October

by Michael Rowe

  The first thing they noticed as they walked to school together the next morning was the two police cars parked outside the main doors of the high school.

  “This is weird,” Wroxy said. “I wonder what’s going on?”

  “Two police cars, not just one. Drugs, maybe?”

  “In this school?” Wroxy sounded doubtful. “Maybe steroids for those meatheads on the hockey team, but they probably get them from their coach. Come on, let’s go inside. Maybe someone in there knows.”

  “I hope Adrian’s all right. I hope Dewey didn’t pull anything with him later, after Adrian beat him up.”

  “Adrian didn’t ‘beat him up,’ Mikey. Adrian broke his nose. You got beaten up. Dewey got punched. And I’m sure your precious Adrian can take care of himself.”

  “Are you saying that because you feel sorry for me or because you don’t like Adrian? Fact is, no one has ever punched anyone in the face for messing with me before, so if I want to call it ‘beating up,’ that should be okay with you. Right?”

  “Whatever, Mikey,” Wroxy said. “He’s not the only one who has ever stuck up for you. Just remember that.”

  “You sound jealous, Wrox. What’s the matter? I have a guy who likes me, and you don’t? That’s a problem for you, huh?”

  Wroxy, who would rather have died than let on how badly Mikey’s words had hurt her, gave a short, curt laugh. “Oh, he ‘likes’you?” she jeered. “Mikey, get a grip. He’s not your boyfriend. He’s not even gay. You’re the gay one here, no one else. As soon as Adrian gets settled into this school, he’ll be sniffing after Gwen Horlick like a dog in heat, just like every other guy here. You watch.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he will,” Mikey said viciously. “Gwen’s pretty, and she’s not fat. She wears colours other than black, and her makeup doesn’t make her look like a slut. Guys like that in a girl, you know. Or maybe you don’t know, since you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  His words brought a sting of tears to her eyes. “Well, at least I’m a real girl,” she said, hating the words and hating the way she sounded as she said them. “I will have a boyfriend someday because I’m normal. I’m not going to always be some wimpy closet-case fag who cries all the time.”

  “You cunt,” Mikey said helplessly. “Fuck you, Wroxy. Have a nice life.”

  Mikey turned his back on Wroxy and sat down. He was trembling with hurt and rage. Glancing back, he saw Wroxy walk to the back of the homeroom class with her head down. She looked like she might be crying, but he didn’t care. He spotted Adrian waiting for him next to his seat. Adrian brightened visibly when he saw Mikey and waved him over, smiling.

  “Hey, I missed you this morning,” Adrian said as Mikey sat down. “Where were you? I was hoping we could walk to school together.”

  “Sorry, I had to talk to Wroxy. Probably the last time, too.”

  “What happened? Nothing serious, I hope?”

  Mikey shrugged. “Who needs a best friend?” he said bitterly. “Not me, that’s for sure.”

  Adrian reached his hand underneath Mikey’s desk and squeezed his thigh. “You have one. You have me, remember?”

  “Yeah, well . . . that’s different. You’re like . . . well, you said you love me. I love you, too,” Mikey said, feeling light-headed to be saying the words aloud. “She’s—she was—different. More like a sister.”

  “You don’t need a sister.” He squeezed Mikey’s thigh harder. “Or a best friend. I want to be everything to you.”

  “You already are,” Mikey murmured, meaning it.

  [34]

  By lunchtime the news of Jim Fields’ disappearance had traversed the school. Most noted that if it had been Dewey, there might be less cause for alarm, but Jim was, for the most part, a straight arrow. His parents were frantic. Over the course of the morning the police had called several of Jim’s friends to the office and asked them questions. No one knew anything. Yes, Jim seemed happy. No, he had never talked about running away. Yes, it did seem weird. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend that anyone knew of, though he hadn’t been short on offers or interest.

  Wroxy found Mikey and Adrian sprawled on the lawn at the edge of the school property eating lunch. From a distance, Wroxy had to admit that she barely recognized him. Worse, that he looked good. In Adrian’s company, the furtive, frightened sissy was transformed into someone she hardly knew. All of which made this overture even more bitter than she could have imagined.

