October

by Michael Rowe

  Mikey made a face. “Gym.” He opened his locker door and placed the books he was carrying carefully back on the top shelf. Bending down, he pulled his gym bag from the bottom shelf.

  “Ugh.” They both hated gym with a passion. For Wroxy, it was a wasted hour out of her life when she was forced to play stupid games with girls she detested and avoided in every other instance. The fact that she was actually quite good at sports was something that she didn’t admit to Mikey, who was spastically uncoordinated. Wroxy intuited that this was something that would diminish his already-tenuous sense of his own masculinity. Besides, she reasoned, it didn’t matter. She hated the games whether she could play them or not, and resented this waste of an hour she could otherwise spend reading, writing, or drawing.

  For Mikey, it was a nightmare hour when everything he was—or, more accurately, wasn’t—became glaringly evident to everyone. From his early years of being unable to play the sports every other boy his age seemed to have learned by osmosis to his later years of not being strong enough to climb the rope with the other boys, of them being able to climb it with ease and of the gym teacher making the entire class wait for him to finish before they were allowed to play the sports they wanted to. Of being the last picked for every team, or accidentally scoring on his own team during a soccer game.

  The shame in the locker room, when the other boys developed faster than he did, or the time that Dewey Verbinski waved his thick, hairy, uncut penis in Mikey’s direction and asked him loudly if he wanted to suck it. The shame of seeing Jim Fields laughing at him while hot tears of shame coursed down his own cheeks as he covered himself with a bundle of his clothes, afraid to dress but too mortified to drop them lest it invite another torrent of abuse.

  Yeah, gym class was hell. When Mikey graduated from high school, he was never going to step into another gymnasium in his life.

  [15]

  It was Jim Fields’ idea, but Dewey wished he’d thought of it first.

  Dewey was momentarily angry, an emotion so frequent with him that it passed like summer lightning. Besides, he would eventually claim that the idea was his, and Jim wouldn’t challenge him. He never did.

  They would nail the Childress faggot, nail him good, and get the senior year’s reign of terror off to a good start. By next year at this time they would be out of school and Childress would be out of their grasp forever. Yeah, this was the year, all right. Best of all, this time they wouldn’t have to touch him themselves. It was too cool.

  The Childress faggot had slunk and moped around the edge of the shirts-and-skins basketball game like a girl no one wanted to fuck. Of course he couldn’t play basketball. He couldn’t play anything. Watching him stumble and mince and flail was an entertainment, one that usually had the whole gym class in stitches by halftime. It was better than television.

  Childress’s team captain, Shawn Curtis, had been forced to pick him—someone always was. Since Curtis was a natural athlete who played every sport superbly and was competitive as hell, he also wanted to win. Curtis solved the problem by keeping Childress off court for most of the game. His team had been skins, which was an added chance for Dewey and Jim to torment Mikey. Naked skin always hurt more when it was knocked to the ground and scraped, and it was easier to reach over and give Childress a hard titty-twist till he screamed and reached for his nipples. Of course Dewey and Jim—playing for shirts—were both disappointed that they were forced to hide their intimidating summer bulk under Auburn High athletic t-shirts, but they solved the problem by tying the shirts around their heads like turbans. The gym teacher, Mr. Sasseville, wasn’t going to argue with Dewey Verbinski. He wasn’t stupid.

  After the game, the boys trooped into the locker room. They stripped off their clothes and strutted into the showers to hose off the afternoon’s sweat. In short order the room echoed with adolescent male laughter. Soap-scented steam billowed out of the shower room into the locker room proper, and the air was clammy.

  Dewey and Jim held back as the other guys jockeyed for space in the showers. They pretended to be deep in conversation, a ruse that was surprisingly effective for two boys whom no one would ever think of as having that capability for depth. When the coast was clear, Dewey stood guard while Jim, who was leaner and faster, vaulted across the locker room. Jim deftly unzipped the gym bag belonging to Shawn Curtis. In Dewey’s opinion, Curtis was one of the stupider members of the Auburn High football team. He neither liked nor disliked Shawn Curtis, and that worked to his advantage. He would make a better weapon without either enmity or the loyalties owed to a comrade. Jim rummaged in the bag and pulled out one of Curtis’s sweat-stained jockstraps. He made a disgusted face and waved his hand in front of his nose.

