The next day was another uneventful day. The only really significant change that day was that Bill had his car back now, so instead of waiting for and taking the crowded, noisy bus, he drove us to school each morning. He frequently had some sort of sports practice after school so he’d come home separately and later in the afternoon, which left me to ride the bus home alone each afternoon. But that was fine because I was still concerned about our being seen together. Whenever I suggested that he keep his distance from me in public he wouldn’t budge an inch. He told me to get used to it because he wasn’t going anywhere. “You’re stuck with me,” he said. “We’ve bonded,” he joked.
Bill had lunch with me, and this time Jeremy joined us too, as well as another friend of his, some guy I didn’t know. He was also a jock, but he also seemed to have a brain. Bill didn’t seem to know the guy, but we all seemed to get along okay, easily finding something we could all talk about together. People all around the room were studying us carefully, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Kids in high school were accustomed to life being a particular way. Change wasn’t common in our world, and it wasn’t necessarily welcome when it occurred. I guess that I threatened the established order of things. I’m sure they also blamed me for breaking up established patterns. Bill used to eat with his jock friends. Now he ate with me. Jeremy used to eat with his jock friends, and now he was eating with us at our table. I had committed the unpardonable sin of introducing new patterns that people couldn’t figure out. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done anything. Logic and reason were not always given top billing in high school students’ thinking when their social order was threatened.
The remainder of that day passed uneventfully—busily, but uneventfully. The following day, however, not so much. The day I had feared and dreaded actually came to pass. In the men’s room between classes I was cornered unexpectedly. After it happened, I noticed that there was a lookout at the door into the bathroom. I was zipping up and about to step away from the urinal when I felt myself grabbed from behind. I was thrown face-first into the wall beside the urinal. It hurt. Whoever had thrown me wasn’t letting go, though. They twisted one of my arms behind my back, and for a moment I was seriously worried that they were going to break it, or at least dislocate my shoulder.
I heard an especially menacing voice very close to my right ear. The speaker was so close to me that I felt his moist breath on my skin. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, faggot. We don’t need your kind screwing things up. We don’t want your kind. You got that?” To punctuate the “discussion” I felt my head slammed into the wall once again. For a minute or two or ten my world got fuzzy, and I had a hard time focusing on anything. I don’t know how it happened, but the next thing I knew I was on the floor and the room was quiet. Somebody needed to clean in here, I thought to myself. Why that was my first thought, I have no idea, but it was.
I heard a sound and was afraid my tormenters had returned, but it was somebody I didn’t know who was trying to help me to my feet. I didn’t know this guy, but he clearly was not one of the inner circle who knew the latest gossip, or he wouldn’t have wanted to be seen associating with me. There was movement, but I wasn’t necessarily connecting one event and the next in a sequential order. I found myself in the nurse’s office next, with something cold pressed against my face. I became more aware and realized that the cold thing was some sort of ice pack. It didn’t really matter to me since it felt good against my face. Oh, wait, that’s right—why did my face hurt? Right. Someone slammed it into a wall. What was that all about?
Pain. Crap. It hurt despite the cold. It was a very nonfocused pain. I don’t think one single thing hurt or throbbed—it was more of a diffuse pain.
I became aware of a number of worried looking faces in my field of vision. There was the school nurse, the principal, a couple of other admin types that I recognized but couldn’t put names to. And Bill. What was he doing here? He spoke to me. Or at least he was the first one that I was aware of speaking to me.
“How are you feeling?”
“Hurts,” I said in careful and detailed explanation.
“What happened?”
“Didn’t see the guy. Only heard the voice. He called me….” I stopped. He knew. I didn’t need to go into it again.
“Hang on. The ambulance will be here soon,” someone said.
“No! No ambulance! I want to go home!”
“You got quite a bump to your head. You need to go to the hospital,” the principal was saying. I couldn’t tell if he was actually concerned about my health or was concerned about plausible deniability for future potential lawsuits.
“I want to go home,” I said to Bill, but he wasn’t any more willing to hear my objection than the others. I lay back on the stiff, uncomfortable bed in the nurse’s office while she changed my ice pack. I also became aware that she was changing some sort of pad she had been pressing about my face. When she moved it away I saw that it was all bloody. Oh, crap! What did they do to me?
I heard raised voices in the next room. The voices were not clear enough for me to follow the conversation or even to make out exact words, but they were quite animated and loud. As I looked toward the conversation I saw that Bill was arguing with the principal about something. Who knew exactly what they were discussing, but Bill was furious and was holding back nothing as he made some point emphatically.
In the end both sides got what they wanted. The ambulance crew, when they finally arrived, checked me over and agreed that I probably didn’t need to go to the hospital. So, I got some cuts on my face cleaned up and bandaged, and then I got to go home. Bill pulled his car up to the front door of the building, and the principal and the nurse walked me out, both hovering only inches away.
As Bill got my seatbelt buckled I heard him say one simple thing to the principal. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning. Set it up.” I didn’t know what that meant, but Bill was adamant about it whatever it was.
“We’ll see,” the principal responded.