  “Hey,” Wroxy said levelly. “I want to talk to you.”

  They stopped laughing. Adrian silently examined the tie of his boot. Mikey looked at Wroxy, noting that she looked like shit. That didn’t please Mikey as much as he thought it might have, but he still stared at her coldly.

  “What do you want? This had better be an apology.”

  “You’re in no position to demand apologies, Mikey. Besides, if it was an apology, I’d make it in private. This isn’t private.”

  “Whatever you want to say in front of me, you can say in front of Adrian.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement, dude. As I said, this isn’t an apology. In the meantime, have you heard about Jim?”

  “Jim?” His tone was mocking. “Jim who?”

  “Jim Fields. Remember? The previous love of your life?”

  “What about him?” Mikey fanned his fingers and examined his nails, an affectation he’d stolen from Gwen Horlick because he thought it looked cool when she did it, though he would have died rather than admit its provenance.

  “He disappeared,” Wroxy said flatly. “He’s gone.”

  Mikey shrugged. “So? What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Roxanne,” Mikey said, deliberately using the name she hated. “The guy made my life a living hell. I don’t care where he’s gone. I just hope he stays there. Better still, I hope he comes back and takes Dewey Verbinski with him.”

  Adrian laughed softly at Mikey’s words.

  “Something funny, Adrian?” Wroxy’s voice was cold. “Not that this has anything to do with you.”

  “Actually, Wroxy, it does. Everything and everyone,” Adrian said, lingering over the word, “who bothers Mikey is my business now.”

  “Oh yeah? Who died and made you his protector? You just arrived here and suddenly you’re Mikey’s white knight?”

  “Well, someone had to be,” Adrian said mildly. “You weren’t doing a very good job.”

  Wroxy stared at Adrian, then looked to Mikey. “Are you going to let him talk to me like that? Is that okay with you?”

  “What did you call me?” Mikey drawled. “I think your exact words were ‘a wimpy closet-case fag who cries all the time.’”

  Adrian scowled. “She called you that?”

  “You called me a cunt,” Wroxy shot back. “We’re even.”

  “You are a cunt,” Mikey said dismissively. “And I’m not crying anymore. So we’re not even. Now, get lost, cunt.” He made a shooing gesture with his hands.

  “I wouldn’t stay if you paid me, faggot,” Wroxy said. “You know what? They were all right about you here. This town has your number, big time.”

  “Had,” he corrected her. “Not has. I’m not the same anymore.”

  “No, you’re worse.” Wroxy pulled her sunglasses out of her knapsack and put them on before she walked away. She didn’t look back this time.

  “Good riddance,” Mikey said tightly. He forced the tears back before they came.

  “Shall we kill her?” Adrian’s blue eyes were guileless.

  Taken aback, Mikey said, “No, of course not. Wait, you’re kidding, right?” He laughed uncertainly. “Of course you’re kidding. Stupid me. Just ignore me.”

  “I could never ignore you.” Adrian leaned over and kissed Mikey on the mouth before Mikey could ask him if he was crazy to kiss him in public.

  [35]

  As October burned in the trees, and the sky that framed Auburn
hung like a stained-glass window of red, yellow, and blue, Adrian and Mikey grew inseparable.

  In the mornings, Adrian would wait for Mikey at the end of Webster Avenue and walk him to school. In Adrian’s company, Mikey felt completely safe, and he began to change. He stood taller and straighter. He became more concerned with his clothes and personal grooming, not wanting to be anything but his best for Adrian. He wished he was beautiful, or handsome, but he satisfied himself that even if he wasn’t, Adrian still wanted him.

  His mother was the first to notice the subtle transformation and was puzzled by it.

  “You look nice today, honey,” she said at breakfast. She’d looked up, confused, as though something was out of place in her well-ordered kitchen. “You look different.”

  It wasn’t until Mikey left the house that Donna realized that her son had looked her directly in the eyes, and the miasma of fear and furtiveness that always trailed after Mikey like a cape was nowhere to be seen.

