by Dirk Hunter
Published by
DREAMSPINNER PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
After School Activities
© 2015 Dirk Hunter.
Cover Art
© 2015 Paul Richmond.
http://paulrichmondstudio.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032
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ISBN: 978-1-63216-541-1
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-542-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920694
First Edition March 2015
Printed in the United States of America
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
CHAPTER ONE
SO FAR, today was shaping up to be a rather ordinary Tuesday. First period had barely begun, and I was already in the principal’s office. Adam Anderson, my sworn enemy since kindergarten, sat in the chair next to me, arms crossed, staring sullenly at the floor. Me? I was grinning.
“All right, Mr. O’Connor,” our principal, Theodore Hayes, said, looking at me from over steepled fingers. “Why don’t you tell me what happened this time.”
My grin widened, turned mischievous. “Theo. Darling, how many times do I have to tell you to call me Dylan?”
TEN MINUTES before the bell rang, the halls of Oak Lake High were swarming with kids. Even so, I couldn’t help but overhear an unfortunately all too familiar sound: small-minded douchebaggery.
“Why, if it isn’t a brand-new fairy boy for us to have a little fun with, right, boys?”
This, wafting from a less-traveled side hall where all the language classrooms were situated — empty this early, ’cause, you know, no language classes before third period. I couldn’t help but sigh. Sure, I could have ignored it — and seriously, Mr. Hayes, I almost did — but honestly? I was a little hurt my nemesis was cheating on me with some unknown freshman. It stung.
So I took a stroll down the hall and found that — surprise surprise — dear old Adam here, along with two of his buddies, had cornered some poor kid I didn’t recognize. Now, Oak Lake is a pretty small school; you get to know everyone, if not by name, then at least how they look. So I figured out pretty quickly that it was probably this kid’s first week, else he might have thought twice before wandering alone down the language hall at all, much less with a bedazzled backpack. A My Little Pony backpack, to boot. Rookie mistake. I couldn’t help but feel for the kid, you know?
“Come on, Adam.” I said, interrupting a mess of giddy snickering, “didn’t anyone tell you how uncool it is to date a freshman, no matter how much fun it is?”
The three bullies turned, with spectacular coordination — did you guys practice that, Adam? Spinning in sync? — but only Adam kept smiling. His buddies, at least, had the good grace to look ashamed. Now I won’t name names, I don’t do that, but let’s just say one of them only passed math last semester ’cause I tutored him, and the other has an older brother who used to date my sister. But Adam, bless his heart, pressed on, not noticing his backup dancers were slowly inching away.
“Oh look. If it isn’t King Queer, come to rescue one of his subjects,” Adam said.
I sighed and shook my head. “Personally I would have gone with ‘Queen Queer.’ Not only for the whole, you know, gay thing, but also for the alliteration. Seems like a real missed opportunity.” As I spoke, I stepped past Adam to talk to the new guy. “Hey, kid. Name’s Dylan. Sorry about my man Adam here. He’s got some issues with his masculinity.” I brought my hand up to my mouth and whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Impotence. You know how it is. Well, you probably don’t. Anyway, welcome to Oak Lake High. I’d love to give you the tour, but I seem to be a bit preoccupied at the moment. Don’t let that stop you, however, from running off and familiarizing yourself with any halls other than this one.”
The new kid squeaked a thank-you and ran. Man, self-confidence, we should really teach that in school. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Hayes?
“Alright, faggot,” Adam growled, spinning me around and slamming me against the wall. “I guess it’s just you and me now.”
Now, at this point I started to get a little concerned. Adam here has done a lot of things to me in the past — good memories, every one — but he had never actually grabbed me like that before, you know? We mostly just traded clever insults back and forth. Well, mine were clever. I still couldn’t believe you missed that “Queen Queer” gem, Adam. And by this point Adam’s companions in crime had made themselves pretty scarce, so I couldn’t even count on them to step in should things start to spiral downward. Honestly, I was a little concerned for my personal well-being.
Not that I was gonna allow that to stop me.
“Oh, Adam, you brute, you! You know how I like it when you take command like that. Such strength! Such power!”
Adam’s cheeks colored. It was clear that I was getting to him. “We’ll see how you like this power when it’s punching you in the gut.”
“Why, Mr. Cortez! Is that shining armor you’re wearing? Tell me, do all English teachers have your sense of timing?”
“AND MR. Cortez said, ‘Alright boys, break it up,’ and Adam was like ‘Not until my fist teaches this faggot a lesson, ’cause I’m a big strong man and I have to prove that every day. Arrrgghhhh.’”
“I didn’t say that.” Adam spoke up for the first time since being sent to Mr. Hayes’s office.
“It was implied.”
Adam opened his mouth to reply, but Mr. Hayes cut him off with a gesture. “Well, Mr. O’Connor —”
“Dylan.”
