“What’s this?” he asked, not believing his eyes. He’d probably never seen or held that much cash together in one place in his life. “How much?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t count. I found that first and then kept searching to see if there were other things on other drawers. One contains a key of some sort.” I held the key up for him to examine. “Recognize it?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“The third envelope has a letter of some sort. I haven’t read it so I don’t know if it explains the money and the key or not. The other envelopes,” I said as I handed them over to him, “were all in the kitchen, also taped to the bottoms of drawers.”
He took the envelopes and started checking them out. The envelopes from the kitchen each held some more cash, again hundred-dollar bills. “Where in the world did these come from?” he wondered aloud. Explaining to me, he said, “We never had any money. There was just nothing. I always thought it was because the farm wasn’t making any money. I have no idea where this came from.”
“Read the letter,” I suggested, so he did. Sitting in a chair in my room, Bill started reading. The letter was long and personal, so I left him to do that while I took care of something that had been troubling me for some time. Since Bill was going to live here now I needed to make room in my room—no, our room—for him. I cleared out space for him in the dresser drawers. I cleared out space for him in the closet. I cleared out bookshelf space for him as well as desk space.
When I finished that task he had finished and apparently returned the letter to its envelope. “Is there some place I can put these?” he asked. Which was a perfect segue for me to tell him what I had been doing.
“Perfect timing!” I said. “I’ve been moving things to make room for you.” I showed him his half of the dresser, his half of the closet, his space on the bookshelves, and his space on the desk. I asked him if there was anything more he needed, but he said no, that he had more than he could possibly need.
“I don’t own much,” he said. “My clothes are pretty ratty, and there aren’t that many of them. I don’t have a computer. I don’t have books.”
I decided that I needed to cut him off before he talked himself into a depression. “So you have lots of options for storing the envelopes. In terms of clothes, I don’t know if these would fit you or not, but I got some new pants before school this summer and the legs haven’t been shortened to fit me yet. You’re a little bit taller than me, so the leg length might be just right for you. We both have about the same waist, I think.”
Bill held the pants up and they looked just about right for him.
“Try them on,” I instructed, so he did.
“You just want to see me naked,” he said with a smirk.
“Of course,” I said simply, knowing that he was going commando that day. But I really did want to see if the pants would fit him. We were both pleased that they fit him beautifully. I pulled out another pair, which he tried on. I made a big production of checking out the fit, running my hands across his beautiful butt, checking the tightness of the fit in the crotch.
“They look good on you,” I said.
“What are you going to wear,” he asked, “if I take your pants?”
“Not to worry, I’ve got more.” I grabbed a couple of shirts from the closet, but I didn’t have any new shirts I could give him. “We’ll have to go to the mall and get some shirts for you.”
“How?” he asked. “I don’t have any money.”
“What was the money in the envelopes?” I asked, curious about what he had learned.
“My mom had been sticking money away for years, little bit here and there, for my college education. She knew my dad would never be able to do anything for me.” He was quiet for a moment. “I can’t take it. She needs it to start her new life. But I don’t know where she is or how to get it to her.”
At dinner that night I told my mom that Bill needed some clothes. He complained and again said that he had no money. My mom and dad reassured him that that was not an issue, and that he had to have clothes to wear to school.
“I owe you all so much as it is!” he objected, looking almost panicked.
“No you don’t,” my mom said. “Someday you’ll be older and have money and you’ll do the same thing for a friend in need. It’s the circle of life,” she said simply, and it was. The next night she and Bill drove to the mall where she bought several shirts for him as well as underwear and socks. He objected once again, but she simply told him to hush.
Chapter 22
THAT week Bill heard that the local farm supply store needed some assistance on weekends. He seemed to be increasingly focused on money, or more accurately on his lack of money. So one night after school we stopped by the farm supply store on the way home. I had been in there with my dad before. They sold a lot more than farm supplies, although I can’t remember what it was he was after the time he brought me there.
The manager seemed delighted to see us, although I was just along for moral support. He told us what he needed help with and said that he needed a couple of young guys like us. I started to shake my head to correct his false impression. But I stopped when I saw the pitiful look on Bill’s face. Sighing, I nodded slightly, accepting what was being proposed. Bill accepted on our behalf, and we agreed to work one day a week—Saturdays.
I had always valued my weekends. They were the only time I had free to sleep in, read, surf the Internet, do stuff that I wanted to do. I wasn’t happy about giving up one of my two free days a week. But I decided to focus on the good point, that I’d get to spend the time with Bill.
So Saturday at 7:00 a.m.—yes, a.m.—we were at the farm supply store ready to get to work. And work we did. The place was busy as soon as it opened at 7:00 a.m. Maybe my mom was a farmer at heart, and that explained why she was such an early riser. The manager put us to work unloading a couple of delivery trucks that arrived. We lifted, toted, and hauled more boxes and bags than I could believe. The rolls of barbed wire were the toughest.