  After school, during the two-and-a-half-hour safety zone between the end of classes and his parents’ return from work, Mikey and Adrian made love on his narrow bed.

  Adrian seemed to genuinely glory in all of Mikey’s oppositeness from him. Adrian bent his superb body to Mikey’s pleasure, kissing and touching him in places he had never dreamed of being kissed or touched. He cradled Mikey’s smaller, frailer body against his powerful one but also used him with an authority that left Mikey faint with lust, feeling not only physically desired but devoured.

  He loved to watch Adrian’s nude body as he walked around Mikey’s bedroom—the way the narrow waist tapered; the muscular legs, the broad back and shoulders, the cabled arms, the tattoo, as though nakedness was his natural state and clothes merely an afterthought.

  The first time Adrian fucked him, slick with spit and hand lotion, he held Mikey close during the initial pain, then for a long while afterward. The idea of feeling so physically complete, so right, had never even occurred to Mikey except in his fantasies during what felt like the endless, spiralling eons before Adrian’s arrival. A small stream of Mikey’s tears—for once, tears of joy and surrender—pooled in the hollow of Adrian’s shoulder as Mikey lay against him, caressing the find blond hair of Adrian’s dense forearms.

  “My mom wants to meet you,” Mikey said one evening in the second week of October. They were sitting on a bench in Rotary Park watching the autumn leaves in descent. “I’ve mentioned you a couple of times. She’s curious about you.”

  Adrian said, “I don’t really ‘do’ parents,” he said. “Parents creep me out. I can barely deal with my own father, you know what I mean?” He took a drag of his cigarette and blew smoke in the air, something Mikey thought made him look tough and incredibly sexy.

  “You look like James Dean when you do that,” Mikey told him.

  Another time, Mikey asked him where he lived and why they never went to Adrian’s house to make love after school. “We could stay longer, you know? Since your dad isn’t there, we’d have the whole house to ourselves. I could tell my mother than I’m over at your house, studying.”

  “The house isn’t finished yet, and it’s really dirty,” Adrian said. “I hate being there. I like your room. I like being around your stuff. You know what I mean?”

  Mikey swooned, so deeply in love that he accepted Adrian’s explanation with no other thought than that it might be nice to buy some vanilla-scented candles at the drugstore to make his room smell even more inviting to Adrian. In the school library he’d read in Glamour magazine that men loved the scent of vanilla. Mikey had tucked away this information and more, in case it might be something he could bring to Adrian in tribute to their love.

  If he was sure of anything, it was this: he had found true love. This, he realized, must be what being normal felt like.

  For her part, Wroxy watched Mikey and Adrian with a mixture of envy and growing mistrust. Mikey hadn’t spoken to her since their fight. Since Adrian was always with him, getting him alone seemed impossible.

  Because she missed him terribly, Wroxy had read her Tarot cards over the situation, asking the cards to tell her if she and Mikey would resolve their dispute. She was comforted by the answer: yes, they would resolve it. On the other hand, when she read her cards over Adrian, the results were puzzling.

  She stared at the beautifully wrought, gilt-edged Death card in her hand, the image of a black-robed child standing in a field under a rising sun, holding a white rose in its hand. The Death card signified transition, passage, and transformation.

  Wroxy reasoned that she was being shown Adrian’s effect on Mikey, and his life. To be sure, something about Adrian seemed to intimidate all the people who had previously hunted Mikey like small game. The boys left him alone. And to Wroxy’s disgust and contempt, a few of the girls, notably Gwen Horlick, had begun speaking of Mikey as though his femininity was something “fabulous” and “wild,” as though he were something from a television show instead of the same faggoty kid they’d all tormented for nearly a decade.

  Wroxy had no doubt in her mind that Horlick’s ultimate aim was Adrian’s seduction—something Wroxy would have welcomed like a lottery win if she’d thought it would bring Mikey back to her.