“— that was very… thorough.” He turned to Adam. “Mr. Anderson, you know we have zero tolerance for bullying and violence. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you detention.”
“But —”
“No buts, Mr. Anderson. You’re dismissed.” I stood up too, but Mr. Hayes wasn’t quite finished with me. “And Mr. O’Connor, you could try provoking Mr. Anderson a little bit less. I’d give you detention also if I wasn’t absolutely convinced it would be a huge mistake to keep you two in the same room. Next time, though, it’s you who will be staying after school.” Adam gave me a smug look. “Now go, both of you. There’s no point in going to your first class. You’d disrupt more than it’s worth. There’s another ten minutes until second period, so I expect you to behave yourselves.”
I SUPPOSE I should consider myself lucky — in a lot of schools, I’d have been the one getting the detention. They’d say I deserved what I got for “provoking” the other students, when it would really be because I was gay.
At least when Mr. Hayes accused m
e of provoking Adam — and I suppose I did provoke Adam, a little — it was because of the insults, not my sexuality. Oak Lake, despite being such a small town, was actually pretty open-minded. Sure, it had its pricks, like Adam, but most of the homophobes were like Adam’s friends from that morning. They’d pick on you for being gay, but not if they, like, knew you or anything. And as far as Adam went, he didn’t really get any social points for picking on people.
The other popular kids didn’t really hold it against him either, but I’d take apathy to outright hatred any day. Baby steps, right?
As it was, Adam sat comfortably at the level of a duke, maybe an earl, in Oak Lake’s popularity kingdom. For one thing, he was on the football team, which practically guaranteed you a place at the cool kids’ table. For another, and perhaps most importantly, Adam was really, really hot. Not the hottest guy in school, of course. That honor was James P. Hogan’s. All-star quarterback, perpetual prom king, with muscles in all the right places, each strand of brown hair falling perfectly to frame an exquisite face, eyes you could drown in even if you only accidentally saw them from the edge of your vision. James P. Hogan graced the halls of Oak Lake High with a perfect smile and a beautiful voice that could often be heard singing between classes, entrancing. He was the undisputed king of the school, but he was the most benevolent of rulers — no matter who you were, whether the most vapid of cheerleaders or the weirdest of nerds, he would happily stop to talk to you, laugh at your pathetic attempt at a joke, say how you were the best part of the drama club’s production of The Pirates of Penzance, that you had the best singing voice he’d ever heard — which was hilarious: no one sang as well as James P. Hogan — and he’d touch your arm just so as he walked away, shooting a smile over his shoulder that could melt the heart of the straightest of men….
Sorry. I got a little carried away. Memory lane, and all that. Where was I? Oh, right. Adam.
Adam was probably the fourth hottest guy in Oak Lake, as such things are measured. Maybe the fifth, depending on how you feel about overly muscular men. Don’t get me wrong, his body doesn’t scream “steroids” or anything, but he’s definitely closer to Captain America than Spiderman — James P. Hogan was a perfect Spiderman. Muscular without bulging. Lithe, that’s the word. But I digress. Again.
Adam kept his blond hair short, and his eyes were as blue as the ocean — but too hard to get lost in. Not that you’d want to, of course. On those rare occasions when he smiled, and that smile wasn’t filled with malice, anyway, even I could feel my pulse quicken. And I hated that guy.
Maybe that was why I was about to do something really, really dumb. “Adam, wait up,” I called, as we got out of Mr. Hayes’s office. He stopped but didn’t turn around.
“What?” His face was even sourer than usual.
“What’s the matter with you today?”
He met my eyes for a split second, then looked away. “What the fuck are you talking about, faggot?”
“That, right there! That’s the second time you’ve called me a faggot today. You usually put a lot more effort into this. You’ll call me an anal excavator, or a rubber-wristed waste of space — you once called me Puck the Flying Fairy Fuck, which I’m still impressed with. Your insults used to be Shakespearian, man! But this? It’s just lazy. It gives me nothing to work with. This hatred of ours is a two-way street, man. You have to give a little to get a little. I should have to struggle to think of a clever-enough comeback. I mean, I never will ’cause I’m amazing and you’re an idiot — but I should. You usually only resort to dropping ‘faggot’ when you’re too mad to come up with anything else. So I ask again, what’s wrong with you today?”
“Seriously? You got me detention and you wonder if I’m too angry to play your stupid little games? I’m going to have to miss football practice, again. Coach is gonna be pissed, again….”
“You should have thought before you practiced your tackle on me this morning.” I couldn’t help it. Adam drew sarcastic comments out of me entirely against my will. But I regretted it pretty much immediately.
Whatever he said, it was obvious Adam got just as much into our insult battles as I did. Something was definitely up, and my snide comments weren’t gonna help anything. “Listen, if there’s anything I can, I dunno, do….”
“Yeah,” Adam snapped back at me. “You can go die in a fire.”
Well. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. Just then the bell rang. First period was over. I put Adam out of my mind and headed to class.