Between deliveries he had us unpacking boxes in the storage area adjacent to the store and stocking shelves as needed. We also helped to load purchases into customers’ cars and trucks. Everything from bags of seed to bales of hay to horse saddles, axes, fencing, wood, salt buttons, and stuff I couldn’t even identify. The work that day made our day of unloading the chocolate truck look like kid’s play. When we finished at five o’clock that evening we crawled home, exhausted and stinking to the high heavens from sweat and the various products we had been hauling.
In the car I laid my head back, and Bill looked over at me and simply said, “I love you.”
“Good,” I said, not raising my head or opening my eyes.
“What? No ditto? No ‘I love you’ back?”
“Mark is tired. At the tone leave a message. Messages of love and devotion will be returned following a nap and dinner. Beep.”
“Mark, this is your boyfriend. He loves you. You better say it back to me later tonight. Bye.”
I sat up, suddenly realizing that he had called me his boyfriend. I thought of us in those terms, we behaved as boyfriends, and we told each other that we loved the other, but I don’t think I’d heard him say the word. I liked the way it sounded. Boyfriend. I had a boyfriend. I had a hot hunk of a boyfriend.
“I love you,” I said. Bill smiled. I just sat there and stared at him, a serious expression on my face. “I love you. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. Always.” If we hadn’t been in public I would have taken his hand and kissed it. We were in his car on the way home, which I guess is not technically “public,” but still, I didn’t want to invite any trouble if I could help it.
Working at the farm supply store produced several benefits I had not expected or anticipated. One is that lifting and moving heavy bags and boxes helped produce more muscles in my arms, shoulders, and abs than any workout routine could. The more they developed, the harder I worked to keep them by lifting weights during the we
ek. In addition to lifting weights at school, I was also now lifting weights in the basement other nights. I took Sundays off because I was just too tired from working on Saturdays.
Another benefit is that we were starting to earn a little cash. Neither one of us was going to get rich doing the work that we were doing, but Bill seemed a little less stressed to have a little money to call his own. He didn’t spend it, but simply having it seemed to make him feel better. And I guess I can understand how he felt. His entire world had changed, and he probably felt that he had to provide for his own support now, that no one was there to back him up. Of course I was, and my folks were. They had done as much as they knew how to do for him, not just financially but in psychological and emotional ways as well.
Between school and work and homework, Bill was working frantically contacting all of the colleges he had applied to earlier in the fall to inform them of his new contact information as well as his change in circumstances. He wrote one damned good letter, holding back nothing. He outlined in clear detail what had happened and that he was now entirely on his own, and therefore needed any financial assistance their school could provide for him to be able to attend.
He was so busy with school, track, work, homework, his work to secure a college education, and adapting to his new life with us, that there were times I barely saw him, even though we lived together and slept in the same bed every night, our heads mere inches away from one another. I knew that this was likely to be something we experienced in the years ahead as we entered college.
Wherever we were going—and neither of us knew yet—we knew that we were going to go together. We had found each other; there was no way we were going to let go of the other man now. We lived together at the moment, and we were going to live together in college and beyond. And it hit me: we were a couple. Simply hearing the word “boyfriend” had felt so good to me. Thinking of the word “couple” made my toes positively tingle.
Chapter 23
AS IF we didn’t have enough going on already, Bill signed us up for something new on Sunday afternoons: each Sunday we drove to the city about half an hour away and took part in a self-defense class offered to victims of assault and abuse. The idea wasn’t to teach you to fight, but to be able to stand up for yourself, defend yourself, and survive.
One thing the class taught me was a very simple concept that was contrary to the entire way I had lived my life throughout high school. The class taught me that, regardless of size or muscles or speed or strength, you needed to project confidence. Bullies were less likely to take on someone who appeared confident and able to stand up for himself. Bullies tended to spot weaknesses in others and take advantage of those weaknesses.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that sooner. It made absolutely perfect sense, even though it was diametrically opposed to the way I had lived my life up to that time. I had always tried to emulate a turtle, tucking myself inside my shell for protection. The class taught me to look people in the eye, stand a little taller, walk confidently. And if that failed, it also taught me how to take down an attacker in two easy steps.
At first I grumbled about one more commitment for our very limited free time, but after a month of attending I was gushing with positive things to say about the class and about the experience. There were a lot of women in the class who had been victims of abuse, but there were also several guys our age or a little older. We hadn’t really dared to talk to them much yet. We thought that they were probably gay, but we didn’t know how they would react to two underage guys trying to get to know them. One day soon we were going to just start a conversation and see where it led. All we were interested in was friendship, mutual support, and the assurance you got from knowing that you weren’t the only one of your kind.
At school I tried this whole new “projecting confidence” attitude, and I actually did notice others occasionally looking at me differently. I wasn’t exactly sure how they were seeing me, and I wasn’t quite brave enough to go up and just ask them yet—maybe one day, but not yet.
