe he’d learned something from our fight that afternoon.

  “Good. Should I wear the Abercrombie or the Diesel? You didn’t say one way or the other this afternoon.”

  That was more like it. I was back on familiar ground. “The Diesel. The Abercrombie are too tight. Robbie-the-Hunk will be able to see your spleen.”

  “The Abercrombie it is, then. Hair? Blown back, or spiked?”

  Yup, Billy was back. “Spiked is good.”

  “Yeah, but is it hot?”

  I rolled my eyes, even though the effect was lost over the phone. “Yes, it’s hot. Jeez, Billy, this isn’t your first date. Don’t you have this down to a science by now?”

  “It’s my first date with him, Jamie. It’s important.”

  “Why? What makes this guy so special? Besides being eligible for Social Security, I mean?”

  “Bite me. He’s only twenty-five. Stop being my mother for a minute, and help me, okay?”

  “Okay, okay.” I remembered what he’d said to me that afternoon about secrets he couldn’t talk to me about. Whatever it was, it had him keyed up. I could practically hear him climbing the walls. “Abercrombie, spiked, and the white T-shirt under the black button down—the one with the cool dragon on it.”

  “Good choice! I look great in that shirt. Shoes?”

  I sighed. “The crackled leather loafers you bought last summer.”

  “Cool. I’m meeting him over in Chester tomorrow night at Throb.”

  I didn’t know what threw me more—the fact that Billy had agreed to meet someone somewhere, which totally went against his usual pattern of flaunting the guy in front of his parents, or that he’d agreed to meet Robbie-the-Hunk at Throb. Throb was a club in downtown Chester, about a half-hour drive away. It didn’t have the best reputation. I’d never been there, but Billy had told me it was tiny, dirty, and boring.

  “I thought you hated Throb.”

  “Things change. Okay, I have to go dig out my shoes and make sure my shirt is ironed.”

  Click.

  Something, and I had no idea what, was going on with Billy. It just wasn’t like him to forgo the pleasure of ticking off his parents and it certainly wasn’t like him to drive all the way to Chester by himself to meet a guy at a club he hated.

  I had no doubt he’d get into the club even though Billy was underage. He’d done it before. Money talked, and lots of money screamed. I worried about him going in there, and even more about him coming out and having to drive home.

  There wasn’t anything I could do, though. I knew I couldn’t talk Billy out of going, and I certainly wasn’t going to rat him out to his parents. Doug was useless, and my mom had her hands full at work.

  All I could do was keep my fingers crossed for him and hope for the best.

  Chapter Six

  I ROLLED out of bed Saturday morning and swung my legs to the floor, staring bleary eyed at the disaster area more commonly known as my room.

  I’d always freely admitted I wasn’t the neatest person on the planet, but I don’t think I’d realized exactly how much of a pig I was until faced with the formidable task of cleaning my room to make it presentable for Dylan. I didn’t want to, but I had to clean it. I didn’t want Dylan to think I was a neat freak, but I didn’t want him to think I enjoyed living up to my elbows in industrial waste either.

  There were dirty clothes strewn all over—a carpet of smelly T-shirts, socks, underwear, and jeans. Some stuff hadn’t even made it as far as the floor—there were socks slung over the shade of my table lamp and a pair of underwear hanging from my headboard.

  I stood up and a bag of chips that had been hiding under one of my T-shirts crunched beneath my feet. Empty soda cans dotted the carpet like buoys in an ocean of litter. There were books and CDs piled in tilted stacks, odd scraps of paper sprinkled around like confetti, and a thick layer of dust coating what few bare surfaces remained.

  I glanced at my alarm clock. It was almost eleven fifteen, which gave me about two hours to whip my room into shape. My only other choice was to dress Dylan in a biohazard suit before I let him come inside.

  Superman had never, on his best day, moved as fast as I did. Still in my jockeys, I flew around the room snatching up pieces of clothing, piling them on a blanket I’d spread over the bed. I picked up the two ends of the blanket and stretched them over the mountain of dirty clothes, then hefted it over my shoulder like Santa’s sack and carted it off to the laundry room, dumping it on the floor next to the washer.

  Garbage went into a big, black plastic trash bag, to be sorted through later—perhaps sometime next summer—for recyclables, and shoved into my closet along with books, boxes, bags, and everything else that wasn’t nailed to the floor or wired to the wall.

  As long as Dylan didn’t open my closet door, I was safe. If, for whatever reason, he did, I’d still be digging him out from under the avalanche of junk come graduation.

  I didn’t even attempt to clean out whatever was lurking under the bed. I figured that as long as the legs of the bed were still touching the floor, there was no point. Out of sight, out of mind, you know?

