Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

by David Connor

  Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

  By David Connor and E.F. Mulder

  Beneath the surface, they share more than dreams of Olympic gold.

  Since elementary school, the question of Reed Watson’s race has needled him. But the one thing he’s always known is that he is destined to become an Olympic star—he felt it the moment he first hit the water. Chosen by a former Olympic swimmer to train for the 2016 Olympics, Reed determinedly works toward his dream.

  Along the way, Reed develops feelings for two men he’s known since childhood: Cal, his next-door neighbor, and Mathias, his rival since the fourth grade. Cal’s struggle with his sexual identity and a tragedy complicate Reed’s feelings, while Mathias’s wealth quickly makes it obvious they are from vastly different worlds.

  As Rio approaches, Mathias becomes a gay sports icon, while Reed is told to hide his sexuality for a lucrative endorsement deal that will offer his family a financial boost and help him with mounting debt. Reed’s unresolved desires for both men remain and so too do all the things that have kept them apart. Has he grown enough to navigate rougher waters, to find truth, pride, victory, and love?

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  About the Authors

  By David Connor

  By E.F. Mulder

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  To my dad and also my great-grandfather, who I never met, but who made me part of who I am. The secrets and questions remaining helped me create and understand Reed.

  Acknowledgments

  MANY THANKS to Desi, who helped shape this story in so many ways. To my other editors—Jo, Andrea, and Yv—your contributions were tremendous and I appreciate them very much. To Rose for helping with the blurb and JC and Janet for the beautiful cover, I am very grateful. This story means so much to me and so do all of you and everyone at Dreamspinner Press.

  Prologue

  “REED, YOUR word is a noun.” My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Smeckler, stood beneath the big clock I spent most of the school day watching, her vocabulary book in hand, her stare boring into me. “It is defined as a deep feeling of pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements. Mathias….” She turned to him. “Your word is also a noun, one meaning something accepted as factual. You must tell this at all times. As you know,” Smeckler said, “the score is tied.”

  Not for long, I thought. I was ready to kick Mathias What’s-his-name’s butt.

  “Whoever gets to the board and correctly writes their word first….”

  That’s going to be me.

  “…will bring their team the victory.”

  My word was pride. I knew Mathias’s too. His was truth. Truth and pride… I planned on writing both, just to show how smart I was.

  Come on! Say go!

  My entire body quivered with excitement as I waited. I really wanted to win, and not just because the victors got fifteen minutes added to recess while the losers had to stay in and study. I always wanted to win—at everything—because winning felt so good.

  “Remember, spelling counts.”

  Stop talking, Smeckler! I was ready to fly.

  “Take your mark.” She dragged it out. “Get set.” She raised her hand. “Go!”

  An empty chair toppled sideways as I bolted, and a book slid off Mike Savoy’s desk when I crashed right into it.

  “Reed!” Smeckler scolded me.

  “Dang it!” I had to go back and pick both items up, wasting precious time.

  “Remember, move to the opposite white board without actually running.”

  What the heck fun is that?

  The class was divided in half, my team in front of the windows, Mathias’s group shoulder to shoulder along the wall with the “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” bulletin board.

  “Go, Reed!” My team cheered me on. Mathias’s sort of coerced him—harassed might have been even more fitting. He hadn’t budged from his spot, and as I glanced back, half his teammates were yelling, while the other half were staring him down. Smeckler did too, like some sort of alien monster with laser-beam eyes.

  “Mathias…?” she said. “Do you know your word?”

  I came to a halt after picking up Mike’s book. Come on, kid, I thought. I don’t want to win on a forfeit. There was no pride in that. Truth!

  His word didn’t seem that challenging for a fourth grader, except maybe for the dropped e from true, its root. “Many of these words will have some tricky phonemes and graphemes.” Mrs. Smeckler had tossed that out at the start of the so-called game. I wasn’t familiar with either one of those terms, but I knew how to spell truth, and I couldn’t imagine any of us didn’t, including poor old Mathias…. Mathias… what? Mrs. Smeckler had mentioned his surname that morning, and each of the four days of school so far that year. He sat right next to me in first-year band. We both played trombone. The band teacher had called out both names too, but I’d have been damned if I could recall it at that moment. The short, frail-looking kid always slouched down in his seat during scales. He was squirmy now, and had been from the start. Actually we were all still summery restless. The fall leaves hadn’t even begun to change color yet. It was still hot outside, and every one of us wanted to be out there, not in some stifling classroom involved in a nerve-racking matchup only Mrs. Smeckler could consider enjoyable. “A vocab bee is a fun way to learn and get to know one another.” Those had been her exact words.

  Fun? As if.

  Personally, I’d have rather been pitted against my classmates in a rousing game of dodgeball. I got a sense timid Mathias would have been petrified by dodgeball—not that he seemed the epitome of calm while playing word games. Me, I was always fidgety. When Mrs. Smeckler asked me on the first day of class why I couldn’t sit still, I told her it was because I had a constant surge of energy coursing through me like an electric eel. “They feel like that, right… all charged up and spazzy?” She looked at me funny. “Hey. Do they, like, electrocute each other when they touch?” Smeckler told me to look it up. I figured that meant she didn’t know. I decided I’d just ask my father—my father, not my mother, because she’d tell me to look it up too, even if she did know.