Even though it seemed stupid to me—okay, I didn’t put it quite that way when he raised it—Bill suggested that I join the track team with him. I personally couldn’t see the purpose. Nor did I have any desire to do that. Granted, Bill and I had gone running several times over the last few weeks. He was a runner and liked to run. The winter had been long and tough for him—me too, for that matter—so when he suggested a run on a warmish late winter day I didn’t argue. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with him but surprisingly didn’t do as bad as I had expected.
Bill gave me a couple of tests—he timed me—to see how I did with different scenarios. He told me that they needed one more guy since someone had quit. Gee, thanks there, lover boy. Way to make me feel needed!
We were in our last semester of school. Spring was just around the corner—please, God! It had been a long winter. I was looking forward to graduation and getting the hell out of Dodge. We still didn’t know where we were going. Both of us had received acceptance letters from schools, but so far we didn’t have any overlap. We were both unhappy, since we both agreed that wherever we went, we were going together.
And then finally it happened. After weeks and weeks that felt like years and years, the day came when we each had a letter waiting for us one afternoon from UCLA. It had not been at the top of our lists, but it was one where we were both accepted and it was out of the snowbelt. Southern California! The more we thought about it, the more excited we became.
Bill received the financial aid he so desperately needed. I got some, but my dad’s income, while not huge, was high enough that it knocked me out of consideration for a lot of the aid for which I applied. My parents had been saving for the day I would go to college, so while I was a little freaked about how I was going to pay for everything, they were much less agitated.
Neither Bill nor I had visited the school. Everything we knew about it we had learned from our guidance counselor and from reading online. We had read blogs by people who attended there, and by and large we were impressed. The school was far larger than I had realized at first. I nearly fell off my chair when I read that there were almost forty thousand students at UCLA, about twice as many undergrads as grads. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of people.
We were both quite surprised—and pleased at the same time—when my mom suggested that we should go out and take a look at the place and see what we thought of it before committing. She made the perfectly valid point that moving twenty-five hundred miles away made it such that we couldn’t just run back home if something wasn’t right. If we accepted their admission offers, we were sort of committing to this for the long haul.
Our school had a midwinter break coming up in a few weeks, so she suggested that we consider going out to Los Angeles to visit the school. She started checking options for getting us there and made contact with the school to set up some appointments for us to get tours, see the place, sit in on some classes, see the dorms, things like that. In typical mom fashion, in less than twenty-four hours she outlined an itinerary with us. She proposed that we fly out on a Wednesday morning. We would have to change planes, which would get us into Los Angeles at about two thirty in the afternoon.
She had researched how we could get to the school using public transportation and had worked out a place for us to stay at low or no cost (I wasn’t entirely clear) on the campus. She had tours arranged for us first thing on Thursday morning, with a full day of activities planned, including attending some classes to get the full experience. She proposed that we use Friday to look for possible employment and perhaps summer housing.
She told us that we had Saturday to explore and to learn more about the city and the area in general, with us flying back home on Sunday. Two days to explore not only the city but also check out employment and possible housing seemed to be an impossible task to me. She suggested that we do as much research in advance as possible so that when we were actually there we could make t
he most of our time.
We were both a little overwhelmed, so she simply went ahead and decided for us, making the reservations and getting things set up. She also made a bit of a big deal out of talking with us about how we were going to have to go on our own because it would cost too much to fly three adults all the way to California and back. She, of course, fully realized that we had both matured a great deal in the time we had known each other and were quite ready to tackle such a trip. I knew her well enough to know that if she had reservations, she would not be the least bit shy about expressing them.
As soon as she gave us her rundown, we retreated to my room and hugged each other. “We’re going to California!” we whisper-shouted at each other.
“Holy crap!”
“It’s really happening!”
“I’m scared,” I said, stating the obvious.
“I’d be worried if you weren’t. But we’re gonna be together. We’ll go into it together, we’ll get through it together, and we’ll come out on the other side together.”
We didn’t say anything else but simply stood and held onto each other for a few minutes.
The following weeks seemed to race past. Between school, the imminent arrival of spring, our Saturday work at the feed supply store, and our Sunday self-defense training classes, the time seemed to simply shoot past at the speed of light. Word of our impending trip to Los Angeles got around. By that time everybody knew what had happened in Bill’s family and that he was living with us now, so there was less gossip than there had been at first. That plus Bill’s kickass presentation to the student body, and there was little if any suggestion or question about us anymore.
The night before we were due to leave, we tried to figure out what we should pack. Neither one of us had ever traveled anywhere before. We had been born in our little valley and spent all of our lives there. This would be a major undertaking for both of us. I sensed that Bill was as nervous as I was—he was just a bit more restrained in expressing it. We finally decided that we really didn’t need to take that much. We weren’t going to be gone that long and didn’t have need for a lot of clothes. We ended up each packing a backpack with what we needed.
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