  Of the hardcore Mikey-haters, Dewey Verbinski seemed most committed to giving Mikey a wide berth. In the weeks since Jim’s disappearance—which, after a flurry of interest from the police, was almost universally being spoken of as “a runaway situation,” since there was no sign of any home invasion or forcible removal of Jim from his parents’ house—Dewey had grown furtive and skittish without Jim by his side. He’d tried to tell the police about the dreams he’d had on the night Jim had vanished, dreams he’d been having nightly since then, but they only looked at him strangely and said they weren’t investigating dreams. The police had heard rumours that the Verbinski boy was a bully, so his broken nose barely registered with them.

  Stash and Yalda told Dewey that they felt sad about Jim being gone—his poor parents!—but that if he knew something about it that he wasn’t telling, that was very bad.

  The swelling around Dewey’s broken nose had gone down, though the bruising remained. He assiduously avoided Adrian and Mikey. His new furtiveness was becoming conspicuous enough to elicit whispers of bewilderment from the other boys, bewilderment that soon blossomed into contempt. While this was a new and shameful state for Dewey, he bore it silently, with downcast eyes.

  “I almost feel sorry for him,” Mikey said to Adrian as they watched Dewey hurry out of the locker room after gym class. Adrian, as it turned out, could play basketball better than anyone else, including Shawn Curtis. “He seems lost without Jim.”

  “Remember what he did to you,” Adrian replied. “He doesn’t deserve your pity. Neither does Jim Fields.”

  “Still, it’s sad to see.”

  Adrian shrugged. “Embrace hate.”

  Mikey stood stock-still. “What did you say?”

  “What did I say? What do you think I said?”

  “You said ‘embrace hate.’ I heard you. Why did you say that?”

  “I didn’t,” Adrian said. “I said ‘that’s the way it goes.’”

  “You did? Are you sure? That’s not what I heard.”

  “Well, that’s what I said. Why? What does ‘embrace hate’ mean?”

  “Just something I saw on a website once.” Mikey’s throat felt very dry. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I won’t. I’ll meet you out by the back of the maintenance shed after school, okay? Then we’ll go back to your place and hang out. I’m feeling really good today.”

  “All right,” Mikey said faintly. He suddenly felt a terrible need to speak to Wroxy. “Wait, no, Adrian. I’m sorry. I can’t this afternoon. I have to go to a doctor’s appointment after school. My mom set it up a month ago.”

  “I’ll walk you there,” Adrian said. “Then home later.”

  “No,” Mikey insisted. “It would look weird.
I’d better go alone. I’m sorry Adrian. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You don’t want to see me today? Are you serious?”

  “I can’t. I said I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  “You’re lying. You’re going to see someone else.”

  “I’m not lying. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You’re lying,” Adrian said again. “It’s because of what I said about Dewey Verbinski, isn’t it?” Mikey heard thwarted fury beneath Adrian’s words. “You said you hated him, remember? Why are you feeling sorry for him? Were you lying to me then, too?”

  “I do hate him,” Mikey said. “I’ve never lied to you, I promise. I have to go now, okay? Please, Adrian. I’ll see you tomorrow, I promise.”

  “Do you love him like you loved Jim Fields?”

  “What? I never told you I loved Jim Fields. I don’t love Jim Fields. I love you.”

  “You did love him. I could tell by how you talked about him, even with what he did to you. Aren’t I enough for you?”

  “I hate them both! I always have! You’re more than enough for me.”

  “Remember that, then,” Adrian said. “Never forget that.”

  Mikey gathered his things and hurried outside, leaving Adrian in the locker room. For his part, Mikey was more than confused. He had felt a glimmer of genuine fear for the first time in Adrian’s presence.

  Did he really say what I think he said? Mikey felt the blood thundering in his temples. Could I have misheard him?

  Of course not. The second voice was more rational. You heard him say the same words you found on that website. The ones you used for that spell. The one you never told anyone about, not even Wroxy. And he sounded . . . sly when he said it.

  “No he didn’t,” Mikey said aloud, defiantly. “He didn’t say ‘embrace hate.’ He said ‘that’s the way it goes.’ And that is the way it goes. He would never hurt me. He would never hurt anyone.” Mikey regretted his lie about the doctor’s appointment. Adrian deserved better.