“No! No ‘we’ll see’. You’ll do it or I’ll be talking to every TV reporter that I can get a hold of to fill them in on the assaults—yes, plural—that have occurred on your watch. Hell of a way to watch your career end, huh?” Damn, he was fired up about something.
When we got home, my mom wasn’t home yet. She had something going on that afternoon, and no one had been able to reach her. She of course didn’t use a cell phone, but who knew. Maybe that would change after today. Bill got me inside, although I was moving much more easily and naturally by that point.
The nurse had given him a page of handwritten instructions of things to do that afternoon, including keeping me awake and talking. While I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and have Bill wrap his arms around me, we had to sit up. He asked me to describe what happened, and I did the best I could to recount what I remembered.
When my dad got home and could take over keeping me talking, Bill stepped away and started making phone calls. I could hear enough to tell that he was starting to call on everybody he knew to get someone to roll on whoever was involved. He knew that it was only a matter of time to get someone who was uncomfortable to give it up, and he finally did. Someone—I don’t know who—spilled their guts and told him what they had heard. That one lead gave him the name of someone else who had been in the room. When Bill confronted him, the guy apparently caved quickly and gave up everything he knew. By the end of his calls, Bill had a list of the guys who were in the room and the ringleader of the event.
That night Bill asked if he could use one of my computers. I got him set up on my laptop at the dining room table. He wanted to prepare a presentation, so I showed him how PowerPoint worked. The man was a quick study, so he had no problem picking up how to use the program and assemble a presentation.
Several times he conferred with my mom about something. He made a couple of phone calls as well. He worked on my laptop for hours, pausing only occasionally to
think about something. Each time he resumed tapping away vigorously at the keyboard. I was curious, but I didn’t push him. He’d tell me when the time was right. Long before he was finished I was falling over tired, so I went to bed. This was a first for us—we were together but we didn’t go to bed together. I didn’t especially like it, but I knew it was an exception and not the rule. Sometime later he came to bed. I hadn’t heard him come into the room or get undressed but I woke when he curled up behind me and wrapped his arm around my middle. I whispered, “I love you,” and said good night.
Chapter 18
THE next morning I would have given a very great deal to not have to get out of bed and go to school, but Bill was adamant that I needed to do just that. Going back into the lion’s den was the last thing I wanted to do, but Bill told me he had some guys he trusted lined up so that somebody would be with me at all times. I wasn’t happy about that because it meant I was disrupting somebody’s life and I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, and having my own personal escort would do that. At the same time, it was comforting to know that if someone were to try to jump me again he’d have a harder time doing it today.
When we got to school Bill introduced me to my first couple of escorts. He reminded them (in a jock kind of way) what he needed them to do and impressed upon them that he was counting on them. They readily agreed and stuck to their word, never leaving me for a second. During our homeroom time we learned that the normal third period class was suspended for that day. In lieu of that, all students, staff, and teachers were required to assemble in the auditorium. No details were provided about what that was all about, but I could guess that I was involved somehow. Crap.
Was the entire world in a giant conspiracy to draw attention to me? Damn! Damn! Damn! I just wanted to keep my head down, live my life, love my man, and be left alone. Why did the world have to have its collective head up its ass about guys and sex? I’d had sex with a guy now. It’s great, and I can say with the utmost authority that it’s nothing at all to be scared about. And all the straight guys in the showers could relax. While I might like to look at their cute asses and pretty penises, there was no way I would ever want to have sex with them. They were straight. Having sex with a man for them would just be wrong—and entirely too much work. I’d much rather have sex with a man who also wanted to have sex with a man. When you both want the same thing it seemed to me that it would all work out so much easier.
First and second periods passed in a bit of a blur. I was aware of my classmates watching me. They were all aware of my incident in the bathroom yesterday. The high school gossip mill was a first-rate vehicle for relaying information—not always correctly, but it got the core story spread fast. And if the gossip mill wasn’t quite so efficient, the arrival of an ambulance with flashing lights, stretchers, and several police cars would have been a good hint that something out of the ordinary was happening. Even the dumbest student should have been able to put the pieces together and figure it out.
When the bell sounded for the transition from second period to third, I headed off to the school auditorium along with everyone else in the building. The room was designed to hold everyone, although it rarely saw every person in the building gathered together in the same place at the same time. As a result, every seat was filled, and there were even some people standing along the walls on the two sides as well as at the back of the room.
My escorts led me to a seat near the front on the right-hand side of the room. Apparently they had received specific instructions, with which they complied. The stage was bare except for a single lectern toward the right side of the stage. There were two chairs beside the lectern. Otherwise the stage was empty.