  “Man!” Jim whined under his breath. “I don’t want to be touching this thing! Fuck!” He held it at arm’s length. It smelled ripe. The odour of other guys’ ball sweat wasn’t something Jim Fields cared for.

  “Get over here, fuckstick!” Dewey hissed, gesturing furiously with one arm. “Hurry the fuck up before they get back! Come on, move it!”

  Dewey crossed the floor to where Mikey Childress’s gym bag lay open beside his locker. No one bothered with locks. Stupid fuckers, he thought darkly. He’d been stealing since he was nine and had more respect for people whose property he had to break into. People who left doors and windows open deserved what happened to them.

  Jim sprinted over to where Dewey stood and placed the jockstrap in the Childress faggot’s gym bag, tucking it under his gay little sweater and placing his yellow Discman on top. It occurred to him that the Childress faggot had managed to replace the Discman that Jim had smashed three years before. He briefly contemplated breaking this one, too, but concluded that it might warn Childress that something was up.

  “Something’s going to be ‘up’ all right, queer,” Jim muttered under his breath. He smothered a laugh. The sight of the yellow Discman, however, continued to slight his sense of right and wrong. For good measure, he flipped open the lid and pulled out the CD. “Dew, look at this. He’s listening to Madonna!”

  “No shit,” Dewey said distractedly. He gave a snort of all-purpose laughter just to show Jim that he’d acknowledged yet another example of Childress’s faggotry, but his eye was on the shower-room door. “Leave it, asshole,” Dewey snarled. “Curtis will be out in a second. Put the faggot’s purse back where it was.” Jim kicked the gym bag with his foot. He put the Madonna CD in the pocket of his track pants and reminded himself to take it out and snap it in half later.

  Then the two of them hurried back to where they were sitting to watch the fireworks.

  [16]

  Shawn Curtis said, “What the fuck . . . ?”

  He slammed a ham-sized fist against the metal locker door. The sound echoed through the locker room like a gunshot. “All right, which one of you faggots took my jockstrap?” He smiled, not sure if the culprit would prove to be a teammate or close friend, in which case he didn’t want to make too much of a scene, especially one that would make him look like an asshole later. On the other hand, if someone uncool was fucking with him, well, it would be their last fuck. Curtis looked around the room at the mute, nervous faces, most staring blankly. “Come on, guys. This isn’t funny no more. I got class in ten minutes. Who took it?”

  The only one who looked disinterested was Mikey Childress. Everyone in the room glanced automatically in his direction, more by rote than with malice. If anyone was going to fuck up or become the object of mockery or ridicule, it would be him. It wouldn’t occur to any of the boys to look at anyone else. Lost in his own world in the way only those who are never included in locker room congenialities could be, Mikey busied himself inside his locker.

  Curtis squinted his eyes, a look that was intimidating on the gridiron because it made him look a bit like a pit bull. Shawn Curtis barely knew Mikey Childress, except to know what everyone knew—that he was a faggot. That was all someone like Curtis needed to know. The beginning of what
to him was a disgusting suspicion was dawning.

  “WHO STOLE MY FUCKING JOCK?”

  At that moment, Mikey spun around as though he’d been shot in the back. The entire locker room was staring at him. In their eyes he saw a kaleidoscope of emotions, ranging from disbelief, to disgust, to relief that Curtis’s fury wasn’t focused on them.

  Curtis walked toward him, menace in every stride. He extended his index finger, shoving it in Mikey’s face. Mikey flinched and backed up.

  This is not happening to me, he thought madly. This is not happening to me here, not in front of these awful, awful people. Not here, not now. Please, God, I’ll do anything.

  “Did you take my jockstrap, faggot?” Curtis said in a low, threatening voice. “Did you?”

  “Your what? Jesus, no. Of course not.”

  And then, horribly, inevitably, the worst thing possible in this situation happened.