  The longer Mathias took to answer, the more restless I became and the more his teammates derided him and glared. Mine were on my case too, but I just flipped them off—three fingers, middle one straighter—as I stood between Trish Haley’s and Mike’s desks, transfixed. As much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t move. I’d noticed several new kids in the cafeteria the first day at lunchtime, but Mathias looked the shyest and always the most uncomfortable. He seemed completely panicked now. His spiky blond hair quivered as he literally quaked in his cowboy boots—red ones. Dude had fashion sense, if nothing else. His gray eyes were wet behind black plastic-frame glasses, as if he was on the verge of tears. Then as his teammates chanted, “Go, Mathias! Go!” he did, and the front of his pants grew wet as well.

  A bunch of our jerky classmates started to laugh.

  “Shut up!” I shouted. I had no real idea why I jumped to the new kid’s defense. It wasn’t as if I was Mr. Compassionate back then.

  “Reed, we don’t say ‘shut
up’ in this classroom.” Mrs. Smeckler turned her evil sneer upon me.

  “We shouldn’t laugh at people either,” I answered back.

  Mrs. Smeckler didn’t have a comeback for that, nor did she chastise the others. Turning her attention back to her frigging competition, she simply asked, all straight-backed and pursed lips, “Would you like a new word, Mathias?”

  Mathias moved his head side to side as the wet spot on the front of his tan corduroys got bigger and bigger. Maybe Smeckler thought ignoring it was the compassionate thing to do, since we were close to dismissal. Surely she saw it. Everyone did. I’d have made a joke, something like, “It’s a vocabulary bee, not a vocabulary pee.” The word pee might have even brought forth a smile from Mathias. We were at that age.

  “Reed, it’s up to you, then.” Smeckler fixed her eyes on mine. Maybe she wasn’t being kind. Maybe she was wicked. “Please, go to the board.”

  “And if I don’t?” From wide brown circles to defiant slits, I imagined my eyes shooting death rays. I was quite the smartass, quite brave. I knew it was close to the end of the day. There was little time for conversation, let alone a new word. If I refused to spell out pride, I assumed the bee would end in a tie.

  “Please take your hand from in front of your face.”

  Ugh. She was really on my case. It was a habit I had—covering my mouth sometimes when I spoke, because my teeth were jacked up.

  “If you know the word, Reed, go to the board and write it.”

  The entire class grew silent. It was a real competition now, not between my team and Mathias’s, but between Mrs. Smeckler and me.

  “Reed?”

  “What?”

  Tick, tick, tick, the clock over her head counted off the final few seconds of the day. She knew I knew. Even after just a few days as my teacher, she knew I was smart, and I knew she knew. Would she call my bluff or just move on to my teammate Caryn?

  “Fine. If that’s the way you want it, tomorrow we’ll have a written test.” Smeckler clapped her book closed, like an alligator capturing its prey. “Spelling. Fifty words. Unless everyone in the class gets a passing grade, there will be no recess at all for the rest of the week.”

  Big deal. I may have lost the vocabulary bee, but I’d won the fight for human decency, and the victory felt good, at least until Jeff Ackerman got up in my business, hissing a whispered warning, like the snake he was.

  “We lose recess, Watson, I beat the crap out of you.” Jeff was a jerk—and a troublemaker. He sat right next to me in our assigned seats, way up front, real close to the teacher’s desk. My reputation had preceded me. His word had been homely, and he’d written underneath it on the board Like Reed Watson. The class had laughed at me, like they had at Mathias. Had it been aimed at someone else, I might have considered it clever from someone our age. I got some solace at least from the fact the doofus put two m’s in homely—h-o-m-m-e-l-y. I got to laugh right back at him. The difference was, when he hung his head and looked sad about the teasing, I actually felt bad.

  “I’d like to see you try, Ackerman.” That was a lie. I was pretty sure Jeff could put me in a full-body cast if he wanted to.

  “Meet me in front of my bus outside, then, and I’ll rearrange your ugly face.”

  “I will.”

  I didn’t. I might have been mouthy, but I wasn’t masochistic. Though I hated my jagged, whack teeth, crooked nose, and scarred chin, I didn’t really want my hommely features rearranged. My pride took a backseat to common sense that day. Jeff scared me, and that was the truth.

  THE FOLLOWING morning, Mrs. Smeckler went down the list in her little black book to call attendance. “Reed Watson.”

  “Here.”

  “Did you bring in your picture for the bulletin board?”

  Again with that damned bulletin board. A large banner asked the question “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” Beneath that were cutouts from magazines and other sources of a doctor, a race car driver, a news reporter, a teacher, loving parents with two little boys approximately our age, and assorted other occupations, including a shepherd. Who the heck wanted to be a shepherd, I wondered. We’d each been assigned the task of bringing in a picture to add to the collection, a representation of our future plans. Mrs. Smeckler had made the request the very first day back from summer vacation, insisting we comply by Monday of the following week. It was already Wednesday, and I still hadn’t done it. I kept forgetting. Plus, my nine-and-a-half-year-old brain couldn’t totally settle on one eventual vocation.