  By the time I’d vacuumed, dusted, and sprayed the room with half a can of mountain fresh-scented air deodorizer, it was a quarter to one in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten anything yet, and I still needed to shower and dress.

  On the way to the kitchen to inhale
a Pop-Tart and maybe a glass of OJ, I passed my mom and Doug’s room. Mom was long gone, having had work at nine. Doug wasn’t there either, and neither was his bowling bag, just as I’d hoped.

  It was the fastest shower of my life. My skin was still damp when I struggled into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t take the time to shave, which turned out to be a good thing since I’d just finished zipping up when the doorbell rang. If I’d shaved, I’d have had to answer it looking like a rabid dog with foam dripping from my chin. As it was I didn’t have the time to put on socks and shoes. Barefoot, I jogged to the front door, forcing myself to take a minute to run my fingers through my wet hair before answering it.

  Dylan looked great, as usual. The fact that he was actually standing at my front door hit me like a baseball bat to the side of the head, temporarily knocking out my ability to speak. All I could do was stare at him in his muscle T-shirt and jeans.

  “Hey,” he said, through the screen door. We stared at each other for a few seconds, before he said, “Wanna let me in? I’ve got Mickey D’s.” He held up a white bag with the familiar golden arches on it, shaking it. In his other hand, he held his guitar.

  I’m not sure if it was the sound of his voice or the smell of the food that brought me around, but I grinned sheepishly as I opened the door for him. “Sorry, yeah, come on in.”

  I felt absurdly self-conscious leading him through the house to my room, and for some strange reason I heard myself giving him the grand tour as we went. It was probably nerves, but I couldn’t seem to stop talking long enough to take a breath between sentences.

  “This is the living room there’s the kitchen do you want something to drink we have soda milk and OJ there’s the bathroom sometimes the handle sticks so you have to jiggle it and that’s my mom’s room there’s the den that’s the door to the basement and here’s my room.”

  Honestly, it was as if I had uncontrollable diarrhea of the mouth.

  Dylan didn’t seem to notice. He walked into my room, laid his guitar on the bed, sat down next to it, and dug into the bag of fast-food. I sat on my desk chair, swiveling around to face him. He tossed me a double cheeseburger and I tore into it, grateful to have something to shove into my mouth to keep it busy for a while.

  “I went over the handouts you gave me yesterday,” Dylan said, his words a little distorted as they funneled their way out around a mouthful of hamburger. “There was a question about why Hamlet hesitated to kill Claudius. Why didn’t he off the guy right away?”

  “Well, mostly it was because in the days when Shakespeare wrote the play, the hero couldn’t just kill a guy because a ghost told him to do it. He had to have proof Claudius was the murderer. Like on CSI—they can’t arrest the killer until the DNA results come in. Arresting a guy without proof positive would annoy the audience, and they’d get bad ratings.” I finished the cheeseburger and started in on the fries Dylan had handed over to me.

  The simple act of eating relaxed me, made me more comfortable with him. I could almost forget he was sitting on my mattress, where I’d done things under the covers the night before that were best left forgotten. I felt a blush coming on and coughed hard to cover it. “Sorry. Fry went down the wrong pipe.”

  Dylan ate another burger, obviously waiting for me to continue.

  “Personally, I think he hesitated because of his Oedipal complex. I think he saw Claudius as the only thing that stood between him and his evil desire to boink Mom. If Hamlet killed Claudius, he’d also destroy the roadblock between him and Mom’s bed. He’d end up doing the deed and damning himself.”

  “Oh, man, that’s so twisted. Come on! He wanted to kill Claudius so he could do it with his mother? The thought alone makes me want to blow chunks.”

  I laughed, polishing off the fries. I tossed the empty sleeve into the wastepaper basket next to my desk. “Yeah, I know. Me too. The other reason could be that he just overthought everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he spent a whole lot of time planning stuff, and almost no time actually doing anything. He wants to make sure that the murder is perfect, that Claudius goes to hell, but he spends way too much time on the details. He procrastinates. By the time Hamlet actually gets around to killing Claudius, he’s dying himself.”

  Dylan nodded slowly. “I never thought of that. Makes sense, though. You want this last cheeseburger?”

  “Nah, but thanks.” I watched Dylan scarf it in two bites, crumpling the wrapper up into a ball and shoving it into the bag.

  “So, you think, if he’d acted earlier, things would have turned out differently for him?”

  I nodded. “We’ll never know, but I think that’s the point. Maybe he would have done the nasty with Mom, but maybe not. Maybe he would have assumed the throne and been a great king. The point is that he dragged his feet for so long, he never got the chance.”

  Dylan fell silent. He flopped back on my bed, arms tucked under his head, looking just as comfortable as if we’d been friends since birth. For a while I thought he might be getting ready to take a freaking nap.