  “Come on, Childress, admit it,” Jim Fields said clearly. “Dew and I saw you. You’d better give it back.” He smiled pityingly at Mikey, as though he knew what was coming and felt sorry for him. Mikey gaped open-mouthed at his idol. Shawn Curtis turned his pit bull gaze on Jim Fields, who met it the way equals do. Beside him, Dewey Verbinski smirked balefully at Mikey, not saying a word.

  “What did you say, Fields?” Curtis took a step toward Jim Fields, his posture shifting away from the implicit violence offered by his stance toward Mikey. His shoulders relaxed, and he shifted from one foot to the other. Fields was cool.

  “Curtis, I’m sorry, man,” Jim said with ostentatious pity. “I didn’t want to tell you here in front of everybody, but it’s only, you know, fair in case this looks weird on you later.”

  “Weird on me? What the fuck are you talking about, Fields?”

  Jim turned slowly to Mikey and nodded in his direction. This time he didn’t even bother looking like he cared to pity him.

  “Curtis, when you were in the shower room, Childress here went through your gym bag and took out your jock. Dew and I caught him sniffing it. He had this fuckin’ smile on his face. Then,” Jim added daringly, “he licked it.”

  Curtis looked between Childress, who seemed paralyzed, and Fields, who looked calmly at him with an indefinable expression on his face. Curtis laughed good-naturedly.

  “You’re full of shit, Fields. Now, where is it? I mean, if you’re queer for me and you want to keep the jock, that’s cool,” he drawled. “But can I at least have it for the rest of the week?”

  “Curtis,” Dewey said in a flat, cold voice. “Fields isn’t kidding. Check out the faggot’s gym bag. It’s in there. We saw him put it underneath some clothes. Your jock is in there. Just look.”

  Something in Dewey’s voice gave Curtis pause. He strode toward Mikey, his large bare feet thudding against the concrete floor of the locker room. He pointed toward Mikey’s gym bag and leaned into his face. Mikey stumbled backward, banging his hip painfully against the sharp edge of the locker.

  “Open your bag, faggot,” Curtis said. “Now. Open it.”

  Mikey stared at him. For one horrible moment he thought he was going to piss through the towel wrapped around his waist, flooding the bench and the floor, sealing his fate irrevocably and beyond any hope of redemption. He squeezed his bladder, willing it to containment.

  Curtis reached past him roughly, pushing Mikey aside. Mikey smelled soap and deodorant. Curtis picked Mikey’s gym bag up off the floor and unzipped the top. Curtis sat down heavily on the bench and began to rummage through the bag’s contents.

  Mikey was amazed that even in a situation as lethal as the one he was enduring, he was vaguely thrilled at his proximity to Shawn Curtis. He took stock of the cantaloupe-sized biceps, the thick slabs of back muscle, the skin flecked with a spray of acne that he’d heard was the result of steroids. By habit he noted all the ways in which Shawn Curtis was not like him, wondering with familiar confusion, as he did with most jocks, whether he wanted to have them, or be them.

  And then, Armageddon.

  “Oh . . . my . . . fucking . . . God,” Curtis gasped. “What the fuck . . . ?”

  In his hand, Shawn Curtis was holding his own frayed and faded jockstrap. He turned slowly to face Mikey, and his eyes were terrible.

  As Mikey watched, a dark red flush appeared on the sides of Curtis’s thick neck,

  spreading upward to his cheeks and forehead. The veins in his neck stood out like electric cables. Mikey clearly saw confusion, shock, dawning awareness, and embarrassment.

  Then, rage.

  The locker room was silent, and then Dewey Verbinski whistled.

  “We told you, Curtis,” he said. “We told you the faggot took your jock.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him, man?” Curtis shouted. He took a step forward, a challenge implicit. But something cold and unflinching in Dewey’s eyes gave him pause. “You let a faggot touch my stuff? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Hey,” Dewey said slyly. He raised his hands in a gesture that was tinged with the exact amount of barely detectable innuendo to guarantee defensive outrage. “It was up to you to deal with it, dude. Would have told you, sure, but if you hadn’t seen him do it, would you have believed me?”

  Curtis stared dumbly at Dewey. Then he turned to Mikey. Almost as an afterthought, Curtis reached out and slapped him across the side of the head, open hand. The paste gemstone of his football ring bit into the flesh of Mikey’s scalp. Purple stars exploded behind Mikey’s eyes, and he crashed backward into the lockers. His towel fell off his waist, and he lay crumpled and nude on the cold, wet floor. Curtis leaned down and jabbed Mikey hard in the chest with his index finger.