  “No,” I told her. “I forgot.” Given the way the day before had ended, I’d never even thought about it.

  “Bring it tomorrow.” Smeckler rolled her eyes and continued. “Mathias Webber?”

  Webber—that was his name, but Mathias Webber didn’t answer.

  “Mathias Webber?”

  I looked toward the back of the room where the well-behaved kids got to sit. I hadn’t been back there since my first day in kindergarten. There was an empty seat, presumably his.

  “Mathias isn’t here?”

  I assumed Smeckler’s question was rhetorical. I knew the word—and I could spell it, silent h and all. I was ready for her test.

  Last I’d seen of Mathias Webber, he was moping across the parking lot to his bus, with a windbreaker tied around his waist to cover his pee pants. He’d probably taken a lot of crap on that bus, and now sat at home, a bad case of embarrassment a more likely cause than any virus or the runs. I figured he’d be back in a day or two. He wasn’t. I thought about Mathias Webber for a few days, a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months. Heck, even after several years I’d get to thinking every now and then, I wonder whatever happened to that kid who peed his pants in Mrs. Smeckler’s class. Eventually, I let it go, figuring I’d never know.

  1

  “YOU’RE IN a lot of activities.”

  By the time I got into high school five years later, I’d joined the Academic Olympics team, chorus, band—first-chair trombone since fifth grade—drama club, and also the Dover Sharks soccer, basketball, and track teams. I also played Little League baseball in town. We’d gone two years undefeated, thanks in no small part to my pitching.

  My mother sat me down at the kitchen table for a serious conversation during ninth-grade finals week. Mama never wore any jewelry, not even a wedding ring. I noticed that for the first time then, because I was looking at her hands, just like she was. The way she kept wringing and opening and closing them, it was hard to look anywhere else. I got the feeling, as the conversation went on, it was difficult for her to look me in the eye too.

  “Some of the things you do are expensive. They take up a lot of time, and though it hurts me to ask you to choose, I think next year we are going to have to cut back.”

  I believed her when she said it hurt. I just kind of didn’t care.

  Dropped off safe-haven/baby-Moses style at the local firehouse a few months into my existence, I’d been fostered by an older white couple for a while, then eventually adopted by Angela and Marvet Watson—Mama and Dad. Our family was like a reverse Diff’rent Strokes—a short, precocious, somewhat Caucasian-looking little stinker being raised by a black family. The other disparity was our financial situation. Nowhere near as wealthy as the Drummonds, my parents both worked yet still probably had a bank balance lower than Mrs. Garrett’s. As for my biological makeup, well, I could have been black for all any of us knew. Despite the fact I sometimes felt as white as Mrs. Smeckler’s dry-erase board from back in the day, most people probably saw something else when noticing the color of my skin.

  One time, Jeff Ackerman asked, “What are you supposed to be?” Since it wasn’t Halloween, and since we were in the middle of the chapter in our seventh-grade history books about nationalities and heritage, I figured he was asking about that. My coloring was definitely up for debate, even within my own family. I had coarse and kinky hair, good rhythm, and I could jump. My father had pointed all that out to me more than once. “I’m pret
ty sure you’re at least half-black,” he often said. When I repeated those stereotypes and Dad’s conclusion to Jeff, he called me racist. I thought that was ignorant. I figured my father would as well. “Did it hurt you when I said it?” Dad asked me. “The thing about being able to dance and play ball?”

  “No.”

  “Not a twinge of discomfort, not a jolt in your chest or a knot in your gut?”

  “No.” I was being completely truthful.

  “Would the same words… the same hackneyed labels hurt from someone else… from this Jeff kid, maybe?”

  I had to think about that. “I’m not sure.”

  “How come?”

  “Well… I figured it was kind of a joke with you. It’s also the God’s honest truth. I got moves on the dance floor and the court.”

  “Do you now?” My father smiled.

  “Yeah, no matter what race I am. If Jeff said it….” I thought some more. “I guess racism is more about how a person acts towards someone overall—on a daily basis—than it is about a possibly inappropriate sentence or two.” I also had a pretty good vocabulary for my age. “Right? More about….”

  My dad offered a word that wouldn’t come to my mind. “Intent?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “So you know the definition?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad kept staring at me, wanting proof.

  “It means why they say what they say.”

  “Or why you do.”

  “Me?”

  “What you say as a joke could rub someone the wrong way just as easily… about race, about a boy’s mannerisms being girly, about a girl being butch because her fastball’s faster than yours….”

  My father wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He was teaching me a lesson regarding past transgressions I didn’t even realize he’d known about. I huffed. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

  Dad smiled again. “That’s what a lot of people ask. Sometimes it’s all pretty subtle.” He ruffled my tight dark curls. “If you don’t know prejudice when you hear it, trust your gut to know when you feel it. As long as you’re aware of the intentions behind your own words and act accordingly from now on… as long as you can defend what you say, apologize when you can’t, and even when the best of intentions go awry, because that will happen too… I think you’ll be okay.”