A room full of teenage high school students who knew something was up but didn’t have specific details led to a lot of talking. The room was loud with what seemed like a thousand separate conversations all happening simultaneously. The noise was overwhelming to me. I tried to slide down in my seat so that I presented the smallest possible target and was as close to invisible as I could be in a crowded auditorium. There was an escort on the right of me and another one on the left. Both of the current guys were recognizable to me. I knew their faces, but I didn’t know their names. They were both big, solid guys who looked like they could knock over small buildings all by themselves. With them by my side I had no fear of anyone trying anything. But I also knew that they would not be there forever. They had their own lives and problems. They might be willing to help out a fellow jock with a special need, but it wouldn’t become a regular occurrence. There would come a day, most likely very soon, when I would once again have to walk the halls and deal with the locker room and go to the bathroom all by myself. When I say it that way, it makes me sound like a two-year-old. In some ways that’s exactly how I felt that morning.
The lights in the room dimmed. A large screen dropped from the ceiling over the stage. Conversations around the room slowed and almost stopped. A picture appeared on the screen. It was a guy about my age. There was no indication of who he was. I didn’t recognize him and didn’t think he went to our school.
The first picture was replaced with another picture, this one of an adult male—a cute male—who was shown laughing at something. That picture faded and was replaced with another picture, this one of a girl about my age. She wasn’t smiling. No, in fact she looked rather dour and unhappy.
This continued for maybe a dozen pictures before it stopped. I was shocked to see Bill and the principal walk onto the stage from the wings. The principal didn’t look overly happy. Bill had his standard poker face on so I couldn’t read him. The principal took a seat beside the lectern. Bill went directly to the lectern, arranged some notes, and then looked out at the audience. He stepped out from behind the lectern and moved to the front center of the stage.
Rather than start speaking when everyone expected him to start, Bill simply stared at the audience. It almost looked as if he was searching for someone, but it wasn’t clear. He seemed to be studying everyone very intently.
With no introduction, Bill’s voice suddenly came through the sound system loud and clear. “Good morning. Some of you know who I am, but not everyone. My name is Bill Cromwell. I’ve known a lot of you for most of my life. I’ve run track with you, played basketball with you, served on Student Council with some of you, sat in classes with others of you.”
Bill looked out at the audience, paused, and then said, “You’re probably all wondering what we’re doing here this morning. The answer is simple. Some shit went down here yesterday….”
The principal started to rise from his seat. We could hear him say something that Bill could apparently hear but we could not. The principal didn’t seem to have a microphone so his voice was not amplified through the sound system. Bill looked at him—no, Bill glared at him. That was the only word that worked. Something passed between them with that look. I don’t know what, but the principal sat back down.
Bill turned back to the audience and continued. “As I said, some shit went down here yesterday. It involves every single one of us in this room right now.” Speaking slowly, clearly, and distinctly, he said, “And it can never happen again.” Bill stepped to the left side of the stage and continued. “The administration wanted to bring in a bunch of experts to talk with us, but I asked that we have a chance to talk to each other directly before anything like that. That may still happen, but I wanted to talk to you first.” Bill was speaking directly to the people in the audience. He wasn’t reading any notes. He wasn’t following any visible script. And he was speaking so confidently it was amazing. And he was good too.
“Yesterday afternoon several of you did something so stupid that I still can’t believe you did it. Several of you attacked a fellow student in the bathroom. A lot of you have heard about it already. There’s probably a whole bunch of different versions circulating around. Some of them are probably way off base. So let me tell you what happened.” He turned to head back to
ward the center of the stage but stopped and turned back toward the audience, as if he had suddenly remembered something important. “Oh, and while I know exactly who was in the room and who did what, I’m not naming names—yet.” The principal once again visibly didn’t like something in what Bill had just said, but Bill seemed to ignore him and simply continue. Again he stopped, “Oh, and don’t anybody try to leave. You’ll be stopped.”
Bill did something unexpected then. He jumped down off the stage to the area in front of the first row in the center. He grabbed something that none of us could see, walked up to what seemed like a random person, and threw whatever he held at that person. It was a girl. I didn’t know her. She screamed. Bill ignored her and walked on. He returned to the front, grabbed something else, and headed up the other aisle about halfway. The look on his face when he passed was ferociously focused. He stopped, picked another person at random, and threw something at them as well. The guy yelled in surprise.
Bill returned to the front, grabbed something else, and returned to the stage. He suddenly started running toward the principal, screaming something at the top of his lungs, and threw something at the man. The cup he had been holding was filled with confetti. The principal, like everyone else, expected to get wet. The poor man cringed and tried to move out of the way. So, aside from his heart rate doubling, no damage was done.
There was apparently nothing more he wanted to throw. He returned to the center of the stage and stood quietly for a moment with his hands folded behind his back, waiting for people to quiet back down. The audience was very startled at what he had done, and everybody was trying to find out what had happened.
“Were you surprised?” he asked. “Did you like being singled out? Did you like being attacked? Hmm? No! Of course you were surprised. Nobody knew what I was going to do. I hadn’t told anybody what I planned. The principal didn’t know. Nobody knew except me. I planned it and only I knew about it. Oh, and don’t worry. What I threw the first two times were only two very old, tired Nerf balls, and in each case I aimed for a spot beside a person so all they had to deal with was shock. The contents of the cup I threw here on the stage was only confetti, so aside from picking pieces of paper out of his hair for the rest of the day, again no harm done.
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