  Time for some Guitar Hero, I thought. I’ll be damned if I waste the afternoon watching him sleep. I can do that in English class. I got up and started plugging in the guitars and booting up the game console, switching the output on the television.

  “So, do you think people should act on their impulses? I mean, what if somebody takes it the wrong way? What if you made a mistake?”

  “It depends. If your impulse is to knock over a bank or bomb a building, then no, I don’t think you should. If it’s to get up off your butt and rock, then by all means, go for it.”

  Dylan picked his head up and looked at me. I held up our guitars, one in each hand, smirking at him.

  “I take it that’s a hint?”

  I shrugged. “If you want to play, then yes. If not, we could discuss Hamlet as a static character in literature.”

  Dylan laughed, jumping off the bed and reaching for his guitar. I cranked the sound up, and before I could blink we were wailing to Heart’s “Barracuda” and scoring star power.

  Holy crap—I’d forgotten myself and joked around with him just as I would have with Billy. What was more amazing was that he’d laughed along with me. It was like a miracle. Somehow, while discussing Hamlet’s sex life between bites of saturated cow fat, we’d become almost-sort-of-friends. But the most incredible thing was that I stopped noticing how gorgeous he was and letting his looks get to me, and started seeing him as just Dylan.

  We played for almost two hours straight, rocking hard, flying through the list, having a blast, until we hit a wall at Tenacious D’s “The Metal.” We tried it twice, screwing up badly both times.

  “Dude, I need a break,” Dylan said, leaning his guitar against the wall. “My fingers are freaking killing me.”

  Mine were too. Hitting the buttons on the guitar at the speed of light for that length of time would do that, I guess. “Want something to drink?”

  “Yeah, a soda would be good.”

  “Cool. Be right back.” I trotted out of the bedroom to the kitchen, snagging a couple of Cokes out of the fridge. When I returned, Dylan was sprawled out on the bed again. I tossed him a Coke and sat at my desk.

  I’d just cracked mine open and tilted it to my lips when Dylan spoke.

  “Are you gay?”

  I choked, doing my best impersonation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Soda sprayed in an arc, missing Dylan’s feet by about an inch.

  “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, dude. I’m just asking, that’s all.”

  I could lie. I should lie. It was safer that way. Easier. No explanations. No embarrassing questions. No cold shoulders, and people changing their seats to avoid sitting next to me. No name-calling, no hate messages scrawled on my locker. No visits to the school shrink with my mom. No evil looks from the coach and the other members of the team. I opened my mouth to say, “No! Absolutely not! Are you crazy?” but what came out was, �
��Yes.”

  Oh, God. As soon as the word left my mouth, I wanted to snatch it out of the air and shove it back down my throat. It was over. I’d admitted it. Not only would Dylan leave—probably so fast he’d leave skid marks on the carpet—but it would be all over school by Monday. Everyone would know. I’d outed myself.

  To my shock and amazement, Dylan didn’t move. He didn’t even blink.

  “Yeah, I thought so. You hang out with Billy all the time. Is he your, you know, boyfriend? Dude, you can do better.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was like a bubble of hysteria had been slowly building up my entire lifetime and had suddenly exploded in my chest, painful, yet funny at the same time. I couldn’t stop either. I laughed until I cried.

  Now Dylan knew that not only was I gay, I was nuts too.

  When my laughter subsided to a few hiccups and snorts, I wiped my eyes and looked at Dylan. He was still lying on my bed, looking as if I’d just told him I was nearsighted, rather than homosexual. It didn’t look as though my bombshell had fazed him at all. “You must think I’m crazy,” I said. “Look, it’s cool if you want to leave.”

  Dylan shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. My uncle’s gay, and he’s a great guy. So, are you and Billy together? You didn’t answer me.”

  Huh. That explained why he was so comfortable with the whole gay thing. “Me and Billy? No. No, we’re just friends. I don’t really have anybody. Right now. At the moment,” I added, not wanting Dylan to think I’d never dated. I hadn’t, but he didn’t have to know that.

  “Ah. Okay. Ready to hit the guitars again?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Dylan… um… I haven’t actually told anybody else yet, besides Billy.” I needed for him to understand that because I wasn’t ready for the shitstorm I’d probably find myself in once I came out to the world at large.

  “Oh, man. I kind of forced it out of you, huh? Sorry, Jamie. I won’t spread it around,” he said, actually looking like he meant it. “It’s hard, though, isn’t it? Not saying anything.” His eyes flicked away, and he wouldn’t look at me. “I mean, my uncle told me it was hard before he came out. Said it was hard to admit it even to himself. He didn’t want to believe it. He tried to be straight.”