  “You’re going to be so motherfucking sorry for this, Childress,” he said softly, but loud enough that his voice carried through the entire locker room. “I promise you. You are going to wish you’d never been fucking born.”

  Curtis stood up and stalked over to his own locker. He dressed quickly, jamming his legs violently into his faded jeans. He grabbed his football jacket with the leather sleeves in one hand and his gym bag in the other. Looking neither right nor left, meeting no one’s eye, he strode out of the room. The door slammed shut in his wake, moving the air.

  The others, most of them already half-dressed, finished clothing themselves and left the room as the bell rang in the hallway outside, announcing the next period.

  Dewey and Jim loped past the spot where Mikey lay stunned on the floor. His head throbbed where Curtis’s football ring had cut him. Their eyes blazed with dark merriment. Jim pursed his lips and blew Mikey a kiss, fluttering his fingers in a gesture of ostentatious effeminacy. “Nice to see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya,” he crooned. “Bye-bye, Childress. Have a great day!”

  Ugly laughter trailed in their wake as they left. Mikey realized that he was crying again—and that he hated himself in that moment as much as he knew they hated him.

  [17]

  Wroxy took a deep drag on her cigarette and contemplated Mikey, who sat across from her in the booth. He looked, if possible, even more miserable and terrified than the morning he’d told her about finding the witches.

  On one hand, Wroxy thought, hiding Shawn Curtis’s jockstrap in Mikey’s bag was the stupidest trick she’d ever heard of Jim and Dewey pulling. A tiny, dark, treacherous part of Wroxy’s mind wondered how Mikey kept getting himself into these situations and if it was somehow not, at least in part, his fault. But the dominant, and much kinder, part of her pushed this cold question down. You just had to look at him, she thought. No one deserves this, no one. She wondered again, as she had on so many other occasions, how much Mikey could take before something snapped. She’d heard that gay kids committed suicide at a much higher rate than their straight peers. Though intellectually she understood exactly why this was, looking now at Mikey’s shaking hands as he held the coffee mug, she understood it viscerally as well.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and they were sitting in a
corner booth at the coffee shop next door to the Milton Mall. Mikey hadn’t wanted to go to the mall itself. He was terrified of running into any of the guys from his gym class, especially Shawn Curtis.

  Wroxy didn’t tell him that she’d heard about the incident in her afternoon classes before Mikey had come to her after school, pale and shaken. Tina Mitterhaus and Gwen Horlick—who never spoke to Wroxy unless it was to call her names—had sidled up to her on the way into their last period social geography class.

  “Wroxy, may I say just one thing to you?” Gwen’s voice had been acidly sweet. “For your own good?” Behind her, Tina giggled. They looked at each other and pursed their glossy pink lips as though suppressing more laughter, as though between them, they held the funniest secret of all time.

  “That’s one thing already, Horlick,” Wroxy had shot back. She knew Gwen hated her last name. She often talked about changing it, either herself or through marriage. Everyone knew she had a crush on Shawn Curtis. Wroxy had once caught her writing Gwen Curtis and Gwen Horlick Curtis and Gwen Horlick-Curtis in various signatures on the back of her English composition notebook. “And if it’s from you,” she added, “it likely isn’t for my own good.”

  Unlike Mikey, Wroxy wasn’t afraid of her peers and of wielding her sharp tongue like a whip when necessary. Generally they left Wroxy alone. Which was all the more reason why this entirely insecure overture from Gwen Horlick was so odd.

  “Very funny, Wroxy,” Gwen had replied smugly. “Haven’t you heard? Your little gay boyfriend went too far this time. I’m worried about him, you know? Some people are really pissed at him. You know,” she added with meaning, “really pissed. He should probably watch himself. You know, like not fall down any stairs or walk into any walls or nothing.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Horlick?” Wroxy snapped. She noted with some pleasure that Gwen flinched at the expletive as well as at Wroxy’s continued use of her last name. “Are you on crack? What are you babbling about?”