I MADE it to biology seconds after the bell rang. I still hadn’t even been to my locker that morning, and it was on the opposite side of the school.
Luckily, my two best friends had saved me a spot at our lab table in the back corner of the classroom. Waving apologetically to Mrs. Webster — a master of the disapproving stare, by the way, and today was no exception — I made my way over to my friends.
Kai leaned in as I sat down. “Let me guess. Another date with Adam and Mr. Hayes?”
I smiled. “Hooray Tuesdays.”
“You provoked him again, didn’t you?” Melanie whispered from the other side of Kai.
“Why is everyone accusing me of that today? I don’t provoke. He’s just an asshole.” Mel gave me an “if you say so” look. “Anyway, thanks for saving me a seat.”
“No problem. Mel wanted to give your seat to Kyle.” He grinned at her. Mel chuckled but didn’t look his way. “I remember things differently,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, pretending like she was listening to Mrs. Webster.
“Her exact words,” he said, turning back to me, “were ‘wouldn’t it be hilarious if Dylan were trapped with half the cheer squad?’ She sounded pretty sadistic too.”
“Yeah, ’cause that doesn’t sound like something you would say at all….”
I smiled, listening to my friends bicker. They’d been this way pretty much the instant Mel moved to Oak Lake in the fifth grade, arguing and teasing. Malachi and Melanie, Mal and Mel everyone called them. Except for me, of course. I’d shortened Malachi’s name to Kai ever since the day I met him in kindergarten. “At least spell it C-H-I,” he’d say every time I wrote his name. “Um, your name’s not Chi,” I’d say, and Mel would chime in that actually “chi” is spelled “qi,” and she’d write out the Chinese character for it, as if that proved anything, and things would quickly devolve from there. It was our favorite argument.
Kai insisted he always knew I was gay, right from that very first day.
He said it was ’cause I insisted on doing everything differently from everyone else, right down to which part of his name to call him. It was probably bullshit, of course — we didn’t even know what gay was back then — but I kind of liked the idea; Kai had always known me better than anyone else, almost as well as I knew myself.
Come to think of it, Adam once said he knew I was gay in kindergarten too, ’cause I “pranced like a fairy,” which was definitely bullshit. I rarely pranced.
“Hey, Dylan! You gonna sit there and take that?” Kai said, nudging me with his elbow.
“What?”
“Mel here is blaming your fight with Adam this morning on you redheads all having fiery tempers.” Of course, making fun of my red hair was Kai’s favorite pastime, not Mel’s. She punched him in the side, her favorite way of saying “nope.”
“Oh, sorry, I…” was dwelling on Adam, I realized. I know, I said I’d put him out of my mind, but it turned out to be easier said than done. It kept worrying away at me, and the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced something weird was going on. He’d never really seemed sullen before. Maybe I was just upset he’d called me a faggot twice. Not my favorite word, and ugh, I’d used it myself at least as many times today because of him. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on and, worse, that it meant I might have to give the guy a break for a while. Which was not going to be fun. What else was I supposed to do during school if not bait the bully? Learn? Ha
rdly.
But I couldn’t tell Kai any of that. How do you explain to your best friend that you weren’t listening to him ’cause you were thinking about your worst enemy? Plus, though Kai would never have admitted it, he tended to get more than a little jealous. He even got a little mad when I first started hanging out with Mel, and they had been friends first. If anyone should have been jealous in that situation, it should have been me.
“…I was trying to pay attention to Mrs. Webster.” I finally landed on a good-enough excuse. “You know, there’s a test on Friday.”
Kai did not seem convinced. He gave me a look that promised I’d be hearing about this later. Even Mel turned to give me an incredulous stare, completely abandoning all pretense of paying attention. They knew something was up. I could feel my face flush. I felt kinda guilty about lying, but what was I supposed to tell them? I didn’t really know what was going on myself. Just when it felt like I couldn’t take their scrutiny for another second, the attendance sheet was passed to me, breaking the tension. I wrote all our names to sign us in.
“Oh come on, Dylan. At least spell it C-H-I.”
CHAPTER TWO
MY VOW to lay off Adam didn’t even last the week. In my defense, he was totally asking for it. That Wednesday I noticed that new kid I had rescued across the lunchroom, spaghetti-filled tray in hand, making his way over to a table full of other little freshmen. I pointed him out to Mel and Kai — by this time, I had told them about my encounter Tuesday morning.
“It’s nice to see he’s made some friends,” Mel said. “Being the new kid can be rough.”
“Especially when Adam is throwing your welcome-to-the-school party,” Kai quipped. “Speak of the devil….”
Not quite halfway to his destination, the new kid was stopped by a blockade of jocks, Adam in the lead. The kid looked to his friends for support, but they all stared back at him helplessly. No way were they going to draw the wrath of any junior, much less the most notorious bullies in the school. It was four on one, and I itched to even the odds.